Right around my last post, someone I cared about dumped me for a third time, and I sort of got... too busy. We'd hired that lead writer at work, and some things he passed on to me from the higher ups made it absolutely clear that my work was not valued. That, combined with the chaos of my company being bought by a larger one, and the utter clusterfuck that turned out to be, with turnover and broken promises and the painful process of shoehorning a small startup's tempting benefits into the reduced generosity of a larger company - it made it clear it was time to leave.
However, in the midst of *this* our long-running search for a home finally bore fruit, sort of. The house took the maximum of our available funds, and took an eyewatering sum to be made ready to live in. We spent May not-really-believing we were in escrow, and June frantically working on the house: new roof, new flooring, new plumbing so we could have a dishwasher, all new appliances (well technically, since the water heater horked at died two weeks in), a lot of new electrical runs so we could safely work from home, and an all new kitchen. That was on top of the usual things like rugs and curtains and figuring out where to put things. I spent a month working from a jobsite, air traffic controlling simultaneous contractors, from a plastic card table in an empty kitchen.
My delicate neck and shoulders did not care for this bullshit one bit and I started having severe arm and shoulder pain that woke me up and kept me up at night. By the time we moved in at the end of June, I was so sleep deprived and lost that the pain relief of a hot shower in the new place made me *actually cry*. It's been a long walk back from that and I'm still not 100% - but at least we're pretty sure this is muscles and not bone this time.
So, during this time, I gave my notice at the old job. My new lead had taken the day off so I had to give my notice to his boss, who I liked immensely and who'd gotten a raw deal joining a company that'd just been acquired. I was so shot I burst into tears and blabbed my heart about being undervalued and patronized, and she was shocked but saw the truth of that and just asked me not to repeat this to the new hires just coming onboard.
The moves were absolutely traumatic. The company had refused to come and give an estimate, so we each got one day. We each should have had two; one for packing and one for delivery. M spent my move day at the house overseeing the kitchen installers, who were done, cleaned up and gone, several hours before the moving van even left my old apartment. Unloading at least went reasonably fast. The second day I stayed at the house, making room for M's incoming things - and I thought I did really well! But oh boy. That was awful. The movers "timed out" in the end, and had to dump everything into the house's garage. We spent the next four months deduplicating our things and making run after run to Goodwill to deposit duplicates.
And I started a new job. The first day of the new job started late, because just as I was signing in (temporarily from my own laptop) I started hearing water running in the wall behind my desk - right below where the toilet was. It turned out to be a bent antique lead toilet gasket, but it set me back a bit. Aside from that bumpy start however, things have been going well, and I've enjoyed getting to do all the same things at a 600x the speed of the last place, with people who take my word that these things are needed.
The months sort of flew by, to be honest. We spent a good several months interviewing contractors and trying to relax, getting turned down by the contractor we'd most liked, and having to start over. In the end we signed a contract for a whole new foundation and a bunch of excavation... and then had to sit and wait until people were available. We did things like go camping, and tried to get back to normal as vaccination rates went up, and cases went down. And then there was Delta and everything went back to the way it was before. We attended a lovely (pre-tested) party in Truckee that had some weird relationship dynamics in retrospect, but that was otherwise absolutely wonderful. Odd Salon had its first back-to-in-person Salon and it was amazing and terrifying to be around so many people so close together.
The new roof held up during the bomb cyclone that hit San Francisco in October, and in November our new stove was finally delivered, just in time for us to celebrate Thanksgiving, still in pandemic distance. We had a lovely, quiet Christmas season with lots of baking and cooking and eating. We explored the neighborhood, and joined a gym, and went wine tasting. We attended and spoke at the second in-person pandemic Odd Salon. All this while waiting for work to start on our house.
The original start date had been "in Q1 of 2022" and when I started emailing in early March they didn't have a timeline. Our architect only finally got to drawing up plans in April, and was gone all of May, doing revisions by email late at night Pacific time, from his family's place in Turkey.
In April my work planned its first traveling offsite to San Diego, and it was absolutely exhausting and unrelentingly work work work, with only dinnertime being the "fun" part. With the international fly-ins, this was just... not great. By Wednesday I was so sleep deprived that we checked into our new, us-paid hotel and I couldn't even explain what food I needed. We had a great pizza and then I went back and slept for a few hours. We spent the next few days enjoying San Diego, though I started to have more and more sinus congestion and a sore throat - I figured one of my typical sinus infections - a few days in. We didn't let it slow us down too much. On the day we returned home, we got an email from our contractor saying they were ready to start in a few weeks and how was our move-out going? I was not in a state to really respond...
It was covid. The next ten days were a haze of exhaustion and sweaty nights and taking sudafed on a timer so I could keep breathing. On the third day I called my doctor to try to get an appointment because my throat was waking me up at night from the pain, and I was coughing up blood and green goo in the mornings. My doctor's office couldn't see me until the next week, and my actual doctor had no openings until eight weeks later. I gave up and joined One Medical, got a telehealth appointment the next day, and a prescription for the anti-viral paxlovid the day after. The next five days tasted like metal, and because of the potential for liver damage, held me off from taking the antibiotics I knew I needed to kick the sinus infection. By the end of the paxlovid and the amox-clavin I felt mostly better, though I still cough and I feel short of breath sometimes.
During this whole ordeal we were scheduling the piano movers, movers to pack our breakables, movers to empty the garage, the asbestos company to take away the ductwork, and the heater guys to take away the antique gravity heater for a future project. Odd Salon ended, somewhat abruptly, due to health issues among the organizers, right after I started testing negative. We also found and compared a couple of short-term rentals (which I will add is HARD when you have a cat in SF in tourist/intern season) and secured and moved into an eye-wateringly expensive one that gives us a lovely view, and puts us close enough to be able to walk back to the house if we're needed.
On the last day of May (Ramadan?) our architect returned to SF and finally took our permits to DBI - where they were approved over the counter. A HUGE sigh of relief. We'd reduced the scope to the point where all the things we were adding - drainage, sewerage, a new bathroom, etc, were just "foundation replacement and seismic upgrades".
So that brings us more or less to today. We're in the beautiful but expensive rental, with the Pride flag out one window and the Pink triangle lit up on the hill out the other side, with Luna contentedly on her chair.
And now I can write about the rest.
Wow! What a marathon of a year!
ReplyDeleteIt was a WHOLE LOT. <3
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