Every little place you spend time, no matter how pleasant and tranquil, has its own concerns

Boss says he was thinking of having me start shelving and pricing and register training after midsummer, so next week I guess. It does make sense, although thank goodness, the lady who was training me is back this week. Even with two people at minimum and three people for the brief period before I go home, it's a bit of a stretch.

The garden department here is just slightly permanently understaffed, and it's a bit Wal-Mart. There isn't REALLY enough space to put all the plants that are supposed to be for sale, so of necessity, some of them end up too crowded or getting too little sunlight or too much of it and dying from that, and some of them get over- or underwatered and there's never enough people to be rotating them all constantly enough so that they all get enough air and light. There's enough things that need watered that one person can spend essentially the whole morning on it, and if that person is me the second person will get called to the register to check people out enough that she won't have enough time to make sure everything has price tags, so there's a bunch of things without them, or with the wrong ones, and they're always falling and not getting replaced.

At this time of year though, the garden department brings about half again as much money as the next most profitable one.

The two regular workers don't have time to register train me because there's too much to do, and because I'm not register trained they're at the mercy of the main store's cashiers to spell them so they can take their breaks, and generally speaking, the cashiers never show up to let them leave on time or promptly when requested. (I think this is a symptom of a relatively small number of cashiers in the store compared to how much stuff they have to do besides cashiering and to a high customer flow that's pretty steady - as opposed to poor management of extant resources I mean. It's resource quantity.)

Tristana in a knock-down and drag-out fight with convalescence

Tristana got fixed today and I was a little worried because she's so small, 1.8 kg still, but the cat specialist okayed it and all. She's a precious little bean, but she's also the most bloody-minded determined little firecracker we've ever met.

The tiniest cat onesie at the vet to cover her stitches, the XXXS, is a little too big for her. She was still stoned on opiates when Wax came to pick me up two hours after she got home and this happened:

ME: Weren't you scared to leave the kitten after her surgery?
WAX: I put her on the floor first. Her legs still don't work.

Later we walk into the kitchen and find the kitten on the cat cushions with Snookums at counter height, staring stonedly around and purring violently. Snookums is holding her in place with one paw as if he knew.
WAX: HOW DID SHE GET UP THERE?

(We normally keep a chair there to let her climb up because at least formerly she couldn't on her own and she'd just sit on the floor and cry.)

I guess she got stronger.

After that the opiates wore off and she continued being a holy terror, insisting on running up the stairs and down, bouncing off the walls playing, walking along the window ledge, rolling around on the floor, wrestling herself out of her onesie twice, etc. We put a third litter box out, filled with clay instead of the wood pellets we usually use because she refuses to use them when they're damp, and she took her reintroduction to the sandbox as if she was still high and it was a toy. She stood there digging as if she was going to tunnel through the earth, chirping to herself, frolicking back and forth and kicking sand everywhere (but not using the box for its intended purpose) for a good ten minutes. The only way to be sure she can't rupture her stitches would be to like... physically hold onto her I guess, but she won't sit still for that either. She makes the tiny growling protest noise, like "Mo-OOOOM, I'm BUSY!"