Hi all, and welcome to February. Will we get the vaccine this month? Eh, probably not, but let's see.
Onward, through the shortest month of the year.
Monday, February 1:
Working from home, day 191.
The wife has let me know that after tomorrow, she'll be back to working from home through February 16. The 15th she would normally work, as it's a Monday, but as she works in banking, she has it off because of Presidents' Day -- another state/federal/bank holiday that I do not get off. I am happy to have her in the house for some extra time compared to the usual, as I'm sure I'll sleep better.
Work is frustrating and tiring, and I spend yet another day working close to half an hour late in the morning. My patience is wearing thin and I only have so much of it. I've been shorthanded, I lost one of my Team Leads to a promotion and move to another department, my other Team Lead under me has been indisposed this week helping to train our three newest hires -- who I've barely been able to speak to since I've been so swamped.
My back is still causing me immense stabbing pains when I move in certain ways. This pain increases into quite limited mobility when I am tired or fatigued, as I constantly am. It gets to the point in the mornings where I can barely move enough to go to bed, which is torturous when all you want to do is be able to go to sleep.
I'm nearing full exhaustion levels.
Tuesday, February 2:
Working from home, day 192.
Groundhog Day.
So the groundhog saw his shadow and we're getting six more weeks of winter. Fantastic.
When I get up in the afternoon -- late, I might add -- I am forced to run to the shower, run downstairs and get the garbage and recycling ready to go out, run to feed the cats and bring in the mail and packages, etc. I've been running since I got up, which (of course) makes me that much more tired and irritable.
I am starving. I can't eat, I don't have time to eat. I have to charge my mp3 player for the overnight, make sure my vapes are charged up, run two full loads of laundry, update my calendar for February, weigh in for the month, help one of my employees troubleshoot his phone issues, go to the bathroom, make sure my cats have enough water, switch out the laundry, and then and only then can I sit down....just as the wife arrives home.
I'm getting burnt-out and frazzled. Very much so. I've now been working a full month of five-day weeks with no break, no extra days, no holidays off (since the holidays are now over) and it's really breaking me down. Adding to this that my weekends fly by and I never really have any true "downtime" to catch my breath or just not have anything that needs to be done and my mental-emotional state becomes severely affected.
As mentioned previously, I took this upcoming Sunday off for the Super Bowl, and yes, I am glad the Chiefs made it again and I have a reason to actually watch it, but I took it off a full month ago (a month ago today, actually) because I knew I'd need the break regardless of who was playing or whether I planned to watch the game. I'm still debating on whether I want to burn the PTO and take this upcoming Thursday off as well, to give myself a four-day weekend. I am undecided at this juncture and don't want my current fatigue and frustrations to influence my decision one way or the other.
As we just purchased new CO2 canisters for the Sodastream, I'm shipping two empties back to them in the morning (it's sort of like how you exhange propane canisters for your gas grill, except via mail). I had to schedule a pickup with the USPS as well as needing to make sure the box is put outside on the porch for the morning, but it's free -- and I get a discount on the new ones because I ship the old ones back. It's neat. I like that I can be amused or impressed at the small things even though I'm old now and we're over two decades into the 21st century.
Wednesday, February 3:
Working from home, day 193.
I decide during my shift, with my back pain still not getting much better, that I would indeed take Thursday off. I relayed this to my coworkers and put in the PTO for it. In weighing the options, I decided I needed the rest and needed to be able to decompress a bit and heal. It's not the end of the world to burn an extra eight hours of PTO.
I end up being relatively busy most of the night, but not overwhelmingly so. Just a long list of tasks I take care of one by one by one, slowly. Nothing too difficult, nothing too time-consuming, what I like to call "upkeep" more than anything else. Keeping ahead of the curve, checking boxes off the proverbial list one by one. Because I was able to stay ahead of that "curve," to to speak, I was able to leave in the morning relatively on time -- putting up my OOO message on my email and recording a "be back Monday" message on my phone.
At this point, I probably don't have to tell you how good that feels.
With my back still spasming here and there, and with Daisy starting her own day of work in the next room over, I collapsed into my chair and very quickly passed out -- sleeping there for the entire day instead of actually moving to the bedroom.
Thursday, February 4: Day off, PTO.
Friday, February 5: Day off.
Saturday, February 6: Day off.
Having a couple of extra days off is strange. It throws my sleep schedule out of whack, it messes with my appetite and energy levels more than usual (generally, it puts me in a better mood and gives me more energy than usual). I always feel so determined to get things done on extra days off -- such as any cleaning or laundry I need to do, or extra cooking, or time being social online with friends. Back in November (I think) I rekindled my friendship with Andrea -- who you folks will know if you've been reading this blog a long time, but I don't even know if she herself reads it anymore -- over the long break I had around Thanksgiving.
"You had a long period of your life around the time when I just met you where you were just cutting people off and were just 'done' with them," Daisy told me. "Like, you'd excise them from your life completely, never to return."
She's right. 2010 through early 2013 or so were brutal on me emotionally as well as physically and financially (interestingly enough, that's also the three years I was in grad school). I lost a lot of friends and gained very few. I had moved to a new state with no support network and no safety net, my relationship with Alley had ended, I had a brief but very intense relationship with Lady (as I referred to her in this blog many years ago) that had ended poorly, I had basically run out of money, and because I was so alone and so isolated I began closing myself off to so many people who were once friends or who had once cared about me. Many of them had slighted me, many of them I'd had fights with. Some of them I believe were trying to give me some good advice or were trying to help me out, but I wasn't exactly receptive to it at the time. I was spiraling into despair. I was mentally unwell. And because I just couldn't deal with some of these people anymore I just began removing them from my life, one by one. I'd cut off all communication, block them on any and all social media, and be done.
