This Writer’s Life

Caturday quickie: Progress? Not.

/ Melanie Marttila / 2 Comments

So . . . when last I wrote about this, Phil and I were optimistic about getting the work on our yard and driveway done. It was October and the road work was to continue until November 15th. We had the beginnings of the retaining wall, and a promise from the city engineer that everything should be completed.

Then it snowed October 31st.

retaining wall

retaining wall 2

retaining wall 3

What we have:

  • a mostly completed retaining wall; and
  • compacting fill in the driveway.

What will be done in the spring (otherwise, Phil and I might not be as understanding as we have been):

  • finish the retaining wall (further wrapping around and steps);
  • install railing on retaining wall;
  • new front steps;
  • old front steps removed from out back yard and disposed of; and
  • driveway paved.

We’re waiting to hear from the engineer about something we’d like to have added to the work order (and which we will pay for because it’s on our property). Since the driveway is all gravel anyway, we’d like to get a contractor to replace the sewer line. We have roots in the line and think it would be a convenient time to get the work done, rather than pay to have the drive dug up, the line replaced, and the drive repaved at a later date.

So that’s where we are.

Will let you know what happens when work resumes in the spring.

Caturday Quickies

Sundog snippet: Chaotic life is chaotic

/ Melanie Marttila / 6 Comments

I will try to keep this a snippet, but there’s a lot happening these days.

Work

The uncertainty continues.

My former manager is continuing in her acting position as senior manager until December 31. In the meantime, one acting manager has yielded to another, this time, a colleague, talented and deserving.

Two other friends from the consultant pool have been appointed to training coordinator, the position I held as an acting consultant for sixteen months. One of my friends will be handling coordination for my business line and the other for another business line. I’m very happy for them. The position will teach them a lot.

The new training is well underway. I delivered the Sudbury session the second and third weeks in September. Then I mentored a couple of acting advisors on our team to help them learn the way we monitor our new agents, post-training.

I’ll be doing a little more mentoring, and taking on the supervision of an agent returning to work.

Then I’ll be getting ready for the next round of training in November. After that, I’m not really sure what’s going to happen.

I got my projects from the summer done, but beyond that, I don’t know if anything more will come of them.

With all the major players in acting roles, we can’t really do more than react.

Phil’s got his own burden at work, but it’s not my story to tell, so I’ll have to leave it at that.

Usually, when things are going well for me at work, they go poorly for him, and vice versa. Now we both seem to be in a bit of a jam.

Home

The city engineer stopped by my mom’s last week. Apparently, Union Gas will be by to bury the gas line properly again on Monday.

The Gas Line

Then, the rock will be blasted out. As you can see, the blasting mats are already in place.

The Blasting Mats

Then, they’ll be tearing up the driveway and repaving and, I suppose, getting the retaining wall up.

The engineer is supposed to be coming by with the work order for Phil to sign off on. He says he has a lovely railing for the top of the retaining wall.

You know about Nuala’s troubles from last week’s post. She’s making headway, but after the first glucose curve, the vet increased her dosage of insulin. Her sugars were too high. We’re in a holding pattern there until this Thursday, when we’ll take Nu in for her next glucose curve.

Phil and I are growing accustomed to our new schedule, but between that, the gloomy weather we’ve been having, and work uncertainty, we’re both exhausted.

At least, I’ll have my normal salary to look forward to for the next six months or so. We have some hefty vet bills to pay off.

Creatively

As you may have guessed from my Next Chapter post, I’m trying to focus my energies on my writing. It’s what keeps me sane.

Unfortunately, trying to cram everything in tends to wear me out. I know this, and still, I do it.

When a writing friend came to town last month, I’d intended to meet her. She was reading at my mom’s church on the Sunday and then at the Public Library on the Thursday.

On Sunday, I was feeling poorly and decided not to go. I’m not big into church these days anyway. The week of her visit was also one of two weeks of training I was delivering. When Thursday arrived, I got home from work and essentially collapsed. It wasn’t until after nine that I realized I had missed her presentation.

More recently, I wanted to get out to the launch of an art show another friend was having, but events conspired against me and I couldn’t get away.

It really is true that life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.

Otherwise

I have a number of friends going through tough times.

