The Isolation Diaries: Spooky Season with Covid, Year Two

 

The wife and I, before a dinner of Indian food, September 4, 2021.

 

 

Greetings, mortals. Let's get weird.

 

 

Friday, October 1:

Day off.

 

It is not lost on me that we're entering our second year in a row of the holiday season where Covid is still a thing, and where everything still sucks. However, it does seem to be lost on a good chunk of the population, most of whom have completely stopped wearing masks and have returned to their lives as normal despite a raging pandemic. Daisy and I, while out in public, rarely see anyone wearing masks anymore, and when we do it's usually a very evident indicator of "hey, that person is unvaccinated" based on a number of telltale signs about their appearance. Daisy and I are guilty of this as well -- during the rare times that we actually go out into public and go shopping together these days, it's been a while since we've worn masks. During last week's work event at the bar with Daisy, not a soul wore a mask. 

Anyway.

It's the month of Halloween, and it's the month when the holiday season begins its slow ramp-up. I have no plans for Halloween; this year it's a Sunday and I'll be working, obviously. Working from home means that I don't even get to wear a costume to work to show off to everyone. Halloween was my favorite holiday for years; now it's just like any other day of the week/month/year for me. 

Next week, when we start our vacation, we're supposed to have one of Daisy's friends/former coworkers stop by the house for a bit in the evening, to visit and see us. That means we have to make sure the house gets a scrubdown over the course of the next seven days, as it is a legitimate nightmare right now. I'll likely need to mow the grass and do the trimming tomorrow afternoon -- depending on how much I sleep tonight in the overnight, I might even do it in the morning -- as an attempt to get the house to look like someplace people actually live in. The outside upkeep of the house has been left to its own devices for the past several weeks/month or so and is looking pretty shoddy, to tell you the truth.

Saturday, October 2:

Day off.

 

 

 

I bought a Slinky.

I haven't owned a Slinky in 25+ years, and I wanted one, so I bought it.

This is what being an adult is like, I guess?

Do I need a Slinky? No. But do I think they're really cool, and did I want one to play with/fidget with? Yes. Was that worth $10 to me? Also yes.

I did not mention it here before, really, but as of last weekend (yes, September), 90% of my Christmas shopping for the wife is done. Most of it has already arrived and has been hidden until December, with the last bits of it showing up this morning. I say 90% because I guarantee you there will be little odds and ends I pick up for her between now and December, but the important things are already taken care of -- to the point where I texted her mother on the side and told her not to get her the things that I'd already purchased (well, the big thing, anyway). 

I like getting the Christmas shopping done early. By the time October rolls around, I generally have a lot of it done. I already know what I'm getting my parents this year too, I just have to wait another month or two in order to ship it to them. Daisy's parents, I have no clue and I'll likely let her figure out most of that, but if I truly wanted to be done at this moment I likely could be. 

 

My own Christmas list on Amazon is mostly finalized at this juncture as well -- I eliminated a lot of stuff off it that I no longer had a use for, and added a bunch of other things to it. Daisy usually gets me 2-3 things off the list and then the rest of it is newer things I've added as of late -- a tablet, a new Chromebook, some clothing here and there, a few books I want, some shoes, some CDs, a game or two, etc. Nothing extravagant. I'm not an extravagant person. I don't need or want anything crazy. You folks putting PS5s and new XBoxes on your list -- I laugh at thee. Good luck.

Now all that's left is to take the Christmas card photos and get those cards designed and ordered.

For any of you who really know me and/or if you have followed this blog for a number of years, you'll know that I put great pride into our yearly Christmas card -- and usually a great amount of money. I order them from Shutterfly, custom-design them with photos of us and the cats, and they are not cheap. The result, however, is the best looking Christmas card of anyone I know, and only 2-3 other people who send us cards send us anything remotely comparable in quality and cost. It's a weird obsession for me, I know, but it's now gotten to the point where it's become tradition, and traditions blur lines. I keep trying to outdo myself every year with Christmas cards, primarily because for a lot of people on the list (and I have something like 50 people we send cards to every year), they're the only pictures of myself and the wife they directly receive every year. I've had a lot of friends and family tell me that they display the cards like family photos, because it's not like we all go take family photos at Olan Mills or Sears anymore, those days are long gone remnants of the 80s and 90s. Also, not all of our friends and family have or use Facebook, so it's not like they see the photos Daisy and I take together on a regular basis (such as the one above). 

 

Last year Daisy and I made an afternoon out of it one day in the early fall; we made ourselves look good, put on fancy-ish clothing, took photos in the backyard/around the house and then edited them a bit to fix the lighting and any glare issues (the main one I ended up using was legit taken in our bathroom mirror), and I formatted them to fit the card shape and style, added the designs, and ordered the cards. They take a few weeks to arrive -- I think I got them shortly before Thanksgiving, though I don't really remember now -- at which point I began firing them off to our friends and family. It's a long, time-consuming process, but it's one I love doing. It's how I show our far-flung friends and family -- some of the cards travel to Canada, and at least one to the faraway land of Germany -- that they are cared about and loved. 

Let's see, what else is going on in Brandonworld?

I have yet to return the power supply (the extra one I purchased to see if that fixed the problem on my dead Acer) to Amazon; I have until October 17 to do so. As it was close to $50 and is useless to me at this juncture, I'm going to return it -- I could use that money back in our bank account, obviously. Likely that will be done next weekend, as Daisy and I will be on vacation at that point and we'll have a little more wiggle room, so to speak, to get some stuff done. It's not getting done tonight (too late in the evening) and tomorrow I'll be sleeping late as I'll be at work later in the night. 

I did mow the grass in the front today, and I did do all the trimming necessary around the house. With any luck this will be the last time the grass needs to be mowed before the winter, unless we get a lot more rain that'll make it grow like crazy. I told Daisy that I wanted to do it today because it was 65 and cloudy outside -- the perfect fall weather for yard work. At least in another month or so, we'll have one-and-a-half less trees to worry about raking leaves from, right? 

I also told Daisy that it felt like she was doing all of the around the house work (and she does admittedly do almost all of it), so I felt that taking care of some of the yard work -- a good chunk of it, actually, about half of what needs to be done -- was a good step in that direction. I also did all of her laundry today and stripped the bed to wash the mattress pad, sheets, blankets, and pillowcases. At the moment, I'm running a "clean washer" cycle with a bleach tablet in there because the little light on the washer was flashing at me to do so. 

 

I also made a grocery delivery order happen this afternoon. I'll now be set for most foods for the next few weeks. Greens for so many salads, string cheeses, some Quorn, some cottage cheese, some other odds-and-ends foodstuffs...I should be more than okay. Again, I don't eat a lot. I know that coming from a fat dude that sounds strange, but I really don't. As long as I have something to snack on and I can make some salads or a can of soup or some steamed vegetables, I'm generally pretty content. I don't think I'll be below 300 pounds for another year or so, but at least I'm trying to get there and I'm doing everything I can to keep the diabetes in check.

The rest of the day has been spent doing absolutely nothing, which is what I generally want my Saturdays to be. I backed up my hard drive, I've been watching car repair videos on YouTube, and generally I've avoided most contact from the outside world. It's been pretty rad. 

Sunday, October 3:

Working from home, day 350(!).

 

Over the course of the next few weeks, I really need to get my novel off the ground again. I've lacked the time and motivation to really drive back in, partially because I am so bitter that I lost what I had before. I'm sure once I start actually writing again I'll be able to write a "better" version of it, but it's the time and energy. And it's the process. I have to be in a particular headspace to try to write the novel, because if I'm not, my work product will reflect that. Getting fully into that headspace is always difficult for me to do with all the other daily responsibilities and anxieties that are constantly running through my head, plus the need to eat and sleep and schedule all of that as well. 

As I mentioned previously, Daisy and I are on vacation next week. I'm off from October 8 through October 16, for a full nine days off the work clock. There are a number of things I would like to do or need to do during those days, and I've compiled a small list of them below:

1. write at least two chapters of the novel

2. return the power supply to Amazon

3. take our photos for the Christmas cards

4. see a movie in the theater again -- I told Daisy she could choose

5. reschedule our dentist appointments (see below) 

6. spend most of, if not an entire day, doing something nice with the parents

Amongst other things.

Our dentist appointments are a big problem. Currently they're scheduled for Thursday the 28th at 10am. This in no way whatsoever works for me. I work the night beforehand and the night after, and I cannot be awake until 10am before going to the dentist to be awake for several more hours after that when I work that night too. It cannot be done, and I can't roll on two hours of sleep between two long work shifts. I also don't have any spare PTO now to take that Thursday off (so that I could just come home and crash, and not worry about work that night). I need to check with Daisy to see if she can reach out to the dentist's office to see if they have had any cancellations during our vacation week, and if not, then to schedule the appointment for the next available Friday, a day I don't have to work and can just deal with it. I'm going to be sleep-deprived and miserable either way. When you work overnights, it's not like you can go double-dipping on your time and burn the candle at both ends when you get older like you did when you were a kid -- because trust me, my body doesn't work that way anymore and I doubt many of yours do or will, either. A 10am appointment on a work day after a work night and before another work night will not work. 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday, October 4: Working from home, day 351

Tuesday, October 5: Working from home, day 352.

