the deep moans round with many voices

Hello!

So since I last posted, I reached the gathering site in Alberta (a very swanky "cabin" in the Canadian Rockies, and I will not be any more specific than that, thank you very much). The get-together was WONDERFUL, which is unsurprising, but alas all good things must end so the vast majority of people left Sunday morning (July 20) in order to fly home (or in one case catch a bus to Banff). I drove northeast to Drumheller, leaving around 11ish, and that was the only day where I had to stop on the side of the road to pee in a ditch because Google Maps decided to route me via county roads through the middle of nowhere so I had no chance to find a gas station.

The Royal Tyrell Museum was EXCELLENT and I highly recommend a visit to anyone who has the chance. If you have the time, arrive in the morning to take a badlands hiking tour (this obviously did not work with my schedule), but the museum itself is still damn cool. I then spent the night in a "hotel" that was 7 rooms above an Indian restaurant. The room was fine! It was just kind of a surprise. But on the bright side, I bought a double order of garlic naan for an evening snack and proceeded to munch on that as car snacks for the next two days.

I also bought a t-shirt, a pair of socks, and a travel mug (no handle, has a tea-and-dinosaurs pun) from the museum gift shop. No regrets!

Monday the 21st I drove back south into the US and then took the Going-To-The-Sun Road from east to west through Glacier National Park. (I had previously acquired an America The Beautiful pass which gets you into ALL national parks, plus any sites managed by the Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Fish and Wildlife Service, USDA Forest Service, and US Army Corps of Engineers that charge an entrance fee.) Glacier is fucking BEAUTIFUL. Due to time constraints (and also weather; it was gray and drizzly during most of my visit) I didn't do any proper hiking, but I did get to walk upstream along Siyeh Creek for a little way.

I spent Monday night at a motel in Kalispell, west of Glacier, where I was able to wash a load of laundry. And I will post about the rest of my trip another day.

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In non-trip news, I am currently staying at Vicky's house while she is off on her own two-week road trip. She is circling through Chicago, Pittsburgh, NJ, DC, South Carolina, Tennessee, and then Chicago again on her way home to Minnesota. Meanwhile I am dogsitting Alfie, bringing in her mail, and generally making her house look lived-in rather than vacant.

What I get out of this is A) some distance from our parents, which is nice (I love them but it's still fundamentally awkward to live in their basement as a middle-aged adult); B) BETTER INTERNET (my parents' wifi works fine for anything word-based but is frankly tragic about images, gifs, and videos); and C) the company of one of the world's most adorable dogs. <3

In job search news, I have applied to two Not The IRS offices in the Twin Cities area (annoyingly you can't apply for a region -- you have to apply to each office individually). I have also updated my resume and tomorrow I am going to poke at LinkedIn until I can figure out how best to upload it and start refining my job search terms.

Also I may have fallen down a rabbit hole reading Ask A Manager columns, but shhh, we'll keep that as our little secret. ;)

1. I had a uterine fibroid embolization on June 4. This is a minor surgery that basically murders a fibroid by cutting off its blood supply. I had to stay in the hospital overnight for observation, since blood clots can be Bad News and this procedure essentially creates an artificial clot -- they needed to make sure it didn't hare off and cause problems.

My sleep was very disrupted for about a week thereafter, and I had some minor side effects as well as discomfort, but I am now pretty much back to normal. It will take a month or two to see if the slow withering of the fibroid fixes some problems I was having.

2. Friday the 20th will be my last day at the rental company. I am trying to get a certain set of tasks complete before I leave, but Lawyer Man keeps yanking me aside to work on stuff related to our imminent website revamp, which is frustrating. I am 90% sure I will not be able to finish everything I want to wrap up, but such is life.

3. I have two U-Haul U-Boxes set to be delivered to my driveway on Monday the 23rd. My parents will arrive later that day, and the goal is to have the boxes packed and collected by midday on the 26th, and for us to hit the road no later than mid-afternoon on the 27th.

Then I get to crash in their guest room and go AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaa for a bit.

4. In July Mom and I will return to Ithaca for my surgery follow-up appointment, and probably also to close my Ithaca bank accounts. Later in July I am road-tripping through western Canada en route to a fandom friends' gathering, and then road-tripping home by way of Washington and assorted bits of the northwestern US, because why not.

Then I will do a bit more AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, and in August I start looking seriously for a new job. New housing will follow, since it's easier to rent an apartment convenient to a job location than to find a job convenient to an apartment location.

5. I have been sorting through boxes and bins of stuff that I have not touched for literal decades, and holy shit I have been clogging my apartment and my life up with so much nonsense. It will be good to start over on a cleaner footing.

As the end of tax season draws near (REMINDER TO US CITIZENS & RESIDENTS: file your taxes) I start to feel like cloth worn a bit thin. It's not that I am failing to get enough sleep, or to carve out some time for activities I enjoy, but I basically spend three months working 7 days a week, and even if some of those work days are pretty short (4 or 5 hours), that is still a long time with no true break.

Ah well. Two more weeks and I'll be down to just the normal 40-hour 5-day business week grind.

Then I can swing back into planning and preparing for my move to Minnesota. *sigh*

I have decided to take the entire month of July as a vacation, during which I will road trip to Canada to meet some Narnia friends, possibly also road trip around the Pacific Northwest, and spend a week or so loafing at the family cabin. Absolutely NO work thoughts or housing search thoughts until August.

...I do want to do a bit of preemptive job hunting during April and May, though. If I can get something lined up in advance, that would relieve my mother's anxiety in a BIG way -- and the less stressed she is, the less she will inadvertently stress me. (That is particularly important since I plan to crash in my parents' basement (yes, ha ha, I know) until I have a job and an apartment lined up, and I know from long experience that I react badly when Mom frets in my direction for too long. I prefer to avoid snapping at her, so anything that reduces her reasons to worry is a plus.)

My Uncle C is notoriously bad at sending cards on time, and my Aunt J is either equally bad at the task and/or doesn't feel like it's her job to help him keep in touch with his side of the family (which, fair -- it's NOT her job so no shade to her).

You would think that given decades of evidence that he is unlikely to improve, he might switch to sending a text or an email, or even making a phone call, but Uncle C remains bound and determined to master greeting cards.

I mention this to give you context for why I received my 2024 birthday card last week.

My birthday is in February.

Astonishingly, this is not the latest I have ever gotten a card from him! I believe the record currently goes to the two birthday cards sent as a pair -- one four months late and the other SIXTEEN months belated.

I will expect my Christmas card around June. :)

We are at that time of year where I spend most of my work days running around in disgusting heat and humidity trying to stage apartments in the hair-thin window between when Maintenance finishes turning them over and the new tenants pick up keys and move in.

Earlier in the summer I usually have a bit more time to play with, but August is crunch time and everything goes straight to hell.

Anyway I think tomorrow I will head in at 9am instead of 10am and see if I can plow through three or four apartments instead of just two. I have one already staged, so that should give me a good starting point. We'll see how far I get.

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In completely unrelated news, as of July 29, my parents have been married for 50 years. :D