Musings on a Small Life

Monday August 2nd is a holiday in some (if not all) Canadian provinces and territories, Ontario being one, and I've booked tomorrow off (July 29) as well as the 30th to make it a nice five days off. I think (hope) I'll be able to enjoy these few days off much more than my week in June, as all but one of my summer projects have been submitted. (Cue the happy dance!) I have a quick appointment early tomorrow morning, then will head out to our mall to meet up with the lady I used to bus into work with. I called her today, just to confirm there wasn't any change at her end, and we're both looking forward to it.     Then I finally have a haircut first thing on Saturday morning! Yippee! There's a lot of hair to work with now, so I hope she'll be able to do something to give it some style, without cutting it all off in a short bob again. I quite like having length at the back, and it will flip up nicely around my shoulders, but it desperately needs layers, particularly...

I was awake around 2:15 AM today, thinking specifically about about our "return" to campus in the fall. My thinking has flipped from going in 1 or 2 days a week to working from home 100% and going in only for a bi-weekly collaboration day, or any other time that I feel like it, if there is a "hotel" desk and computer I can book. All five of the staff seem to be on the same page, and our Exec Director is trying to work out the kinks to make that happen. I don't know how she'll manage that, but that's why she gets paid the big bucks. So I was lying in bed in the wee hours, trying to picture in my mind what personal possessions I still have left in my cubicle. I realized I have more than I thought and will need a couple of boxes to bring the remaining items home. Maybe a third box if I'm bringing binders or other files, desk organizers, etc. (My boss kindly will play chauffeur when she's back on campus.) And I admittedly felt a bit sad, because I ac...

I spied these mushrooms this morning, while heading out on a couple of errands. It's been so wet that there were almost as many as there were blades of ground cover (whatever the city has planted along that path). They look so delicate and pretty to me that they reminded me of parasols. I don't know what's growing on the side of the hill created by the still-new overpass, but it's pretty to see. I was half-way along the path before I even noticed the grey of the fungi along with the green of the new ground cover. (Not visible in the pic above, obviously.) Last Sunday or Monday night we had an intense thunderstorm, the likes of which I haven't seen in the city in a few years or more. We got 53 mm of rain in a very short time, which was crazy. However, late last week we had another deluge, and when I got up in the morning I did find a few small pools of water in the (unfinished) basement. They were under and near one of the litterboxes and even though Derry had peed I...

I thought I'd better pop in and say we're still around, in case those who read this blog think we've run away from home. That's not the case at all, I'm just mired half a dozen work projects (all due within a few weeks of each other), plus our website migration. I am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on two of them, the big ones, the two that I loathe more than any other work projects I do; I just need to clean up the spreadsheets before sending them off and calling them done for another year. And yes, I should be working away at them at the moment, but I've hit the wall and my eyes are glazed; I need the mental break.   I got my second Pfzier shot on July 2nd, with very little reaction. The nurse who did it certainly didn't have the gentle touch of the first nurse, and my arm was a bit more sore than previously, but really only mildly so. I felt very tired and woozy-headed a few hours after the shot, but I can't say whether that was because of t...