Birthday Thirty-nine: "I shaved my arm for this?"

 

Today, I turn 39.

 

As I write this, I technically turned 39 two minutes ago, at 6:22 PM eastern time.  

 

I will say that yes, I accomplished my primary goal this year -- I did indeed get a new tattoo for my birthday, in the exact style I wanted, in the exact place I wanted, for much less than I expected to pay. So, with that large revelation out of the way, let's tell the story of how we got to that point, as well as the time and the effort it took to get there. To do that, I also have to start the story, roughly, on Saturday night in the overnight hours.

On Saturday night, I was not in a good mental headspace. I was intensely frustrated with a number of things, and then wrote a large amount about those things in my December post before paring it down and eventually deleting almost all of it. I have not been sleeping well in any sense of the term; my hopes even now are that I can get some good rest in the overnight tonight/into the morning and daytime hours tomorrow and "reset" myself. I do have to work the next two nights, after all. They'll either be horrible or they'll be dead silent. Judging from my inbox, things are cooling down quite a bit as we inch closer to the holidays.

 

But I digress. I was not in a great mood on Saturday night; my mood was downright foul. I felt as if everything was starting to fall apart, not just everything surrounding the holidays but everything surrounding my mental state. This year has been hard, this month has been hard, and I just needed some things to start going well, some things to start going right, before I lost my mind.

 

Thankfully, some puzzle pieces began to slowly fall into place, and when I woke up yesterday morning, I had a much better, more laid-back outlook on life. Sunday, in fact, allowed me to get a lot accomplished, and allowed me to feel a lot better about everything going on in the lead-up to the holidays. Breathing space, I guess. Allowing me to accomplish most of my goals on Sunday led me to be able to accomplish most of my goals today. I wrapped all of Daisy's presents -- the ones that are here already, anyhow, as the final four arrive tomorrow. I got some PS4 time in. I spent some quality time with the wife. She went and picked up Chinese food for us from our favorite place, and we had a nice lunch together (I still have a fair amount of leftover lo mein, in fact). I got some decompression time in on my computer here with a nice, leisurely strategy game. We ended the night by going to Home Goods (at like 9pm, when they close at 11) to pick up a few small gifts for the parents for Christmas. I was even successful in getting a couple of bars of fancy soap and some seasonal snacks for me. I even did a grocery delivery order, in which I was finally able to get some Quorn Meatless Pieces (they've been out of them for months). The biggest bonus of Sunday was that Daisy confirmed with me that yes, she had begun ordering Christmas presents, and that they'd begin arriving Tuesday-ish.

With the stars coming into alignment a bit more (so to speak), it was time to plan what we'd actually be doing on my birthday this year. I had a list of things I wanted to accomplish, which I gave the rundown of in this month's main post...but you haven't seen that yet, so I'll make a revised list here to share, and then we'll dive into it.

1. get my next tattoo

2. see Spider-Man: No Way Home

3. see Daisy's parents, if possible

4. talk to my own parents

5. do something fancy-ish for dinner

6. possibly do any last-minute Christmas shopping still necessary, with Daisy

7. finally take the "Santa" pictures with my hat on so I can shave off the beard

8. hit up the vape shop for more of my raspberry juice (I had a birthday coupon)

 

Etc. These were the main goals, and I knew before I even started the day that I would not be able to accomplish all of them. Which, I mean, it's fine -- it is what it is. There's only so many hours in the day, and I'm only one person with finite energy.  So I'll start with the things I did not get to do, and why I couldn't, before we get into what I actually did.

I didn't get to take the Santa photos. That was, unfortunately, one of the things that fell to the wayside today, as I just didn't have the time or energy for them with everything else that was going on. We didn't do any other last-minute Christmas shopping, either -- there was also no real time or energy for that. We were mostly mission-focused for the day.

Unfortunately, we did not get to see Spider-Man: No Way Home, either. Most showings over the weekend in the area were either completely sold out, or almost sold out, and because of the tattoo timing today, although theaters were a ghost town on a Monday morning/afternoon, there's no way we could've committed to a time and pre-booked tickets before leaving the house without knowing how long it would take to get my tattoo done, if I'd need to do an appointment setup or have a first-come, first-serve thing. 

Everything else, surprisingly, I did get to do. But there was a long road to that, so buckle in, this will be a story with a lot of twists.

I found out, on Saturday, that the shop I normally go to (I say "normally" but I've only been there once before, for the Starfleet tattoo two years ago) was closed on Mondays. Today is Monday. It's my birthday. I have the day off and it's the only day that I could get the tattoo done. Getting it done on my birthday is important to me. It's a tradition I started in 2019, couldn't do in 2020 because of Covid, and I knew that even this year it would be, ahem, a bit hairy to get it done somewhere because Covid is still a thing that we had to worry about. Many shops have gone appointment-only, many operate on reduced hours, and almost every shop I've ever seen requires everyone to wear masks for every second you're inside them, even now. With 24 hours' notice, it was unlikely I was going to be able to get an appointment set up for Monday morning or afternoon. I shot an email off and requested some information/if a Monday appointment would be possible for the shop down the street (where Daisy got at least one, maybe both of her tattoos many years ago) and never got a response. I talked to one of our close friends (and one of my current colleagues at work), and she tossed out a few recommendations for different shops in the area -- she is covered in tattoos of her own, and her husband has worked as a piercer at several shops around town, so she knows the "scene" -- I trust her judgment and recommendations far more than I would anyone else I know, honestly. 

 

I called a shop across town, who said that they were appointment-only and were all booked up for Monday, but they'd had a few folks drop out of their Sunday afternoon appointments, so if I had the time I could stop by and they could discuss it with me, see if they could fit me in, etc. At the time, that would have been a really strong maybe and I told them I couldn't commit to being able to do that -- Daisy was currently out picking up the Chinese food, and I'd had the grocery delivery scheduled for the 4pm-5pm hour -- the shop closed at 5. Daisy also wanted to do the Home Goods run too.

 

After eating the Chinese food and digesting a bit, it was well after 2pm. There was simply no way we'd have enough time to go get a tattoo consultation and the work done, if possible, before the groceries got here and before the shop would close. I felt bad about that, especially as those guys seemed cool as hell on the phone, but for that shop at least, it would have to be a no.

 

I came back upstairs and looked into the other shop our friend had recommended. It was a few miles away, and Daisy said she'd been there at least once before -- not to get work done on herself, mind you, but with one or more friends. So, I gave them a ring. They confirmed that yes, they were open at noon on Monday -- 12p-8p hours, were walk-in only (first-come, first-served) and that they were a cash-only business. I thanked them, told them I'd likely be there bright and early on Monday when they opened up shop, and hung up. So...we had a plan.

 

As an aside -- is there some law prohibiting tattoo shops from being anything but cash only? Do you have any idea how much more ink I'd have if I could put it on my Discover card? Tattoo shops may be the last "cash only" business model left in the world, or at least in this area anyway. Is it because debt collectors can't repossess tattoos, or something? Surely there's some reason for it.

 

Edit: I guess it's because artists can set their own prices, and so if someone with regrets after the work is done decides to dispute payment, they can't do that. Stuff along those lines. Which is fair.

 

Anyway.

 

With that out of the way, we began formulating our plans for the day. I told Daisy I was pretty open to whatever she wanted and how she would be willing to do it -- outside of the time frame for the tattoo, of course. She, in turn, told me she was pretty go-with-the-flow and that it was really up to me. My only real request of her was that she didn't drink caffeine in the afternoon or evening hours so that she could get some decent sleep on a reasonable timeframe, because I wanted to be waiting in that parking lot when the tattoo shop opened.

 

Sunday night, as the clock hit midnight, she ran into my office and loudly sang the happy birthday song to me, which I thought was adorable. I actually ended up going to bed -- yes, to the bedroom, where I was able to wrap up in my new plush blanket I purchased on deep discount from Macy's last week -- before her, and passed the fuck out. All I remember is being vaguely aware that she'd come to bed when she had, and that the cats were sleeping with us. 

When I awoke, it was still very dark, and it was around 6am. I had to use the bathroom (a few times, in fact; apparently adding high-sodium Chinese food to my diet the day before, even as a treat, wasn't the greatest idea I'd had in recent months) and I was just...awake. I read several comics, I played a little on my phone and on my computer, and saw that my mother had texted me happy birthday and said she had a job interview at noon. So, I called my parents and talked to both of them for some time. I gave them the rough rundown of our plans for the day as well as asked them the fateful question of "when I shipped your Christmas gift to you, did it come in its own box with a label smacked on it, or did it come in the shipping box?" My mother confirmed that yes, it had shipped in its own box with zero discretion and zero surprise whatsoever as to what it was -- a Sodastream Terra machine. I told them both about what it was and how it operates, and what you can do with it, what flavors you can add to it, etc. My dad also explained how my Christmas gift -- an expensive, fancy safety razor -- was the gift he'd gotten for all the men of the family this year.

I also told them about the plans for the tattoo, which they didn't exactly seem surprised by (they were somewhat surprised by the Starfleet tattoo idea, but at the time to them it was a novelty because I'd never gotten a tattoo before). During that conversation with my dad, I mentioned that it would take a decent amount of time to prepare, because I'd have to shave my forearm first -- tattoo artists can't really draw through hair, and I have hairy appendages. 

"I hope I don't take all this time and planning, shaving my arm and the like, to get in there and have them tell me they're full up for the day," I said. "That's why I want to get there early and be waiting when they open up."

"Yeah," my dad said, "you don't want to be like, I shaved my arm for this?"

 

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen -- the title of this post. 

 

I heard the bed/floors creak, signifying that Daisy was waking up. Daisy came into my office a short while later to proclaim that our oldest, most feeble cat had apparently pissed a puddle into the carpet/floor behind her computer chair in her office, six feet from the litter box. Daisy was not happy. I would not have been happy either. The cat is old, and she is very loving, but she isn't all there anymore -- and she is getting a little worse every year. She has a lot of trouble getting around and in/out of the boxes, getting on and off the couches, etc. I told Daisy we could stop at the pet supply store while we were out to get a gallon jug of the cleaner we use to get rid of those smells and stains. 

"Have you eaten anything?" she asked. "You really want to eat something before you get a tattoo, especially knowing how you are with needles."

Now, mind you, I had not eaten anything, but needles only really bother me when they're taking blood out of me, not at any other time. I've had three Covid shots and a flu shot over the course of this past year, and not a single one of them bothered me. I'm not all Bravo Six, going dark over a tattoo, especially not since I've already had a tattoo and knew what to expect about it and from the experience. But, it was my birthday, and she wanted to cook breakfast. Daisy made us (vegan) scrambled egg sandwiches with (vegan) bacon. Well, she made the bacon and eggs. I added them to super-low-carb bread and added real cheese to them to make sandwiches.

While she was waking up and getting the food ready, I absconded to the bathroom, where I popped a new cartridge into my Mach3 razor and meticulously shaved my entire forearm wrist to elbow, all the way around, using my sensitive skin shave gel. I have hairy arms. It took multiple passes, multiple minutes, just to get all of the hair off to give the tattoo artist a clean, open area with which to work his/her magic. I wouldn't need the entire arm shaved, of course, but I did it anyway. What if I changed my mind on the placement? What if I needed a larger area? Screw it, might as well just do it. 

 

I knew the tattoo design I wanted would be large -- 3-4x the size of the Starfleet tattoo, and it would need some space and fresh skin. I also jumped into the shower to rinse off all the excess hair and shave gel cream and to get cleaned up for the day. Once I had showered, I put a thin layer of Hustle Butter on the shaven skin and rubbed it in -- that stuff is like a miracle cream, and is well worth the $20 I spent on it two years ago. It makes the skin so soft, so moisturized. It's mostly a post-tattoo treatment and moisturizer, but I wanted to prep the skin, because apparently if you do, the pain is lessened -- or so people say. While the Starfleet tattoo didn't really hurt much at all (it did in a few places, for brief moments), I knew today's tattoo was going to be bigger, wider, longer, and hopefully contain a few colors in it. It was also going to be in a different spot on the opposite arm, so that alone was going to make it more difficult and possibly far more painful than the last one. Once I was satisfied and the, ahem, butter was absorbed into my arm, we got ready to head out.

There were two things we had to do before we could head to the tattoo shop -- we had to get gas in the car, which was almost empty, and we had to actually stop at our bank to, y'know, get the cash for the tattoo. 

I had no idea how much my tattoo idea would cost. I knew that line art, if I wanted to leave it black and white with a little shading, would likely start around $100 and only go up from there. If I could add color to it? I was likely looking at three bills or more. I'd just gotten paid on Friday, all of my bills are covered until sometime in January, if not early February, and Daisy gets paid on Wednesday. I also get paid again on New Year's Eve...so, I had a little wiggle room, and some monetary flexibility to work with. 

We took out $400 and deposited an insurance refund check of $90-something at the same time. We figured this was likely more than we needed; I was absolutely not planning to give the go-ahead on a $400 high-detail tattoo just because I wanted one on my arm, but it would be enough to get some semblance of what I wanted, and would likely leave us with some cash left over to get some food someplace or what have you. 

 

"Maybe I'll get another tattoo too," Daisy mused. 

 

"It's walk-ins 12-8," I told her. "We'll already be there and it's not like we have anything to do or anywhere else pressing to be. If you want to get something new, I'm all for it, baby."

 

This was and is true; Daisy has not gotten a new tattoo since before we got together. Like, a few years before we got together. In 2022, we'll celebrate ten years together, so...it's been a while. She has two small tattoos -- one on her left wrist, and a small landscape at the base of her neck on her back, between her shoulder blades. 

Because of traffic -- which, for a Monday at 11am, during the week of Christmas, was excessive -- we arrived at the shop at like, 12:01. They hadn't unlocked the doors yet. I waited until they unlocked the doors and switched on their "open" light before we went inside.

I've been in a few tattoos shops over the years, so I sort of know what to expect to an extent. I have seen shops that were very barebones and shops that were decked out with all sorts of art and merch and the like. This place was pretty square in the middle. Lots of art on the walls, but not an excessive amount, no real merch to speak of, no snotty staff. It was very clear that the location had once been a hair salon at some point, just due to the interior construction and the placement of mirrors. It was also in a strange location -- in a little strip-mall area a few miles from the house -- so nobody would ever really suspect it was there unless you were a repeat patron or knew the scene/industry in Omaha. In my experience and my knowledge of friends' tattoos and their experiences over the years, tattoo houses like this were usually pretentiousness-free and no-bones-about-it, these folks were in it for the fun and the art and not the "scene" or reputation. They also tend to produce some of the best work.

We were greeted by the guy I had been on the phone with the day before, who was kind and helpful. "What can we do for you today?"

"Yes, I'd like one of your finest tattoos, please," I said with a grin, which could not be seen under the mask I was wearing. That was another big thing -- anyone who entered the shop needed to be masked, no exceptions. They were hardcore about this.

I told the front desk guy about my ideas and showed him my design, which was this:

And there you have it, folks -- you get to see the genesis of the new tattoo for the first time.

"Oh, that's pretty line art," he said. "Lemme take this back to our guys and he'll come out and consult with you here in a few moments."

"Sure," I said.

There were three guys on staff in the shop, including that front desk guy; all of them were artists (I would later find this out by doing a deep dive on their website in the evening hours when I started writing here). The front desk guy has some amazing work posted out there on the web, and while we were there I learned one of the two other guys (not the one who did my tattoo) had been working there and tattooing for twenty-one years, through two different iterations of the shop -- apparently recently they'd done some remodeling. 

The artist who came out to consult with me, and who would eventually be the one doing my tattoo, was named Tony. Tony cheerfully and actually excitedly looked at the design and was like "I can do this; how do you want to do it? Just the line art? small or large? Colors?"

"Well," I said, "I'd like it to take up a good chunk of my forearm, so I'd like it to be fairly large," I said. "Color is going to depend on what the pricing scale is for it, but I mean, if possible/affordable, I'd like the roses to be red and the vines/leaves green."

Tony looked over the design from a few angles, zooming in and out on it a few times on my phone, and then air-dropped it to his own phone since he also had an iPhone (woooo, iPhone users unite!). 

"Well, the line art would be quick, I'd say less than an hour, about $100 or so. Color and shading will make the time and cost go up considerably."

Ah, there it was, I knew it. I braced for the number.

"I'd say to add the colors to it, we're probably looking at around $200, roughly."

"Sold," I said. "I'll absolutely pay $200 for full color."

"Alrighty!" Tony said. "Let's get this printed up for stencil and we'll get started here in a few minutes."

With the photo template air-dropped to his phone, he went to the back to the printer in order to get the design printed up and onto the stencil paper/ditto paper, whatever it is they use to superimpose the tattoo design onto your skin to trace it. It's pretty neat technology. During that time, I took this photo and sent it to a good chunk of my friends and family:

Yeah, I'm a nerd like that. And yes, those glasses really ARE that big. Purposely.

So, anyway, he came back with a printout that was....way too large for my arm. Don't get me wrong, I totally would've done it that large, but it absolutely would have been a $400 tattoo if I had. Instead, I told him a little smaller, and he came back with a much more reasonably-sized one. I agreed to it, he printed up the stencil, and began mixing the ink.

I watched as he pulled out five different ink colors, which I found intensely interesting. There was the black, of course, for the actual lines/design, but in addition to the bright red and green for the petals and leaves/stem, I saw him do up a little vial of brown and a little vial of white. This intrigued me, but I wasn't really concerned or anything. The artist is the artist, and I wasn't about to argue with his artistic license or what colors he chose as long as it looked somewhat like what I expected it to look like in my head. 

 

Little did I know at the time how spot on he'd be with that when all was said and done.

Anyway, once he'd gotten everything done up correctly and his tattoo needle machine USB charged, because what a glorious future we live in -- with multiple needle tips ready to go -- we got started. 

I will tell you that when I had the Starfleet tattoo done, it was on my left inner forearm, and it wasn't bad. I barely felt a lot of it. There was a little pain here and there on it, especially some of the shading in the center of the emblem, where there is apparently a nerve cluster riiiight beneath the skin there... but it wasn't overall painful at all, and I was in and out pretty quickly. I told my mother when she asked if it hurt that it felt like someone drawing on me with a vibrator with a knife attached to the end. That was a pretty accurate statement.

This experience was a little different. For one, I learned pretty quickly that Tony was a very detailed artist, and that he had a heavy needle hand. I didn't mind this at all -- it means thicker lines, better art, and a deeper color. But I did not anticipate that some of it would be quite painful. Not unbearably so, but as mentioned before, the art was being done on a different arm, and a different spot on said arm than my other tattoo. So there were sections of it -- especially the leaves at the bottom of the stem, that were holy shit levels of painful for a few minutes at a time. 

The actual line art took maybe forty minutes, max. I found that the brown ink was used to add a little shading/shadow to the leaves/stems to give them more definition and a sort of 3D quality, perspective, etc. This looked far better than the line art by itself, and I was impressed.

Sometime in between the line art being completed and the coloring being added, Daisy had decided that yes, she did want to get her own tattoo as well, impromptu. She asked Tony if he'd do it for her once he was done with mine.

 

"Oh, I suppose," he said, playfully.

 

Yeah, I liked this guy a lot. Really funny, really appreciative of our patronage, and seemed to be an all around good dude.

 

As for the coloring...

 

Hoo boy. 

 

Like, I knew the shading and addition of color would be painful in some spots, and places where colors were blended or where shadow effect was needed I figured that would hurt. In reality, those were the parts that didn't really hurt at all to get the coloring added. It was the solid coloring, such as the green on the leaves, that hurt like a bitch. I watched closely and for the addition of color, it wasn't just one needle that was being used -- it was a needle tip with four or five of them lined up horizontally very close to one another that injected the color, acting like a sharpie on my arm. The coloring took another 40 minutes or so, and a good chunk of those 40 minutes I was in some fair-to-middlin' pain. Again, not overwhelming, not excruciating, but a, say...6-7 on a scale of 10 in a very small, localized area for brief moments. 