Some of those people, like Andrea, I let back in over the years. But most of them (again, like Andrea) the friendships never really recovered to the same levels as previously. I've had some long conversations with her here and there over the past few months, catching-up sorts of stuff, but when you were once really close with someone, then aren't for many years, and then try to get back into the groove...it takes a lot of time and mental effort. Andrea was like my sister, I called her my sister, and it is a process. I'll probably never have the same friendship with her that I had ten years ago ever again. That's not necessarily a bad thing -- we aren't the same people now that we were that long ago. Neither of us even remember why our friendship broke down (I'm sure we had a disagreement about something, and I'm sure I could backtrack here in the blog and find it if I cared enough to do so at this juncture, but it's not important).
By the way, she's married now (and has been for a while), and is very happy in life.
On Friday evening (and I don't even know how it started), Daisy and I had a long, very intimate and frank discussion about many aspects of my past as well as my past relationships. That of course contained long, detailed stories about my relationships with Alley and Lady in a similar fashion to how I covered them here in this blog (in my "Places" series about a year or two ago), chronologically.
It was because that series of posts that, unbeknownst to me at the time, Lady eventually did read (she is apparently one of the very few people who follow my blog still, to this day), and at that time she reached out to me to ask how I was doing and to thank me for being so kind and respectful in telling the story. Here's what I wrote at the time:
Lady was much younger than I was; she was a sophomore in college, and she'd had an interesting life. I fell for her almost immediately, and when we broke up, it devastated me -- far worse than Alley did. I was at a very low point before her and was at a lower point after her, though that's far more on me than it is on her, of course. It was a very fast, intense relationship that burned out and ran its course just as quickly for a number of reasons, and that's all that needs to be said about it.
Lady and I had a cordial conversation over the time frame of perhaps a few days; a message sent, read, and replied to back and forth a few times -- but that was really the end of it. Daisy, who I keep no secrets from, knew about this, of course, and encouraged me to develop an actual friendship with Lady. At the time I wasn't exactly warm and open to the idea. What we had took place over a brief period long ago (nine years ago now), during a very intense and emotional time, and we were both very different people now -- essentially, strangers to one another. That's sort of how our conversation played out too; it was like two people at a bus stop chatting about the weather. We updated each other on our current lives -- she lived in the UK and had a little girl, was going to law school, and well, I'm still me.
She apologized for how things went down, to to speak, and it allowed me to get a lot of -- I don't know, actually. Closure seems like the wrong word and implies that I hadn't moved on, when I very much had. I used the word closure with Daisy as a placeholder term, when the real feeling I had was sort of a relief, a peace, the removal of emotional weight that, while I was partially at fault for the way events transpired as they did, it wasn't completely me.
When the conversation died off after a few days, life moved on. A year later, this past November, she reached out to me again and we had another short back-and-forth conversation very similar to the first, which also ran its course over a few days and then eventually ended. Between our first conversation and the follow up a year later, she now had a second daughter. It was very much like a "checking in" sort of thing. I wasn't sure I was comfortable with continuing an ongoing conversation or friendship with Lady, and rereading it now, I think I sounded standoffish to an extent, though if so that was mostly subconscious. Daisy, again, encouraged me to interact and be friends -- peace had been achieved, there was no ill will of any sort on either side, and it was very clear that Lady was making an effort to stay in touch, something that was clearly not easy for her to do.
I mulled it over for a bit, and then the holidays happened and work got crazy and, as life moved on, most social interactions with anyone were swept aside in favor of dealing with things in the present, getting actual sleep, and the message got buried in my other messages far down the queue, out of sight, out of mind.
Fast forward to this weekend's long conversation with Daisy regarding my past relationships, why I'd made some of the decisions I had throughout my life, and of course, Lady came up in conversation.
"Maybe I should message her," I told Daisy. "I'm ready to have an actual friendship, I think."
I'd like to step back here for a moment to note that, as you could probably tell, Daisy has always been encouraging about me having friendships outside our relationship, even with exes. We have no trust issues and Daisy is not the jealous type in the least. Daisy has also told me that Alley and I could probably have a productive friendship as well, if I wanted to, and I mostly disagree with that.
So, I reached out to Lady and asked her how she'd been doing, how her holidays were, checking in -- as it had been several months since we'd talked. I didn't know if I'd get a response but I figured I'd make the effort.
When I woke up Saturday morning, I had a reply. That continued through a several-hour-long, sometimes deeply emotional conversation, during which Lady and I were actually able to catch up on one another's lives aside from the surface details. I'm not going to share those details here for the sake of respect and privacy, of course, but needless to say that some long-standing questions were answered on both sides, and Lady and I began trying to develop an actual friendship. It is a little surreal, and it is a little strange, given our history, but it is just that -- history. Our relationship was a lifetime ago now. Being able to have a reset and a fresh start of a friendship many years later? Opportunities of that sort are very rare. There are many people over the years who I thought I'd be lifelong friends with who just disappeared into the ether upon changes in different stages of life, working/living/location shifts, or just a general falling out of touch -- being able to reconnect with someone like that is exceedingly rare and almost never happens.
Sunday, February 7:
Day off, PTO.
Super Bowl Sunday.
As mentioned previously, I took Super Bowl Sunday on PTO over a month ago, as soon as our time systems would allow us to. It didn't matter to me who played in the game or anything else, it was about getting an extra day off to give myself a short mini-vacation in February so I could get a little rest and downtime. The fact that the Chiefs were going back to the big game again -- something that happened a few weeks after I'd already put in the time and had it approved anyway -- was just a bonus.
