mistressofmuses

Kind of a bunch of stuff that happened in the last week or so...

Last week, we had a minor scare with Bella, where she ate a fairly large piece of a toy. She has swallowed similar bits before without us knowing, until usually after a day or so, she'll throw it up, which is very, very lucky. I wish I could count on that happening, rather than it making its way farther through the tubes and getting to blockage/obstruction or laceration territory, but it's also not a gamble we wanted to take. So we got to induce vomiting (using hydrogen peroxide) which she was emphatically not a fan of, but at least it did bring the chunk up right away. Better than an emergency vet bill.

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Then on Sunday, while I was at work, my stepmom texted me that she was taking my dad to the ER for difficulty breathing and heart palpitations. The ER thought it was most likely a-fib, which is at least easily treatable, but they wanted to rule out anything else it could be, so transferred him to a cardiac hospital. I don't believe he actually had a heart attack (though getting complete information from him isn't always going to happen.) They did a bunch of tests on Monday, including sending in some scopes to look for blockages, plus delivering a shock to hopefully "reset" the heart rhythm. Apparently everything went well, and there weren't any complications or scary findings, and he got to go home yesterday. He's on medication now, which he said makes him feel "woobly."

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The good thing for the week:
I spent the weekend (Sunday night through Tuesday morning) over at Taylor and my mom's house, since they had Monday off for the holiday. (It's always my day off.) We hung out and played a good chunk of Final Fantasy XIV. We did a couple of the job quests (Sage and Reaper) which were fun. Then we started part two of Endwalker. We got through the first bit, where we start to see the Final Days corruption start, and then we got to do some fun time travel back to Elpis, which really was pretty absurdly fun in terms of what they decided to do.

Spoilers for part two of Endwalker:

Yeah, go ahead and team up with Emet Selch (before he became Empires Georg), his coworker-bestie-husband (who you met as a ghost at the ghost DMV once), the guy who will become the most recent big bad you fought and killed (but like before he went very extremely destroy-all-life crazy), and their really cool previous coworker (before she becomes like... The Main Goddess Of Everything) and follow them around while Emet Selch really just wants to conduct a job interview.
Emet Selch, civil servant, and his worst day at work (so far.)

- I love finding out that, ah, Emet Selch was always just a bit of a bitch. Delightful as always.
- They made Hythlodeus just... absurdly pretty. Like. Why is he that pretty? He's also the best, and while I can't say I approve of Emet Selch wanting to burn down the universe to regain all the people he lost in the apocalypse and revive the glory days of his people... Look, one of those people was Hythlodaeus, so even if I don't approve, I kinda get it. He's just that pretty.
- Venat is very cool, and I'm so glad that we got to see who she was pre-Hydaelyn.
- Yes, the cutscene with her and the whole "No more shall man have wings to bear him to paradise. Henceforth he shall walk." bit was really badass.

We also finished reading Witch King, and had a really good Labor Day dinner.

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On Monday, Alex texted me to tell me that our AC had died. He tried hard resetting the unit, but no luck. It wasn't quite hot enough to qualify as an emergency issue to be called in on a holiday, so he submitted a regular non-emergency request to management. It's relevant that in the request he included the information that a) the compressor does come on, and the unit blows air, but the air itself is not cooling at all, and the unit itself will not shut off; and b) that he turned off the unit and the thermostat, because it was blowing in warm air; however the only way to get the unit to shut off at all is to flip the breaker it's connected to, as turning off the thermostat does not do anything.
We are told that now our maintenance requests go through some third party company that "helps to diagnose and expedite service requests," even though the maintenance itself is still done by our on-site crew.
They say they'll send someone out on Tuesday. We went on a hike after Alex picked me up, so we weren't home when they came by, but they did leave us a note on the door saying they came and that everything is fixed!
... The note helpfully says that they found the problem: we had turned off the thermostat! Now that they turned it back on, the unit was again blowing air.
So yeah, it was about 82° in our apartment, despite the fact that they (not we) had set the thermostat on 68°, the lowest it goes.
So Alex submitted another request for service, saying that yeah, the problem isn't fixed. The problem is not that the unit does not blow any air, the issue is that it is not cooling the air which is the primary function that we want from an AC unit. It also will not stop blowing air, unless the unit is shut off via the electrical breaker, because none of the functions of the thermostat are being communicated to the unit.
The third party company responded by asking for a picture of the thermostat "to ensure that the settings are correct" and they ask again if the unit is blowing air.
Alex sends them a picture of the thermostat, as well as reiterating that yes, the unit moves air, but it is not cooling the air that the fan is blowing into the apartment.
Then, a couple hours later, responding to the text that included the picture of the thermostat, they asked him to please send a picture of the thermostat.
That was the last we heard today. Tomorrow is supposed to be back into the 90s, which IS supposed to be "emergency" territory for an AC unit. We'll fucking see.

