Crazy Cat Lady Chapter 5 - Trying to recover from the pandemic

janb5

Love it Foxholes- ` an ex- reduction`! 

beanielou

An ex reduction sounds just fabarooni.
That would make life much less stressfull.

badmemory

Personally I would go for ex elimination, but that may be more expensive so I guess not really an MSE option.

apple_muncher

Could be another job for Dog the Bounty Hunter....?

WinterWarrior

badmemory said:

Personally I would go for ex elimination, but that may be more expensive so I guess not really an MSE option.

Worth every penny! 

crazy_cat_lady

You lot really make me laugh
Thanks for the suggestions. As you all know I desperately want ex off the deeds and the court says he has to come off the deeds but it's the hassle of having to pay Dog the Bounty Hunter to find him and serve papers, and having him not sign anything, so me having to go back to court to get his name taken off the deeds. 
I spoke to L&C - thanks f0xh0les. and I spent a long time on the phone to a lovely lad who went off and searched on my behalf and came back with a deal almost too good to be true. I will have to see if that all works out - I've put the application in, and hopefully we can get the ex sorted and gone once and for all.
It's been a busy old week and I am beyond exhausted. 
I often go walking with the deputy head from school (to stay in the good books with the management and because I like it). Anyway, her hubby has only gone and gotten Covid so he's home isolating. On Wednesday she invited me to use his ticket for School of Rock, which I did. And I thoroughly enjoyed it right up until 7 minutes from the end when the fire alarm went off in the theatre and we all got evacuated and not allowed back into the building. So I missed the end. Arrived home well after my bedtime though and was so tired all day Thursday. Very much looking forward to putting my feet up and having an early night. Except ds had other ideas when he came to tell me about a horrible pain in one of his testicles and right up into his tummy. Symptoms into 111 symptom checker and advised to go to A&E immediately. Decided that he was too well to turn up to A&E so rang a trusted, male, friend. Who told me off the horror of torsion and told me to take him to A&E. So off we went. At half nine at night. To children's A&E. And the hospital had no functioning computers. It took us over 40 minutes just to get checked in, and the place was bursting with very young toddlers. And I was very tired and grumpy, and ds couldn't be bothered with the toddler banging her feet off the wall constantly. We did manage to jump the queue once he was triaged, but we also had to wait for the F1's boss to come and double check her diagnosis. He's ok. Injured but not twisted, and it was after midnight by the time we left the hospital. So I was very, very tired and grumpy at work yesterday - and I still have a sore throat and earache.
Deputy Head emailed me to ask if I wanted her hubby's ticket to Riverdance last night at the arena and I said I only wanted to go home and rest, and be asleep by 8pm as my tiny brain can't function on a severe lack of sleep like it did when I was married. She then sent me a text at the end of the day asking if I was sure. Friday night is food shop night and I had to pick dd up from work so I said I wouldn't be home in time anyway. She said we had plenty of time, even if we left at 7pm. So I ended up picking dd up, doing the shopping, dropping dd and the shopping at home and then picking deputy head up and going straight to the show. I was shattered. Riverdance was ok - I enjoyed the dancing and music but it it all felt a bit surreal. Mostly because I was so tired and it's not the type of thing that I would choose to go and see. I crawled into bed at 11pm last night absolutely exhausted and aching from head to toe. Woke up this morning just after 7am, still feeling exhausted and still aching from head to toe. Obviously I need more rest than I got. 
I planned a lovely restful day of telly and crochet which has not gone entirely to plan. Mainly due to continual nagging from ds and his huffing about my current lack of money. Never mind. It's almost bed time again.

foxgloves

Oh my goodness, @crazy_cat_lady. Early bedtime for you tonight & tomorrow. Ignore the huffing from DS. There's no magic money pixie, as we all come to realise eventually. You defo need some crochet, something nutritious for dinner & a bit of TV. Are you watching 'Hollington Street?' (may have got road name wrong!) but it's the ITV one with Jessica Stirling & Anna Maxwell-Martin in it. It's proving quite thought provoking because you can see these characters making big mistakes & obstructing police enquiries, yet a bit of you thinks' What would I do? '
Anyway, whatever you do, please attempt to have two relaxing evenings in a row, m' dear.
F x

dawnybabes

Hope your get some rest today. 