"It's wild how some of it you barely feel," I said, "and then for some reason for some places, there's a nerve cluster close to the skin and it'll just scream at ya."

"Oh yeah," Tony said. "What's bad is if you hit one that sends that radiating pain all the way up your arm, and just aches at ya."

I didn't have that, thankfully. 

 

But, I did have a side effect that I hadn't really expected or really thought of that much -- I began to bleed. Like, not a lot, but some. Noticeably so. I also noticed that the bleeding was coming primarily from the more painful sections -- some of the leaves, one of the larger petals, etc. 

As the color and shading was added, the design and style took shape, and the more he worked on it, the more I absolutely loved it. Tony had put his own style into it, and it appears that his style is very much that classic, timeless Sailor Jerry sort of tattooing style -- a style of art that I adore. I've heard that described as sort of a "stained glass" look as well, and that's sort of accurate also. I had told Daisy beforehand that I hoped whoever did my tattoo would do it in said style, because I was a huge fan of it, and I found it immensely old school and classy.

"That's just beautiful," I told him.

"Ah, why thank you," he replied. "Just have to do some accenting/lighting with some white and we'll be all done."

Ah, so that's what the white was for. 

He spent some time, took it slowly, and outlined most of the larger petals and some of the leaves with thin, white accenting. I have really pale skin as it is, so I was afraid it wouldn't really show up well. But, the way he did it, it makes the design pop out even more and appear to shine. He also let my natural skin tone show through as natural highlighting and accenting as well on some of the petals. The effect, and the completed tattoo itself, was gorgeous.

"Okay," he said, "All done. Oh wow, that took less time than I thought. $180."

"Awesome," I replied. 

He wrapped my arm in several tight-ish layers of plastic wrap to help protect the tattoo, and I guess to make sure nothing would get in it. 

 

"Some shops bandage it up," he said, "but when people get a tattoo they want to be able to show it off, you know?" 

 

I was instructed to keep it covered for at least an hour, though 3-4 hours was likely best, and to wash it/apply antibiotic ointment on it a few times a day. Washing should only be done with soap and hand, no scrubbing, etc. I knew Daisy had triple antibiotic cream at home, and I also knew I had my trusty Aquaphor and Hustle Butter. Later in the day, I would also purchase a few tubes of bacitracin zinc/antibiotic ointment as well, just to make sure we had some extra in the house.

I slid my coat on, gave Daisy $200 in cash out of my wallet so she could pay him for mine if he wanted that before he started on hers, and went outside to vape.

The arm ached; it hurt as if someone had beaten me there for hours on end. It was sore and tender and hot to the touch. But, it did not burn or tingle or feel like there was some sort of nerve damage to it or anything like that -- my Starfleet tattoo burned for the rest of the day after it was done, and every once in a while it would twinge -- like I would feel a jangling nerve that felt like the needle was digging into my arm anew. That feeling hit once or twice a day for a week or two. I thankfully did not feel and have not felt that with this one.

What I did not know at the time was that I, uh, hadn't really stopped bleeding from the spots where I had bled some while the tattoo was being done. And with my jacket on, covering the arm and the plastic wrapping over the tattoo, I didn't notice. There was no padding, no bandage to soak it up or really stop it, so I slowly continued to bleed under the plastic, and the blood -- body temperature, of course -- didn't dry, it just sort of moved around under the plastic on my skin. I couldn't feel this; to me, it just felt like my arm had plastic on it. 

When I came back in after vaping, Tony was prepping Daisy's tattoo and the stenciling for it -- she wanted three stars on her outer wrist, with a swirl of blue-green fade to look like a galaxy inside. Stars have meaning to Daisy; it's part of a secret inside code thing she has with her sister (the Canadian one) and, additionally, we're all made of stardust -- just like the famous Carl Sagan quote. I did not recall until later (though I did know it) that it was a grand coincidence that she got a stars/stardust tattoo on my birthday, which is also the day Carl Sagan died -- he died December 20, 1996, 25 years ago today. 

Daisy's tattoo was fast -- he had it done in maybe 25 minutes at the most. 

"$60," Tony said. 

Daisy's tattoo was very pretty and super simple, but sometimes those are the most elegant ones. I really like it a lot. 

With $180 for mine and $60 for Daisy's, that came to a total of $240 just for the work. I wanted to tip him well, especially since he decided to do Daisy's tattoo on a whim too, and because the work was gorgeous. I also fully expected before leaving the house that morning that I'd be paying something like $240 for the base price of mine alone, not even factoring in a second tattoo for my wife. 

We ended up giving him $300 or $310 total, I believe -- a $30 or $35 tip from each of us, which we thought was pretty fair. We had also watched a couple who'd come in to get tattoos from one of the other guys in the shop tip the artist $5 each on $150 of work, and we were like we're not going to be like those buttholes. 

 

Truthfully, I think Tony was shocked when he counted the money and saw how much we'd given him. As we were getting in the car, he ran out the door and personally thanked us, like a little kid. I think it absolutely made his day. At his personal workstation he had a few photos up of his family, and he had at least two or three kids. I glanced at them and hadn't really paid close attention, but Daisy had, and made a mental note of it when we were driving off. 

I always want to be a kind soul -- this dude did amazing work on both of us on a Monday, during the week of Christmas, when many other folks would be already checked out during the holidays. And he has kids. If I can do something to make his Christmas a little better and make his kids' Christmas a little better, I'm going to do so. This shop treated us with respect, these guys were all class acts, they had humor and talent without pretentiousness, and I will absolutely have them at the top of my list every year for future work. 

So I guess here's the part all of you have been waiting for throughout this whole post, right? Here's the finished work:

It's sort of difficult to get a great photo of it because it's legit right on top of my arm, and to put the camera over it directly creates a shadow which obscures it. 

Also note that these photos were taken almost as soon as I took the plastic off, before I was really able to clean it or moisturize it that well, so I hadn't had any ink leaching or skin peeling or minor scabbing yet. 

Needless to say, and I'll repeat it again here, I love it. I think it's beautiful. Sure, the colors will fade some over the years, and it'll blur here and there, and the hair on my arm will grow back over it, but yeah, this art is gorgeous. I have zero regrets. It is exactly what I wanted.

 

Now imagine if I'd had it done so large that it took up almost all of my forearm, like the first printout he tried. Yeah, again, definitely would have been a four-bill piece of work.

Now for Daisy's tattoo:

Blue is a gorgeous tattoo color. My next tattoo(s) will likely have blue in them. Daisy's stars came out really well, though she said that they were incredibly painful to have done -- far more than the other tattoos she has already. This surprised me, but they're also on the outer part of her forearm/wrist area, and that's where the leaves on mine were the most painful, so I believe it. Again, Tony has a heavy needle hand, and that's part of why I think both of them came out so well.

Also of note: I asked Daisy for her permission to post this photo, and she said it was fine. I also asked her if she wanted me to crop the photo so that it didn't show all of the cleavage for days that my fine wife sports while wearing that top. "Hell nah," she said, "YOU SHOW THAT SHIT OFF." And I was like "YES MA'AM."

So. Anyway.

Moving onward, there's a lot more of my birthday story to tell.

In the car, Daisy asked if I wanted to go see the parents to show them the tattoos. I emphatically said yes, as I knew the parents would want to see me on my birthday anyhow (even though we already had my birthday dinner and the like on Saturday) but because I also wanted to show off our new ink. 

Remember how I said that I had kept slowly bleeding, but didn't know?

Well, by the time I got to the parents' and was able to show them the tattoo, the slow bleed had basically begun to fill the plastic wrap around my arm, and it was allowing the wrap to move instead of stay in place. I had my jacket on, so it's not like I noticed, but believe me, when I rolled up my sleeve to show the parents, I noticed -- it was close to dripping out and soaking the inside of my jacket sleeve. It was not a lot of blood, but I mean, it was enough. It made the plastic and my arm somewhat uncomfortable. 

We socialized with the parents for a bit and showed off the art, before I told Daisy, quietly, that I was beginning to bleed through everything and needed to get home to remove the plastic and clean it all off, coat in Aquaphor, etc. She was exceedingly understanding and had the patience of a saint -- especially when I told her I had to, had to hit up the vape shop before we went home, bleeding or otherwise, because I was almost out of juice.

So, I did that -- used the birthday coupon code they sent me, in fact, to get something like 30% off my total -- and then came home to wash the blood off my arm. That's one of the strangest sentences I've written in a while.

I very carefully washed it and applied some Aquaphor to seal it and keep the moisture in the skin. I don't know how many of you have tattoos, but it is a process to keep them clean and moisturized for the first week or two after you get a new one. You're supposed to be washing it with gentle soap and hand (nothing else) 3-4 times a day, applying moisturizer or balm afterwards to seal it -- like I mentioned above. You're also not supposed to wear any tight or form-fitting clothing over it that doesn't let the tattoo breathe, and you can't scratch it or pick at it or anything like that no matter how much it itches. Well, for those of us who have normal lives and/or get tattoos in the winter months when your skin is already prone to dryness and the like, that is sometimes really hard. 

 

Look, I know it's going to fade and go dull and lose some color and detail over the years, especially once the hair I shaved off grows back out under (and through) it. I'm okay with this. I can live with it, because that's what tattoos do. But I really don't want to damage it before everything sets and fully heals (usually about a week or two, but can be up to a month or two). 

After I took care of that, we wound down for a bit before I told Daisy if she wanted to get pizza, we could. We had a coupon for a free large three-topping from our favorite local place, and I figured we could order some cheese bread and tip them really well too, since we're nearing Christmas. I also told Daisy if she wasn't feelin' it tonight, or otherwise didn't want to, we didn't have to -- I could wait on pizza, I didn't need anything else if she wasn't into it -- I'd had a nearly perfect birthday. 

She did end up wanting to get the pizza, so we did -- a large pizza with vegan cheese, whole roasted garlic cloves, artichokes, and vegan sausage. Their vegan sausage is great -- I don't know who their supplier is, or if they make it in-house, but holy shit that is some good food.

And so ended what was really, really a pretty perfect birthday. I've had good birthdays over the years, and I've had some pretty terrible ones. It depends on the year and my mental state, really. Daisy has been amazing in recent years in doing everything she can to make my birthdays special, and this year was no exception. 

So, 39. One year short of forty. I have so much to accomplish in the last year of my thirties on this planet.

Let's see what I can do. 

 

The Isolation Diaries: Gravy Season During Covid, Year Two

 

Me and the wife in our backyard, October 3, 2021.

I have a large head.

 

Hi all. Welcome to November. It's Gravy Season 2021.

 

I warn all of you now that this is likely one of my longest Isolation Diaries posts to date. A lot happened in November, and we're gonna cover it all...

Monday, November 1:

Working from home, day 366.

 

Well, it's November.

It doesn't feel like it should be November. The year of 2021 has passed by really quickly, despite a good bit of it, well, sucking pretty hard a lot of the time. We're also about to enter our third year of Covid being a thing here in a few months, too -- keep in mind that this bullshit started in January 2020, and ramped up around March 2020. 2020, 2021, and now likely 2022 we'll be dealing with Covid in some capacity. NPR told me this morning that five million people have died from Covid now. Five million! That is a simply stunning figure. It's a very sad figure, too.

I got up this afternoon really late, around 6pm almost. It was already getting dark. I guess we turn the clocks back this coming weekend, too, which means that when I get off work in the morning it'll be dark, and when I get up in the afternoon/early evening it will either already be dark or will be hardcore on the way to darkness. Late fall and winter is a weird time of year for me. I do not like the cold, so therefore I don't go outside any more than I have to (not that I do that anyway). Tonight, to mark the beginning of November, we're predicted to get our first really hard freeze, with temperatures falling into the 20s. It's as if Nebraska saw what day it was and decided to flip a light switch on us. The western half of the state, not to be outdone, got a bunch of snow dumped on it last night. Halloween ended and winter began -- no fall in sight. 

It is Gravy Season now, as mentioned before, but I'm not incredibly enthused by it. For now, I'm going through the motions. Maybe I'll get more into the spirit of the season as it progresses. Maybe I won't. 

I have a lot to do in November that I didn't get to do in October, and the #1 thing on that list is that I must get the Christmas cards made and ordered. I just got a credit limit increase on one of my cards for another $1,000 (choo-choo, all aboard the bad ideas train) which is good, because I'll likely use that card to get the Christmas cards. 

I do have some things to look forward to in November. Ghostbusters: Afterlife comes out on November 19, as does the live-action Cowboy Bebop series on Netflix. Season 4 of Star Trek: Discovery premieres on Paramount+ the day before that, and season 2 of Tiger King hits Netflix the day before that. Plus, later in the month, Hawkeye hits Disney+. Thanksgiving is coming up, and with that a four-day weekend -- plus Black Friday and Cyber Monday. These are all pretty superficial things, though. Yeah, they're things to be a little excited about, but really in November I'm looking forward to a little more downtime if possible. I just want to be able to relax and decompress. The past several months have been really stress-filled and they've put a lot of wear and tear on my soul. 

Tuesday, November 2:

Working from home, day 367.

 

Our new tracking system at work is nowhere near as complicated as it looks. I spent some time working in it last night and was able to figure out about 70-80% of it with a few pointers here and there. But it is new, it is more complex than our previous systems, and if there's anything I've learned from being a manager over a team is that people do not like change and are very resistant to it, whether actively or passively. But, overall, it's not bad. It'll take a few weeks to get used to, but it is not bad. We'll pick it up just like we pick up every other new system we learn. It's all a process.

 

"Imagine it like getting a new phone," one of our directors explained. "When you get a new phone, you mess around with it to see how it works and figure out what it can do and how."

It actually is a lot like that, not gonna lie.

We did have our first hard freeze last night -- when I got off work this morning (forty minutes late, I might add) it was 29 degrees outside. It didn't get out of the 40s today -- this is more December/January weather than it is November. By the weekend, though, it's supposed to be back into the high 60s again, so there's that. If I get to venture outdoors, I do have a new pair of aviators that have the transitions tint lenses in them that I'm itching to try out -- they're the same big silver aviator frames I had before, but I ordered a second pair of them (because I love them so much) with transitions lenses in them so that I always have a pair of the most comfortable, huge glasses I love at the ready, regardless of weather or light conditions.

With that I'm likely done buying any new glasses until I get another prescription in a year or two. I absolutely don't need any more, and the ones I have are all good now. I'll take care of them and wear them normally but I'm basically done getting the styles and frames I want. 

Even though it's only November 2, I see a lot of folks already getting into the Christmas spirit for the season. And I'm already seeing Black Friday deals popping up. Black Friday is still over three weeks away. I don't want to shit in anyone's cereal or anything, but slow your roll, y'all. I don't have a need to start celebrating this early or ramping up for everything, but that also may be because I already have most of my holiday shopping done and there is very, very little I need or want from any sort of Black Friday sale, or in general.

I look back on my life from my current position in it and realize how grateful I am to be where I am at this juncture. Ten years ago I was so poor and alone that I was buying $2 bottles of very questionable motor oil from the grocery store just to keep the Monte Carlo running, and was using $1 bottles of Palmolive dish soap from the Dollar Tree as laundry detergent because, well, I couldn't afford anything else. Now, I have a decently paying job, I own a house, I have a wonderful wife, and I'm able to order my groceries over the internet and have them delivered to my door without generally worrying about staying on the tightest budget possible. I can also (and do, as a matter of fact) subscribe to multiple streaming services for entertainment and subscribe to about 20-ish comic books, all of which I read and follow in my downtime. And, not to be outdone, I work from home in my underwear and bathrobe, with podcasts playing in the background and fresh cups of coffee and vape materials at my desk. 

I'm pretty goddamn lucky. 

Wednesday, November 3: Working from home, day 368.

Thursday, November 4: Working from home, day 369.

 

My escalation manager colleague has had a rough...well, past week or so now, I guess. He has some mental health issues; I won't get into them here as it's not my place and because he's genuinely a really good person and a close friend. Anyway, he's been out of the office all week (doctor's orders) which has made the first week we've been learning a new system...rather frustrating at times. 

As I mentioned before, the new tracking system itself is actually really nice. It's a lot faster to use and it's organized in a similar way, not exactly the same as the old system, but in the basic ways we perform the job, it's pretty much the same. I won't go as far to say that I love it or adore it or anything, but it's adequate enough. As I've been immersed in it the past four nights in a row now, it doesn't really matter whether I like it or not -- it's how we do business now, and it's what we've got. It is rather buggy and those bugs will need to be worked out over the course of the next few days/weeks -- I've reported a number of them myself -- but it's not bad at all.

Our Sun-Weds team has been in and has been using it since Monday morning, and most of them have it pretty well down at this point; it's quick to learn the basic ropes in, and a few hours into using it, you'll know 90% of what you need to know for it. However, last night, our Weds-Sat team came in to use it for the first time, and almost none of them had ever touched it or logged into it for more than five minutes before -- as we were still using the old system until Monday morning. I have a lot less people on Weds-Sat than I do on Sun-Weds, so that was a blessing at least, because if I had a full team in who didn't know the ins and outs of a new system I may have gone insane. Having a few, and having both team leads in to help them out with setup and the like, was greatly helpful to my mental state.

The week itself has been tiring to a degree, but hasn't been bad. I've actually felt like I've had more energy this week than I've had in a while, and I think that's partially because I've cleaned up my diet again and have (mostly) gotten back to pre-vacation foods of salads and soups, steamed vegetables and the like; very limited bread and somewhat limited overall carbs, and as much sleep as I can allow myself every day. Tonight, though, I told the wife I crave Chipotle. I've been wanting a burrito from Chipotle for literal months -- the sofritas burrito with a lot of vegetables and the like, and for some reason I want it more tonight than I have in a while. She agreed to pick one up for me on the way home from work, so I will have one of those here in a bit and that will be my actual meal for the day.

V8 is still in very low or otherwise unfindable supply pretty much everywhere I look. I've gotten a few bottles of the Walmart generic version, low sodium, as I wait for anywhere to get the cans back in stock. Regular V8 can be found anywhere, but I get the low sodium version because I find the normal stuff WAY too salty for as much of it as I like to drink. I'll likely have to go on the hunt for it this weekend because I can drain one of the large bottles of it in about 3 days, max. I believe I only have one unopened bottle left.

We need to go out this weekend anyway and I need to do some actual grocery shopping, as I've been doing subsistence living on what's been in the house. As such I'm now running low on a lot of my little essentials. I haven't had string cheese in the house in two weeks, for example. I've gravitated back to snacking mostly on nuts and some trail mix here and there, but I do like to have a bag or two of chips around just to have something different -- haven't had any in the house for days. I do have some Goldfish crackers, but it's just not the same (and likely it's more carby for me than most chips would be). 

The other reason we need to go out this weekend is because I need to get my booster shot for Covid and I need to get my flu shot for the year. I haven't done either yet; we've had busy weekends for the past month or so and/or I've just been so burnt out that I haven't wanted to leave the house any more than absolutely necessary. Daisy will need to refill our prescriptions next week too, likely, and of course we'll have to start prepping for Thanksgiving soon enough. I also need to put in an Amazon order and pay some bills -- again, there's stuff to be done. I have just been so consumed with the work-sleep-eat, repeat grind that much of it has been pushed to the side for the moment.

Friday, November 5:

Remember, remember, the fifth of November

Day off.

 

Yesterday I received an email that an Amazon order I'd made had shipped. This isn't exactly out of the ordinary, as I do Amazon orders all the time -- but this time around, I hadn't ordered anything recently. I checked the shipping and found that it was, surprise, the ABBA album Voyage -- their first record in 40 years -- that I'd pre-ordered way back in the beginning of September.

When I woke up in the afternoon, I went downstairs to get it. This evening, I gave it a listen. So, here's my mini-review of the album...

It's not bad.

But it's not great either.

