Me and the wife, April 3, 2021
Sweet Jesus, look at all the gray in my hair.
Hello everyone. Welcome to April.
Thursday, April 1:
Working from home, day 231.
I hate April Fools' Day. I really hope I don't die on April Fools' Day because nobody would be convinced that it wasn't an elaborate practical joke that I was playing on society, and that I'd gotten my friends and family to play along with it.
As mentioned in the end of the last post (which by the time you're reading this, is a month ago now) this week at work has been brutal, and I am very tired and burnt out on it. My hopes are that tonight, and throughout the weekend, everything pipes the fuck down as we're going into Easter -- a lot of companies/countries have Friday through Monday off for the holiday; some entire countries have everyone out of office as a bank holiday.
The US is not one of those countries, by the way; Daisy still has to go to work tomorrow as well as Monday. I still work tonight, Sunday, and Monday as per the usual -- Easter doesn't mean a goddamn thing to my job or my company.
Work ends up being less taxing than it has been as of late, though I did still work half an hour late and still did not end up getting a lunch hour. At this point, I remain unconvinced I'm going to get a full lunch hour again anytime soon. Maybe I will Sunday, since it's Easter.
Friday, April 2: Day off.
Saturday, April 3: Day off.
I wake up Friday afternoon in a daze, and feeling miserable. Not sick, but like...just angry and miserable. Part of this is due to a shitty email from one of our clients at work -- who, even after my team did an exemplary job of getting their service restored quickly, felt the need to ask why it took six hours to get any actual movement on it.
I really wanted to reply to them and say "because the 2nd shift agent who 'worked' this case is dumber than a sack of fucking doorknobs and for some godforsaken reason, her leadership won't fire her. As such, not a goddamn thing was done on this issue until my team got on shift and I personally made sure it was taken care of," but I didn't. That would be poor form. It would have been poor form to send that email internally to my own peers/leadership as well, even though I desperately wanted to.
I do have some tact and restraint.
I am criminally undervalued and underappreciated in my job most of the time. I am not bragging or exaggerating when I say that my actions alone have saved multiple people's jobs (as well as the fate of the program itself) on a handful of occasions in that place -- I'm being factual. I've saved the jobs of several of my peers on numerous occasions, as well as the occasional higher-up and many, many underlings who did not deserve to be saved. I get very little to zero credit for most of this, and (as I've mentioned before) any other respectable company I did the same amount of work for would be paying me a salary at least double what I actually make where I am now. So many folks in that place are just "checked out," and just don't care -- and one of the things I learned a long time ago that has been continually proven right over the years is that you can't pay people to care. There's not a magic money wand that will make people give a shit, though I wish there were.
I'm in a sour mood for most of the evening hours and find everything frustrating and stress-inducing. I finally come upstairs shortly before midnight and fall asleep in my chair.
Daisy is worried about me. She's worried about my mental health, about my depression, about my anger. She doesn't know how to help. In the night, after I wake up, I feel that she's owed an explanation about what's going on in my head, and so I take twenty minutes or so and do what I do best -- I write it out for her. I explain that it's not her, and that I'm not actually depressed, but I am frustrated and angered deeply by a great many things, externally as well as internally. I feel like I live a life unfulfilled, that I was put on this planet to do great things and that my destiny had already passed me by. I lament on this and the dreams I once had that I'll never accomplish, all the things I wanted to do but can't do anymore due to age, money, time, energy or just plain lack of motivation.
Once I lay out my thoughts, I feel a lot better. I feel more centered, more focused -- more able to be at ease or at peace a bit, I guess? Regardless, my mood changes, and I make some food and let Daisy wake up and talk about it with me for a bit.
The parents are out of town; our plans for the day are to go feed their cats and make sure the house is okay and all that -- and then stop and get cat litter at the local PetSmart on the way home, for us. This is, generally, a pretty easy enough plan to accomplish, but the heat doesn't make it easier.
Yes, the heat -- it got above 80 in Omaha with bright, hot sun -- enough to make me sort of ill being out in it. I'm not used to the heat again yet. It feels like it was just last week when temperatures were below zero (it was actually about six weeks ago now, but we did have frost on a morning or three over the course of the past few weeks). I don't like being sweaty, and being in the sunlight for a night shift worker is almost like asking to be burnt alive like a vampire.
Daisy and I both receive texts/snaps from one of our friends (coincidentally, also one of my current employees) who lets us know he's in the hospital for blood clots from long-haul Covid. He is, rightfully so, scared shitless and hating every minute of the situation, but it likely not going to be kept much longer than tomorrow or Monday. He got Covid around Halloween, and ever since has been fighting to recover fully from it. He was almost back to completely normal, and then he had to make a long road trip to Mississippi during that aforementioned below-zero cold snap, which fucked him up pretty badly and he's been trying to get back to normal from that since. Long-haul Covid is a motherfucker -- this dude is 6'4", in decent shape (he actually lost something like 50 pounds this past year during isolation, when everyone else seemed to be gaining weight) but he's been telling me how he can't sleep -- like, almost at all anymore -- and how he's been having major trouble breathing since all this shit started rolling back into his system. He's also been having some awful digestion issues, and all of these factors combined have made him miss work a few days over the past few weeks. This is a dude who does not miss work unless he absolutely has to. Well, apparently over the last few days his leg began swelling up like crazy (edema) and began really bothering him, and he was experiencing chest pains as well, so he took himself to the hospital and they admitted him -- they found blood clots in his chest (I didn't get specifics, of course, as to where -- but I'm guessing lungs/heart) which scared the shit out of me as well when he told me about it. I had an aunt who died really quickly, when she was already in the hospital on the day she was supposed to be released, when a blood clot broke off from her lungs somewhere and gave her a massive stroke. This was twenty years ago, yes, but having a friend in a very similar predicament scares the bejesus out of me. These are the types of ailments that kill people who've had Covid, and part of why I never goddamn want to get it.
