Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

I went to pick up the keys to my "new" (temporary) apartment this morning. Turns out it's not just my apartment that didn't pass inspection. It's not just my whole building that didn't pass. Two buildings full didn't pass.

On the phone, they told me I'd be in the temporary apartment for a week. This morning they told me it would be two weeks, but no guarantee it wouldn't be longer.

On the phone (last week), they told me my apartment was complete and ready to move in -- it just hadn't passed inspection. I looked at it this morning, and it's not. None of the building is, it's all still a mess of construction. My apartment doesn't even have electric hooked up yet (no meter box).

The temp apartment is a one bedroom, while mine was a studio, so that's in theory an upgrade, but it's in a much worse location. Plus, even though it's newly renovated, the quality is crap. Screens missing, blinds broken, the door locks don't really work (from the outside/the keys, from the inside they work fine).

Plus the apartment I was moving in to has no mailbox. Yet my mail is now being forwarded there. Who knows what will happen to it?

Movers are due in a couple hours, and the apartment I currently live in is already rented out, so I have no choice but to move in there. I just feel like this is a very, very wrong decision. How many weeks will I have to go without unpacking my boxes?

Related note: I have no idea how I own so much stuff. I gave away and threw away so much, yet I still have 20+ boxes and a bunch of non-box containers of stuff. I have odd, strong desire to just throw it all out and run off and live in the woods or something.

It's two weeks and two days until I move, and... I'm done. Everything is packed except last minute stuff that I'm still using. I've done nearly all the move-out cleaning that I can do with boxes in the way and me still living there. I'm all done, yet I still have two weeks to wait and do nothing.

On one hand, I should enjoy this time. I have AC, and I'm moving into a place without it. I'm in a pretty, nice complex, and I'm moving into a place that's more than 50% smaller and a whole lot less nice, so I should just enjoy the last of my time here. But I can't. Because I'm moving in two weeks.

It's actually better to have stuff to do because I feel like I'm accomplishing things and getting stuff done when I pack. Now I'm just sitting around, twiddling my thumbs, and stressing/worrying about all the what-ifs. I just want to get on with life -- get moved, get unpacked and settled, iron the bugs out of my new place.

The first day there is going to be interesting. All of the apartments are being moved in to at the same time. (They were all being renovated, the whole building.) I don't know how all the moving trucks are going to handle it -- there's so little parking, and people are going to be moving in all day. Hopefully it will be a little easier for my people, since I'm taking Thursday the 1st off for the move. Maybe more people will move in on Friday the 2nd or the weekend.

Ellie New Cat update: Her nonstop meowing begging for food is 90% corrected in the evenings, yet somehow only 20% corrected in the morning. (How do kittybrains work that she can't connect the two?) Whenever she meows, I run at her hissing and waving my hands over my head (just plain running at her stopped working after a while). It's a good thing I live alone, as I'm sure that would be amusing to watch. However, since she's improved so much in the evenings, I have hope that eventually the mornings will get corrected as well.

I no longer make her talk for a treat, as I think that would send mixed signals. Maybe not, maybe meowing on command might register differently in kittybrains, but I don't need to risk it.

For some reason, I like to keep my book review posts on their own, so there will be another post sometime later today with a couple of reviews.

First off, exciting times! While this DOES NOT COUNT, as tomorrow is my official weighing day, I couldn't help but take a picture anyway. The first time I've been under 200 since I went away to college (multiple decades ago).



Now I just have to eat really, really good today so it doesn't go up for my official weighing tomorrow. :D (And yes, I'm bad, I can't help but weigh myself every single day. Yes, it makes me crazy. But I also think it makes me more accountable for my day-to-day eating.)

For a couple reasons, I think I'm going to move to Kaiser insurance when we're able to switch. Money is part of it (they're the cheapest plan by far), but also gonzostar posted some information on coverage of skin removal, and it seems like it will be a much easier process there. I'm not 100% sure I want to have it done (surgery, eek!), but my surgeon said I have about 15 pounds of stomach skin (can you imagine?), and getting my breasts done would be another big chunk, so I almost want to have it done for "easy" loss off ~25 pounds.

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Stardew Valley people: I found an easy way to get a screenshot of your whole farm. Go to http://upload.farm, upload your save file (open Windows Explorer, enter %appdata%, and you can find it from there), and you get a page like mine, scroll down to the bottom for the map. You can see my farm and all my game stats there.

orangerful had said I had a had a good farm, which started my quest to make that screenshot. As you can see, my farm SUCKS. I hadn't even realized how bad it was until I saw that overhead shot. So much wasted space! I think I'm going to scrap the whole thing and start over.


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I'm spinning my wheels right now on so much stuff. My vacation is coming up in less than a month, and there's so much I have to do/plan, I'm so nervous about so much. (I really hate my brain sometimes.) Even though I'm planning on leaving my apartment four hours before my flight (leaving two hours for what should be just over a 30 minute drive, but it'll be rush hour, and two hours for security and such), I'm so worried something will happen and I'll miss it.

