Endings

At the beginning of the week, I was looking forward to getting to this period where I have a bit of time to catch my breath. When Friday arrived, it was a mix of happy and sad. I’m going to miss my coworkers very much. That was the best place I’ve worked at in Ottawa. Unfortunately, mat leave contracts are not easily extended. Hopefully there will be room for me in the future!

Some things I won’t miss like the loss of time commuting everyday and depending on the bus. I’m looking forward to catching up on sleep and getting some things done around my place. The weather is also getting nicer, so I’m looking forward to that too.

But I have no shortage of things to do in the meantime. Row 80 is kicking off a new round and I have a revised goals list to go with it.

Goals Update

French

Class began on Saturday despite snow, freezing rain, and rain.

My teacher is an African hailing from the Congo. So far, he teaches in a bit of a scatterbrained way, but he gave us a list of all the French sound families and I think that is going to help a lot. I’ll be retyping it as it’s a grainy xerox and I want to have a copy in a safe place. Other than the scatterbrained part, there was a lot of useful information I’ve never had in all the times I have taken French.

I was initially really angry that I was bumped back to Level 1 after taking time off to do graduate studies, but I think this is going to be a good thing. I also decided that it doesn’t matter where I am in the “official” lessons as I can work ahead. Indeed, I’m currently ahead in my French speaking for this level, but there are a lot of little things I don’t know, like when to use liaisons and not. Clearing up those things might be enough to help me be more confident.

I’m planning on watching French movies and TV as well to help me develop my ear as that is a piece that I’ve been struggling with.

Writing

I have a number of things on my list. Here is the general order:

Short for the horror project. Short for Digi60.Revise and rename Puppy Chow to send out.Increase the word count on The Page & The Magician to send out.

And in no particular order:

A non-fiction book [research and outline]Finish Shads a.k.a. The Mockumentary [first draft]Finish The Blood Waitress Club [first draft]A podcast [research and outline]Finish Scion [first draft]I might also try to enter a short story into an anthology that has a June deadline.Also, there are songs I haven’t written yet.

Home

I now have time to actually deal with my bathroom door. I’m wondering how much it will cost to have it delivered, though maybe I can strap it to the roof of my car if it’s not raining. I’m going to need to stain it and that may be fun to figure out in my little condo. I’m going to go with a whitewash stain, so it’ll look older than it is since it’s to be a sliding barn door style door.

Having more time for the decluttering effort won’t be bad. I want to get rid of anything I don’t need.

I’m working on a quilt of my old theatre tees. I stopped wearing them long ago, but didn’t want to get rid of them. I also didn’t want to wear them because I knew I wanted to do something with them.

And of course there’s no shortage of dishes and laundry to catch up on around here.

I want a proper dresser at some point. I feel this will help a lot, but it’s also not my top priority. I think getting my living room, kitchen, and bathroom fixed up is more important right now. Most people don’t need to enter my bedroom. I can’t close any of the other spaces off from visitors since it’s a fairly open concept floor plan.

Also, I need to start cutting apart my bathroom vanity as I will be replacing it. I plan to do it in stages because there currently isn’t a shut off valve on my bathroom sink. The counter spans the length of the room and really doesn’t belong in such a small room. It also has an out-dated design. I figure if I take half of it out, I’ll at least have a better temporary space for its replacement cabinet than my tiny hallway. I feel like I’m living in Tetris some days.

Finances

I will be spending a little time getting these done. I need my paper from school and from that bit of time when I did Uber Eats and then I think I can file.

My car is supposed to be paid off sometime in May. This will help me a lot.

Job

I’ll also be applying for jobs of course. If I can’t work where I was, I really want to aim for somewhere closer to home. It’ll be easier to accept a lower paying position once my car payments are done also.

Anyway, lots to do.

R~

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