Bubbles on the Banks

My POD crossed the border yesterday evening and is in St Paul. I have a delivery date of Friday. THAT IS A DAY AND A HALF AWAY AAAAHHHHH.

I get to have stuff. I get to have furniture, not just a bed and a kitchen table and a couple of not-terribly-comfortable kitchen chairs. (And a desk I'm not using except to hold my viola case.) I get to have my bookcases filled with books and games. I get to have clothes beyond the half-dozen shirts and underwear I brought with me. I get to have kitchen accoutrements and to be able to cook for real. I get to make my apartment look like mine.

I've found movers based on "a guy I played some train games with had them deliver a couch and he was really happy with them." I am mostly nervous; I'm not convinced they're gonna send enough guys (at least two, three might be better) or equipment (at least a sturdy dolly, and a flatbed cart would be useful as well). We'll see how it goes.

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I spent much of last week with Steph and family at their cottage on the St Lawrence, in Ontario. It was good to be outside and among trees and water. The whole thing made me wish I could draw or paint, a litle. It's pretty, yes, but also... I don't know. I could visualise what coloured-pencil sketches or watercolours of the landscape would look like.

I started off by swimming the hundred meters across the little bay, and that was rough... and then tried to swim back, which turned out to be upstream, and that was much much worse. The chill and the muscle exhaustion were bad enough, I was having trouble "swimming" and was mostly "flailing sort of forward while trying to get enough oxygen and not sink." That coupled with fighting the current, and the sense of not moving any closer, added despair and muted terror to the list. I got myself over to a dock that was about halfway across, and hung on gasping until Steph came out to fetch me on a paddleboard. Not recommended, at least not without some conditioning beforehand.

Other than that... there was cooking, there was weeding, there were boat rides and walks and ice cream. I brought my viola so there was some music, and that was good. It was also a deeply lonely experience. "But Steph was there!" Yes, in her natural habitat, with her family, taking care of her kid. I am notoriously bad at identifying 'belonging' but am pretty sure that for a variety of reasons this wasn't it. It might be, later; just not now, or yet.

My life has been fairly unsettled since ... call it a year and a half, since I realised that I wasn't going to be getting a job with the BC government. It's been mostly upended and in boxes for going on five months now. I'm hopeful that having an apartment that looks like mine will help matters.

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Interview this morning for an election judge position that would run from mid-September through early November. That was followed by an unexpected call from a place where a friend of Steph's works that was looking for a tech writer. That position didn't pan out; they want someone with an active clearance. But there's similar positions open, that will sponsor one for a clearance, so she passed my resume etc along.

And then I got a pingback from a place I'd applied for a GIS position, and an interview tomorrow morning. This is the place that ghosted me at about this time last year, after being exceedingly flaky about getting an interview scheduled, so I am not terribly optimistic, but at this point I am intimately familiar with the beggars/choosers dichotomy. So we'll see.

The tech writing thing would pay extremely well, which would be nice, and would be wholly remote, which would be nice assuming I can get myself into work-mode. The only downside is that it's tech writing. Well, and it's for a contract for DHS ("but not ICE!" the person on the phone was quick to assure me). The other would be GIS work, but for much less pay, some amount of on-site, and with multiple smallish red flags waving already.

Onward. To bed, right now.