I woke up around 4am and continued my conversation with Lady for a while, during which time I also began loading up my cart on the grocery store's website as well as Walmart.com. It was still snowing, still coming down and bitterly cold. It's so cold that the furnace runs every 20 minutes if we set the thermostat anything above 66 in the house, and it's only supposed to get colder this coming week -- high temperatures a week from now are supposed to be below zero. Yes, high temperatures for the day:
I am not impressed with this. Daisy and I also took about half an hour and shoveled the driveway and walks yesterday, and this morning they were covered again and you could almost not tell we'd done it in the first place. It was disheartening and depressing, and we literally just said "fuck it," as we're not going anywhere anyhow and are not required by the city to shovel when we get less than three inches of snow.
I told Daisy my overall plan to stop vaping once vape stuff can no longer be purchased by mail (the deadline is two weeks from today) and once I run out of supplies and juice. She is very happy about this, as I was sure she would be. The supplies I have will get me through some months ahead, but once the juice is gone, it's gone. I've made a few juice orders from my favorite company over the past few weeks just to stock up, and I'll probably make at least one more, especially if some sites do deep clearance to get rid of stock in the following days -- but after that, well, it's all over. I'll just have to deal with it, so to speak, and get off the juice. I actually don't think it will be that hard; it's the habit, the muscle memory; that's what's hard to break. And I can deal with that.
In the afternoon hours, I am sleepy and absolutely need to take a nap so that I can stay up most of the night. I sleep for a few hours on the couch and have somewhat bizarre dreams, and wake up shortly before the game begins -- and remember that even though I have the night off, I still have to take care of my employees' payroll, so I login quickly and do that, and make the corrections and PTO approvals I need to make.
Of course, the game went terribly for the Chiefs; the Buccaneers, led by Tom Brady, could have played the same game against a sack of doorknobs and gotten the same result, and the sack of doorknobs may have been able to score more points. The game was over before I would've even started my shift at work for the night -- if I'd been so inclined (which I absolutely was not), I could've clocked in, canceled out my PTO, and worked a normal shift.
We came upstairs after the game ended and Daisy went to bed rather early (for her). I played my computer game until my back began to cramp up again, and then wrote here for a while before sitting in my chair and dozing off. When I came to, it was around 4am, and I got up, turned everything off, and joined Daisy in bed.
And so ended my few extra days off.
Monday, February 8:
Working from home, day 194.
I woke up around noon, surrounded by cats. I was starving; I hadn't eaten anything since the game the night before, and I needed to use the bathroom. I also desperately needed a shower, as I had planned to shower yesterday but never got around to doing it, what with the conversation with Lady and the Super Bowl, so I started a load of laundry (Daisy's stuff), went downstairs and made soup, and then came back upstairs, switched out the laundry, and showered -- full scrubdown, post-shower beard balm, jock itch cream (yeah, it's not pleasant, but it flares up sometimes), testosterone gel, the works.
Yes, the beard is still there on my face -- I'm getting to the point where I want nothing more than to desperately be rid of it, as it gets in the way of almost everything and because I have to balm it, comb/brush it and the like, and it's getting to be far more trouble than it's worth. However, you saw those negative temperatures I posted above -- until the temperatures actually reach non-disrespectful levels again, the beard is staying on my face.
Also, this is a thing too.
I haven't fully decided whether I want to do this.
Daisy, who is still working from home this week, told me a bit about her day and then took her own lunch. I made sure the cats were fed and I switched out the laundry. It's been a perfectly normal afternoon.
My work email has been outrageously full over the past few days I've been out of office, and topped out around 400 messages by Saturday night -- a ludicrous amount of emails showing that the weekend was, ahem, rather busy. I'm hoping that is a trend that reverses itself by tonight, because I am likely going to be dragging ass in the later hours of the night and will desperately want to sleep by the morning.
Tuesday, February 9:
Working from home, day 195.
Last night at work wasn't awful; we're finally starting to slow down a bit again. There's an ebb and flow to much of what we do, and there's not really any way to predict what nights will be bad versus what nights won't be. Overnights are weird like that.
The bitter cold is a thing; it's been below zero every night for the past few days, and while they've updated the forecast above a little bit here and there, it's not been by much. More, significant snow is expected for Friday into Saturday, and we're not going to be able to avoid shoveling this time -- and this time it's going to be far colder when we do it. Our furnace works really well, but every year I get more and more fed up with Nebraska weather, especially in the winter. I long to escape it, to live somewhere more temperate. Friends and long-time readers here will know what I call the "Brandon Pants Philosophy" -- I want to live somewhere where I don't have to own pants. Not wear, own. But, I make like $35k a year so that dream is...not going to be fulfilled anytime soon.
It's also why I don't have a shiny new car sitting in my garage, but alas.
Daisy is still working from home this week, which is very nice. It's comforting to have her presence in the house with me at all times, and the cats really seem to enjoy it too.
The Tuesday overnight is not bad; I am on a bridge call for our company for over an hour for systems testing as they upgrade some servers and software pathways, but otherwise it's mostly quiet and I am able to get off work mostly on time, after which I pass out in my chair (and end up sleeping there for the day).
Wednesday, February 10: Working from home, day 196.
Thursday, February 11: Working from home, day 197.
Friday, February 12: Day off. Payday for me.
Saturday, February 13: Day off.
The new hires we're slowly integrating into our teams are split between the two sites our company operates out of -- Omaha (where I am, of course) and El Paso. There are vastly different network setups and hardware between the two sites, but the agents all access the same tools and programs through the VPN. Most of our jobs (like 80% of our work) is browser-based. As long as there's an updated browser that has proxy access to the tools we need, 80% of the job can be done. The other 20% is phone and email. Outlook does a good job and generally isn't hard to configure for new hires, but their phone setups can legendarily be nightmares. And that's when the VPN allows them to connect at all.
