The Isolation Diaries: Mission Focused in Talking to Myself

Here we are, all -- in glorious September. Please keep all hands inside the vehicle.



Tuesday, September 1:
Working from home, day 98.

Despite how it may seem sometimes, I do try to keep a very positive outlook on life. Sometimes that's easier said than done, of course. As we enter September I am reminded that fall is coming, that football is coming, that cooler, hoodie weather is on the way. My hair may be going grayer and I may feel constantly fatigued, but there are indeed things to look forward to even when the rest of the world is awful. Fall is a big one for me. I'm looking forward to being able to turn off the air conditioner, leave our windows cracked or open 24/7 when we're home, watching football and eating football food, Halloween, pumpkin spice, and voting for a president who won't be a demented, racist asshole. You know, fall stuff.

Because I have taken a little time off around Labor Day, Daisy and I have made some rough plans for some adventure time this weekend -- this includes visiting and hiking through a forest/national park sort of area on the southern edge of town. We have to finalize these plans, of course; I dunno when we're going to do this or what day, but seeing as she'll have a three-day weekend and I'll have a five-day weekend, we'll have time.

"Do you want me to take Friday off too so we can have more time together or did you just need that day to decompress and get alone time?" she asked me last night.

"Go ahead and work Friday," I said, though I felt a bit bad about it. "I desperately need that downtime to not have anyone around and to not have anything work or social to do."

And I do, folks. I still feel bad about it, but I do need that time to be able to hit the pause button on life, to be able to perhaps finally order a pizza or watch a movie or just be able to do some chores around the house without feeling like I'm burning time that I should be using for other things, or sleeping, or both. If my five-day schedule has taught me anything, it's that while I've traded an extra day off for shorter shifts and more time in the evenings with the wife, I now suffer from a near-constant state of burnout. It's why I'm sleeping until after 6 at night sometimes when previously I would get up for the day around 2 or 3. It's why on Fridays I still sleep all day, get up and spend a few hours with the wife, and then again pass out in the chair in the overnight hours -- it's exhaustion. It's not physical so much as it is mental and job-related.

In the morning, Daisy tells me that in the evening, she'd like us to take another walk. I tell her I can't promise I'll have the energy for it; my sleep cycles are fucked up, my nights at work have been hectic (I didn't get off work this morning until after 7:30, and can't remember the last morning when I actually left on time at 7) and relayed that's a decision I'll always have to make in the afternoon/evening no matter how nice it is for walking or what have you. Tonight is also garbage/recycling night where all that stuff needs to be taken out too, and that takes more time away from normal activities as well. When I awaken in the afternoon, it's around 3. I can't really sleep anymore, so I get up, shower and feed the cats, and let her know that if she still wants to walk, I can do it, but she has to get home ASAP in the evening so that we can do it, because again, it takes time. She does not reply.

I weigh in for the first of the month at two pounds heavier than I was two weeks ago; this was expected but still disheartening a bit. I've now basically lost all real progress I made in July with the juice diet, but I've also been eating like an asshole for the past few weeks on a semi-frequent basis. I don't know if I'll ever do the juicing thing again on a regular basis as it really messes with my metabolism and blood sugars, but for most of September I'm going to make a more conscious effort to, y'know, try to be a little healthier. More vegetables, more beans, rice, cut back on a lot of wheat and other carbs, etc. Less snacks where possible. It can't be an all the time thing because I start to feel trapped, but a conscious effort as possible.

The wife wants me to take off a few days next month around her mother's birthday; I tell her while that would be nice, I really don't want to burn any more PTO than I have to in the time before the holidays, because I want to be able to take the full week off for my birthday/Christmas and take most of the week off for Thanksgiving so that I'm not plagued by idiocy while I try to enjoy holiday time. I have enough to cover most of that now, but not all, and my brain is too tired to try to figure out PTO accrual schedules and expected time accrued between now and then. There's also a good chance I'll have to end up working both New Year's Eve and Day, as the Eve falls on a normally-scheduled night of work for me, and I always work New Year's Day as the one holiday I always volunteer for so that people don't bitch at me that I don't work holidays because I have "a family" or "a life outside the job."

If you got the biting sarcasm there, good; it was intended.

Anyway, once the wife returns home, I take out all the trash and recycling and then we go for our walk. We walk 1.19 miles in 20ish minutes. When we return home, I drink some coffee and some other fluids and listen to The Airborne Toxic Event via the Alexa for a while to decompress.

The night at work is semi-hectic at times; the 2nd shift teams get creamed again and they call in one of my second-half-of-week 3rd shifters in to work OT until 12-1 or so. I never have a problem with this, but it would be nice if I were ever told when it's that bad. Generally I'm not so occupied as to where I can't login and help out. The overnight hours go mostly smoothly, and I only work 10-15 minutes past the end of my shift in the morning.



Wednesday, September 2:
Working from home, day 99.

So close to day 100 yet not close enough. Day 100 for me will be Tuesday. It originally would've been tomorrow, but y'know, PTO. As my long weekend nears ever closer, I can feel it. My mood changes a bit. I get more energy. My appetite returns. I get more twitchy. I feel excitement and a bit of optimism. My give-a-shit meter at for work runs pretty dry as well -- I just want my night ahead of me to go as quickly and painlessly as possible. I begin making a to-do list in my head for the stuff that I know I'll actually have time and decompression space to take care of on my days off. I don't write it here because I can't commit myself to anything if it doesn't get done, because I know that my energy levels are on a big ebb and flow basis.

After a delightful temperature of 72 last night when the wife and I took our walk, and a low in the fifties last night, today it is...95 degrees. Because Nebraska. It's supposed to be the same throughout the entire weekend that I'll be off, which seriously endangers our outdoorsy plans for the long weekend.

When I wake up in the afternoon -- far earlier than normal, around 2 -- I am hungry and restless. I go downstairs to take care of the cats, bring in the mail, and get the trash/recycling bins in. I don't make food until shortly before the wife returns home, primarily because I didn't have anything to eat this morning for breakfast (last time I ate was about 3pm) and I just can't wait any more. My dinner is (somewhat) healthy, at least -- white rice with the last of my soy nuggets in it with soy sauce, and some pita chips and hummus. There are far worse things in the house for me to eat, and I take pride in at least trying to eat a little healthily when I make meals for myself.

When the wife returns home we watch the entirety of Kevin Smith: Silent, But Deadly on Amazon Prime. She actually really enjoys it, and I didn't think she would from the get go, but I'd watched a good chunk of it before she got home and thought to myself Daisy really needs to watch this with me, because it's hysterical. So, we watched the last 25ish minutes of it together and then restarted it from the beginning so she could see the whole thing.

The night at work is fairly hectic; lots of idiocy flying about. I am still forced to work half an hour after my shift is supposed to end, as the morning went crazy. But, once I was finished, you bet your ass I logged off and stayed as far from work as possible.



Thursday, September 3:
Day off. Day one of five-day holiday weekend.

I pass out in my chair in the morning, at least for a while. When I awaken, I have ear pain and a sore jaw, as well as a very dry throat/irritated tonsils feeling that I can't get to go away. My guess is that I was snoring very hard and had my head in a really weird position, and all of my allergy drainage, well, drained. I get up, drink some water, and move to the bed, where I sleep for a few more hours. It still takes a few hours after I get up for good to make the dry throat feeling go away.

The wife returns home and we go out walking. It's hot and sticky -- worse than Tuesday, when we last did it -- and this exhausts me even more. Returning home, I have some pretty bad intestinal distress that sidelines me for most of the evening hours. By the time that Daisy finishes making dinner, I eat about ten or so bites of it before I have to run to the bathroom again for one of the most painful experiences in recent memory. It wasn't the food, of course, but my body. After I'm done, shaky and sweaty, I put away the food to eat tomorrow and go back upstairs, where I eventually fall asleep in the chair while listening to Joe Rogan, praying to whatever powers there are that my stomach doesn't explode on me again.



Friday, September 4:
Day off. Day two of five-day holiday weekend.

I awaken slightly before 7am. I am not energetic, I am not particularly well-rested. I have to go to the bathroom again, before the wife awakens, and I am so fearful of doing so due to the pain and discomfort of the night before. It is painful but not as bad as the night before. I feed the cats, put on a load of laundry, and balance the checkbook while the wife gets ready, and leaves, for work.

By the afternoon hours I have been to the bathroom three times (less painful each time), and I have ordered a ton of supplies for around the house from Amazon -- cat food, laundry detergent, vitamins, etc. and have paid my bills. I have also put away the previous laundry, done three more loads of blankets, bedsheets, bathroom shower curtain and rugs, couch blankets, and have unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher. I have eaten a lunch, watched two episodes of Watchmen, and scrubbed out the cats' water fountain (breaking the front off the water pump while doing so, but meh, I ordered a replacement one today anyway since the old one is starting to go wonky). Eating lunch made me tired, but eh, it was/is too hot to mow the front yard anyway; I can do it in the morning on one of the next three days. By the late afternoon hours I have also unloaded and reloaded/ran the dishwasher again, bleached and double-washed/rinsed the white shower curtain liner, reorganized my storage ottoman, and drank probably a full liter of iced coffee to keep my energy going.

I did not mention last night that finally, after an entire six months or so of not being able to do it after I upgraded this PC, I did some finagling with the driver settings and actually got my favorite strategy game to boot up and run on this computer again. I was so happy I almost cried; I called the wife upstairs to show her because I'd been fighting with this computer to try to get it to run again for so long.

I don't know if I can properly describe to you the feelings of loss I felt when I lost the ability to play my game; it is what I did to decompress, to de-stress, what I did when I wanted to put my podcasts on in my earbuds and just fucking detach from the rest of the world. Not being able to play it was a large part of my depression -- I suddenly no longer had an outlet with which to decompress. In a pandemic, when you're stuck inside a lot, and especially when one works from home, being able to get away from everything and everyone else and slip into another world is very, very therapeutic. Yes, it may seem childish. I don't disagree with that. But it is vital to my mental health. Listening to podcasts while playing the game is vital to that too, but I have 300+ gigabytes of podcasts to listen to; I'm five years behind on some of them. I have but one game I can play on this PC, and it's that one.

