The Fandrogyne

~ It was a pretty relaxing weekend. I slept a lot, which was both good and bad, I guess, but I liked it. It passed too quickly, as weekends are wont to do, but it was still pretty good.

~ I finished reading Django Wexler's The Forbidden Library and started on Delilah S Dawson's Servants of the Storm, which is wonderfully creepy and I'm loving it so far!

~ I tried candied smoked salmon for the first time, which is a bit too sweet to eat on its own, but when it's between two thin slices of potato-chive focaccia, it's freaking amazing! Not something I would go out of my way to buy again, I think, unless it's on the amazing BOGO sale I got it on this week, but I'm glad I took a chance on it and tried it while I could.

~ I went to view a house for rent that looked like it would be perfect for what I needed. Same price as where I'm currently staying, 3 bedrooms (or from my perspective, a bedroom, a spare bedroom, and an office), 2 bathrooms, great location that could help save me money in cabs by being so close to major grocery stores that I could walk much more easily, attached garage, fenced-in back yard. It seemed amazing!

Then I got there and it was... less than amazing.

First off, the fenced-in back yard had a large chunk of fence missing. The garage roof leaked badly, and around light fixtures. The stove's range hood was missing. The walls and windows hadn't been properly cleaned since the previous tenants left, nor the floors from other viewings, so it looked very much like cleaning up someone else's mess would be part of the new tenant's move-in chores. The 3rd bedroom was in a finished basement, which also would have been wonderful for potential future heat waves because it would be cooled down there than upstairs, but it was hard to actually see anything because there was no power running to the building and the woman showing it to me (or more accurately, letting me wander through at it my leisure while she stood at the doorway playing with her cell phone) didn't know about that and didn't bring a light source, so I tried to get what info I could by the light of my cell phone camera. But that did reveal to me that some rooms downstairs were missing wall and/or ceiling panels.

I could understand a place like that being rented for $650 a month, with all those problems, but $800? Hell no! I could understand $700 if the fence and garage roof were fixed, but that's still not $800.

But the biggest nail in the coffin was that the house was up for sale, which means that even if the landlord was willing to drop the rent to $650 a month in light of all the damage done to the place, I might still find myself in the exact same situation I'm trying to move to avoid in the first place.

So that turned into a bit of a wasted hour on Saturday. It was interesting seeing another house to possibly rent, I admit, but nothing came of it.

Back to the drawing board where that's concerned, I guess.

~ A friend and I have started to read the Twilight saga together, as a sort of "share my pain" project and so that when people tell us that we can't badmouth the books because we've never read them, we can say that we have indeed, and that they're still pretty bad.

Really, though, we're a quart of the way through the book and nothing's happened except for a load of banal conversation about nothing, Bella being simultaneously pretensious and self-deprecating, and Edward saying a lot that amounts to, "Come with me. ...You should stay away from me. We're going here together... but I'm too dangerous to be around, for absolutely no reason that you can fathom. Want to hang out with me? WELL YOU SHOULDN'T!"

I'm honestly not sure how this managed to attract an agent, because there's absolutely nothing in the standard excerpt length that would lead me to believe the book is about anything but an unhappy girl trying to cope with general life while being ignored by attractive people. You don't even get to that whole "Edward saving Bella from a car accident" bit until after chapter 3, and that's usually the limit most agents will give anything, if they're feeling generous.

Yes, it went on to make lots of money and launched the YA reading careers of a million teens, but I don't know how, because it isn't a very good book, and there were plenty of better ones already on the shelves at the time.

~ At least I've finished Arrows of the Queen. That took some of the bad literary taste out of my mouth.

~ I did play more Final Fantasy X this weekend, which was nice because I neglected it all last week. Made it through the temple at Macalania, laughed maniacally over winning the battle with Seymour, then spent most of the night level-building on Bikanel Island, because the desert is vast and full of monsters that actually give me a bit of a challenge. So that was plenty of fun.

I have the Airship now, which I think is an event that every long-time Final Fantasy player waits for in every game.

