Drunken Owls and Other Delights

So of course I can't let a day off go by without Doing Stuff That Needs Doing. Because I don't know how to slack off without feeling guilty about it, heh.

More pictures have been hung on the wall, and several have been put aside for storage as we're thinking of updating our art prints. We of course buy most of them from our local museums or ones we've visited in the last couple of years, and the old ones have started suffering from sun fade. A is currently looking at multiple museums' online shops, and we're also awaiting the re-opening of Ukiyo-e Heroes' website -- they do a lot of giclee prints of anime and sf/f characters in a feudal Japan style, and we already own a handful of them already. We'll be putting more pictures up tomorrow!

Also done today: two of three things I've been meaning to get rid of have now been gotten rid of! Thanks to FB Marketplace our moving boxes have been picked up by a few local Millennials that will be moving soon, and our old Dyson stick vacuum (which is around seventeen years old at this point, and it was a refurb when we got it) was also taken. Someone is picking up our old floor lamp tomorrow. This means we once again have more room in the garage, and the pile of Things to Donate is once again shrinking. I'll need to find the time to drop the four or five boxes going to Goodwill. I'd do it tomorrow but there's no rush.

Tomorrow is my second day off in a row (yay!) and A is doing a half-day, so after she signs off we'll be doing some grocery shopping, but that's about it!

Well, at least I did get to be lazy and lie in bed until 7am!

Despite being 98% settled in at this point, we still have a few outstanding things to do here at the new digs...

--Bring up the remaining boxes of books. I think I have maybe about five or six boxes in storage downstairs that need bringing up when I have time (and do not have a bum foot due to previous dumbassery). One of the tall bookshelves was missing a few pegs that got lost in the move and we put replacements in. The midsize bookshelf next to my side of the bed also has two empty shelves for my TBR/TBR-then-donate pile.
--Bring up the one box of musical box sets and find a good place for them. I'd rather they be up here, though where is a good question... My boxes of CDs and other music-related things will stay downstairs, though. I don't mind those hanging out and they're well contained.
--Bring down the two area rugs, and contemplate keeping or tossing. We've decided not to use them and they're rather run down due to wear and cat claw-sharpening and are just taking up floor space in the living room.
--Break down more of the boxes that can be recycled. Our bin isn't nearly as big as the ones our old place had so there's only so much I can put in there alongside our usual week's recycling. Same with the bags of trash. We rarely have a lot of compost so there's no worries there.
--Speaking of boxes, I should put up a post for Free Moving Boxes on FB Marketplace. I'm sure someone will want them! Also should put up the floor lamp, small table (the one we had in the kitchen at the old place) and its two wooden chairs. At this point I'll give them away cheap, as we don't need them now.

Still, this 2% is all stuff I can do over the course of several weeks with no cutoff time, so I'm not worried...

A and I were talking yesterday about the differences between our old place the new one. Aside from the change in layout, I was taken by the fact that it's wonderfully quiet. While the old place wasn't on a high volume street, it did get its share of vehicle traffic coming and going between Geary and California, not to mention the foot traffic from the restaurants on Clement. Whereas here, we only have the kids across the street at the elementary school and the occasional car driving by. We're also kind of surprised we don't hear the traffic next block over on Fulton, which is often used as a speedway for people cutting east-west across town. Our cats make more noise!

Oh, and we are both very thankful that our downstairs neighbors are very quiet and very nice. The most I hear from them is the occasional piano practice, which I am all for. Which is a LOT better than the idiot bro at the old place with an electric drum kit and no sense of rhythm and a guitar and an amp and only plays Eddie Van Halen squealy wank with no sense of melody.

There's also the fact that it feels warmer and less humid here. It could be the fact that this is a brand new renovation so the windows are nice and tight, and we don't have leaky skylights either. The breeze is a bit cooler since we get the direct ocean wind, but only when we're outside. The view from the office on a clear day isn't as grand as it was in Spare Oom, but you can see the top of the GGB towers popping up over the hill of the Presidio, and the Marin headlands range is still lovely. We can even see Mount Tamalpais this time!

We are now completely moved into our new home, and have been spending the last several days unpacking, setting things up, putting things away, and ensuring the cats aren't too freaked out by their new surroundings.