It feels good to take the Friday to do household chores and to try to decompress. It's been so long. While I wait for the laundry to finish, I reflect on time past -- it has not escaped me that it has been ten years almost to the day (the official date was a few days back) when I went back to school at Wichita State to get my Master's. I have a lot of mixed feelings about late 2010. It was uncharted territory for me -- my girlfriend at the time, and I, had moved 200 miles away from anyone we knew and were pretty much without a safety net. I was entering grad school after a five year hiatus; she had never had a hiatus between high school and college, or college and grad school. For me, everything was new and exciting, and returning to academia after having been away so long was like coming back home. I was meeting new people, making new friends, and beginning a new purpose in life after, well, several years of working grocery store jobs just to get by and help pay the bills. At the same time, it was a bit frightening -- I'd taken a leap of faith not knowing where I'd land after all was said and done three years later. And, truth be told, I landed in a much different spot than I thought I would, so different that I can't even tell you now where I thought I'd be compared to where I ended up because I don't even accurately remember. It is what it is, I suppose.

Onward.

I mentioned previously that I would stop the archiving of the CDs after batch 14 finished in...like, July? I think, and then revisit the possibility or the interest as a whole again in the fall. With the exception of the four or five Stevie Ray Vaughan CDs I purchased about a month ago (comprising "batch 15"), that has indeed been the case. Well, it is now September, and after careful consideration and perusal of what I've archived so far, as well as my sense of accomplishment but overall "meh" feeling that I just wasn't getting large amounts of what I wanted, just some interesting stuff here and there...tonight I ordered batches 15, 16, and 17. They arrive sometime between now and the end of the month.

I do plan for those to be the end of the archiving for the year; whether I decide to continue in 2021 once this Coronavirus shit goes away and I can actually leave the house to do things again remains to be seen. However, there was something psychologically fulfilling about taking up the torch again. Perhaps it was because, even though I've purchased a lot of "around the house" stuff recently, I've not gotten anything fun just for me, or rather...it's all been needs, not wants. Even if they've been want-ish things -- for example, a new pair of sandals I got last week -- they've been to replace old things (I've had two pairs of older sandals blow out on me this summer, one pair of which literally fell apart). As I've mentioned here before in far more words, I could buy any number of t-shirts or hoodies I wanted, but they become meaningless when I'm cooped up in the house and nobody sees them but me. I have stacks of books to read. I have movies I purchased months or even years ago that I've literally never watched. I don't need to buy any more "novelty" foods or anything like that as they'll just make me fatter, and I don't have anyone to buy gifts for aside from little things here and there for my parents -- Daisy has explicitly asked me not to get anything for her for Christmas this year. Most of my purchases are needs or supplies to support the house; I almost never get anything fun for me anymore. I even canceled (or let expire) five or six comic subscriptions this year. About the only "large" purchase I have on the horizon is to get a new phone eventually, and I've been putting that off as long as possible so that I can try to avoid the expense of doing so. In the light of abandoning my "one small purchase every day" retail therapy idea, the CD archiving project really does give me something to do, something to look forward to, and it's something I can do just for me. Few things make me more excited than being able to leave my desk on my lunch hour (well, when I get those, anyway) to come upstairs and archive three or four more discs out of the stacks, knowing that on each one I could get something mind-blowingly good that I've never heard before.

Anyway. In the evening, Daisy tells me she wants us to get cat litter and go to Whole Foods, and asks if that's something I want to do with her. I tell her sure; we have maybe two hours to do it before the stores close in the evening. Ten minutes later, I hear her vacuuming. As in, vacuuming the whole house.

I step out of my room. "So we're not going anywhere tonight, are we?"

"Do you want to go somewhere tonight?"

"...."

"What?"

"We have less than two hours before the stores close; I doubt we'd be able to get what we needed in that time."

"Okay, good," she says, "because I just ate two of those coffee CLIF bars, and they both have an espresso shot in them, and now I'm hyper and ADD and really just want to vacuum the house and then clean the entire bathroom top to bottom and--"

I stop her. "Good," I say. "Do that."

I know that this will be the most energy and enthusiasm I'll be able to get out of Daisy to do anything of this nature anytime soon, so I, ahem, let her use the force.

Some time later, when it's clear that she is going to spend hours cleaning the bathroom, I tell her just to focus on that while she has the energy, I don't need to eat (I'm not exactly hungry anyway) and I pass out in my chair.



Saturday, September 5:
Day off. Day three of five-day holiday weekend. 

When I awaken in the morning, it's almost 8. The bathroom is spotless. It's super-well-organized and as clean as it was the day we moved into the house -- possibly cleaner. I am impressed.

I make food and feed the cats, and finish watching Star Wars Rebels. The ending is fine, but feels really rushed. Like, really rushed. It almost feels like they ran out of money to make the series (which, since it's Disney, definitely was not the case) or that the writers just lost interest in making sure it was wrapped up in a truly satisfying way. Like I said, it was fine -- could've been way better, though. That's the curse of being a writer and an intelligent one at that: being disappointed with the way some of your favorite media is written. Rebels was a series that could have gone on for ten seasons or more, introduced new characters and a new focus, told backstories of the characters in the universe, or let the fans see what was going on in the background while the main series canon played out in the movies. It ended far before its time. Oh well.

When the wife awakens, we discuss our plans for the day. Because of the extreme heat (95+ degrees with searing sun), any actual outdoor adventure plans we had -- hiking, sightseeing, exploring a forest or state park -- end up boiling down to, more than anything else, "getting in the car, driving in a random direction, and seeing what we find."

Mind you, this is generally the opposite of what I consider to be a fun trip -- I like to plan things, I like to go somewhere with a destination in mind as well as a reason for doing it. Most of the time I am not spontaneous enough to just jump in the car and go wandering, especially as there is not a lot in Nebraska to wander to. Once you're outside of the cities, there's next to nothing in this state but like...trees and corn fields. And Trump supporters.

We end up driving west for a while. When we hit a junction, we turn south for probably 30ish miles, a scenic route along the Platte River, passing a few state parks (full of people) and a few RV parks that we couldn't even drive into without paying a fee. Turning around, the town of Syracuse, NE ends up being our destination, partially because we didn't know it existed and partially out of a sense of adventure to see what was there.

The answer to that question, by the way, is nothing. There is nothing in Syracuse, NE. There's a truckstop, a Godfather's Pizza, and a Dollar General. And farmland. Nothing fun, nothing to do, no end to our adventure. We decide to turn back east and head towards Nebraska City. At this point we're basically driving in a big square around the southeast quadrant of the state.

We reach Nebraska City. It is a gorgeous old historic town, and the town where Arbor Day was founded/started. This means, of course, that there are parks, and that there are trees. We find a large, beautiful park area with lots of shade from giant trees, and walk through it.

The wife, of course, takes pictures of many things. She is an amateur photographer anyway, and loves documenting our journeys together, including with pictures of both of us. I am sweaty and hot but in good spirits, and she takes many photos of us together (two of these, different ones, are our Facebook profile photos right now). We finally get the outdoor adventure we were planning, despite the heat (and how tired we were).

More than that, the road trip serves -- and has always served -- a greater purpose, and that purpose is to just talk and be with one another with no distractions. Daisy and I have always had our most intimate conversations, the ones where we share our hopes and fears and thoughts and opinions on anything and everything, on road trips. Generally they're longer trips than this one, but still. Road trips allow us to decompress and just loosen up, without stress, to let us be ourselves -- the person each of us respectively fell in love with. As such, road trips with Daisy are a magical thing.

When we return to Omaha (close to a 50-mile drive back north, completing the square) we stop at the grocery store to pick up some essentials and then return home.



Sunday, September 6:
Day off. Day four of five-day holiday weekend. 

We sleep late, both of us getting up in the early afternoon hours. I don't do much, I just try to let Daisy do her own thing for most of the day -- she deserves some downtime too. In the evening, We go to Walmart, where Daisy picks up some garden supplies and I pick up diet Mtn Dew, two new pillows (finally) and some Tums, and we get a LOT of paint samples as Daisy wants to repaint one or both bathrooms, and then we go pick up cat litter for the month at the local PetSmart.

Upon returning home, I shower and do some laundry, and we end the night by watching most of the finale of the first season of Married at First Sight -- watching this show, we've found, actually helps our marriage a lot because we can pause it and ask each other questions about how we'd handle a certain scenario or what have you. When she's too tired to watch more, we come back upstairs and she showers. My big black cat comes in the room with me and lays down on my feet while I sit in my chair playing on my phone, and he conks out -- for over four hours. It's the longest he's ever been in my room (I don't let him in, generally, because he wants to explore and get into things). I eventually fall asleep in my chair for a while, even though that wasn't my intention, and get up around 5 to take myself (and the cat) to bed.

I would also like to note -- and Daisy will curse this statement in a few weeks when she reads this post -- this night is the last Sunday until February without NFL football constantly on the television.

Unless, like, the Coronavirus starts killing a bunch of players and they cancel the season, or something.



Monday, September 7:
Day off. Labor Day. Last day of the holiday weekend.

I shake the bed at 8am because the wife is snoring so loudly that she woke me from a dead sleep. I can sleep though people entering the house, sleep through tornado sirens, sleep through the cats literally crawling on top of me, doors slamming, phones ringing, neighbors doing yard work, construction work or car alarms going off in the neighborhood, you name it -- I cannot sleep through her snoring. I'm sure this says something about me, but I'm doubly sure it says something about her snoring.

I used to sleep through trains passing by the house when I lived in Kansas City. Just a reminder there.

We both get up for the day in the late morning/early afternoon hours, Daisy pays her bills, and we eventually make our way over to the parents' to see them, as we've been planning to do so all weekend. We spend a few socially-distanced hours with them, our masks on the whole time, before leaving to go to Aldi to pick up a few small things before coming home.

We end the evening by watching three episodes in a row of Married at First Sight while eating a mostly healthy dinner of vegetables -- supplemented a bit with half a loaf of fresh-baked bread from Daisy's mother. It is a nice, quiet night at home, which gets even better once the temperature plummets like a stone and the rain starts. It's supposed to be cold and rainy throughout the rest of the week, which suits me fine. September means hoodies and possible bathrobe weather.

When Daisy eventually goes to bed around 1, I stay up for a while listening to podcasts and playing my game on my computer, in an attempt to stay up as late as possible so that I can sleep as long as possible tomorrow to reset my sleep schedule for the rest of the work week. This works....somewhat, as around 2AM I get too tired to stay awake any longer no matter what I do, and I doze off in my chair. The first time I wake up, around 3-4, I force myself to get up and go to bed, joining the wife and the cats.

And so ends my vacation.



Tuesday, September 8:
Working from home, day 100(!)

When I wake up, I don't know what time it is. I know that the wife is not in bed and is more than likely already at work, but it's so dark that it could also still be the middle of the night and she could be in the bathroom, or something. I look at the clock to see that it is almost noon and the room/house is as dark as if it were 5am. My eyes hurt. My body aches as if someone has beaten me. I can't breathe out of my nose. Of course, all of this means that it's raining/storming and my allergies are attacking me.

