Good Things, Bad Things
Good Things:
- milady has been accepted as a resident of Canada; we're still miles away from the mess that is permanent residency, but for now they can't kick her out until 2018 heck YEAH!
- we found an apartment! It's a 30-minute walk from campus though it's near the subway when we're feeling lazy, but we have one, we move in on Monday, it's DONE.
- I think -- I think -- we're almost done with the massive running-around of errands related to immigration, school, house-hunting, loans, whatever. I still have to reinstate my provincial health care and T needs to get her social insurance number, but we're waiting on other paperwork first so we get a bit of a breather. Yesterday we walked over 12km just doing errands. 12km, me with a 10lb bag on each shoulder. As inthespout said, "You would have walked less if you were hunting down traitors in the arena!" My new whiny phrase is "I could've killed x tributes by now", which is totally appropriate for a schoolteacher to say, I'm sure.
- I'm wearing my Hogwarts robes on campus today, as I sit in the library on a 3-day holiday weekend doing work, because I can that's why.
- I have been drinking 2-3L of water every day and eating both healthily and well, so screw you "you're going to get so fat now that you're in Canada, lol" people.
Not So Good Things:
- lowest word count for any month since 2011: around 25,000 words, or half a NaNoWriMo. For context, before the move I was topping over 100,000 words per month. I've been brain-dead and stressed and unable to do anything substantial; what I have written are either ridiculous things for the Hunger Games/Hogwarts AU or snippets or little flashes of things. I've been having massive amounts of trouble getting new characters' voices right, so I've been mostly edging away from experimental things. Hopefully once things settle in September I'll get my groove back.
- my Fitbit tracker says I've been managing 2.5-3.5 hours of actual sleep each night regardless of how many hours I spend in bed. I believe it. I keep seeing things about how lack of sleep is aging me prematurely and slowly killing me from the inside but when my tracker says "7 hours in bed, 3 hours 4 minutes actually asleep" I'm not sure what to do about it.
- my energy reserves are low, guys. My "I just can't" hits really quickly, and since T's is lower than mine, sometimes that results in one of us crying at the food court of the Eaton Centre or in the supermarket because decision fatigue hits out of nowhere.
Still. Right now I'm in the 'overwhelmed and blinking in the sunlight' stage of culture shock -- I'm waking up in the hospital after the Arena and can't decide whether I'm happy or sad or scared, and only time will tell, but mostly I just want to sleep a lot and eat everything. Though I did go into a Rexall and have to talk myself out of buying an entire tetrapak of chocolate pudding because ... well I have no idea, but they don't have pudding in Japan and suddenly I NEEDED IT. But I also have impulse control, so I refrained.
- milady has been accepted as a resident of Canada; we're still miles away from the mess that is permanent residency, but for now they can't kick her out until 2018 heck YEAH!
- we found an apartment! It's a 30-minute walk from campus though it's near the subway when we're feeling lazy, but we have one, we move in on Monday, it's DONE.
- I think -- I think -- we're almost done with the massive running-around of errands related to immigration, school, house-hunting, loans, whatever. I still have to reinstate my provincial health care and T needs to get her social insurance number, but we're waiting on other paperwork first so we get a bit of a breather. Yesterday we walked over 12km just doing errands. 12km, me with a 10lb bag on each shoulder. As inthespout said, "You would have walked less if you were hunting down traitors in the arena!" My new whiny phrase is "I could've killed x tributes by now", which is totally appropriate for a schoolteacher to say, I'm sure.
- I'm wearing my Hogwarts robes on campus today, as I sit in the library on a 3-day holiday weekend doing work, because I can that's why.
- I have been drinking 2-3L of water every day and eating both healthily and well, so screw you "you're going to get so fat now that you're in Canada, lol" people.
Not So Good Things:
- lowest word count for any month since 2011: around 25,000 words, or half a NaNoWriMo. For context, before the move I was topping over 100,000 words per month. I've been brain-dead and stressed and unable to do anything substantial; what I have written are either ridiculous things for the Hunger Games/Hogwarts AU or snippets or little flashes of things. I've been having massive amounts of trouble getting new characters' voices right, so I've been mostly edging away from experimental things. Hopefully once things settle in September I'll get my groove back.
- my Fitbit tracker says I've been managing 2.5-3.5 hours of actual sleep each night regardless of how many hours I spend in bed. I believe it. I keep seeing things about how lack of sleep is aging me prematurely and slowly killing me from the inside but when my tracker says "7 hours in bed, 3 hours 4 minutes actually asleep" I'm not sure what to do about it.
- my energy reserves are low, guys. My "I just can't" hits really quickly, and since T's is lower than mine, sometimes that results in one of us crying at the food court of the Eaton Centre or in the supermarket because decision fatigue hits out of nowhere.
Still. Right now I'm in the 'overwhelmed and blinking in the sunlight' stage of culture shock -- I'm waking up in the hospital after the Arena and can't decide whether I'm happy or sad or scared, and only time will tell, but mostly I just want to sleep a lot and eat everything. Though I did go into a Rexall and have to talk myself out of buying an entire tetrapak of chocolate pudding because ... well I have no idea, but they don't have pudding in Japan and suddenly I NEEDED IT. But I also have impulse control, so I refrained.