CAT!

Lord Brock is now on prednisone. (I remember the name because it's the same steroid my sister was treated with when doctors first diagnosed her auto-immune disorder.) Two days later he was eating his weight in chicken and four days later he is following me around the house and yelling at me like nothing happened. Complete turn-around. Fingers crossed this is the magic bullet.

HOUSE!

Inching along. Work on getting the walls and doors fixed was delayed by days of rain, but dude promised he'd be here first thing tomorrow morning. Haven't heard from roof guy, probably for the same reasons. I have started calling around for quotes to get the stairs built from the kitchen.

ME!

I have shit feet. They hurt pretty much all the time, but lately they've been extra special painful. So off I hobbled to a podiatrist, who immediately told me I have plantar fasciitis. This is a Latin phrase that roughly translates to "shit feet".

I can't even blame age for this one.

He gave me stretches, a prescription that has to be compounded, and an order to stay off my feet. So far I have managed one of those three things. Eventually I will manage to find a compounding pharmacy in this city that is open more than two hours a week, but not walking is going to be harder.

Hopefully my insurance will pay for orthotics. But I draw a hard line at Birkenstocks.

Haven't posted for a while, mostly because I've been working my ass off.

I had the week off and once again planned to get some work done on the house. This time I wanted to get the backyard sorted. My daughter came over at the start of the week, and the two of us spent two days pulling up the waist-high weeds in the hot sun. We filled five yard waste bags and I put cardboard over the bare dirt around the house. I did some initial raking around the house to try and slope the soil away from the walls. Somebody is coming over this week to finish the covering on the bottom of the exterior walls - once he's done I'll finish raking the dirt so at least the upper part of the yard is properly graded and then I'll toss some clover seeds all over it. That should hopefully help keep water out of the basement.

Then on Wednesday it started to rain.

And rain and rain and rain.

Thursday the ex-housemate came over and the two of us worked all day in the pour. The sump pump was dumping massive amounts of water into the yard and it was just - collecting on top of all that thick clay until the backyard turned into a flood zone. We built a clay dam along the fence to keep it out of the neighbours' yard and dug a six-foot long trench under the pump outlet. It's just a big water-filled pit right now, but at least it managed to keep the water in one spot.

Then we dug another long trench for my vegetable garden. We framed it with the wood the contractor had left lying around. I filled the bottom with the branches that had been left behind by the felled tree, and mixed four bags of composted manure into the dirt. It's covered with cardboard right now, just waiting for my seedlings to get big enough to plant.

When the backyard dries out enough I'll deepen the trench and fill it with rocks. Both of us vaguely remember from when we built a pig-roasting pit years ago - and the vegetable garden digging seems to confirm - that there's a sand layer about 3-4 feet down, so if I can get the trench that deep the water might actually drain instead of flooding. That's a project for later in the summer though, right now it's just a sea of mud.

Apart from the bags of weeds I have also have two extra bags of trash to put out this week, just from the garbage that the original contractor left behind. Apparently they just dumped all their left-over coffee cups and pop cans and chunks of plastic and scrap wood and metal onto the ground and threw the clay fill right on top of it. More than once after prying the imploded corpse of a bucket of drywall compoud out of the ground with a spade I felt the urge to stand upright, fists clenched at my sides, and shout at the uncaring sky, "Who Raised These People?!"

***

Got my head eplayed, so the vertigo is considerably less than it was.

Still managed to hit me a couple of times this week because I spent most of it digging, and there is nothing like being half-bent over a watery trench with a shovel full of heavy mud to make one's inner ear decide now is the time to send one's sense of "up" into a random dimension. I managed not to actually tip over, although I did have a couple of episodes of just having to tripod with the shovel until the world stopped spinning.

***

Lord Brock is - not great. He ended up having an endoscopy on Wednesday, which found a large mass in his duodenum. Now I'm just waiting on the biopsy results. In the meantime, he's on a steady diet of painkillers and appetite stimulants just to keep him eating.

I'm bracing myself for bad news.