Cimorene

I was making smalltalk with the bus driver along with the other guy at the bus stop and he asked if I was a student, lol. (Wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses took twenty years off I guess.) I said, No, but I'm going to driving school!

And he said close enough and gave me the student ticket rate.

Well, we finally just called the plumber on Thursday. No go. Just like every other plumber we've talked to, he doesn't have enough time for a job where he has to do a survey and make a plan before potentially digging up the yard until next year. (That's only a couple of weeks now of course. The first time a plumber said that to us was over a month ago... but then again, it could still be that he means not until February!). But in the meantime, in all their defence, this isn't a standard emergency as long as our sump pump is still working fine. I mean, our current situation IS acute or emergency in the sense of "there has been sewage contamination in the basement and it will recur if anything happens to the pump" but not an emergency in the sense of "the tenants' apartment lacks functioning plumbing and drains": the radiators, hot and cold running water, toilets and other drains are all perfectly fine in their apartment. The latter kind of emergency is the kind emergency plumbers usually deal with - stoppages and blockages and things like that. The former kind actually can't be fixed at all without installing new pipes either under the yard or under the cement floor of the basement (preferably the former because that's faster and cheaper, but it's still not actually FAST to do it legally). And that's why nobody has enough time to do it in the next month, because that's just how plumbers' schedules in this area fill up: they have holes where they can run off to a quick job but they don't have gaps long enough for a whole proper job, because they've got all those booked in advance.

I was complaining to my newest friend about the situation and saying how agonizing it is knowing that we're causing pain and inconvenience to our poor Ukrainian tenants and we're trying to fix it but we can't become better landlords because we lack the people skills, and they would be better off with my BIL or MIL or someone like that for a landlord, because, I said, probably we would have found someone to agree to help us by now if we were just friendly extroverts who know everybody and are good with people!!!

But she said actually, her parents had a nearly identical problem just a few years ago. They own a house and a pipe failed and flooded their basement and even though her dad IS an extrovert who knows everybody and is really good with people (he's a fantastically likeable guy, he's great, remind me to show you a video of him throwing an axe at the Viking village last august). He worked as a manager in a big local industry plant (he's an engineer) for his whole career, so he knows even more people in the building trades than your average small town extrovert, but he STILL couldn't find a plumber who could fit them in, and they had to wait over a month, including Christmas, with whatever he could MacGuyver together.

Also the Ukrainian tenants just asked Wax about renewing their lease next year and we are happy to have them, even though we are surprised they don't want to run for the hills.

Anyway, after the last plumber said no, I did look up a few businesses from the next town/island over who say they do work out here, but we have not called them (yet?), and we've discussed the possiblity that we should just call the guys we already know and ask how soon they CAN fit us in, even if that means waiting another month or whatever, and go from there. We were both kind of "Hmm, yeah maybe that's what we should do" about it, but after two phone calls on Friday we didn't have any energy left to make that decision. I suggested we should try sanity check by asking her brothers if this sounds smart to them, because even if they aren't smarter or whatever, at least they are not four months into crisis mode, which really does a number on your ability to compare and contrast things, or make decisions, or strategize in any way, because everything is just INTERNAL SCREAMING all the time, like Anakin's Vader reveal in RotS going NOOOOOOOO, and anything you have to choose or judge just seems insurmountably huge, like all the options are equal but with a huge heap of existential despair on top, like "Should I buy socks for BIL? Would BIL like socks? But would anybody actually like socks? Does anybody need anything at all? Probably not and also probably not socks!" So anyway: maybe we will try this sanity check idea, but it's also a nontrivial task to compose the question readably for them.

I really like the little teenaged summer workers that I'm supervising: they're quite sweet, even the boys, who are a bit lazy and useless comparatively if you don't explicitly tell them exactly what to do, and even then if it sounds boring ("read these articles, and make some notes for when you have to write one next week" resulted in zero notes).

But I'm so overstimulated already! Yesterday we were outside at the street festival all day and now my Saturday is destined to the same fate. At least Wax is working, so I'm not missing time with her.