My annoyance is compounded, because we had this issue before. Maintenance came out (pre "third-party"), and they were the ones who told us to try switching it off via the breaker as a hard reset. That did fix it that time! But both of the members of the maintenance team who came out told us they'd seen this issue before with the specific unit we have in our apartment; that almost all of that type have had to be replaced, because once the internal electronics go bad and don't communicate with the thermostat, it's not really repairable. So if this is a familiar, known issue (or so we were led to believe), I don't understand why "aw, you stupid little shits, you just switched the thermostat off the way you said you had, I'm sure in the SEVEN FUCKING YEARS you've lived in this apartment you just never figured out how that worked so la-di-da, we fucking fixed it by turning on the thermostat and not checking to see if it was actually performing its function at all" was the response this time.

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A couple months ago, they also introduced a "new employee" who manages rent reminders via text. I suspect that "Ryan" is actually an AI bot, despite all the claims being that "he" works for our rental company, hence the dismissive scare quotes. This is the helpful third party that last month sent us reminders a week after we paid rent that we still owed rent. A few days later, "he" acknowledged that our rent had been paid.
This month we got our paper bill, and our reminder from "Ryan", but "Ryan's" listed amount owed was $100 less than the paper bill we received. Alex asked for clarification, and "Ryan" confirmed the lower amount. We plan to pay the lower amount, and see what they say if we show documentation that we were told that was the amount owed.

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The hike on Tuesday was nice though.

If only we'd gone for some historical reenactment...

Next week is going to be a busy one, at least in some regards.

I'm going over to hang out with Taylor tomorrow night through Tuesday morning. We'd been planning that already, back when mom was going to be down in NM. Still doing it, but also glad I'll get to see mom after the injured rib thing.

(Mom says it still really sucks, and hurts a whole lot, but seems slightly better every day. She was told by both urgent cares that she needs to stay active and make sure to take deep breaths. Since deep breaths feel like being stabbed, she said she understands why people start only breathing shallowly, so she's trying to force deep breathing exercises as a form of home PT.)

Then Alex is going to Kansas, Thursday through Saturday. This is for BreyerMidwest, a model show and event. For the last several years it's been BreyerWest, held in Colorado, but this year they moved it to Kansas, which is now apparently the permanent home. (I have lots of mostly annoyed feelings about this; it was supposed to be a sort of alternative event for people who couldn't make a trip out to Kentucky for the annual BreyerFest, but now it's basically in the middle of the country, removing the original purpose of making something more easily accessible to the western chunk of the country.) Since I just took a long weekend off in February, I can't take another this month. So Alex is going solo.

This means I am alone with the dogs and no car while working, which is not ideal.

I've been planning to stay over at mom and Taylor's for those few days, getting rides to and from work when possible (and taking Uber or Lyft if needed), and since Taylor works from home, the dogs don't have to be alone and confined all day. (While Cy would be okay, Bella would have to be kenneled, and nine hours while I'm at work is just so long.)

This was something I have been *really* worried about, because of the new cat. Cy loves cats, and Bella mostly seems just *interested* in cats, but I am so afraid of her trying to chase, and having something bad happen. She has more of an obvious prey drive than Cy does, even if she's never acted aggressively toward cats she has seen. While Taylor would be home, they are working, and can't have all their focus on the animals. We do not yet know how Jaspurr feels about dogs; Mocha made it clear that she wanted nothing to do with the dogs, so we kept them separated for the one day that mom was dogsitting, but that's less feasible for three whole days.

Now that mom will also be there (and not in NM) I am slightly less worried, because I don't think there will be as much unsupervised time... but also, my mom has badly bruised ribs! So dealing with a super energetic dog is probably low on the list of desirable activities. :/

So... looking forward to hanging out with Taylor quite a bit, but not looking forward to the anxiety about animal interactions that I'm not present to supervise. I know that all the other times I've been anxious about the dogs - when we left Cy with mom, then when we left him with her overnight, then when it was both dogs, then when it was both dogs while Mocha was also there - it has been fine, despite my worry. That doesn't make the worry go away.

