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[selenay]

You know how sometimes life just can't give you a break? It throws everything at you all at once?

Right now, my kitchen is a bare room with holes in the walls, some of them at ground level and large enough for small cats to get through and get lost inside the walls. It's also got sharp nails poking out of the floor. This bare room thing also means that preparing meals involves transporting a table plus any cooking devices (e.g. toaster oven) into the kitchen each time we want to make supper.

Added to this, my car is going into the shop for repairs (someone dinged it) on Tuesday so I will be transport-less for most of the week.

Also, we have workmen coming in most days this week and important deliveries (cabinets!) at the end of the week.

This we can cope with. The cats are with my aunt, mum is home during the day, I can car-pool. Mum and I can cope.

This morning, my uncle in Manitoba died. He and Mum weren't that close, so she's doing pretty well, but my aunt is completely devastated. Mum is over at my aunt's right now.

I'm fine, don't worry. I'd met my uncle a couple of times and spoken to him half a dozen times, so he's a rather distant figure for me.

The problem is that coping with this week was rather dependent on the cats being with my aunt and my mum being here, plus us not needing to go anywhere after the car went to be fixed.

Seeing the problem here? Mum and aunt are probably going to Manitoba on the first flight they can find. There will be three cats (mine plus my aunt's) here, in a house that is currently unsafe for cats and a cooking situation that requires careful, delicate working to avoid lighting the house up. There will also be workmen and deliveries, with my mum not here. Plus there is likely to be running around needed, with no car and no aunt-with-car to help out if we need to get somewhere urgently.

This is going to get very complicated, very difficult and probably insanely stressful. Uncle, you couldn't have waited two weeks to die? (I'm allowed to say this - my aunt said it this morning, we're that kind of family).

Dear universe,

You suck.

No love,
Me

Comments

[feather-autant.livejournal.com]

Would it be possible for you to stay at your Aunt's house and use her car? It seems insane for you to have to spend your evenings worried about the cats and how to cook dinner! Does she live too far away?

If she's too far away to stay overnight, maybe you can still use her car and leave the cats there, going over to check on them every few days.

Or call and reschedule the car repairs.
{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{Sel}}}}}}}}}}}}}}

[selenay]

I'm not insured on my aunt's car, so I wouldn't be able to drive her car. Plus someone needs to be here during the day for the workmen and deliveries, so it wouldn't be a particularly practical solution.

The cats definitely can't be left on their own for long either, due to the mix of my aunt's car plus mine. They, ah, require a bit of supervision. An hour or two is the most any of us feel comfortable with.

And the repairs can't be rescheduled for a whole ton of reasons. So I need to make the mess we're left with work. I'll be chatting to my bosses at work about working from home for most of the week because all the things happening here were dependent on someone being in the house during the day. If that stuff doesn't happen then we're stuck with the worries about cats and cooking for even longer.

Right now, the only element that I'm really unsure about how we're going to work is getting me from the car repair place back home on Tuesday without taking most of a work day off. Mum and my aunt leave at midday for Manitoba, so me going to work (the shop is near my office) and car pooling home in the evening won't work because the cats will be here on their own for too long.

Right now, we're trying to get hold of the builder to make sure that he'll fill in the biggest holes tomorrow so that the house is at least semi-cat safe.

Really, my uncle is probably up there laughing at all the chaos he's caused right now!

[gmul.livejournal.com]

As above, plus/or
- Does the kitchen have a door? Could you use some board (cardboard, wood, whatever) to cover the big holes while the workpeoples aren't there?
- Could you not get a courtesy car from the repairers, since it's an insurance job?
- Won't the workmen accept the deliveries, maybe leaving you to work from home on Friday or whenever if necessary when they're not around?
- Big meal at lunchtime and something cold and/or salad-ish for tea? (Risk of afternoon nap requirement notwithstanding)
- Send the cats with Mum & Aunt to keep them company
- Put the cats in a cattery for a few days (expensive and however unpopular with them this may be)
- Delivery food? Dearer but less stressful

OK, some may be more realistic than others but we live to improvise...

Keep calm. Carry on. Do knitting.

[selenay]

Kitchen does not have a door. Open plan house. It would be so much easier if the kitchen had a door! We're going to try to block the doorways off, but can't guarantee how successful that will be.

It's not an insurance job :-( And I felt bad about adding the cost of a rental to what the girl is paying. I don't have the spare cash right now to fork out for a rental and I am not going back on my word at this stage :-(

Mum and I aren't really happy about having the workmen in the house on their own all day, not to mention that we need to make sure that they know what they're doing and I need to make sure the cats aren't getting in the way. And even if I felt happy putting the cats in a cattery, my aunt wouldn't be happy with her cat in a cattery.

There may be delivery food at times if things get too chaotic here. There's only one place that delivers to the house (the perils of living in the middle of nowhere) but I'm anticipating that it's just not going to be practical every night.

It's all a bit complicated. It would be less complicated if the car wasn't going, but putting of the repairs is not going to happen. It has to be done this week because our sales tax goes up at the end of the month and I'm pretty sure the girl paying for this will baulk at paying extra just because I'm in a bind.

Ack. It's going to work out, but the next week is going to be rather stressful for all of us. It feels like I'm on a train that can't be stopped, so I just have to find workarounds for everything.

[gmul.livejournal.com]

I do have sympathy. I've just discovered a few logistical and financial excitements for the next few weeks that I'd not been expecting, Not fun but it'll get dealt with somehow.

[selenay]

It's not fun when this kind of thing happens, particularly if you're the kind of person who hates surprises and likes solid plans. I'm going to have a better idea of what we're going to manage once I've talked to my bosses at work and figured out whether I can work from home, cancelled the out of province trip I was supposed to be on and decided whether I'll have to take bereavement/family sick time to deal with any major headache days.

The hard part is that, even if the cats weren't coming here, I can't delay the workmen because of the way all this needs to fit together. The workmen have to do their stuff this week or there will be nowhere to put the boxes of cabinets and appliances. We can't get the deliveries delayed because the place we're getting them from won't store them for more than a day or two (they wouldn't even store the sink). I need to be here for the workmen, because they never seem to know what they're doing or have the wrong information. Our lighting would have been rather...unexpected if Mum hadn't been here to correct them before they started putting in potlights in odd places.

So it's all rather non-stop-train-like and the cats are just an added headache.

{{{hugs}}} Hope your stuff can get resolved with minimal complication and worry. Maybe the universe can give us all a break soon.