Tuesday, March 12
Mar. 13th, 2024 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gottawonderToday I am grateful for:
The fellow did show up and do the first window frame (my husband and I wanted to do ONE first, as a test of our communication skills).
The window frame passes, as far as what we expected, which is good (my husband looked at it when he got home from work).
That means we move on to do the other window frames, starting with the ones on the main floor.
Not so good: he doesn't seem to realize that I meant what I said about sleeping at odd times. He basically acted as if "I sleep for half the day" means that I actually wake up at 9 am and am ready to answer all of his queries and sit and talk with him.
He pretty much ignored everything I said about "please just work on the bathroom without needed input, and leave when you're done, we'll talk to you when my husband gets home about things". Nope. He basically walked into the house when he showed up to "let me know he was here", asked me to get up and "have a look at what he was doing to make sure I was happy with it", and then got me to get up again in about 20 minutes because he wanted to keep working on other windows, as he was done with the bathroom, even though I told him we were only doing one window today as a "tester".
So, I pretty much did not sleep today.
I know that if we just push ahead (he's fast, at least) this can be over in a few long, weary days.
I spoke with Sister E after he left, and was trying to make light a bit about not sleeping, and she kind of turned it into "well, you have to take the good with the bad", and it rubbed me the wrong way. Like, for every good thing (like progress on the house) I have to trade off with having something bad happen (like no sleep?). That seems like the kind of mentality that I keep running into with our family. A kind of fatalism, or waiting for the other shoe to drop if something nice happens.
I replied with "no, I don't have to accept that I'm going to be exhausted or inconvenienced horribly every time I want something to happen on the house. What I probably need is a better plan, and maybe stronger boundaries".
The plan is THIS time, I'm going to sleep in the downstairs bedroom, and I'm going to text him in the morning and say that I'm trying to sleep, please don't disturb me, if you need anything call my husband. Literally DO NOT ASK FOR ME TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTIONS.
I went to see River today, and he was very relaxed again. It's so warm.
I was too tired to want to do much of anything, so mostly I just enjoyed being with him. We did a bit of Liberty, and he ended up doing very well with the turn on hindquarters in the one direction. Not fast, but steady and properly. So that was good.
When I was scratching his itches, I found a WOOD TICK on him!!! There is still snow on the ground! Not only that, but our province supposedly doesn't HAVE any wood ticks.
I made a point of showing it to R, and she kind of flipped out, because now that's one more thing we all have to worry about. She's got enough on her plate.
My Sweetie did come to say hi at the barn, which was nice, then he went home (he's in nice work clothes, so doesn't tend to stay long when he's on his way home from work).
When I got home, he had supper made, we conferred about the work on the window frame, and let this fellow know that he could work on the windows on the main floor. We had to clear everything out of his way tonight.
Roxy had been doing better with her sore leg (a partially torn ACL that the vet said might heal on it's own if we were very careful), but tonight she could barely put any weight on it. I don't know what could have happened, as she was doing just fine with it when we went outside earlier today.
Over the last few weeks, I thought it was healing, as she seemed to be using it more, and putting more weight on it. We were letting her come outside for about half an hour twice a day, but no running or playing, just letting her do her gentle meandering around the yard.
We'll have to likely go ahead with the surgery then. Sigh.
We watched another episode of "Boardwalk Empire" which is quite good. I do hate the way it views women, and it doesn't have any female characters that are "active" characters, just passive ones that things "happen to", not fleshed out women who have their own goals or actions or personality. Even though Boardwalk Empire was set in the Prohibition Era of the 1930's, it seems to have written female characters as basically prostitutes or saintly wives, both of whom are at the whim of the male characters entirely.
That's my feeling after only two episodes.
Kosovo is another land-locked Balkan country that was once the Kingdom of Dardanania, then it was part of the Roman Empire where it was Christianized for a while, then it was part of the Ottoman Empire where Islam was introduced.
Then it was back and forth for quite some time between being Serbian or Albanian.
It was just wars, wars, wars, and more wars. Lots of wars. There was the first Balkan War of 1913.
Then during WW I it was occupied by Bulgaria and Austro-Hungary, which were pushed back out by the allies.
In WW II, it was occupied by the Axis: Italy, Germany, and Bulgaria again.
The modern borders of present day Kosovo were delineated in 1959.
And more war. When you think of Kosovo, think "war".
"Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on 17 February 2008.[165] As of 4 September 2020, 114 UN states recognised its independence, including all of its immediate neighbours, with the exception of Serbia;[166] 10 states have subsequently withdrawn that recognition.[167][168] Of the UN Security Council members, while the US, UK and France do recognise Kosovo's independence, Russia and China do not.[169]"
They're still having lots of internal issues, civil unrest, deaths.
Today, "Kosovo is a multi-party parliamentary representative democratic republic.", but corruption is a huge issue, and it's not REALLY democratic.
It's a small country of just over four thousand square miles, and mainly mountainous (home of the "Accursed Mountain Range", which seems appropriate).
The economy is based largely on mining, but also is a wine producing region.
I can't get over how these places seem to have a lot of tourism. REALLY? TOURISM?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo
Though you pretty much aren't going to absorb anything, this video is a pretty good explanation of the endless conflict of this region.
https://youtu.be/mlVzRjqJCYY?si=1KUke66JJQfj3qzJ
The fellow did show up and do the first window frame (my husband and I wanted to do ONE first, as a test of our communication skills).
