Where to begin?
It's day 1 of 2025!
I'm trying to be at least a little optimistic about the smaller things in life, because the big things are, well... *gestures broadly*
I just checked the date of my last post (not counting yesterday's), and it's been almost three years since I last updated this LJ. Oops? I complained about the Freedom Convoy disrupting my life, and then never came back. What a note to leave on! I don't know if I should even try to sum up the last three years, but maybe I should note some salient points so anyone who's still around will have some idea of what's going on.
(Random note: I don't like this new post editor thing on LJ. I can't find anything! How do I make a bullet list anymore?)
1- I'm no longer with the RCMP since August of 2022. I took a risk to try a new job that I thought would be more aligned with my values, and the risk did not pan out at all, so after a year I ended up unemployed for about five months, and that suuuuucked. I found a temporary gig at Transport Canada (a six-month contract), and then a longer two-year contract, still with TC, but took a pay cut in so doing, alas.
2- I'm still living in the same place in Orleans. My roommate KK and I are still looking to buy a house in a more rural area where we can have a bit of land and a bunch of chickens and the like, but as we know all too well, the real estate market lost its goddamned mind in 2020 and has yet to find it again, so finding a house we can afford has been like finding a needle in a whole pile of haystacks. We've made offers on several houses, and those offers mostly fell through on inspection, with one exception where we were simply outbid by other buyers with deeper pockets.
3- On the cat front, I am sad to report that my oldest kitty Ben died in late August of this year after a couple of years of declining health. He was about sixteen, and had come to me through fearsclave when he and his wife had to rehome all their cats due to his wife's now life-threatening allergies. Only one of those four cats is still with us, and that is Libby, my roommate's cat. I still have Octavia and Juno, who are turning 11 and 12 this year, respectively.
4a- In dog news, Peggy is going to be 6 in March (God, how time flies!), and Pixie is now 3 and a half! She has calmed down a bit, much like Peggy did at her age, but is still a giant ball of energy. "Pixie-ing" has become a verb in our house.
4b- KK's little chihuahua mix Lidan died very suddenly and unexpectedly in November of 2022 after a short bout of illness. He was fine on the Saturday, but seemed a little off on Sunday and threw up a couple of times. On Monday KK took him to the vet because we were worried, and came home with antibiotics and a diagnosis of pneumonia, and on Tuesday morning she awoke to find he'd died in his sleep. It was pretty awful, because he was only 11 years old, and we'd expected to have him for many more years. KK was devastated, and even though she tried valiantly without him, he was very much an unofficial emotional support dog for her (she has some pretty severe mental health stuff going on), and after a month it was obvious we needed to do something about it, so I paid the adoption fee for a new dog for her from a local rescue. Enter Rika, a tan-coloured chihuahua with a little bit of miniature Pinscher, who was not quite 1 year old at the time, and was also quasi-feral. She has improved since then in terms of confidence, she loves my dogs, and haaaaaates everyone except KK, myself included. She has warmed up to me *slightly*, inasmuch as she has accepted the fact that I live here and must therefore be tolerated, to a point. She is also revoltingly cute, weighs just north of five pounds, and is hilarious in that way that only tiny dogs who think they're gigantic can be.
5- My parents are still doing pretty well, all things considered. They're still living in their condo in Montreal, and we visit each other regularly. My father had a stroke in the summer of 2022 which gave us all a scare, but luckily he received really swift treatment and has 100% recovered from it. My mother's health continues to be fragile but stable, and we're working very hard to keep it that way, although I have some concerns about some cognitive decline that I've noticed in the past few months. She's going to be 88 years old soon, though, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised that she's having some struggles on that front.
6- I've been having a bunch of health issues for the past three years, none of which are life-threatening or anything, but all of which have made my life harder in various ways. I will probably complain about some of them at length in other posts. Overall, though, I'm still chugging along as best I can.
