The end of the Mazda 5

 Back in 2013, I bought a used Mazda 5. It was great. It had storage space or seating, and I took full advantage of both.

When my mom brought the 3 ten-to-twelve year olds to visit, it picked them up at the airport. 

When I started building furniture, I hauled 8-foot-long boards home in it. 

It was there through Halloween parties, road trips, injuries, renovations, storms, COVID, picking up the puppy, and everything else that has happened in the last 10 years.

It was hard to find a replacement! The Mazda 5 had a lot of storage, not to mention the flexibility of the 6 seats. But it was time, so on Friday I traded it in.

It was a good car.

Shaking

I have a middle-of-the-day doctor's appointment coming up. I work towards downtown, my doctor works in Kanata, and I live in the middle, so I decided I should get set up to work from home so that I don't spend an hour driving each way.

Tuesday, I applied for access to work from home. (Since I am a contractor, I didn't think I got access automatically.)

Yesterday morning I found out that I did have access already, and I started installing the VPN software. It needed a restart, though, so I decided that I would let it install at the end of the day and take my laptop home on the weekend to try it out.

By now I'm sure that everyone has heard that Ottawa got hit with a minor earthquake yesterday afternoon.

It's not the first one - I remember feeling at least two others in the last 10 years, and I know there were more that I just didn't notice.

Yesterday's, though, was the first one that happened while I was at work. It's also the first one that happened while I was around other people, actually.

I was at my desk on the 9th floor of the building with two coworkers when it started shaking.

It turns out that an earthquake is almost as good as a power outage in making everyone stop what they're doing.

After it ended, everyone milled around and then we got the word to evacuate. By this time, it looked like it was pretty much over.

I work in a group of three towers, but they're pretty much the only tall buildings in that immediate area, so being outside wasn't the worst idea - and pretty much everyone in my department decided to work from home the rest of the day, so we all grabbed our laptops and headed outside.. I hadn't driven to work, so I got a ride with my neighbour.

When I got home, I saved everything I was doing and rebooted my computer. It finished installing the software, and I connected.

It's not the way I planned to test working from home, but it worked.

Perhaps I should be building an ark

I've decided that I need to update more often, even if I'm not actually doing new things. (Sorry, I blame work.) Let me tell you about my day - or at least the portion that happened before my alarm went off.

I don't believe I've ever talked about this, but I have no problems washing dishes. I don't dry them - I stack them in the drainboard, and they stay there until a) I have to kill some time in the kitchen, or b) I need to use them again.

So it's winter, and naturally there is snow outside. We didn't get our usual January thaw, but yesterday it started raining.

This morning at 4 a.m. (exactly) I heard rattling in the drainboard. I was very puzzled. And sleepy, let's not forget that.

I got up, and asked my sister what on earth she was doing. She told me that the basement was leaking.

I went downstairs. There was water on the floor - not over the whole basement, but enough to get my feet wet as I walked around.

I helped Wanda get all of her stuff off the floor. (One would think that perhaps that the floor wouldn't be the best place to store stuff, but apparently Wanda disagrees.) While she finished up, I went upstairs and made up another bed for her.

I don't know what happened exactly. My theory is that the rain plus the melting snow caused water to leak in the windows. It rained all day today, and everything is dry now.

I still don't know how rattling dishes was supposed to help.