I always figured if I was going to end up in the hospital, I'd at least want a good story to go with it. And I at least achieved that goal; the nurses all agreed that "I was pole dancing in 7" heels, which I've done before, but I had a new pair with no ankle straps, and when I went to do a one-legged pirouette, my heel moved but the shoe didn't" was one of the better ones they'd heard recently.

Unfortunately it also came at the cost of a thoroughly broken ankle. Both bones, unstable fracture, bad times all around.

As it happens, I'm very good in a crisis. When it happened, there was some pain, but it honestly wasn't that terrible—thanks to adrenaline, the actual pain itself was maybe a 3. Initially I thought it was just dislocated, and having some familiarity with bodywork and first aid, my first instinct was to immediately grab my heel and pull. (This thoroughly freaked out the other girls in the class, but as I explained later, it was better to do it then than later, when the swelling would have set in and the adrenaline wore off.) As that only got my ankle partly back in place, though, I figured a doctor would be necessary, so one of my classmates was kind enough to drive me to the urgent care, where they took x-rays and informed me that no, my ankle was broken, it was time to head to the ER. Brian having fetched the car and caught up with me at that point, we drove to the Rush ER—the doctor at the urgent care said she'd usually recommend a smaller hospital with shorter wait times but the orthopedics team at Rush is legendary. (Rumor has it most of the professional athletes in Chicago go there when they have injuries; from what I saw of it, they certainly have state-of-the-art facilities. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

The ER was a seven-hour wait. On the one hand, I was grateful that my situation wasn't more urgent; on the other, by the time I got in the adrenaline was definitely wearing off and my pain levels were climbing. They gave me a local anaesthetic and set the bone into something resembling its usual shape (a painful process even with the lidocaine); the actual repair would require surgery. We thought I'd be waiting until at least Monday, but they had a doctor who was able to do it on Sunday, so back I went the next day.

To be honest, I was completely terrified. I'm used to being the caretaker in these situations, and "no significant medical history" also means "no idea how I might react to anesthesia or drugs". It was a very different experience from being nine years old and going in to have my arm set after I broke it—then, it was just Another Thing People Did, whereas as a 38-year-old woman I had a much better idea of the stakes and the possibilities for complications. That said, the team was lovely; the anesthesia team in particular consisted of several Korean (I would guess? my East-Asian ethnic identification skills are not great) girls who were super friendly and chatted with me beforehand. There was one person in particular, though, I remember—I have no idea who she was, honestly couldn't even see much of her beneath the cap and gown and mask, but she had the biggest and most sincere blue eyes, and she clearly picked up on how scared I was—she held my arm as they were administering the anesthesia, assuring me that I was going to be all right, that they'd take good care of me. (I wish I knew who she was so I could send her a card and tell her how much that meant.)

As it happened, my skin was so badly compromised from the swelling that they weren't able to do the internal fixation (where they put your bones back together with plates and screws), so I woke up with my leg in an external fixator, also known as the Hellraiser frame—it had pins that literally screwed into my tibia and calcaneus and metatarsal, holding my ankle in place while my skin healed. (The sensation of not being able to move my ankle despite there being nothing visibly restraining it was weird as heck, and is definitely going into a horror story someday.) The idea was to give things a week or so and then come back for the final surgery, so they gave me half a pharmacy's worth of prescriptions and sent me home.

Unfortunately, two days before the follow-up, I noticed a red rash on the skin of my foot. The next day I went to the urgent care, assuming it was just cellulitis (a common complication, especially with external fixator surgeries) and they'd give me antibiotics for it...but their take was that they couldn't rule out a blood clot and I had to go to the ER again. So back to Rush we went.

Luckily, this time it wasn't quite such a long wait (both because it wasn't as busy and because potential blood clots are more time-sensitive, I suspect). I got to have an ultrasound on my leg, and luckily there was no sign of a clot, so then I got to have a CT scan to check the progression of the infection, and they told me they wanted to keep me overnight to give me IV antibiotics and run my situation past the doctors. They put me up in one of the nicest hospital rooms I've ever seen, spacious and uncluttered and new, with an amazing view. (I guess there's a lot of money in orthopedics.) And after taking approximately fifteen liters worth of blood samples, they let me sleep.