They say news, whether bad or good, is supposed to come in threes, but it’s been far more than that, and since I’m such a hermit these days, I often don’t know what’s happened until after the fact.

I can only give them my moral support in most situations and wish them well.

I sincerely hope all of this misfortune comes to an end soon and that life resumes a better balance for everyone.

And that’s where I’ll leave you, with my very best wishes for a speedy recovery, a soothing of grief, a securing of contentment, if not happiness, and a world of ease to all your troubles. This, too, shall pass.

The warmest of hugs to you all.

Sundog snippet

Pupdate, part the whatever

/ Melanie Marttila / 8 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these. Phil and I had, foolishly, fell into complacency, having felt that the worst of Nuala’s troubles were behind us.

Not so, apparently.

When we had seen the veterinarian in June, following up on Nuala’s persistently inflamed and fibrocystic ear canals, we had been sent home with Nu on a regimen on low dose prednisone and periodic flushing of the problematic canals with TryzEDTA. She would be due for further blood tests in September to follow up on her kidney function and liver function to see how she was tolerating the pred.

September hit and Nuala started to behave poorly again. Her ears started to throw off more crud/pus, and we thought we’d up her pred for a bit to see if we could clear it up. She became listless and her bladder control was practically non-existent. She also started to drink a lot of water. A lot. It was so bad that I’d have to restrain her from drinking from puddles when we walked. We had to remember to keep the toilet lid down.

We noticed she was losing weight, too. We theorized, because we both knew the symptoms, that she might be diabetic, but I preferred to remain in denial for a while and hoped that her difficulties resulted from an existing condition that we could treat.

I thought initially that we could wait until the vet called for her follow up blood work, but week before last, we decided we couldn’t wait any longer and made an appointment for this Tuesday just past.

We brought in a urine sample as well, just in case. Turns out it was good that we did.

The first thing we did upon entering the office was to weigh her. It’s something we do every time. If there is any medication to be doled out or adjusted, the vet needs to know her weight.

She was 25 kilograms. The last time we’d weighed her in June, she was 31.4 kilograms. That was a shock.

In the examination room, though he confirmed the increased inflammation/infection in her ears and her poor physical condition, the vet said that we were to return to the lower dosage of pred with an eye to eliminating it altogether. Pred can apparently exacerbate the onset of diabetes. Joy.

He said that his immediate diagnosis would be diabetes, but that he’d actually like to perform the tests to confirm his diagnosis before prescribing anything.

Wednesday, Phil received the call at work: Nu was indeed diabetic, and there were ketones in her urine.

Now, for those of you who don’t know, this is bad. It means that Nu had depleted her fat stores and that her body was now consuming her muscle mass in an attempt to compensate for her inability to metabolize sugar properly.

I noticed that she had been a bit unsteady on her pegs in the last couple of days.

So, we both took off work early on Thursday to get back to see the vet before he left for the day. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to get the insulin pen and supplies he wanted for Nu, but he had some canine insulin and syringes that had been returned by another client. She’d need 12 units of insulin, morning and night.

We were also given new food, a diabetic diet, and advised to feed Nu between three and four cans of it a day (she was doing well on a half a can and a cup of kibble a day before) to bring her weight back up.

And finally, I’ll be taking her back in this coming Tuesday for a glucose curve to see how she’s doing and if we have to adjust the dosage or the food in the next little bit.

In the three days she’s been on the insulin, I’m happy to say that Nuala is already looking better, drinking less, peeing in the house less, and enjoying her usual activities (like eating garbage on our morning walks) again.

The hope is that getting the diabetes under control will also reduce the stress on Nu’s body and reduce the inflammation in her ears, if nothing else. Otherwise, it’s a game of wait and see. We’ll address her health issues as required, moving forward.

This is not new territory for Phil and me. Our cat, Thufir, was diabetic for the last three years of his life. Plus, Phil was a medical laboratory technician in a past career, so he’s cool with the whole injection thing.

The unfortunate part for me is that Nu needs her insulin an hour before her meals, morning and night. So . . . there will be no more sleeping in for Mellie on the weekends. I’ll either have to take up napping (something I’ve never been good at) or try to find some other way to recover from my weekly sleep deficit from working.

Something tells me I shouldn’t have decided to defer my leave with income averaging until the spring.