 

Whenever I'm asked what my favorite season of the year is, I usually say spring. And for the most part, that's correct. But, there's also a certain part of fall that I really enjoy, and we're entering that part of year now in Nebraska. It usually starts around the second or third week of October and continues through Halloween or the week after -- not too cold, rarely too hot. Pretty leaves. Hoodies. Pumpkin spice. College football. Crisp air. Beard weather. Cider weather. Nature walk weather. If you're aware of where I'm from in West Virginia, it's also buckwheat cake weather. 

And yet....October has always been a historically bad time of year for me. I've had long strings of terrible luck, historically, in Octobers past. It haunts me in a sense. The traumas I've dealt with in Octobers of years past have all left their scars on me, and I know that at my age I shouldn't be so fixated on these things, but I am. I'm not going to list all of them here, but just understand that for me, it tends to be the time of the year that nothing can go right, and if something can go wrong, it will, and usually in the most spectacularly awful way possible. I've had friends and family die in October, I've lost close friendships, I've injured myself, I've been really sick, etc. Every year I wonder what could happen that would make this year worse than the others, and I am rarely disappointed. Last year, thankfully -- aside from a bunch of very early in the season snow, it wasn't bad. Therefore, I'm expecting this year to fucking suck. At least I won't be surprised if it does.

Over the weekend, Daisy got a new tripod for her phone so that she could take some good, artsy photos. As you may recall, she has the highest end new Samsung Galaxy whatever it is (I'm an iPhone guy, and therefore I don't give a shit about any other phones) and it has one of the best cameras on the market. What followed, on Sunday afternoon, was an impromptu photo session in our backyard, as the lighting and weather was perfect for it. 

I am not generally a photogenic person; I think in most photos I look terrible or look like I weigh 100 pounds (or more) more than I actually do. And to be fair, in a few of the photos she took, especially wide body shots, I had, ahem, an especially wide body, to put it mildly. But in most of the photos, I looked good. Really good. and so did she. Therefore, there's about four or five photos I'm going to have to pore over carefully to choose which one I want to use as this year's Christmas card photo. All are good, all are slightly different. I'm not sure yet which one I like the most. 

Since we now have the photos done, I guess one of my new goals this weekend is to just go on the site and get the cards designed and printed up. No real need to wait on it, really. To those ends I already ordered four more books of stamps today from the USPS. Like, I don't necessarily need that many stamps to send out the cards, but I like having a large selection of stamps on hand. I'm not a philatelist or anything, but I definitely appreciate some good stamp art and a variety of it. Daisy and I had to send out some mail-in ballots today (for some school levy or something, I guess -- anything outside mayoral elections and presidential elections I give no real shits about) and on each envelope I put a holographic T-Rex stamp, because of course I have those. 

Today is Daisy's mother's birthday. She took the afternoon off and took her out to dinner at a hipster burger bar a few miles from our house just as I was waking up for the day. Daisy works in the office for the rest of the week until our vacations start Friday night. I miss having her home every day. When the new firm who purchased her company takes over in the spring (or the summer or fall, who knows when that'll happen) she will likely no longer be able to work at home at all, while several others in her office will be allowed to work from home permanently. This doesn't sit well with Daisy and she voiced her opinions on that when she visited/met with the new firm's leadership last month. I would much prefer Daisy work at home 60-80% of the time, and she was very much looking forward to a work-from-home schedule continuing from this point forward -- not just because of Covid, because that will eventually go away (or go away-ish), but because it's far more comfortable with far fewer distractions and far more safety. 

I've said before multiple times that I will never work a job in an office ever again if I can ever possibly avoid it. There is zero reason for it in 2021, especially now that for the past almost two full years society has proven that work from home isn't just some niche thing for very specific people/jobs, but that almost any office job can be done from a home environment. Of course, you folks know that my overall goal is to never work period after I leave my current job -- I want my job to be writing the books that I've always wanted to write, starting with my novel (to give me the motivation to write others) but also re-editing and re-configuring the nonfiction book that came out of the first three years of this blog and getting that published, professionally -- as well as actually releasing a few volumes of poetry. I am a man of many talents and many hats, and all of them are being wasted and are going unappreciated at the moment. I'm not a fan of that, and if nobody will give me the recognition and acclaim I require, I will go on the offensive and take it. 

 

Anyway.

 

I have a shipment of e-juice from my favorite company coming in two days. It should last me another month or two, give or take. I'm not happy about it, but it's taking much longer for me to work through my remaining vape supplies than I previously anticipated. This is good and bad, really -- good because I'm not vaping as much as I used to, but bad because the longer it takes me to go through the supplies I have left, the longer it takes me to just quit and be done with it. At this point the juice is basically a necessary evil so that I can finish the habit. One of my stick all-in-one devices died this week too (the fire button broke), so, progress?

Wednesday, October 6:

Working from home, day 353.

 

Well, that didn't work.

I mentioned before that the juice company I use came back with some extra stipulations for their orders. For one, the price of each bottle of juice went up by about $3 each. For two, there's no longer free economy shipping (though I did find out this past week that there is free shipping available...for orders $75 and over). And, for three, shipping now has "adult signature required" for deliveries. 

I didn't think much about that last part -- the last order I did, which arrived the same day I got the new power supply for my computer, was just dropped into my mailbox normally, unceremoniously. That told me that they really didn't seem to give much of a shit about that "adult signature required" thing.

Well, today, when I was scheduled to receive my next order, I instead got an orange slip in the mailbox that said "adult signature required for delivery, tell us when you want it redelivered" or some other such bullshit. I watched the camera recording from when the mailman came -- he didn't even bother to ring the bell or attempt to gather said signature for delivery, just put the slip into the box with the rest of the mail and moved on. 

Like, what the fuck, USPS? 

Again, I've always been a strong, passionate defender of the postal service, but it is getting harder and harder by the day to defend these people and their carriers' incompetence. Effort is a big thing for me -- make the effort. If you make the effort on anything you do, even if you fail I likely won't be disappointed. But you have to try. You have to ring the bell, you have to actually make an attempt. 

So, instead, I had to login to the USPS website and set up re-delivery for Saturday, and now I have to be home and awake the entire day for them to bring the box of juice and to sign for it when it comes, because who knows when they'll actually deliver the mail on a Saturday. It used to be around noon, almost like clockwork, every week. It is now anywhere between 10am and 8pm, and you never know when it'll arrive because they don't seem to have reliable, normal carriers anymore. And yes, in my re-delivery request, I told them to ring the Ring doorbell when they arrive.

 

I 100% realize all of this is a first world problem. I realize that in the grand scheme of things, even in my own life, there are far more important and/or pressing things to worry about. It doesn't mean that I'm not still pissed off about it.

I appreciate consistency. I appreciate people not "giving up." So much of my life is consumed by dealing with inconsistent people who have given up or otherwise don't care about what they're doing, don't care about details, don't care about appearances or effort, or expectations, or anything regarding why they're in the position they're in. For someone like me, who has a very strong code of ethics and honor, it is maddening.

 

Case in point: one of my colleagues at work is fed up with the job (he has the same job I do, just on a different shift) and has told me multiple times he's now past the point of caring, past his breaking point, and has given up on trying to make the experience better or going above and beyond anymore -- he's going to do the barest minimum of his job duties and hate every minute of it and wants to quit.

In the job we have, if you want to get anything accomplished and affect any real change -- or make anything better -- that's the exact opposite of the attitude you need. Our job sucks, make no mistake -- as operations managers over a team of customer service agents, we realized a long time ago that our job is to act as go-betweens to give the customers someone to yell at instead of the technicians who are engaged on fixing their issues. The other part of our job seems to be to make customers accept and be okay with the fact that they're paying a lot of money for very, very shitty service, as frequently our hands are tied and we can't do a lot to help get their stuff fixed, especially on overnights. But that's the corporate side of our job, the large company we work for. My colleague is more frustrated by the immediate side of our job, meaning our local leadership who run operations for the company we're contracted through -- that means our direct supervisors/directors/program directors. 

I will admit -- a lot of those folks really have given up. I know people who have been in that job in leadership roles for a long time, as I've been there for seven years now. I've seen great managers and directors whose work product and care levels were once exemplary now drop through the floorboards. I've watched these people become sad shells of themselves, going through the motions of their jobs without any real effort or passion, like they've been beaten and broken.