(Well, I tried to sleep. About the time the urgent care doctor said "blood clot", my anxiety spiked, and it basically didn't calm down for a good five days—I don't think I got more than three or four hours of sleep a night that whole time. But that's not their fault.)

In the morning, the doctor came by and told me the good news was that the cellulitis infection hadn't progressed past the skin, although ironically, that made it harder to treat (since there weren't any abcesses or discharge they could sample and hit with targeted antibiotics). If I hadn't had the fixator as a complicating factor, he'd've just sent me home with pills, but with the fixator and especially with the upcoming surgery, it was his opinion I should spend the week in the hospital, both so they could hit me with the big guns via IV and also keep an eye on any further complications that might crop up and catch them early. Much as I hated to admit it, his logic made sense to me...so that's how I ended up in a hospital room with a million-dollar view for a week and a half.

In the way of hospital life, it was both very dull and very stressful, and also an abject lesson in how even the most proactive and driven of us sometimes have to learn to let other people help. I was surrounded by people whose literal job it was to take care of me, who were actively working to help me get better, and yet...well, like I said, five-day anxiety spiral. It was hard to trust, if that makes sense. It had honestly never occurred to me how much of the active go-out-and-make-friends part of my personality was a defense mechanism, but here I was making friends with all the nurses/assistants/doctors as if my life depended on it, because in a real way, it did. (One of the night nurses in particular was a fairly closed-up dude—not cold, exactly, but not really one for small talk. It took me three nights to get him to open up a bit, but when he did, my anxiety levels went down significantly. Which probably says a lot more about me and my trust issues than about him. Still, it was gratifying when he said to Brian and me on the third night, "I'm so impressed with y'all, you haven't messed up my name once." High praise!)

Anyway, the infection was a tough one, but by five days in they'd seen enough improvement to tentatively schedule the second surgery, which helped immensely with the anxiety. I slept much better during the latter half of my stay, and while the second surgery wasn't easy, it helped a lot that I had a better idea of what to expect. (Never going to quite get used to the sensation of someone holding an oxygen mask over my nose and mouth, though...I could breathe fine, obviously, but the THIS IS NOT OKAY signals were all going off in my brain, heh.) The surgery itself went smoothly, though pain control turned out to be trickier the second time around; they gave me a nerve block (cool thing I learned: even when drugged out and in a lot of pain, I really like listening to people teach other people things about bodies—Rush is a teaching hospital and the anesthesiologist was teaching a second person how to use the ultrasound to guide the needle to the exact nerve cluster), and after that wore off it took a few tries to find a medication dose where I was functional. (Being stoned out on pain meds is not my favorite feeling, but I'll take it over being in constant debilitating pain; knowing that the worst is over and all this is temporary helps a lot.)

So now I'm back home. Brian bought new pillows and a new mattress for the second bedroom, much nicer than the futon-with-memory-foam-topper we had in here before; we also invested in a new duvet cover and sheets from my favorite company. My ankle now has two plates and a dozen screws in it. The doctor says he sees no reason why I won't make a full recovery; depending on how well he's done his job, I may be more prone to developing arthritis in the joint, but that's a problem for Future Me. I now have a whole-ass pharmacy's worth of prescriptions to take, what with antibiotics as well as pain meds and blood thinners and I'm not even sure what all else. I'm getting around okay on crutches; for the first week I'm supposed to be pretty constantly in bed with my leg elevated, so I'm very grateful for my nest of new linens and pillows. So at this point it's just a waiting game to see if there are any more complications.

On the emotional front, I've definitely had a bit of a time adjusting my identity mentally from the "athlete" population to the "patient" population. (The nurses would profess amazement at how mobile I was, being possessed of three functioning limbs and no small amount of core strength, and it seemed almost condescending until I remembered that their pool of comparison was the rest of the patients in the orthopedics ward, most of whom were probably not athletes before their hospitalization.) It's helped a lot, though, in being less frustrated with all the things I can't currently do.