He's been put on blood thinners to help break down the clots and is being held on observation, resting comfortably by all accounts at the moment. The medicine he needs to be on for this at least for the time being is something like $500 a month, but with a special type of insurance card he should able to get it for like $10 a month moving forward, so we're going to see how that pans out. He is (quite obviously) not returning to work tomorrow or probably even Monday night.
Because of this, I reach out to our director (my direct boss), who knows this guy as well as Daisy and I do, to let him know the situation. His response? "K."
Like what the fuck, man? Show some empathy and compassion. The concept of the one-letter "K" response always pissed me off anyway, but this is a dude we all know well, who's worked there longer than either my director OR I have, someone who, in the confines of that place we're all pretty close with...and his response to him being in the hospital with possibly serious blood clots is "K."
"You should respond to him with 'wow, wonderful showing of empathy, [name]'," said Daisy. "What the fuck kind of response is that?"
"That would likely not go over well," I said.
You can't pay people to care.
In contrast, I told our other director -- who is arguably more social with said friend in the hospital than our primary director is -- and his immediate response was incredibly empathetic and to send him his well wishes.
I don't know what's going on with my boss. He's been incredibly cold and distant over the past few weeks, and there are many nights where we're literally on shift together for 6-8 hours where we just don't speak, or he doesn't say anything in our shared leadership chatroom (unless it's to criticize someone or to tell someone to do something he should probably be doing). If I ask him a question regarding an issue we're working, he'll either not respond at all, respond sometimes an hour or three later, or if he does respond immediately it's almost like a robot talking to you -- no emotion, no real concern, etc.
I've tried to talk to him, to start conversations about stuff I know he's interested in, and have actually asked him -- as a friend, not as an employee -- if he's okay, if everything's all right or if he's going through some shit in the background, because it's not just me that's noticed he's being really quiet, and he is not a quiet person.
"We're all remote," he said. "It's not like we're in the same room together anymore, it's a different setting." And that was it.
No shit, Sherlock. I'm not disputing that, I'm asking if you're depressed or sick or want to kill yourself, and/or why you seem to be so actively disinterested in your employees or the jobs that we're all here doing while reporting to you.
Now, to be fair, my boss has had some minor health problems over the past year or so. Daisy (who knows him pretty well also) actually drove him to the doctor a few weeks ago when he needed a ride to and from a procedure he was having done, as he had to be put under general anesthesia for it. And to be fair, his demeanor really changed after that, not just towards me but towards everyone else on the team. I know the medical details of what he's going through and it's not anything major -- it's shitty, but not life-altering and it's not killing him or anything like that -- but I dunno, maybe he got some bad news on his last set of tests and he doesn't want to tell anyone, or something. Who goddamn knows.
This is a prime example of why I stopped really investing emotional energy into a lot of friends and their life situations. I try to be a good friend, I try to be the person others can open up to, the person they can talk to and confide in (the phrase "we are all fighting our own battles" comes to mind) and yet it gets ignored or otherwise ends up seeming/feeling unwanted. Why bother?
Anyway, I've gotten very far off course.
We went over to the parents' to take care of the cats and house, as mentioned; per Dad, they should be returning on Monday or maybe Tuesday, so Daisy and/or myself will probably only have to go back over there once or twice more before their return. On the way home we did stop to pick up the litter from PetSmart...which also happens to have a Ross Dress for Less store in the same plaza.
Ross is one of those stores that's very hit-or-miss for both myself as well as Daisy. I've gone in there a few times and have found really good stuff -- one of my favorite button-up shirts came from there -- but there are other times when the racks have been bare or there's been absolutely nothing of interest I've found. I feel the same way about other similar stores like Burlington as well. There are days where I've spent like $200 in Burlington and then other days where I've not found a goddamn thing I was interested in.
But, we were masked up and had some time to kill, and didn't really have anything pressing we should have been doing during those mid-afternoon hours, so we decided to go in. I am glad we did -- I was able to find three different packs of underwear in my size and in the style I like (cotton, jersey-t-shirt-fabric styled boxer briefs) for $8 to $10 per pack -- also almost unheard of to find them that cheap. I immediately grabbed them, and Daisy found a leopard-print cardigan she really liked for $8, so we were lucky.
In the car on the way home, relaxed and a bit tired, I said "today was a good day."
"It really was," Daisy replied. "I always love spending time with you going on little adventures."
This is really what marriage is -- it is a series of little adventures.
Sunday, April 4:
Working from home, day 232.
Easter Sunday.
I have received no fewer than three different text messages from three different agents -- all of whom have worked with us in the same job, same program, same setting for multiple years -- asking me "is tonight a holiday? Do we get tonight off?"
FFS, no. We don't. You people know this. You've worked every other Easter for us in the past, haven't you?
Now, as an outspoken atheist, I don't give a shit about Easter. I like the chocolate, and I like that folks consider it a holiday, so working on it generally means it's quiet. Tonight is no exception; I finally get a lunch hour (which I use to take a nap) and while there's a few things I work on, the night ends peacefully and without any real incident.
Monday, April 5: Working from home, day 233.
Tuesday, April 6: Working from home, day 234.
Wednesday, April 7: Working from home, day 235.
I am so constantly tired that I barely touch my computer and don't write here.
Thursday, April 8:
Working from home, day 236.