My new hires have been shadowing under my Sun-Weds Team Lead for a few weeks now and have just begun taking issues. It's a...slow process. My job is to supervise that shadowing and help out where I can, but I've mostly been hands-off, letting my Team Lead do his duty as an incredibly competent instructor. Well, I'm getting at least two more people within the next few weeks, and currently have four people added to my roster in our systems that I've never heard of, which brings the total of people "reporting to me" up to nineteen. This is, of course, a ludicrous number. How I can be expected to reasonably be accountable for nineteen people, all of them sending emails, making calls, and working sometimes 8-10 issues each is beyond me. I am but one person working a five-day, eight-hours-a-day work week.
I'm not sure it can be done. To again bring this into perspective, I may be the only person in our entire segment -- our entire program, even -- who has people working under him in the office all seven days a week. Some here, some there, scattered all around. This means, even on my days off, I occasionally field calls, deal with scheduling issues, and generally have to keep a very close eye on my email, lest someone send something to me and me only and it explodes before I see it happen (this has occurred several times over my tenure there as a manager, and generally because I do, occasionally, sleep).
So what else is going on?
Well, as mentioned previously, the cold is unrelenting. The high temperature on Monday is supposed to be -2, with a low of -19. This is a cold that I haven't seen in decades, not since I was living back home on top of the mountain in WV, and for Nebraska, well, it's a cold that hasn't been seen in almost a century. On Thursday night before work, we went to pick up our meds from the pharmacy. It was 2 degrees when we left the house shortly before 7. By the time we returned home -- less than an hour later -- it was -2 and dropping. I believe we bottomed out around -8 that night.
The ongoing conversation with Lady has died down quite a bit, and now amounts to a message or three here and there over the course of as many days, which was to be expected -- conversations ebb and flow, etc. There's nobody I know period aside from Daisy who I talk to every day, after all. Not even Daisy's parents or my parents. Part of that is due to the pandemic, of course, but I have close friends I haven't talked to in months. Daisy herself has been talking back and forth with Lady a bit as well; they're getting to know each other a bit, something neither had ever done before. I think this is wonderful; open and honest communication is an amazing thing.
I have spent a good chunk of the weekend in pain; when I went to bed last night -- yes, I actually went to the bedroom, climbed into bed, and went to sleep instead of passing out in my chair -- I woke up three hours later with excruciating back pain from my pulled muscle...which I thought had almost completely healed. Apparently, that is not the case. I hobbled to the bathroom, where I took a fistful of ibuprofen in my half-asleep haze, and hobbled further into my room -- where yes, I sat down in and fell asleep in my chair.
As an aside, the chair is one of the few places where I do not experience this back pain when I relax into it. The way it hits my back when I get comfortable is just right, it's that sweet spot where I can fully relax and that muscle isn't stretched or pained by that relaxation.
I woke up in a daze sometime between 10am and 11am in a dark room -- I'd had the foresight to pull my curtains closed -- to hear the garage door closing and the kitchen door slamming.
What the fuck, I thought, is the wife doing? I asked Alexa what the temperature was, and she gleefully told me it was 3 degrees.
Daisy came quietly into the room a few minutes later to disrobe of the multiple layers of clothing she'd been wearing while she was outside, found that I was awake, and explained that yes, we had gotten the expected snow (a few inches) and that she knew I'd hurt my back again, so she'd gone out into the freezing cold and had shoveled the driveway and walks herself while I was sleeping. She knew that if she'd done it after I'd awakened, I would've gone out to help her and probably would have injured myself more in the process.
I almost cried. Here I was in my chair, hadn't showered in three days, my back seized up to the point where I could barely move. I'm sure I looked like a fat sack of shit at best, an invalid at worst -- and my loving wife had gone outside and had shoveled everything off already.
Most of the remainder of the weekend was spent trying to move slowly and not move any more than I had to, really. I posted on Facebook that I've now reached that part of my late thirties where I can injure (or re-injure) myself just by sleeping, apparently. I placed a grocery delivery order and had it delivered, and we watched probably six or seven episodes of The West Wing. We are nearing the end and will start the final season this week, likely.
Sunday, February 14:
Working from home, day 198.
Valentine's Day.
Daisy and I have done nothing for one another this year for Valentine's Day, and that was by our choice. She told me not to get anything for her or do anything special (unlike some other women, when Daisy says something like that, she actually means it), and I told her I didn't need or want anything either, just having her love was enough, etc. Sounds sappy, but it's true.
It's not lost on us that eight years ago today, I proposed to Daisy in my crappy little rented house in Kansas. In the kitchen, even. It varies by the year whether we decide to do something to "celebrate" the day or not. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't. Sometimes I take the night off work if it's a working night, sometimes I don't.
"I want to make you a card," Daisy said.
"You don't have to make me a card," I replied. "It's okay. I know you love me."
"What about a heart-shaped pizza?" she asked.
"...sold," I replied.
And that was the extent of our Valentine's Day conversation, really. I'm expecting a heart-shaped pizza sometime later this evening, quite possibly involving banana pepper rings and vegan sausage (a personal favorite combo for me).
My back is a little better. I am trying to be easy on it, trying to move as gingerly as possible, especially if there's a movement I need to make that may possibly make it begin spasming again. I'm having fair-to-middlin' success with this plan. It remains slow-going, however.
Daisy is off work tomorrow; it's a bank holiday (as well as a holiday for state and federal offices too, I believe) -- Presidents' Day. In the Great White North, it is also (apparently) National Flag of Canada Day, so there's that as well. This means for at least two of my five workdays this week, I'll wake up in the afternoons and she'll be here. The rest of the week, barring any unforeseen circumstances, she's working in the office again. Her off-again, on-again office schedule is continuing for the foreseeable future, though I'm guessing once Covid gets completely under control they'll go back to permanent in-office as soon as reasonably possible.