Getting up, the outside is so dark it might as well be night. Streetlights are kicking on. It's pouring rain. Thunder is rumbling and rattling the windows. This trend continues all day long as we have multiple thunderstorms and heavy rain rolling through the area. The temperature outside is 46 degrees -- possibly the coldest September day I've ever experienced. I make some breakfast and take a shower, and check my work email to see what's going on (remarkably little for the day after a holiday). The wife sends me a posting for a company I've been interested in previously, and I apply for it.

I get two shipment notifications -- one that batches 15, 16, and 17 have shipped, with an expected arrival date of the 21st (here's hoping they don't take that long to get here) and the second being the last juice order I'll ever make from Vapewild.com. Why the last? Well, because they're closing their doors and their last day of business is tomorrow.

Those of you who have known me for a long time probably know my history with Vape Wild. They are singlehandedly responsible for my quitting smoking. When I first began vaping it was Vape Wild who offered the juices, hardware, and coils I wanted at the prices I wanted, and over the years I probably spent at least $1000 with them. I own Vape Wild t-shirts, even. They had the best selection and best customer service I've ever seen from any vape company, and I was a very, very loyal customer.

And then the dark times came. Sales stopped being frequent. Coupon codes disappeared. The flavors I liked -- all but two or three -- were discontinued one by one over the course of a year or two, citing their inability to get the ingredients for them. The YouTube videos stopped. The face of the company, the owners and their creative directors, who were all very active on the Facebook fan page, began quitting, being laid off, or plain just disappeared. There were rumblings in the community that the company had been bought out, but nobody knew by whom. Finally, it was proven in a few news posts/articles shared within the group that the company had been purchased by a big tobacco conglomerate (I believe it was R.J. Reynolds Altria Group, but I could be wrong) with the express purpose of selling off all old stock and shutting it down for good.

I was, like many other supporters, furious. I became even more furious when the company was called out on this multiple times and they remained silent and ignored it. I burned up the last of my store credit I had on one last order and left the Facebook group. I unsubscribed from their email list. Having my favorite vape company who helped me quit smoking more than anyone or anything else be purchased by a big tobacco conglomerate to shut it down seemed like the most 2020 thing that 2020 could pull.

That was a few months ago, however. I also remembered that for big holidays they always did big holiday sales, and sometimes (not always) in those sales they would bring back long-discontinued flavors for a limited time and in limited quantities. So, I figured, worth a shot to take a look over the weekend. I didn't necessarily want to give them my money anymore but I do very much miss those discontinued flavors. It was then that I discovered that they were indeed completely shutting down, and that their last day of operations was Wednesday the 9th.

They had but one of the flavors I liked left in stock, at $4 a bottle (normally $7). I purchased sixteen bottles (I didn't spend $64, there's a bulk discount and my entire order, with shipping, was about $40) and told them I wished them well in the "customer comment" field of the order. It arrives sometime between now and Friday. I won't need juice for a while, but once it's gone, it's gone.

And so life goes on. They're not the first company I loved which closed its doors, they're just one of many. Thinkgeek, National Record Mart, Kmart, Hastings, Hills, Ames, Value City, several different grocery and restaurant chains, etc.

The night will be a long one, I predict even in the afternoon hours. Going back to work on a night after a holiday weekend, especially when I'm coming back from "vacation" is going to be interesting. It's also going to be hard to stay awake, so in the late afternoon and early evening I begin pounding the coffee. I break it up with some water as well, so I don't overly dehydrate myself, but I absolutely need the coffee. Each time I have to bounce back to my normal working schedule after a long weekend or holiday it feels harder than the last.

I mentioned earlier in the weekend that I've had some...disturbing intestinal distress as of late. I don't know why. It comes and goes, and doesn't especially seem related to what I eat or when. Sometimes I'll be okay for a few days and then out of the blue I am sidelined hard by it. Other times I will get violently ill within an hour or two after I eat and it will dominate the next 12 hours or so before finally going away -- again, what I eat doesn't seem to be a factor, it can happen anytime, whether I've eaten like an asshole or extremely healthily. I'm beginning to wonder if I have IBS or something similar. I'm also extremely paranoid a lot of the time, especially if the intestinal distress has been prevalent lately, about eating at all. Especially eating before, say, a full shift at work. There have been nights (thankfully, not crazy busy ones) where I've been forced to run to the bathroom five or six times over the course of an eight-hour shift.

I'm sure none of you really needed to know this, but the wife has asked me to write more about my thoughts and feelings here in these posts, so, here you go.

I often wonder who still reads this blog. There are friends I haven't talked to in years -- well, "friends" in name only at this point, more than likely -- who used to read it all the time. I never really publicized the blog's existence, unlike my old "The Criminally Goofy" blog from close to...christ, almost twenty years ago now, which I shared with everyone in the hopes that it would somewhat make me famous (it did, for a while, in certain circles, for many of the wrong reasons). I know there are friends back home, and in certain other circles, who are aware of this blog's existence, but who knows if any of them still read it -- or ever really "followed" it in the first place. It's fine, I guess. My writing isn't for everyone, and not everyone needs to know who I am or what I'm doing all the time. Nor should everyone care. I used to have a tracker app that showed me where all my blog's hits were coming from, and it was discontinued several years ago, so I now have no clue if anyone is reading these posts at all.

For all intents and purposes, I'm literally writing into the ether, into cyberspace, for almost nobody but myself. I disabled comments here a long time ago (primarily to cut out the spam, but also because, well, I don't really care if people agree or disagree with me) so I am essentially talking to myself. I'm not exactly looking for validation in any sense of the word, but back in the day it was nice to have a friend message me out of the blue every once in a while to say "that post was hilarious" or somesuch. Back in the day, my parents used to read the blog, and I'd get an email or a text from my mother telling me the same, or asking a question, or what have you. My mother confirmed with me several months ago that she doesn't even have the link anymore and hadn't read the blog since before Daisy and I were married. That's probably for the best, actually. My sister -- the one who just had heart surgery -- used to read it too. If she still does it would greatly surprise me.

One of my other two sisters -- this one related by blood (we share a father) is getting married this week. I am not sure exactly what day. I think I got an invite for it and sent back the RSVP that I wouldn't attend, sadly, which I'm sure she already knew, but I really don't remember any of that process. I'm bad at that sort of thing. I'm in contact with this sister sporadically, more than probably anyone else in my extended family. She's a frontline nurse during this pandemic, is very comfortable and stable in life, owns much better house(s)/property/vehicle(s) than we do, and it is very clear that she's done well for herself. Now, at age 29 -- I know because I was in the hospital the night she was born -- she is getting married to what seems to be an all around good guy, and I couldn't be happier for her. We've connected a little more here and there over the years since we've both been adults, but we're very much strangers to each other. In our older years (read: once her parents are dead) we'll probably become much closer. However, right now we just lead our own lives. I'd like to connect with her and meet up with her for the first time as adults when I visit back home next time -- there are several people on my father's side of the family I'd like to see -- but who knows when that will be in the cards. Family is very important to me, and there's an entire side of my family I barely know.

Anyway, moving forward.

Once I login, the night at work is fairly well balanced, actually. No major incidents occur, nothing keeps me there late, and I simply do my job and log off in the morning.



Wednesday, September 9:
Working from home, day 101. 

I literally pass out in my chair in the morning before 8:30. I force myself to get up around 11 and go to bed, where I sleep until after 3pm. When I awaken, I'm hungry, so I go downstairs to feed the cats and get something to eat.

I've received a few comics in the mail over the past few days, mostly DC stuff, but not the DC stuff I've been waiting on (my issues of Batman Giant and Superman Giant). I'll get them eventually, I'm sure. All of their organizational stuff has straightened out at this point, so we're now just playing catch up. Interestingly enough, my Batman subscription auto-renewed today, and for Marvel, my Fantastic Four subscription renewed yesterday. No updated shipping info is available for my next set of archive CDs yet -- still says 9/21.

I received an email almost immediately after applying for the position the wife found and sent my way, and I have an initial phone screen set up for it now on Friday, the 25th at 8am -- right after I get off work for the morning. I'm fine with this. I'm hoping it goes well but I'm also not holding out a lot of hope that this new job will be the right fit for me, nor will it be something I want to do. I'm also not sure that the pay will be sufficient even if it is something I want to do. There's a lot of variables.

Daisy makes a big vegetable stew for dinner, which is the perfect meal for when it's been this chilly -- we turned on the furnace for a while for the first time tonight, as the temperature has been in the 40s for the past two days with constant rain. Fall is nice, yes, but to go from 95+ and sun to 45 and rain for several days running is a big goddamn swing in weather, and makes my seasonal allergies positively scream. I've had more allergy issues this week than I have since spring.

The night at work is full of frustration and stress. Half the country is on fire, you know. And the stuff that's not is, well, stupid. I need to have a sit down with the directors, other operations managers, and our other operations and escalation folks to remind them -- and set it straight -- what my role is versus the roles of escalations and the roles of the Team Leads, because the organizational structure of our program is fucked and we need someone other than myself to follow the rules and pay attention to how things need to work. It seems that more and more recently, everyone acts like they're "checked out," like they just don't care how process works or what people are supposed to be doing and when, or how work is supposed to be delegated and dealt with, and then the few people who do care, like me, are left holding the bag and taking the blame when something goes wrong -- even if and especially when I had no part of what went wrong. I'm so, so tired of being used as a scapegoat and/or being set up to fail when, if people did what they were supposed to do, our jobs would be so much easier and the program wouldn't be on the verge of collapse.



Thursday, September 10:
Working from home, day 102.

I wake up with a lot of bodily aches and pains, probably due to the allergies more than anything else. I take a quick shower and run a load of laundry, then go downstairs to feed the cats and get the mail. My Vape Wild juice is here today, a day earlier than expected. There's no frills with it, no extra goodbye gifts, no "hey thanks for being a great customer for all these years" or anything like that -- just the juice in a mailer envelope and a receipt. Their website, by the way, is now offline.

The wife and I have a nice, quiet couch chat in the evening, leisurely-like. Our schedules clash so much on a daily basis that it is very, very nice to have more time with her in the evenings to just...be. I've felt really disconnected from her in our relationship sometimes as of late -- this is not her fault at all, and she hasn't done anything wrong -- it's my own stress levels and lack of sleep. It's this virus. It's depression, it's the weather, it's any number of things, really. Daisy is my safe space, she's my one bright spot when everything else sucks. I've tried to spend as much time with her as I can recently, be more agreeable, go on adventures with her, and just be together, because both of us really need it right now. I need and crave quality time with her and don't ever want to take it, or her, for granted.

