So the past few days have been rough. I’m starting to come out the other side of feelings of utter despair – so far I’ve proven something to myself about bending, not breaking, although some of that is down to a lot of time with my wife holding me and giving me somewhere to hide from the world. Most of this is down to the evil ongoing in the world. Watching as more facists get power, watching the institutions I grew up with (the BBC, the Guardian) amplify the words of those who would have me dead and ask if it’s just “a refreshing alternative to political correctness”, seeing locally bigots running around with pride… It’s been tough.
There have also been the appalling events in the news, hate crimes happening at least every week, and most likely every single day. Murderous terrorists running around while the GOP conflate the discomfort of being called out for being an arsehole over dinner with being gunned down in a supermarket, and then having the press bothsidesism it to be comparable.
It’s left me profoundly worried about our safety here.
It’s left me profoundly disturbed and considering where we should go. The vague “we should have a plan” has become a more and more incessant clamour in my brain.
It’s made more tricky by the fact that the inside of our house still looks like this:
Which is not conducive to selling it.
Thankfully, my wife pointed out to me that while we may not be happy with contractors as a general rule, they’d be fine if we were selling it, and a good team of contractors could probably have the place done in a month, maybe two.
As it is I’ve started to nose at Canada. My wife reminded me that if we want to leave the US and don’t want to go back to the UK (where they’re still debating whether I should be a person in the press on a regular basis, and hate crimes against minorities and LGBTQIA people went up dramatically last year), then I might have to get over myself and get some more OB/GYN education and some more surgical experience. Although, that said, I also now have an MSc in Critical Care (which I didn’t have when I applied last time) and I’ve completed the NCLEX (which again, I didn’t have last time). We should probably think a bit about where we’ll go if we do, because the application timeline wasn’t terribly short.
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Of course, particularly Sunday night, after I’d curled up and cried for a bit, I slept like absolute shit. That led to a bad day yesterday, where pretty much every job had some mistake in it. Basically my day started badly when the store had run out of the specific stainless steel finish nails we use for our cedar trim and then…
– I picked up the wrong paint – and instead of priming the last two sheets to go on the outside of the house, I instead painted them with the top-coat intended for the trim (which is just off white). I realised this as I closed the can. There is some debate about whether the paint will adhere online if you do this, with some arguing the main purpose of primer is to soak into the wood and prevent you wasting the more expensive top coat, and some arguing that primer has some binders in it to make it stick to the wood better. Fuck knows. I put top coat on all the same, but I’m not sure whether we should go ahead and put it up.
– I misscut the trim I’d carefully left long on the front of the house. It’s marginal, I think less than a mm, maybe a mm at most. But still, depressing. I’m going to have to get a sander and see if I can blend it with the ones around it to make it ‘fit’.
– I forgot to pre-paint the vertical of the furring strip next to the door. That’s meant to be black, not white, which meant I had to try and paint around the cedar I’d put up yesterday. In that process I managed to get paint onto the cedar (not a lot, and not anywhere visible, thankfully).
In the end I switched to digging the trench (which will be filled with stones) around the front of the house, which is a less stressful thing to do.