I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting to feel a wave of melancholy when I left the old apartment yesterday after picking up the last of the leftover things I had to bring over. And again today when I left the keys and the garage door opener on the kitchen counter. It felt...well, sort of like when I moved out of my parents' house in 2005, now that I think about it. A little over fifteen years in the same place and it becomes a strong part of your history, I guess. We were only at our apartment in North Beach for just shy of four years and it took me that long to get used to our last place. 

But yeah, walking out of there for the last time was definitely a trip. Lots of memories, lots of life events.

There's still a lot to do, even though we're mostly settled now. The shared office needs things put away, the garage needs a LOT of rearranging and organization (and the two storage shelves built at that), and we still need to do a bit of grocery shopping.

It's slow going, but we're getting there. 

After all this wait, all the paperwork and the banking and the scheduling and rescheduling and info updating and everything else, we'll have finally fully moved into our new home come Tuesday! It's been such a weird and wild and extremely exhausting couple of months and I've completely lost track of time to the point of what day it is half the time. I'm finally on a full week's vacation where I can focus on the final couple of 'soft moves' (moving the small and fragile stuff, storing new purchases, setting up new furniture and whatnot) without juggling it with the Day Job.

This however doesn't mean that I'll be able to sleep in most of the days because a lot of our plans involve early or midmorning things to do like meeting up with our soon to be former landlady for a final walk-through and having the place cleaned, and most likely a lot of unpacking in the next several days after that. Still, I don't have to worry about any eight-hour shifts on top it all!

And after all that, I'll hopefully be back online and blogging and writing on a regular schedule soon!

...until we officially move into our new place! I'm still trying to wrap my head around that. It's not helping that I feel like I've been putting off all the packing even though I've done quite a large amount of it (and tossing/donating) already. It's also not helping that the Day Job has had some of its busiest days in months these last couple of weeks. I'm deliberately running on half-speed to conserve energy -- I'm not as fast at work so I can keep some of that oomph to move boxes and bins over to the new place.

We've also been doing a lot of shopping lately, buying stuff for the new place. We've even gotten ourselves a membership to Costco after all these years! Not that we're about to buy Armageddon Preparation Size boxes of cereal mind you, just looking for good deals on things we frequently use and need like household stuff. We're also buying things other than bookshelves (heh) at Ikea for storage modules we will need. We're trying not to go overboard considering we're moving into a slightly smaller space and there's only so much space for storage, but being smart about the space we do have is important. I will be heading to said Costco later today to pick up some storage shelves for the garage.

And INTERNETS! As of yesterday we are all wired up at the new place so that's one more thing to cross off our to-do list. Yay!

I am a little worried about some of the stuff we're getting rid of, though I'm hoping that won't be too much of a problem. We'll be getting rid of our old Dyson vacuum cleaner which we've had for almost 20 years that STILL runs perfectly (not bad for a refurb at that) which I'm sure a neighbor will yoink. The living room couch is going to be tricky, though. It's the one we bought from Home Reserve, known for their really good durable furniture that comes in boxes that you put together yourselves. I want to see if one of our neighbors wants it first before I put it up on FB Marketplace. I'd rather someone take it because aside from a bit of wear and sun fade, it's still in great condition, but if we have to toss it, at least it's gotten sixteen years of use!

I'll be honest, what's bothering me the most is that I'm barely getting any writing work done. I'd packed all my notebooks and brought them over to the new place so I haven't done any journaling in ages. I might squeeze in a few pages of revision and editing on the trilogy remaster, but that's about it. I just haven't had the time. I'd expected this and I'm using the time as a bit of a vacation from all that, but I am SO itching to get back to it once we've moved.

On that note, I have today and tomorrow off and I'd better get moving. Still using pockets of time to rest and relax, but I still have a lot to do.

A couple of weeks ago I'd decided I needed a three-day weekend as desperately needed the break. As mentioned before, I'd been feeling overworked but was also fighting back a cold and/or a sore throat, not to mention said cold constantly waking me up in the middle of the night. I put in the request and the weekend is FINALLY here!

This is something else I really appreciate about my current employer, by the way. At the bank I would have had to call in sick/play hooky, or if I put in the request I'd have had to jump through a few hoops with management. Sure, I have a few coworkers who gleefully exploit this so they can slack off, but for the most part the teams make do and power through the best they can. And besides, they're trying to make budget right now and I basically told them that they can give my hours to anyone who wants them instead of paying me for that extra day off. [And that's also a plus for me in that I end up not using my floaters, paid vacation or other days so I can use them later on!]