We watch most of the first NFL game of the season -- Chiefs vs. Texans -- together tonight before work. And, thankfully, the night at work is really slow and quiet. I stick around for a few extra minutes in the morning to make sure everything is wrapped up properly before I leave and cease caring about anything that happens in that place until Sunday night.

Friday, September 11:

Day off. Payday. 19th anniversary of 9/11.

I actually have a lot to do this weekend, and it's sad that a lot of it is basically delayed by my need to actually sleep, which completely wastes one of my two days off. When I awaken in the afternoon, I do a load of the wife's laundry and force myself to get dressed and look respectable, as the wife gave us the go-ahead to finally be able to get pizza for dinner from our favorite pizza place here in town, and goddammit, I am mission-focused for pizza. As you folks know (as I've not made it a secret here in my posts over the past few months), I have not had an actual pizza from a pizza place since probably February, maybe even before that. Everyone panicked when the Coronavirus thing happened and restaurants started shutting down, fear was running at an all-time high, and the wife, ahem, basically wouldn't allow me to order pizza for fear of the virus. Then we basically went into lockdown and you know the history since.

There is a particular pizza I get from this pizza place, and for the past several years, my order has not changed -- it is an XL pizza with normal sauce, extra cheese (mozzarella and provolone), vegan sausage, big dollops of cream cheese, and sriracha poured all over it. It is my go-to; it is what I generally crave. The vegan sausage on it is a substitution (given my vegetarianism) for pepperoni, which is what the regular version has on it.

Tonight, however, it's not what I want. For one, it's expensive. For two, for the past two weeks or so I've been craving just a normal, New York pizzeria-style cheese pizza, with those big, floppy, foldable slices. I don't need anything fancy, I just need it to be like that. Our local pizza place we love is the only place out here in Omaha that I've known who does that style of pizza right. My fancy pizza above is done in the New York style too, but costs like $10-ish more than just a normal plain cheese. 

I tell the wife that she can get whatever she wants, but I want two large, plain cheeses -- one to eat now and one to eat over the next few days -- and that tonight, I'm just going to be unabashedly fat. 

Our meal also serves a secondary purpose -- Daisy is starting a whole foods, no oil, raw-as-possible (or some shit, I dunno) diet next week to help regulate her blood sugars and energy levels. She's trying it for four days (Mon-Thurs) and I am joining it with her, just to see what it's like. Unless I'm eating nothing but fruits and vegetables, this sort of "diet" doesn't do much for me. My own blood sugars are fine, and every blood test I've ever taken has told me I'm not diabetic, so whenever I go on a "diet" for one reason or another, it's primarily for weight loss -- and it has to be a livable, manageable diet. Sometimes that's easier than others, but I also have been blessed with a metabolism that is, interestingly enough, fairly adaptive to what I put into my body. It's not perfect -- I don't get like, miracle results or anything, but my metabolism is, indeed, fairly malleable. The wife's is...not. She has always had a big problem losing weight because of various (mostly minor) health conditions. My own problems losing weight have been primarily because I'm lazy, like to eat shitty food, have low testosterone, am constantly stressed/burnt-out/sleep-deprived, etc. Very big difference there. I have no doubt I could lose 100 pounds in a year if that was all I focused on. But, I have a really stressful, frustrating job, I barely sleep, and my low testosterone (even with treatment) keeps me from having the energy I need to really get up and be super-active. 

Anyway, we eat the pizza and watch two episodes of Married at First Sight, which as I've said before is really helpful to our marriage. We see people on this show making all sorts of rookie mistakes, and frequently pause it to discuss with one another. It's like our own form of relationship self-help and self-counseling. That's not to say our relationship is bad -- far from it; I've seen very, very few couples with a better relationship and/or marriage than me and Daisy -- but marriages require upkeep and check-ins with one another, and they are work. If you're not married, and even if you are, I'm sure you've heard that before. Even the best marriages require you to put in work; sometimes a lot of work, sometimes only a little, but they require work and discipline to maintain and keep it prosperous. Daisy and I understand that and neither of us ever shied away from that work. 

I'm actually putting together a post that'll be sort of like a marriage FAQ, and a list of tips and advice to help people thinking about getting married, or to help people work through some of their own issues with their current partner/spouse. I think I'll probably put it out at the end of the month alongside this post when I complete it.

After dinner and watching the show, Daisy goes to bed and I stay up reading some of my comics (which I seem to have less and less time to actually do these days) before sleeping a few disjointed hours in my chair. 

Saturday, September 12:

Day off. 

Today really starts the college football season in earnest, even though a few teams played last week. The college football season is a mutated version of what it normally is, given the Coronavirus and many schools' decisions not to play, or possibly have a later season in the spring (or some shit, I haven't really paid a lot of close attention to it as of late). WVU plays their season opener in Morgantown today, but I couldn't even tell you who they're playing because, again, haven't paid much real attention to anything recently. 

Also, the game is not televised anywhere I can actually watch it, so meh.

Around 10 or so I crawl back into bed with the wife to cuddle her and my cat as she's just waking up. Smash cut to 3:30 PM, when I awaken groggy and hot and have to pee really badly due to all the water and Mio I drank to rehydrate myself this morning when I took my pill. I also found that WVU won their season opener by a very large margin, which makes me happy. 

Daisy tells me she wants to go to the store to pick up stuff for her (read: our) diet this week. So, we do that, donning our masks to go to Trader Joe's. The diet is high carb, no oil, no sugar. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, really, but eh, I'm okay with the no oil, no sugar part of it.

Sunday, September 13:

Working from home, day 103.

I don't touch my personal computer today and don't write here.

Monday, September 14:

Working from home, day 104.

I awaken in the afternoon to find that the grand jury decision pertaining to charges on the death of James Scurlock (you know, the guy who was killed in protests here in Omaha by a racist white dude) is looming, and multiple protests and civil unrest is expected. Once I sit down at my computer I hear screaming sirens for close to twenty minutes straight all rocketing past my house heading towards the downtown area, which doesn't give me a lot of hope that these protests will be peaceful ones. 

Last night at work was mostly quiet, punctuated by a lot of back and forth on a few stupid issues. My boss was stuck working a case himself all night because it was at a VP escalation with our company (I told him I'd be happy to take it over for him so he could sleep, but apparently he was under direct orders to own it until completion). I got a lot of administrative stuff done on the back end, though, and our executive director is out of office until tomorrow, so I didn't have to worry about receiving any phone calls on stupid bullshit long after I'd logged off.

The wife messages me and tells me that tonight would be a great night for a walk. It would, except I got up about two hours later than I normally do, in a fairly shitty mood (this is the first full week I'll work in the past...three weeks or so, roughly, so knowing there are still four more nights ahead of me is goddamn depressing) and I'd just gotten out of the shower and sat down. I told her that I desperately needed some decompression/alone time tonight and that I wasn't going to go on one of our walks, but I loved her.

After what seems like a month of waiting (in reality it was like four days), my box of pumpkin spice K-cups arrives in the mail today, and I can start the fall season correctly now. For years I was opposed to pumpkin spice anything. I hated the idea of it, I thought companies stretched the gimmick too far and made too many things pumpkin spice flavored -- and to some extent I still believe this -- but I've softened my views on it over time. I do love pumpkin spice coffee, creamer, cookies, etc. Enough to where I paid something like $25 for a box of K-cups. 

Ironically, the temperature is going back up again -- for the next week we're supposed to have warm weather for mid-September, with highs in the mid-80s some days. Compare that to last week when we had highs barely reaching 50, with cold rain, and Daisy and I turned on the furnace twice on different days to warm up the house. 

My mental state is slowly starting to deteriorate again. I don't really know why. I think I'm just stressed out and becoming really depressed again. I know part of it is allergies and body pain -- I'm sick of my face and my teeth hurting all the time because of fall allergies setting in, and my knee has been killing me for the past few days too -- not my normal knee pain either, but the feeling of cartilage finally being worn completely away to where it feels like bone on bone pain. Every other day or so I get a twinge of ache in one or both feet, too, similar to the gout ache. I've tried to stay hydrated as much as possible but it's all so damn tiresome; I miss the days when I could just survive on coffee and energy drinks and never worry about being hydrated or being in pain all the time. Being able to rid myself of all the stress in my life would be hugely beneficial and I almost guarantee that most -- if not all -- of my bodily aches and pains and depression would go away.

In the mail today I received a Ghostbusters graphic novel that I ordered on a whim a few nights ago, along with a few more Marvel books (one of them having a publication date of March 23, which tells me that on some level they're still catching up). I'm still waiting on my first issues of Superman Giant and Batman Giant to arrive in the mail from DC, and it bothers me that it's taking so long for them to sort everything out.

There is no shipping update yet on batches 15, 16, and 17, though I did go to the USPS tracking site to request email updates on everything so that I can actively track these CDs. I fear that it's going to end up like the previous batches where I had to wait something like three weeks after they were supposed to arrive before they finally showed up, even though it's from a different seller: 

September 5, 2020, 9:44 pm
Shipping Label Created, USPS Awaiting Item
LAKE OSWEGO, OR 97035 
A shipping label has been prepared for your item at 9:44 pm on September 5, 2020 in LAKE OSWEGO, OR 97035. This does not indicate receipt by the USPS or the actual mailing date.

This pisses me off as today is the 14th, nine days later, and no updates. This is not the fault of the USPS, this is the fault of the seller. If eBay would do something like Amazon Prime does, with 2-day shipping of anything covered by Prime, I'd sign up for it in a heartbeat. I'm sick of this waiting around shit. In a world where few things are keeping me sane, the archiving project is one of them. 

"How much money have you spent on the archiving project?" Daisy asked me last night.

"I have no idea and really don't want to know," I said. 

I really don't. It's a few hundred dollars, probably, since I started doing it back in the spring.

"You're bad with money," she replied.

"I'm not," I said. "I budget for everything and I pay down my debts, I have very few vices anymore -- it's not like I'm a drinker, smoker, or meat-eater -- and I've let a lot of my comics subscriptions expire because of the cost vs. enjoyability factor. You just spend your money differently than I do."