The beard remains on my face, though it now has become much more of a bitch to take care of than it ever was before, especially with the extreme cold drying the fuck out of my hair and skin. With highs expected to be in the mid-to-high 30s as soon as next week again, once that happens it's coming off. I've been growing the beard for almost -- or more than -- five months at this point. It was supposed to be a bonus Christmas present for Daisy. Christmas was a long time ago now. I'm hoping that by this time next month, it'll be warm enough (and possibly safe enough) to get a haircut again, too.
The cold makes me long for something to do -- anything to do -- that's constructive and creative. I started a subscription several months ago to Poets & Writers magazine, mostly because Amazon had it for $5 a year (I am now subscribed through the end of 2022; thank Amazon for the ability to just tack on another year for $5 anytime I want) and would desperately love to be able to sit down and write some poetry again, put together a few collections/chapbooks, and see what I can do with them. I used to be able to bang out 2-3 quality poems a week when I was at my prime. I don't know what happened to that part of me, or where my drive disappeared to. If I could get it back, I could absolutely put out some quality work this year, work that I'd be proud of. I just feel as if I'm lost when it comes to trying to write anything other than in this blog anymore. Writing in academia, in the workshop environment, left me bitter and jaded about the process. So many quality pieces went completely (or nearly completely) ignored -- not just my own but those of friends and colleagues with talent far greater than mine -- all while I could pick up a copy of almost any issue of Poetry magazine, thumb through it, and be like "this is horseshit, this is crap. Who writes this bullshit, and who thinks it's actually good?"
Monday, February 15:
Working from home, day 199.
I think this is all that needs to be said.
Tuesday, February 16:
Working from home, day 200 (!)
The wife returned to work this morning, in the office, during the above cold. Remarkably, her car made it just fine and her day at work was fine, with the exception of some burst pipes and closed bathrooms in her office.
This is what we dealt with this morning:
The past 48 hours or so have been madness. Rolling power outages (planned, of course, by the local power authorities), internet outages lasting 18 hours or more due to cold and commercial power shutdowns, water pipes and mains bursting because of the cold (again, see above). We have been very lucky here at home that we haven't lost power or internet, and that our pipes so far seem to be just fine and dandy, functional as per the usual. This is not the case for many, many others in the area, though. We're still under "emergency" status until at least tomorrow afternoon, when the temperatures are finally predicted to rise enough (kicking off a warming trend that'll last into the next few weeks) that will end these bullshit cold shenanigans.
The night at work is predictably awful -- there are 4 million in Texas without power, so the people down there and in surrounding areas, who actually have power, spend the night complaining that my teams aren't working hard enough or fast enough to restore their services (as if we have any control over that whatsoever). My own team is plagued by power and internet outages all night, and my internet crashes hard at least once too. I am very glad when I am able to get the fuck off shift, and pass out in my chair about 20 minutes after Daisy leaves for work.
Wednesday, February 17: Working from home, day 201.
Thursday, February 18: Working from home, day 202.
So apparently life waits for me to go to sleep in the morning before all hell breaks loose.
Less than half an hour after I fell asleep on Wednesday morning, Daisy texts me to say that there is no water whatsoever at work and no working bathrooms for any of the employees there. I don't see this, of course, as I'm passed out. Eventually, after some finagling with the people there onsite, her team is allowed to come home and work from home for the remainder of the day (while, I assume, the plumbing and water issues are getting fixed).
I don't know about any of this, so when I'm jarred out of a dead sleep by hearing movement and talking in my house when nobody should be there, it is of course a bit disorienting until I can get my bearings and confirm that it's Daisy and not robbers/intruders.
At that point it's sometime around noonish, and I get up and migrate to the bed -- because the cats desperately want to cuddle up with me and sleep, and because I've been sleeping in my chair to stop my back pain, they haven't been able to do so and the daily pattern has been broken. I sleep, somewhat uncomfortably, on the bed with the cats for another four hours or so. This is the first time I've actually slept in the bed in days.
The overnights this week at work have not been fun at all -- the ongoing cold and weather concerns have been brutal for our teams' workload to the point where we're taking on three or four times the amount of work we'd usually have. This has been very negatively affecting my stress levels both at work and at home; I have found I'm snapping more and am having unconscious tone issues with Daisy in our daily interactions, and a big part of that is because I've just been so frustrated with everything.
All the things I do seem to get gummed up in the works somewhere to the point where I don't feel like I'm progressing in life, if that makes sense. Nothing good can happen without something terrible overshadowing it and generally stopping that forward progression. Case in point -- I had been interviewing for multiple great jobs in early 2020, then bam, Covid happened, and those opportunities disappeared. Tax refund comes in? Bam, Daisy's car needs new brakes. First Covid stimulus check comes in? Bam, a teenager in an SUV backs into us in a parking lot and causes $1000 damage to the front end of Daisy's car. I finally get to move to a completely work-from-home schedule for my job, and begin to hate the job much less than before? Bam, schedule has to change to five days a week and the drain in our utility closet backs up and floods into the living room, AND the repair guys blow out an outlet which sparks for another 36 hours at random until we can get that replaced too. Second, smaller Covid check comes in? Bam, Daisy's car needs $400ish more of repairs and maintenance, like clockwork. If you feel like these are coincidences, that they may be -- but it doesn't stop me from feeling like life is fucking us every chance it can get.
Daisy, the more optimistic of the two of us, tells me that she's simply thankful that when these things happen we can afford to deal with them and we take care of them, because many less fortunate people would be bankrupted or otherwise devastated by them. While that is a very good mentality to have, it's not a free pass for life to just keep randomly fucking us.