I have been dealing with some health issues this week. Not mental (amazingly enough) but mostly physical. I can't seem to sleep much at all -- no matter how tired/exhausted I am in the mornings when I get off work, for some reason my body will always wake me up between 2 and 3pm, generally closer to 2. This means I get about 4-5 hours of sleep, max, any given day...and then I'm just awake.
I can't go back to sleep at that point, either -- no matter how hard I try -- because I know that was your next question. What generally follows is that if I try, my back begins hurting, or I have to poop, or I get incredibly hungry (that's a problem in itself) or my body will do pretty much anything it can to get me to not go back to sleep, because goddammit, I should apparently be awake and moving and doing things at what would be, logically, about 2am or 3am for most normal people who don't work overnights.
So, I just get up. I'm not happy about it, I don't want to be awake, but I am, so...yeah. Generally I just take the extra time to do something constructive, like shower or laundry, or I balance the checkbook, or refine a grocery order (adding/deleting things, checking with the wife on what we need). But overall, it's miserable -- I'm getting less than half the amount of sleep I want and need in order to actually feel like a person instead of pea soup poured into a t-shirt and boxer briefs.
On the plus side, the night is not miserable and isn't even particularly hectic for most of it. I take care of what I need to take care of, I (remarkably) get a lunch hour -- during which I yes, again nap -- and go to bed in the morning really early -- like, before 9am.
Friday, April 9: Day off. Payday for me.
Saturday, April 10: Day off.
I tried to write entries for both of these days but I just couldn't. I'm having a very hard time concentrating and words just aren't flowing like they normally do. Maybe I'll be able to recover and regroup somewhat this coming week.
Sunday, April 11:
Working from home, day 237.
5 years smoke-free.
Today is a monumental anniversary; it is the day I celebrate five years smoke-free -- meaning, today in 2016 I quit smoking and never looked back. It was hard, I won't lie; those first few days/weeks sucked. But, just like everything else in life, I got through it. While I still vape today, and will do so until I run out of juice and supplies/working equipment, I quit smoking cigarettes that day. This is a big deal, yes, but it's not necessarily something I want to make a big deal out of. It's not much of an achievement to say "woohoo, I'm not white trash anymore" or something like that, because
a) I'm still white trash in many ways
b) not all white trash people smoke, and
c) a lot of people who aren't white trash smoke too.
It is, however, an achievement to say that I don't spend $150 or more per month on cigarettes anymore.
I have taken PTO for Thursday in addition to next Sunday (read: the day after my vaccine) to give myself a longer weekend. I also put in the time to take off all of Memorial Day weekend -- two days before and the day after, I believe -- in order to get a little breathing space. It is not clear as of yet whether Daisy and I will be traveling or even really doing anything outside the house for those days, but we'll see. I've told her I really want to see what the country looks like when it comes to infection levels and normalization activity before we make any concrete travel plans anywhere -- and we do have a few possible destinations in mind. We'll see, though.
The beard is growing back; it has been over a month since I last shaved it, and in that time it has slowly grown back in. This afternoon when I took a shower, I used my trimmers to shave down the neck area -- because I'm growing a facial beard like a man, not a neckbeard like a troglodyte (or a My Little Pony fan, whichever reference works better for you). In another month or so, the beard will be almost back to what it was before I shaved it earlier this year.
This is good, because I still owe the wife Christmas card photos.
The night at work is hectic for a Sunday. My friend/employee with the long-haul Covid blood clots is still out of commission (and likely will be for the remainder of the week) and still isn't doing too hot. I don't get stuck working anything crazy, but I do end up getting needled to death by stupid questions from our new hires in training, who should really be working with my Team Lead and not with me directly for most items/questions, but whatever. I leave on time -- like, almost exactly on time -- and am in bed before 8:30 am.
Monday, April 12:
Working from home, day 238.
The wife has a gardening problem.
Well, let me be frank, I have a "funding the gardening" problem.
Over the course of the past four days, Daisy has gone to Lowe's three times and has spent a combined total of something like $400.
This does not count the $300ish she spent on an order for a delivery of more soil and river rock for the garden and for landscaping around the house (respectively) as well. That order gets delivered (read: dumped on our driveway) a week from today.
Over the weekend, Daisy has redone a large part of the back yard, de-sodded and stripped the entire left side of the house and created a long flower bed/ground cover area, purchased multiple berry bushes and at least two small trees to plant all around the yard/house, and we (together) went to Lowe's to pick-and-choose the vegetables we'll be growing this year in the giant raised beds she created. This year's new additions include watermelons, snow peas, green beans, onions, and asparagus -- amongst a few other things we've never tried before.
Daisy gets the green thumb gene from her parents; she certainly doesn't get it from encouragement from her husband (that's me, in case you'd forgotten). Don't get me wrong, I'm all for Daisy having this hobby that she so dearly loves and enjoys, but I'm more of the guy who would call up a gardening/landscaping company and say "here's [double the money Daisy spent on plants and supplies], you do this, we'll be inside watching Netflix." I'm not a manual labor guy anymore; I did it far too much, for far too little pay, for far too many years. I don't get a sense of accomplishment from working in the yard or the garden; at age 38, I get muscle pain that lasts weeks and joint inflammation.
But, Daisy loves it, and she's younger and works daytime hours and has far more energy than I do, so I do not fault her for any of it. She gets peace and fulfillment out of it, and as long as we can afford it, who am I to be a sourpuss about it?
And yes, I do help her...sometimes. Most of the time she doesn't necessarily need or want my help, but when she does or asks for it I try to oblige, as long as I have the energy and time. That isn't often, to be sure, but occasionally. Mostly weekends, and that's if the weather isn't shitty. As I have a longer weekend than usual coming up (due to the PTO I mentioned yesterday) it is likely that at least some of that time, as long as the weather is decent, will be spent outside with her to help out.
