Cimorene

Yesterday I dropped by one of the little local boutiques that sell house stuff and I got a chip basket for the firewood! Also some adorable handmade candles! I was in luck, because it was the only one she had and it was a bit old and scuffed - she had it out full of blankets for sale - so she gave me a slight discount. And the store was really nice and cozy inside. I'd never been in before, because these sorts of little stores are mostly only open on weekdays, and occasionally a few hours on a weekend. I learned some new interior décor terms in Swedish and saw a near-clone of our cast iron stove, the same shape, but hers is all enamelled white. It was lit, and the door was open! The store is the whole downstairs of a cute wooden early 20th c. house (maybe a bit earlier: I'm just guessing, without a detailed inspection). Big plank floors everywhere and piles of blankets and wool rugs, cast iron hooks and enamel door signs and crystal and china and big piles of baskets and of course, Morris wallpaper, which I still can't buy because it's expensive and the wrong period and I have nowhere to use it, but it's even more tempting when you're touching it.

But also yesterday, my work computer tried to update itself and plunged into an endless cycle of reboots, as some other people have described it. The update doesn't install correctly, and it demands that you restart, and then it says it has installed and wants you to restart, but then when you do it isn't installed. After a bunch of restarts and being unplugged and multiple attempts to simply uninstall the broken update (that doesn't work either), I concluded that you probably either need to do a clean install or go in with admin privileges and delete some sensitive bits manually. I did find some Google results that point to this type of solution, and logic tells me this is how you'd fix an issue of this type in Linux, but I don't know enough about Windows to do that to my work computer without a lot more confidence in how to restore from backups. So I called the local computer company that belongs to one of waxjism's second or third cousins (a descendant of a sibling of her granny who was one of nine) and they're sending a guy Thursday afternoon. The internet still works and my work laptop and the printer are all fine, but the work laptop is without a power cable, and all my attempts to email the groups who might have accidentally taken the power cable have so far come to naught. So I've gotta try to save the laptop's power a bit. It's at 56% now because I had to do some Photoshopping today, not just answering emails.

It wasn't supposed to rain today, but it's raining. I wondered why I saw so many people in raincoats on my way to work!

Wax had last Monday off but she has to work this Saturday, which is always a bummer.

We had the first overnight freeze this week, and today the chimney sweep came and gave the chimney a pass, so we also had the first wood fire of the year in our cast iron stove. The weather has been beautiful, sunny and crisp otherwise, but near freezing and a little windy, which turned my fingers numb on my walk to and from work (wearing half-finger gloves in a densely-knitted merino cashmere blend), so we didn't go for any more walks after Tuesday.

We were having a lot of fun trying new recipes together for a bit, but Wax's acid reflux started acting up and she ate oatmeal and fruit all this week, even eschewing a planned roasted cauliflower soup, which would obviously be mild. She made this a couple of weeks ago and it was delicious, but now she doesn't remember what she did anymore. Hopefully she'll be able to figure it out: she says it should be easy but she also swears she didn't roast it but I'm quite sure she told me she did on the day she first made it.

I've been doing an officially sanctioned art project at work this week, which is more fun than any of what I usually do and also a more than welcome way to use up all the extra time I usually have. The deadline is in ten days, so I'm looking forward to the intervening ones with placid delight.

Oh, and I've started slowly tapering off venlafaxine, at least to a lower dose. Not enough to notice anything so far.

I get a little bit more time before unemployment. The board had a meeting and decided they can't afford to just KEEP me without the subsidy, but they offered two months (to the end of October) at 80% of my current hours. I'll just have Mondays off. And they'll advertise the job and hope for applicants, planning for me to train them for two weeks. I'm honestly not sure how likely it is to find someone in that time or what will happen if they don't, but I'm glad to have a little more time. There still don't seem to be any very plausible alternatives that I would actually like - I would prefer to work at a little store, but they are mostly so small in town that they can't hire anyone.