~ I got quite a bit of housework done this weekend, too! The dishes are all done, laundry mostly folded and put away, the kettle cleaned and descaled, and I made beef strips and rice one day and then chicken fajitas the next, both of which were delicious!

And let's not forget the tasty pumpkin cinnamon rolls!

I'm glad I managed to be so productive and get so much done!

~ I'm finally and properly caught up with my wordcount goal for NaNoWriMo! It took a few 3k+ nights, but I got there, and now I can just work at a normal pace for the rest of the month, provided I don't take any more days off.

Then it'll just be a matter of continuing to write until I actually properly finish something. Which for me is a lot harder than writing 1.6k words a day.

~ I bought my first binder! I'm probably a little too excited about this, but I can't wait until it arrives and I can see what I look like in it! I've tried to bind before, usually with lousy homemade wraps that take forever to put on and then may or may not actually stay where they're supposed to for longer than a couple of hours, and the hassle just wasn't worth the payoff. So I'm hoping that a shirt that I can wear much more easily than a wrap will help bring a bigger payoff for less effort.

~ Caught Giratina in Pokemon Shuffle! Now, to hope that I can rank in the Mega Banette battle and get a Mega Stone this time. I didn't manage to rank high enough to get the Absolite last time, which disappointed me, but I'll push to get the rank this time!

~ Someone will be coming by to do some roofing tomorrow, which means having my sleep interrupted, combined with the landlord coming over to do a few things to finish winterizing the house (mostly cleaning the furnace filters), so I anticipate not only very broken sleep, but also having to do a bunch of housework again to get ready for him arriving. I did a bunch the weekend before last, of course, but over a week has passed and things get messy or need doing again, so, tonight is a cleaning night.

Then hopefully he can come and do what he needs to do and then largely leave us alone for the rest of the winter. I do best when I'm largely left alone and can live and work to my own schedule.

Fortunately it's both compost pickup and recycling pickup tomorrow morning, which will mean a whole load of stuff can easily be taken out of the house and left for somebody else to deal with. I love that recycling pickup is curbside in this city!

~ Speaking of recycling, though, I'm very tempted to start making a weekly trip to the recycling depot with cans and bottles, so that I can get a little bit of money back. Curbside recycling doesn't give me a deposit back. And I don't have a car, but the depot is less than an hour's walk from my house, so it would be an okay trip in most weather, and even if I only got a couple of dollars back, that's a couple of dollars I wouldn't have otherwise, and I have a ready excuse to get out and walk more.

If I don't start doing that before winter, it's definitely something I'll start doing in the spring. But so far I hear we're going to have a mostly mild winter, not nearly as much snow as last winter brought, so even this year I might have plenty of clear weeks where I could make the trip.

~ As always, grocery shopping on Friday morning was fun. I took advantage of a few sales and came home with plenty of toilet paper, some ground pork, ground turkey, simmering steaks... Most of what I buy at grocery stores now is meat, because vegetables are so cheap at the 2 farmers markets, so it's better to just get meat when there are good sales and get vegetables elsewhere even when they're at regular prices.

Unless there are some good fruits or vegetables on the markdown rack. Last time I got 5 ears of corn for $1.49, which is a good price for this time of year. Most of the stuff there isn't much good unless you're going to use it within a day, maybe 2, but sometimes I can find some amazing deals on markdown produce.

~ One of the grocery stores I went to has a walk-in medical clinic, so even though I was tired and had groceries to take care of and just wanted to come home and go to bed, I sat there for an hour and a half until I got an appointment. Got a prescription for my asthma meds, filled them the next morning, and yay, I have things that let me breathe properly once again! Expensive, but I prefer oxygen to money most days anyway.

Sadly, my meds are more expensive here than they were in the last province I lived. By about $30. Which is very unfortunate, since it's not like I'm going to stop needing them any time soon, so that's an extra expense on top of the regular expense and bleh, why do I have to be unhealthy, anyway>

I also got this year's flu shot while I was there, which was cheaper than it was in the other province, but not by enough to offset the increased cost of the asthma meds. To offset the cost, the pharmacy would have to have paid me $10 to get the flu shot. They were usually around $20, before. But even then, I never paid, because my asthma entitled me to a free flu shot each year. (Pre-existing lung conditions occasionally have minor perks.) But that same allowance isn't given by this province, so I went from paying nothing to now paying $12, on top of paying $30 more for my regular meds.