It is, definitely, ABBA. It sounds like ABBA. It sounds like the late 1970s, specifically. It's exactly what you'd expect a record from these folks to sound like, regardless of what year it was released. Kind of like how every AC/DC record sounds sort of the same -- ABBA has a very distinct style that you can't mistake for anyone else. 

Look, I'm an ABBA fan. I'm actually a pretty big ABBA fan. Voyage is a pretty decent record and representation of the music the band does, and for the most part it does it right. It has its "dancing" tracks ("Don't Shut Me Down"; "Just a Notion"; "No Doubt About It"), which are done moderately well, and its slower, more heartfelt tracks ("I Still Have Faith in You"; "I Can Be That Woman"). It even has a Christmas song on it ("Little Things"). But there's no real, I dunno, bangers on this record, a la "Dancing Queen" or "Does Your Mother Know." Their second-to-last track, "No Doubt About It" comes close, though.

But, really, I don't know if it's fair to compare this record directly to the older stuff -- it was a different time then, and (obviously) ABBA was much younger back then. It also feels like a lot of the songs are half-finished -- as in, they end a minute or two sooner than you'd expect them to.

Overall, B+ for effort and delivering a record that most fans will likely enjoy enough, for what it is, after 40 years. It's not going to win any "album of the year" awards or anything, but it's a perfectly fine effort and a love letter to the longtime fans. The late John McCain often cited ABBA as his favorite band, and I have a feeling he'd enjoy this record were he still alive. 

Anyway. Onward.

Tonight, the wife decided she wanted Chinese for dinner and didn't want to cook, so she stopped by one of the Chinese take-out places near our house that specializes in vegan options, and brought home some sort of eggplant stir-fry and vegan egg rolls. I had her grab me a cup of curry noodle soup, as it's my favorite item this place makes, and that's what we had for dinner while watching an episode of Shameless.

 

The week has been long and pretty tiring, and I'm glad for it to be over. My soul has been craving a little downtime and I've finally been able to get some of it. It's payday weekend for both of us too, which is good, since I had to pay a few bills and order some odds-and-ends household supplies), which I mentioned above. I try to be a bit frugal in getting the stuff around the house we need, but most of the time that's not really, ahem, in the cards for us. Stuff is expensive. Life is expensive. Laundry detergent and cat litter, toilet paper and tissues -- stuff like that all adds up, and it all adds up in addition to food costs, house maintenance costs, car maintenance costs, etc. 

 

I guess that's why I got rid of a lot of stuff I'd had on my Christmas list for years. I don't need any of it. There's nothing on that list that I desperately need for any reason, or I'd buy it myself and be done with it. I need to spiritually be done with a lot of possessions, really. In the three years we've owned this house, I've gone from getting rid of 2/3 of my possessions to slowly, slowly replacing them with new things. Most of them are little things, but they're things that I don't really need to survive in life with. In the spring, I vow to get rid of a lot of them again -- sell a lot of stuff off, use it to help fund our trip to WV when we actually get to go. There's just so many books, so many comics, stacks of movies that I decided to keep for...some reason, games I never get to play (nor will I ever really be able to play), etc. Did you know that my Switch Lite has been in storage since around New Year's? Yeah, it's because I only play it when there's a new Pokemon game for it that I'm interested in. I played through the last two I bought, became bored with them, and put the Switch away. I can't remember the last time I played on my PS2, either -- but it was many months ago. Daisy and I haven't played with her Wii together since...March? ish? Something like that. There's always something else to do. 

 

I've talked before about putting this site on hiatus for a while, and I will likely do that sometime within the next month or two. I need to be able to focus on writing my novel and taking care of actual life things that my writing here does tend to get in the way of. With the holidays coming up, time is at a premium and while this little HP I have is fine...for what it is, I guess, I'd like to be able to complete the novel, sell the novel, and use some of the proceeds to upgrade to a much better computer setup. The highest-end Dell desktop out there right now has two 2TB solid-state drives and 64GB RAM...and it costs four times as much as my Monte Carlo did when I bought it -- total cost of that Dell is something like $2100. A comparable Dell to my old Acer can be purchased for about a tenth of that, but even I can't justify spending another $200 and change on a computer right now. Again, this HP is fine for the moment, but it is slow and old and I don't like not having a backup machine for when this one inevitably/eventually fails on me. As that will likely be sooner rather than later, I have (of course) been backing up all of my files on a weekly basis, not a monthly or every-other-month basis. I just completed a backup tonight.

Anyway.

So yes, I will eventually put this site on hold so that I can complete the novel, and...sorry for that, for the like, four of you who may or may not still read this site and/or care about that. I'll give you warning when I do, it's not like you're gonna be left stranded without notice. 

Saturday, November 6:

Day off.

Booster shot day.

 

This morning, Daisy and I both woke up early, around the same time, and Daisy scheduled our appointments at the local Hy-Vee grocery store to get our booster shots and flu shots.

I'm going to take a second to let you unpack that sentence a bit.

1. appointments

2. at a grocery store

3. for walk-in pharmacy care

4. for a Covid booster

5. and flu shots.

Welcome to 2021, everyone. 

This will put us back up to full immunity from Covid (well, I mean, as much as one can be, anyway) and the flu by the week before Thanksgiving -- as it takes two weeks for the shots to be fully effective across the board. Any of you who have ever been vaccinated for...well, pretty much anything probably know this. 

This, and getting some groceries (some of which we'll likely actually pick up at the same store we get the shots in) are all I have on the docket for the day. It is, also, all I want to have on the docket for the day. Brandon be tired, man. I need some rest and some more actual downtime than I've gotten in weeks, because it feels like all I do on my days off is run around and do shit that I can't do or have no other time to do on other days when I'm working overnights. If you've never worked overnights, I cannot describe to you how positively draining it is on body and soul, and how little free time you have to yourself or to do the things you need to do outside of your job. I've been doing it for over five years now and it is taking its toll on me more by the year.

I've mentioned that Daisy has wanted me on a day job for years, but I can't do that where I am now for multiple reasons -- for one, I'd still never get any real rest, mainly because the overall job is so demanding. For two, there's nobody who could replace me on the current overnight team who would actually be able to perform the job and run the team I do. There are likely people who think they could do the job but would either try to fire half the team for stupid shit (can't do that, need the warm bodies whether they're fully competent or not, for multiple contract-related reasons) or would very quickly crumble under the pressure of having 23 people report to them for every single need and every single issue/problem/grievance. I also don't want to work on days in that place again as a manager; trust me, it's far worse than overnights. 

But I can't really leave the job at the moment, as you know -- especially not if we've got a decent/substantial raise coming our way soon that will significantly improve our finances -- which we do, according to our leadership. My question is "when?" and, additionally, "how much?" My overall goal is to only work at this job for as long as I have to, and then once the novel is finished, use that to get the fuck out. 

Even that may not be incredibly realistic. An average writer's first novel advance is $5k to $15k -- not enough to live on by itself, but when you factor in that by the time the novel will be done I'll already be working on the second, and then other books, it adds up. I can live frugally and provide for myself and the wife with my writing, which is all I've ever really wanted to do with my life. I can also find another job that isn't as stress-inducing or soul-sucking as my current one is, as necessary -- but I need the novel as a springboard to get away from my current job. It needs to act as a catalyst. Because, as it stands now, without that springboard I'll be working until I die or until I'm fired. And I'm so tired of working. I've been working jobs for twenty years, thankless ones, joyless ones, for never near enough pay for what I'm worth. I'll never be able to "retire" as a lot of previous generations have been able to do, but I do want to get to the point where I don't have to "work a job" to be able to survive -- because doing so is destroying everything I am as a person. I can't do this forever. I don't know how some people can work jobs -- the same job, even -- for 30 years, 40 years, and then be proud of it. 

 

Proud of what?

Proud that you sold your soul and all of your time to a company or corporate master?

Proud of having 30 or 40 years of knowing every night when you got off work, you'd have to go back to the same place the next day and do the same thing again, day in, day out?

 

That sort of thought process boggles my mind; that level of stiff-upper-lip stoicism terrifies me. Did you not have dreams? Did you not have life goals? 

 

Are there really people so shiftless, so bogged down by their own life responsibilities (that they created, I might add) that this is a point of pride for them?

 

I am a Millennial. Well, more accurately, I'm part of the subset of Millennials they call "Xennials" because I was born right at the end of Generation X. Most of the time I've identified as Generation X myself, going on the original definition of "born between 1965 and 1983," but as often happens, people wanted to redefine that year range to distance themselves from the younger folks. Some call us "Generation Y" or something equally stupid. Anyway, my generation was brought up on the notion that any of us could do, and be, anything we wanted to be -- that life was a book filled with blank pages, and it was up to us to fill them how we wished. For most of my life, I've wanted to be a writer (it's why I went to school for all those years, became a professor, a poet, and am working on a novel now) and that's still a goal, but as I get older I've realized that what I really want out of life is...to do nothing else. To do as little as possible and have most of society leave me alone, and to just...live. I've worked long enough. Now I want to live.

Anyway. I digress. Back to the main story.

So we got up this morning, got dressed, and left the house to go to the local Hy-Vee (where, apparently, we get all of our vaccines now, as we got our first two Covid shots at one in Iowa). This Hy-Vee is legit three minutes from the house, and it's across the street from our gym. It's practically next door.

As it's gorgeous and in the high 60s today for the first time in a few weeks, I put on a pair of shorts, a Smiths t-shirt, my transitions-lensed aviators, and just for good measure, my new Chicago Cubs baseball cap (backwards, of course). Daisy said I looked extremely hot and sexy. I dunno, you be the judge there:

 

I mean, I think I look good, but I still think I look like an old man. But whatever.

The first thing we noticed upon arriving at the Hy-Vee Pharmacy was...well, it was busy. With the edict coming down this week that kids 5 and up can be vaccinated against Covid now, that pharmacy was packed, and we quickly realized why appointments were needed for these shots. Daisy had realized this last night, when she tried to do a walk-in at the Hy-Vee across town and they point-blank told her it would be an hour and a half to two-hour wait. She said the hell with that and came home.

Meanwhile, I had been a bit apprehensive about getting the Covid booster when I hadn't put in for PTO for work the next day. For about 36 hours after my second shot back in -- April? I think? -- I was fairly out-of-it and fuzzy. I wasn't sick or anything, but I did feel off. 36 hours would be about midnight tomorrow night, or two hours into my normal Sunday night work shift. Still, screw it, right? I'm a big proponent of vaccines in general and am an even bigger proponent of this one in particular, which I haven't exactly made a secret of here on this site. 

We sat and waited for about ten minutes as there were multiple folks there before us. They took Daisy in first, into a small room right next to the pharmacy window, and she came back out within 2-3 minutes later.

"They do them both at once?" I asked.

"Yeah; Covid in the left arm, flu in the right."

"Neat," I said.

They called my name and the same lady who administered the shots to my wife ushered me into the little broom-closet of a room.

"Please tell me your name, date of birth, and the reason for your visit today."

Uh, what? 

Pretty sure they had the document in their hands with all that info, but sure, I complied.

"Brandon [last name], [date of birth], and I'm here to get my Covid booster shot as well as my flu shot for this year."

"Perfect," the lady said, checking off stuff on a clipboard.

Do they think that people are faking this, or something? I thought to myself. 

I got the Covid booster in the left bicep. I barely felt it. I did not feel it travel down my arm or into my bloodstream as I had the first two shots. Maybe my body is just used to having it inside me now, I dunno. It didn't bleed, either.

"Huh," she said. "No blood, nothing."

"Is that abnormal?" I asked. 

"Not really; about a third of people don't have any blood and don't need a band-aid or anything."

"Neat," I said. I bled a few big drops from the first Covid shot, but didn't from the second one. Apparently not this one either.

Then she moved to the right arm and stuck me with the flu shot.

Now, I get a flu shot every year. I have since 2015 or so, when I got a really nasty bout of Influenza-B that knocked me on my ass for about four days. I'd rather not have to go through that again if I can avoid it. The flu shot is not bad, it never is. Most of the time I barely feel it, though I do generally have a mild allergic reaction to it -- my arm swells up into a knot a bit at the injection site and my arm is generally achy/sore for a day or two. But that's fine.

This year's flu shot stung, like a bee sting. I didn't yelp or anything, but let's just say it got my attention. 

"Okay," she said, "You're all done. Oh nice, that arm didn't bleed either." 

I looked down and she was right, nothing. 

"We ask that you hang around for fifteen minutes, just to make sure that you'll be okay, but you don't have to come check back in or anything -- you can walk around the store, shop, etc."

I thanked her, got my paperwork back (including my vaccine card, which has a new shiny little sticker on it now), and we were off to do our grocery shopping.

It has been several weeks since we've done any sort of real grocery shopping together -- possibly a month or more since Daisy and I were both in a grocery store picking up items together at the same time. As mentioned, we were either out of or very nearly out of a lot of stuff, and some of that was some expensive stuff.

We got a full cart of items at Hy-Vee, which is generally more expensive than other grocery stores (but eh, we were already there), and then did the same thing across town at Trader Joe's. Daisy then decided that she needed to pick up a few items at Whole Foods (where I took the above picture in the car, while waiting for her to run in and do that).

By the time we returned home, I added up the totals -- we had spent four hundred and sixty-four dollars on various groceries and household supplies. 

But.

We won't need laundry detergent for months. 

We have almost all of our Thanksgiving foods ready to go/to be made. 

I have enough string cheese to last weeks.

 

I have enough salad materials to last weeks. 

 

I have soups for weeks.

 

Daisy has the materials to make chili, soup, and spinach artichoke dip. 

 

We have almost all household essentials covered with the exception of a few items she'll pick up in the coming days (vegan butter, coconut milk, one of the kinds of cat litter we use, etc).

Sunday, November 7: Working from home, day 370.

Monday, November 8: Working from home, day 371.

 

I don't remember much of Saturday night after I wrote what I wrote above, as almost as soon as I finished writing that and had some dinner, I immediately got very nauseous and dizzy. I also had some of the worst diarrhea I've had in several years -- repeatedly. 

My diet had not changed, and I was not otherwise sick. And all of this kicked in about 6-7 hours after I got the shots. I looked up known side effects to the shots -- diarrhea and nausea were not on the list. But I felt, well, rather bad. I went upstairs and laid down in my chair, trying to get the room to stop spinning and trying to get my stomach to calm down, and I napped for about four hours. When I got up, I went to the bathroom and shit my guts out yet again, and upon returning to my room (it was well after midnight by this time, so Daisy was already asleep in bed) I felt...a little better? I guess? 

My arms were aching something terribly, both of them -- because of course, Covid shot in the left arm, flu shot in the right -- so they were sore and developing big knots on them at the injection sites. The knots are still there, by the way, even now -- but they no longer hurt/ache unless you like, press on them.

I tried to center myself and feel better. Most of the nausea was gone, but my stomach still felt upset and weird. I hadn't really changed my diet, as mentioned, but I had requested that we have burgers and fries for dinner, which we did. I figured part of it could be that I'd just had too many carbs, or something.

Throughout the night, I slowly began to feel a little better as the hours progressed. I spent most of the night writing the 100 questions intermission post (the post before this one) so that I could focus on something and keep my mind off of feeling ill. By the time I went to bed Sunday morning, Daisy was already awake and I was feeling mostly okay, just tired. 

I woke up Sunday afternoon about fifteen minutes before the Chiefs football game started, and this was sort of planned. I was okay by this juncture, but both arms' injection sites were still swollen and sore. Throughout the afternoon and evening I felt better and more normal, but I was -- warm? I guess? Not like feverish, at least I don't think so, but I just felt hot. It was in the low 60s outside and we had the doors and windows open, and I was still hot. I made a salad and had a few chips and string cheeses (read: back to my normal-ish diet) and just tried to focus on feeling normal. By the time I started work, I was still mostly okay, but still felt just a little off. I couldn't place it.

In the overnight hours, as there was a breeze going, I opened the French door next to my desk downstairs and allowed some fresh air in so I could breathe and relax a bit more. This seemed to do me some good, and I easily felt better.

The night of work itself was really dead -- I didn't have a whole lot to do, and neither did most of my team. This was a blessing as it gave me a bit of time to do some admin stuff and to read a bit. I had two issues I was passively keeping an eye on and doing a little work on here and there, but I did not need to give them my full focus, or anything like that. I'm hoping this is an ongoing trend for most of the week, since I still have people on my team learning the new system -- and because Thursday is Veterans' Day, meaning that all banks/federal offices and the like will be closed. Hopefully that means on Wednesday and Thursday nights this week I'll get a little bit of a breather. Daisy has Thursday off for the holiday, and is working from home on Wednesday.

When I came back upstairs this morning after finishing my night, I brought with me the paperwork -- probably 20 pages or more of wasted paper given to me when I got the Covid booster, and put my vaccination card away. While flipping through the papers to make sure there wasn't anything I was missing or needed to keep before I put them in the box of "things to be shredded," my eye caught the list of possible side effects of the vaccine.

Nausea and diarrhea were indeed on the list. 

I opened the door and read the list aloud to Daisy, who was already awake. It was almost as if I had won a battle, like I was proclaiming victory in knowing that there wasn't something wrong with me overall, it was just the shot. She found this amusing. 

I will also note that Daisy really didn't have any side effects at all this time around. She was sore and fatigued, and achy -- said she felt like someone had beaten her -- but nothing else; she was perfectly functional the whole time. 

So, there you have it -- that's the (rather disjointed) story of us getting our Covid boosters and flu shots. Interestingly enough, I didn't get any paperwork for the flu shot, so who knows what they actually stuck in my right arm and called it good. It could've been horse laxative for all I know. It would explain the poops.

Tuesday, November 9:

Working from home, day 372.

 

After almost a month of putting in for it, my boss finally approved my PTO for my birthday and the day before it next month. I'll likely take off December 23 (a Thursday) too, to give myself a buffer day to rest and prepare for the Christmas weekend. We generally go to Christmas Eve church services with the parents in the afternoon hours -- I've written about this before -- and the last thing I want to do is try to sleep quickly and then get up and rush through getting ready to be at the church by like, 4pm. Most times these days I'm not usually up or even conscious before 5, so it would be hard on me.

I don't know what plans are for Christmas this year; I believe that it's just going to be us and the parents here in Omaha. Daisy's sister has been trying to get us to come out to Colorado for Christmas and I have 100% politely shut that down every time it's come up. I don't have the PTO to use for it, and I have to be back at work on the 26th per the usual, as it's a payroll Sunday -- I have to work so that my team's payroll can be processed and they can get paid, and I can't do that outside of the VPN, which I can only access via my actual work computer downstairs. Not to mention that I absolutely do not want to spend Christmas in a hotel, nor am I traveling ten hours each way, to and from Denver -- in the middle of winter in the snowy season -- in a 13-year old car that probably needs new tires at this juncture already. Unless Santa wants to buy us a new Bronco with snow tires for Christmas and make me independently wealthy so that I no longer have to work, this isn't happening. 

I also don't know why I'm getting so far ahead of myself, either -- I still have no idea what we're actually doing for Thanksgiving, even. I know we have all the stuff we need in the house now for the actual meal, with maybe a few last-minute items still to come and still to be purchased the weekend beforehand, but I don't know if it's going to be just us and the parents, or if any family will be in town, or what. I just know that my primary goal for the day is to get up early and watch the Macy's parade, as I do every year (even though every year I become more and more out of touch with pop culture and the celebrities involved with said parade). I mostly just watch it for the balloons, I call my parents, I drink a ton of coffee, etc. It's a yearly tradition thing for me -- one of the few traditions I am very proud of and try to never skip. 

Work last night was mostly quiet again, until around 5am -- when everyone and their brother seemed to wake up and start emailing our shared box to piss and moan about their tickets. My boss went to bed around 4-something, but our executive director was already awake and online and working (on something, who knows what) by 6, and in my last 90 or so minutes I was there, I did more actual work than I'd done the entire night preceding that time. When I finally went to bed in the morning hours it took a long time to actually fall asleep.