I'm sure I've forgotten a bunch of things in there. Whatever I've forgotten I'm sure I'll get around to writing about in a later post.
Having attempted to summarize three years of stuff, I'm now going to turn my attention to the future. Well, the near future, anyway. I'm turning 46 on Sunday, and apart from the fact that my body appears to be attempting to decompose ahead of schedule, I find I'm not minding middle age at all. I haven't had the time or the mental bandwidth for a full-blown midlife crisis, although I have had more than a few thoughts along the lines of "I thought I'd be at a different stage in my life by now." I will likely angst about that in future entries as well, but not here.
I have a few goals/resolutions for this year, so I may as well document them here f0r my own benefit as well as a way to try to keep myself more accountable. I'm not going to break it all down into detail here, just note the broad strokes, and I'll get into the weeds of it all later. So, in no particular order:
1- I want to fully clean and organize the house (with the exception of KK's areas). KK is a bit of a hoarder, and between that and her increasing issues with physical disability/mobility, the house has slowly started drowning in stuff and is increasingly difficult to keep clean. This is on top of my own extremely indifferent housekeeping skills, so I need to step up my game if I want the house to go back to livable levels.
2- I want to start an indoor vegetable garden, and I also want to start a bunch of seedlings indoors this year for my community garden plot. I finally got off the waiting list last year, but too late to start seedlings, so this is the year that I am going to do that!
3- I want to learn new resilience skills and improve the ones I already have. My country decided it wants to ignore the fact that the Covid 19 pandemic is ongoing, as well as the fact that climate change is accelerating at a terrifying pace, and also the fact that we're poised for a bird flu pandemic on top of the current Covid 19 pandemic. Not to mention that the USA has just elected a fascist as their new President, one who is erratic and arguably suffering from some sort of dementia and acts predominantly based on his whims and spite. Our own elections are looming, and it's looking grim on that front as well. So I am doing my best to prepare for what I think is likely to be a long, grinding slide into societal collapse. And no, I don't think collapse is going to look like Mad Max or any other post-apocalyptic fiction, I think it's just going to look like having to pay ever-increasing rents while food and water become more expensive and scarce, supply chains slowly unraveling, and lots of poor and middle-class people dying because we can't afford basic necessities or healthcare or shelter after a while.
4- Speaking of which, I also want to increase my involvement in my community this year. Building local ties, supporting those who need it, etc. In the late spring I'm going to try an idea I got from someone I follow on social media, which is a "Popsicles on the porch" event. It just means inviting the neighbourhood to convene outside my front yard and distributing popsicles, and giving people the opportunity to socialize and get to know each other.
5- Ideally this will finally be the year we buy a house. I don't know if we'll be able to find anything, but I am damned well going to try!
6- I'm going to be more pro-active about my health this year. I've been neglecting it a fair bit, but this year I will be seeking out more medical care, in spite of the various obstacles (mostly in the form of my new doctor not taking my concerns particularly seriously). I've been bad about going to the dentist regularly, so I plan on fixing that too. I'm also going to try to be more mindful about what I'm feeding myself and how much exercise I'm getting (which has been very little). There is some weight-related stuff going on that I will address in a later post, because it's A Lot.
7- Last but not least, I want to be better about my finances. I am in decent shape, but those five months of unemployement were rough. I got employment insurance during those five months, but it was only about 25% of what I was making while I was working, and that's not really enough to maintain our current household expenses (even though I cut down on a lot of things during that time). So this year I want to cut back on expenses even more, eliminate what's left of my credit card debgt, and keep putting money aside for a new house as well as an emergency fund, as well as retirement. It's going to be difficult, given the pay cut I took with this new job, but I think it's doable, especially since the new job does occasionally allow for me to work overtime, which is a nice little bonus amount of money every so often. It's nowhere close to the OT I used to get paid at the RCMP, but it's still something.
Okay, I think that's more than enough for now. Time for bed over here.
Take care, friends, and I will see you on the flip side!