My first thought is always something like WTF? You used to be so good, so wonderful at this job, and you and your team were always the best. What the hell happened? That defies all logic and reason to me. Like, if you don't want to work the job anymore, quit and go somewhere else; I don't have time for your lack of effort. When you're still there and want to piss and moan about how much you hate it, or conversely, just stop caring and "give up"? That's even worse. Life's too short, man. And that's not how you make things better.

In our job, to make things better and make things happen, you have to be loud. You have to be vocal. You have to fight and not let conversations (or arguments) die. So few of these people realize that. So few of these people are confrontational and actually want to fight for change...and that's why everything remains status quo. I am very vocal to my leadership on policy issues, I am vocal in telling them everything I need to succeed and elicit actual change or create pathways for success. If there's something I need to be able to do and policy or rules of engagement don't let me do it, I take that to leadership, loudly, and ask that they find a way to, basically, permit me to actually make it work. I am passionate. I care. I don't give up or give in. Doing so lets the company win, and I'm not in it for the company. I'm in it for me. I'm not afraid of anyone in that place or anyone in our parent company's leadership -- I am not concerned by that. Why would I care? What are they gonna do, get me in "trouble"?

I'm almost forty years old. I don't get in "trouble." I'm not a middle schooler and my job isn't going to put me in detention or paddle me. 

 

People in that job are so afraid of pissing off leadership. I don't care if I piss people off. I'm an operations manager. I didn't care before when I was an agent, either. I have a job to do, and I expect my leadership to be, y'know, leaders and problem-solvers when I bring problems to their attention. I'm brash, I'm uncompromising, and I don't give a single shit about what anyone in that program or parent company thinks of me, because I get shit done. If the first level of leadership doesn't address my concerns or ignores them, I take it to the second, and third when possible, because I will be heard and it will be addressed. 

That being said...I don't always win. I don't always get my way. I am frustrated on a pretty consistent basis. But I refuse to basically "give up" like so many others have. I'm a fucking warrior and that job is my battlefield. I see myself as a rabble-rouser, a revolutionary. So when I see people giving up, when I see people checking out or saying they're past their breaking point, most of the time I just think they're weak or lazy. I don't let the company's bullshit crush me -- they don't own me, it's just a goddamned job. I am not that job, I am not the position I work in, I am a person. When I'm on the clock, I work like I want to command a corporate takeover; a coup, if you will. When I'm off the clock, that place doesn't exist.

Thursday, October 7:

Working from home, day 354.

Payday for the wife.

 

Finally, the last day of work before our vacation week.

This week has been frustrating on multiple levels, for multiple reasons. Every night at work I have owned and ran with at least one highly escalated, stupid issue either due to being short-staffed or it needing management oversight. Last night that issue came in 45 minutes before I left this morning, leaving me holding the bag. I'm so burnt out and am very glad tonight is the last night I need to be there for the next ten days. I'm even more glad that tomorrow is payday for me.

I haven't been sleeping much. I haven't really felt a lot of need for sleep, to be honest with you. I think those high energy levels I had earlier this summer when I got on the Metformin and began losing some weight have leveled off now, but they have also transformed into an outlet to vent stress and a need for far less sleep than I generally would want. I've been averaging about 4-6 hours a day, with roughly an hour of that (when I can) being on my lunch hour at work -- where a few nights over the past few weeks I have set my alarm on my phone and taken a quick power nap on the couch. Doing so allows me to need to sleep less during the daytime hours, I think. Today I didn't fall asleep until nearly 11am and got up around 3:30. If I'm tired tonight during work, and I have the time, I'll likely nap again. 

What else is going on in my world? Well...

I have added to the list of things I want to do on our vacation next week. The updated list is now:

1. write at least two chapters of the novel

2. go see a movie, ANY movie, in the theater -- I'll let Daisy pick, even

3. order pizza to enjoy, likely during football on Sunday, diabetes be damned

4. return the power supply to Amazon and get the refund for it

5. clean the downstairs of the house, with or without Daisy's help

6. go to the gym at least twice

7. eat in at an actual restaurant -- as in, sit down, order food, and eat it

8. actually play some games on my PS2 and play Wii with the wife

9. catch up on some correspondence with friends I've let fall to the wayside

10. set up a list of goals I'd like to accomplish in the next year

11. find somewhere that has V8 in stock, and stock up

12. call my parents and figure out what they want for Christmas

13. design, finalize, and order the Christmas cards

14. finish several series I've been watching through on various streaming platforms

15. watch several movies I've been planning to watch but haven't gotten to yet.

 

I don't know how many of these goals I'll get accomplished; I've only included the actually "do-able" ones, really.  Note that none of these goals involve travel anywhere outside of town, which is the one thing that Daisy really wants to do -- she really, desperately wants to get away from Omaha for a few days. I don't know if, at this juncture, something along those lines will be possible. She's waited far too long and piddle-dicked around trying to find something to do, and now we're 24 hours away from our vacation week starting and we still have zero plans whatsoever as to anywhere we'd go for anything we'd do. At this juncture I'd be fine with a day trip somewhere, or an overnight or two adventure that just gets us out of the city for a bit. I'm not picky, but I also don't want to waste money or my entire vacation traveling or doing something I'm not interested in or will be miserable doing when I have so many other goals I need to accomplish in the brief week I have off. If I don't get the novel back off the ground now, for example, I don't know when I'll be able to do so for the rest of the year as the holidays are coming up, and I don't have extra PTO to burn again. If I don't clean the downstairs of the house when I have the time and energy to do so, it will never get done. Etc.

I also don't know if Daisy even attempted to cancel or reschedule our dentist appointments at the end of the month. Regardless, I told her if she doesn't cancel mine, I'll do it myself. 

The next 48 hours or so are going to be fairly hectic; I work all night tonight, but I have to sleep fast and get up early in the afternoon as (at this juncture), we're still scheduled to have a friend drop by for a visit for a few hours tomorrow night once Daisy is off work. The house needs to be gutted and cleaned still, at least to a somewhat passable state, and while I can help with that to an extent, I can't do it all -- I just don't have the time or the energy to take care of a thorough reconditioning of the downstairs of the house with less than 24 hours before we have company. 

Friday, October 8: Payday for me.

Saturday, October 9: Day off. 

Days one and two of vacation.

 

To her credit, even on like six hours' sleep over the course of two days, Daisy cleaned the downstairs of the house remarkably well -- she spent hours un-fucking the vast majority of the kitchen (which is not an easy task, as I've done it before as well) and cleaned out the living room really well, giving us a quite habitable space for our visiting desk. She also -- once our friend arrived -- made one of the best pizzas I've ever had, completely from scratch.

Our friend's visit was fine. I was social for over three hours, and after eating and taking my meds, I excused myself for the evening and went upstairs to pass out in my chair. When I woke up, I found that our friend didn't leave until almost 2am, and that Daisy herself didn't go to bed until around 4 or so. As I write this, it's 9:30 AM on Saturday morning, so I'm letting her sleep. Also, she told me last night to let her sleep. 

We have a fair amount on the docket to take care of today, and the first step of that is to get my juice order delivered by signing for it...whenever that actually arrives. Could be in an hour, could be in another eight hours -- Saturday postal service people are unreliable as fuck, as I've mentioned above. I'm over halfway through my last remaining bottle of juice, so I am going to be incredibly pissed if that doesn't show up or they try to tell me they attempted delivery but couldn't deliver it, without ringing the bell or anything like that (as they were specifically instructed to do). 

Sunday, October 10:

Day three of vacation.

 

Those fucking liars, man.

 

I watched the mail come yesterday, on the camera live, around 1pm. No packages, nothing but a little junk mail, basically. The mail guy tossed it in the box and kept on going.

 

This was fine, as my juice was a re-delivery, which means usually a special delivery that would be brought by at a different time by a different driver; I've had this happen before, so I didn't think much of it. 

 

By 5pm I was getting a little concerned.

 

By 7pm I was getting angry.

 

By 9pm I was furious.

 

By 11pm, the tracking said it was still out for delivery and on schedule to be delivered today, so I knew that the entire thing had been a damnable lie. At midnight, when this hadn't changed, I accepted my fate, since I had little choice. 

At 8am, I began calling numbers. This package of six bottles of juice cost me ninety dollars and should have been here five days ago. It should have been re-delivered yesterday with confirmation. Tomorrow is Columbus Day, a mail holiday, so the post office is closed.

Calling different numbers, unsurprisingly, got us nowhere. It's a Sunday. Outside of daytime business hours M-F, there are no representatives in customer service available. So I called the local post office, as I know they do deliveries on Sundays here in Omaha, as I've gotten USPS deliveries on Sundays quite a few times in my years...and the phone rang off the hook. I must've let it ring for a full 2-3 minutes, getting angrier and angrier. 

I tried to modify the re-delivery request to see if they would get it out today, or if I could just tell them to hold it at the post office so we could get it Tuesday morning once they open. Apparently that's not a thing, as it told me my "re-delivery request was expired" and I would have to open a new one. Okay, so I tried to open a new one -- "only one re-delivery request is permitted for each item, and this one has already had a re-delivery request for it."