Not to be outdone with around-the-house upkeep projects and what-have-you, we also have a HVAC guy coming to check out the AC unit as well and do any servicing to it that it needs, next week.
[Edit: due to a cold snap, this appointment is rescheduled for May 5.]
Our AC works amazingly well, but the unit itself is original to the house, meaning it's about ten years older than I am...so we want to get routine maintenance done on it to help keep it going in tip-top shape. It will eventually blow out and die on us, of course, but until it does, regular maintenance and upkeep is definitely a thing -- it's akin to owning a classic car, I guess.
Tonight at work, we're extremely shorthanded, because...
a) my aforementioned employee is still out with the long-haul Covid blood clots and stuff
b) his roommate and also my employee/friend is in Nigeria on vacation for another full week
c) another employee's girlfriend has leukemia and had a bad reaction to one of her treatments today, so said employee is out of the office taking care of her
Because of this I got permission from my director to call in my other team lead who generally works the weekend shifts to help pitch in and work OT for the overnight to help rectify shit. And she does -- I could not have gotten through the night without her help, as we just didn't have the manpower to do so. I end up working half an hour late just to tie up some loose ends, and am in bed about an hour later -- very early for me.
Tuesday, April 13:
Working from home, day 239.
Hustle Tuesday.
As today is another hustle Tuesday, I get up around 3 and immediately shower, go check the mail and feed the cats, make coffee and open up the house, light incense and get the essential oil diffuser running (with orange oil in it) and get the recycling/trash down to the road. And then...I don't have much energy for much else.
I mentioned above that we've been putting the money from the stimulus and our tax returns to good use. Aside from the yard and garden stuff, over the course of a few carefully-chosen grocery orders and a trip for the wife to Natural Grocers, we have made sure the house is fully-stocked with good, long-lasting food, household supplies, and produce.
Some of it feels like I'm trying to fill holes that can't be filled, though. There's a motor of sorts in me that tells me that maybe the next grocery order, the next Amazon order, the next comic book I subscribe to or t-shirt I buy or new laundry detergent I try will be enough to fulfill me for a while or bestow upon me some sort of higher purpose or reason to not be so dissatisfied with my life.
This is a very sweeping generalization, of course, as I don't have the time or energy to go into deep psychoanalysis here. Needless to say, it's not working that well.
We also have another actual hole that will be filled soon; our vaccine holes. Our second appointments for our final shots are on Saturday morning. In the three weeks between the shots, I've seen many friends, coworkers, and family come out of the woodwork to proclaim that they've been vaccinated as well, and some of them (some younger than me by a good bit, so tell me how that works) have proclaimed they're now past their two-weeks deadline after shot #2 to where they should be at full immunity. This is all amazing news. Maybe this series of posts (the longest series of posts I've ever written, by the way) will be able to come to a natural end in the next few months (more on this later) as the population slowly edges closer and closer to ending this virus horseshit.
Wednesday, April 14:
Working from home, day 240.
I mentioned earlier that we've gotten some stuff for around the house and some groceries, but I did not mention that we've also gotten a few personal things for us as well. Daisy, for example, finally did an order from JCPenney for two pairs of sensible New Balance sneakers, something I've been trying to get her to do for the better part of a year.
She offered to get a pair for me in my size as well -- well, I mean, she told me if I wanted a pair I "should just get them" is a more accurate way of saying that. I declined; I have at least three pairs of new sneakers that I haven't worn (or have only worn a few times) and a few other pairs that I used to wear all the time but, well, don't now because pandemic means you don't leave the house unless you're forced to. We're also entering summer soon, and I don't wear sneakers in summer unless it's raining cats and dogs and I have to go out in it -- in most of spring, summer, and fall I wear flip-flops exclusively. Only in late fall and winter -- and the exception of when we were going to the gym on a regular basis -- do I ever actually wear shoes of any sort.
I also did something I've been meaning to do for some time, and purchased an air fryer for us. Yes, our household has finally leapt into the 2020s. It's a small air fryer, one that Macy's had on sale for $25 (yes, $25) but we're going to see if it's something we like and see how well it works. I have no idea yet what we'll make in it, but I've got some thoughts I'd like to put into action. Spoiler alert, those thoughts involve tater tots.
I'll also remind all of you that I am still waiting for my last two sets of vape coils -- I ordered them the last week of March (which seems like it was ages ago now) from a website called FastTech, which is in China. I can't do much about that; the coils are made in China anyway, so I'm essentially getting them directly from the source. I always forget, however, just how incredibly long it takes to get stuff shipped from China. FastTech will actually ship in pre-approved-for-customs envelopes, which is a bonus -- no worries there, generally, about being held up by customs or what-have-you because I'm technically ordering vape-related materials by mail past the cutoff date. The order itself, however, was well before the cutoff date, as was the original shipping date -- so it's not like I'm doing anything shady; it was all above board.
I do heartily recommend FastTech, as their prices are amazing and they generally have almost anything electronic that you could possibly want for any reason.
The night at work is rather hectic and seems to drag on forever, probably because I know I've got four days off in a row coming up. I end up working a full half-hour late, but am in bed before 9am.
Thursday, April 15: PTO.
Friday, April 16: Day off.
Sometimes I really miss the nights many years ago, when I lived alone in Kansas, where I could take my mp3 player and my Nintendo DS to bed with me, sprawl out in the dark, and just listen to podcasts and play until I fell asleep. The cats would join me, I'd tire myself out, and I'd just pass out after a bit.