Wednesday, November 10:

Working from home, day 373.

 

I have had a lot of people ask me how, and why, I was able to get a Covid booster. Well, it's been open for over a month (maybe two now, actually) for the elderly and for anyone with a pre-existing, immune-affecting condition. I have diabetes. It's well-documented and on the medical books for me, and that qualified me to get a Covid booster. However, I didn't really pay much attention to this. Daisy told me I could get the booster, and I was like "cool, let's do it." So we went in and I got it, no questions asked of me about it, etc. Nothing to prove that yes, I had diabetes, nothing asked of me to justify getting it, none of that. Just a shot in the arm. For the record, Daisy could get it because she was fat and has asthma. Asthma is one of the acceptable pre-existing conditions. But even for her, she didn't get asked about this, they just proverbially waved her through.

I don't know what the overall future plan is for the boosters, or if anyone even really has one yet. It was announced today that Pfizer has petitioned to open up the booster to all adults now, which sort of surprised me because I didn't know that wasn't a thing anyway already.

It's been cold and rainy all day, and there's some interesting stuff in the forecast coming up for tomorrow and the weekend -- basically that we may see our first real snow of the year here in Omaha. Even if we don't, it's going to be blustery and cold for several days, and I can definitely already feel that setting in. I could feel it when I went out to bring the garbage and recycling bins back inside -- it definitely feels like late fall and Thanksgiving-ish weather. That train is never late here in Nebraska.

Thursday, November 11: 

Working from home, day 374.

 

Continuing from above, we're not supposed to get snow here in Omaha, but that appears to almost be sheer luck. We're on the very tail end of this new big weather system that's going to dump a lot of snow on the upper midwest as it moves through, and we're just getting the wind and cold from it, with a little rain here and there. The highs tomorrow are supposed to barely be above freezing, and we're under a wind advisory until tomorrow evening too. As long as it doesn't knock out power or internet, or take down the half-tree we have remaining in the front yard, we should be okay.

What else has been going on? Well...

On Sunday or Monday, I noticed that our toilet was leaking again. Mind you, it had been a full year since it started leaking before, and I tightened a few bolts in the back of it and it stopped. Well, it has started again, and worse this time -- the floor behind the toilet had basically a puddle of water on it. I tried to tighten the bolts again, but that appeared to make it a little worse.

The problem is that, as it's an older toilet, it has an egregious design flaw. Toilets have three parts to them -- the tank, the mechanisms inside the tank (the ballcock and the flapper/handle, filling tubes, etc) and the bowl. These are all modular parts, meaning they can each be swapped out and replaced fairly easily -- for the most part, elbow grease not included. This means that when something goes wrong with your toilet, most of the time you don't have to replace the entire unit. Well, on ours, the tank and bowl portion have a really, really shitty design flaw -- to hold them together, a plastic bolt goes down through the bottom of the water tank, through an eye-hole on the back of the bowl, and it's tightened within the water tank with a rubber washer and tightened underneath on the bottom of the bowl with a nut. This makes a seal, keeps water from going everywhere, and secures the two major components of the toilet from moving.

Well, the bolt is loose and can't really be hand-tightened unless you're twisting it from both sides in opposite directions (think of the motion of wringing out a towel) and the rubber washer is shot and rotted because it's so old and has been underwater its entire life. So, what happens here is that a small bit of water will constantly drip down through that bolt hole, out of the tank itself, down the bolt, and onto the floor. I was able to get the bolt tightened a year ago, and it mostly stopped, but I noticed over the weekend that it looked like it had started again, and by Monday was really letting loose.

The wife opened a ticket through our home warranty at my request for a plumber to come out and fix it, seal it up, replace the bolt and washer, etc -- whatever they need to do to make it never leak again (I hope silicone or something along those lines is involved) and I told her that while I could probably fix it myself with the right tools, like I did before, I'm just not fucking with it anymore and I'd rather have it be fixed correctly so we didn't have to worry about it anymore. In preparation of the plumber coming (which we expected to be on Wednesday or today at the latest, with Daisy opening the ticket on Tuesday night), Daisy completely cleaned the bathroom from top to bottom -- impressively so -- making that bathroom gorgeous and spotless. She then got a plastic salad bowl from...somewhere, I have no idea as I've never seen it before, and put it under the leaking bolt area. This worked -- it caught all of the dripping, which is sometimes a lot (especially when we're sitting on the toilet) and sometimes not -- and we can dump it when necessary.

Wednesday morning, Daisy called in and there was no ETA available; the guy who she spoke to sounded gruff and told her to call another number. She did, and got a voicemail. We had no response throughout the rest of the day.

"It's fine," I told Daisy. "We've got Thursday too."

Daisy is off work today because of Veterans' Day, but even if she weren't off work, it would've been one of her scheduled work-from-home days. Two days is a reasonable turnaround for a non-crisis plumbing issue, so I expected we'd hear something this morning and would have a guy out to fix it today while I was sleeping. 

Nope.

 

November 16th, between 10am and 2pm.

You're fucking kidding, right? was my immediate reaction.

But, honestly, that is not awful for a non-emergency issue. November 16 is Tuesday. Daisy works from home Monday and Tuesday next week. We can empty the plastic bowl under the leak once a day or so (or whatever) until then; I'm not incredibly concerned by it. But it does bother me that it takes two full days for a response and a full week will have elapsed since we opened our warranty claim for a plumbing issue. That is a shockingly bad response time. 

It is what it is though, I guess.

Anyway. 

Tonight is the last night of my work week. It's been a work week that has surprisingly not been as awful as I expected it to be, for the most part. Now that I've said that, I'm sure the overnight hours will suck once I get logged in for the night. 

Friday, November 12:

Day off.

 

I'm actually getting pretty excited for the holidays this year.

I know, that's really unlike me.

I don't know what it is, really. There's not really anything that I'm excited about getting for Christmas or the like, but I am, for some reason, intensely looking forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas more than I have in many years. I think it's possibly because my brain craves the dopamine hit of the end of this fairly shitty year, which also helps signal the possible end of Covid being a thing, or at least a big thing that still matters to most of the world because most intelligent/civilized folks have been vaccinated at this juncture. But it's not just that, it's the...spectacle? of the holidays? I don't know if I can put it into words.

As you know, for many years I've been of the bah humbug mindset, that Christmas is for the kids, and for adults it just means more bills. And while that is still mostly true, I think I've just become so worn down by everything I hear being bad news and bad times that I need it to be something fun and something to look forward to this year. 

I think a big part of it is that in two weeks we're coming up on a big anniversary for me -- Thanksgiving week marks fifteen years that I've been living in the midwest. I moved to Missouri over Thanksgiving week in 2006 with little more to my name than some boxes in the back of a truck and about $5k saved in my bank account to live on. While my reasons for moving to Missouri were noble at the time, I would regret that big leap about five years later. However, I knew even then that if I didn't get out on my own when I had the chance, it would be a very long time before I ever did so, and I needed to take a leap of faith.

In doing so, yes, I went through some really hard times here and there, but it all brought me/led me (in a very roundabout way) to where I am today -- happily married for almost eight of those past fifteen years, and owning a home, with a Master's degree and a job that doesn't pay amazingly well, but pays enough for me to mostly be comfortable. Oh, and I now have all sorts of health insurance, a savings account, and a big screen TV, so I mean, there are perks, too. 

It's really weird to look back on at this juncture. I am not the same person I was fifteen years ago. I mean, fundamentally I'm the same; I have the same DNA, the same goals in life, and some of the same mindsets -- but I'm obviously much older and wiser now, and far less idealistic and naive. I have carefully constructed my life and personality, much more since I've been married of course, but I was already in the process before that. Knowledge levels about, well, pretty much everything have drastically changed -- I am more educated by books, yes, but also far more educated by life. I feel like going through the school of hard knocks, or whatever you want to call it, by living on my own for a while and scraping by for survival -- even the most basics of survival -- helped that a lot. It also gave me a thick crust of jaded cynicism on life that I'm not sure I ever would have gotten otherwise. It took me years for my edges to soften on a lot of things, and even at this point I wouldn't say I'm all the way there. I have always said that I'm not a pessimist, but a realist, as in I see things as they are -- just that a lot of those things are really shitty. Over the course of the past few years I've become much more of an optimist, primarily because Daisy has inadvertently taught me how to be one. 

Anyway. Onward.

It's cold as shit outside, and the winds have been brutal. Not enough to damage the house or take out the half a tree we have left, but there have been times where I've wondered if that would happen due to just how hard that wind was blowing. Numerous times last night while I was working, the gusts were so strong that the house would creak and crack, and I wondered if we were going to start losing shingles (I did not see any laying in the yard or anything, so we're likely fine). 

I have a lot to take care of this weekend, some of which I've already started on. I've already done all of the dishes and laundry, and washed/dried the sheets and blankets. The washing machine errored out on me while doing this, telling me I had a LF error code. That means that it was taking too long to fill up, or there was flow issues from the water hoses.

Uh...no, it's perfectly fine, bro -- no water flow issues anywhere, it's literally had the same water hookups and pipes and the like running water through them for the past three years since we bought this house. I did the old unplug, wait, and replug reset for it, and finished the rinse and spin cycle with no issues. I am not a fan of our washing machine -- it has needed repairs three times now, and if it dies or somehow breaks again, that'll make repair #4. As we're already waiting and have another $107 ticket in on the toilet after a $107 repair on the microwave, about the last thing I want to do is spend another $107 to have someone come out yet again to work on and/or fix the washing machine. I am over this shitty Whirlpool Cabrio; the next machine we get will be something with actual buttons and dials and hopefully something that doesn't need multiple repairs over a six-year span of owning the fucking thing and running normal laundry through it a few times a week.

One of the other things I've already taken care of is a birthday present for my friend and escalation manager colleague at work. His birthday is two weeks from today and he jokingly told us this morning to prepare for it. Well, I always do, and I always send him something ("send" now, because it's not like we see each other in person at work every day anymore). Last year it was a Mandalorian shirt, this year it's a Conan shirt with one of his favorite phrases from the first film on it. It's already been ordered and will be shipped to his home around the time of his birthday. 

The next thing I took care of was, yes, ordering the wife something else for Christmas. She mentioned it earlier this week in passing, so I just went out and grabbed it. This brings my total spent on her this year to almost exactly $200. 

The next thing I took care of after that was getting new underwear.

But Brandon, you may be asking, didn't you just get a bunch of new underwear this summer from Tommy Wiseau? And the answer there is yes, I got some new underwear from him over the summer. In the time since, two of those pairs have ripped in half or otherwise badly torn after legitimately around five wears and washes. So, while they're pretty comfortable, they're apparently not exactly durable. I wasn't exactly expecting the best clothing ever for the price, but still. 

In my travels through Amazon, I came across some trunk-style underwear in my size from the Amazon "store brand" Goodthreads. I've had Goodthreads stuff before; I have a few shirts and some hoodies from them that I've really liked, and they had a three-pack of underwear in my size for like $8. Screw it, I said, I'll try this, could be fun.

 

They arrived in the mail earlier this week and may possibly be my favorite underwear ever. I immediately ordered three more three-packs, in black, then today ordered another pack in white and a pack in gray. Now I can finally cycle out a lot of my older underwear that's worn out or I otherwise don't like, trash it, and can replace it with all of the new. So that's something else I'm doing this weekend -- starting tomorrow when the black ones arrive. It's high time I went through my clothing again anyway for donations. I know I did this earlier this fall, but I should likely do it again just to clean out everything else I don't need, and be brutal about it -- there's just so much in my closet I have no use or need for anymore, and I keep trying to hang on to it in the hopes that I'll change my mind on it. Nope. Time to go.

The next thing after that I need to do this weekend is finally get the Christmas cards created, ordered, and paid for. 

Saturday, November 13:

Day off. 

 

Other things on Brandon's to-do list:

1. Pay bills. 

- Done, as of around 5am Saturday. I don't have any more bills due until shortly before Christmas. This is good, because I don't get paid again for another week, and Daisy doesn't get paid again for another week and a half.

2. Retest washer, run a cleaning cycle in it, etc.

- Done, as of about 6am Saturday. Washed a load of Daisy's laundry first, and it ran fine. Ran a cleaning cycle afterwards to try to de-gunk it (read: to see if that's what was causing the issue yesterday) and that ran fine. So...I guess it's okay? I don't know. I hate technology sometimes.

3. Sleep.

- Yeah, did that already, about four hours in the middle of the night. I'll nap again this afternoon, likely. 

4. Take care of the essentials.

- Done, as of 6:30am Saturday. Ordered a new case of Reign, orange oil for the diffuser downstairs, cat litter pan liner bags, and what will likely be the actual last thing I get for Daisy for Christmas -- putting my total spent on her at $215. 

5. Preorder tickets for Ghostbusters: Afterlife.

- Fuckin' done, baby, as of 6:35am. One week from today, Daisy and I will be sitting in the theater watching the movie I've quite literally waited for my entire adult life to see, because the 2016 reboot...while it was, ahem, interesting, it was not the sequel I was hoping for. 

6. Figure out what I'm going to do about this:

Like...you're kidding, right? I preordered this game some time ago, when it had a release date of December 3. I was looking forward to it, and looking forward to spending some free time leading up to Christmas actually playing through it again, just like I did with the original versions in my college years on my Game Boy Advance. And then I got that email. Nintendo's actual website for it mentions that it was pushed back to Spring, which I guess I'm fine with if they need to do some fine-tuning and the like, but it's legit a re-release of two games that are twenty years old. My question is...how hard can that be to do? I guess Amazon's servers just threw up their proverbial hands and were like fuck it, let's just give him a date of fourteen months from now.

 

I don't plan to cancel the preorder; it's already paid for and accounted for, so screw it -- and of course, I still want the game, but a lot can happen in fourteen months. Here's hoping we get an update that says "oh, new estimated date, March" or something.

7. Go see a play tonight.

- A friend's daughter, in high school, is in a stage version of Sister Act tonight that the wife and I will be going to see. We've had these plans on the books for a few weeks and it means a lot to the kid that we're coming to see the play, so it's going to be a thing for us. I guess plans are to make it a "date night" of sorts with the wife. And if those plans weren't already in motion, I'm personally going to make it a "date night" with the wife, so she can either play along or not. 

8. Finally make the Christmas cards and order/pay for them, as mentioned above.

- Done, as of 8am. $78 for 50 custom, high-quality cards. I don't like the design this year as much as I have in previous years, but eh, it'll do fine. I also got a discount of $52 by using a coupon code, too, so without that code it would not have been worth doing. Per the shipping notes, the cards should arrive by the weekend after Thanksgiving, which is perfect -- that gives me the nearly perfect amount of time to get them all filled out, stamped, and in the mail, even for our international friends and family. And, before you ask, yes, I have way more than enough stamps. I still have half the stamps from last year and just purchased I think three more sheets/books (something like that) last month. I'm good. 

 

 

I think that's about it. 

Anyway, onward.

It has now been a full week since I received my Covid booster and flu shot. You'd never know I got the flu shot, even though it hurt more than the booster did. My arm had stopped aching and the knot had gone away by Monday. However, the other arm I got the Covid booster in, I still have a bit of a knot on, though it doesn't hurt/ache anymore. And, of course, my bowels have returned to normal. 

 

I feel...well, not gonna lie, pretty great, actually. I've been trying to keep my diet balanced, as in not everything has to be super-healthy for me, but I'm not eating like an asshole most of the time, either. I still feel as if I at least look like I'm losing weight, but I doubt I actually am. I'm also on a regular vitamin regimen every day, I'm trying to keep properly hydrated (harder than it seems sometimes) and I'm trying to get adequate sleep -- or at least adequate enough, 7ish hours most days. I'd love to actually sleep 8-10 hours at a time again, but if I did that I would have zero time for anything else on days I work. I usually can't wind down to sleep for the day until around 10am, so if I slept 10 hours, I'd wake up at 8pm, would barely have time to shower/eat/see the wife, and I'd be back on my computer for another shift of work at 10pm. I'd be getting somewhat better rest, but I would absolutely despise my life.  So, generally, I get up anywhere between 3 and 6pm, and use that time to goddamn chill and decompress instead. 

Our scale has been broken for close to a month and won't actually work correctly anymore, so I don't exactly know whether I'm really gaining or losing any weight. We have a spare scale in the garage that I purchased a few years back and never took out of the box, so likely I'll have to get that out and set it up. I also need to set up the spare phone charger in the bedroom (I got another wireless charging stand that will work for not only my phone, but Daisy's too) with its plugs and the power strip I'm going to use for it. There's lots of little things like that around the house I need to do for both of us; it just takes time and focus and sometimes a little more of that than I have on any given day. 

To those ends, I have been doing a lot more around the house as of late. I've found that my energy levels are on the rise again -- why, I couldn't tell you, but they are -- and so I've been really proactive on trying to clean things, do the dishes, do little thoughtful favors for the wife, etc. Sometimes, if it's not a crazy night at work, I can do a lot of little things around the house (at least the stuff that's not noisy, anyway). It takes me maybe ten minutes to load and run the dishwasher, and another ten once it's been ran to unload it and put the stuff away. I always try to make sure the cats are fed, have fresh water, and are comfortable, too. I make sure the house smells good with some strategic incense burning and running of the diffuser. Yesterday morning I even gave the wife a foot massage as she was waking up, while telling her that since it was cold, I'd already made a pot of hot tea for her and it was ready go to with her to work. This was also after I'd ran and emptied the dishwasher and cooked a meal (like, with pots and pans on the stove and everything) for myself in the middle of the night. Of course, I still do all of the laundry too -- she even has special detergent and fabric softener for her stuff. Daisy does a lot around this house and I want her to feel special and want her to know I care and am trying to take care of what I can, too. Our relationship is amazing and has only gotten better in the past several weeks because of this. 

I am still really excited, for some reason, for the holidays. Again, it's not because of the time off  -- I really haven't taken much of that for the holidays this year at all -- but for the actual holidays themselves and the spectacle of them, the celebration. This is, as you know, still very unlike me. I don't know what it is; maybe it's that I need something to look forward to, to celebrate, to think about, to enjoy. So much of my life is spent sleeping and working or preparing to do one or the other. 

Sunday, November 14:

Working from home, day 375.

 

The play was cute.

As mentioned yesterday, last night we went to see a high school play that our friend's daughter was in -- the musical stage version of Sister Act. But, as this was the middle/high school version, they called it Sister Act Jr., which to me is a little demoralizing as an adult, so I can't imagine how the kids felt about it.

Let me tell you, about four or five years ago, Daisy and I went to see the professional version with the parents, done by the Omaha Performing Arts people. There's really no difference in that version versus the "Jr." version when it comes to overall story or plot structure. The professional version is longer, and had better production values, and that's about it. 

What was most amusing about the play we saw last night was just how hard they were trying to get people to forget that this was a play we were watching in the whitest part of one of the whitest cities of one of the whitest states of the country, in a private Christian school. For example, our friend's daughter -- a teenage white girl brunette -- was playing a latino male thug with makeup sideburns and slicked back, greaser hair. The kid did a great job, but wow, that's some exceedingly white casting. 

We were so, so hoping they weren't going to cast a white girl in the role of Deloris. They did not, which made me happy because that would've been exceedingly awkward to watch. They cast an African-American girl with decent acting ability and a pretty good singing voice for her age. But she was one of but two people of color -- any color other than shockingly white -- in the entirety of the play.

Look, I get it, to an extent. Rich, white, west-side Omaha, and a Christian middle/high school (yes, both combined) -- so the play had to be something that would appeal to those folks and likely have a religious slant to it without being too religious to scare away the normies. Sister Act is about the only real choice for a musical that would have some sort of universal appeal one way or the other. Were it not a Christian school, they could've gone for something on the level of holy shit that's white, like Grease or Oklahoma!