 

When this failed, I said fuck it, searched for the names and numbers, and yes, I 100% called the public relations coordinator and postmaster general for the greater Omaha area.

Neither of them answered their phones, nor did they allow me to leave voicemails. They just rang off the hook. Office numbers, probably, but they should at least have a voicemail system.

You know, this would all be much simpler if they just did their jobs the way they're supposed to do them in the first place. By, like -- oh, I don't know, following instructions and following through on their commitments. 

 

The IVR for the main postal service number was particularly condescending, too. 

Sooooo yeah, I'm done at this point defending the postal service. I'm done supporting them, I'm done fighting for them and advocating for them, I'm done with the soapboxing and beating the war drums to get them support and funding when it appears that they can't even get the basics of actually delivering the mail right. In the past six months or so, I've had two packages outright disappear, with no response to my inquiries or claims filed despite multiple attempts at outreach and escalations with them, and now I have a scheduled delivery that just...never showed up, with no communications as to why not. So, my support for the postal service has ended. I'll pay extra now, if I can, to ship something via FedEx or UPS just to actively avoid any chances of it being lost or not-being-given-a-single-shit about. And on Tuesday morning, you bet your ass we will be at the post office when it opens to even see if the goddamn package is there for me to pick up in person, or if it's vanished as well.

In the interim, I will now have to go to the local vape shop today -- something I hate doing -- to pay some outlandish price for a bottle of juice or two that isn't my normal flavor and isn't something I want, just to be able to get through the next 48 hours or so. Add that to the list of dumb bullshit I shouldn't have to deal with, but now do, and you can about guess how well my vacation is going thus far.

I'm not the only one having problems, though. This morning, Daisy found that she had a $200 fraudulent charge on one of her credit cards -- the card she was going to use for wherever we decide to go for our getaway together -- for some warehouse company in Florida. She looked it up and the site was quite sketchy, so who knows. It's been disputed and taken care of, but the new card -- which she paid $15 to expedite shipping for -- doesn't arrive until...Tuesday. At some point. Via FedEx. That, of course, throws a further wrench into the gears. 

I just...again, October is a historically bad month for me, and it's getting off to a great start, apparently. 

I know all of these things are first-world problems. That doesn't change the fact that I am very much angered by them. Sometimes it really feels as it almost nothing can just go right and happen the way it's supposed to. I must never forget how thankful I am to have a roof over my head, lights on, food in the fridge and pantry, and steady jobs for the both of us. 

Speaking of jobs, I have basically ignored mine completely since I logged out and began my vacation on Friday morning. My email count is (presently) sitting at 840 unread messages in my inbox, and it feels good to not give a single flying shit about any of them. The program can burn to the ground and we could all be fired while I'm gone for all I care, as long as I get a good severance package once I return. Gotta have money to live on while I write the novel, you know.

We still have made zero decisions on where we want to go for our vacation getaway, and the window for this is getting smaller by the day. Daisy floated the idea of Chicago, which I'm not particularly mad at overall -- but, I mean, people. And I'd rather not get shot or stabbed (or have any chance whatsoever of either of those things happening) on my vacation. Of course, the fraudulent charge on her card screwed that up for the moment, so...we still don't know yet. At this juncture we can't even leave for anywhere until late Tuesday/early Wednesday because of that alone. 

"We're leaving Wednesday morning," Daisy told me earlier, with finality.

Uh, okay, but to where?

Monday, October 11:

Day four of vacation.

"Columbus" Day.

Canadian Thanksgiving.

 

I put "Columbus" in quotes there because I have a lot of feelings about celebrating a day (or even making it a quasi-holiday) named for a man who brought disease to the "new world" as well as the slave trade and, through his actions (directly or indirectly) ended up with basically whitey moving in, setting up shop, and killing off the vast majority of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Caribbean islands. Someone far more important and/or famous than me suggested a while back that the day should be renamed "Indigenous Peoples' Day" and I'm really behind that movement quite a bit. 

 

 

Today is also Canadian Thanksgiving, which is always the second Monday of October. Why? I don't rightly know, even though I married a Canadian, and therefore married into a family full of them. I've never asked. I've always assumed it's at least somewhat analogous, in some fashion, to the normal American Thanksgiving celebrated here in late November (which I've already taken PTO for, naturally) but aside from that, I don't know. I'll have to ask Mom today. What I do know is that Canadians don't seem to make a huge deal out of Thanksgiving like Americans do -- or at least, if they do, I've never seen it. They seem to be pretty chill about the whole affair, which -- to be fair -- most Canadians are pretty chill about everything, really. 

So, as we're slowly nearing the midpoint of our vacation, before I go any further, let's just do a brief recap of everything we've done (or couldn't do) thus far...

1. I still haven't gotten my juice order from the USPS (no surprise there; we'll likely pick it up tomorrow morning directly from the post office), but we did go to the vape shop about two miles away, where I got two store-brand 60ml bottles for less than $20, and was quite satisfied by that price point and by their extremely helpful staff; I was in and out of the store in less than five minutes, juice in hand. Bonus: their strawberries & cream flavor, "Scream," is fantastic, so as long as I'm still doing this vaping thing, I'll likely go back a few more times this winter to stock up -- especially if getting my normal juice from my normal company through the mail is going to continue to be such a godawful hassle. I'll totally support the little guy and brick-and-mortar stores when they make such quality product for very reasonable prices. I was expecting to spend $100 to get a few bottles of completely mediocre juice and was way surprised.

2. We have still not decided where we're going or what we're doing for our vacation. Daisy's frauded card is a big part of that, but she was also not feeling great last night and went to bed really early. I did too, actually -- I was passed out in my chair by 11 or so, probably earlier. The plan is to finalize something today. I guess.

3. Because the wife was feeling ill last night and because football Sunday on a night I didn't have to work, I did go ahead and order my standard normal pizzas from Dominos -- and it was a bittersweet experience. I got one of what they're calling their "surprise frees" now; it is a promotion where you get a surprise menu item for free, and it ended up being a cheesy bread, which is pretty cool. However, I ordered my pizzas with onions, hot sauce, spinach, and two different cheeses (cheddar and feta) and they came with no cheddar, no spinach, onions, mushrooms, and olives. Uhhh...yeah, that's not what I ordered. They also did not remove the red peppers from my Mediterranean veggie sandwiches I ordered, either, as I requested. I sent them a message about it -- not a complaint, just a "hey, this is different than what I ordered, but it was still great, just thought you'd want to know" -- etc. I'm not a fan of olives or mushrooms, but on pizza they're fine, I can live with 'em. And it's not like I'm gonna send the pizzas back, or anything. I'll likely get free pizza coupon codes from them for it. I'm not necessarily trying to get free product or anything (I don't order pizza enough anymore to make it really worthwhile, what with the diabetes and all), but I'm not gonna lie, I adore Dominos now. They stepped up their game big time in the past few years and every order I've ever gotten from them has been amazing. Not only that, but they treat their customers so extremely well by doing the offers, coupons, and free stuff they do. I used to love Papa Johns back in the day too, but their pizzas went way downhill after 2015-16 or so, to the point where even though I could order vegan pizzas for the wife, their food became so shitty I didn't want to order from them at all (and neither did she). For a time about ten years ago I was a Pizza Hut guy as well, only because of the P'Zone and their big family meal deal things -- but now I'm 100% a Dominos guy if I'm ordering pizza from a chain. It's just way better.

4. Sort of along the same lines of the above, I have been eating like an asshole for the past several days -- basically since my vacation started. It's been (mostly) unintentional; I just haven't had my customary meals of salads, vegan soups with lots of vegetables, or steamed vegetables with fake meat for a few days. Instead, I've opted for the more quick and easy things, and it feels like my body is sort of in revolt because of it. Last night and today I have had some pretty awful intestinal distress, a distress that I really hope clears up more and more as the day goes on and as my vacation goes on, because I do have another sandwich, an unopened cheesy bread, and a pizza and a half to eat still. Like hell I'm letting any of that go to waste. 

5. Of course, if we are going to be going...somewhere, I need to pack a bag of essentials. I haven't done that yet and have barely thought about it, really. I tend to pack for wherever we're going to, and because I don't know where we're going to, well...

6. I still have to return the power supply.

7. I still have to refill my prescriptions. I have four pills left of my allopurinol and probably roughly that many days left of the metformin -- I'm getting very low and never let myself get that low if I can avoid it.

8. I would also like to get my flu shot for the year while I'm there getting my pills.

9. I still have not done any work on the novel. I haven't been in the headspace for it this week and my confidence levels are pretty low.

Tuesday, October 12:

Day five of vacation.