I'm going to relay a story I meant to tell a few months back, but I need to preface it with a bit of background first. In the mornings, an hour or two before I get off work, I turn off the outside lights as the sun is coming up (not as noticeable of course in the winter, but still) and I open up the curtains of the downstairs of the house. It lets me see outside, lets me see the sunrise sky -- during the times of the year where that's a thing before I get off work -- and it lets me know what the weather is like. It's also a ritualistic thing where it signifies the end of my work day and the beginning of a new one -- no matter how much work sucks, tomorrow is another day, etc. I like opening the house in the mornings. It lets me feel like yes, I do own the place, yes, I am alive -- yes, it is a new day.
But as I do this with an hour or two left in my shift, I obviously sit back down at my work desk (which is in the living room, about eight feet from our set of French doors to my right, which go out onto our covered back deck where our gas grill is, etc) and I continue working. As it gets lighter outside, I obviously get to see more of the outside -- but most of the time, unless I'm very busy and don't take down the curtains over those doors until I get off work, it is very dark for some time after I take down the curtains.
In the midst of all the bad shit happening one thing after another in the fall months, I was sitting at my desk one morning finishing up my shift when it was just light enough to see movement on the porch, on the other side of the French doors -- again, eight feet or so from my desk and chair. I didn't think much of it (there are stray cats in the neighborhood, lots of squirrels, and the large family of rabbits who live under our deck like to hop up on it and hang out on a pretty regular basis. But, for some reason, this time I turned my head to take a look -- and saw in the very dim light of the early morning hours, the unmistakable black and white pattern and two little beady eyes of a skunk staring back at me -- legit close enough to the door to press its nose against the glass if it wanted to.
I froze. No sudden movements, Brandon. I stared at it, straining to see it in the very dim light of probably 5:30 or 6 in the morning. It stared back for a few moments, then apparently lost interest and shuffled back off into the darkness, and it was gone. I never saw it again.
This was, unfortunately, before we had our backyard security camera with light and motion detection, otherwise I would've had video of our entire encounter.
Our backyard is no stranger to wildlife. It's not as sealed off as it appears; we do have a gate and a picket fence around the back of the house, but the fence ends at the edge of the yard at the "alley" I suppose, between our house and the neighbors' house. Animals can and frequently do go in and out of the backyard via that "alley" area, and Daisy and I have since caught multiple cats, a massive raccoon, and several opossums on the camera we have out there now as they make their ways through the neighborhood. -- in addition to the squirrels and our rabbits, of course. Never have I seen a skunk. Skunks aren't uncommon here -- they're not uncommon anywhere except for maybe the arctic and antarctic climates -- but I don't really see them in and around Omaha. I have seen far more foxes in and around Omaha than I have skunks, even counting roadkill.
As all of the shitty stuff was happening around the time of my skunk encounter, I made the joke that "some people are visited by the bluebird of happiness, while we...we are visited by the skunk of misfortune."
And so there's the title of this month's post.
Friday, February 19: Day off.
Saturday, February 20: Day off.
I have purchased an external hard drive dock, in an effort to see what I can finally access and pull off the numerous old hard drives I've saved/salvaged from many old computers over the years...if I can get said drives to spin up, of course. I have drives from various machines, from my 40GB Maxtor drive that was in my HP, and later home-built machine from about 2002-ish to 2010 (the one I'm most excited about possibly being able to recover data from) to the 10GB drive from my old backup Gateway (yes, Gateway) machine, to some other odds-and-ends drives I've pulled out of various junked computers over the years. There's probably six or seven hard drives in all. I know there's data on some of those drives that I considered lost forever as I didn't have the technology to reclaim it at the time, some of it stuff I desperately want back (family photos, tax documents, games) and some of it that'll be more like a blast from the past (music, old podcasts that are 15ish years old, papers I wrote in high school and college, articles I wrote when I was a newspaper reporter, etc). I'll need another external backup drive to offload whatever I can salvage, but I'm holding off on that until I can see what I can actually recover. There's bound to be at least some degradation over the years.
I am confident, however, that I'll be able to get into a few of them, at least. If not, oh well; the drive dock was like $20 and I can make sure the drives are wiped and destroyed before disposal if they're too corrupted. I also told Daisy I'd try to recover data from her ten-year-old, super-high-end media laptop too, the one she used throughout all of college and was still using for a year or two after we were married until she bought her new one. The machine is likely busted and I'll have to extract the drive from it, but even if I can't get anything off my old drives, if I can get the data off hers I'll chalk up the entire venture as a win.
This gives me something to do that feels constructive and is along the lines of the same productive feelings I got from archiving all of the CDs last year. Also, as it's going on four years old now, my current desktop PC is no spring chicken and while I hope it doesn't die anytime soon, diving into the older drives will give me useful knowledge of how to get my stuff off this machine when it does eventually die on me. I back up all of my important files about once a month, but there's never a really convenient time for a critical hardware failure, is there?
I've been asked in the past why I like desktop machines vs. laptops -- and my answer is always the same: laptops suck. They're small, they're not easy to use, they have external power supplies as well as batteries that need to be charged, and if you want a real keyboard or a real mouse, or speakers worth a fuck, you have to buy them and provide them separately. If I'm gonna do that, give me a big-ass tower desktop that I can customize however I see fit. Laptops also cost way more than equally-or-more-capable desktop machines. If I were to buy a new computer today, to get all the hardware and capabilities I wanted on a laptop would make it about $2k. I can get a comparable desktop machine for about $800, probably less, with far less hassle involved. I would not be opposed to a laptop if I found one I liked that did what I wanted it to do and had a keyboard/mouse that were easy to use, but it's just never gonna be my first choice -- not to mention that finding laptops these days with an optical drive is getting harder and harder to come by, as well. I bought my Dell Chromebook about two years ago now (something like that, time blends together) and while I love it for what it is, it is legit delegated to "backup-or-travel-only machine that I boot up about once every six months to make sure the OS gets its needed updates." I was planning to take it with me to use while we were traveling to WV and back last fall, but that didn't happen because of Covid. So really, it just sits in its case next to my chair and only gets occasional use. It also has a massive power brick that I have to plug in somewhere when I want to use/charge it.