When I took this job last September, it was with the understanding that the charity receives government subsidies to hire someone for a maximum of three one-year contracts. So my predecessor worked there two and a half years or so, and that was what I could expect if both parties agreed.

When they asked me in the spring if I intended to continue I said yes, and I said it again at that meeting a couple weeks ago where I nearly had a meltdown. At that point my volunteer bosses asked the organization to apply for a new subsidy.

Aaaaaand then today at work the employment bureau called ME (not them, even though they were the ones who applied) to tell me it can't be renewed. Apparently the law changed and now they can't reapply two years in a row for the same employee anymore, but they didn't know that? So when my year is up, sixteen hours after the end of this month - so less than eight work days from now - my time there is over.

That's less time left than I had to train! They can't possibly find a replacement before I have to leave; and that's less than one month out from the charity's main fund drive and the busiest time of year. I'm not sorry to miss that, but they probably will be.

And it's obviously not enough time to find another job. I haven't even had time to think about what to attempt to do. Plus our fixed-term electricity contract ended, so this coming winter we have no idea what to expect from the power bills: not the ideal time to be unemployed. I probably will barely finish digesting the shock by the time I'm done there.

Oh, and I obviously don't want to be responsible for breaking the news to my volunteer bosses. I left it to my boss on paper, the professional from the district office. But now I've gotta wait for them to find out and... react to it. Noooo, not reactions! Ugh.

We've never owned an orchid. Wax loves plants and she has filled the house with them kind of - not quite to jungle levels but that's mostly because of cats and their determination to climb and destroy things. But orchids are exotic and famously persnickety, or so she's said. Her grandmother had some.

But there's an orchid at work, along with a yucca, and caring for them is part of my job. My predecessor simply taught me to place the orchid in its inner pot in an immersion bath every seven days for about ten minutes, and that's it, so that's what I did at first. It seemed to work okay. The orchid had like one flower when I got here, and it kept it a long time. Then last Christmas on my vacation, the board members who came in forgot to water it, and it withered a bit and dropped its blooms, but a renewal of the old regimen had it flowering magnificently at the beginning of summer.

Except two days ago all the flowers were wilting! I googled how to tell what's wrong with orchids, and since then I've been reading in English and Finnish and watching YouTube videos and -

... Possibly two doses of ADHD medication in a day where there's about 15 minutes of work for me to do in five hours is excessive, but I need to take it the whole week for the trial so the psychiatrist can evaluate; I can skip it when there's nothing to do later.

- I've learned all kinds of stuff!

This orchid is a variety of phalaenopsis, which the vast majority of cheap and widely available orchids are.

In the wild they grow on trees in the rain forest. All their roots are exposed to air and able to photosynthesize (well, usually) in that environment.

Growing them with their roots exposed to air is pretty rare though, and not the default even with hobbyists. Partly this is probably due to water, which a potting medium around the roots can store a bit, so they stay moist and don't need watered as often as naked roots would. However, it's very important that they get enough air circulation around the roots and that they don't sit in water.

The pots they're typically sold in are pretty terrible for this, usually having drainage holes only in the bottom. A quick search in English shows plastic orchid pots with vertical ventilation slits are extremely widespread. They are usually transparent, which lets you see the roots, but also allows them to photosynthesize. However, they're commonly put inside a larger pot. This is probably nicer to look at but less pleasant for the orchid, though I gather phalaenopsis are pretty tolerant (for an orchid).

But searching in Finnish didn't turn up any of that. I guess these pots must be a recent development, because plastic pots with just a couple of drainage holes are all that you can find for orchids, even in websites that are just ABOUT orchids and not selling them. I'm actually pretty indignant about this. I can't even find a similar pot anywhere. The closest are the little ones made for herbs, but they're not clear and they're way too small.

Because I actually can't be sure if this one is dehydrated or over-watered right now. It doesn't seem diseased, so it's probably that, and I can't examine the roots properly because the inner pot, besides being unventilated, is way too tight and the roots are busting out. It's potted in bark chips too, which likely need to be changed anyway.