I also need to give a huge shout-out to the friends and family Brian and I have formed here in Chicago. KC (his girlfriend) has been an absolute rock; doing housework and helping Brian set up the new bed and regularly inquiring after how I'm doing/listening to me rant about feeling helpless, as well as loaning me the crutches and shower stool she used after her recent hip surgery. Evan (her husband) drove my to my first surgery when Brian (who'd been up with me in the ER the entire previous night) didn't feel safe to do so. Taylor (my boyfriend) came to visit me in the hospital a couple of times so Brian could have a day off, despite a full plate of grad school work and a difficult transit schedule; plus he's studying to become a nurse so he was able to demystify some of the odder aspects of hospital work culture.

--

So I wrote all that a couple of days ago, and meant to read it over and post it, but (in the way of things when you're recovering) I didn't get back around to it. And today Adora Belle, our eldest cat, was wandering around perfectly normally, went to sleep...and woke up in severe distress and unable to walk. Brian rushed her to the emergency vet, who diagnosed her with a large blood clot cutting off circulation to her hind legs, likely caused by a silent heart condition. There's not really any meaningful treatment, so...at least he was able to be there for her when they did the euthanasia. Even more, KC was able to be there for him, since I'm not going anywhere right now.

Feelings are strange when you're on opioids. To be honest, my strongest reaction has been "are you kidding me right now?" Not that it's that strange for an 18 year old cat to have a sudden health emergency, but it just seems like life's been one string of emergencies lately. I'm sure the grief will come later, and I'll do my best to sit with it when it does.

Maybe I'll lie back and listen to "Comfortably Numb" for a while...

On a whim, I went to Los Angeles last week.

Well, it wasn't quite on a whim. I'd been daydreaming about a trip during much of the pandemic—I've made three good friends over the past year, and all of them happened to live in the city. And I hadn't visited California in nearly a decade, despite being quite fond of it (I don't know if it was living in Sacramento as a young kid or having family history in the area, but it's always felt weirdly like home to me, even though I have no desire to live there). So, when Alaska Airlines sent me an email a few days after my second vaccination shot offering ridiculously cheap fares from Chicago to LA, the serendipity seemed too strong to ignore. So I bought the fare, booked a convertible for the week (via Turo, because rental cars are insanely pricey right now), made plans with my friend Myra to stay with her, and a couple weeks later I was jetting across the country.

We road-tripped up to Tracy (of tumblr infamy) to see for ourselves if it was as creepy as the post promises. Verdict: actually, yes. Nothing overtly dangerous-feeling happened while we were there, but that distinct sensation of something being a little off was absolutely present, and occasionally spilled over into interactions with the townsfolk, many of whom seemed to nurse that sort of quiet desperation and hopelessness that I've seen a lot in rural areas. If I ever write a Supernatural case fic, I'm 100% setting it there; you couldn't have paid me enough to go wandering through the town after dark.

From Tracy, we drove to Santa Carla Cruz, which is actually where my parents met in college (as the bookshop clerk told me when I mentioned this: "Oh, so you're banana slug spawn!") We did wander around a bit downtown after dark, and found dinner at a sketchy-seeming but (it turned out) thoroughly delicious Greek takeout place. The vibe was interesting; a fair number of homeless folks, some people making deals, the bar crowd (fairly low-key as it was a Thursday night); there was a mild air of menace, including one particularly creepy moment where we were passing by a parking garage that had some kind of ruckus emanating from it, of the sort where it's hard to tell if it's laughter or screaming. Interestingly, when we came down the next day to check out the bookshop, the same mildly-sketchy downtown street had practically transformed into a pleasantly shady avenue of shops; there was still a fairly significant countercultural presence (street musicians, probably-unlicensed vendors, etc.) but it was much friendlier. More fodder for writing in the future, I suspect...

Other highlights included a lovely lunch with my friend Jay, and taking my friend Rebekah up Mulholland Drive at night; the views are every bit as amazing as advertised. I also got to see my friend April, who's now running two businesses (a realty and an AirBNB management company) and trying to find good employees to help her with them...I have zero intention of moving to LA (I quite like my life here in Chicago), but it's nice to know that if something goes pear-shaped, I have opportunities elsewhere. Really, I think that's half the fun of travel; getting to try on new identities for a while, see who I become in a different context, which parts of me stay the same and which alter. It gives me perspective on who I am now, and lets me choose whether I want to keep that identity or make changes to it.