So what else is going on?
I'll likely take off the beard very soon; Daisy wants to take the Santa Claus photos, powdering up my hair and beard for them and likely putting blush or other makeup on my cheeks to make it all the more realistic and old-elf like. I don't really want to do it; I'm not generally a fan of "themed" Christmas card photos. When I make our cards every year, I usually take the best photo of us we've taken together during said year, do some minor editing and color-corrections as necessary (sometimes it's not necessary), and overlay the card design on top of it. On the back of the card, as is tradition, I include a short message as well as one or more photos of the cats. There's never much that's "Christmassy" about it, as, well, I'm an atheist and Daisy is basically an agnostic unitarian universalist (yeah, figure that one out; I've been trying to pin down her religious beliefs for years, really, and her explanation basically boils down to "there are good things and parts of truth in all religions").
Still, it's something that Daisy wants and I generally will do almost anything to please her, even if I bristle about it at first. Why? Because I know she goes to great pains to do almost anything to please me. That's what marriage is, folks -- part of it, anyway. I have an amazing wife.
Sunday, February 21:
Working from home, day 203.
There are so many things I want to do on the weekends that I just don't end up having time for. Yesterday I had grand plans to clean the entire dining room, unboxing and putting away the items inside all of the Amazon boxes that have been piling up in there (filled with stuff like cat food, cat litter, toilet paper, furnace filters...etc etc) to be able to actually walk through the room and the like -- yeah, that didn't happen.
I wanted Daisy to just take the damn pictures so I can shave off the beard -- this did not happen either.
Instead, I slept in my chair from 7am to around 11am, Daisy took her parents to the vaccination center so her mother could get her first Covid shot (Dad has already gotten his first one, and will be getting the second in about another ten or so days). I made food and got tired again, but stayed up so that I could wash the bedsheets and blankets -- Daisy's only real request of me this weekend.
When she arrived back home, she let me know that she wanted to take some of the groceries we'd purchased on Friday night at the local Asian Market over to her parents to share them, and to spend a little actual time with them, so we did that -- me unshaven, unshowered, tired and achy, wearing the same shorts and the same Bernie Sanders hoodie I've been wearing since Friday afternoon:
In case you were curious. I'll wear this thing until it falls apart.
We then ventured to numerous grocery stores running errands -- taking all of our glass to the local recycling center, picking up Daisy's meds from our pharmacy, getting gas in the car and getting a Powerball ticket (I don't even care what the jackpot is at this point, just save me, Powerball), and finally finding the Mountain Dew Major Melon at a Hy-Vee store across town.
That last part has been an endless source of frustration for me until tonight. I'll explain.
I am a fan of Mountain Dew. I have been my entire life. As a kid growing up, and throughout college, I could burn through a 24 pack "cube" of it in 2-3 days, max. As an adult, especially as I've gotten older, I drink it more and more rarely, and almost never drink the full-sugar version, always getting the diet or the zero sugar version. This is partly because I don't really drink any non-diet soda anymore, but also partly because I don't really drink much of any soda anymore -- I have the Sodastream that I have diet syrups for, and no-sugar water flavoring syrups for, but even with that I drink far more straight seltzer (or water with the energy drink syrup, also sugar-free) than anything else. I haven't bought actual Diet Mountain Dew since well before Christmas, and when I did buy it, a 6-pack of bottles lasted forever (there's still one bottle left downstairs now, and it's probably 4-5 months old at this point).
But, PepsiCo puts out at least 1-3 new Mountain Dew flavors every year, usually as "limited editions" that, if you can't find them as soon as they hit the stores, you won't be able to get them. I'm sure most of you are aware of this. Only very rarely do they make any of those limited editions into permanent flavors (the last one I remember they did that with was Pitch Black, and it is still almost impossible to find in stores around here -- oh, and to my knowledge, they don't make a diet). The first one this year is "Major Melon," a watermelon variant that comes in both full sugar and a zero sugar variety...and it was to be assumed, of course, that based on their multimillion dollar Super Bowl commercial, that it would be around for a while.
For the past month, everywhere I order my groceries from -- and I utilize several stores in a rotating fashion, depending on what I need -- has said that they have Major Melon in stock, in both 12-pack and 20oz bottles, both full sugar and no sugar.
For the past month, with every grocery order I've placed, I've ordered it every time.
For the past month, with every grocery order I've placed, I've always received a call or text or notice that says, after I've ordered it, that it's completely out of stock, sorry.
With every order from every store, this made me angrier and angrier, so last night Daisy and I went on a mission, so to speak -- we were going to find this fucking soda and we were going to purchase it and drink it. We only had to go to three stores to find it -- at a Hy-Vee 10-12ish miles away on the far other side of town. We bought three 20oz bottles of the regular stuff.
And it's...just okay, I guess.
I mean, it's watermelony, it tastes like a liquified watermelon Jolly Rancher. It's fine, but it's not something I ever need to buy again. If I can ever find the zero sugar one though, I'll try it just to see the difference.
By the time we got home, it was dark, my back was starting to ache again (though not in the same place where I injured it) and I was hungry. I ate dinner and took a nap for about three hours, and Daisy went to bed during that time.