So I need to repot it, and I have to ask my boss for permission to buy the stuff it needs, which apparently includes a larger pot (and a larger outer pot), and I don't really want to ask for permission to order a cheap plastic orchid pot internationally. That's ridiculous. I'm already a bit nervous about saying it needs a new ceramic pot.

Anyway, after dunking my head in all this information over the past few days, I'm starting to think we need an orchid at home, if only so that information won't be wasted. But mainly because it's chafing me to pot it in a sub-optimal pot, so I want to soothe myself by putting a different orchid in a better one.

Monday I took my trial dose in the morning, but I left the lunchtime dose on the counter and forgot to bring it to work with me.

Yesterday I took the meds to work, but I forgot to take them at lunchtime. Already worn off, or they don't help with absent-mindedness in quite that way...?

Monday on top of everything else I also left my work key at work, because, well:

I use a usb stick to transfer images to the tv in the front window. I had just put a new image on it and was carrying it back to the tv and bumped the doorframe with my hand, knocking the usb stick out of it, but I didn't hear it plink on the floor! I spent an hour looking everywhere for it, crawling around on the floor, sweeping, looking behind and under the furniture and up high and all kinds of places it couldn't've possibly gone. I took my shoes off twice and turned down the twice-folded cuffs of my trousers, also twice. No dice. Finally I consulted the manual and figured out how to get the images onto the tv internal storage, but to do that I had to use my own usb stick that travels with me on my work keychain. I plugged the keychain into the tv, copied to the tv, then took the stick back, but then I discovered a mistake and had to go back and do it again and that time I forgot to get the stick back out of the tv. It stayed there, with my keys attached to it.

Then right before the Meeting of Doom, I crouched down for something and heard a little plink and the usb stick fell out of the hem of my right trouser leg, where I had already looked like twice, mind you. I suppose just folding it down and feeling it wasn't enough: I should have unfolded it all the way and jumped up and down. So the usb stick was recovered, but I locked my keys inside.

In the morning yesterday I had to text my boss to get someone to let me in, and she was in a meeting at first but she managed to let me in within half an hour, and before the Severe Weather arrived in earnest. (It did rain while I was waiting under the awning by the door, but the awning saved me. The really intense rain and wind came later.)

Yesterday I had a much nicer work day after that, though. It wasn't so hot anymore. Nothing really strained my powers of focusing though, so it's hard to say much about the medication yet.

1. We are watching the developments wrt OTW and AO3 mostly via synonymous and kinda blinking and staring. Obviously everyone has heard and seen stuff about this before but it's sort of a case of simultaneously 'Ah, just as I thought' and 'Whoa, REALLY?' Neither of us has ever worked for OTW, just bought memberships and donated. In fact, we've both wanted to volunteer for a long time but fallen off in the not-good recruitment and on-boarding processes for volunteers. We're gonna vote now, I guess. But it does seem like elections aren't enough - because the whole structure needs to be fixed! - and I'm feeling some anxiety about that.

2. Got my official ADD diagnosis. I've been seeing a psychiatric nurse practitioner to go through the DIVA questionnaire and a long personal history monthly since last September, and we finished about two months ago and then last week I saw a psychiatrist who went through the report and my history briefly and was like, Yep! Well. I have to go to the big hospital in Turku for blood work and EEG before I can get a prescription of any kind, and I'm not going to try any of them during my summer vacation anyway; this Thursday is my last day of work until August 7th. I got distracted and followed the wrong white coat down the hall while the doctor was fetching the bloodwork referral slip for me, so that was amusing. And today I found out that I seem to have mislaid and/or destroyed a key component of last year's accounting report, which is partly on Boss Who Hates Bob for unclear instructions and not checking, but still, like, I honestly thought it was there so it's a bit of a mystery.