 

Well, I did get some stuff accomplished in the past 36 hours or so since I last sat down here to write:

1. Power supply has been returned.

2. Canadian Thanksgiving dinner with the parents has been had.

3. Prescriptions have been refilled and picked up this afternoon.

4. Picked up my juice from the post office.

5. Got Daisy's new card in the mail.

4. Picked up some groceries/trip essentials.

5. Book the lodging for the trip

6. Establish a game plan for the trip

7. Got new gas in the car, as well as an oil/coolant/washer fluid top-off and tire air.

8. Packed my suitcase (not using the huge duffel bag this time, it's a short trip).

9. Paid all my bills so I am free and clear for the trip.

*in progress

As for the trip itself, I guess we're going to Chicago. I guess. Daisy gave me two choices, that or Colorado. She gave me no options on Colorado, nor did she even name a city or area she wanted to go to, only "to a cabin in the mountains."

Uh. For those of you who don't know, Colorado is getting its first snowstorm of the year at the moment. Because in Colorado, that happens in October. A good chunk of Wyoming and South Dakota are getting it too, from a storm system sweeping across and under the Rockies right into the flyover states where I just happen to live and where I have lived for the past fifteen years. 

Of course, this storm system wouldn't be complete without threatening the possibility of severe weather tonight -- yes, again, the night before we leave on a trip, just like the South Dakota trip earlier this summer -- so, that's a thing too. The chances of anything severe in Omaha are relatively slim, but it's likely we'll get some drenching rains and some thundering here and there for a few hours in the overnight...and then we'll have to drive through it as we head east in the morning.

Our trip is straight east on I-80, 480 miles (give or take), a little over 7 hours of drive time (which will, of course, be a few hours longer for restroom stops and/or gas). To put this into perspective, it's about ten hours to drive from here to Denver -- from experience -- and about nine to get back up into the Deadwood area of the western Black Hills. So, compared to other recent trips, it's significantly shorter.

I myself have not been inside Chicago proper in about thirty years -- not unless you count O'Hare airport, which I've flown through numerous times. Air travel aside, I rolled through the edge of the city on a family trip in 1991 and really haven't been back through there since. The closest we got was a few years ago, during my last trip to visit my parents, when we made a side-detour through Joliet to get White Castle and Rax Roast Beef (this was, of course, when I was still eating meat). Daisy, however, has some soul-fulfilling connections to Chicago, including various vegan eateries -- the most famous being The Chicago Diner -- and has been there multiple times, including at least twice since we've been together (but, I believe, before our marriage). She used to go there fairly often in her twenties with one or more friends. So, for this trip, I'm more or less along for the ride and will let her take the proverbial lead.

It's also worth noting that this past weekend (I can't remember the exact day, but I think it was Thursday or Friday) we celebrated nine years officially as a couple. We've been married for over seven of those years, almost seven-and-a-half at this point -- and it's sometimes been a wild ride. Other times it's been exactly what we both expected. This trip is a short getaway for us to get out of Omaha, do something new, and enjoy ourselves for a few days.

When I say short, I do mean short. We'll leave in the morning, be in the city by the evening, stay two days/nights in our hotel, leave Friday morning or early afternoon, and then be back home by Friday night. We got a great rate on a pretty highly rated hotel with an L train station literally right in front of it and three minutes from The Chicago Diner, and I told Daisy to jump on it before it went up in price. She activated her new card (which arrived in the mail today) and booked it without incident.

So before I go further into the story, I need to recap the events of the day -- because moving forward without doing that is going to leave a lot out.

In tracking my juice package and figuring where it had gone and hadn't gone, I logged in and accessed my USPS Informed Delivery. It told me that delivery had been attempted and all but confirmed for me that it was still being held at the local post office a mile and a half from our home. But it also showed me a list of all of the other packages that had been delivered to our house in the past two weeks or so (basically anything that the USPS had hands on at one point), and I noticed an interesting discrepancy. On the list was a package from the questionable warehouse place that Daisy had said her card had been frauded by.

"[Daisy]," I said, walking into our bedroom. "Did you happen to use the card with fraud on it to purchase [item]?"

"Umm..."

"Was that [item] delivered October 4 and did it cost [dollar amount] overall?"

"...yes," she said, sheepishly, finally remembering. 

"Then it's not fraud, it was [item], I've verified it through the USPS tracking system of everything that's come to our house over the past few weeks."

What followed was a call from Daisy to what sounded like a particularly dimwitted representative for her credit card company that ended (after her asking multiple times) with the representative canceling the fraud investigation/processing as it was indeed a valid charge. The new card did arrive today via FedEx as expected, and she did use it as mentioned above to take care of our trip stuff...but man did Daisy feel stupid.

It happens, I guess. For everything I use my cards for I'd be surprised if one or more of them hasn't had an actual fraudulent charge on them at some point that I haven't even noticed. 

The juice thing was another story entirely.

So I waited until after 9am to call the local post office just to see if I could verify for certain that my juice was still there and that it wasn't going to go out today without anyone telling me. The post office opens at 8, I verified. The phone rang off the hook for a good two minutes without anyone answering it before I gave up.

"The last thing the tracking said was that delivery was attempted last week," I told Daisy. "There's legit been no movement since, leading me to believe on strong suspicion that it is still at the post office today."

 

The USPS website asked me with an automated form how I felt they had handled delivery and concerns about that particular shipment, and I laid into them about it. I know it will likely be weeks/months before anyone reads that feedback, if ever, but honestly I didn't feel a lot of shame in dragging their teams through the mud a little bit. I made sure they got my contact info in the event that they wanted to discuss it further. There's nothing they'll do to compensate me for my time, effort, or anger though, so there's little point.

A couple of hours later, we got in the car for our errands for the day and drove to the post office first, where the lady there was like "yeah, it's here," took down my ID details to make sure the addresses and names matched, and then I signed the little slip to confirm I'd taken delivery before I finally, after a full week of it being locked into limbo, had my juice in hand. Almost effortlessly.

"So since you like the other place's juice now," Daisy asked, referencing the local brick-and-mortar store we'd gone to on Sunday, "are you now done with this company?"

"Psh, no," I said. "I'm not mad at the juice company, I'm mad at the postal service. It's not the juice company's fault; they took my payment and shipped the juice as they were supposed to."

This is true; I have no ill will towards the company I get my juices from. I have no reason to; they have their own regulations they have to follow, and it's harder than ever to legally sell juice online, so I get it. 

Anyway, I have the juice, so that crisis is over.

After that we ran the rest of the errands briefly mentioned above -- we took care of the car maintenance stuff, did some Walmart shopping and picked up our prescriptions, and came home. The Walmart trip was a little excessive; they had a giant clearance section where the wife and I picked up a lot of items, including some clothing, a few paintings (yes, paintings), a giant wall sconce, a bottle of my Sodastream energy drink mix, two new jersey sheet sets (a remarkable deal at $16 each) and some other odds and ends. I picked up a light, stretchy zipper hoodie for $11, for example, in my size. I got some new anti-blister boot socks specifically made for walking or being on your feet all day -- which I figured would be helpful if I'm going to be wandering Chicago a lot. I picked up some various energy drinks to stuff into our cooler. I got my string cheeses and Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, two bottles of low-sodium V8 (as nobody has the cans in stock at present) that I'll just have to live with, and some snacks for the road. We then went to pick up our prescriptions from the other grocery store we frequently utilize before coming back home.

The next few days will probably be really busy and will warrant a post of their own here on the side, likely, as I have done for the stories of our other trips in the past. We'll see how that pans out, though.

Wednesday, October 13: Day six of vacation

Thursday, October 14: Day seven of vacation

Friday, October 15: Day eight of vacation

 

These days are covered in the side post "Brandon and Daisy Go to Chi-town, Get Fatter" posted alongside this one -- so go back and read that before going further, otherwise a lot of the following won't make sense.

 

 

 

 

Saturday, October 16:

Last day of vacation.

Saturday was spent sleeping and writing most of the above-mentioned post, and doing little else. Saturday was my recovery day; I got my sleep schedule turned around and I took care of all the laundry from the trip, caught up on my Youtube subscriptions and generally did as little as possible.

Sunday, October 17: Working from home, day 355

Monday, October 18: Working from home, day 356.

 

I'm still working on the Chicago post, because writing that stuff takes up a lot of time and mental energy. Yesterday afternoon, when I woke up, I saw that it was my last day to use my coupon for a free pizza with Dominos, so I ordered a vegan pizza for Daisy (no cheese, olives and pineapple, thin crust) for lunch and grabbed another pizza and a cheesy bread for me, which I've already consumed most of by this point. Today is the return to normal Brandon rabbit food for the foreseeable future, at least until Thanksgiving a month from now. 

 

I worked an extra half an hour late last night/into this morning as I had been owning and updating one of our clients on a mass outage that was being worked on (and had been worked on) all weekend. The outage had the attention of both the program director and my executive director, who sent me a semi-brusque email asking where the updates were on it (he'd been left off the main email trail all night by semi-accident) and the client team was still howling at me for updates well over an hour after I'd already transitioned the case back to the daytime folks for follow up. Other than that, my first night back to work was fine.