This is true, and I've said it before -- I don't really have a bunch of things I spend money on that are extraneous items. Aside from the occasional book, clothing item, or the vape juice I get, I have relatively few splurges for things that are just for me. The pizza this weekend was one of them. The batches of CDs are another. Everything else I spend money on is for foodstuffs or around-the-house supplies and other grocery-like items. I don't manage my money poorly, and the vast majority of stuff I purchase with it is stuff I need, not stuff I want. I think that's part of my overall depression problem -- almost all of my money disappears to necessary survival items, bills, and the mortgage, leaving me feeling that all I'm doing with my life is working to pay bills until I die -- and every waking day feels like the next chapter in the never-ending long existential nightmare of late-stage capitalism. 

Tuesday, September 15:

Working from home, day 105.

Weigh-in day.

I don't weigh myself. I forget to, actually, primarily because as I'm getting ready for bed this morning, my right foot begins hurting. Aching, actually, like I sprained it. This is odd, as I don't remember doing anything to it. When I wake up in the afternoon, it is a full-on gout attack -- or at least feels like one. This is doubly odd because normally it's my left foot, not my right -- I haven't had anything like this in the right foot in several years, easily since before we bought our house and quite possibly much longer. I hobble about until I can get some ibuprofen and acetaminophen in me and then the pain subsides shortly thereafter. It's really odd. I double-down on the water intake for the night.

Work last night was mostly quiet and/or boring; I was able to get a lot of administrative stuff done yet again, and this remains the plan for tonight as well, as long as everything remains somewhat of a dull roar. Having a Monday night be so quiet was very odd; normally Mondays are awful. I expect tonight to be terrible, even though I have my escalation manager colleague back in the office, simply because Hurricane Sally is making landfall on the gulf coast tonight. That territory is all ours, and I'm expecting a ton of outages to be reported.

Some of you may not know what I do for a living, and it may sound confusing for me to say such things when you don't have context for them. I work in telecommunications as a long-term contractor for one of the largest telecommunications firms in the world. I am an Operations Manager and (currently) have a team of fourteen agents reporting to me, and it is those agents' jobs to manage outages and align resources to facilitate maintenance and repair for when that telecommunication company's customers have their services go down. Each customer has a specific issue (ticket) number, and our teams are the liaisons between the customers themselves and our repair/dispatch crews. That's basically the broad strokes of it. What we do in our program is a complicated, sometimes incredibly complex, stressful, and detail-oriented job requiring lots of back-and-forth, technical communication with sometimes very angry clients. But, I hope this description puts it into perspective for those of you who were previously in the dark.

Anyway, when hurricanes hit, or derechos sweep across our territory, everything goes bugshit because our customers send in hundreds of trouble reports that we have to sort through and work. Sometimes this is easier than others -- if an entire city goes down for a singular cause, for example, everyone in that city who sends us an issue gets the same update. If multiple parts of a city or state goes down for multiple reasons that becomes much more complicated. And it's nights like that which make me want to hang myself off my cubicle -- except I no longer have a cubicle because I work from home now. 

One day I won't work in this job anymore, and won't have to deal with the PTSD it creates, but for now, I'm stuck there.

Anyway.

There are no new shipping updates on my CDs. I am getting more and more frustrated by the day. I need something new to break the monotony and the CDs do that for me. I'm also getting frustrated by the "diet" that the wife and I are on, even though we're only on the second full day of it. The "no oil, no fat, and no sugar" thing is killing me. I don't care about the sugar, it doesn't bother me and I have gotten rid of a lot of the sugars I used to consume, but the "no oil, no fat" part of it is horrible for me -- it means I can't eat cheeses, it means I can't have my fake meats or make wraps with mayo or mustard in them, it means I can't eat chips or peanut butter (though I can have raw nuts), can't eat crackers or soups, or, well, basically about 90% of my daily diet. I've been eating pita bread and hummus and vegetables and rice for the past two days and that's it, and it's driving me crazy. The wife is making a diet-approved pizza tonight -- I don't know how she'll be able to do that without cheese -- and I'm about ready to goddamn snap. 

The night at work is mostly awful and I am stuck there, working on issues, until 9:30 am -- a full two-and-a-half hours after I'm supposed to be off shift. By the time I'm done, I'm disgusted and disillusioned with the world and the company I work for, and go to bed angry and depressed.

Wednesday, September 16:

Working from home, day 106.

I still haven't weighed in for the mid-month. I wake up after 5pm with a roaring headache that only seems to get worse the longer I'm awake. I am exhausted, angry, and bitter. I realize I shouldn't let one bad night of work get to me this much, but I'm too tired to fight off the anger and resentment.

This anger and resentment rises more when our teams get an earful from the site director because one of my agents needed to get a monitor replacement over Labor Day weekend and said agent did not "follow the proper protocols" to swap it out -- not that any of us knew what those "proper protocols" were other than to open a replacement hardware ticket and to let the onsite people know they needed to be there to handle it. This is primarily because nobody from After Hours is ever told anything. It simply boggles my mind that our teams do 2/3 of the work in that place (no, that's not a joke) and nobody seems to notice or care or even keep us informed of policy changes or directives simply because we work the 2nd and 3rd shift hours. On a secondary level it makes me look like an idiot for not knowing any of these protocols, or worse, it makes me look like I'm flagrantly disobeying them. 

In reality, I took the steps I was told to take, as did my agent, and still ended up looking like assholes. And I took those steps when I was out of office on PTO, too, because nobody else was willing to do so. ALL of this makes me so fucking angry. My work environment can be, and frequently is, very toxic, with very little communication, a bunch of folks in leadership who appear to be completely checked out and/or otherwise don't give a shit, and I am almost singular in actually caring about what needs to be done and how it needs to be done correctly. It's even worse when I believe I am doing something correctly based on the information I have available to me, only to find out days (or sometimes weeks) later that no, I wasn't, because we were never informed of multiple extra steps.

If I didn't already have two days put in at the beginning of October, I would take tonight and tomorrow night off and give them all the proverbial finger. I cannot tell you how sick I am of the bullshit I have to put up with just to be able to pay my bills. I like most of the people fine -- okay, some of the people -- but the bullshit is almost too much to bear.

As an aside, I always hated that old phrase "people don't leave jobs, they leave managers." That may be true in some places, but let me tell you in my line of work, people leave the job because of the bullshit involved. Do we have some bad management in that place? Abso-fucking-lutely. But is the job-related bullshit worse? Yes. By leaps and bounds yes. Is that the reason most people leave (voluntarily, I mean)? Yes. 

Tonight the bullshit is thankfully at a duller roar than normal, and for the first time in several days, I am able to step away from the computer on a lunch break. I use this time to go to the bathroom and start a load of laundry from my overflowing hamper. This is notable because I almost never have an overflowing hamper, and I believe that's symbolic as to how swamped, stressed, and exhausted I have been over the past week or so.

Daisy asks me if I'd be open to her taking 10/2 off, or at least partially off, so that we can go in for eye exams and get our glasses prescriptions updated. I tell her it's fine, but let's do it early in the morning so I can come home and actually sleep (I will still work the night beforehand, of course). I can stay up a few extra hours in the morning if necessary if it means I get a good new prescription and what will amount to a new pair of HD vision glasses.

I say HD vision because the last time I got a new prescription, it was like everything I looked at was in high definition. I could instantly see details on faraway trees, read signs that I couldn't read before from much greater distances, and everything looked sharper, crisper, more in focus than ever before. Over the years since, my vision has definitely gotten worse. My glasses still work, of course, but to a much, much lesser degree than they did before. I'm also to the point where I'm not so confident I'd pass a vision exam when I need to renew my driver's license again -- because I'm sure that'll be on the docket for that eventually. 

I have gotten three emails today about how my next batches of CDs is slowly moving through the USPS network, with an expected delivery date of Monday. Here's hoping they actually get here by, say, Friday or Saturday, as I tend to get stuff a tad faster than the expected delivery date.

Thursday, September 17:

Working from home, day 107.

I still haven't weighed in. But, thankfully, today is the last day of the wife's diet experiment thing. I've not been eating a lot, and I've barely even had time or energy to do so. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised when I do actually weigh in.

"If you've lost weight, do you want to keep doing this diet?" she asked me last night.

"Not only no but fuck no," I replied. "I hate it. There's almost nothing I can eat on it."

"You're supposed to be able to eat more on it, or eat until you feel satisfied."

"Okay," I said, "Let me rephrase: there's nothing I can eat on it that I actually want to eat."

It's true; the diet has made me pretty much miserable. I don't know what it is about it that I don't like. Every diet is restrictive, but this one seems to be much more so.

My foot is mostly okay now; it flared up a bit this morning before bed, and is a little achy this evening, but overall, meh, it's okay. It's not debilitating, I can walk as per the usual, stairs don't kill me, it's just a minor nuisance. 

I was able to get off work this morning only a few minutes after 7, and ate one of the few things I can eat on this diet for breakfast -- hummus with whole wheat flatbread crackers. It is not satisfying overall, but I remind myself that tomorrow morning I can be back to whatever I want to eat and this diet ends. Because I was so exhausted, I went to bed before 8:30.

In the afternoon, I awakened and started laundry -- well, finished the laundry I started last night, I should say, as I came upstairs on my lunch hour and ran a load of my own stuff. I could have waited on it, I suppose, but there's already always so many things to do over a weekend that I didn't want more things to pile up. The next few Fridays in a row I have all sorts of errand-like tasks to do. Next Friday I have a phone interview. The following Friday is when we'd have our eye appointments, if Daisy set them up (I haven't gotten confirmation on that yet). At some point I'll also have to mow the grass for the last time this fall as well, and we have other around-the-house fall tasks to take care of.

[Update: phone interview moved up to Monday afternoon at the interviewer's request]

Daisy and I decide to end the diet because it's driving me crazy, and eat a somewhat normal dinner for the first time since last weekend. I do end up weighing myself, to find that I've lost almost a pound since my last weigh-in at the beginning of the month. Aside from the few weeks of juicing, I've remained roughly within 10 pounds of where I was at the beginning of the year. Not losing, not gaining, just maintaining really. 

The night at work is mostly okay, I guess. There's a fair amount of idiocy I have to deal with, but that's par for the course for any night in that place. I leave in the morning relatively on time, eat a quick breakfast of normal foods for the first time all week, and go to bed.

Friday, September 18:

Day off.

I am awake, and up, by around 3:30 in the afternoon. Normally I'd sleep longer, but it's my day off. Brandon has shit to do on his days off. I strip the bed and wash the sheets and blankets, I take my beard trimmer to my face and shave down to scruff (not clean shaven, just to scruff), I take a shower, I put away all of the laundry, and I put in two Amazon orders -- one for around the house stuff and a second for stuff just for me (coffee, seltzers, etc). 