I can't do that anymore; I now have to sleep during daytime hours most of the time, and I'm old and my eyesight is going, so trying to play games when going to bed is blurry and frustrating since I won't have my glasses on. Adding to this is that generally, any noise like podcasts in my earbuds won't put me to sleep anymore, it'll just keep me low-level awake. That's bad when I have to force myself to sleep so that I can be functional in the overnight hours now -- pulling "all-nighters" are no longer a fun thing to do once in a while, but now an actual necessity.
Over the past week or two I have been experiencing low-level inflammation throughout most of my body. I thought it was just fatigue at first but it is very obviously far more than that. Whenever I feel swollen or inflamed, or feel like I'm somehow retaining water, there's a good bet that it's a gout attack readying to flare up, or something of that nature. I've been trying to stay extremely hydrated, and have been drinking a full bottle of tart cherry juice here and there (it zaps inflammation right in the nuts; try it sometime). A few days it's been particularly bad, where my knees, shoulders, elbows (and sometimes ankles) feel like they're being squeezed, and moving them either makes them ache like mad, crack or pop, or both.
This is, ahem, distressing, to say the least.
I haven't had a real gout attack for the better part of a year; there are days on occasion that my foot aches a bit, but the ache quickly passes within a day or two with some extra fluids and ibuprofen. I don't think my medicine is working any less effectively, so I don't exactly know what's going on with my body. Maybe it really is fatigue. Maybe it's my burnout causing physical symptoms. Only time will tell.
Saturday, April 17:
Day off.
Vaccine day two.
Well, today's the day, so let's tell the story of shot #2. First, a photo collage from the wife's Facebook:
Yes, this morning around 10am, we hopped in the car and made our return to little rural Glenwood, Iowa, back to the little one-room brick building Hy-Vee pharmacy, to get our second shots. I can tell you that we are now successfully fully vaccinated.
We're also really out if it.
Let's backtrack and start the story from the beginning, shall we?
I did not sleep well last night. Even though I'm off on PTO bookended on each day of the weekend specifically because of the shot more than anything else, I've been sleeping fitfully and at weird times. I'll conk out in my chair or in bed for 4-6 hours at a time, roughly, will be awake for another 8-10, and then repeat the process. It's my body trying to "catch me up" on sleep and it's failing dismally most of the time. What I really need is about eighteen hours of uninterrupted sleep and rest, punctuated only by waking up to go pee. I am never going to get that again in my adult life; I have too many responsibilities and other things/daily tasks to take care of. Not to mention that without next-level drugs in my system, my back would never let me sleep that long. I slept last night from around 3am-7am-ish. I got no real rest out of it, but it did allow me to recharge a little bit and feel normal-ish by the time the wife awakened this morning. I ate a decent breakfast, drank a cup of heavily-creamered coffee, dressed myself, and then we were in the car.
We arrived to find a much busier pharmacy than we found the last time we were there three weeks ago. There were multiple people in line getting vaccinated, and we were fourth and fifth, respectively, for these fun little shots. I was expecting this; in the time between our first and second shots, vaccination appointments across the country opened up pretty much everywhere, and suddenly every time slot started getting booked really quickly.
The guy who gave us our shots (pictured above) is not the same pharmacy tech girl who gave them to us the first time around, though he was very nice and very efficient -- though this time around they didn't put the little discs over our "vaccine holes" as they did before, just a sharp stick and then a band-aid over it.
Daisy got hers first, as she had previously. I took the picture of her above. I then sat down and got my own -- almost zero pain this time, compared to the first one which legit felt like being punched with a razor for about three seconds. This time, I didn't bleed, either.
"I can't even see where the injection hole was," the pharmacy tech said, "so here's hoping this band-aid is close enough."
[EDIT: I do see where it was now, and there's a tiny little knot of swelling where it is, almost like a bug bite. I do not know whether he actually covered the spot with the band-aid as I stripped it off once we got home.]
We were indeed once more made to wait for fifteen minutes to see if we developed any adverse allergic reactions (which, I guess, can happen the second time around too). If you recall, the last time I was very acutely aware of the sensation of the vaccine moving down my arm, into my bloodstream, and then traveling back up and hitting my heart/chest/lungs. This time I could feel the same, but it was very much lessened compared to the first shot. If I didn't know it was traveling through my system, I would not have noticed it at all, likely.
It was around this point where Daisy began to feel nauseous.
The first time around she hadn't felt this way for about half an hour or more, until we were on our way home. This time it was within five to seven minutes of getting the second shot. It wasn't debilitating or anything, but it was very clear from her mannerisms that she was not completely okay.
Nausea is supposed to be one of the side effects of the vaccine, and it was the one I was probably dreading the most, as I am prone to pretty nasty nausea at inopportune times (I used to get car sick a lot, even throughout college, if I was riding in the back seat of a vehicle). But surprisingly, I was okay. We got our filled-out cards (our "vaccine passports," if you will) from the pharmacy tech and a few minutes later, we were back on the road headed for home.
And that's when my own symptoms started.
The first was a nice thick brain fog that rolled in and made me feel slow and heavy, like I was treading water or something. My body felt heavy and I immediately started feeling like I hadn't slept in days, but wasn't tired enough to sleep. This was accompanied by a mild headache and some muscle/joint aches, once I got home. I just felt, as I told Daisy, "not sick, but really 'out of it' and weird." And very tired and hot. Looking back on it now, it was probably a mild, low-grade fever I was developing as my immune response kicked in. I went upstairs, plopped down in my chair, and fell asleep...for five hours.
During this time, Daisy was experiencing some of the same symptoms, but to a greater or lesser degree I couldn't tell you, as I was passed out. What jarred me out of my sleep was a dream where I had joined the Mafia, and to prove myself as loyal and not a cop, I had to carry out a hit -- which I refused to do. The other members of the Mafia then told me that they had to kill me then and there because I wouldn't do it, which is what shook me out of the dream and back to being awake.