But there's so much happening; my brain is so overworked that I have to spend like two hours playing solitaire or something equally numbing before I can even read! And reading is my absolutely necessarily counterphobic coping mechanism: in the normal course of things I do it in every little bit of spare time all day as well (no spare time with teenagers to supervise).

I want to sleep for a week but at the end of the day when I get home my brain feels confusedly too tired to sleep, and keeps just trying to go back over a million random things that happened recently and I have to catch myself and stop it each time with "They're not paying you right now! You don't have to worry about that until you're on the clock!"

I had a first aid class after work and was out of the house until 9 pm. It all went okay and I feel pretty good... except that it feels like it's Friday, and I still have to work four days this week.

I had only three visits at work today, a couple minutes apiece, so four hours with five other women (only two complete strangers) didn't send me into overload.

Anubis woke me fifteen minutes before the alarm this morning by escaping from Wax like a little eel and darting upstairs straight to the bed, then chasing Tristana around the upstairs until I managed to stumble into the next room and circumnavigate a stack of boxes, a chair, and a laundry rack to catch him. I was too sleepy to check the time and had just gratefully cocooned myself back into the blankets when my alarm went off. 😑

It's SO hilarious yet deeply pathetic that I forgot that I was afraid of inboxes and unknown communications from strangers and on my OWN initiative opened my askbox and asked people to submit suggestions and images to my decorative art blog.

This is WEEKS ago now, and I have been simply not doing anything with the blog because I can't upload or post or use the queue without looking at the inbox and I can't deal with the inbox. So complete lack of updates. Which is a completely predictable response that has happened to me plenty of times before (just not at my own instigation like this), but I didn't think of it at all!

When it had only been like half a week I told Wax I was afraid to look at it and she was like "I wondered why you did that since you hate inboxes," and I said, "But why didn't you say anything?" and she (reasonably) responded "I thought you knew!"

*which I have also done

The first time socializing with anybody but siblings, niblings, and our tenant since the pandemic began: we had dinner at our tenant's bff's house today, along with tenant and MIL's bff (tenant's bff's sister - that's how we found our tenant in the first place). And we met the tenant's bff's husband, but that was just one unknown person and so it didn't really feel alarming and new and we stayed for exactly two hours before coming home to give the diabetic cat insulin, which was also good.

Because they're all over 70 - in fact, MIL was a bit younger than all of them - everyone except us was vaccinated. It was surprisingly nice! Low key, of limited length and not too novel - I admit I reacted "NOOOO" on receiving the invitation because we already spent a few hours Friday evening planning our garden with tenant & her bff, and that is closer together than I would generally like social interactions to be, but it turned out to be fine after all. It was actually nice! Enjoyable conversation, and it's nice to get Swedish conversation practice in real time.

'Camping' that is actually living out of piles and garbage bags and half-packed boxes in an apartment with a kitchen and a bed and a table and two chairs isn't actually that bad. I would like to have a sofa or comfortable chair so I could use the computer without sitting on the bed or the floor, and ideally I would like to know where the rest of my belongings are and be able to reach them, but I've stayed, camped, and lived in way less comfortable places, albeit not while caring for two bunnies and two sick cats with semi-incompatible dietary requrements.

I'm mostly just tired of (1) the executive function drain of having so many open questions to worry about at one time, (2) not being able to do anything about them yet, and (3) the resulting flood of social interaction that has not given me enough introvert recovery time so I keep getting overstimulated again almost immediately any time I have to go anywhere or interact with anybody. Not to the point of having any anxiety attacks, just to the intensely wanting to scream, teeth-grinding level and the level where I try to dredge up the ability to put on an In Public Face and emote and respond verbally and just come up completely blank and keep staring at the wall instead.

Also, though, we've been having a heatwave (for Finland), and it's pretty cool inside the flat but it's horrible to do anything outside. And it's not gonna be fun to clean our old flat, which is way less cool, over this weekend before turning over the keys.