My mental state has been pretty good as of late, for the most part. I've been trying to see the positives in things, I've been trying to be a force for good. But it is all so tiresome. Constantly being optimistic and upbeat when the world is just such an awful place and I'm so very low-energy and tired all the time is stressful in itself. But when I don't try, everything becomes very dark, very depressing.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg died today. I am upset. I am angry. I want to do everything possible to carry on her legacy and keep looking forward, upward, fighting for right -- but that is very hard, folks. I don't even feel as if there is time to mourn her passing, because in giving that time, the Republicans will sweep in and install someone else in her Supreme Court spot who will not be good for this country, who will only help the march towards fascism. They see opportunity while the rest of us feel pain. 2020 has exposed so many horrific things about our country and our world as it is; I don't know how much more I can take while still trying to remain positive and hopeful. I've already lost faith in much of humanity. How much more faith can I lose before hope goes with it?

I used to joke a few years ago about feeling dead inside -- as in "it's okay, I'm dead inside already" -- it was mostly a joke then. Now it's starting to feel like a reality. 

Because of the gorgeous weather, the wife wanted us to go for a walk when she got home. I told her I would love to, but wasn't going to, as my foot is still bothering me. She then mentioned that she wanted to go to Whole Foods, which I was okay with (less walking, and a cart to lean on if the foot got that bad). So we did. We got some "extraneous" groceries -- meaning, nothing we absolutely needed, but stuff good to have around the house -- and returned home. Thankfully, the ibuprofen I'd taken for my foot had fully kicked in by the time I was out and about. 

We eat dinner and watch close to two episodes of Married at First Sight, season 2, before bed. I pass out in my chair for a while around 3 or 4, and get up at 7 to join her in the bed.

Saturday, September 19:

Day off.

38 years ago today, while on a shopping trip with my grandmother, my grandfather had a massive heart attack in the middle of a grocery store and, according to what I was told as a kid, was basically dead before he hit the floor. This happened several months before I was born, so I never got to meet the man, nor did he ever get to see/meet me. I can count on one hand how many times I've been to his grave, though I do have a photo of it -- a photo taken from before my grandmother joined him in 2018. My grandfather was 60 years old; my grandmother hit 90 before she died. I can't imagine what it was like living without him for 30 years. She was only 55 when he died, and she married him at age 20. They had celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary less than three weeks before he died. 

All of this weighs heavily on me every September 19th. From what I've been told there are a lot of similarities I share with my grandfather, some of them quite spooky. I inherited his receding hairline, for one; he was bald long before he died, and I'm slowly following in his footsteps a little more every year. But, honestly, that's just family genetics; all of his sons are bald or almost bald, too. In the photos I've seen of him, he had a stocky build with long limbs, like myself. Could've been tricks of photography, but I have always been overweight with long, powerful limbs and a barrel-like torso, much like I've seen him in photos. I've inherited his temper, which was apparently legendary, and his need for control. By all accounts he did not say much to his kids; he was a very quiet, angry man. But, of course, I'm getting all of those accounts secondhand. I've also been told that he loved the grandkids, all of them that had been born before he died, of course. He was much kinder towards them, I was told.

Aside from that, I only know facts about him. Histories, records. He was in the Navy in World War II, and was a cook on a ship in Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked. He was on the ground in Japan, bringing home his service revolver as well as an honest to gods katana taken off the body of a dead soldier. Both are safely in the possession of my uncle, and I have seen both of them. I have touched the sword. It is a marvel of craftsmanship. My mother has a military photo of him, taken in the 40s. I believe he served in Korea, too, though I am not completely sure of that. He had a guitar and played guitar, I suppose -- my uncle has that guitar too, or he did at one time. He was fond of the old Jack Webb Dragnet series, apparently; that's the one piece of pop-culture information I know about him. My mother told me that. Knowing everything else about him that I know, it fits.

My grandfather had a wooden leg. He had two of them, in fact; he'd had one of his actual legs amputated due to a blood clot (not that I could tell you when that happened), and was buried with one of the legs. The other, a "spare" of sorts, was still in my grandmother's trailer 11 years ago the last time I was inside it. That trailer has fallen in on itself and has crumbled to basically dust now, but I told the family that if the leg was ever recovered, I wanted it. I own nothing of my grandfather's. I never have. My aunt and uncle, who presided over the family estate when my grandmother died a few years ago, agreed to this bizarre request from me.

The only other thing I'd want of his was the '57 or '58 Ford Fairlane he drove -- but that car was long gone before I came into the picture, and I have no idea what happened to it. I doubt any of the family does, either.

I would call my grandmother every year on September 19, and she would know why. She'd tell me "I know what day it is, so I knew you were going to call" but that's all we would ever speak of it. She told me the story once when I was a kid, and it was hard for her to tell. My mother told me her own recollection of what happened that day as well. Ironically, September 19 is my father's birthday, and when my grandfather died, my parents were still married (and would be for another five years). What a shitty birthday, right? That's like my friends who were born on September 11. Normal birthday right up to 2001, and after that, well...

Anyway.

I wish I knew more about my family history. I have tried to get some bits and pieces of it here and there, but there's a lot of second-or-third-hand information, and much of it contradicts what others have said. I'm 24% Swedish/Norwegian/German, and all of the rest is UK-derived: England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. My ancestry DNA report was pretty clear -- I'm so white I should probably be transparent. My genetic ancestors came from those places and settled in two different, very distinct and centered places in the United States -- Rhode Island/Massachusetts, and the Ohio River Valley. Guess where I grew up? That's right, in the Ohio River Valley. I have a lot of ancestry in and from Ohio and western Pennsylvania.

Sometimes I think it's weird having been born in the 1900s. The wife and I were both born in the 80s (me near the beginning, her near the end); my father was born in the 50s, my mother in the 60s, and my grandmother and grandfather in the 20s. The vast majority of my employees were born around or after Kurt Cobain died. My youngest employee ever was born in 1999, when I was a sophomore in high school. It's been over fifteen years now since I graduated from WVU. Next year is my 20-year high school reunion (not that I plan to attend). The differences between generations is just staggering if you really think about it. I try not to think about it too much. 

Sunday, September 20:

Working from home, day 108.

Last night, the wife spent close to three hours trying to fix my blown-out office chair in my room. We have the parts for it, but it is/was a very expensive chair and had a very intricate and complicated underside design, with all sorts of adjustable levers and knobs. She couldn't get it taken apart and I eventually just told her to give up, it wasn't worth it -- especially after she broke one of the seat brackets on it. I told her I'd just say screw it and order a new chair, and put this one in the bedroom for the cats to sleep on/in. 

I was able to find a remarkable array of replacement chairs, but I ended up settling on this one:

As you can see, it is not cheap -- you can't purchase a chair that will support my fat ass for much less than $200. I still think spending $200 on a chair is outlandish; I'd expect it to come with an attachment that blows me for that kind of money. It's akin to spending $200k on a luxury sedan. $200k on a car and it doesn't even suck your dick? Pass. But, a lot of other, less nice chairs were selling for a few hundred more, and initially I wasn't even looking for gaming chairs, it's just what popped up when I looked for chairs that would hold me. 

I've needed the chair for a while, though. Can't do much about it. This was, as I said, actually one of the cheaper options and was very highly reviewed. It arrives some time during the first week of October -- I can deal with the current chair until then, I suppose. 

Batches 15, 16, and 17 are on-track to arrive tomorrow, at last update. We'll see. Haven't seen a shipping update since Friday afternoon, so here's hoping. They'll give me something fun to do for a few weeks, hopefully. 

The next few days are going to be...hectic, to say the least. Tonight I have a lot of admin stuff to do at work, including payroll. Tomorrow I have a phone interview at 2:30, meaning I have to go to bed almost as soon as I get off work in the morning. Daisy gets paid on Tuesday, and I summarily have to pay a few bills, as does she. She also needs to confirm when our eye appointment(s) will be and set them up. When the CDs get here, I'll be dealing with those. The kitchen needs cleaned badly. We need to finish trimming the trees in the back yard and will have to dismantle the garden soon once it gets too cold for anything else to grow -- oh, and mow the front and back once more as well before it frosts. We also need to clear a spot in the garage for our new garbage/recycling cans, which will be arriving soon. Both Daisy and I have so little time and energy to spare, especially when the days are getting shorter and the temperatures are getting colder. I'm also not a fan of having my schedule wall-to-wall booked so that I don't get any downtime at all, because holy gods that's depressing. Soon the holidays will approach and we'll be in the long, cold slog of winter, and then who knows. 

The night at work is great in the beginning; I can get everything done I need to do and can take care of all of the administrative stuff on the backend. As it goes on, I get more and more bogged down by stupid to the point where my anger/frustration/disgust-ion levels are so high that I wonder why I even try as much as I do in the first place. By the time I leave I am glad to be done, and am hoping that my phone interview in the afternoon provides some hope for a way out. 

Monday, September 21:

Working from home, day 109.

Phone interview day.

I set my alarm on Alexa to wake me an hour before my interview; in theory, this should give me enough time to force myself to become awake and to force myself to deal with feeding the cats, getting the mail (which includes the CDs) and to perform bodily functions. 

In reality, it puts me into panic mode, makes my allergies go crazy (because I haven't gone through proper wake-up processes) and makes me deathly afraid to use the bathroom because I fear that I cannot be done before the phone starts ringing. 

Which...makes for an interesting phone interview, really. 

It also tells me, yet again, that I need more than an hour to properly wake myself up and be coherent when I am working overnights, which is really concerning on multiple levels. 

The interview actually goes really well, and I am immediately scheduled for a follow up, hour-long session with the two hiring managers on Wednesday. It, as well, will be virtual -- the phone interview today was just that, a phone interview. The one on Wednesday is via Zoom. 

I...do not have Zoom. I do not have a webcam. Well, I do, I just have no idea whatsoever where it is. I immediately purchase a 1080p webcam on Amazon for like $25 (Prime one-day shipping, so it'll be here on time) and immediately create a Zoom account.

The second interviews are on Wednesday evening, 5:30 to 6:30pm (back to back, 30 mins each) and they're looking to make selections for the "training class" starting in mid-October by Friday. It is possible I could have a new job by the weekend -- they're moving quickly. 

I'll also mention that this is a lower-level position with much less responsibility than I have now at my current job that starts at several thousand more per year than my current job pays me. That says a lot about this company, but it also says a lot more about how little my current job pays its employees or cares about employee retention. Then again, as I've mentioned here in the past, the vast majority of the employees at my current job are already checked out, and the company will hire anyone with a pulse who can fog a mirror. 