 

My middle school, in West Virginia, did a performance of Oklahoma! when I was a kid. They were so proud of it that they forced it upon us in class, to watch a recorded video of the performance during a rainy day around the end of the school year. That's right, I was traumatized by Surrey With the Fringe on Top. Imagine how I felt a few years later while watching When Harry Met Sally. 

Anyway.

The play was fun. It became very clear very quickly that there were a handful of kids in the cast who were born to be in show business. My guess is about 3-5, kids who could, conceivably, go into movies, music, or theater basically right now and be pretty successful, including one really standout performance from one of the girls in the convent choir (there's the strangest phrase I'll type this week). 

I had intended to make it a "date night" with the wife, and it was in the sense that we both got dressed up and went out to do something fun together -- for me, this involved grabbing a sweater out of the closet, putting on pants that weren't sweatpants or pajama pants, and attempting to comb my hair (and face) a bit so that I didn't look like a wild bush man. I had visions of us going out, picking up a pizza and enjoying it together, just the two of us totally focused on one another, but that did not come to pass. Daisy had made us a vegan quiche for brunch, which was still sitting heavy on both our stomachs well after the play had ended, so we just came home. I came upstairs and played a game on my computer, and she sat downstairs, did her nails, and watched Netflix until she was tired enough to sleep. Around 2am, when I was falling asleep sitting here trying to play a game, I moved to the chair, where I passed out for about four hours before getting up, making myself lucid enough to turn off the lights and go to the bathroom, and then moved to the bed.

When I got up this morning (yes, morning, I woke up for good around 10am) I was frustrated. Yes, I had gotten a solid eight hours of good sleep, but doing that the way I did it last night and this morning is dangerous for me -- I awakened twelve full hours before a nine hour shift at work, and yeah, I 100% have to be awake for my work shift, of course. Only rarely is it quiet enough for me to take a full hour lunch and nap when I need to, and that also messes with my rhythms and makes it harder to wind down and sleep in the morning. So, basically, me getting a decent amount of sleep translates to me being miserable and forcing myself to stay awake afterwards for the better part of the next 24 hours. It's a lose-lose scenario for me on the overnight -- get too little sleep, be tired and unfocused. Get a good amount of sleep at the wrong time, be tired and unfocused. Sleep the right amount of sleep at the "right" time, miss out on every part of life that doesn't involve work. I can't really win on this. 

If anything, I guess it will help reset me -- I've been having a very hard time falling asleep in the mornings when I get off work as of late, even if it was a long night and I'm tired. I'm not sure why. I'll go to bed and I'll just lay there, not able to turn off my mind and body for close to an hour sometimes. I'm perfectly warm and comfortable, most of the time the cats are there with me (they like to come to bed with me and sleep with me all day, like watchful guardians) and yet it takes forever to actually wind down and pass out. There have been many mornings where I'll not finally doze off until after 11. It used to be that I'd be in bed by around 8:30 or 9, and my first deep dream would run its course and I'd wake up for the first time around 10:30 or 11, be cognizant that I'd just finished my first dream cycle, and go back into a much deeper sleep until around 3 or 4. So, maybe, my body will let that cycle reset again starting in the morning. 

This is my last full week of work before Thanksgiving -- I work three days next week and then have four off for the holiday -- Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. This probably means that this coming week will be horrible and will seem like the slowest week ever. Weeks before holiday weeks usually suck.

While I physically feel fine, I also know that mentally I am teetering on the brink of another depressive episode. I can generally recognize these when they're coming, as I can feel myself walking a fine line -- a razor's edge -- between being able to push through it with positivity and optimism or falling into the proverbial chasm of despair. It's been a long time since I had any real depression lasting longer than a day or two. I don't know how long, exactly, but probably before we all came to work from home due to Covid. I'm on that precipice, though, where some bad news or an argument with the wife or any number of little things could push me over the edge. While I'm cognizant of that, knowing it doesn't necessarily always stop it. A bad day at work could send me over the edge, as well as could any other number of little things. I've struggled with depression for a good chunk of my life; sometimes it's closer (or further away) than I think.

I also wanted to take a little time here, while I have said time, to explain a particularly odd happening last week that -- while really strange -- nothing really came of it. 

Either Monday or Tuesday morning last week -- I can't remember which day -- I woke up in the afternoon to some strange notifications on my phone. The first was someone ringing the doorbell at like, 10:40am. I was still awake at that time, though I was upstairs and in bed, and the doorbell never actually rang -- as in, never made noise (we have our Ring doorbell connected to both Alexa devices in the house, so when someone rings it, it plays the ringer across both devices, loudly). So, therefore, I never knew there was someone here and ringing the bell. I pulled up the video when I got up -- it was a middle aged man in sweats, probably in his 60s, who had come up our walk to our house specifically, rang the bell, and then turned around and left. The camera caught him crossing the street and walking back up the driveway of the house directly across the street from us, where it lost him in the background and the video ended.

Okay, I thought, it's the neighbor, and he came to ring our bell for...something. He didn't go next door or to any other houses, just to ours, and then went right back across the street to his house. This in itself was odd to me. There are two houses to the left of us on our street before the main road, and probably six or seven to the right of us. It's the same for him, just in reverse -- two other houses to his right before the main street, and then the rest of them to his left down the street. He didn't go to any of them -- just to ours, and then back home. Wtf. 

 

I checked our secondary camera, the one in the window that gives a wider/broader view of our driveway, the surrounding houses, and the surrounding yards. He did indeed come straight from his house to ours, and went straight back over to his. The video quality on the window camera is much lower-definition than the Ring, though, so I couldn't see many other details.

On the logs/notifications for our window camera, though, there was a flurry of activity. This isn't out of the ordinary -- that camera identifies cars driving up and down the street as people, so any time a car passes it triggers the camera and records it. I find this feature sort of annoying, but it's also beneficial to see just who is on our street, when, and why, so we haven't changed the settings. On each notification, it shows a thumbnail of what it captured, so usually we can just glance at the thumbnails and see "car, car, person walking their dog, another car," etc. 

On the notifications from that afternoon -- from about three hours before I woke up -- I saw ambulances and fire trucks lining the street on those thumbnails, literally right in front of our house.

 

What the everliving FUCK, man?

 

Mind you, I had been sleeping, I had not heard nor seen a goddamn thing. Even when I'm really, really out and sleeping hard, there's no way I could sleep through ambulances and fire trucks' sirens 50 feet from my bed. No way whatsoever. So my guess was that they'd come in quietly without the sirens on.

I pulled up the videos, and in them was some sort of service truck/van for a glass company pulling aside to let a fire engine pull up, and then an ambulance pulled up from the opposite direction and parked legit at the end of our driveway. I could see a few people standing in the driveway of the neighbor who had rang our bell, and motioning the crews of both vehicles toward the top/back of the driveway where it meets the house -- somewhere that is too far away for either of our cameras to see clearly. In the case of our Ring, the pillar that holds up our front porch is directly blocking where the action was taking place from our field of view.

The next video was someone being wheeled, on a stretcher that was partially propped up/reclined at about a 45-degree angle, into the back of the ambulance. I zoomed in as much as I could (again, camera quality isn't exactly HD) and it very much appeared to be the neighbor -- the old guy who had rung our bell four hours prior, still in the same clothing. They loaded him up, closed the doors, and both the ambulance and fire truck drove off. 

And we never heard, nor saw, anything else about it. 

All this does is raise, for me, a shit ton of questions. 

I've seen this neighbor a handful of times throughout the time we've lived here. By "a handful" I mean "less than fifteen times." We don't know him, we've never talked to him, I don't know his family name or if it's just him or if he has a family there with him, or what. The only reason I knew anything about him whatsoever is that I noticed, when we first moved into the house, that he drove a white Silverado 1500 work truck that looked identical to mine -- quite possibly the same year and everything, with the same characteristic rust in the wheel wells. I sold mine, of course, but he later traded his in for a metallic copper Ford Edge SUV. When I would get off work in the mornings and would have the dining room curtains open while making breakfast, I'd sometimes see him warm up the SUV, get in, and leave for the day. 

This is, however, legitimately the only information I know about him. Apparently he knows our next-door neighbor to our right, a woman in her early forties who lives alone and who bought the house from the previous renters about two years ago, and she's told us he's basically the neighborhood's watchful eye, making sure nothing bad happens, etc. Daisy told me that one night we came back from an out of town trip really late (like, not getting back to Omaha until after midnight or later) he stood out in his driveway and watched us. When I was told this (I didn't see him myself), I thought that was exceedingly creepy until our other neighbor told us the bit about him being the watchful eye of the neighborhood -- he was making sure we were taking items back into the house, instead of out of it -- i.e., making sure we weren't people robbing the place since it was apparent we'd been gone.

Not that I've been paying a whole lot of attention, but I haven't seen any movement or anything at the house across the street since. Daisy said that night, when she got home, there were lights on inside -- indicating that someone was there -- but I've really not paid much attention to the house even though I've been out and about once or twice since the ambulance/fire trucks were here. It's been a sort of "out of sight, out of mind" sort of thing. I don't associate with people any more than I have to, really. Daisy suggested we could go knock on his door to see what was up, but I told her no, that I'd really rather not get involved and wouldn't necessarily want him to know that yes, I was home and had inadvertently (because, well, I didn't know) basically ignored what was likely some sort of plea for help -- that makes us both look like supreme assholes. 

As an aside, our street used to have a thriving, interconnected community -- there's an entire Facebook group for our street in particular -- and that community went away when we bought this house...because the people keeping it running were the people we bought the house from. They organized block parties, they kept people updated on the happenings of the neighborhood, and they were well liked. Then they sold the house to us and moved away, and Daisy and I aren't particularly social people, so that "happy neighborhood interconnectivity" BS quickly went away. I'm sure the GO AWAY doormat I put down at the front door doesn't really help. When the residents of other two houses on the street who interacted the most on the page moved out/away as well, nobody posted on said page at all anymore. While it's still there (I just checked it), the last post containing any actual content on the page is from my own wife, from 2019, thanking other neighbors (who moved out well over a year ago) for shoveling out our driveway for us during one of the giant snowstorms we had that winter. 

We'll likely never know what happened with the guy across the street unless someone tells us further on down the road. Again, most of the time I'd so, so rather not be involved. I know that likely sounds horrible, and call me an asshole if you want, but them's the breaks. 

I've got a lot coming up this week, and for the rest of the month. Tonight is payroll Sunday and the Chiefs on Sunday Night Football, open enrollment for healthcare/insurance coverage starts tomorrow, the plumber is set to fix the toilet on Tuesday between 10am and 2pm, season two of Tiger King hits on Wednesday, the first episode of season four of Star Trek: Discovery drops on Thursday, Cowboy Bebop drops on Netflix on Friday (also, payday), we have our Ghostbusters: Afterlife tickets booked for Saturday morning, and Pokemon Go's community day is a week from today -- all in addition to everything else that happens during any other normal week, including five full nights of work in the interim. Then, after this week it's Thanksgiving week, Black Friday, payroll Sunday again on the night I return to work, and then a few days later we dive into December and into the real holiday season.

Monday, November 15: 

Working from home, day 376.

 

Daisy, originally scheduled to work from home today and tomorrow, has been forced back into the office for the day (and probably part of tomorrow, I don't know yet) because one of her colleagues begged her to work from home on Monday/Tuesday this week. This throws a possible wrench into the plumber plans for tomorrow -- which Daisy has to be home for, as I can't be awake all day waiting on this dude and then still work the entire night -- that's just not gonna work at all. And I don't have any spare PTO to just say "fuck it, I'll take the day off" because I still need three more hours, which will be made available by this Friday's check, to take 12/23 off.

Upon waking up this afternoon, the first thing I saw when I opened my work email is that there's a failover test tonight that I'll have to be on a multi-hour bridge call for. Not only that, but our director (not my boss, because he's on vacation this week) in El Paso will need to be on it too, because testers are needed from both locations. That basically shuts us down for any actual in-office work or escalations that we'd need to do to help out our employees on shift tonight until the testing call is over, and well...there's not much we can do about that. Sorry kids, you're likely gonna have to fend for yourselves for a few hours. 

Of course, the last thing I want to do is a multi-hour call monopolizing every bit of my time, too. The testing bridges aren't generally a pain, they're just tedious and time-consuming, and they're something I have to pay attention to and can't space out on, can't be listening to my podcasts or reading the news or playing on my phone. That makes it just dull. It also means that my wife can't watch TV in the room behind me because I'm chained to my desk and actually have to be on the phone and respond to prompts and the like when they ask me to speak. The bridge call isn't for another five hours and already, I am over it.

 

I mentioned briefly above that my boss is out of the office for the week -- which is fine, I'm happy to get some more quality time with our El Paso director -- but it's a continuing trend that I tend to be the last person to know when my boss takes vacation, even though he and I frequently talk outside of work and work together on issues nearly every night when we're both on shift. I don't know if he thinks that if he tells me or anyone else that it'll somehow jinx his plans, or what. I'm exactly the opposite -- when I know I'm going to be out for a few days, I give my entire team as much heads up as possible, including dates/times and who my backup/in-charge will be when I'm out, via my team "weekly newsletter" sort of email. I generally remind them a few times as well before I'm actually gone, and I put up an out-of-office reply on my email as well as my voicemail, not only so that I'm left alone, but so if clients try to engage me directly, they know who my backup is and who to reach out to. I guess that's just my mindset versus his. Because, let me tell you all again -- that place doesn't own me, and regardless of whether I'm salaried or not, I do have a life that doesn't revolve around my job and when I need to be out, I'm going to be out. 

Anyway.

 

I guess the plumber appointment is still on for tomorrow. I haven't heard otherwise. It'll legit be a 15-20 minute fix at most, and truthfully I hope I just sleep through it and it just gets done. I'll be fine regardless; if Daisy is at least working some of the day from home tomorrow it'll be okay. I'll make sure all of you are updated on what actually happens.

Tuesday, November 16:

Working from home, day 377.

Hustle Tuesday.

 

The plumbers arrived around 1pm. It was, as mentioned and expected, a problem with the loose bolts. Also as expected, they also fixed this within 15-20 mins and were on their way. But, because I'd been awakened by them, I was just up now, no hope to sleep more. 

 

I mean, it is what it is, I guess. I'll have to try to catch up on some sleep this weekend, because it doesn't look like I'm going to get many chances between now and then. I'll be fine. At least the toilet is fixed now, and that's the main thing.

Since awakening, Daisy went to the office to finish out her day (she was only home because of the plumbing thing, and will have to spend the rest of the week in the office), and I immediately got to work. Today is hustle Tuesday, after all, one of the only days of the week that I have a lot to do in the afternoon and evening before work. So, let's go down the list of everything I've taken care of in the past two hours or so:

1. I have showered, exfoliated, and balmed my beard, and have put on actual clothing for the day -- including a pair of the new underwear.

 

2. I have gathered the trash and taken it down to the road for trash day in the morning.

3. I have ran three loads of laundry -- our cat yacked all over my side of the bed in the middle of the night, which led to Daisy needing to get up at 4am and change out the sheets. I washed those sheets, twice, to make sure any residual yack was cleansed from them, and then did a separate load of Daisy's laundry, my bath towel, and the bathroom rugs.

4. Upon taking the trash down to the road, I trashed the old bathroom scale which had stopped working correctly (or at all, really), got the "new" one from the garage -- I had ordered a new one years ago but had never used it -- put new batteries in it, and brought it upstairs. It works fine; I have lost approximately two pounds since our trip to Chicago, which was around the last time I weighed in.

5. I brought in and sorted the mail.

6. I dumped the overflowing recycle bin in the kitchen into the large recycling cart in the garage. Recycling doesn't go out until next week.

7. I opened the kitchen window and turned on the ceiling fan to circulate air in the house. I did the same upstairs in the master bedroom. It is 70 degrees today and positively beautiful outside -- quite possibly the last really warm day we'll have this fall. Seems like as good a time as any to air out the house. 

8. I have consumed some caffeine, though I would imagine to get through the entire night of work I'll need much more. 

Last night at work we had another "change bridge," where testers (read: management and other people with common sense within our company) get on a bridge call and test all of the systems when our IT staff makes a back-end change to our servers and/or hardware at one location or another. This took from about 10:30pm to almost 3am, all of which I was on the call for via my cell phone and Microsoft Teams. Change bridges are fine; I don't mind doing them if I'm in the office and on shift for them. It gives me an excuse to not be available for stupid questions or needless escalations, and lets my agents actually learn, think, and respond to problems in the way they should be doing anyway. Our program would completely collapse if me, my team leads, and our escalation manager weren't doing 75% of the actual legwork -- partially (read: mostly) because our company hires people with zero common sense or actual education and apparently a large number of them have never used a computer before.

Anyway, I digress. I received an email this afternoon (since I'm already up and awake, might as well actually be constructive and clean out my inbox) telling me that they're doing another change bridge tonight at the same time for a similar change, and testers will be needed again. Within five minutes of that email going out I replied to it volunteering myself as tribute -- partially because of the above but also because Tuesday nights mostly suck these days, and my escalation manager colleague is back in the office tonight (he works Tues-Fri, 4x10 shifts). There are apparently two more coming up on Friday and Saturday nights too that, well, they'll have to get someone other than me to do, because I'm not there those nights, and this weekend in particular I am 100% not available to do them, even out of the goodness of my own heart (as I have done them before in a pinch on those nights when necessary). Daisy and I have Friday night plans and on Saturday we're going to see Ghostbusters, so I actually have to get sleep and detach from work. 

Also, next week is a shortened week for me anyway, so I'm not lengthening my time in the office any more than I can help it between now and then -- especially not when I've already been massively sleep-deprived. Also-also, Friday is a full moon, so fuck that noise. I'm gonna be as far from work as possible. 

Some other little things that have been going on:

 

I have been informed that my large order of Christmas cards has been completed and shipped, so we should see those arriving well before the end of next week. I still won't begin sending them out until the beginning of December, since I'm not a maniac or anything, but it will be nice to have them and to get them all ready-to-go. 

In case you weren't aware (I don't know if I've ever really talked about it here or not; if I have, I can't remember), I do keep track, every single year, of everyone I send cards to and the dates I send them. I also make sure my address book is meticulously updated every year as well, because people move and change addresses quite a bit, especially us shiftless millennials. I also keep track of the cards I receive, from whom, and when they arrive. It can be a tiring and/or depressing process, especially if/when I go down my list and see people who have died in the year since I last sent out cards. Generally, though, I get a 50-75% return rate on cards, meaning 50-75% of the people I send cards to send us one every year as well. There's about 10 people on my list who I know will never send us a card back, even if they're close friends and/or I talk to them all fairly frequently. Some of them just don't do cards or holidays, and some of them I just never see a response to. I don't really question it, because I don't do the cards for reciprocation; rather, I do them to remind people that they are thought about, cared for, and loved. It's one of those old-school traditions that I'll probably never really let go of.

And yes, every year, I save one single card so that we have a collection of all of the ones I've made. A progression of sorts. This year's isn't that impressive, but it does have one of the best pictures ever taken of Daisy and myself, as well as one of the best pictures ever taken of one of the cats. I also make sure I have backups -- if for some reason, I run out of the custom cards (which these days isn't likely, I order 50 of them every year now because I've learned my lessons in the past), I always have a generic set I can pick one from and send out to whoever's left who needs a card. I buy a box of them every year on the pre-or-post-Christmas clearance sales at Walmart or wherever, and stash them away, so at any given time I have several boxes of decent cards with different designs to choose from. This also serves the purpose that in the event that I can't afford to get the custom cards made or society collapses or what-have-you, I always have a set at the ready that I can still send out. 