One thing that made me laugh a little bit was Myra's combined confusion/awe at how people on the street would just...talk to me. And I'd talk back. I'd never really thought of it as being anything that strange; I've intentionally cultivated a certain approachability as I've gotten older, but she's not the first one to comment on it. (Once, not long after I started dyeing my hair bright colors, Brian and I were wandering through Bisbee during an art walk night and three different people commented on it in a stretch of five minutes or so—I remember him turning to me and asking "is it always like this?" and it took me a minute to realize what he meant.) Myra, by contrast, is physically much smaller and distinctly uncomfortable around strangers/in crowds, though she said she liked being with me because she got to absorb some of the positive feelings from casual interactions without having to actually interact at all.

In any case, now I'm home, and it feels comforting rather than confining. I'm going to roll up my sleeves and try writing again this afternoon; it's been tough lately, I suspect due to pandemic burnout. But after spending a week seeing new places, meeting new people, and being (a little bit of) a different person myself, I think it'll come a little easier.

Y'all may have noticed that I haven't been around much. I don't think I mentioned it here, but I've taken a temporary job doing phone support for tax software during the busy season.

I was expecting it to take up a fair amount of my time, given that it's a full-time-plus-OT kind of deal, but what I wasn't expecting was just how mentally exhausting it would be. In retrospect this seems rather shortsighted—it turns out that learning how to operate and troubleshoot two different software programs, as well as huge chunks of the incredibly complicated U.S. tax system, is super draining! who knew?—but, yeah. I've been keeping up with workouts as a self-preservation mechanism, since they keep the associated anxiety from eating me alive, but by the time I'm done with a full shift plus a workout I'm just...mush, physically and mentally. And I haven't even started the serious overtime yet...this is my last two-day weekend for a month, I've got 12-hour workdays happening starting tomorrow.

I just hope I can at least keep the workouts going.

It's only for a month. (Maybe more, if the IRS extends the filing deadline again...but I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.)

On the up(?) side, I've been taking very well to the work—surprise, surprise, it turns out that I'm really excellent at talking to people. I might not be the fastest or most knowledgeable troubleshooter, but 90% of my clients love me by the time we're done talking, and that earns me a lot of leeway. Especially with the New Jersey clients who're notorious for being fairly impatient...I guess I speak fluent East Coaster, haha. One of the products I'm supporting recently made a switch to an entirely web-based program, and I've carved out something of a niche for myself being the person who gets the seventy-something CPAs on board with the new setup, in one case giving a remedial course on how tabbed browsing works. I figure if I can get a New Jersey caller to say "Now, you take care of yourself out there" at the end of a call, I've done good.

There's a strong possibility they'll be offering me a full-time position at the end of the busy season, which...I don't know if I want to take. Which feels a little silly, as I've spent all this time getting to know the software and the pay is quite decent, but frankly, I miss writing. And massage. And with vaccinations becoming more available, I may be able to do the latter again soon.

Anyway. If you reach out and I don't immediately get back to you over the next month, I promise it's not because I don't love you. <3 Soon enough I'll be back to my usual analytical reading/writing self.

Onward.

Yesterday I had to have a talk with a good friend that boiled down to "I think you're a super cool person and I like you a lot and yes I'm attracted to you but my gut tells me I can't give you what you're looking for in a relationship right now."

She...didn't take it well.

I know I did the right thing—I've never been less than upfront about my relationship status, and while our interactions have always had an element of flirtation, I've been very careful to be clear about what I can and can't offer. And while she says she'd be happy for things to basically remain as they are (where we text frequently and occasionally watch a movie online together), I'm incredibly leery of slapping a "partner" label on them, because that comes with additional expectations of emotional labor that I'm frankly not in a place to fulfill. Especially for someone inexperienced with polyamory.