This position is also entirely remote until at least sometime in early-to-mid-2021, primarily due to the Covid-19 pandemic. It'll let me work any shift I want, but I specifically told the interviewer that I have been trying to get off overnights for years, and a dayshift, 9-5 or whatever worked best for them would be perfect for me -- this made her happy. The only drawback is that when people do return to the office, the building is in downtown Omaha -- and I mean, downtown Omaha -- like, not an ideal location to get to and from at all. 

But, I have hope. I'm beginning to see a little glimmer of hope and change. Maybe I will be able to get rid of my stress, anxiety, and angst. Maybe I will be able to get off of working overnights eventually. Maybe I won't have to deal with idiots or insubordinate/absentee employees every single day anymore.

As mentioned previously, batches 15, 16, and 17 arrived today -- on time as expected and all crammed into one box without being sectioned off into different groups. Most also included liner notes, shockingly enough. Only one other batch I'd ordered included liner notes with any of the discs, so this is interesting in itself. I split the discs into thirds and begin work on batch 15, which is remarkably good -- Morrissey, Pearl Jam, Marilyn Manson, B.B. King, R.E.M., Tori Amos, Madonna, Jane's Addiction, and Tupac Shakur being some of the highlights I found just by thumbing through the discs. If the rest of the box is this good, I definitely got my money's worth. I also have a rule that I don't go through the next batches until I finish the current one I'm on, as the surprise is part of the excitement for me. 

A few more comics arrive in the mail today. I'm finally getting back to the point again where I'm receiving more comics than I actually have time to read, and on some level that's soothing. On another level it reminds me of why I set several of those subscriptions to expire when they're done -- no need to let stuff pile up. 

The computer chair has shipped; it's shipping via FedEx, so I have tracking for it, but I don't see where it's shipping from -- it very may well take until the first week of October to get here. All I can do is wait patiently on it and set it up when it arrives. 

Overall, my mental state is good today, despite the fact that I only got about four hours of sleep and have a full night of work ahead of me. I am finally feeling more relaxed and a little less stressed. I am tired but I'll get over it; my body will adapt. Even if it means I crash out in the morning and sleep until dark tomorrow, it will adapt. 

Tuesday, September 22:

Working from home, day 110.

Payday for the wife.

I have entered some new state of zen, to an extent, while at work -- it's not that I'm "checked out" or don't care, but it's that feeling of "this may possibly be the last few weeks I ever have to do this bullshit" and let me tell you, that feeling is delightful. The stress of doing the actual work is still there, of course, but it's also somewhat freeing to think about maybe not needing to do it much longer. I worked on several high-profile issues last night for companies that believe me, you have heard of, and juggled that with personnel management and administrative tasks like a pro -- only about half of which should have been my actual responsibility. 

However.

I cannot tell you what my director did for most of the night aside from be quiet and then act surly and aloof when he actually did deign to speak to any of us about any of the work we were performing. His attitude has gotten progressively worse as of late, which puts a strain on interactions with not only the two of us, but between him and the rest of the team as well. When I ask him a question on an issue, his responses are curt or otherwise cold or dismissive, like I shouldn't be asking him for guidance or assistance in the first place. Understand that I do not like asking questions; I do not like asking for assistance and would much rather be able to resolve problems without anyone else's help, but even after six years in that job there is still stuff that I do not know -- and there's a lot of it. If I have to ask for clarity on an issue I'm working, there's a reason I'm asking that question -- and it's not for my health -- I would like an answer to it. When what I get in return is attitude and disgust, it really makes it difficult for me to perform my job to the best of my abilities, or otherwise be motivated to do so. I will remind you all that I am not a front-line, take-all-the-heat agent who should know better, but I am a manager, a manager requesting support from a higher-ranked member of leadership. I don't ask for much; I don't ask for people to do my work for me, and I generally dive on any proverbial grenades to keep them off my leadership's collective plates in the first place (unless someone else dives on them first), so to be summarily dismissed or treated as if my requests for assistance or guidance are unimportant or "beneath" the level of what I should reasonably be asking is problematic for me.

I've always prided myself on being the best employee, and team manager, that I can be. But I'm not perfect. There are times I fall short, there are times I miss one thing or another. I'm only human, and I'm only one human at that. So I just think to myself how much the program would falter and possibly collapse without me, and think about how valuable I am to the team, as well as how the skillset(s) I provide help everyone in that program as a whole. As the old adage goes, they may not appreciate me enough when I'm here, but they will be completely fucked when I am gone. Or something like that; I'm paraphrasing. 

By the time I get off work in the morning I have been awake for about nineteen hours straight. Remarkably, my body did adapt. I am not overly tired but I know when I lay down I will be able to sleep just fine, and probably straight through damn near anything, for the entire day. Because of this knowledge, I decompress from the night by, you guessed it, working slowly through batch 15. I am impressed because this seller did not include a ton of Christmas music, jazz, classical, or religious content -- at least not in 15, anyway. There is some, but nowhere near the "normal" amount -- that stuff usually comprises 1/3 to 1/2 of most batches, and with the religious stuff it goes directly in the recycler without a second look. Judging from the amount of records I have in the box, unless I have a particularly slow few days with nothing better to do, this is gonna take me a few weeks to get through. We'll see.

When I get up in the afternoon, every part of my body hurts and I feel extremely exhausted. I don't force myself out of bed until after 5, get a shower, and then by the time I go downstairs the wife is already home and is outside gardening. There's not much gardening left to do -- we are still getting a good bit of tomatoes, and our peppers are coming in still, but mostly everything else is dying or already dead. Daisy fries us up some fried green tomatoes for dinner and then makes fresh white rice as well, which I douse with soy sauce, and then I begin my shift for the night.

Wednesday, September 23:

Working from home, day 111. 

As I enter my lunch hour for the night, the internet goes hard down. Not just for me, but for my Team Lead halfway across town, too. We appear the only ones to be affected. I call it in to find that Cox is doing a planned maintenance in the overnight hours and that service is set to restore by 8:43 AM. 

Hahahah. Hahahahahhhhhh....

Cox does this a lot, actually. Especially in the middle of the night. Generally when they do it either doesn't affect me (because I'm asleep or I'm not part of the "down" area) or I never notice because my service never drops. Even when it does, it will generally only stay down for about an hour or two at the most, not the entire time.

I let my director and team know, and we wait. And wait. And wait some more.

I don't mind this; truthfully, it gives me an excuse to get a bit of a break from the BS this week. And I can connect my home computer's wifi to my phone, so I can still see email updates and can just sit upstairs in my room archiving CDs until the outage restores. When it does come back up, about 90 minutes later, I am thrown back into a huge amount of horseshit that we continually deal with from that point forward until my shift is over -- and I still stay an extra 25ish minutes to help get everything on my team's plate taken care of.

When I awaken in the afternoon, the wife is already home -- she had an at-home training session today in the afternoon hours that she got to do via a Zoom meeting (how ironic) as well. I wake up late, so I don't have time to shower, but I do have to shave and make myself look somewhat presentable for my interview, and put on a pair of glasses that will cut down on glare from the camera/lights.

The interview itself, once it gets going, is pretty straightforward. Same types of questions I'd be asked in an in-person interview, mostly. This disheartened me; they're almost always the same questions, like they come from "the big book of interview questions" or something. Nobody asks any truly unique questions anymore to gauge someone's personality, their likes and dislikes, or their hobbies or anything like that. For entry-level positions, someone's personality means everything because it's not so much that their skills will make or break them, but that they'd mesh well in a team environment or taking orders from superiors. Interviews should be far more like personality tests and far less like an inquisition.

This is an entry-level position that pays far more than my current management position, though, so meh. I'll submit to their line of questioning. The interviews last about, oh, 90 minutes or so. Part of the extra time was my Zoom/webcam (which does work, and works well) giving massive audio feedback. That'll have to be something that gets worked out if I end up getting the job, as all of the training is via Zoom. Fun. 

How do I feel overall? Ehhhhh. There's a lot of downsides to the position itself. It is a straightforward call-center job, both incoming and outgoing. That's the biggest downside. It's basically a helpdesk position, though, which is indeed an upside. I won't be promoted or allowed to move around in the company no matter what for at least a year -- downside. However, for the foreseeable future, it's entirely remote -- upside. There are no holidays that you're not expected to work if your schedule falls on a holiday day -- downside. Holidays are double-pay, though -- upside. You'll generally work the schedule you want/request -- upside. Your schedule can be changed to 2nd or 3rd shift though, with little notice and no choice in the matter, based on business needs -- mega-downside. I could go on, but I'm sure you get the idea. There are pros and cons to any job, of course, but I'm not sure the pros here outweigh the cons, even if it is more money and gets me away from the fresh hell I face every night at my current job. If it were $15k-20k more it would be one thing, but it's not. As it stands, I'm not sure I'm completely comfortable leaving my current job if I were offered this one, and would have to think on it long and hard before making a decision.

Thursday, September 24:

Working from home, day 112.

I expected a job offer after my interview(s) ended last night, actually. I did not get one. Final decisions are to be made by Friday, I suppose, and I guess that's when I'll find out.

I am so tired I barely touch my computer and don't write here.

Friday, September 25:

Day off.

House Anniversary Day.

It was two years ago today that we closed on this house and moved in. In that time a lot has changed, but most of the house itself has remained the same. I was exhausted, I was sweaty, I was cranky. I'd taken a few days off work to take care of the move. I was still getting used to being a vegetarian, so I was foggy and out of sorts. Daisy was feeling about the same. But we did it, we became homeowners. One of the first things I did was switch out the showerhead in the bathroom as the one that was in there was awful. I see that as my "christening" of the place, really.

Today we spend our time working; it's not a bad overnight at work leading into the morning -- not really, anyway, and certainly not as bad as it has been the past few nights -- but I am just so exhausted and burnt out from this week. I've had three interviews this week, have gotten my sleep schedule wonked out because of them, have felt aches and pains in joints I didn't know could ache, have barely been able to do anything but work, have not gotten much real quality time with the wife, haven't had any real downtime, and now I have another swath of errands and duties I need to take care of over the weekend, including paying bills and cleaning and etc etc etc, it goes on and on.

When I awaken in the afternoon it takes a long time to wake up. I shower, and this does not help. I am not fully awake or completely lucid and unbothered until after 8pm. The wife, in the interim, has trimmed the last of the trees in the backyard that needed to be trimmed and tells me we'll need to get a saw from Lowe's or the Home Depot in order to cut them down to manageable sizes so that the garbage people will take them. I'm fine with this. 

Upon checking my phone, I see that the place I interviewed with has called me back (while I was asleep, of course) and requests a callback on Monday. Sure, I can do that. They probably want to offer me the job.