I dug out the now confirmed to be four old hard drives I intend to get data off of, to find that three of the four are (understandably) ancient IDE drives, not the more-common-for-today SATA. The drive dock I got is SATA only, so I'll be able to pull the data off that one drive as well as Daisy's old laptop drive, hopefully, but the two drives I care about the most -- one of them being my 40GB Maxtor I used for like nine years and has a manufacture date of October 2001 -- I'll have to get another dock or converter/adapter tool for. It's slightly frustrating, but eh. It's not something that can't be overcome. I'll get the hardware off Amazon in a few days when I have the time -- it's not like it's prohibitively expensive or anything like that.
I have no idea what machine the one IDE drive I have came out of, but it's a 40GB Western Digital. Probably a junked machine from a yard sale or Goodwill or something like that -- I used to buy random computers for like $20 for parts back in the day. There could legit be anything on that drive. It'll be a surprise.
Returning to work for the overnight is a challenge. It's snowing again today (we're not expected to get a lot or anything like that, but still) and I'm really really missing my three-day weekends . I'm also missing Sunday football, which I'll have to wait until what, August or so to have back again? Something like that.
Monday, February 22: Working from home, day 204.
Tuesday, February 23: Working from home, day 205.
The snow that we were "not expected to get a lot of" ended up being like 4-5 inches. Daisy was kind enough to shovel it off Sunday night as I was just waking up and orienting myself for the day.
Today we found out that we will be in the last group of folks to get the vaccine, probably in late April or May -- something along those lines. The state of Nebraska is ignoring the guidelines of the CDC and has wiped the "you can get it in the earlier groups if you have one of these pre-existing conditions" off the slate, and are now just operating off the age-based system only. Daisy and I would've qualified early because we're both fat, and Daisy would've doubly qualified as she has asthma too. Now we're back to the drawing board and will get it, I guess, with the rest of the general populace.
The hard drive dock has arrived -- it arrived early Monday, but I haven't had time to even try to mess with it yet. I ordered a secondary IDE adapter tonight so that I can get into the older drives this weekend.
I shaved off the beard on Sunday. I was given permission to do so by Daisy. We did not end up taking the Santa pictures. If I grow out the beard again between now and the fall, we might at that point. For now, though...no. My face feels remarkably better; it is no longer dry and itchy, and I am no longer getting small boils or ingrown hairs under the beard in places I can't access. It's been a very long time since I've had my longer hair (haven't had a haircut in almost a year now due to the pandemic) without facial hair. It's sort of jarring and strange for me.
Despite Daisy being home, I've not been sleeping well for most of the week. My back is still healing, and while I've been sleeping in the bed more than my chair to get my body actually used to the bed again, my most comfortable sleeping position in the bed is still the most painful position possible for my back, which means I can only sleep for 4-6 hours at a time before it's just too unbearable to actually get any further rest, no matter how tired I am.
Wednesday, February 24: Working from home, day 206.
Thursday, February 25: Working from home, day 207.
Friday, February 26: Day off.
I really didn't do anything on these days but work and sleep, and did not write here. I've been so miserable and just exhausted.
Saturday, February 27: Day off.
Sunday, February 28: Working from home, day 208.
I was able to get into three of the four hard drives with an adapter plug kit I purchased from Amazon (the dock I got was useless for my purposes, but we'll get to that). I was rather easily able to recover my data from my almost twenty-year-old Maxtor 40GB drive, which hadn't been installed in a machine or spun up in over ten years. Likewise, I was able to get into the even-more-ancient 10GB Western Digital drive from my old-old backup Gateway machine and pull what little I had saved on there as well.
The other two drives were kind of "mystery" drives. I had no clue what was on them or what machines they'd come out of. One was a Seagate 40GB drive, upon which I found (from context clues only, it's not like I could boot from it) an old Windows XP installation and a bunch of low-quality porn pictures. Not even good ones either. Aside from that the drive appeared to be much of a blank slate -- no other photos (aside from clipart stuff), no music, no movies or any games I could find, and really no documents of any sort. I have no idea where it came from, and to prevent any sensitive data from falling into anyone's hands I completely wiped and reformatted it. If I ever need a small hard drive as a backup again, at least I know that one works.
The final drive -- the SATA drive I bought the adapter for in the first place -- is either dead, seized, or completely frozen/locked up somehow. I ran power to it from two different sources, and hooked it up via multiple connections, and it would not even spin up. As such, none of its data will be recoverable, and I'll likely (eventually) dismantle and destroy it just to be safe. 3 out of 4 ain't bad, though.
I still have Daisy's old laptop hard drive (if it won't boot up or if I have to yank it, regardless) and the old 500GB drive from my old Acer machine before I had this one to hook up and look through, if and when necessary. There's nothing on the old Acer drive I don't have on this computer, though -- save for some old podcasts from 2017ish, but Daisy's old laptop drive will have everything on it from her college years and after. I wish I knew where my other old laptops were, like the 2005ish Dell machine that my friend Jae gave me; I put a new keyboard on that, new RAM, and I believe a new hard drive in it in like, 2011. I have all of those old machines -- all of them -- here in the house somewhere.
Work Sunday night was hectic and tiring, even though it was quieter than it normally is. Every night is hectic and tiring when you have 20 people reporting to you. I'm so sick of all these new people asking questions, or myself being forced to put on the fake smile and be cheerful to people I will never see face to face and are little more than a number to me. With that many people reporting to you, you don't get a "quiet night" anymore. I miss the nights of the job where I could play on my phone for hours and listen to podcasts and still be able to do everything my job needed me to do. I instead need to keep constant eyes on everything now, and have only had three lunch hours over the course of the last eight or nine days I've worked simply because the action never stops.
When I finished work in the morning, I came back upstairs and cuddled with the wife and the cats for a bit before she had to get up and go to work herself.
And so ended my February.
Onward to March...