Which makes me wonder if I'm a jerk for flirting with her in the first place. I wasn't trying to lead her on! My interest wasn't faked, nor was I trying to manipulate her. It just...became clear as we got to know each other that, to her, a partner is someone who can prioritize her and her needs, and I already have two other partners and a fairly busy life (and, y'know, live several states away). She accused me of being emotionally uninvested in the people I flirt with, which I don't think is true—I don't get jealous when I see them flirting with other people because I understand that they're separate people with their own lives, not because I don't care about them. Hell, if I didn't care about her I wouldn't have spent hours on the phone doing emotional labor trying to sort out our respective feelings.

In short...grah. Feelings are complicated, and sometimes the kind thing to do doesn't feel kind in the moment. Which is a bummer, but here we are.

In other news, we're having emergency renovations done on our tiny cramped downstairs bathroom. Which, in fairness, needed to be done anyway, but was very much not what we wanted to do during a pandemic. This being 2020, however, things rapidly tipped over from "not great but serviceable" to "nope, gotta rip the drywall out":

( Pictures of the terrible bathroom! )

So anyway, now I've got a bunch of strange people going in and out of our downstairs, tearing out drywall and fixtures and the linen closet. And I'm doing my best to stay upstairs and wear a mask and keep the central air fan going all day and cross my fingers that nobody's coming to work sick/asymptomatic. It's not great, but it's the best of a bad set of options.

I am looking forward to when it's done—at the very least, we should have a little more room in there. More importantly, I trust our project manager—he's done a number of projects for our building, and he managed the minor miracle of pulling together the demolition guys, a plumber, an installer for the concrete board and the pocket door, a tiling guy, a flooring guy, and a painter to do the work within a week, in the midst of a pandemic-related labor shortage. Assuming it's up to the quality of the other stuff he's done, I'm going to be damned impressed.

Now to navigate this next week without going entirely mad...

After some wrangling, we (and by "we" I mean "technically the condo board, but effectively me") have managed to secure a contractor to come rebuild the leaking parapet. It's messy and inconvenient, in the way of construction work; there was a worrisome moment this morning, when the crew came to scope out the site, that there wouldn't be a place for them to put the lift. (The buildings on our street are jammed pretty close together, and our building in particular has no parking area—the little clear space around it is almost entirely parking for the neighboring buildings, and I have no idea who to begin talking to to negotiate using it.) Luckily the gangway beneath our decks is open to the sky, and there was just enough room for them to set it up there.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned crowded conditions have meant there's nowhere for the crew to park their truck other than in the alley, outside the gangway door; being a work truck, it takes up most of the alley width. Obviously this isn't ideal, as it's blocking traffic through the alley as well as blocking a few of the neighboring cars in, but I genuinely have no ideas on how it could work differently—they have to load up the demolished brick and bring in new materials/supplies, and if they parked on the street they'd literally have to walk a good quarter-mile around and back with each load. (The few narrow passageways between buildings are all closed off with gates.) So far I haven't had any complaints or heard any incipient shouting matches, but it's only day 1 and they're going to be working through Saturday. I'm genuinely unsure if they'll need the truck there the whole time (I'm hoping that, once they're done with the demolition work, they'll be able to unload everything and park it out of the way), but I'm not a masoner so I genuinely don't know.

It's a little funny, really; I've more than once come across a work truck blocking the alley (usually a cable or phone worker, though occasionally a contractor too) and just thought to myself "well, that's not ideal, but it's not like there's anywhere else for them to go" and gone around. But now that it's my responsibility I'm incredibly anxious about it. It's suddenly a different ballgame when You're The Asshole, even when there's literally no way around it. But often, that's really the only way we can coexist in a high-density space like a city—we all take turns being the asshole and hogging shared resources, and everyone else (hopefully) cuts us some slack because they know they'll probably need to do so at some point too.

I wonder if this is tied to the consistent finding that people who live in cities tend to be more tolerant than people in the suburbs or the countryside...I would imagine it's much easier to feel self-righteous about your place in the world when you don't have to constantly negotiate for shared space, even just on a mental "oh hey, I should move out of the entrance to the subway tunnel so people can get past me" level.

Ups:

So this is happening.