"How do you feel about that?" the wife asked me.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't want to think about it right now. I'm tired and hungry and I need some downtime. I'll think about it over the weekend."

Truthfully, this is how I felt at the time and still feel. I don't want to think about it. I need some downtime. I need to decompress and not be constantly anxious about everything. I get a very short two days off every week and one of them (Friday) is spent unconscious -- so, really, I get one day off every week. 

At some point I passed out in my chair after dinner, and awoke the next morning.

Saturday, September 26:

Day off.

I took care of a lot of around the house stuff, watched the WVU game (they lost) and took a nap in the afternoon. I did not write here.

Sunday, September 27:

Working from home, day 113.

I don't touch my computer at all today and don't write here.

Monday, September 28:

Working from home, day 114.

Because I haven't been writing here, I figured I should update you all on everything that's been going on. Truthfully, I haven't been writing because I haven't had the time or energy to do so. Last week was awful overall, and for the vast majority of the weekend, I was asleep or otherwise not sitting at this computer. I haven't stepped outside this house aside from sticking my arm out the door to get the mail from the mailbox in more than two weeks. It's not that the weather has been shitty or that I don't want to, but because when I'm off work I have been exhausted. My downtime is generally spent sleeping because I don't feel like I get enough of that as it is, or mindlessly scrolling through my phone in an attempt to engage with something. 

The new computer chair has arrived. I may have mentioned that earlier, but I don't remember. The wife and I put it together over the course of an hour or so on Saturday afternoon. It is huge, heavy, and rather unwieldy -- but it is a new chair and it's (mostly) comfortable for its purposes. The old chair has been rolled into our bedroom to be used as a corner sleeping place for the cats. I'm still getting used to the new chair, and the more I sit in it, the more I like it, so we'll see how I feel about it in a few weeks once I've got it completely "broken in," so to speak. 

Over the weekend, when I have been at my desk, I did make sure to get my bills paid (the wife paid the mortgage as well) and I ordered some necessities from Amazon, as Friday was also my payday. Most of those necessities arrive today. I also completed batch 15 and am about to complete batch 16 today. 15 gave me 56 albums and 709 tracks total. It was a mixed bag overall, but far better than a lot of batches I've worked through during the course of this project. Batch 16 gave me similar results, even though (again) it's not complete yet. 

As for the job...I don't know whether I'll accept it or not if they offer it to me today. I've been rolling it around in the back of my head all weekend. I almost want to tell them yes and to tell them to put me in the second training class that rolls around (starting in late November) so that I have more time to decide whether I really want to do it. I mean, if I decide against it at a later date I can always call them and tell them I've changed my mind. Few job offers give you enough leeway to do something like that. I almost want to see how badly the next few weeks at work go before I commit to anything new, especially a "new" that I'm not sure how much I'll actually like. As Daisy told me, "selling your soul" to another job is not something I want to do, and I agree with her. Also keep in mind that I don't have to tell anyone at my current job that I've accepted another position until the last acceptable date to do so. It's a tempting thought, regardless. 

I'll have to make a callback this morning on that one regardless, so I am...I wouldn't say nervous or anxious per se -- it would be great if someone actually (read: finally) recognized my knowledge base and skillset and wanted to hire me -- but just... ehhhhh about it. 

The Sunday night leading into the Monday, at work, is not bad overall. I feel a bit detached, as if I'm simply going through the motions that I should be going through, helping out my team where I can and should, but to an extent I just feel hollow and disconnected. I start a load of laundry on my lunch, even though I don't really need to do it at the moment, just to feel like I'm accomplishing something worthwhile. When I get off, even though it is on time, I feel...strange. Like something's not quite right, like some big bad change is coming. 

Upon getting off work I call the job recruiter lady back. No answer. Mind you, I'm calling at 8:30 in the morning. Nothing. I call again forty minutes later. No answer. Rather frustrated, and again (by this point) seriously tired, I am about to put my phone on to charge when I see an email pop in my box from her. She is in meetings this morning and wants to call me at 11. 

I look at the clock. It's 9:45. Fuck it. Okay. I reply to her and tell her that's fine.

It's really not fine, but eh, I need to at least make somewhat of an effort to hear her out.

"You are still leaning towards a no, right?" Daisy asks me. 

"Yes," I reply, "but I'm going to hear her out." 

I describe to Daisy the "possibly the November class" plan to see what she thinks. She thinks it's a decently solid plan and tells me she supports whatever I decide. 

 

I finish batch 16 and move on to batch 17. 16 gives me 48 albums and 639 tracks. Thumbing through 17, I'll probably get about that amount from it as well. There's some good stuff in there as well as a lot of chaff. 

As the clock nears 11, a calm comes over me. It's mainly exhaustion, I think; I'm not used to being awake this late on a work morning. But, maybe it's the cosmos telling me that the coming call will send me down a different life path, or something. I don't know. I mean, I am tired. I do just want to go to bed. 

What occurs is the kindest, sweetest rejection phone call I've ever received. 

Look, this is not what I was expecting. It was, in fact, one of the last things I would ever expect -- generally if I'm going to get rejected it's via email, form-letter, very quickly. Rote. Clinical. 

Throughout the course of a nearly twenty-minute phone call, I was told by the recruiting lady (the one that I'd spoken to first) that she thought I was clearly the best candidate of everyone who had applied for the position -- a feat that I'm sure isn't hard to accomplish, so it's not like I'm really proud of that or anything -- and it came down to not having enough space.

When I told the wife about this later, her response was "So they filled both training classes and hired everyone they wanted to hire before they interviewed you, then interviewed you and realized they fucked up."

"Sounds like it," I replied. 

The conversation continued with how wonderful a candidate I was, etc etc, and the recruiter told me in a very passive way "apply for other jobs in this company, because you're better than this one anyway." She didn't come out and say that, but it was very strongly implied that was the point of our long conversation. She did tell me that when other jobs were open and once I applied for them, to reach out to her directly on the side via email or phone and she would make sure I was at the top of the candidate list -- and that in the future, regardless if it was for this company or not, I could reach out to her at any time and she'd offer advice, give pointers, etc. That was surprising.

So, back to the drawing board, I guess. I'll follow the company's page closely and apply for anything I feel that I'm qualified for or would actually like to do, but this one is not going to be my new career.

Tuesday, September 29:

Working from home, day 115.

Night of the first presidential debate.

Last night at work, during a particularly hellish night in which I was forced to work almost a full hour late this morning (to be fair, I was doing a favor of my own volition for our executive director/daytime leadership team, so I'm not mad about it), I learned -- at 4am, mind you -- that my boss will be out of the office for the next two days, and for the first time in a long time, I am not listed as his backup. My 2nd shift counterpart and my escalation manager colleague are listed as his backups for tonight. Tomorrow we have our other director in the office, so tomorrow doesn't matter.

This sort of rubs me the wrong way on multiple levels. For one, I have been the overnight operations manager for over four years now and have backed him up before on multiple occasions. I almost wonder if my escalation manager colleague spoke to him on the back end and specifically said he'd volunteer as backup so that he didn't have to take orders from me. Which, if that's the case, I'd be really pissed off. I have seniority and experience and I would much rather our escalation manager be, well, working escalations and doing his actual job. It has always irritated me that as the team's manager I can't order our escalation manager to take on a hot issue and run with it. That is essentially what every manager does on dayshift, in fact, and it is in the job description. He threw a fit about that to leadership when he joined the overnight team, though, and as such, I've basically been forced to do my entire job and half of his as well (going by job duties alone). The entire "backup" thing just seems a little shady when you take that into account.

Whatever, though. It's all office politics that I don't care to involve myself in as it just highlights how toxic of a work environment I'm forced to deal with on a nightly basis. What I care about is that the work gets done and the people there do their best with the time they have on the clock on any given night.

Tonight is garbage/recycling night. Most of batches 15 and 16 get recycled, as they're done. I'm about 1/3 of the way through batch 17; I'd be much further through it if I'd actually been able to sit down at my desk for more than half an hour or so over any given day for the course of the past week. With my long weekend ahead of me (I took Sunday and Monday off next week, giving me a four-day weekend) I look forward to getting a lot of decompression time, time not spent sleeping or having a quick meal before my next work shift starts. Daisy told me that she enjoyed the five-day schedule so much more than the four-day schedule, when she worked it, but I've found that I have so much less time overall to do the things that need to get done, and it feels like all I do is work and sleep. I shouldn't have to submit a few days of PTO to be able to feel like I am getting a good work/life balance, but here we are. 

Tonight is also the night of the first presidential debate between Trump and Biden, a night I have been looking forward to for months on end. There's nothing I want to see more than Biden systematically dismantling Trump in front of a live audience, and I hope it happens. As always, as it's live television, I also hope for swearing and other obscenities. I'm sure there's a delay, of course, but I still hope for it. A man can dream, after all.

Wednesday, September 30:

Working from home, day 116.

Well, here we are, the last day of the month.

That debate was, as it was famously called, a shitshow. I agree with most folks on the internet who say there's no point of any further debates; it's very clear there's no actual debating going on, just a lot of Donald Trump yelling, interrupting, and shouting down both Joe Biden as well as the moderator. 

And, oh yeah, refusing to denounce white supremacy, numerous times, on national/worldwide television.

I am stunned and weep for the future of my country. There should be no more debates between the two of them. There's no point to it. If you're still an undecided voter after last night's horseshit, there's quite literally nothing else I can say that will change your mind, and I...I just can't keep up any sort of facade anymore that people who support Donald Trump are good people or otherwise aren't racist, misogynist, or just fucking stupid -- or all three. It's not just a difference of political opinion anymore; there is now a very clear right and a very, very clear wrong. Which side of history do you want to be on?

Anyway.

As we end the month I just want to put a message out there to anyone reading this. 

That message is be kind.

There are so many people out there who have forgotten this as of late. So many who have lost their way, lost their paths, let the world and everything happening in it this year turn them cold and bitter and jaded. I am not immune to this, and at times it has been very difficult for me to be nice to others and to stay positive. And it's so easy to remain positive, even if it seems like the hardest thing in the world to do sometimes. This world is good because positive, hopeful people exist in it and try their hardest to spread that positivity, and we are all better for it.

Be kind. Attempt to be understanding. Attempt to see others' views even if you think they're wrong and do not agree. Take care of yourself. Take care of each other. Help those you see struggling. A smile or a few nice words can go a long way to help someone out, even if you don't see it or it isn't immediately noticeable or appreciated.

Be kind.

And with that, on to October.