But hopefully the vaccine will help keep me from getting as sick this winter, and my regular meds will do the rest to keep my lungs in decent working order. I hate that they cost so much, but I do like not being sick.

~ I earned enough points doing surveys to get a $10 payout! I have plans for this $10. Not huge plans, because it's only $10, but I'm going to have a little bit of fun with it. Money I earn from surveys like that is my fun money, money that doesn't need to go elsewhere, so I'm pretty happy earning little bits here and there to help me buy a video game or craft supplies every once in a while.

~ I finally splurged and bought a microwave, too, which, even though it was expensive (though it was still the cheapest microwave there), will help me make sure I eat more leftovers. Leftovers are a pain to reheat without something convenient like a microwave, so sometimes I just wouldn't go through the hassle, and some food would go to waste. No longer! So even if it was an expense, I think it will save money in the long run.

~ I've been having so many problems with my Internet connection lately. Sometimes it works wonderfully, high speeds and everything... for about 10-15 minutes. Sometimes less. And when it stops working, I'm left with no Internet connection for at least half an hour. I'm not sure if it's the router in the living room, or the signal booster on my computer, or something else entirely. I can't find anything on virus or malware scans, which means that "something else" isn't too likely, but that still leaves me with two options that I can't do much about. Other devices do work when they're closer to the router, but also sometimes they don't, and the router needs to be reset, so in the end I just have no idea.

I suppose I should try to see it as a mixed blessing. A sporadic Internet connection means less opportunity to get distracted by online stuff when I ought to be doing other things. The Internet's great for a lot, but it's also great for killing certain kinds of productivity, and really, sometimes I do need an excuse to step away and do other things. Not necessarily step away from my computer, because there's plenty of work I can do on it without needing the Internet, but step away from YouTube and Facebook and other distractions that I really need less of in my life.

Still. That doesn't make the lousy connection any less frustrating to deal with.

~ I managed to get both Palkia and Dialga and beat level 50 of the Latias challenge to get a Latiasite in Pokemon Shuffle, all of which makes me very very happy! I'm not sure I'll be able to rank high enough on the Mega Absol challenge to get an Absolite, either. No matter; even if I don't manage it this time, I'm sure those levels will come around again at some point in the future.

~ Last night I got the laundry folded and put away, the recycling bagged and taken down to the basement until pickup day, washed a load of dishes, vacuumed the downstairs room and the stairs leading upstairs, and a bit of the junk cleared off the kitchen table.

I also ended up taking a nap, due to sleeping very little the night before. Completely worth it, because I probably managed to get more done after feeling rested and refreshed than I would have if I'd just tried to push through the fatigue.

~ Tried a chai latte from Starbucks. It was pretty good. Not as good as the ones I used to be able to get at Java Moose, but since there's no Java Moose here, Starbucks's is a decently-priced alternative.

I also tried their gouda, egg, and bacon breakfast sandwich. It was okay. Nothing special, and smaller than I expected, so I don't really think it's worth the price. I can spend only a little bit more across the street at A&W and get a couple of their bacon & egger breakfast sandwiches, which taste better and fill me up more.

~ Walked about 2.5 km today, which isn't spectacular, but it's more than I usually do, and it helped me get a load of steps logged on my FitBit, so yay!

~ Ended up with a random inexplicable fever while trying to sleep, one that seemed to sap me of my ability to feel like I had any body heat whatsoever, and I slept under a ridiculous number of blankets and had to take muscle relaxants to unclench enough to fall asleep in the first place. I woke up later, drenched with sweat and feeling shaky. I still feel shaky, truthfully, but I can't get away with not doing housework tonight. Fortunately I have a friend coming over tomorrow who can help me with whatever's left over, so I can go easy on myself tonight, at least a little bit.

~ Supper tonight was leftover salmon and rice. So when I do more housework later, at least I'll have some high-energy food in my belly to help keep me going!