The melt and the agitator

 

Before Rustle

After Rustle- note that the laundry line twisted at some point so the icicles on it are now pointing up instead of down

Currently all the ice on the laundry line has fallen but the trees are still ice covered.

In pulling the laundry out of the tub, I have found that one of the agitator fins has broken off so I have ordered a new one from Amazon.

Tomorrow is our last training session as next week is the last week of classes!

How it is going

 

Mid storm

 I could hear the rain/ice/sleet coming down during the night but there was not much accumulation in the morning. The bushes were bent and there is currently lots of crackling. The next wave should be arriving soon. This is what is looks like now but it doesn't do it justice:

Batten down the hatches

 We'll see how the weather tracks overnight.

We had a great time with the students doing testing with dry ice today. One week left!

Spring storm

 There is apparently a spring storm approaching. The week has gone ok so far. Next week is the last week of term! Today I have to try to catch up on email and in the afternoon we are doing some project testing. I think I woke at 3am so it will be a long day!

Amazon is having a spring sale until mar 31, so I did pick up some deals.

The strike is not going well as apparently Queen's can't understand the response to their Mar 9 offer was the strike. They say that the union has not responded but it looks like they have pretty clearly responded. There seems to have been a lot of backlash to Queen's statement so hopefully that will cause them to start talking soon. It is causing a lot of frustration for everyone.

Tea and Crackers

Today I have taken it easy sustained on tea and crackers. So far, everything seems ok.

Tomorrow, a chief window installer is coming by to measure the kitchen window as it has been having issues for years and needs to be replaced. 

Stomach bug

 Last night I woke up at 1:25am with a bad stomach bug. I had no idea that so much was available to be expunged from my body. I was sick on an off until 4am. Now it is 10am, things seem to have stabilized. I cleaned the bathroom and am making some tea to see if that will be ok.

Washing the winter away

 I was worried that they had locked my building down today and Malik needed to get in for 3D printing so I walked to work in the rain. It was only light rain, not too bad. Made sure Malik and my supervisor were all good and then I walked to Rustle in the rain. Because I was arriving later than planned due to my work trip, Esther did up all the slides for me so everything was mostly ready to go when I arrived. 

Because of renovations, the AV set up is much lower and I can't actually see what is going on the stage so I run it all by sound instead of sight which is interesting.

I needed to finish up the timetabling and the training for the sessions tomorrow, then I watched the Elevation sermon. I missed a bit of it but it was talking about the scripture with Mary and Martha. I relate to the Martha and always thought that Jesus was just telling her to take a break, not be so busy. Which is a good thing. But the sermon talked about what Jesus's  concern was not that she was too busy but that she was running her own agenda and her agenda was not God's agenda. I hadn't seen it like that before.

Tomorrow we have training (except Paul is sick and so he asked me to run them) and I have more interviews.

Ratification or not

 We had our contract ratification meeting yesterday and it is possible that we'll be on strike tomorrow. We will find out later today how the vote went. The general thought seemed to be that Queen's has created a toxic work environment with the cutbacks and then gave managers so created a lot of unhappiness.

Today I need to try to finish up the timetabling plus I have 8 hours of interviews for SWEP positions that if we're on strike I can't complete the hiring for. A good 12 hours of work today at least!

some grass showing

 Despite the weather being negative. There seems to be green grass poking out in the backyard which is promising. The robins are also singing around. I worked 11 hours on both the course and timetabling. I somehow need to get the timetabling done tomorrow as Friday is interview day. Hopefully, I am very efficient because I spent most of today on one course.

melt

 It is nice that the ice banks are melting. Because of the time change it was lighter coming home as well. Our sleep schedules are all a bit wonky.

The receiver still is not working. 

Fixing a receiver

 James' TV has not been working for a while. I tried using the Bell Virtual fix, which did not work so I had to wait on hold for a human. The hold took 1 hour. But the human wanted to restart the modem again and so I did but it had difficulty in the restart so it took a long time and the human disconnected because it took too long. Then support closes at midnight. So after a few hours, I am no further ahead except for knowing that restarting the modem doesn't really help anything.

Agreement

 Apparently, before I wrote the last post, there was an email that we had reached a tentative agreement but I didn't see it as it was in my junk mail. But there is no strike, work as usual tomorrow!

Negotiations

 Our union is currently in negotiations and I thought waking up I would know if we were on strike or not but based on the issue tracker it looks like they are still negotiating with only about 4 issues outstanding.

I wonder when they started the negotiations? Are they sleeping? It doesn't seem healthy to need to negotiate for so many hours. Maybe they have shifts.

Elevation

 

Yesterday Julie and I trekked to Toronto to see Elevation Nights which was an amazing experience. We then stayed at an AirBnb inWhitby and went to Whitby elevation in the morning

Then Julie and I had lunch at my parents and she headed back to Ottawa while I stayed to be picked up by James. We are running a test on Tuesday and apparently some people who knew about conflicts for a long amount of time have only let me know now. Sigh. Lots to manage tomorrow!