What I can tell you once I was awake was that my feverish symptoms were gone, but the feeling weird and the brain fog was still there -- and the heaviness/muscle and joint aches were far more pronounced than they were before I'd fallen asleep. They weren't awful, but the closest sensation I can describe them as is that it felt like I'd worked outside in the yard all day or had a particularly hard workout at the gym. I know that sentence structure is screwy, but you get the gist. These symptoms persisted the rest of the night and into the overnight hours, and were still around when I went to bed with Daisy in the middle of the night.
Sunday, April 18:
PTO, day two.
When I awoke around noon, most of the aches were gone. I still felt very "out of it," though. Like, I'm not sure I can describe what it feels like to be roofied, because I've never been roofied, but I would imagine it feels like coming out of a haze when it wears off. It took me a good chunk of the day to come out of the haze and feel somewhat normal again. My body still feels a little stiff and sore in places, but it's not an active background ache all over like it was yesterday.
It took until the evening and partially into the overnight hours before the brain fog fully burned off -- so, about 36 hours. I'm still tired and still a little sore, but it is a leaps-and-bounds improvement over yesterday and last night. Daisy reports that she felt about the same as I did, with the addition of the aforementioned nausea, and is now coming out of it just as I have.
May 1st will be the day where we can count ourselves as officially as "fully protected" as the vaccine will make us, since that'll be two weeks to the day after receiving shot #2. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is something like 80% effective after the first dose, which jumps to 90-95% effective two weeks after the second dose, so I like those odds. Still, we're not all out of the woods yet -- apparently the new South African variant can't be stopped by the vaccines, and is also pretty nasty to boot. The jury is still out (as of the moment, anyway) on the efficacy against the Brazilian variant too. If either of those become dominant strains, we'll likely have to go through all this pandemic quarantine horseshit all over again. If that happens, well, if you think our economy is fucked now....
Still, power of positive thinking and all that.
I likely could have worked tonight, but I didn't know that when I put in the PTO a few weeks ago. It feels good to have a Sunday night off again, for once; it gives me a bit of breathing space and some much-needed downtime. It also gave me some more time with the wife this weekend, which is always good.
Monday, April 19:
Working from home, day 241.
Back to the grind, I suppose.
The wife is working from home this week again, though she is starting a modified schedule where soon, every Friday she will be in the office regardless. I mean, we're vaccinated at this point so it's not a huge deal, but I still think it's rather risky to start the "back to the office" migration for anyone at this point. The end of summer would likely be far more reasonable for companies to start doing this, and even then may be too soon.
When I wake up in the afternoon, I stumble to the bathroom in a daze, and once I finish, the wife tells me "Look outside, it's snowing."
It's snowing?
It's April 19th, and yesterday the temperature was in the 60s.
I look outside and, what do you know, it's goddamn snowing.
Look, I understand that Omaha is a lot further north than I used to live (on a pure north/south scale, Omaha is the furthest "north" I've ever lived), but it's not like I'm living in Canada or something. It should not be snowing on April 19.
Now mind you, in Wichita, on May 12, 2014, it was snowing like hell when I gave my final classes of students their final exams during my last semester as a professor.
There's still no excuse for any of it. I'm really close to just becoming a flat-out climate change denier until I actually see some sort of actual change that's supposed to be happening (i.e., warming, making temperatures/weather/climate in Nebraska year-round be more like that of Florida).
(Minus the hurricanes, of course).
(I'm also kidding about this, of course -- I know climate change is a real thing.)
The other thing that happened today was Daisy's delivery of soil and river rock for landscaping and for the garden. This was planned in advance -- a few weeks in advance -- and was paid for with our stimulus money (at not a small fee, really).
Upon delivery, the truck did two things incorrectly:
1) it backed up way too close to our garage door to dump it, and
2) the truck's "separator" mechanism to keep the rocks and soil separate failed spectacularly and dumped all of it at once in one big pile, with some/most of it against our garage door.
I was fucking livid. I still am livid.
The dump truck operator realized what had happened as soon as it happened and immediately called his boss. After a few phone calls and discussions back and forth with the wife -- because you bet your ass it would have gone differently if I were the one talking to them and not her -- they refunded the rock delivery portion and will be sending someone back out to re-deliver it correctly.
In addition, they sent out a worker to move/remove the rock that's there and will be hiring other worker(s) to come out tomorrow, likely, to get what remains off the garage door and surrounding area -- so that we can get in and out of the garage. I am sincerely hoping that they did not damage the garage door itself, or you bet your ass I will be pursuing some sort of legal action for repairs.
Tuesday, April 20: Working from home, day 242
Wednesday, April 21: Working from home, day 243
Thursday, April 22: Working from home, day 244
Friday, April 23: Day off.
Saturday, April 24: Day off.
I did not sit down here and write on any of these days.
Sunday, April 25:
Working from home, day 245.
It's becoming more and more frequent that I don't have the time or motivation to do much at all anymore but eat, sleep, and work -- and then, on my days off, to try to take care of everything else I didn't have time to do all week. That generally also involves getting roped into doing whatever the wife needs me to to -- which, this weekend, was exhausting myself and injuring my arm helping the wife move a full ton of soil from the driveway to the garden (more on this later) and mowing the front yard for the first time this year. I don't know where all my energy is going but it's certainly not being channeled into anything I want it to be. Instead, it feels like a whirlpool, being drained out of me like water out of a tub.
