The State of the Liz
Wednesday, August 21st, 2024 08:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizvogelHello there, journalspace. It's been a while.
When last we spoke, I was dealing with Mom's passing and prepping her condo for sale. While getting a few minor things fixed one day, I went into the master bedroom and came out saying, "Why are my feet wet?" Well, because the supply line to the toilet had sprung a leak sometime in the past two unattended days, and the whole master suite was flooded. There followed adventures with insurance claims and Servpro (who, despite their slogan, left it very much "happened") and trying to see what could be salvaged. The furniture came out largely unscathed, once it dried off; the boxes of scrapbooks and four generations of family photos, which were of course on the closet floor in the hardest-hit corner, rather less so. Though, amazingly, even most of that may be salvageable, if with a certain amount of warping and blurred ink and water stains. But not a total loss, at least.
After emergency triage, I had to put all that aside for a while to run Narrativity. Which was a small but very pleasant con this year, low-key in a good, no-drama way. And lots of people variously stepped up to help, which is awesome. Unfortunately, I haven't given them anything like the time and attention they deserve, because a couple weeks after I got back, I had to drop everything convention-related and get back to estate managing and condo salvaging.
Servpro made a godawful mess, so a lot of my time went to patching and painting drywall, replacing molding, and so forth. And a lot of my time went to spinning in small circles and gibbering every time I tried to deal with the scrapbooks and photos. Heck, the reason they were all shoved in boxes was that Mom didn't know what to do with them, either. And it had been my clever plan to shove them in waterproof bins and continue to not deal with them for a year or two; if only I'd gone ahead and done that sooner.... I finally recognized that trying to cope with them "properly" was bogging me down to the point that nothing was getting done, and switched to bare-minimum triage and temporary measures. There's still piles I haven't dealt with, including several scrapbooks in the freezer (turns out you can wrap water-damaged documents in plastic and freeze them, and it effectively puts them in stasis until you have time to cope), but the proportion of dealt-with versus non-dealt-with is shifting. And making that call meant I could redirect efforts to getting ready for the carpet replacement, which took so much longer than it ever possibly should have, multiple nights working till 1:00 a.m., etc., etc....
I've also, of course, been wrangling the legal and financial sides of the estate. Which is pretty straightforward as these things go, because Mom had her act together, but it's still A Lot. Also, IRAs are weird. Seriously, if you have an IRA, make sure you have a beneficiary designated, and if there are multiple people you want to split the money if you go, make sure they're all listed as beneficiaries, in the percentages you want them to inherit. It will save them an insane amount of finagling, because the IRA doesn't care about your will or the executor's decisions or anything else; the beneficiary designation trumps all. So yes, finagling has been finagled.
Along with all that, we acquired an extra cat. The adorable creamsicle stray that kept hanging around the house for months before Narrativity continued turning up after, and we finally couldn't leave the worrying runny eye and oozing toe unattended. I worked on coaxing him to hand, and almost got him there; then he turned up one night when I was busy, so I sent my housemate out to talk to him. (At the very least we kept needing to get him away from the glass door, because our cats were Not Amused.) An hour later I went out to see what was keeping her -- she'd been petting him all that time. It didn't take much more to get him into our garage. (Though it took quite a lot to get the garage remotely fit for feline habitation, hey look more work.) We always quarantine carefully when a stray joins us, until we can get them vet-checked; unfortunately, this time it turned out to be justified, as he's FIV-positive. Which is making it extra challenging to find him a new home. But he is sweet and friendly and playful and amazingly well-behaved, and he's going to make someone a terrific pet.
Meanwhile, my beloved library job has been going steadily to hell. I love the work, really genuinely in a happy-to-wake-up-on-work-days way. I love the patrons, and the community, and my nifty co-workers. I do not love having a manager who thinks he's the only one who can have a good idea, who routinely says to do a thing and then criticizes me for doing the exact thing he said to do, and who rewrites history to cast his staff in a bad light to support his own agenda. And this is the guy who writes my performance reviews! I even went so far as to have a meeting with HR to try to get some of it fixed, which is when I discovered that our HR director is a vicious, vindictive bully. (Yes, I know, HR works for the company, not the employees, but this bordered on the psychopathic.) I was not the first member of the department to appeal to HR, but I was, it was make explicitly clear, the most expendable. Things did not improve after that, and, much as I loved what the job had once been, I couldn't stay and keep my self-respect or my sanity. Monday was my last day.
I expected it to be bittersweet, and there were certainly a lot of sad goodbyes, as many of my favorite patrons happened to be in that day. But overall, I came away grinning. I'd have stayed at that job until they had to wheel me out on a bookcart if they hadn't screwed it up, but as it stands, getting out was the best thing for me. I'm lucky enough to be in a position where I can take some "me" time, so unless the perfect job comes sauntering along, that's what I'm going to do. Get my feet back under me, get some sleep, and then focus on my writing for a while and see what I can do.
I'm excited to see what's next.
(Of course, the first day of the rest of my life got subsumed into working on the condo in final pre-carpet prep, and today got eaten by carpet installation and some more repairs that got pushed off until after that was done. But the carpet's in now, and I can at least see, vaguely on the horizon, when the condo will be back to where it was in April. And then maybe, maybe, I can get the rest of the work done and get it up for sale, and get the estate settled and get my life back.)
