Man in Tweed dot Com

Warning: The following post is quite sad and I am trying not to cry while writing it.

The past few months have been really difficult. Back in July we had our annual vet visit and ran a senior blood panel on our eldest cat Cotton. Last year’s senior panel showed a thyroid problem which we got under control. This year’s panel showed something a little harder to deal with: diabetes.

We started off by treating him with caninsulin but it hasn’t seemed to work. His glucose level started at 26 and has been hovering at 36 for the last few weeks. That’s bad. To make matters worse Cotton started loosing a lot of weight. He slowed his eating and started drinking less water throughout the day. We were trying everything including feeding him by hand and giving him subcutaneous fluids. We finally discovered that his sole remaining tooth had been pressing into the top of his mouth and created an abscess. Even worse, we just found out that he had ulcers at the back of his mouth. He’s not eating because it hurts too much. How can you top that? Simple. You find out he has bronchitis.

Saturday our vet told me he doesn’t know what else he can do, especially if we cannot get him eating. Cotton may have given up.

When we first got Cotton from the cat rescue group his mouth was a wreck. Living outside, without dental care, left him with severe gum disease and rotting teeth. He was listless and looked like he had given up on life. But we got his mouth to stop hurting and he slowly pulled himself back together. He ate his breakfast, walked over to the dangling cat toy, worked out until he was exhausted and went to sleep. He brought himself back from death.

Last night Cotton walked downstairs to use “the real litter box” for the first time in a week. He’s slowly eating his slurry and drinking more water even though it hurts. We are switching him to a new insulin when it gets delivered to the vet. He looks like he’s finally shaken the cold.

We’re not out of the woods yet but my little guy doesn’t look like he’s giving up. Anything prayers/mojo/vibes you want to send will be greatly appreciated. He’s a smart boy. He’ll let us know if it is not going to work. Until then we will be doing whatever we can to help him get better.

I am actually close to seeing something new on the jobsite: completion. I have never worked for a company long enough to see the work end and the site be handed over.  Now it is entirely possible that I will not see the end of this particular site, I’m being moved “temporarily” to another site sometime in the middle of this week and $diety only knows if I will ever see the current site again. But if I manage to make it back I will have officially made it from close to the beginning (again thanks to the random temporary assignment) to close to the end. I personally managed to finish up the third floor last week in anticipation of the hand over. It felt good, especially since I’ve done about 60 to 70 percent of the work on that floor.  Mind you construction being construction I’ve actually done 60 to 70 percent of the work on that floor twice. Someone noticed they put in the wrong size of piping, tore out around 200 feet of work and then spent the better part of two weeks fighting about who was going to pay for the repairs.

I am once again impressed by the amount of knowledge and skill I seem to be picking up. I’m getting quite adept at this whole Insulation stuff. There’s still a ton I don’t know but the little I do I am getting to be fairly good at. I’d say I’ve got three or four skill points in the trade and two or three in construction overall. My confidence is higher than it ever has been and I am actually starting to figure out solutions to the random weird things that occur.

So while I may or may not be there at the end I can safely say that my presence has helped finish something. Now whenever I drive down that particular road I can point out the window and say “I built that.”

Today I used my favorite invention to make it’s way to the workplace: disposable ear-plugs. Today was one of those days where the cacophony of noise began to reverberate in my brain pan. The sprinkler guys were machining their pipes, a lift was constantly beeping, and every now and then someone decided that cutting through metal with a circular saw was a wonderful idea.

Normally I keep a set of ear-plugs in the car for just such an occasion. Of course, today being such an occasion meant that they were nowhere to be found. So after scouring the site one of my co-workers found someone with a pack and I was tossed a pair.

Disposable ear-plugs come in two general varieties (that I’ve seen anyways): shaped and tubular. Shaped ones look like a cone mated with a hourglass and dressed the offspring in two-tone neon jump-suit. Despite their appearance they fit quite nicely into the ear. Tubular are tubular. They don’t fit quite as well. I’ll let you guess which ones I was handed.

To reach the goal of decibel reduction you must first pinch one end of the plug, twist it between your thumb and finger until it is thin as possible. They you tilt your head, reach over top of it, grab your ear and pull it towards the sky. Once you look sufficiently stupid you jam the squeezed piece of foam into your ear and hold it gently in place until you feel it expand as far as it will go. The time involved varies from ear to ear and plug to plug and more often than not you get frustrated, put the other one in while your waiting and end up just trying to push the damned thing back into the ear so you can get on with your life.

Even though they didn’t fit as well as shaped plugs and took a bit of effort to get them to fit properly in at least one ear — today it was the right — the end result was satisfactory. I could think again. Thinking is good.

They say silence is golden. I don’t know about that. Pure silence drives people up the way crazy. I’ll settle for a few less decibels and be happy about what I get.

I am officially “random guy” at work. Ever since showing that I can do my job when left to my own devices I have been given the random tasks that always seem to pop up. Now I’m being sent to random job sites, three in fact, in the span of five days.