Also, I had thought I wouldn't have to check my bag, but it's a couple inches too big, so I guess I'll have to. That's not such a big deal on the outgoing leg, but onto the returning home leg, I have a 45 minute layover (shorter than I'd like), so I have no idea if I or my bag will make it... Plus there's always the worry that someone might steal your bag during luggage claim.

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Though it's still early, I'm plotting and planning things for my move. I'd like to be rid of my sofa, but I had no idea how hard of a task that is. If I have someone come in to haul it away, it will be a minimum of $150! It's way too big for me to get out of my apartment myself, otherwise I could sneak it into the apartment complex trash (not supposed to dump furniture there, but people do).

I'm semi-considering buying a saw and, assuming it's made of wood inside, breaking it down into smaller pieces that I can take out during the night myself (putting a sheet down to contain any mess). However, I have no idea of a number of things: How expensive a saw is. What I would do with the saw after. If it's made of wood inside or if there are metal bars. How big of a job it would be to saw a sofa into pieces myself.

I will NOT be buying a new sofa to replace it. :P

Been five days since my last post. While I've been reading my friends list, I haven't felt like posting. Lots of points in semi-random order:

* Less than five days until I go into the hospital. I've gained some weight back, but not too much. More than I'd like, but still within the range the surgeon wanted me to lose. I keep thinking "this will be the last time I can ever have..." and how can you resist eating whatever that is? I'm really depressed and down. I wish I were excited about this, but it's a "have to" not a "want to" situation. I don't want to fall over dead in the next few years, so... no choice.

* Part of my depressed issue is likely period-related. Where the hell is it?! It's now nine days late. (No chance of pregnancy.) If I get it when I go into the hospital, I'm going to be pissed. I don't want to have to deal with it then! Sigh. Damned body.

* I'm starting to have stress bad dreams. I expect them to only get worse the closer Monday gets.

* Work sucks. I'm taking three weeks off for this, but in our group there's no reduction of amount of work or deadlines because of vacation -- so I have the same work and the same deadlines, with three weeks less to do it in. Way to let us enjoy our vacations. Most people in my group work though theirs.

* I read a Harry Potter fanfic for the first time in years. In Loco Parentis by Dolores_Crane. I loved the first chapter of it, though the second and third less so. It's everything I usually wouldn't have liked, but it was so well written that it worked. Hermione POV. Hermione/Harry (though it's minor). Snape/Harry (mostly in the background). It was a more realistic look at muggles at Hogwarts. At the end it became a bit preachy for me, but all in all, I liked it a lot.

Boy do I miss Snape/Harry. I don't think I've had an OTP since then. I think Snarry was what sparked my enjoyment of age and power differences in fic relationships. There was so much good HP fanfic back when I was in the fandom. I should poke about and see if there's more good Snarry out there (or heck, reread the older good stuff, it's not going to be like I remember it).

* This is an odd time. Usually I'd be wishing for Friday to get here, especially when that Friday was the start of a three week vacation, but this time I'm wishing the week never ends. At least I got good RP tonight, probably the last of it until my mother flies home in two and a half weeks.

* I'm reading the best book, but it's so long, it's taking me forever to finish (yay!). 24 hours in and I'm only just over 50% done (it's 1,000+ pages long; for comparison, the first Game of Thrones book was 800). Usually a book takes me 10-12 hours to read. Stormlight Archive (Way of the King) by Brandon Sanderson. From his website: "I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words worth of worldbuilding for it". You can so tell he has all that worldbuilding done. It's amazing. And man, I'd kill to see all his notes about the world.

I started writing this post and paused to pick an icon, this one. *points* Then I got sad because it's been so long, likely no one remembers where it's from anymore. Then I realized that *I* didn't remember the video anymore either. So I googled it.

This video had been all the rage years ago.

Oh. My. God. So horribly annoying now. Same thing with that 'badger badger badger badger, mushroom mushroom' one. How in the world did we think these things were funny and amusing?

Anyway. The post I had been writing was about how horribly full my head is right now. Work is crazy-busy, I've RPed more in the past two days than the last two weeks, online stuff has been less settled than I'd like it to be, I still have hundreds of stacks of ore to deal with in-game, I've had a headache for four days straight now, and I swear to god, I think my head might explode from it all. I can't take anything more happening right now.

When it gets like this, I need quiet. No TV, no radio, no sounds of people talking around me. Silence is the best. ...and then that video started. It couldn't have been more opposite of helpful.

The one good thing is that I'm sleeping. Don't ask me how that works, when all this stress and endless busy-ness is going on. I go to sleep at bedtime and I wake up 3-4 minutes before my alarm goes off. It is glorious.

So anyway, if you find me chatting less and hiding more online, it'll soon pass. I'm over the hump at work, so hopefully that part at least will be returning to normal soon. Hopefully everything else will follow after that.

This headache can end any time now. Stupid sinuses.