Honestly, it both isn't a big deal and really, really is. Gumbo Fiction Salon is something of a mainstay with the local genre crowd; they regularly feature writers with super long lists of awards and professional credits. Meanwhile, here I'm sitting with my modest AO3 resumé—I've read at their open mic a few times but never won any awards, let alone been paid for my work. But I've gotten to know Tina (the woman who runs the salon) over the past couple of years, and she was having trouble finding a featured reader this month, so when I jokingly said "I could read half an hour of my smutty fanfiction?" she jumped on my offer.  (I comfort myself that she's already familiar with at least a bit of my work, so I'm not exactly a shot in the dark.)

But yeah, writing a professional bio was intimidating—I totally believe in fanfic as a valid art form, but we don't really have awards or bestseller statistics. It's more like coming from the punk underground, we're mostly self-taught and refine our craft entirely through community feedback.  On the upside, several of my fanfic friends have expressed interest in coming...this being the Pandemic Times, it's hard to say who might show up, but maybe we'll take over the salon, haha.

Anyway, thanks to the pandemic, it's all via Zoom, so if any of you want to hear a scene from the novel-length Stranger Things story I've been working on, I'd love to have you! And yes, it is smutty, but I'm honestly pretty proud of it—it's one of the better erotic scenes I've written, and I feel like the dynamic and the atmosphere stand on their own pretty well.

On the subject of the punk underground, I've been disappearing down the fascinating sociological rabbit hole of the Southern California hardcore punk scene in the late 70s and early 80s. (Ironically, this started as research for Billy Hargrove's background, only I discovered last night that I was researching entirely the wrong subculture—metalheads were the ones with the long hair who listened to professionally produced bands, both of which were outright shunned by the punk scene.  Ah well, it'll be useful for some other project, I'm sure.)  I've been fascinated by Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk, which is basically a collection of short memoirs by various people who lived through the scene. Similar to The Dirt: The Unauthorized Biography of Mötley Crüe, the constantly shifting perspective gives a surprisingly in-depth look into the context and community, as well as shining a light on the Rashomon-esque differences in perceptions and experiences; it's also an approach particularly well suited to the DIY ethos of the movement. (The audiobook is particularly awesome, as each piece is read by the contributor and—perhaps unsurprisingly—they've all so far been strong performers who really bring their pieces to life. Plus they interweave clips of the music here and there, which is a nice touch.)

I'm only a couple hours in, but so far I think my favorite moment has been from Jane Wiedlin—"By 1978 nearly everyone was in a band except for a few lone girls. That was how The Go Go's formed...Eventually it became painfully obvious that you needed no prior knowledge to form a punk band and that we were the only kids left who hadn't done so...hey, why not? We were perfectly capable of being just as incompetent as everyone else!" It honestly puts me more than a little in mind of the fanfiction scene—there's something about that combination of a low bar to entry, an enthusiastic community audience, and a wide range of 'acceptable' skill levels that creates something like an Oort Cloud of artistic achievement. I feel like there's something to be said here about the inherent creativity of the human spirit vs. the capitalist assumption that people will only create in exchange for money, but I also suspect it's more complicated than that—for all that the chaos is exciting, humans tend to crave structure, and the introduction of money into a system inevitably creates a hierarchy. Even in systems like fandom that by their nature can't involve money, the initial chaos and excitement of a new fandom or new shop eventually stratifies into the big-name authors and the lesser-knowns, which (if tumblr discourse is anything to go by) often results in no small amount of bitterness from people, especially those who've been there since early on but been pushed to the edges...

Man, humans are complicated.  But endlessly fascinating!


Downs:

Condo board stuff has been especially stressful lately. The latest emergency involves two words that strike fear into the heart of any property manager: Water Intrusion, courtesy of the hundred-year-old roof masonry. We're doing our best to get it addressed ASAP, but there's a whole roof parapet that needs to be rebuilt, tuckpointed and caulked, and thanks to the pandemic, our usual masonry company is backed up by several months. I did get one company out here for a quote—and the amount was equal to literally our entire reserve right now. I've got a line on another company to come give a second opinion after the holiday weekend, but we're almost certainly going to need a special assessment, which means calling an emergency owners' meeting, and possibly applying for a bridge loan...and meantime I'm eyeing the roof doubtfully every time it rains. Still, at least the assessment should be an easy sell, if not particularly fun. Water intrusion is one of those universal Building Emergencies that even non-handy people know is A Big Problem.

