The week off work has been productive. Veggies all taken care of, lawns maintained, chapters pushed out on my projects, and a surprising amount of Overwatch 2 played.

However.

There's this one cat in my neighborhood, I'm pretty sure I know which one, who has been leaving a steaming pile of shit on the top of one of my raised beds each morning.

I say on top of, because I anticipated cats treating them as a giant litter box, and fashioned a mesh covering to protect the veggies from any attacks, fecal or otherwise. This cat? He walks onto the mesh, lays a turd on it and leaves. So I wake to find a suspended pile of crap nestled above my potential potatoes.

I even set the mesh up in such a way that it sags when touched, to hopefully startle the cat or make it feel uneven enough not to sit there. It doesn't care. Bombs away.

So I'm scraping it off each morning considering other options. I can make proper hooped coverings with pipe and netting but every store nearby doesn't have what I need, for now.

The war continues.

During this week off, I checked my emails sporadically despite knowing I shouldn't. But I have a team and I want to make sure they're okay. They know what they're doing, shit they don't need a manager, but occasionally one panics and if I can help, even on leave, I will. I logged in to find a series of emails from an academic freaking out that I'm on leave, cc'ing my manager in (big fucking no no) and wondering where everything is for a clinical hire she was wanting to make. Suggesting that this is a poor time to take leave when she needs me there.

The work was already done . It was done two weeks ago and I kept her appraised of everything. She just ignored every email and phone call until I was gone, it seemed. Thankfully my manager, in a rare moment of backing me up, explained that I was on top of it, here's their contract (that she also received) and that I have to take leave because I have accrued so much HR sees it as a massive liability, and I accrue so much because I tend to never take leave out of fear of an academic hurting themselves in their confusion.

It's just past 8am here. Time to see what presents have been left amongst my spuds.