Loony B!tch is Back at the Lake

It's 2022. Covid is still here (Omicron is the now VOC), we still have vaccine passports for indoor social things. I personally just still avoid it all though. I started a new job in January. I was working from home (which was great) until last week, when we were called back to the office. We still have mask mandates too, so I'm hoping and praying that my N95 keeps me safe "enough".  There is a lot of social and political pressure now though to "get back to business". I'm not sure anyone is really thinking in "lessons learned from a pandemic" terms. My Department still doesn't even have a flex work policy. I don't think they've really turned their minds to what happens when a percentage of front line people are all sick and in isolation for weeks.  It also adds a new wrinkle in the Loon Lane Finish Line plan. We could stay at the Lane and pick away at the house when I was WFH. Now we are limited to weekends only. *Good weather weeke...

It's September 2021.  Yes, this feels like a war journal, because basically, it is.  We sat out the winter, mostly. When spring came, Ian and I were chomping at the bit. We launched ourselves at the house, plan in hand, ready to roll. And we did make some progress. Until the "Third Wave" of Covid happened in Nova Scotia. We were all being asked to stay in place and only leave our homes for necessities. For weeks.  I discussed this with Ian. I was sure there wasn't a legal restriction on travel inside the municipality, but The Powers That Be were using very strong language discouraging it. Even going so far as to scold and demonize cottage owners specifically. We decided to stay put until the travel bans were over. This cost us quite a few weeks of work in good weather.  Finally, the restrictions lifted and we got back to work. Throughout this time we were also both taking time to get vaccinated (and post-vax recovery), I had a call-back on a mammogram, insurance th...

 A whole year has passed since I wrote here. The Winter was largely uneventful, the commute back and forth from the Lane to the city was unexpectedly brutal but I was able to negotiate some work from home days which made life a little easier. We moved our offices in February of 2020, but not until a couple of elevators fell in the old, under construction Maritime Centre building. The first fell while they were testing it, it rocked the entire building when it crashed with a near sonic boom into the basement. It sounded and felt exactly like an explosion. We had to evacuate down the stairs from the 12th floor, never knowing when we would meet smoke, a fireball or worse. It was probably around this time that they posted the new layouts for our swanky offices at Nova Centre, that we were moving to in February. Which was when I realised I was losing my office and being slotted into a cubicle (along with some other mid-management colleagues.) This was around the time I knew I was gettin...

I texted Ian from the loveseat at Chadwick, he was out getting lunch: "Hey, I just sold the house." The shock of this was somewhat comedic as the house wasn't for sale. He approached me immediately when he got back home. He was emotional. He asked if I could possibly buy Loon Lane from him/the Estate now that I was house-less. He told me how he felt like he couldn't get his life started, he was near tears. It was in those moments that I realised for the first time that the burdens of being the Executor of his father's Estate had worn heavy. He had always been in over his head, of course, and although I guided him through whatever needed to be done with banks and lawyers and taxes, the house and the vehicle remained. Loon Lane, for those who don't know, is the overly large, hard to heat house that Ian's father and I bought together when Ian was three. We separated a couple of years later, I kept it alone through elementary and then Joe bought it back fr...