 

When I got back up this afternoon, I immediately showered and ran another two loads of laundry, the remainder of everything left from the trip and a load of whites (my undershirts/tank tops and a new hoodie). Daisy let me know that as the Denverites were in town and were at the parents', she was going over there after work this evening to see them and spend some time with them, which is fine by me -- I'll see them later in the week at some juncture to make an appearance before they head back to Colorado, and as Monday is usually my most difficult night of the week, I could also use the decompression time to watch some television and to eat a meal. 

Tuesday, October 19:

Working from home, day 357.

 

It's been getting really cold at night -- down into the 40s almost every night now. I guess it is, yes, the time of year for that, but I'm not full-on ready for it yet. The weather in Chicago, when we were there last week, was wonderful -- mostly overcast but temperatures in the 70s, with a good breeze and some sprinkly rain here and there, moisture coming off the lake, etc. It will snow here in Omaha soon; we generally get our first snowfall of any sort of accumulating fashion between Halloween and Thanksgiving. While we have our new snowblower now, that doesn't mean I like the winter any more than I did before. 

I'm looking into new job opportunities, and one in particular -- our friend who came over to visit last week works in operations for one of the service industry chains, and it's a work-from-home job with better hours and what appears to be far better pay compared to what I'm doing now, with little responsibility and a lot of downtime. The best part of it is that she doesn't have to manage anyone and doesn't have to interact with any customers or clients -- something that after seven years of working where I am now and currently having 20 people report to me sounds very, very lucrative. A job that I can do from home and do peacefully without people nagging me or asking me for help or customers yelling at me via phone or email? Sign me the fuck up. 

 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, October 20: Working from home, day 358

Thursday, October 21: Working from home, day 359

Friday, October 22: Day off; payday for both of us.

 

I haven't exactly had the easiest week ever, and as such, I didn't write here on these days.

 

 

 

 

 

Saturday, October 23:

Day off.

 

I have still not finished the Chicago post, even though we returned from the city a week ago now. I have gotten so behind on so many things, and it seems like any time I have off is spent running errands or doing some other bullshittery that keeps me away from my computer, this site, or from actually getting any real downtime. 

Well, today's gonna be some downtime, I decided. 

There is a lot I need to do on a personal level this weekend, starting with finishing the Chicago post, but also a lot of stuff around the house. Our microwave blew out last night, so Daisy will be putting in a service order for that through our home warranty (we can get a new one installed free and clear, aside from a $100 service charge) and our flapper door on our refrigerator ice dispenser no longer seals, so we need to get that taken care of through the same process as well. The microwave is a big thing, though, as I use it every day or almost every day, as does she. It's not something we can really live without for very long at all. I could just buy a pretty decent tabletop microwave for less than $100, but if we're going to have the warranty and pay for it every month, let's use it, goddammit.

As for the fridge ice flapper thing, I don't know how to fix that really. That's definitely gonna need an appliance guy to repair. I told Daisy I could duct tape it closed for the moment just to make sure the freezer stays sealed and doesn't ice up like crazy (as it has been doing) but she didn't want me to do that, soooo....nothing's been fixed on it because she hasn't called it in yet. 

If you're asking why I don't take care of these things or call them in myself, it's partially because I don't want to and partially because I'm not the handyman of the house, Daisy is. I've probably said it here before, but I'm not a manual-labor fix things person, that's Daisy. I'm an idea man, a conceptual fixer. I can talk most people off a ledge or persuade them to doing whatever I want them to do, or I can look at a computer system and tell you what's wrong with your hardware settings, or I can give you love/relationship advice on the do's and don'ts of a good marriage (I actually have a post in my drafts here about that, which I'll finish eventually) ...but actual manual labor is not and never has been my thing. In the entirety of our relationship, that's been a Daisy thing, and most of the time she dives into it deeply and quickly. 

Sure, I do all the laundry and wash all the bedsheets and blankets, and occasionally scrub toilets, clean the litter box once in a blue moon, or do the dishes a time or three every week -- and when the weather is nice, yes, I will do some yard work here and there. When I can, and have the time and energy, in the winter I will shovel the snow as well, or we'll do it together or take turns with it ("I shoveled it last time, you shovel it this time" etc), but most everything else is Daisy. 

Oh, and I do cook (well, "cook" in air quotes only) the vast majority of my own meals. Occasionally I'll make dinner for both of us, but it's rare. But it's also a once-a-week thing that Daisy makes a meal for both of us to consume at the same time as well; we mostly fend for ourselves when it comes to sustenance, especially with us working on opposite schedules. 

But anyway, this is just a roundabout way of me saying that I don't do the service calls for our appliances because it's not something I do or even know how to do -- Daisy has all that information, knows how to log into the account and do it, and just takes care of it over the course of five minutes or so, once I've nagged her enough to do so. And I just let her do it.

Don't think I don't pull my weight around the house otherwise; like I said above, there's a lot I do actually take care of, but it's safe to say that she does a lot more than I do most of the time. If I worked a normal and not-overnights schedule, I'd likely have a lot more energy and time to take care of such things. As it is, I just...don't. I can't really vacuum or cook a week's worth of meals or what have you at 4am, because noise.

 

Ahem. Anyway.

What's been going on this week? Well...I guess I can start from the present and work backwards. Right now, I'm doing my weekly backup of the HP's hard drive, in preparation for upgrading to Ubuntu 21.10 this afternoon. I've never upgraded the OS on this machine yet, so I don't necessarily fully trust it yet. Therefore, if it borks itself, I want to at least have the latest file backup possible when I hit that "upgrade" button later today. 

Last night, one of Daisy's friends from college was in a stage production of Steel Magnolias that we went to see in a local community theater. It was surprisingly wonderful and ended up being a fun little date night for us. It was $12 a ticket and was held in the city hall of one of the little suburbs of Omaha. I signed up for their mailing list and told Daisy I'd be totally down for going to see every one of these little community theater's plays every year, whether her friend was an actress in said plays or not. 

 

I love theater in general. As a writer, I'm drawn to it. I took some scriptwriting/playwriting classes in college and grad school and loved them (though none of my stuff is really good enough to be put on the stage). I really just like performance art. It also helped that 90% of the audience at this play was comprised of senior citizens and/or other folks older than the wife and I, and last night's audience was maybe only half full. That's a sweet spot for me -- old people, half-full auditorium, and a fully-stocked concessions stand with people actually cooking food. Plus there was a 50/50 raffle! (We did not win.) It's a quaint little experience straight out of the 1980s. No-frills theatrics. A good experience like that goes a long way for me. If the people had been rude or if the location/venue gave me anxiety it would be a different story, but thankfully it was exactly the opposite.

I also mentioned that earlier this week, the Denverites were in town (they left yesterday morning). On Thursday night, after Daisy got off work, we went over to the parents' to see them for a few hours before I would have to start my own shift on the overnight. While we were there, I received a text from one of my colleagues that the second-shift manager on our team was unceremoniously and mysteriously fired that evening.

I wasn't able to get any details; my Director was not at liberty to relay any, though I did ask (of course I asked, because wtf man) and mentioned that I could ask about it later once everything was finalized. It was apparently fairly public knowledge, though, as one of my director colleagues on dayshift messaged me about it the next morning, echoing my sentiments that the loss of this guy from the team was gonna be a huge blow to our productivity. That part is absolutely true -- aside from myself, he was probably the most competent operations manager we've had on our After Hours teams in several years, and he stopped a lot of BS from coming over to our overnight shift since he kept a tight leash on his folks. Without him, the floodgates of stupid are gonna be opened wide. Add to this that on Thursday night, my escalation manager colleague on the overnight shift also called out sick, and the entire night was more or less a trainwreck nightmare with multiple types of free-flowing horseshit that I was also more or less responsible for with little backup help. 

But, I mean, at least I still have my job. 

Like I said, I don't know what happened. It'll likely be several days or weeks before I get anything close to an actual story there. 

In other work news, we did have a management bridge call on Wednesday night with all of our leadership involved, and said leadership (my executive director specifically) told us that because the quality of our recent hires have been so bad because our parent company pays the agents $10 per hour to do a very complex job and because of that, we're basically hiring the rejects that McDonald's doesn't even want (his words, not mine) he's been working in the background to get not just raises of the agents to $16, 17 per hour but across the board, including a sort of "cost of living" raise for all of us in leadership as well. 

A real raise, a living wage, would be amazing for me -- not life-changing money by any means but enough to where I would have some breathing space for bills and maybe even make me be able to afford a new used car, finally -- or replace Daisy's car with an SUV of some sort that'll get around better in the snow. A 30% or so raise (I did the math) would make that job actually pay me pretty close to what I believe I should be making for the responsibilities I have, would be a competitive wage overall, and would absolutely be a large factor in my decision on whether I stick with this company and ride it out, or find something new and move on. So....we'll see, I guess.

