Family Get-Together

Recently my grandparents came to visit my mother and brother in Guelph, and my aunt and cousin were planning to be there as well. Unfortunately, I'm so locked in with work, it didn't seem that I would be able to make it to the get-together. However, by some quirk of fate, the entire household at the grouphome decided to go camping for three days and two of my direct support contracts went on vacation at exactly the right time. My boss gave me the option of tending to the empty group home or taking the time off, so I just took the time off.

My aunt and cousin stayed over at the Guelph location overnight, which including me made for five people in a two bedroom apartment. Probably the most people to ever stay overnight there.

I was going to stay for two days in Guelph, then come home and do such things as turn my timesheets into Extend-a-Family and visit the Summer Program again, but I kept letting time slip away and postponing things until I heard that the Hattsoff camp was getting called off a day early and I had to go back a day before I thought I would.

Makes sense the Hatsoff thing didn't go as planned, it was awkwardly timed. The week before, two of the kids were away camping, and we got a new kid a couple days before the trip. That means that two of them would be sick of camping, and the other would still be getting used to the house before setting out.

But yeah, last week we were at half capacity with only three kids in the house, and we've had an empty room for awhile now. This is the first time in a good bit that the house is full. Still, I don't make lunches anymore, since it's summer vacation and I don't have to wake the kids up for school either. So some of my duties are still diminished.

We lost two of our summer staff. Without getting into it, they chose to go a separate direction. But that means we have no morning shift, so we've been finding people to fill the morning shift, either through relief workers or getting our house staff to do overtime. We can't get our UMAB trainer to cover only two people either, so unless we hire six new workers, we have to find two new employees that are already UMAB trained.

A neighbor of mine recently got evicted. She was an older woman whose husband left her about a year ago. This overlapped with the time that I was looking for a roommate after my first batch at my current location. Unfortunately, her home was fully loaded with items. Logistically, if I'd moved in with her, there would be no place for me to even put down a mattress or store my clothes. She wasn't willing to part with any of her belongings and she was attached to where she lived. We quibbled about who'd move where, and eventually I took another roommate. Time passed, and she managed to last long enough on her own that I grew to believe she was financially secure and her need for a roommate was more due to loneliness than anything.

But then she got evicted, couldn't find anywhere else, and now she's in a homeless shelter. She left everything behind. Saw her place unloaded recently. People can judge her lifestyle, but it was still pretty depressing to see her lose everything after she fought so hard to hold onto all of it.