DRAWESOME

1 month since last update! Last I posted, Aug 9, we were still trying to track down the Last Rat. Turned out that it was eating the cat litter, which is made of corn. After another week of video recording and strategically moving the cat litter outside, the rat finally tripped a rat trap on the morning of Aug 15, so spouse bravely disposed of the Last Rat.

Then the Aug 17th the flooring guys came and finally fixed up the floors (though the wood is a different texture and size). Aug 17 was also when school started for real (vs the prev week which was a week of meetings and PD), so I was running around trying to get all my start-of-school ducks in a row (a part of my job has a pretty dense start-up cost where I needed to interface and give promos to everyone in the school), so it wasn't until the weekend (Aug 22) that I was like "shit, we're going camping next weekend and all of our camping stuff is in storage. The original plan was to (1) get the room all fixed up, (2) set up loft bed, (3) call the guys to bring back all the stuff that they'd packed away back in late-June. But even though the flooring and walls were done, the construction guy was dragging his feet about the closet repair. And we had 5 days before we needed all our camping gear.

So I told spouse "text the contractor guy and tell him that we need the closet fixed by Wed latest", so that the stuff can get moved back in Thurs, and then we can do weekend camping on Friday. This was also the week where I had a school retreat from Thurs-Fri, *and* back to school night for the kiddo was on Thurs. A lot of moving pieces in a short amount of time!

Closet guy shows up on Wed and was like "the built-in-shelves are too short" and Spouse was like "yes because there used to be a dividing wall there" and the guy was like "well I don't build walls" so he just put up the closet doors (one of which is kinda broken by the process??? :/). BUT ALSO I was leaving on the school camping trip Thurs morning (yes, I was doing back-to-back camping), so Wed night we went out and bought a closet shelf rack, and I found an old bulky sleeping bag to bring to the school retreat. Got back from school retreat on Friday 4:30pm, and then turned around and left for weekend camping with family friends at 6pm, aiyah. Spouse did a great job of finding all the camping gear amongst the 18 boxes of stuff that got returned, as well as buying all the foodstuffs.

Camping went pretty well in general. Miss R got a little heat-stressed but that happens quite easily with her, apparently. Spouse went and did the long hike with the other 2 parents and ended up spraining his ankle, but that cleared up in a few days. I bought a very comfy t-shirt.

And suddenly I was back at school and it was September. Last week was back to school night for *my* school and unpacking the entirety of of Miss R's room, and then it was finally Labor Day weekend. Saturday morning Spouse got sick, but managed to stay upright enough to help with teaching taiko on Sunday. Mon morning he did a test and it came back positive for COVID. So he was knocked out from basically Saturday to just last Thurs, poor guy. Thankfully we've gotten pretty good at quarantining so neither me nor Miss R got COVID (though Miss R got a separate stomach bug). It was very flash-back to 2020, since Miss R has decided to start a new Animal Crossing save file, so I'm running around netting bugs and owing Tom Nook money again.

Anyway this weekend is like, the first normal weekend??? EXCEPT that Saturday I had Chinese School teacher meetings all day, and today was supposed to be a taiko performance, I was kind of hunkered down waiting for next weekend to finally relax. But! I've ending up sitting out of the taiko performance today (because I wasn't able to show up to rehearsal yesterday), so I'm actually having a quiet afternoon?!!! A blessing!

Next I'm going to drop off Miss R at grandma's and try to do some of the following:

- Chinese School stuff:
--- grade Chinese School tests (due next Sat)
--- pay rental invoices
--- do year-end taxes
--- record a small lesson demo

- House stuff:
--- deal with last few boxes of Miss R's room (the box currently upstairs, the bag of curtains in the corner, and the box in the living room)
--- move more of the linens to the space under the couch, maybe buy more of those rectangular boxes

I might just end up playing some animal crossing or working on a fic, tho. We'll see