I don't know if any of you have heard of the spoons analogy before, or "spoon theory" as it is sometimes called. If not, here's a helpful diagram:
Let's go through an average day for me, which would automatically start with 11 spoons instead of 12, because I never sleep well.
I get out of bed, I get dressed, I take my pills, and I shower -- that alone is 5 spoons, so I'm down to 6.
I generally use the internet for a bit; that's two more -- I'm down to 4.
I generally make and eat at least one meal a day, so that's three more -- 1 left.
While I eat, I generally watch a little TV -- that's my last spoon. Before I even work.
If I do "light housework" like laundry, feeding the cats, getting the mail, unloading or reloading the dishwasher, or any attempts at trying to clean anything, I'm well into the negatives before I even start work for the night. I also count "drive somewhere" as "leave the house for any reason" in this scenario. On a "hustle Tuesday" or a night where Daisy wants me to run errands with her after she gets off work, I could be close to -10 spoons sometimes before I even start my night at work.
Also note that there's no activity on that chart that "adds spoons back" to your running daily count; once they're gone, they're gone.
Not all days feel this extreme, but a lot of them do. Going by this chart alone I don't think it's possible for me to have a day that doesn't end with me having at least a -5 to -8 spoon count, even days I don't work.
Now if we all get 12 spoons a day, and your negative overage bleeds into the next day, and the next, and the next...how far into the negatives do you think I am by the end of any given month? quarter? year?
Again, you can't add spoons back. And what about particularly bad nights at work? Is that 6 spoons? 8?
I digress.
The rocks and soil order was sorted out; they gave Daisy a refund for the rocks, separated them all from the soil, and took them away the next morning. The garage door is fine. They'll be delivering a second shipment of the rocks for free at the end of the month. They were also kind enough to move the soil to the side of the driveway so that Daisy could get the car in and out of the garage normally. So, they were very conciliatory and they made it right.
Daisy and I spent a good chunk of yesterday moving that soil to the backyard (just us, two shovels, and a wheelbarrow) and to the two garden beds we needed it for, and later, while I mowed the front yard, took a shower, and took my Saturday nap, she was able to finally get some of our first garden plants into the ground. In the process, with all the shoveling, I somehow pulled a muscle in my arm (in what feels like my tricep, specifically) or I've otherwise irritated some of the tendons in there. Said arm hurts/aches, and I am not a fan of any of it. It's no worse than any of the other run-of-the-mill muscle soreness I've had, though.
Tonight I start the first full week of work I've worked in three weeks, and it's a month of full weeks now until I get to Memorial Day weekend. We still don't have any plans for that week. I need some actual breathing space that'll give me real downtime and time to think before I make any actual plans, if we do.
Monday, April 26:
Working from home, day 246.
Full Moon.
My parents are selling the house in West Virginia.
Well, eventually.
Look, let's face facts here; my parents aren't getting any younger. My dad is having cataract surgery on Friday. They're both retired. They can't afford to keep up two properties and keep going between them (the house in WV, and the beach house in NC) several times per year. They can barely take care of both houses now, let alone 10 or 15 years down the road -- if both of them are still alive at that point.
I called my parents yesterday and spent an hour with them on the phone. They'll likely sell the house in the late summer or fall, and from that point will be down in North Carolina permanently. I still have some things in that house -- not a lot, but some things, like my old PC (that I can now strip the hard drive out of and recover the data from, with that neat little dock thing I have) as well as a nice, expensive 3-disc DVD player -- that I'll need to collect and bring back home. It's likely that the parents will let me bring some other stuff back too, stuff they don't need or don't have any storage for. Still, it's not like we have a moving van, it's just our little car.
I gave my boss heads up on this trip tonight so that he's aware with some level of certainty that it'll be happening at some point this summer, and he understands/gets the need to do it. I haven't been back home since 2017, which was before we bought this house AND before my grandmother died, so it's been some time. This will also, likely, be the last trip Daisy and I make to West Virginia for many years, if ever again -- once my parents are gone, we lose our anchor for going back there again. Oh sure, I have friends and family in WV still, but my parents and their house there is the hub out of which everything else operates. I'm not going to be so keen on returning to WV for family/friends visits if my parents aren't around and we'd have to operate out of a hotel. There's no point to that for me -- it ceases to be a fun adventure and ends up being more of a chore than anything else.
As tonight is a full moon, I braced for the worst at work, and ended up getting it -- on top of a dozen or more really stupid issues my team was working, around 3AM my home internet went hard down. I called it in to Cox and was told that we were part of an outage in our neighborhood and that the estimated time to repair (ETTR) was 7:38 AM. Around 6, this got bumped to 9:58 AM. Around 7:20, after the end of my shift and after I'd already resigned myself to "fuck it" mode and had already turned off my work computer and returned upstairs, I checked again and the ETTR had been bumped to 10:58 AM. When I checked a final time before just giving up and going to bed around 8:30, they had removed the concept of any ETTR altogether and said they didn't know when it would be fixed.
Tuesday, April 27:
Working from home, day 247.
Still under a full moon.
The internet restored, per my text message updates from Cox, around 10 this morning. It's been working fine ever since. Well, it's been fine since I've been awake this afternoon, at least.
It is a muggy, dreary day. It's likely we'll get some rain and a possible thunderstorm this evening, but nothing major; all of the severe stuff today isn't anywhere around us. It's interesting to note that it was five years ago today that I was still working dayshift when the last real tornado to roll through the Omaha area happened -- we were all crowded into the downstairs breakroom at our old, old office (a building that has now been closed and vacant since 2018) to shelter in place for half an hour, even though it was 3-5 miles away from our building and never touched down in town.