And perhaps most heartbreakingly: when Dexter's latest kidney panel came back a couple weeks ago, the doctor warned us that his numbers were well into end-stage levels; this past weekend, he seems to have hit the point where he's losing continence. He's still pretty with it and doesn't seem to be in distress, but he's spending more and more time napping; long story short, I think we may be calling the vet this week. It's never an easy decision, but I'd much rather he make the transition before he reaches the point of serious pain/distress. We've had a good extra year with him thanks to fluid therapy; I'm extremely grateful, both for the additional snuggles and the time to process my own feelings about this. I'm sad, but I'm not angry. Seventeen to eighteen years is a good run for a kitty.

Still, I'm going to miss the heck out of this cat.

Last night was the quarterly condo board meeting (held via Zoom, here in this pandemic year). It was somewhat more interesting than usual, in the sense of "interesting times".

Back when I first took the position, I looked over our finances and budget history and discovered that our reserve had been basically static for the past decade or so—it would occasionally dip down or be boosted above its usual amount, but hovered pretty stubbornly around that line. The good news was that said line was a substantial emergency fund; the bad news was, it was nowhere near enough for the major projects (roof repair, basement foundation work, deck replacement) that were coming down the pipe. During my first meeting as president I noted this and asked the Board to approve a (small) annual increase in dues solely as a means of combating inflation, and was turned down flat—the message I got was "come back with hard numbers, and we'll see."

As it happened, Fortune gifted me with a new board member whose background is in accounting; she dug into the numbers, and I got quotes for the work that needed doing. And the unsurprising but uncomfortable news is, the building's dues have been underpaid for so long that we're well into special assessment territory. Frankly, it's a 100-year-old building with a 37-year-old gut rehab; there's a lot of maintenance involved.

It took a fair amount of talking in circles, but the Board passed a significant HOA dues increase unanimously, with surprisingly little pushback—it's equivalent to something like five times the annual increase I was asking for? I guess they figure they'd rather just get the pain over with in one big chunk.

The flipside is, that's really only the first step—it brings our dues more in line with what we need for regular maintenance and reserve contributions, but doesn't fix the fact that we're so far behind on major projects. So, it's probably going to be special assessment time in the next year, which requires calling a meeting of all the owners (not just the board members) and obtaining a two-thirds vote from whoever shows up. To be frank, I have no idea how that's likely to go down—I don't even know a few of the owners, and I definitely don't know their financial situation. But hopefully pointing upwards and clearly enunciating "Roof! Roof need help! Otherwise roof leak, we all get wet!" will be enough to convince them that it's a necessary investment.

From a more personal angle, I'm having a surprising amount of feels about my role as president. Fairly consistently now, I've spent the rest of the evening after board meetings getting hit hard with imposter syndrome: lots of certainty that I've screwed up, that everyone hates me, that the only reason nobody's told me to get out is because they want to do the job themselves even less. (Which is in itself its own kind of power, but I'd far prefer to be well thought of. Machiavelli shakes his head at me, I know.) I suspect this is amplified partly by the current uncertainty; it feels particularly shitty to be raising fees in the middle a pandemic and economic crash, with record unemployment and an upcoming and frankly dire election...but at the same time, this stuff needs doing, and it's not like there's ever really a good time to raise dues.

At the very least, it's nice to feel like I'm doing something useful. And if, when I send out the announcement about the HOA increase and upcoming assessment, a mob with pitchforks and torches shows up outside my door...well, at least then it won't be my problem anymore, except in the more general sense where it's everybody's problem.

Dexter's been slowly but steadily improving, more than I even expected. We're still giving him fluids twice a week, and he still drinks a lot of water (with the associated uptick in litter box output, sigh), but he's perky and intrusive and seems generally much more like himself. He's also eating again, and even slowly regaining a bit of weight. I'm doing my best to love him while still recognizing that this is likely only a temporary reprieve—but I'm extraordinarily grateful for this extra time with him.