I have put in my PTO for the day before Thanksgiving (as mentioned above) as well as the day before and the day of my birthday this year. It is likely the only time I'll use/take over the holidays this year, but that's also because I don't have any other time left and because all of the holidays fall on weekend days this year, and I don't work on the weekends. This year I told Daisy now that we're all (slowly) crawling back out of Covid, if possible I want to get my second tattoo (on my right inner forearm, for symmetry with the starfleet tattoo) on my birthday. I actually kind of want that to be a continuing trend every year if possible.

No, I have no idea what I want yet, but it'll not be anything nerd-related. I only know that I want it to take up the vast amount of my inner forearm, I want it to be a universal/classic design, and I want to have color in it. This also means that it will likely take multiple hours and will cost a few hundred dollars.

I've finished Christmas shopping for Daisy (more or less, anyway), with the final two items being purchased this morning. I may or not find one or two other little things for her between now and then, but I'm done overall. Surprisingly enough, it doesn't look like a lot when all laid out together, but that's because the big gift this year isn't incredibly large in size, just expensive. We're still trying to do Christmases on a budget, I guess, but I only spent about $50 more this year than I did last year, so that's not really a problem.

Sunday, October 24:

Working from home, day 360.

 

The upgrade to the new version of Ubuntu went off without a hitch. I also installed a few little tweaks here and there to make navigation and functionality a little bit easier, but it's still not (nor will it ever be) the setup I had on my old Acer that died.

 

As an aside, I did find on Amazon the Dell version of my old Acer (same specs/hardware), for less than $200. I'll likely wait until after Christmas, for obvious reasons, and then pick it up for myself. This HP has been a decent little machine and I know it's got a good bit of life left in it (hopefully) but I never intended for it to be my full-on, full-time machine for daily computing -- I purchased it as a backup machine because good lord do I know how shitty my luck generally is, and I'm almost always right.

Last night the wife and I watched through the first 2/3 of Dune -- only the first 2/3 because it is a long movie, folks. I liked it enough for what it was, I guess. I still have a lot of problems with it. It's very pretty, but if you haven't read the book or seen either of the previous adaptations (David Lynch's 1984 film or 2000's Sci-Fi Channel miniseries) you'll likely find it slow, boring, art-house-y, and almost nonsensical at times. If I were unfamiliar with the source material, I'd be utterly lost. I asked Daisy what she thought of it thus far and asked if she could understand what was going on, and she replied that yes, she got the basic premise of it and understood what was happening. Truthfully though, and it pains me to say this for a film I looked forward to for so long...I really think the David Lynch version was better executed. Now I have a ton of problems with the David Lynch version, but at least it had exposition, explanation (especially in the extended version that clocked in at like four hours) and it didn't feel like an assault you were thrown into.

Oh, and this new film is "part one," so...it's only about the first half of the first novel. I've read the first three Dune novels; I've read the first one a few times, in fact, and Messiah and Children of Dune at least once -- but way back in high school. I'm not of the mindset that the novels are "unfilmable" as some of my friends think, but it's been a very long time since I read them, and I saw the Lynch film first -- so those character designs and settings were in my head as a baseline when I read them. I just watched the Lynch film again earlier this year and while it is far, far from perfect, it is not anywhere near as bad as people make it out to be. The new film has great casting going for it, and the effects are great, but that's about where it stops. The adaptation of the story, in my opinion, leaves a lot to be desired. Personal preference, I guess. I'm all for big-budget sci-fi epics, but they have to be well-executed, and I sadly feel that the new Dune doesn't really live up to the level of execution I expected. It's a movie I would've loved as a teenager while reading the books for the first time, a movie I would've watched over and over and obsessed about, but as an adult feel sort of bored by. 

So that's my mini-review -- of the first 2/3 of the film, anyway. We'll finish the rest before I start work tonight. My suggestion for those of you excited to watch it on HBO Max over the course of the next month that it's readily available is to familiarize yourself with the source material and what came before it first. I'm sure the Sci-Fi Channel's miniseries is streaming somewhere, and the Lynch film is available on multiple platforms for streaming/buy/rent. It is not a bad movie but it is not at all what I was expecting. 

Talking with one of my friends tonight, I realized that the last movie I saw in a theater was Little Women, the new one from about two years ago with Saoirse Ronan and Timothee Chalamet (who, ironically, is Paul Atreides in Dune). That was about a month or so before Covid shut everything down. I only expect to see a few movies in the theater again over the course of the next year or two -- Ghostbusters: Afterlife being one of the obvious ones, and probably Spider-Man: No Way Home.  But other than that? Eh. It's expensive and time-consuming and I'm not particularly down for it anymore. I used to love the theater experience, but now it's just...not as fun? Maybe I'm just getting old. Maybe when we go see Ghostbusters, it'll rekindle my love of cinema. Who knows.

In other news...

I received an email on Thursday that told me that my juice supplier (the folks I order the bulk of my vape juice from, who closed up shop and then reopened a few months later) now had to close their mail shipping down for good, as the loophole that allowed them to ship again for a few months has now, apparently, fully closed federally. I recently ordered six bottles -- it was the package that was being held hostage by the USPS, as you may recall -- and I have five left right now. So I guess once those are gone, I'll never be able to get that juice again. At least I have the local vape shop down the street from us, for the time being. It'll get me by, I suppose. With my devices dying left and right anyway I may end up being done sooner rather than later anyhow. 

In the overnight last night, some storms and heavy rains swept through -- nothing major, nothing even more than a few rumbles of decent thunder -- but enough to remind me that we do have at least half a tree out front that could come down in the next big storm. I'm still a bit traumatized by the events of this summer, of course. Still, to feel the cool October air blow into my upstairs office is a welcome change from the 100-degree days we were experiencing a month or two ago. We've been running the furnace, even, on the really cold nights this month already. I've worked a few nights sitting at my desk downstairs in my bathrobe. I haven't broken out my new slippers yet but I don't fear that'll be too far behind this fall as the temperatures keep dipping. My guess is that we'll see our first good snow before Thanksgiving. Fall is truly in full swing in Nebraska. 

So I guess...with everything gearing up towards the holidays and Covid becoming less and less of a thing in a lot of places by the day/week, the question is...how long do I continue this series of Isolation Diaries posts? Booster shots are now readily available to most folks (I can get one now, for example, as I have diabetes) and I'm already planning to get my flu shot next weekend if at all possible, so where do we go from here? I've been thinking about this a lot as of late. I really rather enjoy this series of posts as it gives you all a day-to-day window inside my head, but the wife has told me multiple times that she thinks they're too long and take forever to read through, and I'm not sure how many others have the patience to read through them at this point either.

At this juncture, as I've been doing them for so long, I think I'll ether do them until the New Year or until day 500 of working from home (which is coming up, to be sure) and will reassess at that juncture. I do have my novel I need to be focusing on, and that will likely take up most of my writing time in 2022. I also don't want to feel like I'm chained to this website to post new content every day -- especially during the winter, when it's cold and I'd much rather sleep an extra hour or two in the afternoons into the evening than feel like I need to get up so I can write something here. It's good practice, but when it feels like a chore instead of an exciting pastime, I know that I need to ease back from it a bit. We shall see, I guess.

Monday, October 25: 

Working from home, day 361.

 

The microwave is still dead. We got it to kick on for a few minutes and reset the clock, etc, but when we tried to heat up food, it died completely again. On Saturday, Daisy plugged it in again in an attempt to try to get it working, and it was stone-cold dead, wouldn't even power on. It's likely a small part, an interior fuse or something, and is likely repairable -- but my guess is that the home warranty people will just yank it out and replace it with another unit. I couldn't tell you for certain. What I can tell you is that it makes it really difficult for me to eat anything but cold foods or foods out of the cupboard until it's fixed or replaced. Most days this isn't a problem, as I can make salads and the like and be happy, but other days, when I want a big mug of (vegan) soup or steam-in-the-bag vegetables, well...

In the grand scheme of things it's but a minor inconvenience, yes, I know.

 

 

 

Tuesday, October 26: Working from home, day 362

Wednesday, October 27: Working from home, day 363.

I didn't really sit down here and write either of these days. This week has been a mess, yet again. But the Chicago post is up now.

Thursday, October 28: Working from home, day 364.

Friday, October 29: Day off.

 

So this weekend is Halloween, I guess.

Daisy and I don't really have any plans. I don't expect we will, either. It's been a really rough week on both of us and all I want is some peace and quiet and silence. I've been constantly feeling ragged and run down and I don't even care about Halloween this year, as mentioned above. I don't want to dress up, I don't feel in the Halloween spirit at all. I feel pretty sleep/rest deprived, and it's been raining constantly for the past two days. When it rains constantly it's like a light switch telling my body to sleep, and I've frequently been sleeping well past 4pm, 5pm, etc. Part of that is because it's so dark outside that I can actually get some rest, but part of it is also because my allergies are a mess when the weather gives us significant changes, as you know. 

