cimorene

Last week I spent all five days out of the house, 9 am to 3 pm, at a course designed to help job seekers. I was hoping for this to be more immediately helpful to me than it was; the last one I went to had time blocks for comparing positives and negatives to decide what kind of places to apply, compiling a list, and creating separate cover letters and CVs, all with counselor feedback; but it lasted longer. These are all things that I know how to do but which are much easier to do with external structure because of executive dysfunction!

And it's very hard for me to pick targets and rank them because I don't have qualifications to do anything that is actually interesting and exciting but I also don't have enough experience in any field to recommend me to potential employers in it, and hence make it an obvious choice.

The things that I'm skilled/talented at and enthusiastic about are basically academic (going back to school wouldn't pay very well even if I thought I could manage not to drop out this time!) or artistic (and that mostly requires you to either become an entrepreneur or often get professional training).

The things I have actually done are childcare (requires professional qualifications for all but a tiny fraction of things like dishwashers/cleaners in daycares and substitutes - and I've only done it for ~1 year of work practice) and retail (which I don't fully hate, but I'm not suited to busy settings where you see a lot of people). My last job was in an office, but that's the only employment experience I have in that field and it was only 2 years (normally people want professional qualifications for that too).

What I really WANT to do is restoring old houses and furniture, especially the finishes, and this IS a thing you can learn to do through apprenticeships or sometimes study at a trade school, but it's also a very niche area of the construction field and many of the people who do it do so as entrepreneurs (which would not work at all for me). The employment caseworker was trying to help me find a work practice position for this earlier this year, without luck.

I did not learn much last week, though I did get a few tips about modifying my CV. I found the week surprisingly nice, though - way too draining (I didn't have the energy to do anything else all week), but it was pretty comfortable. I liked the other people and would have been happy to keep seeing them.

After one week where I was too exhausted to do anything, after having been in the habit of near-daily sweeping and vacuuming of the kitchen/dining Sipuli enclosure where I spend the day and Wax sleeps at night, there were a staggering amount of dust bunnies today. I spent a long time sweeping and vacuumed a bit (until the vacuum needed charging). Then I took the rinsed recycling from the draining cupboard where it drips dry, because it was starting to leap out whenever you opened the cabinet door, and I also washed the counters and the sink. That was extremely fun and exciting for Sipuli. She got the zoomies and zipped around sniffing things and warbling at me and playing for a couple of hours. (She is back inside the duvet tent against the radiator now, though.)

A week ago we also finally gave up on the triplets telling us what kind of sweaters they would like (these are their 18th birthday present from last summer: Sweater of Your Choice. I tried spamming them with pictures and suggestions for months. Ciara picked a mariniere and a color combination, but the others didn't even make a peep). We also could not get a response on 'When can we come to your house and measure your teenagers' or 'Could you measure the length and width of a sweatshirt from each of them' from Wax's brother, so we finally just asked for generic size class (M for all three) and then decided to guess. Wax and I picked the patterns and the colors for the two remaining sweaters. She is working on Ciara's sweater and I have started one of the others, and already managed to knit too many hours in a row (in spite of not even having made it down from the neck opening to the underarms yet) so my right shoulder was feeling stiff. So now I'm trying to knit for shorter blocks of time and do other things in between, to avoid hurting myself so badly that I have to stop knitting entirely again.

Due to the aforementioned exhaustion we've only gone out for me to practice driving our car once so far, and I was disconcerted that it was pitch black and I couldn't see the inside of the car. Everything's different, including the gear shift! Driving in daylight in this season will require a little more work though, since the sun is up from about 8-16:30. Wax is working too late this week.