Let DS huff, if he wants money that much he can earn it …..

saving_is_good

Hi CCL,
I'm a long time lurker. I think you’re doing extremely well. 

I’ve got two naughty girls. One tortoiseshell and one tortoiseshell, silver tabbie mix. They are both a bit semi feral and nobody can pick them up. We got them to the vets for vaccinations and spaying when they were younger but one of them completely destroyed the cat basket when OH tried to get her in it because a stitch had come out. I ended up having to cut the stitch myself. 

They’re overdue their booster vaccinations, but as I can’t get near them with flea drops, I have given it up as a bad job. 

I was going to suggest adding inspector Montelbano or the Mallorca files to your box set watch list. Montelbano is in Italian with subtitles, but is highly watchable. Both free on bbc iplayer. 

crazy_cat_lady

Hello!
What a couple of weeks I have had, on top of my end of half term teaching, getting some exam work (finally) and being generally run down, ds only went and brought Covid into the house - bless him. It was inevitable I know, but he'd missed out on his vaccination at school because that whole scenario has been such a shambles and then caught Covid there just a couple of weeks later. Having seen it first hand I think it's a little unfair to suggest that children are only mildly ill. OK, he never got into any trouble with his breathing but he had a severe headache for 5 days straight and slept for approximately 18 hours a day for those 5 days. So scarred from the media coverage that he asked me on day 4 if he was going to die because people die from Covid. Makes me so mad. Anyway, he's now getting a bit better (today is day 8) and starting to feel a bit more like himself. He's lost over a stone in weight and I still can't get him to eat anything more than a couple of pieces of toast a day. Not a mild illness at all really. I had to take 3 days off work last week to look after him because when he was awake he was crying and feeling awful and couldn't get out of bed because the pain from the headache would make him throw up.
Anyway, we seem to be through the worst of it now - fingers crossed. And the really bizarre thing is that neither dd nor I have caught it from him. Which I think is particularly strange for me as he has been sleeping in my bed with me for the past week. I am double vaccinated, but so are a lot of people who still go on to catch it. I can't help but think that in evolutionary terms I must be the epitome of 'the fittest' (you'd have to see me to believe how very unlikely that is). Still lateral flow testing every day and still negative, with no symptoms at all other than usual end-of-term-teacher run down.
So I have made it to half term, although the situation in schools is much worse than the media would have you believe. We have loads of staff and students off with Covid at the moment. My form class was down to 14 students out of 29 by the last day of half term and one of my classes that should have had 27 had 12 in it. And we were 4 members of staff down just in out department, and struggling to get enough supply teachers in to cover the classes. Absolutely exhausting, and me trying to run the department from home whilst looking after ds because our head of department is one that is off sick.
Not good news on the mortgage front. I got L&C man to apply for this mortgage that he told me about who then got back to me to tell me that because of my wanting to use my own solicitor (due to the slightly complicated legal situation with ex) then I would be charged a fee to do so (£3000). Which I said no to, then he told me that I'd already had a hard search done on my credit file. So I'm a bit annoyed because the mortgage thing hasn't worked out and I have a hard search on my credit file and I spent so much time going through the application form over the phone, and my mortgage payment is going up by £28 a month as of next month, just as my energy bills have gone up £30 a month and my petrol costs have gone up £10 a month. I don't know how much more I can soak up financially because my wages aren't going up at all. I hate being a single parent in the 'squeezed middle'. Or a JAM as Teresa May used to call us. I don't mind admitting I wake up most mornings feeling nothing but generalised despair at the state of the country and how things are turning out between a pandemic, environmental disaster, brexit disaster and shortages of everything everywhere. On top of my running up more debt to manage when my second income disappeared. It is starting to get to me a bit and I thought the mortgage thing was one thing that I could control that would help me to get a hang on something, but apparently not. Ugh. I will sort it, I always do, but things feel really tough at the moment.
Anyway, I'm not going to keep bleating on about it. I have things to deal with and no amount of moaning will help me to deal with them. Time to get on and try and come up with a new plan.
Have a good day everyone. I keep saying I'm going to get on here more often then it never works out - so I'll 'see you when I see you'