 

As alluded to above, this week at work has been pretty brutal. Our teams are learning a new system (a system that everyone will be switched over to by Monday) and truthfully...yeah, I have almost no clue whatsoever on how to really use it. I've watched the videos, I've joined conference calls, I've read through the instruction manuals that our leadership has sent out, and...yeah, it's just not connecting for me in my head. I can follow directions, and I have, but as a person I am generally really resistant to change, but I've learned over the years in my job that I just have to roll with a lot of it, or well....I can't actually do my job. I'm not ashamed to say it, but learning this new system is actually really complex and difficult for me. I may have just gotten to the age where my brain doesn't want to learn new things anymore like it used to, because I'm having great trouble with it. That bothers me on multiple levels, because, well, I take pride in being smarter than most other people I know...as you've probably realized if you've been reading my stuff here for a while.

The microwave is fixed; Daisy put in the repair ticket for it -- and $107 and a 20-minute visit from an appliance repairman later, we had a functional microwave again. They didn't replace it; apparently it was one of the fuses, as suspected. Daisy said they didn't even have to unmount it, just popped open the panel and swapped out the fuse. It's still a bit concerning to me, however. In doing some research, I found out that microwave fuses generally don't just blow out unless there's some sort of electrical issue with the house wiring, which -- if left uncorrected -- will eventually just blow the fuse again.

I already know that the wiring in this house is fuckin' stupid -- when the outlet blew downstairs and shot sparks out of the wall, and we called the electricians to fix/deal with it in 2020, they found it was wired to a breaker that was completely wrong for the job, and replaced that in the breaker box too. I shudder to think how many of those breakers are incorrect or are completely wrong for the amperage. That would also explain why it kicks the breaker off sometimes when we try to vacuum and run the microwave (or run the vacuum and anything in the kitchen) at the same time. 

We didn't do much tonight. Daisy had gone to Walmart and Whole Foods earlier in the week and had gotten groceries, so we had food in the house. After a quick jaunt over to the vape shop to restock some of the juice I've been getting from them -- something that I'll now have to do about once a month or so -- I cut up some crusty bread and heated up some vegan nuggets for both of us, and made sandwiches for us for dinner with vegan garlic aioli and fresh spinach. We watched an episode of the final season of Shameless that just hit Netflix, and then Daisy went to bed. I stayed up until around 2 or so but as this week has been terrible, I was exhausted and let sleep take me.

Saturday, October 30:

Day off.

 

Daisy informed me as she was going to bed last night that she would have to go in to work today to catch up on things.

"Like go in to the office, or 'go in' as in, sit upstairs and work from your laptop?"

"The office," she replied.

This was fine with me, of course. We have no weekend plans, and I have so much to do around the house and in my own personal time. Since she left for work this morning around 10:30 -- yeah, it's a Saturday, she doesn't have to be "on time" or anything like that -- I have done two loads of laundry (and am working on a third), I have scrubbed the toilet upstairs, I have started the first of what will likely be two or three loads of dishes to run through the dishwasher, and I have ordered some essentials off Amazon (cat food, cashews, a few plugs for the power strip I'm about to install in the bedroom), etc. I've gotten more accomplished around the house today than I have in a few weeks, actually.

There's still a lot I wanted to get done this month that I just...never did. I still haven't gotten the Christmas cards made. I still haven't done further work on my novel. I never saw a movie in the theater, nor did I catch up on correspondence with friends. I've been eating semi-poorly and need to get myself back to my normal diet of salads and soups and steamed vegetables almost every day. I never went to the gym, not once, during the month of October. That's a big one for me -- I must get back into that habit and soon. There's more yard work to be done, including tearing out all of the old garden plants that'll now be dying off and cleaning up/mowing both the front and the back yard at least once more before winter.

The beard is back, likely for the rest of the winter. I think I've shaved maybe twice since we returned from South Dakota, and I've decided to just let it grow back out while it's cold. If it gets too irritating, I'll shave it off at some point, but the goal right now is to at least keep it through the new year, likely, then take it off and let it grow in again from January to April or so. It is fully in at this point (the picture at the top of this post was taken almost two months ago now) and it is, well, thick and mostly gray. I have been balming it up every 2-3 showers -- I can't use the balm every day or it'll get greasy and irritable -- and I clean it with face scrub or shampoo like I do my hair. When it gets long enough, I'll also begin conditioning it like I do with my hair (actually, I could probably start doing that now). 

Of course, I could change my mind next week, who knows.

Tomorrow is Halloween, and Daisy and I aren't doing anything. I have to work as per the usual on Sundays, and as a diabetic, it's not like I can really enjoy Halloween candy anymore. I have to save all of my carbs consumption for Gravy Season, which starts on Monday. 

I'm not...really into Gravy Season this year. I don't have any real desire to celebrate it, I don't have any real need or want to glorify it, and I'm now diabetic, which means gravy in most forms is a generally really bad idea. but over the years I've cultivated a following, and Gravy Season has gathered some traction, and I don't really want to let the fans down, but also don't want to flat-out say "here, y'all take this and run with it, because I don't care anymore."

For those of you new to this site or who don't know in a general sense, Gravy Season is a "holiday" that I "invented" close to ten years ago now, that runs from November 1 to December 31 -- a time of year where gravy is celebrated pretty heavily with Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. It's supposed to be a humorous holiday season, a celebration of gravy and everything about it -- including actual consumption of gravy, of course, but also lots of memes and other gravy-related craziness spread all over social media. Well, since I started it up, Gravy Season has garnered a lot more fans than I ever thought it would and a lot of people I know look forward to celebrating it and seeing the seasonal content I post -- and create/share content of their own. Could I just fake it and pretend that I'm super-into all of it still? Yeah, and to an extent, I probably will. The last two years have really sucked for a lot of people, mostly because of Covid, and people need to have something to celebrate and be happy about. 

On the flip side, I've also gotten a lot of shit over the past few years for being vegetarian and still celebrating Gravy Season, and have even gotten some shit for Daisy's vegan gravy being one of my all-time favorites (because apparently, to some people, if it doesn't have meat in it, it's not gravy). To those people I give a hearty middle finger -- some of the best gravy I've ever had in my life has been vegan gravy, and yes, you can do it without harming animals. I live an almost entirely plant-based lifestyle -- even my laundry detergent and dish soap is plant-based -- and aside from some cheeses, I'm practically vegan as it is. Why would Gravy Season be any different for me?

Sunday, October 31:

Working from home, day 365.

Halloween.

 

A few days ago, a particularly powerful solar flare shot off the sun and towards the earth. The past two nights, all of the local news channels have been telling us "oh yeah go out and look between Xpm and Xam and you'll be able to see the aurora here in Nebraska!"

Yeah, they lied. Daisy and I drove around northern Iowa in the dark for an hour or two and didn't see a goddamn thing. Friends of mine who went out later and drove about two hours north into far northern Nebraska didn't see a goddamn thing either. So, their aurora predictions were a big, big bust.

We had two trick-or-treaters. I guess that's better than the zero we had last year and the year before. Our first and second years in the house (2018 and 2019) we had a lot of them, and Daisy almost ran out of candy to give them. Something else to blame on Covid, I guess. 

Work was really quiet for the most part -- I guess it slipped my mind that people consider Halloween an actual holiday (well, some of them do) and nobody wants to pay attention to their phone and internet IT issues over Halloween -- they'd rather get drunk, dress up, and eat candy. I'm okay with this. It allowed me to get a lot of admin stuff done, do some reading, learn a little bit more of our new system in the background, and do a few household chores -- the quiet ones, the ones I can do when Daisy is asleep. 

For example...

One of the cats peed in the living room. We don't know which one or why, but for the past two days we've been able to smell it. We just couldn't figure out where it was coming from. It wasn't on the couch (or on the blankets/pillows on the couch), so I figured it had to be on the floor somewhere. Last night during my lunch hour, I noticed that my little old lady cat was smelling a spot on the floor in a really weird way. I got down on my hands and knees and smelled around the same area. Yep, found the pee. I soaked it down with the cleaner we use for their pans (scent-eliminating/removing cleaner), waited a while, and then soaked that back up into one of the moisture absorbing puppy pads we put under and in front of their pans. I then got our big five pound bag of baking soda and dumped a good...oh, half pound of it directly onto the spot, spread it out evenly, and left it there to absorb everything. I don't know if Daisy vacuumed it up during the day or not (I would never know, as once I'm out, I'm really out most of the time), but if not, I'll get to it when I'm downstairs.

I also ran two loads in the dishwasher and started a third. I scrubbed down cookie sheets we'd used to bake things on. I disassembled, dishwashed, and re-assembled/refilled the cats' water fountain. For some reason I was full of energy. I don't know why.

Anyway, that's October for you. Nothing else to see here, move along....