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Still not 100% over the crud I got last week, but still doing better than everyone else who got it. Wednesday was rough, and so was today a bit, but overall it's mostly just minor annoyance at this point.

I still feel really behind after having lost a bunch of days to being too sick to do much more than sleep, though. I need to get my friend's book chapter back to her. I've fallen behind on DW. I haven't even touched my own writing for weeks now. (Still doing okay at reading, but not much else. Four books done for the month so far!) I know that this upcoming week, what with not being home for more than a single night, I won't be getting much done. I'll hopefully manage to get my friend's chapter completed, and then maybe next week I'll feel okay about easing back to writing again.

Of course, it doesn't help that I *still* just want to sleep once I get home. :/ Every time I give in to that, I just get farther behind, but every time I *don't*, I'm afraid I'm extending my time spent sick! I hate it.

Sunday was our last full day in Arizona. It was a "do what you want" day. Someone's brother-in-law owns a brewery that a handful of people were going to go visit, and a bunch of people planned to either lounge by the pool or go play in the casino, but none of the above sounded great to us.

So we went to the Desert Botanical Garden.

It was a perfect day for it - low 70s, which felt pretty heavenly on comparison to the weather in Colorado! The gardens were a little on the crowded side, I'm sure because of the beautiful weather, but it was still a very nice time.

I really do find the desert beautiful. I spent a lot of time in New Mexico as a kid and as a teen, mixed between desert and mountain areas. I love it.

This is the post with the most pictures, though only narrowly, haha.


I was so excited to see saguaros! (We saw plenty ever since we arrived in AZ, of course, but these were the better pictures.)


A particularly dramatic saguaro! With an interesting growth pattern at the top.


A bee on a fairy duster. :)


Saguaros up the mountain, a quail on the stairs, and a roadrunner in the plaza! (I love roadrunners.)

( 22 more below the cut: )

Bonus inappropriate cactus:

...Ahem. (Jokes crowdsourced from Taylor's post about this specimen: "What a prick." "The Cocktus." "Desert girls make do.")

After Butterfly Wonderland, we did sit outside for maybe twenty minutes or half an hour, hoping Taylor would start to feel better. Luckily they did! So after that, we headed toward the OdySea Aquarium.


There were a ton of rays, which I really loved.


Seahorses!!


I was extremely charmed by the variety of clownfish! I don't think I've ever seen this many kinds before.

( Twenty three more below the cut: )

The big plan for Saturday was a group hike with most of the party.

Originally we had signed up to go with, but my mom had us bail. Her foot is still barely healed from the melanoma surgery back in December, and she was very worried that a serious hike would be painful and potentially damaging. So instead, we decided to do our own thing!

We got tickets to two local attractions: Butterfly Wonderland and The OdySea Aquarium. Both are located along a sort of walkable mall/city center/tourism center called The Arizona Boardwalk.

I took a bunch of pictures at both the butterfly house and the aquarium, so those will get their own posts. This one is just for the other stuff we saw on the boardwalk.

We were able to take a shuttle from the hotel over, which was nice.

Right at the entrance is a really cool carousel, with all kinds of interesting animals!


We were most excited initially to see an okapi! I love okapis, and they're definitely not a common animal to see represented anywhere. I was then very charmed by the little poison dart frog right next to it. <3 When the carousel was in motion, the frog looked like it was hopping.

3 more pictures from the carousel:

A lovely hummingbird. The butterfly on its saddle is the logo for Butterfly Wonderland.


My absolute favorite was this sort of classic dragon.


Another angle on the dragon (the tail!), plus the nice rainbow seahorse.

I'm sad I did not apparently get a picture of the manatee, which had a lily pad saddle, and was super cute.

There was also a bunch of art, some of which just seemed to be public art, some of which was advertising things you could do on the boardwalk.


I liked this delightfully unsettling statue. :)

5 more pictures:

A flying saucer. (There was an alien encounter/UFO museum, but having been to the UFO museum in Roswell, NM, I fear all other UFO tourist traps will pale in comparison.)


I WANT TO BELIEVE


Not art, just an advertisement. We did not go eat at the Pangaea Dinosaur Grill, but I loved the dinosaurs that were in only some of the product photos. Both the model dino in the top photo, and the weird photoshopped glowing raptor, ha.