Part of this is simply the fact that I’m working for an outfit that does commercial work — condos, hospitals, offices and whatnot — and, unlike industrial sites where you can spend four weeks working on one stretch of piping and it doesn’t really look like you are accomplishing much, commercial work just stops when you run out of pipe to cover. Occasionally you spend time covering it with canvas or pvc but more often than not most of what we cover is covered itself by drywall. If you can’t see it there’s no reason to make it look pretty.

So while this leads to a feeling of accomplishment and the answer to the question “how does one not become bored” it can occasionally be a tad overwhelming. Just when you get used to one site, and in my case when the coffee truck comes and who gets what in which beverage, you pop over to another. Generally speaking there’s not this much jumping which leads me back to “random guy.”

As I am not a journeyman/mechanic I need to be on a site where there is at least one person with that rank. If they aren’t there, I can’t be. Couple this with the fact that when I go to work I tend to, get this, work and you end up with me being sent to sites to essentially be the guy who does that random task that really needs to be done. I’m trusted to get it done. That is a good thing. I still don’t quite understand why I’m trusted to get it done but then again I have issues valuing my own work.

I’m getting close to putting on around 500 linear feet per day. Top help make that number seem useful Journeymen/mechanics put on around 700 feet per day. I don’t smoke or text so I’m generally always working. I don’t speed but I end up with a fairly decent pace simply by virtue of not stopping. Two days in a row I’ve essentially ran out of material. Part of me thinks that’s a good thing. It means that I’m doing more work than I’m estimated to do.

I can be happy with that.

From the beginning of this year to April 19th I was unemployed. Big deal. That happens a lot in the trades. If I had stayed as a librarian the situation would be pretty much the same if not worse. Fine. Not a problem. However since I was off so much the previous year I ran out of Employment Insurance (EI). Great. So I called the student loan people to get some relief. Thus started the months of FAIL.

Let me start off by saying that the National Student Loan Center (or whatever their apparently privatized operations are called) have been great.

CIBC? Not so much.

Apparently somewhere in the past I never signed a piece of paper saying I would be repaying these loans. Despite the fact that I have been paying them for eight years everyone needed proof that I wasn’t a deadbeat. The national center’s forms came and went. I hear nothing.

I call in to find out that they are waiting for CIBC to give them a piece of paper. I call CIBC.  I need to sign papers for them too. Fine. Whatever. I’ve only been paying it for ages. Give me the paper.

I send it in and find out that one of them wasn’t signed two weeks later when I get them back in the mail. Sighing I sent them back.

Then CIBC started their phone calls trying to get me to call them. I call and get a woman who is quite annoyed when I say that I’m returning their call. She checks the computer and tells me I haven’t paid lately. I tell her that I applied for the interest relief/not-paying for a while program. She tells me they haven’t received the paper. I tell her that I sent it in last week. She says she will mark it down on the computer (all of this very begrudgingly I’ll add).

A week goes by. CIBC starts calling again. I call them to find out that they haven’t received word from the government and why haven’t you paid. I tell them that the government is waiting for them to send a form. Skippy checks the file and finds out that, yes, the government asked for the form and they will send that out at some point.

Today I get a letter from the government saying that I owe them money. I sigh and call to find out that CIBC never sent over the damned form and as a result my application was canceled would I like to reapply? I ask for all the information I need to yell at CIBC (saying over the phone that I will indeed yell at them) and proceed to work out that my next regular payment will cover the interest from the last two missed payments and they will call it a day adding another two payments to my overall account.

I call CIBC ready to yell and am on hold. Surprise. I get a message saying there is a high volume of calls. Well duh, I’m on hold I expected that. I get another voice telling me that if I would like to leave a message they will call me back within the next 24 hours if I press 1 now. I don’t press it because they’ll be calling me anyways and I want to rant at a real person. The next thing I know I’m listening to another voice telling me to leave said message  and they will get back to me.  I don’t want to leave a message you incompetent morons. That’s why I have a fucking book in front of me. I’m expecting to wait for an hour.

So now I get to spend my weekend hopefully getting hold of someone but not being certain I will because it’s, surprise, the weekend.

The sooner I can be rid of these ass-clowns the happier I will be.

Today I got to climb up on top of things in order to get at other things and cover them with insulation.  So part of my day was spent in a three foot high space that is completely covered in dust and other fine things. Luckily I brought in my blue overalls yesterday so the mountains of dust were on my outer layer and not on the clothes I had to spend the rest of the day plus the trip home wearing. The downside of this whole day was the heat wave. Southern Ontario is in the midst of a nasty hot weather streak, breaking record temperatures and everything. Wearing an extra layer is hard to do on days like this. Plus, thanks to said heat, I’ve slept a total of 18 hours over the past three or four days. I climbed aboard the GO Train for the ride home, sat down, felt the air conditioning waft over me, and woke up 45 minutes into my ride.

I’m really looking going to bed at 7 tonight as a serious proposition.