Millennials are likely the last generation of folks who will send out holiday cards, and that makes me sort of sad. A good chunk of millennials already don't send cards, and the Gen Z kids likely won't; they'll think it's goofy and antiquated and likely won't bother. At the same time, Boomers and Gen X are beginning to get old and die off, and the postal service sucks, so I predict we'll see the end of holiday cards being "a thing" within the next fifteen years or so, and completely extinct by around 2050 -- sort of like newspapers. One of my close friends back home, when I asked him tonight for his new address (as he recently got married), asked me "you still send paper cards every year?" He's my age. 

I also got word that the birthday present for my escalation manager colleague at work has shipped and will arrive sometime next week (I believe his birthday is next Wednesday). I always do something for him every year as a token of appreciation and friendship. I know it's not necessary. He's told me before it's not necessary. But I am a good friend and a nice guy, and that dude has saved my ass in that job more times than I can count at this juncture. We don't always see eye to eye on everything -- truthfully, we've had our fair share of disagreements and petty arguments -- but there's really nobody else in that place I'd rather work side-by-side with. If you're wondering if he ever gets me anything for my own birthday or Christmas, the answer is generally "not really." He has in the past, on occasion, but it's not like I really expect it. That's not what it's about for me anyway. I never want to be one of those people who's like "okay, where's my gift?" It's tacky and obnoxious. 

I plan to get my parents a Sodastream for Christmas. I know I can type this here on this site and talk about it because my mother told me well over a year ago that she hasn't read this page in a while and didn't even have the link to it anymore. I'm waiting on them to go on sale, like a Black Friday sale or something, before I pull the proverbial trigger. 

"Will they use it?" Daisy asked me.

"They will when they realize how awesome it is," I replied. 

Back in the day, my mother was really into the bottled seltzer waters from Walmart and K-Mart, specifically the white grape ones. I'm sure this will be somewhat in the parents' wheelhouse. If not, or if they don't go on sale (I remember that when Daisy got me mine, it was $100 or so) I'll find some other gift option. I'm just sort of burnt out on getting them different variations of the same stuff every year, and I'm sure they probably are too. I used to get Daisy's father a knife or sword of some sort every year until Daisy pulled me aside and told me to stop. Ironically, the year I stopped was the year he gifted me the best knife I've ever owned. 

I used to order a lot of Publishers' Clearing House stuff too. I stopped doing that before we bought the house. Occasionally they still send me their mailers, which go right into the recycle bin. 

I have zero idea at this juncture what we're going to do for the parents, and for Daisy's sisters' families and the like for Christmas. I generally let Daisy do the planning for most of that, and I get both of her parents one small, thoughtful gift each. They usually do the same thing for me for my birthday, which is five days before Christmas. I already know that Daisy's mother is making us yet another giant quilt for Christmas, which I will never be upset by -- she is the best quiltmaker I've ever known and we own many of her quilts. I believe she's made us at least three different ones since we've been married, all of which have been huge, intricate, and amazingly warm. I don't know if you've ever bought a quilt from a quiltmaker, but if you have, you will know that they are not cheap if you want a high-quality one. If you haven't, you likely have some idea of how expensive they are in your head, and I am here to tell you to, generally, quadruple that amount and you may have an accurate price range. I have seen quilts sell for more than some cars I've owned. 

Anyway.

I told Daisy earlier this week that for my birthday, I only want to do two things. The first, on the day beforehand (which I took off work) I want to see Spider-Man: No Way Home in the theater, as it releases that weekend. I don't care when, I don't really care where we see it, I just want to see the movie. The other thing I want to do -- now that Covid is rapidly going away with the advent of boosters and kids getting vaccinated -- is to finally get my next tattoo, on my right forearm.

Most of you know this at this point. It's not exactly a secret. However, my views on what my next tattoo should be have changed quite a bit over the past two years. Originally, I was going to get the rebel starbird from Star Wars on my arm there -- just a big, thick, line art version. But as I thought about it a bit more, I realized I didn't really want that. I already have one nerd tattoo, the Starfleet delta, on my left arm. I want something artsy and eloquent, something different, on the other arm.  

I began researching different designs that meant something to me. While I'm not a huge fan of astrology, I am a Sagittarius and I love a lot of the symbolism of the archer, the bow and arrow, and I've found a lot of art I could take to an artist and say "something along these lines; your interpretation of this." Similarly, I've also been drawn to (no pun intended) tattoos of roses, of many different colors and designs. I've been trying to mash up these two ideas in my head, trying to see if there's a way I can combine them and make them look good or if I should pick one or the other. If I have to pick one or the other, I'm leaning more towards the roses. 

I like dragons too, and I may eventually get a dragon somewhere, but right now I'm more fixated on the rose designs than anything else. 

Something like this, perhaps, but draped around my forearm and not my shoulder. I'd rather it have some color, but a lot of the rose tattoos I've seen with color have faded really badly over the following few years after getting them, and line art with shading like this will likely be a) cheaper, and b) less prone to that sort of degradation. As someone who's already seen his existing tattoo fading a bit after only two years, and after how I've seen Daisy's color tattoos badly fade, I'd almost rather get the color done later if it remains something I'm interested in.

I also plan to get hot rod flames around the Starfleet delta at some point too. What are hot rod flames, you ask? Like, the kind of flames you see on hot rods, of course:

You get the idea, I'm sure. 

Yeah, I'm a weirdo, I know.

We'll see what happens. Right now I'm just focused on getting through the month and getting through the few weeks following until I can get some real rest around the holidays.

Wednesday, November 17:

Working from home, day 378.

When I started work last night I was feelin' it -- the fatigue, that is. I was nausea-filled and had a headache and some dizziness that I couldn't really place but I now know was my body trying to tell me to sleep, before my coffee kicked in. 

I let both my director and my escalation manager colleague know that hey, I've barely slept and if it's quiet, I may just go after the bridge is done and I have the reports taken care of. Neither of them were really fazed by this, so I took that as tacit permission. 

The bridge was done by around 2:30 or so -- much faster for us last night than for Monday night -- and by that time my adrenaline (and my coffee) had kicked in, and I was mostly fine. I took my lunch at 4:30, took a quick power nap during it, and then worked the rest of my shift normally -- I actually stayed to finish working on some background stuff an extra 35 minutes late this morning, to the point where Daisy was already up and getting ready for work by the time I came back upstairs. I was in bed by shortly after 9, and I slept until after 4...so I guess I was able to catch up on a little rest, at least. I'm still tired, but I'm mostly okay. 

I received an email this afternoon that because I'd checked my credit score (said card lets me do that for free, any time I want, without it affecting my credit) and had confirmed my yearly household income, they were increasing my credit limit on my card another $3,000. 

This is a terrible idea for many reasons, but eh, whatever. 

"Great," Daisy told me, "don't touch it, and your credit score will continue to go up."

 

The first thing I did was go purchase three more packs of underwear, sneakily, while she was in the room with me, on that card. 

 

Aside from that...

That's the plan, of course. My credit score has slowly been climbing over the past two years or so after it was basically the same every month for the four years prior. Since the pandemic started, it's gone up by about 20 points. Not a lot, but progress. But it is good to know I'm not considered a "credit risk" and it's even better to know that if something catastrophic happens and I immediately have to drop $3k on something, it's there. 

The wife messaged me from work today with a screencap of a coupon she'd received in her email from our favorite local pizza place (the place that is like 2 miles away and makes the vegan pizzas she adores) for 25% off our next order. Her only question of me was "Friday?"

"YES," I replied. "I need more of that keto crust in my life."

The last pizza I got from them was on their keto crust, which is made from cauliflower and some sort of cheese base with egg. She won't eat it (of course, it's not vegan), but I 100% will, as a diabetic, to keep myself from full-on carb overload. That last pizza I got was on that crust, normal cheese, vegan sausage, and onions and damn was it good. 

So, there's Friday night's dinner plans for us. 

Tonight I'll be working again in about two and a half hours, but first, we'll be having dinner and starting season two of Tiger King.

 

 

 

 

 

Thursday, November 18:

Working from home, day 379.

 

I've mentioned here before, and haven't exactly made it a secret, that I hate Wednesday nights at work now. It's the night of the week (the only night of the week) that I have twenty of my agents all in and all working at the same time. On a busy night, that is catastrophic, because I have double the emails and double the workload to sort through -- and cannot as one person physically or mentally keep an eye on everything. On a less busy night, it means that everything my team does gets a laser focus because there are so many of them and so few tickets, so anything that I miss or that my team misses looks doubly bad on me and on our program. It's the worst of a lose-lose scenario, and on most Wednesdays my goal is to just get through the night and be done. 

 

Last night was, well, interesting. 

My biggest accomplishment last night was that we had a client named Jim Croce contact us for an issue we were working, and I was able to prevent myself from asking him his thoughts on air travel or if he knew a guy named Leroy Brown.

Yeah, we sometimes get the fun names.

Last night was yet another night I stayed at work 35-40 minutes late this morning because managing 20+ people is like herding cats -- nearly pointless and unsustainable, depressing and frustrating. If I were a drinking man, I'd be drinking every day. I am glad that I am no longer a drinking man.

I got up this afternoon, showered, and have been trying to force myself to mentally prepare for Thursdaydome ever since. Yes, that's what I call Thursdays at work -- Thursdaydome. Like Thunderdome. This is generally because every Thursday is a battle, a long slog from beginning to end. I have the least amount of people on shift on Thursday nights and the ones I do have tend to be mostly useless at best, or completely unreliable at worst. I am not a fan of busy nights when I only have about five people working for me and when I'm expected to run pretty much the entire ship in the background. I have some help, yes, but it's still a shitty situation. 

 

At least tomorrow is payday.

Thanksgiving is a week from tonight. I'm just trying to focus on that. Last night, my thoughts were basically "a week from this very moment, you won't be here, you won't be on shift, this computer will be turned off, and you'll likely be sleeping at this time. Won't that be nice?" etc. 

Daisy only gets Thanksgiving day off work. She doesn't get the Wednesday before or Black Friday off -- those are working days because they're not bank holidays or federal holidays. I have both off. Well, I took Wednesday off. I always have Friday off. 

Ghostbusters: Afterlife gets its release in theaters tonight, finally. I have several friends going to see the movie tonight, and many more tomorrow. As you know, Daisy and I will see it Saturday morning. So far, I have not yet read one single good review of the movie. This worries me, a lot. Most reviewers say it's fine but soulless (which is what my thoughts were on the new Dune film last month, really) and that they basically dropped new actors and a new setting into the exact same plot of the first movie. I'm here to say that, well, if that's what they did, I'm 100% okay with it. Reviewers have criticized it by saying the movie can't stand on its own, that it's full of callbacks and easter eggs and fan service...and I'm also okay with that. It's not supposed to stand on its own, it's supposed to be the next chapter in a long, continuing story that started 35+ years ago. Because duh. I'm not necessarily fazed by bad or lukewarm reviews, as there are many movies that I absolutely adore that have been objectively terrible pictures. And realistically there's no way this movie could possibly live up to the hype. Expecting it to do so is asking for disappointment. I just want it to be worth watching and a worthy sequel. That's all I ask. It's all I've asked since June 1989 when I saw Ghostbusters II in the theater. 

Similarly, reviewers are skewering the live-action Cowboy Bebop series that premieres on Netflix tomorrow, as well. I showed Daisy the trailer in great anticipation that she'd be totally onboard for it -- as it's something I've been waiting on for about two years now since it was initially announced -- and she was pretty "meh" on it. I guess to really get into it you need to have been a fan of the original anime series it's based on, and need to have an open mind that it's a live-action version of one of the top five best anime series ever made -- knowing that some of that will obviously be lost in translation to an extent. I've seen all the trailers, I've seen the vignettes, I think it looks like they're paying homage to the source material for the most part, and I'm excited. I watched a few episodes of the anime with Daisy in the room -- because she'd never seen it -- and got even more of a "meh" response from her. 

I almost feel like I should retreat into a shell, of sorts, and not get excited for anything anymore. Nobody ever really shares my enthusiasm, and it feels like I just get shit on for having things I look forward to. And, of course, everyone on the internet shits on everything anyway. It's so exhausting to continue to try to be positive about anything these days. It's starting to seriously wear me down as a person. Looking forward to things I've been excited for is about all I have left.

Friday, November 19: Day off. Payday.

Saturday, November 20: Day off. Ghostbusters day.

 

I have been tasked, by my mother, to give her some things that Daisy and I would want for Christmas, as well as to tell her what I want for my birthday.

This is far harder than you'd think.

Look, I appreciate my parents. I know there have been times I've been at odds with them in the past (that's been well-documented here over the years) but over the years, a lot of my hardline stances on a lot of things regarding my upbringing have mostly softened as I've gotten older. I now realize that my mother didn't know anything more about raising a kid than I would if one plopped into my lap today, and she did the best she could. Similarly, my "dad," upon meeting my mother, was thrust into a situation where he'd be a teenager's father figure to a kid that wasn't his, and did everything he could to be a good father and good example of that -- despite already having three kids of his own.

Like, they've done well for me and for themselves; I feel like a burden and it feels kind of weird when, at age 38, my mother wants me to tell her things to buy me and Daisy for holiday presents. They're both retired and on fixed incomes (well, so to speak, anyway) and don't need to be spending their money on us. Daisy and I, on the other side of the coin, both work and have decent jobs/income, and could get ourselves nearly anything we wanted/needed -- even if we'd have to save/budget a bit for some things, of course. I feel blessed in that I don't have to want/need for much these days, which wasn't the case ten years ago. 

Moreover, the only wants I have are the extravagant ones. Like an '84 Recaro Trans Am. Or one of those stand-up arcade machines or pinball machines. I don't need these things. But, I think being able to say that these are wants only because of the things I don't want or need -- like more clothing or shoes, books, electronics, food, etc -- shows that I'm doing pretty well in life. Mind you, there are things in those categories that I'd like, but they're not necessary and not must-haves. 

I have the same sort of problem every year with Daisy, to an extent. I update my Christmas list on Amazon, and basically tell her to use it as a guide, because all of those things are nice but I don't really care one way or another if she gets any of them for me. I used to be the exact opposite on this -- where I only wanted things off that list -- but over the years I've begun to care less and less and less, to the point where it's now basically take-it-or-leave it. All I need from Daisy is her love. Everything else is ancillary. I know she'll likely pick up a few things from that list, and that's fine, it's the only reason it exists, but I'm at the point where I don't care if I don't get anything on it. If I don't, I can get what I want myself in my own time.

Buying things for Daisy is far easier. I know her likes and her dislikes at this point of our marriage, and I know what she'll appreciate and what she won't give a shit about. There's only one thing I've gotten her this year that wasn't meticulously planned out, and if she doesn't like/want it, I'll use it myself -- as it was sort of an impulse purchase anyway. 

Anyway, back to my parents. 

I put together a new list on Amazon for my parents specifically; I'll add more to it in the coming days. A lot of the stuff on it has come from other different private lists I've kept on Amazon for the past few years, including from our wedding registry from seven years ago (yes, that was on Amazon too, and yes it is still active on the site). It's got some various items on it that aren't too ungodly expensive (nothing over $200 on the list for the parents, and I even feel sort of bad about that). It has a few items for me, a few for Daisy, and a bunch for the house -- stuff like housewares, a carpet cleaner, coffee, a knife block set -- etc. Mostly innocuous things. I have to give them some idea of stuff to get or my mother goes off on her own, gets us something that we'd never, ever use, and is like "this is awesome, don't you love it?" 

This is true -- a few years back she got me this like...key ring/phone tracking thing? I think it was called Tile or something. You attach it to your stuff and then if you lose your keys or your phone, you can track where it is to find it.

Um. I am incredibly obsessive about knowing where my phone, wallet, keys, etc are at all times. I have never lost any of them. They all have their very specific spots that they are put in when not in use. They aren't just tossed somewhere or left in pockets or the car or etc etc. I will never lose them and always know where they are, and keep them safe. So yeah, the Tile thing never left its packaging, and was put into storage somewhere.

Last year, my mother got us a nice, fancy cutting board. Like, to use as a charcuterie board or something? I don't know. The entire concept of this is hilarious because we almost never use cutting boards for anything whatsoever -- Daisy is vegan and I'm vegetarian -- we're never cutting up meats or cheeses, obviously. We also have had a grand total of six people who have come to our house to visit us in the past two entire years -- two of those were Daisy's parents  -- so it's not like we entertain guests. As for our other cutting needs, we have a set of $5 flexible cutting mats for vegetables that we can throw in the dishwasher when we're done chopping onions, garlic, or anything of that nature on them...so the fancy, wood, non-dishwashable cutting board has been sitting in the dining room, still in its packaging, since the day we got it. 

Anyway. I'll likely let Daisy add some stuff to the list or give me a few ideas of hers to add to the list that she wouldn't be uncomfortable with my parents getting for her. She has the same sort of "this makes me uncomfortable to ask for" problems I do when it comes to getting gifts from my parents. I had to tell my parents to get her the popcorn popper she wanted for her birthday because she didn't want to ask anyone for it. Even that made me a little uncomfortable. 

Moving onward...

Last night was the premiere of Cowboy Bebop on Netflix. The new live-action adaptation, I mean. We'd had plans all week to get pizza and watch some of it, as I mentioned before. 

When I got up yesterday afternoon, I had a text from the wife asking me if I'd mind if she came home a little later than usual, as one of our mutual friends -- one of my current employees, actually -- wanted some help in chaperoning one of his foster kids for a date night with said kid's girlfriend. It would end at 9pm and she'd be home shortly thereafter.

Let's unpack that a bit. 

Two of my current employees are close friends of ours. They worked for Daisy when Daisy worked there on overnights, and when she went to dayshift and I went to overnight, they shifted over to reporting to me. This has never affected our friendship (they know how the game in that place is played as well as any of the rest of us do, and know I'm their manager because I wanted the responsibility/duty even if it's a sometimes useless title) and we remain close to them. They're good guys, have been friends for ages and bought a house together (no, they're not gay). They are both licensed by the state to foster kids -- there's a lot of details there that I'm not going to get into to prevent you folks from becoming bored, but suffice it to say that they're legal guardians, for lack of a better term, for two "troubled youth" teenage boys, and get paid to be so by the state of Nebraska. Those boys are now dating age, and because of some unspecified history (or because our friends likely want to) they have to be chaperoned on dates. Sunday is our friend's birthday, so this would give Daisy some good quality time with him when we haven't hung out with him in over a year. 

So, of course I said it was fine. I don't mind. It's Daisy's good deed for the day and she gets to see our mutual friend on his birthday weekend. That's cool with me, whatever works. 

 

She did get home very shortly after 9pm and asked if I still wanted the pizza.

 

"Ehhhh..." was my reply. 

At this point I really didn't want it anymore; it was too late in the evening for me and I knew she was tired. It's not much of an "event" if you only watch one episode of a show and then go to bed because you're exhausted. Pizza is event food. It's something you get when you want to celebrate and plan to enjoy it. There was very clearly going to be no enjoyment when it came to dinner last night -- it was going to be food, TV, and bed. Still, I wasn't going to say no to Daisy if she still wanted pizza, so I tried to leave it up to her.

"If you want it still, I'm all on board," I said, "but if you're not that into it tonight it's fine, I don't need it or anything."

I'll also add, as an aside, that on the way home from work she stopped to pick up my Metformin refill and spent $108 on other groceries -- but most of that was necessary as we needed paper towels, toilet paper (out of both) and a few other little items. I'd offered to just do a delivery order, as grocery stores the weekend of Thanksgiving are likely to be a horrific nightmare, but she said she wanted to go in anyway (upon returning home, she told me there was almost nobody in the store, which shocked me). 

She did not end up wanting the pizza, but made us a couple of vegan chicken patties, some hash browns, and big salads, so that's what we had for dinner. We watched one episode of Cowboy Bebop before going to bed. I'll reserve my review here for the next few days at some point once we watch more of it/finish it -- but so far, it's exactly what I expected it to be. 