Aside from the downburst rain/hailstorm that took out our fence and retaining wall in 2019, we haven't really had any bad/severe weather in Omaha (at least not tornado-wise) for some time. I was telling my dad on the phone over the weekend that we've not had a really active tornado or spring storm season in multiple years, with the last moderately bad ones on record being the year before Daisy and I were married, the year of, and the year after -- so, really, 2013, 14, and 15.
"But," I added, "the longer we go without a nasty tornado season, the higher the chances are for one to happen."
Meteorogically, I have no idea if that's true. I don't have a fuckin' clue, to be honest with you. I just go with the odds. You go 6, 7, 8 years without a really bad tornado season and the odds say that you're due for one. We have had the occasional severe storm, but no real tornadoes to speak of in or around the city.
I'd just be happy for rain at this point; the mugginess in the air sucks and we're trying to get our garden going, so rain is kind of important for that.
Once I was at work in the overnight hours, the full moon reared its ugly head again, and this time a Cox planned maintenance took down me and two of our other employees for over an hour. This was not good as I had a LOT of stuff to do and knew before I was even halfway through my night that I wouldn't get a lunch hour anyway. Every bit of my job requires the internet to be working -- there's nothing I can do in the background for work stuff on my work computer without an active internet connection, at all -- I need access to multiple databases and servers to do every single part of my job; it can't be done any other way.
As a coda to my night, as I was wrapping everything up around 6:40 or so, we had one, monstrously-loud thunderclap that shook the doors and windows of the house....and nothing else.
Wednesday, April 28: Working from home, day 248
Thursday, April 29: Working from home, day 249
I didn't sit down at my computer and write on either of these days.
Friday, April 30:
Day off.
So here we are, at the end of April. As you know, Tuesday is generally my hustle day, but this week it was more today more than anything else. In the first four hours I was awake, I:
- Washed/dried two loads of laundry
- Put an entire basket of clean laundry away -- something I've been avoiding for the better part of a month
- Coordinated coverage for work, on a night I'm off, by having two people come in for OT (as I currently have two people out of office for various reasons)
- Tried to put together a grocery order that ended up being mostly negated by Daisy stopping at Target on the way home anyway
- Called my parents to check in with them after my dad's cataract surgery today (he's fine)
- Set up tentative plans to visit WV in the late summer
- Confirmed that my parents would still be in WV for Mother's Day, and ordered/shipped the Mother's Day stuff to my mother while on the phone with her
- Paid my cell phone bill
- Paid my Discover bill
- Paid my Cox bill
- Made plans with the wife for the remainder of the weekend.
The jury is still out on how many spoons I should count for all of this.
The PTO is in for the end of May, corresponding with our anniversary as well as Memorial Day, so I have hope on the horizon for some much-needed downtime. For me, the concept of "PTO" is a formality anyway, it's numbers on a screen that I enter in good faith so that my leadership is vaguely aware when I'm not going to be in. I'm salaried; I get paid the same whether I enter the PTO hours into the system or not -- and believe me, as much as it is tempting to abuse that system with a "let's not and say we did" mentality, I am far too honest and honorable to ever do that. I always put in my times accurately and fairly, though I am sure there are many salaried folks who do not when they take time off.
Then again, as you're probably aware, I always pride myself on being better than everyone else.
As an ending note for April, I'm announcing here the upcoming end to this very-long-running series of Isolation Diaries posts. These posts will end when one or more of the below happens:
1) I no longer work at home (pandemic-related or otherwise), and thus can't say I'm exactly in "isolation" anymore -- note that this is the least-likely of these scenarios
2) The pandemic ends and everything becomes fully open again -- including no masks, everything back to normal, etc -- unfettered travel resumes, borders reopen, people can go to movies and restaurants and bars and concerts again, the usual.
3) Eradication of Covid-19, in the vein of the eradication of stuff like Smallpox and Rinderpest (also unlikely, but more likely than it is for me to work in an office around other people again)
4) Any "majority combination" of the above three things.
Based on the current health climate -- not to mention how horribly the pandemic is going for India right now, with about 350k new cases every day -- I would imagine we still have a long way to go in order to get out of this mess, from a global perspective anyway. I find it appalling that the news media is talking about "wave two" and "wave three" of this virus having already happened -- nah fam, this is still the first wave of it. You can't have a wave two or three until the first one ends, and we've never ended the first one yet. The real "wave two" will likely come about six or eight months from now just when we all think we're safe and immune and life can get back to normal, and it will likely be worse than the first and will hit faster and harder due to the mutations these viral strains have picked up in the interim. It's like nobody reads history anymore.
Because of that, while I do expect this series of posts to end, I do not expect them to end anytime soon.
Get vaccinated. Do it now. It's free, they don't even ask you for your ID or any health insurance information or anything of the sort. Just go do it. If it later comes out that we'll all need an additional booster shot in the fall or winter months, cool, go get that too. I don't care what your thoughts on vaccines are, or your thoughts about the "new" technology of the M-RNA version of the vaccine, or what your opinions are on herd immunity, the side effects of the vaccine, your YouTube conspiracy theory research, or the risk of blood clots that the media played up waaaay higher than they responsibly should have -- my friend who had a relatively mild case of Covid got lots of horrific blood clots as a side effect of having had it; I promise you, it's better to get the shot than to get the virus and suffer.
Just go do it.
You want this world to get somewhat back to normal? Go get the fucking shots.
You want to spend Christmas with your family this year, and have them all still be alive? Go get the fucking shots, and make them do it too.
For you young millennials and gen Z people -- you like bars, concerts, and being able to freely get your sexual needs met via apps like Tinder and Grindr? Go get the fucking shots.
This pandemic is not the last one we'll see in our lifetimes. We will very likely see more, and will likely see worse ones.
On to May.
