Category: Uncategorized

I napped twice day, which I don’t think I’ve done in many years. I had to wake up early to move my car into a different parking spot because they were pressure washing the parkade today.

I napped in the late afternoon and then I napped again after dinner. Both naps were glorious and I felt much better afterwards. During my afternoon nap, I fell asleep with my phone in my hand and I didn’t drop it over the side of the bed. I’ve done this a couple of times now. It’s a neat skill.

I’m hoping I won’t need to nap tomorrow.

My sister, my brother-in-law, and my niece are temporarily moving back to the greater Vancouver area this weekend. My niece is almost six months old now and I have never seen her in-person and obviously never held her in my arms. These unfortunate circumstances are because of the pandemic. My niece was born during a pandemic, something which will probably be a trivia answer for her as she grows up.

I am excited to see everyone when they arrive this weekend but I think I’m gonna be a tiny bit more excited to see my niece in-person. She is definitely an adorable baby and I cannot wait to hold her.

As many of you know, I’ve been working from home since mid-March of 2020. It has been well over a year since I worked a day in the studio. In that time, I’ve only returned twice to the office: once in the summer of 2020 to pick up my personal items and once in the fall of 2020 to get my flu shot.

Depending on where you are in the world, some people have begun to or already have returned to work in an office environment. If you want to know something amusing, the original work from home order from my employer called for employees to work from for just two weeks. Obviously that order has been extended several times over the last fifteen months or so. The latest news I have heard is that, at least for my team, we will definitely spend the rest of 2021 working from home at a minimum.

There are already signs of what working back at the studio will look like, whenever that happens. Earlier this week, all employees of the Vancouver studio were informed that over the next few months of the summer, everyone is to pick a day to come back into the studio to pack up all their personal belongings and to clean up their desks. Last summer, there was a voluntary opportunity where employees who wanted to come pick up their stuff could. It was purely optional and it was solely for the benefits of the employees who may have been missing their coffee mugs, toys, and other collectibles.

This new mandate, however, is for the benefit of the studio itself. Management wants everyone to remove all their personal belongings and to clean up their desks because it needs to be flexible about who may or may not be at work on a particular day. It is most likely the concept of one permanent desk for every employee will be going away for most people.

I think it will take many months for management and facilities to setup the studio for employees to return. It will be a different environment, where many employees are only at the studio for part of the week.

Anyways, I have at least another six months of working from home still and I’m ok with that.

Both my parents now have their appointments booked for their second shots. My Dad has his on Sunday and my Mom has hers a week and a half later. The timing is great because in this province, casinos are opening up again on July 1, Canada Day. By then, both my parents will be at least two weeks post-second shot, meaning they will be fully vaccinated.

I’m not sure when I’ll be getting my second shot but it’ll probably be in July sometime. I cannot wait to be fully vaccinated. There will be a definite sense of relief.

It was quite warm today in the greater Vancouver area. I guess it was apt that today was also June 1st. It feels like summer is at hand though in true Vancouver fashion, it will be rainy starting on Friday night. Today, however, was a hot one. I wore shorts for a walk during the evening and I didn’t feel cold in the slightest.

I need to start breaking out my hot weather clothes. It’ll be my second pandemic summer but I feel like there is an end in sight.

I e-mailed three different contractors on the weekend about some drywall repairs and only one responded. This contractor is going to try to come over tomorrow to look at the wall and give me a quote.

Not sure why the other two didn’t respond. Maybe they’re too busy. Maybe they saw my pics and thought the job was too small for them to be worth it (that’s fair). Maybe they don’t treat e-mail as a serious method of communication (one of the contractors had a web site in their Google profile but it was down).

Whatever it is, it seems like I’m gonna just get a single quote so far if I don’t expand my list of potential contractors. That’s not really smart shopping, so I’m gonna keep looking, just so I can have at least two quotes to compare.

Despite the deadline for filing your income tax return for 2020 was April 30, 2021, I didn’t actually calculate my income tax return until this weekend. I was going on the assumption that I was going to get a refund and not have to pay more tax. Luckily, my assumption was correct, most likely due to a final RRSP contribution in February for tax year 2020.

I really had no excuse for not doing it sooner and in the end, I just kept myself from getting my refund sooner. I’ll probably be lazy again next year.

After four years, I now have the ability to heat my living room. I woke up very early this morning to allow an electrician into my home, the first stranger to spend an appreciable amount of time in my apartment since the beginning of the pandemic.

I would later find out that my electrician’s name was Chris. Chris had to cut two exploratory holes in my drywall where my electric fireplace was. This was so that he could location the proper wiring for the new baseboard heater.

Once he understood what was going on behind that wall, he knew had to cut along the bottom of the wall and then across the wall where the new heater was going to. This was required because he had to splice new wire and pull it along. He was able to purchase the exact same heater that is in my bedroom.

The actual wiring and installation of the heater took very little time. Most of the time was spent trying to figure out what the wiring situation was like behind the wall. Chris then had to leave for about an hour to get more wire and also buy my heater.

He was very professional and even vacuumed my living to room to get all the debris cleaned up at the end.

As I’ve mentioned before though, this is just step one. As you can see in the above photo, the baseboard trim has been removed for two of my walls and there are now two holes in the wall where the fireplace used to be. I need to repair the walls and then paint them. I need to start getting quotes on the drywall repairs very soon.

I could never be a tradesperson. My lack of skills with my hands notwithstanding, I could never work the hours. The electrician is supposed to be at my apartment at 8am tomorrow. I usually don’t roll out of bed for work until 10am on most days. I need to get to bed now.

In March of 2020, I was preparing my living room so that an electrician could come in and install a baseboard heater. I had removed the only source of heat in my living room, a fake fireplace, a few years prior and it was now time to get a new source of heat. I moved some furniture around so I could remove some baseboards from the walls. My living room was in a “temporary state” when the pandemic hit. The plan was to have some furniture in temporary locations and stuff just set aside for a few days while I made room for the heater and for the electrician to do their work.

The pandemic threw those plans out the window. I had gotten as far as getting quotes from some contractors but imagine having a stranger come into your home during the last few weeks of March of 2020. That would have been crazy.

It’s now May of 2021 and on Thursday morning, an electrician will finally come to install that baseboard heater. More than a year after I had anticipated the work being done, it’s will actually happen this week.

This is actually the first step in a series of home improvements that I will be doing. The next step is to repair some drywall and after that, some painting.