So what do we have planned? Well, not much at all, really. A few local errands, that's about it. The weather's supposed to be crappy the next few days anyway so holing up to watch movies, listen to podcasts and work on writing is just fine by me.

WHOOF that was a longass week for the Day Job. Three midshifts followed by two morning opens, and each day had its planned day go awry for the most annoying of reasons. Some days it was front end people getting pulled to do other work. Other days it was someone from a different department coming in late so the person who was supposed to open with me had to take their place, leaving me solo for the first hour. And of course midshifts mean dealing with not one but TWO busy waves (lunchtime with the high school teens and dinner time with the people stopping on the way home from work). Most all of these reasons meant me doing not just my job but someone else's on top of that, so at the end of each day I was exhausted. I can handle the occasional derailment of plans, but not when it's every single flipping day!! Yeesh.

And on top of all that, even though I get to wake up at 6am instead of earlier, it only allows me maybe three hours or so to squeeze in things I'd like to do like blogging, writing sessions and so on. By the time I get home at 8pm on those midshifts, I'm too tired to do anything except jump into bed and read until I eventually fall asleep.

The plus side is that next week is all opening shifts -- which are my favorites and ones that don't entail multiple busy waves or Drop Everything And Do This Instead moments. Tuesday's shift is kinda-sorta a midshift at 10-6.30, but it means I'll still be home for dinner and time to chill before heading to bed. I can handle waking up stupid early because I get out at 2pm al the other days, and have the entire rest of the day for myself, including a midafternoon chill-out. I'm always saying that I prefer these and eventually I'd like to talk to the boss about making that a bit more permanent, but we shall see.

It's going to be another week of weird work schedule hours, three of them being the dreaded midshifts, but I'm trying to look on the positive side: this means I'm waking up at 6am instead of 5 or 4ish so I can sleep in a bit. And if I keep following my current flexibility in the writing half of the day, then all will be well. I do think, however, that I really do need to work more on keeping the stress levels even when I manage the front end on those midshifts. I'm doing better, but I think I'm still being too much of a pushover.

I mean, part of it is generational, I think. I work with a bunch of millennials that can't wait that minute for me to finish talking with someone and just barge right into the conversation and derail it. They're great kids, but they need to Talk to the Hand sometimes and wait their turn. A lot of them can't stand being up front for their full shift, either. Neither do I sometimes, but at least I know how to accept that sometimes I'm just a register jockey for those eight hours. As a front end manager, I need to learn to say 'sorry kid, you're up here until further notice.' [I sent one of them out on the floor last week simply because I had Zero Patience that day. Thankfully it wasn't too busy and they quickly returned when we needed extra ringers.]

Anyhoo, I'm pretty sure these wonky schedules are going to become the norm for at least a few more weeks, as this is a dead time for the store. There's like a month and a half between Valentines Day and Easter with no major holiday in between, so volume will be down, budget will be tighter, and hours will be cut a bit. Given that I'm pretty much full time, that means I'll be put where I'm needed most for three of those days. [I still have my Friday and Saturday bookkeeping days, which are set in stone. I might lose an hour on the back end on one of those days, but that's it.] It's not the most stable schedule for me, but it's at least workable.

Not me, actually, but work. The big Valentine's Day holiday rush is now over, and there really isn't another big one coming until Easter in April, so it's going to be a slower couple of months at the day job. This also means I'll be working more like 32-36 hours instead of a full forty, which on the one hand kind of sucks pay-wise but gives me a bit of a respite and refocus on what I need focusing on.

And speaking of which, I've finally started playing daily rounds of Squaredle on my phone. I've been meaning to do that for a while, but this seemed like a perfect time to follow through with the plan. It keeps me from passively doomscrolling on social media for one, which is a big plus. But I've always loved a good word search game (I've also got a few Penny's Finest word seek magazines on my desk for funsies) and this is a phone game that's not timed or ridiculously hard to the point of frustration. The games at the beginning of the week are relatively easy but get harder as the week goes on, but I'm enjoying it.

In the process this is keeping my head clearer when it's time to sit down and start my writing sessions. It's good to be focusing on the Trilogy remaster of course, but I seem to have finally realigned myself to the point where it's a lot easier to focus because of my Squaredle games. I suppose in a way this is the same thing as my pre-writing FreeCell games back in the Belfry days, but I'm not going to complain. Whatever works and gets me moving, right?

Now if I can only get myself to start exercising more again...