I don't remember much after dinner. I remember coming back upstairs, and trying to mess around with stuff on my computer a bit (I had backed up my HD earlier in the evening) and I could feel sleep taking me. On Friday nights I need to listen to that impulse, otherwise I'll completely fuck myself for the rest of the weekend. I sat in my chair, put my podcasts in my ears, and then the next thing I knew, it was 4am and I was waking up from some really bizarre dreams, though what they were now I can't remember. 

So, in the hours of Saturday that have transpired thus far, I have made the list for the parents mentioned above, have written here, and now most recently have taken a shower and gotten dressed for the day. It is 8:31 AM. Exactly two hours from now, Daisy and I will be settled snugly into two reclining theater seats to finally, finally see Ghostbusters: Afterlife. 

I have read a lot of reviews of the movie, as I mentioned above, and many of the critics can't stand it, or at best basically review it as "meh." It's got a 61% Critics score on Rotten Tomatoes at present time, but a 95% score from the audience -- meaning, at least from what I'm seeing, this movie isn't made for the critics, it's made for the fans. Every spoiler-free fan review I've read is calling it amazing, exactly the story that needed to be told, is told the right way, and is the greatest possible tribute to the original films as well as Harold Ramis. And that's the mindset I'm going into it with, honestly. It doesn't have to be a perfect picture. I don't expect it to be a movie that could completely stand on its own, nor do I expect it to be the Best Picture winner this year (even though it will very likely be 2021's highest grossing movie). I expect to see ghosts and busting of said ghosts. I expect to see a movie that is worth my time waiting for it and worth the extra effort I spent going to see it on opening weekend at 10:30 in the f'ing morning. Nothing more, nothing less.

I will, of course, write a full review of it here in the coming days.

Sunday, November 21:

Working from home, day 380.

 

Okay, so.

I posted a spoiler-free review of Ghostbusters: Afterlife on Facebook. However, in my in-depth review here, I will caution that there are some minor spoilers ahead. I will keep them very minor and most of what I mention below will confirm a lot of what you already expected, I'm sure -- but fair warning nonetheless. If you want to go in blind, skip the rest of today's post. 

Still with me?

Okay then. 

1. The original song is in the movie, but you've gotta wait for it -- and I feel that there were a few places in the movie that it should have been cued up and started playing, but it didn't.

 

2. Slimer is not in the movie, which greatly surprised me.

 

3. At least one ghost only previously seen in The Real Ghostbusters toy line from the 80s makes a full on-screen appearance for about 5 seconds. It is only one of about six or seven actual ghosts seen in the movie. Yes, you read that correctly. For a movie called Ghostbusters, there aren't a hell of a lot of ghosts.

4. Yes, ALL surviving members of the original main cast return, with the exceptions of William Atherton and Rick Moranis. I wasn't necessarily surprised Rick Moranis wasn't there given his retirement from acting, but you don't really miss him -- he wouldn't have had a role to fill in the storyline anyway. It also kind of hurts a little to say that. You don't miss Atherton either, as the movie doesn't really need a human villain. 

 

5. Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts, reverting to her 1984 look, just much older) is in the film and no, she is (sadly) not related to any of the younger characters -- which is a surprise to most fans because it was something we were all expecting.

6. As suspected/reviewed, the movie does not and cannot stand on its own. Anyone who hasn't seen the original film will mostly be lost, or at least won't have the same perspective. It is very much a sequel/continuation. You can see it without having watched the original 1984 film, but you'll miss a lot of the little references and, well, easter eggs strewn throughout. 

7. The movie seems to ignore the events of Ghostbusters II almost completely, almost intentionally and forcefully so. There's no real canonical reason to do this other than without doing so, it would make this movie not make any sense whatsoever. So...based on this film alone, I am not sure if Ghostbusters II is still canon. 

8. The last half hour of the movie is what every Ghostbusters fan has been waiting for, for over thirty years, to see happen on screen. Take from that what you will. 

9. J.K. Simmons has a small but (canonically) very important role!

10. There are two post-credits scenes -- one is more of a mid-credits scene and the second is fully at the end. Both are very much worth your time.

11. This movie is the greatest tribute anyone could've ever given to Harold Ramis. 

Now, for my thoughts...

It is good. It is not "great," but it gets really close, especially by the end. It's a hair's breadth away from being great. 

Ghostbusters: Afterlife is basically an exercise in expectations, because more than anything else, if you've seen any of the trailers, it's very much the movie you're expecting it to be. The trailers don't hide much except for the last half hour of the movie, which I am glad they hid. 

Basic plot, not spoiler-y if you've seen the trailers: Callie, a (likely Chicago-based, from context clues and the Illinois license plates on the car) single mother of two teenagers, finds out her estranged father has died and left her an abandoned farmhouse property in a tiny town in Oklahoma. This happens right as they're being evicted from their apartment, so they pack up and move to Oklahoma to settle the arrangements. It takes until an hour into the movie to reveal what everyone expected/had guessed within the first fifteen minutes of the movie, and is not made a secret from anyone who's seen the trailers -- the estranged father who died and left them this farmhouse property was none other than Egon Spengler of the Ghostbusters, who ran off to Oklahoma ten years before (in the Ecto-1, with a bunch of ghostbusting equipment) to try to save the world from another pending apocalypse. For the past ten years, he's been successful in preventing said apocalypse. However, now that he's dead...

And so on. 

It is a fantastic, exciting premise to base a continuing Ghostbusters story on. However, that great premise falls flat on its ass for almost the entire first half of the movie after the very first scene, and creates a first half of the film which progresses way too slowly. I'll put it this way -- you could remove two or three very short, minor scenes from the first half of the movie, and if you did so, you would have no idea whatsoever this movie was supposed to be about and/or building up to ghosts and the busting of said ghosts. Some folks will disagree with me and say that this was natural character progression and natural storytelling -- and I would agree with that...if the movie were an hour longer than it is -- or if the second half, once the plot kicks in, was built up with a similar pace of progression before the payoff. It's not, it's a bam and then the movie ends.

 

I think that's my second biggest gripe with Afterlife as a whole (I'll get to my first soon enough, don't worry). The movie suffers from a lot of pacing and logic issues, and takes forever to get moving. Once it does, it could absolutely use a few expository/explanatory scenes here and there, just to help connect things and explain why/how some characters know what they do and can do what they do. There are some major logical leaps here and there, a few of which are nearly unforgivable. Some of the dialogue is stilted and some of the characters -- namely Carrie Coon and Paul Rudd's characters -- vary wildly in their personalities/characteristics from one scene to the next, primarily due to shoddily-written dialogue. The second half of the movie is indeed great, but it moves far too quickly and gets to the payoff far too soon, and ends far too quickly -- when it ends, it just stops dead (no pun intended). The second half of the movie needed at least another ten minutes or so of buildup to what was coming, and at least another five or so of wind-down time after the climax to wrap everything up nicely. It got neither of those things. There is a very small bit of wrap-up in the lengthy, final post-credits scene, but that's it.

And I guess that brings me to my biggest gripe of the movie overall -- it is not a different story. Afterlife's second half is the 1984 movie set in Oklahoma in 2021, with everything that entails, for better or worse. I'm not going to spoil it any further than that, but suffice it to say we have different characters playing the same roles, the original cast returning to do what they did in the first film, and a climax very similar to the first film. The film itself follows an arc that is wholly predictable. You can see characters falling into roles from a mile away. You know exactly what's going to happen half an hour before it does. Instead of creating something new and/or going off in a different direction with these new characters, the movie specifically tells you "oh, what happened in Manhattan in 1984? yeah, it's happening here in Oklahoma in 2021." There is literally writing on the wall in two different scenes that spells this out for the viewer. It's a reworking of the plot similar to the way The Force Awakens rewrote the plot of the original 1977 Star Wars -- the "oh, we blew up the Death Star in the first one, but now the Empire is calling themselves the First Order and they've made another Death-Star-like weapon out of an entire planet, so let's get a new group of people together, recruit some of the old heroes out of retirement, kill one of them, and blow up this giant planet-killing weapon too."

So, all of that being said...let's talk about the good.

What this movie does well, it does really well. The last 30 minutes of the movie is worth the price of admission alone -- the last 30 minutes of the movie is peak Ghostbusters. It does some very exciting things in some amazing ways. You will laugh. You will cheer. You will cry. You will be forced to make at least three major logical leaps, but you will (likely) be okay with them. When the original Ghostbusters show up (and they do, this isn't exactly a spoiler as you can see it coming a mile away) there were cheers and applause in the theater. When the proton packs turn on and fire off, when ghosts get trapped, when Ecto-1 barrels around corners with lights on and sirens wailing, it's all great.

 

The movie uses the original Elmer Bernstein score from the first film, with some very minor tweaks here and there in places. This perfectly sets the tone, but also reminds you that this movie is very much based in its roots of the original 1984 film. The musical cues are great, and the score swells and falls where it's supposed to.

 

McKenna Grace's Phoebe steals the show. She steals the show for the entire movie, honestly, and is without question the best part of it -- she is the heart and soul of the film, fully carrying it and making what it is. I'm not sure any other young actress in recent memory could have done a better job. If this kid isn't showered with awards and praise for this role, I'll be very surprised.

 

While I expected the ending to be what it was overall, I wasn't sure how the filmmakers would accomplish it -- because, not-a-spoiler -- Harold Ramis has been dead for longer than Daisy and I have been married. What they did, and how it was treated throughout the entire movie (but especially the end), was truly remarkable. The entire film is, and was throughout, a massive tribute to and celebration of Harold Ramis, yes, but especially the end scenes. I can't elaborate on that further without giving it all away.

I do need to tell you about the movie's final scene -- and I mean after the action ends, the scene right before the credits roll -- it lasts about 30 seconds, and is not spoiler-y for me to tell you what it is, simply because it ruins nothing of the story or what happens. It is one of the simplest shots in the movie but, for me, one of the most powerful.

The movie's final scene is a wide overhead shot of the Ecto-1, lights on, sirens wailing, driving, with other traffic on the road around it. The camera pulls back, slowly, as a very familiar song starts playing -- from its very beginning. As the camera pulls back further, you can see that the Ecto-1 is crossing a bridge. The camera pans up a bit as it pulls back more, to reveal the very modern, 2021 New York City skyline. The Ecto-1 is crossing the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. She's coming home, and ending the story where it all began. Cut to credits. 

 

It is...a very powerful scene, one that had me -- not just as a fan but as a writer -- speechless for about 20 seconds when the lights started coming back up in the theater. 

Is this the movie I've waited most of my adult life to see? Yes. It is an incredibly worthy sequel, even with its flaws. And, I will stress this, there are many flaws. However, I will absolutely be purchasing it on Blu-ray to watch multiple times, as I feel that it's one of those movies I'll gain deeper appreciation for upon repeated viewings. I have no doubt that as word of mouth spreads, it will likely become the highest-grossing film of the year (for at least a few weeks, anyway, until Spider-Man: No Way Home overtakes it).

So, there you have it.

Without any further ado, let's leap into Thanksgiving week.

Monday, November 22:

Working from home, day 381.

 

First, before I go further, this is an excerpt from an interview regarding the canon status of Ghostbusters II:

 

 Okay, sure Jason, whatever you say.

 

I don't think it's implausible that canonically the Ecto-1 and Ecto-1A could be two separate cars, of course. They are in the real world too, obviously. We just didn't see that in Ghostbusters II -- it was heavily implied that the original Ecto-1 was souped up/beefed up and made into the 1A. 

 

I guess we'll see what he has up his sleeve. The one thing I neglected to mention from my review yesterday is that (quite obviously), the movie is left open for a sequel -- in multiple ways. The main story of the film itself concludes, yes, but there's always another evil out there to vanquish or more problems to solve. Gotta keep the money machine rolling!

 

Anyway, moving onward.

I woke up yesterday morning at like, 11am. I don't know how long I slept. I know I slept in my chair and fell asleep before it was light outside, so there's that. That means I got at least five or six hours of real rest before spending the remainder of the day awake and working all night last night. This is fine. I don't really care about being a little short on sleep this week as it's the holiday week. I can rest some when I'm off, and tonight and tomorrow are likely not going to be too awful simply because it IS the holiday week.

This week is a short week for me, as you know; it's Thanksgiving week, as well as the 15th anniversary of my move out here to the midwest, which was November 23 (so, tomorrow). I have a lot of feelings about that move and about the time I've spent out here. The first half of those fifteen years was mostly rough, but the second half of it I was finally able to stabilize myself, help get my shit together, and found an amazing woman to marry. So, overall, it was very worth it. I've been married to Daisy for almost half the entire time I've lived in the midwest. Definitely worth it. 

My downtime this week will be spent doing some odds and ends chores around the home and helping to prep for Thanksgiving. On Saturday, after the movie (and visiting the parents), Daisy and I did some grocery shopping to get the last odds and ends we'd need before Thanksgiving dinner. There's some other stuff I'll need this week or by the end of the week, but I'm waiting and putting it on hold due to the fact that we'll have some Thanksgiving leftovers, likely, I can eat. I've also got plenty in this house to consume. About the only thing I'm out of is Quorn and V8 (perpetually). Again, I don't generally eat a whole lot of anything anymore. On Saturday, my meal for the day was basically a Diet Pepsi, the movie theater popcorn, and two vegan jerky sticks from Natural Grocers. I made a small sandwich on a piece of naan and had some string cheeses in the middle of the night, too, but my guess is that I barely put 1000 calories into my body during that 24-hour period. 

Yesterday was spent doing laundry and taking care of around the house stuff before work. I decided to wash the bed sheets and blankets, despite the bottom sheet having had only a few days' worth of use because our cat decided to yack on the one we'd had on the bed, in order to save some time for later in the week. I'll be sleeping a good chunk of Wednesday (I work tomorrow night) but Thursday is Thanksgiving so I won't be home, and on Friday I'd like to kick back and enjoy the day off, possibly purchase a few Black Friday deals if anything strikes me, and do something fun like watch a movie, play some video games, or something of that nature that will allow me to decompress. It's been so long since I fired up the PS2, so long since I've sat down in the living room with a meal and watched a movie I wanted to watch from beginning to end. 

I also need to spend time shredding all of the stuff I've let collect in my "shredder box" -- junk mail, credit card offers, anything that has our address printed on it, I put into the shredder.

I should also mention that on Saturday, the Christmas cards arrived in the mail from Shutterfly, a week after I ordered them and almost a full week before I expected them to get here/before they were projected to arrive. They look good. This year, as mentioned, they're pretty basic, but they'll do the job. I'm excited to begin sending them out, and more excited to begin ushering in the overall Christmas season. It doesn't feel like the season is here until I begin sending out the cards. Or until it snows, which (aside from a flurry or two here and there one day last week) it hasn't done yet. Instead, we're in late November and we're expecting temperatures mostly in the 50s and 60s for the foreseeable future -- so, I guess, Nebraska gets a true fall this year after all. Maybe that means the winter won't be awful. Maybe it means it'll be worse. Who knows, really. 

Also, changing gears a bit, I mentioned a few months back (when we were still planning on traveling to WV) that I joined the Facebook group for my high school's graduating class, only to find that they'd planned my 20 year high school reunion during the time that I was planning to be in WV -- August, originally. Those were apparently tentative plans that fell through at some point, and the group went silent for months on end. Now, mind you, my graduating class had 300+ people; it really wasn't a small class by any means. And over the years, most of them who actually had Facebook accounts actually joined the group. Anyway, when the group went silent, I basically forgot about the reunion and its planning.

Well, about two months ago, I saw some movement on that again, some rumblings in the group about it. One of my friends who I knew pretty well but wasn't particularly close with posted that she had taken over organizing the reunion, and that it would be in some park somewhere in the deep backwoods of the county, in November.

If you're like me, you likely thought do these people forget that in November, in the mountains of West Virginia, it's generally snowing and cold as fuck? Of course, as I knew it was November, that meant that I'd never be able to go. 

Anyway, over the course of a few weeks, I slowly watched in the background as plans unfolded, being the lurker that I am. They settled on an outdoor park/pavilion area, my friend organizing it designed and printed up commemorative t-shirts (which were actually sort of nice, I was impressed) and they generated a lot of interest and a lot of page views in the group on the posts. They set the date for November 20 -- that was Saturday -- as it was the weekend before Thanksgiving and allegedly would help with travel for folks coming back home for said holiday. Also, today starts deer season in West Virginia, and I'm sure nobody would want to go to an event the weekend after Thanksgiving during deer season. Also-also, you get a group of people in a park during a West Virginia deer season and there's a high probability that some backwoods redneck is going to mistake a partygoer for a deer from a distance, and fire off rounds. 

I wish I were making that up.

I was excited for some of my friends who were supposed to be going; it would be a fun time for them, a nice little commemoration of our high school years. I posted in the group myself that I wished I could attend, but it's a long walk from Omaha -- or something to that effect, I can't remember exactly what I said. The last I checked, it looked like they were gonna have a pretty big turnout from folks still in the area.

Saturday night, after waking up from my evening nap and checking Facebook, I saw that a few people had posted pictures and a video in the group from the reunion (which up to that point I had, again, once more forgotten about). At the forefront of these photos, someone had gotten a group shot of everyone there. The reunion had an attendance of eight people. 

 

LOL.

 

Of those eight people, I knew exactly three of them. One of them was my friend James, who I've been pretty close with for almost 25 years now. He's now the mayor of one of the small towns back home. One was my friend who organized the whole thing, and the other I'd call an acquaintance at best back in high school but not someone I've spoken to in the many years since. 

Oh well, maybe we'll all get together in 2031 for our 30 year reunion, when we're all pushing 50.

 

The final thing I want to cover today is cat food.

 

Yes, seriously.

 

So I'm sure all of you have heard about the "supply chain" problems/issues the pandemic has caused. Anything that requires components from basically anywhere outside of the US, or from countries that do not have a high vaccination rate for Covid, has basically been fucked by it. That's why cell phones have become more expensive, lumber and large appliances are super-expensive or nonexistent with long wait lists, why cars have become more expensive (computer chip shortages), and why manufacturing has taken a big hit on a global scale. It's also why some companies were putting out notices last month, in October, to "order your gifts now if you want them to arrive by Christmas, and they still may not." This isn't limited to any specific industry, but it's across the board. The price of food is going up, inflation is on the rise, and some things that were readily accessible during the pandemic just aren't available anymore until the world recovers from it. This extends to machine parts too, even here in the states. Oh, you need a specific component for your machine/plant to be able to manufacture your product? Oh, that component is made in and shipped from another country? Too bad man, I guess you just gotta wait.

I've been hit by this too, in the form of nobody having V8 in stock anywhere since...August? Roughly? I've been forced to "get by" on the bottles of it, if I can even find them. Mostly I've had to get off-brand or store brand vegetable juice, which, let's be fair, is not V8. This isn't the only thing, though. I've noticed a large amount of my groceries and normal household purchases either increasing in price astronomically or completely going out of stock for months on end, from stuff like cat litter and laundry detergent to various different foods. I was at Trader Joe's on Saturday evening and they didn't have french fried onions! The week before Thanksgiving, when everyone needs them for green bean casserole! It boggles the mind, folks. 

I remember when I was in college and grad school, the Kroger company would put turkeys on sale for, not kidding, something like 49 cents per pound. We could get giant, hefty birds for something like $8-10. In ye olde 2021, I haven't seen a turkey on sale anywhere this year (not that I'd buy one anyway -- vegetarian, etc) for less than $1.99 a pound. You want a 20-pound turkey to feed a giant family? Bam, forty bucks.   

It also appears that as of the past few months or so, these supply chain shortages have trickled down into the pet food business. It is near impossible to get my cats' wet food -- Fancy Feast and Friskies, to be precise -- in the 24-can cases anymore. When they come into stock on Amazon they quickly sell out from Prime, and as soon as they do, the private sellers jack up their prices to $40+ per case. I've been lucky a few times and have been able to snag a few cases as soon as they come back in stock, but that luck is fleeting.