The important thing is that Nuala is on the road to recovery again.

I hope I won’t be writing another pupdate for some time. My poor dear has been through quite enough.

Next week: I’ll be posting my Next Chapter monthly update. There are still a few days left in the month and I want to make the most of them 🙂

So, this dog walks into a writer’s office and says, “Whatchya up to?”

Further thoughts on uncertainty

/ Melanie Marttila / 4 Comments

I guess I was a little over the top last week. Several of you reached out to me in concern, and I thank you, every one, but I’m okay. Really.

Writing is one of the principle ways I address feelings of anxiety and depression when they arise. It’s very much like I wrote last week, I pin my thoughts and feelings to the page. Once they’re there, I can gain perspective in a way that I can’t when talking to family and friends.

Phil, love him as I do, like most partners, tries to offer solutions. I have to find these for myself. My mom and other family can only commiserate, really, and after a while, repeating the same story over and over again to friends only serves to intensify my negative feelings.

Let me tell you, that beast does not need to be fed.

A few things happened at work in the last week that helped a bit.

  1. The project I was working on finally worked out.
    I’ve been struggling with this thing for weeks.
    Short version: I’ve been making some screen videos. The recording was okay once I had some dedicated time to write my scripts and work out my storyboard. I’ve had to learn how to use a new video editing program (thank you Lynda.com), edit the videos (again, no sweat), and export the final product. This is where my lack of experience in formal video editing has come back to bite me in the ass.
    I tried format after format, but either the audio was choppy, the program required add-ons that I cannot install, or I ended up with a monster file. How monster? A seven minute video was over 5GB. Whaaaaat? That’s like a whole movie!
    In any case, I finally got most of my problems resolved.
  2. I’m no longer going to be travelling for training. Generally, I don’t mind it, but this would have been three weeks away from home. Mellie is a happy camper.
  3. I managed to negotiate my self-funded leave. This, too, is a boon, but this weekend, I’ve been thinking that I might defer it until the spring.
    Yes, I’m a bit toasty around the edges, but I’m not burned out yet. The summer’s break from training and monitoring has been a balm. My trips to Ad Astra, Can Write, and When Words Collide have fed my creative side, and I think I can move into the fall refreshed.
    There’s some truth to the saying that a change is as good as a rest.
    Plus, it will be nice to resume my full salary for a portion of the year. The way I had to rearrange my leave around training and monitoring means that I also didn’t get the time I wanted off. I had wanted the last week of October and the month of November so I could do NaNo again this year. It’s going to be most of October and just a week in November.
    Spring might be a better time.

Otherwise, work is still up in the air, but things will sort themselves out eventually. They always do. I just have to pull myself back into the here and now, appreciate each day for what it is, and take it as it comes. Projecting too far into the future is not a good thing.

At home, we’re still in a holding pattern, waiting for reports to get to the city engineers regarding the rerouting of our gas line (currently naked) and the removal of the rock in our front yard/building of the retaining wall.

Creatively, it’s been a low month.

I’ll write about this a bit more in my month-end update, but I’ve been in a state of collapse since my return from Calgary.

It’s not writer’s block. My well is topped up. It’s just my creative brain’s reaction to going all out for so long. I had a bit of a stumble back in the spring, but then I jumped right back on the writing bandwagon with a vengeance. It was a great few months of writing, but I think writer me wanted a holiday.

It’s the joys of writing with a day job. There just aren’t enough hours in the day and I’m getting old enough that working two jobs is a bit much for me. I think I’m going to work a day of rest into my schedule.

And now the new television season is about to begin. I hate to say it, but I’m a bit of a TV junkie. I watch, as I read, for story. There are a number of new shows I want to check out. I’m getting increasingly picky, though.

Last year, I worked out a great system with my lap top. I’ll see if it continues to work this year.

That’s it until next week, when I’ll get into The Next Chapter update.

What’s going on in your lives, lately? Just drop me a line in the comments and let me know.

Muse-inks

Caturday Quickies: “L” is for love

/ Melanie Marttila

Here is a picture of Nuala snoozing from overhead. She’s taken to this style of rest since her ACL repair.

"L" shaped pup

Notice the distinct “L” shape.

L is for love.

That is all.

Caturday Quickies