American Relative Visit

Sneaking in one last update in March.

It's finally done. The fiscal year is over and I'm going back to my usual schedule tomorrow. No more double shifts and I get a day off again.

Except I have a special training session to go to tomorrow, so that's not off, and I'm being requested for an evening shift next Monday as well. Well, I'll probably get a day off half a month from now, at least. Oof.

I started paying off my student loans. It's like $80 a month until it's paid off. Pretty much means an extra bill, roughly equivalent to Hydro.

I didn't have to loan anything for college, and for my year at University, more than half of it was a government grant. But I still have an annoying little chunk of debt from the time I spent there.

I always have conflicted feelings when I talk to U of W students doing their placements at Extend-a-Family, or when I visit (sometimes I go to their Earth Sciences museum for work-related reasons, and it's the place to be on a Pokemon Go Community Day). On one hand, I really enjoyed my experience there and still feel some sense of pride as a former student. On the other hand, I dropped out before I could gain a credential because I got a job, and now I'm paying for the experience.

My mom's cousin, so I guess my Uncle once removed? was in Canada for business-related reasons recently, so he wound up doing a tour of the Canadian branch of the family tree. He's the guy who gave me the first three Harry Potter books.

I was pretty washed out, though. I had just finished with Safe Management, which was the last really difficult thing to schedule for during this last leg of the fiscal year, so the visit happened during my peak levels of stress.

Originally he was going to bring my aunt to Guelph, and then bring my mother, brother, and aunt to my place in Kitchener. But they overshot Guelph and wound up in Kitchener first, so they instead drove me to Guelph, where we had our visit, and then he drove me and my aunt home.

It was kind of a letdown, since it would have been the first time my mom has visited since I moved out seven years ago, and the second time that my brother has, and for him it would be the first time since I moved out of student housing. Oh well.

I've been sick recently. Mostly respiratory. At first I thought it was just allergies, since apparently I have allergies now, but then it got into full-blown illness territory. Lots of coughing and sneezing, bloodshot eyes, really pervasive headache. I'm pretty much done with it by now, though.

It snowed last night. We've been pretty deeply into Spring for a few weeks now. I'd officially traded out my winter coat for a spring jacket. When I woke up, looked outside and saw we were in the dead of winter again, I just laughed. My roommate has a bet with a coworker that it will snow in April. Just one day off and he would have won the bet on the first day. Maybe it will snow a little tomorrow.

At work, we're having these three-person discussion groups where we talk about company culture. We get to choose who we work with, and I got special requested someone. You wanna know by who? By the person who runs all of Extend-a-Family! The top rung of the ladder!

I'm so nervous. It's happening this Wednesday. When I first got the request, I was in the WALES kitchen and started making exclamations. At one point I said, "I'm so scared, I'm actually dying!" to which a number of the people we serve took literally, and they started shouting and reassuring me that I wasn't actually dying.