A T-rex made of old tires.


And a scrap-metal Predator. :)

*screaming into a pillow*

It's been a hectic week.

Monday the apartments were doing random inspections, supposedly of only ten units. We drew the short straw, again.

They inspected part of the unit, but did not go to the bedroom/bathroom part of the unit. Then they gave us a "failure to comply with lease" warning, saying that we have two weeks to make the rest of the unit accessible or face eviction.

( It isn't inaccessible! )

Then we had to replace our TV. 

( Annoying. )

I ordered a gift for Alex for Valentine's day, and it made it to Denver last week... before mysteriously being sent to Pueblo, where it's now been stuck for days and days. So... I probably need to get him something else while I start a postal claim for the lost item. But since I didn't get paid until today, I wasn't able to do that in advance...

Further limiting... I am flying out of town today.

The company that Taylor works for does an annual "holiday party" that is actually generally a weekend vacation of some variety. They get to bring a plus one, and I've been Taylor's for a few trips, now. :) Several years ago was when we went to Austin. Last year was a fancy hotel elsewhere in Colorado. This year is scenic Scottsdale, Arizona! The trip is today through Monday.

I'm excited to hang out with Taylor and my mom (who works for the same company,) but I am less excited to have to fly.

Now I'm just hoping I can find something nice for Alex while I'm in Scottsdale. :/ Which I was going to do anyway, but now it has to do double duty of souvenir and belated Valentine's day gift.

We'll celebrate on Tuesday once I'm back, but... now we also have to spend that time on apartment nonsense. (I was hoping that we'd be back at a reasonable time on Monday, but we won't be back until evening. :/ And when we have to deal with that apartment stuff is not ideal timing for me to then be gone for four days.)

My heart is breaking for a coworker going through some horrible health stuff: his own, which involves leukemia coming out of remission, and the drug they want him to take to treat it costs $16000 per month, and then his wife "feeling unwell" and going to the doctor turned into a stage 4 liver cancer diagnosis for her, and they've now been in the hospital for nearly a week with her. 

Plus the apartment worry has kept me up almost all night multiple nights in a row with just churning anxiety, and I've had a headache that I can't quite shake for the last few days, and considering how badly it spikes every time I move and how many times I've just been unable to say words or express complete thoughts over the last few days I'm afraid it's a migraine (even though I haven't been totally incapacitated), AND on Wednesday morning I had one of the worst nosebleeds I've had in years, followed by an even worse one on Wednesday night that I was *almost* concerned wasn't going to stop... I feel like I'm a mess!

I am looking forward to the trip, but am also painfully worried that I will struggle to enjoy it, because I'm so anxious about everything else! I'm going to try very hard to have a very fun few days away, then a very fun belated Valentines with Alex (the plan right now is Indian food!) and then really try to get all the unfun nonsense dealt with.

We had a pretty nice Thanksgiving.

I took a half day on Wednesday, and then went over to my mom and Taylor's. Taylor still had to work, but I hung out for a while. My mom made pumpkin pies.

On Thursday, Alex was going to make stuffing, then join us partway through the morning to come help cook, but... his morning was a rough one. He was having a bad pain day, and then Cy was sick, and it pretty much just kept spiraling. Ultimately he made it over, though!

We did our usual: mom got a turkey breast rather than a whole turkey, since there were just the four of us. We made mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, stuffing, cranberry sauce... pretty much the classic stuff. It was all very good!



And of course, Bella was the helpful-est dog in the entire world.


The most helpful creature ever to exist.

Cy helped by getting on my mom's couch and then not budging. He hurt his back again early in the week - not sure how, but he's definitely had a hard time getting around. He also decided that he no longer wanted to eat much of anything. Somehow he managed a few bites of turkey being hand-fed to him. (Spoiled monster.)


The saddest creature ever to exist.


Bella found the whole day very exciting, and she did many zoomies around my mom's house, including flinging herself onto the couch and back.


Even Cy eventually sat up.

The day was nice. It was mostly pretty low-key, and I do enjoy the chance to make a bunch of food that we wouldn't normally cook.

I was pretty jealous of mom and Taylor, who both had Friday off, but alas.

My mom and Taylor have adopted a cat. <3 They picked her up on Friday.