3. It's been in the low 80s here, but blah blah Nordic societal infrastructure and nobody has A/C so that's actually quite bad, like, old people keeling over bad. It's in the 80s inside at work, where there's supposed to be a/c but it doesn't work. And it's not just solid infrastructure like the unavailability of window and door screens, box and ceiling fans, etc, it's culture. People don't know to cover their heads, they don't automatically seek shade, they don't know to wear light colors and fabrics. I can't tell you how many times I've been complained to that it's hot by a Finn in all black or long pants or long sleeves. I bought a couple of expensive full below-knee skirts (from emmydesign of Sweden) in cotton and linen with pockets, because that's the most comfortable indoors when it's over 80 degrees: you can tuck the skirt around so your legs don't stick to each other with sweat when you cross them or sit down.

4. Still cat divorced. Tristana's siblings are now cat-shaped, but not quite big enough to leave home; they had some health worries, but they seem okay for now, fingers crossed. Anubis has lost balcony privileges after learning to climb over the tall chickenwire we put on top on the railing and having to be dragged out from under the decking. But the balcony is open to the hall and the wfh office, so he can't be with Wax while she works. He has to spend the day alone downstairs in his bedroom (the dining room and kitchen, so the coolest room in the house, the best sunbeams and the best view of Fledgling TV in our backyard, but he doesn't like being alone). And Wax is sleeping in the coolest room in the house with him, so we can't both just move down there to sleep for the hottest few weeks. I have to sleep elsewhere with Snookums and Tristana.

5. I am getting into kumihimo, Japanese braiding that makes beautiful cords, and also to jewelry making, a bit. I haven't been on Tumblr much because of the cat divorce, and the need to hang out with one cat or the other away from my desktop computer. Wax has more patience for using the ancient 2014 netbook for social media than I do.

I was compiling a spreadsheet of all our org's costs associated with printing in the last four years, so I had to go into storage and look up our old bills paid. On the shelf with all our accounting paperwork, between the two binders of bills from 2020, was a third binder without a label on the spine, so I pulled it in case...

... and it took me several minutes of flipping through it to realize what it was: it's all the bills and receipts from a vet practice I've never heard of in a nearby town, also from 2020.

You might think it would be an easy mixup for an accounting firm, but we use a local business college and they don't make visits like that. They wouldn't be in the document storage at all: we package our documents up and hand them over in envelopes, and that's how we get our bookkeeping reports back from them. It's just the volunteers and me (or my predecessor) in the document storage room.

(To make a good mystery there would have to be some further drama about the binder, but it's a good setup.)

The board of directors at work are going to buy some Enjo mops, dust mops, and cleaning cloths that are mostly for my use, and they are not re-hiring the monthly professional cleaning service as a result, "Because this will make cleaning so much easier that Cim can do it no problem!" I simultaneously HATE this from a supporting-local-tradespeople and a that's-not-really-the-job-I-signed-up-for perspective and... kinda am excited to get them. I do, actually, already have to clean in general, I just wasn't in charge of like, deep cleaning everything in the bathroom, or thoroughly mopping the whole floor with lifting the chairs up and getting in all the corners. But even though I'm the world's least tidy person, I'm kinda a big fan of using microfiber and melamine sponges (aka Magic Eraser) to do it with because it's a bit magical to see, and Enjo is some kind of extra SUPER microfiber that works even faster with cold water than regular microfiber works with hot water. And they're also going to buy an expensive bagless cordless vacuum and... I'm kinda excited about that too. I mean, on the minus side, cleaning, but on the plus side, a new high-tech toy to play with!

Doing the research into them is making me, in my private capacity, super jealous of the professional me that is soon going to have access to a vacuum costing like, oh, somewhere between ten and thirty times as much as any vaccuum I've ever used before, because life with two long-haired angora-mix house bunnies is life that is FULL of dust and dustbunnies and a small, light, highly effective bagless cordless vacuum with HEPA filters would be extremely useful around the house. Whereas my workplace is just, you know, stone and shitty wooden laminate floors that people walk on after hiking around outside all winter, tracking in gravel and dirty snow and road dust.