hel - pez dispenser of happiness

Currently listening to the Goths Against Fascism raid train. They're raising money for the ACLU and appear to be just short of their goal.

Current DJ is playing fantastic music but will not fucking shut up talking over it.

[EDIT] Very Talky DJ just raided to a new channel and it's somebody I knew back in the day. Heh.

[2nd EDIT] And now new DJ is playing a bunch of Spanish-language punk and goth and ska and it's fucking amazing.

***

Very productive weekend was had where I managed to cross a bunch of things off my to-do list. Lord Brock got his blood taken but I completely failed to get a urine sample because I have to collect it and then get it to the vet within a fairly narrow time frame and he refused to cooperate while they were actually open. I'll try again in the morning.

Which means having a conversation with my boss, "Hey if my cat pees I have to run out the door right away."

I've been thinking anyway, I need to sit down and have a talk with her about medical accommodations. My vertigo has been hell with all the rain storms sweeping through and that's going to be an issue every spring so it would be good if they're prepared for me to be around less when that happens. Unless they want to send me a driver or something.

***

Did another long walk on Friday. Stretching and being good in between. So far foot is still holding up well.

And I was thinking about this as I was out looking around at the various storefronts, Toronto has SO MANY cannabis shops. SO MANY. Some sections of particularly popular shopping streets has a half-dozen per block.

The vast majority of them are not licensed. Ironically our former drug-dealer premier could not figure out how to get legal weed shops sorted when they first became legal so people just went ahead and opened their own. Occasionally cops will go around and close a bunch but they're really the only ones who give a shit.

So anyway one of the things you see frequently here - no idea if this is true in other locations - is weed shops that say in big letters on the front that the owners are from a specific indigenous tribe operating on unceded land as per their treaty rights. I've always wondered if that actually got the cops to stop bothering them.

And then recently a friend pointed out there are also weed shops that say Sovereign people without the tribal mention, and those are run by Freeman and now that I know I see them everywhere.

(For those who don't want to click on the link, Freeman are a group in Canada who have decided that they if they don't "consent" to be citizens they can't be forced to do things like pay taxes or follow laws. I knew somebody who fell for their nonsense and I am absolutely fascinated to know how that's the kind of self-deception that outlasts the first speeding ticket.)

***

Current media consumption: I am binging Slow Horses with the gf and I am loving it. I'm not really one for spy stories, but I am really digging the personalities and the plot twists and the internal conflicts. Also the character Gary Oldman plays is amazing.

Mostly what I'm reading is terribly-written romantasy series which are entirely cookie-cutter and disposable so I can just tear them off the role and then forget about them. Kinda where I'm at for the moment. I will challenge my brain via reading material when it has less going on in the rest of life.

I've been planning to recondition the ol' walking muscles for a while now, but spending 20 minutes putting on layers before you can walk out the door is not conducive to the casual stroll. Friday it was 20+ degrees and sunny so I went for a 90-minute walk, just in a big circle around the neighbourhood. I was not alone in this decision. The sidewalks were full, every patio was packed, and the ice cream store had a line down the block.

This morning I woke up and there was snow on my deck.

So that was second spring. We're due two more and then we enter smoke-from-forest-fires season.

In the course of my walk I found out there is a new brewpub at the literal end of my street. They will have a patio. This is going to be very very bad for my wallet.

***

Word has come down from Above, I am going back into the office one day a week starting the last week of May.

Completely stupid and unnecessary but it could be a lot worse. I suspect it's only once a week because they've received so much negative feedback from their employees and they'll try to bump it up to higher frequency once they figure we're resigned to it. But that's unlikely to happen this year.

Or you know, gas will hit $50 a litre and they'll have to either back off or pay people more. Which could also happen! Who the fuck knows, this is the most stupid of all possible timelines.

I'm taking a staycation to work on the house in a couple of weeks and after that I'm going to try to train myself to get up earlier on a daily basis. I would try to get up early on the monthly office days but anything that disrupts my sleep sets off the vertigo like woah, and I ended up leaving the house at the same time or later by the time I got it under control. It took me almost three weeks to get over the shift to daylight savings time. I figure I can spend a month being wobbly at home before I have to go into the office and navigate bright lights and too many moving bodies.

***

Lord Brock continues to develop concerning test results and cost me five million dollars per vet visit. But he still beats on a catnip mouse like it owes him money, so I have hope that whatever the underlying issue is it remains manageable.

While going through old paperwork to see what I could shred this year I found his original adoption records. He is 13 this year, not 15 as I originally thought. So he's definitely in his old man years, but not quite as old as I thought. So I might get a couple more years of being yelled at.