She's 14, though she seems to be in very good health. She was picked up as a stray, but was microchipped. Checking the microchip, it turned out she'd been adopted as a kitten (or young cat; unsure) from the same rescue that had picked her up. Apparently, attempts to contact the original adopters and microchip contact information yielded no response.

She was given a pretty extensive dental procedure and wound up having several teeth extracted. She's otherwise very healthy! A bit underweight, though she'd gained about a half a pound while in the shelter, though lost some of that post-dental-surgery.


You can see the shaved patches on her legs where she got IVs for the surgery.

She doesn't have a name yet: my mom was leaning toward "Mocha", though my favorites off the brainstorming list were "Blackberry" and "Nebula."

I also put forward that she should get a creepy/magic-themed/ominous name, because her intake weight after being picked up by the rescue was 6.66 lbs. (Grimoire? Spellbound? Macabre?)

She is astoundingly sweet. She's already settled into the house like she's owned it all along. She's very content to lay in a lap for hours. She purrs like a little jet engine. She wanted pets from me and from Alex the instant we met her, and gives lots of headbutts. My mom and Taylor have both remarked on how gentle she is. She's very talkative, though her meow is a little rough, so she sounds grumpy even though she's not.

She does not like other cats, and has never been tested around dogs. We'll have to see whether my mom can still watch Cy and Bella occasionally for us... Bella has also never been tested around cats. (Cy loves cats.)

I'm so glad they have her. <3

I gave myself another four-day weekend, this time to attend Denver Pride on Saturday. It's the 50th anniversary of Denver Pride this year!

Saturday:
( Denver Pride )

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Sunday:

We started by visiting the park! It was already stupid hot, but we wanted the dogs to get to walk around outside for at least a little while.

I took pictures of bees, but right now my photo-embedder thing is timing out, so I will have to share those later.

( Mostly, we had to clean. )

Monday:
We'd braced for having to do nothing Monday and Tuesday, since we didn't know when it would be our turn for the apartment inspection, and we weren't allowed to leave the dogs in the apartment unattended/unconfined. Since it's so hot, we can't take them anywhere either, so we were going to have to stay home until it was our turn.

Well, they came to our apartment first thing on Monday morning at 8:30, ha. Score! It took them all of maybe 90 seconds, so it definitely didn't require as much cleaning as we did, but it'll still be worthwhile for us to have a better environment. The guy was nice, and he said that it was preventive, not in response to any issues. (I hope that is the truth. Having a friend here going through a bedbug war right now, it sounds AWFUL.)

Buuuuuut... despite no longer having to wait around we also didn't have any plans for the day, since we'd assumed we'd be stuck home.

Alex went down to the county services office to try and sort out an issue with some of his benefits, which wound up being a very frustrating appointment. (They want a letter from his psych provider, which they did not include anywhere in their redetermination list. And his provider just moved to NY.)

After that, he was annoyed and just wanted to take a nap.

I finally got around to making more boards to put my enamel pins on! I've been trying to do that for months and months, and just never manage to get around to it! I'm really happy with them, but again, I apparently can't embed photos at the moment, so that'll be a later share.

Today:
We filled out our ballots and dropped them off. We took the dogs to the park to give them a good brushing, because oof, so much shedding!

Ran some needed errands, including over to the vet to put in a new request for refills on Cy's meds, since the voicemail on the px line we left weeks ago never got returned. Also hit the grocery store.

I wish we'd done a bit more with the long weekend. It's likely to be the longest stretch I'll have off for a while, and I feel like I wasted it a bit, minus going to Pride. But at the same time, it meant that all the cleaning and responsible errand-running didn't take up ALL my time off for a given week, which feels better too.

Plus I really am happy about getting the pin boards done, as well as quite a lot of reading. (I am finally halfway through The Name of the Wind. Why is it so looooong?)

Had a pretty busy string of days over the last week:

( Wednesday I had my dentist appointment )

( Thursday: snow + organizing project )

( Friday was the model show )

( Saturday: recovery day + swap meet )

( Sunday I came over to Taylor's to hang out )

( Monday was mostly more gaming )

Mostly good days (minus Friday being a letdown), but pretty busy. I feel like I have a bunch of stuff to catch up on, and we'll see how well I manage it as I head into my workweek. This is likely the longest string of days off I'll have for a very long while (six days!) but it feels like they were over in a flash, and like I'm very not ready to go back to work.