When last we spoke, I was dealing with Mom's passing and prepping her condo for sale. While getting a few minor things fixed one day, I went into the master bedroom and came out saying, "Why are my feet wet?" Well, because the supply line to the toilet had sprung a leak sometime in the past two unattended days, and the whole master suite was flooded. There followed adventures with insurance claims and Servpro (who, despite their slogan, left it very much "happened") and trying to see what could be salvaged. The furniture came out largely unscathed, once it dried off; the boxes of scrapbooks and four generations of family photos, which were of course on the closet floor in the hardest-hit corner, rather less so. Though, amazingly, even most of that may be salvageable, if with a certain amount of warping and blurred ink and water stains. But not a total loss, at least.
After emergency triage, I had to put all that aside for a while to run Narrativity. Which was a small but very pleasant con this year, low-key in a good, no-drama way. And lots of people variously stepped up to help, which is awesome. Unfortunately, I haven't given them anything like the time and attention they deserve, because a couple weeks after I got back, I had to drop everything convention-related and get back to estate managing and condo salvaging.
Servpro made a godawful mess, so a lot of my time went to patching and painting drywall, replacing molding, and so forth. And a lot of my time went to spinning in small circles and gibbering every time I tried to deal with the scrapbooks and photos. Heck, the reason they were all shoved in boxes was that Mom didn't know what to do with them, either. And it had been my clever plan to shove them in waterproof bins and continue to not deal with them for a year or two; if only I'd gone ahead and done that sooner.... I finally recognized that trying to cope with them "properly" was bogging me down to the point that nothing was getting done, and switched to bare-minimum triage and temporary measures. There's still piles I haven't dealt with, including several scrapbooks in the freezer (turns out you can wrap water-damaged documents in plastic and freeze them, and it effectively puts them in stasis until you have time to cope), but the proportion of dealt-with versus non-dealt-with is shifting. And making that call meant I could redirect efforts to getting ready for the carpet replacement, which took so much longer than it ever possibly should have, multiple nights working till 1:00 a.m., etc., etc....
I've also, of course, been wrangling the legal and financial sides of the estate. Which is pretty straightforward as these things go, because Mom had her act together, but it's still A Lot. Also, IRAs are weird. Seriously, if you have an IRA, make sure you have a beneficiary designated, and if there are multiple people you want to split the money if you go, make sure they're all listed as beneficiaries, in the percentages you want them to inherit. It will save them an insane amount of finagling, because the IRA doesn't care about your will or the executor's decisions or anything else; the beneficiary designation trumps all. So yes, finagling has been finagled.
Along with all that, we acquired an extra cat. The adorable creamsicle stray that kept hanging around the house for months before Narrativity continued turning up after, and we finally couldn't leave the worrying runny eye and oozing toe unattended. I worked on coaxing him to hand, and almost got him there; then he turned up one night when I was busy, so I sent my housemate out to talk to him. (At the very least we kept needing to get him away from the glass door, because our cats were Not Amused.) An hour later I went out to see what was keeping her -- she'd been petting him all that time. It didn't take much more to get him into our garage. (Though it took quite a lot to get the garage remotely fit for feline habitation, hey look more work.) We always quarantine carefully when a stray joins us, until we can get them vet-checked; unfortunately, this time it turned out to be justified, as he's FIV-positive. Which is making it extra challenging to find him a new home. But he is sweet and friendly and playful and amazingly well-behaved, and he's going to make someone a terrific pet.
Meanwhile, my beloved library job has been going steadily to hell. I love the work, really genuinely in a happy-to-wake-up-on-work-days way. I love the patrons, and the community, and my nifty co-workers. I do not love having a manager who thinks he's the only one who can have a good idea, who routinely says to do a thing and then criticizes me for doing the exact thing he said to do, and who rewrites history to cast his staff in a bad light to support his own agenda. And this is the guy who writes my performance reviews! I even went so far as to have a meeting with HR to try to get some of it fixed, which is when I discovered that our HR director is a vicious, vindictive bully. (Yes, I know, HR works for the company, not the employees, but this bordered on the psychopathic.) I was not the first member of the department to appeal to HR, but I was, it was make explicitly clear, the most expendable. Things did not improve after that, and, much as I loved what the job had once been, I couldn't stay and keep my self-respect or my sanity. Monday was my last day.
I expected it to be bittersweet, and there were certainly a lot of sad goodbyes, as many of my favorite patrons happened to be in that day. But overall, I came away grinning. I'd have stayed at that job until they had to wheel me out on a bookcart if they hadn't screwed it up, but as it stands, getting out was the best thing for me. I'm lucky enough to be in a position where I can take some "me" time, so unless the perfect job comes sauntering along, that's what I'm going to do. Get my feet back under me, get some sleep, and then focus on my writing for a while and see what I can do.
I'm excited to see what's next.
(Of course, the first day of the rest of my life got subsumed into working on the condo in final pre-carpet prep, and today got eaten by carpet installation and some more repairs that got pushed off until after that was done. But the carpet's in now, and I can at least see, vaguely on the horizon, when the condo will be back to where it was in April. And then maybe, maybe, I can get the rest of the work done and get it up for sale, and get the estate settled and get my life back.)
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Date: 2024-Aug-22, Thursday 07:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-Aug-31, Saturday 01:54 am (UTC)