The window frame passes, as far as what we expected, which is good (my husband looked at it when he got home from work).
That means we move on to do the other window frames, starting with the ones on the main floor.
Not so good: he doesn't seem to realize that I meant what I said about sleeping at odd times. He basically acted as if "I sleep for half the day" means that I actually wake up at 9 am and am ready to answer all of his queries and sit and talk with him.
He pretty much ignored everything I said about "please just work on the bathroom without needed input, and leave when you're done, we'll talk to you when my husband gets home about things". Nope. He basically walked into the house when he showed up to "let me know he was here", asked me to get up and "have a look at what he was doing to make sure I was happy with it", and then got me to get up again in about 20 minutes because he wanted to keep working on other windows, as he was done with the bathroom, even though I told him we were only doing one window today as a "tester".
So, I pretty much did not sleep today.
I know that if we just push ahead (he's fast, at least) this can be over in a few long, weary days.
I spoke with Sister E after he left, and was trying to make light a bit about not sleeping, and she kind of turned it into "well, you have to take the good with the bad", and it rubbed me the wrong way. Like, for every good thing (like progress on the house) I have to trade off with having something bad happen (like no sleep?). That seems like the kind of mentality that I keep running into with our family. A kind of fatalism, or waiting for the other shoe to drop if something nice happens.
I replied with "no, I don't have to accept that I'm going to be exhausted or inconvenienced horribly every time I want something to happen on the house. What I probably need is a better plan, and maybe stronger boundaries".
The plan is THIS time, I'm going to sleep in the downstairs bedroom, and I'm going to text him in the morning and say that I'm trying to sleep, please don't disturb me, if you need anything call my husband. Literally DO NOT ASK FOR ME TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTIONS.
I went to see River today, and he was very relaxed again. It's so warm.
I was too tired to want to do much of anything, so mostly I just enjoyed being with him. We did a bit of Liberty, and he ended up doing very well with the turn on hindquarters in the one direction. Not fast, but steady and properly. So that was good.
When I was scratching his itches, I found a WOOD TICK on him!!! There is still snow on the ground! Not only that, but our province supposedly doesn't HAVE any wood ticks.
I made a point of showing it to R, and she kind of flipped out, because now that's one more thing we all have to worry about. She's got enough on her plate.
My Sweetie did come to say hi at the barn, which was nice, then he went home (he's in nice work clothes, so doesn't tend to stay long when he's on his way home from work).
When I got home, he had supper made, we conferred about the work on the window frame, and let this fellow know that he could work on the windows on the main floor. We had to clear everything out of his way tonight.
Roxy had been doing better with her sore leg (a partially torn ACL that the vet said might heal on it's own if we were very careful), but tonight she could barely put any weight on it. I don't know what could have happened, as she was doing just fine with it when we went outside earlier today.
Over the last few weeks, I thought it was healing, as she seemed to be using it more, and putting more weight on it. We were letting her come outside for about half an hour twice a day, but no running or playing, just letting her do her gentle meandering around the yard.
We'll have to likely go ahead with the surgery then. Sigh.
We watched another episode of "Boardwalk Empire" which is quite good. I do hate the way it views women, and it doesn't have any female characters that are "active" characters, just passive ones that things "happen to", not fleshed out women who have their own goals or actions or personality. Even though Boardwalk Empire was set in the Prohibition Era of the 1930's, it seems to have written female characters as basically prostitutes or saintly wives, both of whom are at the whim of the male characters entirely.
That's my feeling after only two episodes.
Kosovo is another land-locked Balkan country that was once the Kingdom of Dardanania, then it was part of the Roman Empire where it was Christianized for a while, then it was part of the Ottoman Empire where Islam was introduced.
Then it was back and forth for quite some time between being Serbian or Albanian.
It was just wars, wars, wars, and more wars. Lots of wars. There was the first Balkan War of 1913.
Then during WW I it was occupied by Bulgaria and Austro-Hungary, which were pushed back out by the allies.
In WW II, it was occupied by the Axis: Italy, Germany, and Bulgaria again.
The modern borders of present day Kosovo were delineated in 1959.
And more war. When you think of Kosovo, think "war".
"Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on 17 February 2008.[165] As of 4 September 2020, 114 UN states recognised its independence, including all of its immediate neighbours, with the exception of Serbia;[166] 10 states have subsequently withdrawn that recognition.[167][168] Of the UN Security Council members, while the US, UK and France do recognise Kosovo's independence, Russia and China do not.[169]"
They're still having lots of internal issues, civil unrest, deaths.
Today, "Kosovo is a multi-party parliamentary representative democratic republic.", but corruption is a huge issue, and it's not REALLY democratic.
It's a small country of just over four thousand square miles, and mainly mountainous (home of the "Accursed Mountain Range", which seems appropriate).
The economy is based largely on mining, but also is a wine producing region.
I can't get over how these places seem to have a lot of tourism. REALLY? TOURISM?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo
Though you pretty much aren't going to absorb anything, this video is a pretty good explanation of the endless conflict of this region.
https://youtu.be/mlVzRjqJCYY?si=1KUke66JJQfj3qzJ
