New Job

I heard back from the shelter manager yesterday; the job is mine if I want it. I do! *tailwags*

I'm starting on Tuesday. I let him know that I have dog walks to do for the first couple of weeks (I'm going to give Wag! two weeks notice to find new people for my walks during work hours), and he doesn't mind.

Of course, now I am deeply anxious that something will go wrong. I'll start working there and be incompetent. Or I'll spend too much time walking dogs and he'll be upset with me. Or Wag! will be really upset that I'm not finishing out my 90-day commitment on recurring walks I signed up for and I'll have to deal with that. This is the kind of reaction I have always had to significant changes of circumstance. Now, though, I am a lot more self-aware and have better tools to deal with that anxiety. It's still difficult and makes me want to curl up in a ball under blankets with some chocolate sometimes, but I'm managing it and it's getting better.

I'll be taking care of cats and bunnies. Cleaning their crates and the cat common spaces. Feeding them. Giving them medicine. Driving them to the vet. Customer service-type phone stuff. Janitorial stuff. Unloading the hay shipments for the bunnies and stacking them up in the closet they go in. I'll write about it as it goes.

At home, Danae and I will have to re-sort who's doing what chores and things, since I've been taking responsibility for dishes and cleaning and everything. With extra money coming in, she thinks it would be worth it to higher someone to come in and clean everything once a month. Personally, I've always felt like having cleaners is something 'rich people' do, but it might make sense for us.

I have the option of insurance after three months! Once that kicks in, I'm going to look into continuing my therapy. Since my current therapist is graduating, I need to find a new one anyway. I'd like to talk to someone about gender identity and how I form relationships, among other things.

I'm scared to even write about this because there's a part of me that thinks it will all fall apart before it starts. But rationally, I think this will be really good.

Bicycle Work

At Aldi, I saw a bicycle work stand for $30. This is the sort of thing you clamp your bicycle onto so it's held off the floor for easier maintenance. A lot cheaper than decent ones I've seen online, so I figured it was worth buying. I biked home with it, in it's four-foot-long box, held over my shoulder with one hand and steering with the other.

Today I set it up and used it for the first time and was really impressed! It's a nice, metal stand with five sturdy fold-out legs, a telescoping center tube that will extend to around 6 feet, and a nice clamp to hold the bike. It makes any kind of mechanical work *so* much easier. And it folds down small enough to fit in our small basement storage cube in the condo building. I've wanted a bike repair stand for years, and I'm so glad I bought it!

I had the bike on the stand to install the front fender I removed last time I put it into a car. I'd forgotten that one of the pieces went bouncing off into the grass and got lost, so I'll have to get a replacement bolt first. Unfortunately, I also found that I have a broken spoke on my back wheel. I thought that might have happened yesterday when I went over some rough streets and noticed the brake was rubbing a bit.

Wheel work is really intimidating to me. It's one of the most, for lack of a better term, abstract, or least straightforward, things one can do on a bike. All the spokes should be under approximately equal tension, and tightening or loosening one affects all the others, and sometimes the wheel is bent in a way that requires spoke adjustment that seems counter-intuitive to me. But I think I'm going to go buy a replacement spoke and a nipple wrench (yes, this is what spoke tension adjusting wrenches are called because the spoke attaches to the rim with a thing called a nipple) and give it a try. I'm pretty sure I can at least get the thing installed and then *try* to true the wheel. And if I can't get it right, there's a bike shop just a block away.