A few weeks ago, I saw that the cats' Fancy Feast was in stock, when it hadn't been for at least three months. I immediately ordered two cases, paying about $3-4 more per case than I'd been paying previously, and it arrived without incident. The cats were happy, I was happy, and I could stop buying the 9Lives food from Walmart, which I could tell that they did not like anywhere near as much. 

The Friskies, however...sigh. That is a different story.

My cats like only one variety of Friskies that won't stink up the house or make them sick. It is their chicken and tuna dinner pate. I don't know if it's a high seller (I almost never see it in stores) or if it's a low seller (again, I almost never see it in stores) but it is my cats' jam, it's what they like. Very few places carry it, but the most reliable supplier for me has always been Amazon. I could get a 24-pack of the cans for $11.96, and as they don't eat it every single day, it's very conceivable that a case would last me more than a month. 

Last year around this time, it went out of stock and stayed out of stock for months on end. When it finally was available again in the spring, I ordered four cases very quickly, at a higher price than usual, just to have it. When I started running out of it again as we entered the fall, I tried to get more. Nope, out of stock again. For a long time. 

In mid-October, it came back in stock and I ordered two cases, which were now $17 each instead of the normal $11.96. I got an email a few days later from Amazon telling me the order had been canceled because the supplier had ran out, and that my money had already been refunded to me. I was pissed, but at least I understood that. Out of their control, etc. A week or two later, when I saw it was back in stock again (for the same inflated price), I ordered two more cases.

It shipped, and then...disappeared.

It was a Prime order, so there was tracking. I watched it very slowly cross the country. I got an email notice that the shipment had been delayed, but would still arrive, with a new date given. It sat somewhere in Tennessee for two days, and then I got an update email saying it would be two more days before it arrived. Okay. I watched it arrive in Bondurant, Iowa, and it...sat there. And sat there. And sat there some more. I got yet another email from Amazon saying "your package may be lost. It may still arrive, but you can now request a refund for it."

It was still sitting in Bondurant, Iowa. 

I waited another day or so, and then when it didn't move anywhere else, requested the refund. Suddenly, I get another email from Amazon saying "we sent your refund, but noted that the shipment was stopped during shipping by the carrier or that the recipient refused delivery."

The fuck? No I certainly had not refused delivery. The fucking cat food was in Bondurant, Iowa.

"I am not sure this cat food even exists," I told Daisy. "I think they're all like yeah, you can order this, yeah, we'll 'ship' it to you, sure and then just take your money."

This was at the beginning of November. I have yet to see that refund issued to my account via Amazon. 

Two weeks ago, I ordered a third shipment of two cases, again. It went off without a hitch, shipped on time, and then sent me a notice that on Wednesday or Thursday last week, it was out for delivery via UPS. I was sitting upstairs writing here when the Alexa's notifications went off, telling me that it had been delivered. 

I went downstairs and opened the door to bring it in...and nothing was there. Anywhere. Nowhere at my home had a package been delivered. I was about to lose my fucking mind. Now it wasn't Amazon's fault anymore, now it was the fault of UPS -- who had either lost my package or who had delivered it to completely the wrong house (that would be at least the second time this year, if not third, that they've done this). 

Of course, our Ring battery had died, so I didn't have any sort of record on file of the UPS guy actually coming up to our porch to drop it off, or see if some porch pirate had stolen it, or what. Our secondary camera caught what looked like a UPS truck on the street earlier in the evening, but the quality was so bad and it was dark (because hello, it becomes night at like 5pm now) so I couldn't confirm.

I got busy at work, so I didn't have the chance to actually file a report with UPS that night. I was still pissed off about it, though.

The next night, I came downstairs to get ready for work and to get the mail, and amazingly enough, there's a box of cat food on my doorstep -- and no, it wasn't there before. Ring battery was still dead, so...I have no idea how the cat food materialized on my porch -- whether it was delivered to the wrong house and a neighbor brought it over, if UPS marked it as delivered when it wasn't and discovered their mistake the next day, or what, but my cats had food again. 

Anyway, that's all for today. Onward we travel into the rest of the week.

Tuesday, November 23:

Working from home, day 382. 

 

Tonight's the last night I have to work this week and it couldn't come soon enough. The week itself to this point hasn't been terrible -- Sunday was quiet enough, and last night was mostly okay, primarily because the "hottest" issue of the evening was already being worked by my director by the time I logged in for the night.

The washing machine is fucking up again, and I'm sitting here mumbling under my breath, softly, don't. Just don't. I just need stuff to work like it's supposed to, I can't go from one crisis to the next over and over.

 

 It gave the "LF" error again, which is code for it's taking too long to fill or there's something wrong with the water line/flow into the machine or what have you, and believe me, there isn't. However, there's likely something wrong with the circuitry of the machine, again, that will need to be addressed if this continues -- because there's no physical reason for it to be throwing that code. The water in the house works just fine, and I've run probably 20ish loads of laundry normally since the last time it threw that code, with no issues whatsoever. I reset it, again, and it ran another load normally. So....eh. I ran a second load after that, and it ran normally as well.

 

I guess the weather must be changing, or something -- both Daisy and I have headaches today. Daisy doesn't usually get headaches, and I get them only when I'm sleep deprived, or when my allergies are nasty -- such as when there's a big change in the weather coming. My allergies today are merely normal, and I slept almost 7 hours, so I don't know. 

I'm fighting the need to order groceries for delivery tomorrow (since I'm off); I found out that I am now completely out of Quorn Meatless Pieces -- one of the big staples of my diet due to its versatility; it's basically cubes of vegetarian chicken -- and it's very hard to plan a lot of meals I eat without it. Mind you, Thanksgiving is in two days, so I don't know how needed it is, but I also don't want to go another four or five days without having it in the house simply because of the holiday. I tend to get a bit neurotic about stuff like this at times, and as my mind is mostly checked out in the sense that I just want to get to my holiday days off.

Tonight I have another change bridge, and said bridge requires me to login a bit early -- it starts at 10pm, which means I need to log in shortly after 9 to get everything ready and set up for it and join the call, which could last until 4am if things go poorly. I've only been on one change bridge that's ever lasted that long, and, well, it sucked, so I'm hoping that my last night before I roll into a few days of holiday time off, that won't be the case. 

The holiday schedule at work for tomorrow and Thursday is a clusterfuck, even though I did a massive amount of work on my end gathering volunteers and providing their hours to the (daytime) director in charge of the scheduling. There were still numerous errors that needed to be corrected either by me, my team leads, or by the agents themselves reaching out to say "hey, that's not right, I'll be here X time" etc. More than that, they're already trying to get a Christmas and New Year's schedule put together (bad idea to try that this early; nobody wants to think about that yet) and, adding insult to injury, they already had me marked down as working on New Year's Eve and Day.

Yeah, no, I'm not working on New Year's Eve, I'm working on the actual holiday, New Year's Day. Because New Year's Eve doesn't count as my holiday worked, but working on the actual day does. New Year's Eve is a Friday, and I'm not scheduled on Fridays anyhow. I made sure to correct said daytime director on that scheduling error. Daisy and I always have plans, of some sort anyhow, on New Year's Eve. We either do something special together at home, or we go to the parents' and ring in the new year with them. As it will be my only night off from December 26 to January 7, you bet your ass I'm not working it. 

Yeah, you read that right. 

Daisy has had a soul crushing week at work -- the week before holidays generally suck for her, and she gets no extra time off at all. She's off Thursday for the holiday itself, and then is right back at it on Friday, in the office, as it's the last Friday of the month and all of the end-of-month processes kick in. She's been working late every single night and has frequently not been getting home until around 7 or later. She's exhausted and crabby and I understand and take it with a grain of salt because it's not really her fault. It's not just been this week, but it's been most of the past month, really. That's also another reason why I've been trying to do as much as I can around the house as of late too. She needs the help, and as I've mentioned, I've had quite a bit more energy as of late than usual. I know what it's like to have no real downtime, to feel like you're being killed every day at work. It's not fun. 

I am preparing, quietly, for Black Friday. I got an email today that another one of my cards had its limit increased by another $1500 (not that I'll use it, but that's nice) and I've been keeping a close eye on Black Friday deals, notably Amazon stuff, juuuuust in case I see something I've been wanting for a while go on a deep discount. I should be awake most of the day on Friday and in peak form to grab anything I see. 

I should mention that I'll be buying stuff on Black Friday anyhow -- I already have a cart full of stuff from Amazon, from vitamins to toothbrushes to a pair of sherpa-lined sweatpants (don't you judge me). While I may not get the sweatpants, anything else I find between now and the weekend is purely a bonus. As much as I may want to, I have forbade myself from getting any more new underwear, though. I likely have enough new pairs from when they went on sale to keep me in a new pair almost every day (or after every shower) through...well, maybe Christmas at this juncture, I'm not sure, but pretty close. 

So, with that, let's dive into my last night at work before four glorious days off....

Wednesday, November 24: 

Thanksgiving vacation, day one.

 

At around 7:20 am, I said my goodbyes, made sure all of my OOO messages were up and functional both on my phone as well as my email, and I dropped the fuck offline before someone else could engage me on some other stupid issue that wasn't my problem to fix, went to bed, and...yeah, barely touched this computer for most of the night.

Thursday, November 25:

Thanksgiving vacation, day two.

Thanksgiving Day.

 

Let me be clear, Thanksgiving is a made-up holiday. 

 

Well, all holidays are made up. Christmas is the celebration of the birth of a fictional guy who's worshipped by fans of an ancient series of books, for example, if you want to get right down to it. It's no different than if people celebrated Harry Potter's birthday by giving each other gifts. American Thanksgiving celebrates a particularly whitewashed version of events of when, and after, the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, to paint the picture with a very wide brush (so to speak) and therefore I celebrate the actual holiday with a grain of salt.

I've talked a lot here about what and who I am thankful for many times, so I'm not going to dive into that again. You're all aware, and there's no need to try to rehash that again when this month's post is already so long, so I'm instead going to tell you the story of my actual day, as is customary for holidays. There's not a lot of people or events involved, so it should be (fairly) brief. Well, brief for me.

I woke up around 5am with only a vague sense that it was morning and that I felt like I was awake. It was cold in my office, as I'd left my window cracked all night -- that lets the vape out, but also provides the bonus of the room not being terribly, suffocatingly hot most of the time due to a computer almost constantly running in it. I'm not incredibly concerned about the HP being an almost "always on" machine, because it's the same computers we had at my job, and those machines were left on and connected to the network 24/7/365 -- and the vast majority of them are still working just fine in the homes of my employees.

The first two things I saw online could have ruined my day completely, if I'd allowed them to. 

The first was that one of my closest friends from grad school (who was in my wedding, actually) lost her pregnancy. She was very far along, as in, probably 6-7 months or so, and at a routine checkup found out that the child died inside her and no longer had a heartbeat. This was confirmed by ultrasound, and is one of the most heartbreaking, terrible things I think anyone could ever endure -- but it's happening to my friend right now. She let her friends and family know that basically, her Thanksgiving would be spent in surgery, delivering a dead baby. It's terrifying, horrifying, and so incredibly depressing. I reached out to her to let her know I loved her and that Daisy and I were mourning with her and her husband. There is little else I can say or do to help that situation. I almost didn't say anything, because there's nothing I can do.

Daisy and I don't have children. Physically and biologically we're pretty sure we likely can't, between Daisy's PCOS and my low testosterone. If we could, we likely would have already had one or more by now. I can empathize but it's very difficult for me to understand what it feels like to lose a child so late into a pregnancy. It has to be a crushing, horrible loss. 

Shortly after that, when I was already feeling down, I read that -- happy Thanksgiving, everyone! -- there's a new Covid variant in South Africa that could spread like crazy and be completely vaccine resistant!

B.1.1.529 is apparently what they're calling it, and it's a nasty fucker:

 

 50 mutations! Fifty! Already.

We're fucked, all. The human race is fucked, the planet is fucked. We may have won a few battles, but adaptive biology/microbiology is going to win the war. It's just a matter of time, and it really does look like our time is running out.

This tells me that we're not likely to ever see another year without a threat from some sort of virus, whether it's a coronavirus or something completely different. We're all going to eventually get it (or one of its mutations), and a lot of people are going to die, and there's really nothing we can do fast enough to stop it. 

Of course, because of the world we live in, this news was quickly drowned out by hey, today's Thanksgiving and you're Americans, so go overstuff yourself with foods and tomorrow, be a good little capitalist and spend a lot of money in retail establishments! Well, that and oh, did we mention we have a parade, too? Look at the parade and all its advertisements for things for you to spend money on!

 

I did watch the parade, or most of it anyway. There was nothing that really stood out for me this year. Of all groups/bands to perform during the pomp-and-circumstance of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, 70s/80s rock band Foreigner put on a surprisingly great  performance of "I Want to Know What Love Is" that ended up being an overall highlight for me. Seeing the new Grogu (read: "baby Yoda") balloon was a mild highlight as well. There's not a lot of nerdery anymore in the parade balloons, not since they stopped using the Spider-Man and Superman balloons back in the...90s? Probably? Yes, there's a Pikachu/Eevee balloon now, and inexplicably a Dragon Ball Z Goku balloon (which defies most logical explanations) but I miss the older balloons a lot. Truthfully, I believe I missed a good chunk of the actual balloons this year. I wasn't paying attention to a lot of the parade as much as I normally would or have in years past. 

I called my parents as is customary on Thanksgiving morning, and spoke to my mother for probably half an hour or so. They're in NC at their beach house and were making a traditional, but obviously small(er) Thanksgiving dinner for themselves. My parents are boomers, and I am pretty sure they're really the last generation that cares a lot about holiday traditions and gatherings, Thanksgiving turkey and stuffing, etc. I see a lot of folks my age or a little bit older going through the motions without a lot of feeling to them, out of habit -- and I see a lot of younger folks (Gen Z and the like) just...not really giving a shit at all? I don't know. Sort of like Christmas cards, I see the traditional Thanksgiving dinner setup dying out in 10-20 years with the boomers. I have a feeling when I'm in my 50s and 60s, I won't care about it anymore and would rather order a pizza than cook or have people in my home for a gathering. Maybe that's just me, I dunno.

Anyway, my parents are fine. I told them to watch for their Christmas gift, which I purchased as soon as it went on sale on Wednesday -- the new Sodastream Terra, which I got half off and had an additional $9 off coupon for. It arrives at their home in NC on Tuesday. Obviously I didn't tell them what it was, only to watch for it. As I've mentioned before, I can write about it here because I know my parents don't read this website anymore. I also can't send them flavorings or syrups without them being able to know/tell what they are from the box, and therefore being able to deduce what the big gift is -- Amazon no longer sells the syrups and flavorings stand-alone anymore, and you have to get them directly from the Sodastream site or in retail stores. I found that out the hard way after I'd already sent them the actual machine. But yeah, if I did a separate order directly off Sodastream's website, and a big Sodastream box arrived in the mail to them a few days after the big, nondescript box from Amazon does...well...it'll completely ruin the surprise. So, they're just gonna have to get their own flavorings, I suppose. Can't really be helped. 

After I got off the call with my mother, I started a video call between me, Daisy, and her own parents. Upon getting on that call, Daisy's mother asked me almost immediately if my Cox was out.

Cox is our internet provider out here, but in that split second the little devil appeared on my shoulder and told me do it Brandon, make the joke, you know you want to and a piece of you will die inside if you don't. 

"Not presently," I replied, "but I mean, I am wearing underwear."

Daisy appeared only a little mortified and shocked at the joke because she knows who she married. Thankfully, her mother found it funny.

This is how I bond with the in-laws. There are very few people I could ever make that joke with in mixed company and have it get a laugh.

(Alternate joke: "No, he's downstairs on the couch with your daughter; I just gave him a fresh can of food and some treats a short while ago.")

Anyway.

Daisy's father had told us last weekend when we had visited them after the movie that he wanted to eat around 3, and didn't want to wait until late evening. I therefore assumed Daisy would follow that request and we'd leave the house here no later than around 1 or so in order to get over there, finish making the dinner, and eat. While I have Black Friday off and while the parents are both retired, Daisy has to work it normally as it's not a holiday and it's business as usual for 95% of the population. Because of this, I also therefore assumed that Daisy would want to get everything taken care of early so that we could return home and she could shower and go to bed at a reasonable hour.

Around 1:30, Dad texted us asking what time we were coming over, because he was hungry. Daisy called him, let him know that we'd basically be there when we go there, and told him to eat a snack beforehand. 

We ended up getting there around 3, and Daisy cooked onsite what was left (mashed potatoes, the stuffing, corn, and our fake turkey). We ate around 4, had a dessert Daisy made -- a deconstructed cobbler thing with chocolate, cranberries, and blueberries -- and were done and cleaning up by shortly after 5. We spent some time with them talking, digesting, and taking photos (I took a particularly good photo with Daisy, and a really nice one with Mama too) before we loaded the car back up and came home.

 

The highlights of the day:

1. The Cox joke (obviously)

2. The surprisingly good Whole Foods 365 brand vegan turkey roast

3. Mama's wonderfully baked dinner rolls

4. Daisy's dessert thing

5. Getting home at a reasonable hour

6. The photos

 

The lowlights of the day:

1. The parade being somewhat lackluster

2. My friend's lost child

3. The new Covid variant

4. A small argument with Daisy

5. Black Friday shopping, early

6. The cold weather (high in the low 30s, and in the 20s by the time the sun set)

We returned home and the garage door opener had stopped working (either a dying battery or the remote is breaking) so I went inside the front door and opened the garage from the inside, we brought the stuff in, and I came upstairs to my office once more, where I continued halfway watching a movie I started in the morning hours and halfway browsed through Black Friday deals until I got too tired to stay awake. Eventually, I turned on the lava lamp I keep on my desk for some soft, ambient light in the room, and I was eventually asleep in my lounge chair. 

And so, that was Thanksgiving. No big productions, no big deal, just another day with the exception of extra time with the parents and a particularly carby meal -- which I compensated for and balanced with some extra fluids and by bookending the day with Berberine capsules to help keep my blood sugar lowered. 

Friday, November 26:

Thanksgiving vacation, day three.

Black Friday.

 

Before I go any farther, I want to mention that I spent $240-something on Black Friday, and only two of the items I purchased were actual Black Friday deals. One was two packs of my Dickies socks that I really like, as my older socks are starting to wear out and the Dickies are my go-to, everyday socks, and the other was a 10,000 mAh power bank with digital readout, as I realized how vital it was to have a power bank to charge our phones (and my vapes) with when the power was out this past summer due to the storms. The one I have now is fine, but this is a new one, and a second one. Yeah, it's important. 

The rest of the stuff I purchased consists of:

1. What will hopefully be the very last of Daisy's Christmas stuff

2. A Christmas present for Dad that he specifically asked for

3. Around the house stuff (vitamins, a spare shower curtain liner, wet wipes)

4. Foods for the house, including peanut butter, coffee, and vegan pepperoni.

Nothing really leapt out at me as an outstanding deal, and if it did, it wasn't something that I actually needed or even halfway wanted. 

What I've been doing most of the day in the interim, really, is work. I woke up early (before Daisy did, in fact) and have been taking care of stuff around the house ever since. That includes three loads of laundry, two runs of the dishwasher, stripping the cats' blankets off the couch to clean/wash them, cleaning out the cats' fountain and their food plate/bowls, etc. I wanted today to be a day of relaxation, but there is just so much to be done and I just don't know when else I'll have the time to do it. I want to nap, I want to eat something and zone out on the couch for a while, but I know if I end up doing that I'll end up making myself useless for the rest of the day, so that's a bad idea. 

There's college football going on right now, and I could be watching that -- Nebraska plays Iowa every Black Friday as tradition. I just don't really care. I need to shower at some point, and yes, I do need to eat something, as it's been almost 24 hours since I had anything other than a coffee, an energy drink, and a few handfuls of Goldfish crackers. Maybe I'll do that, and maybe it's not an awful idea after all to take a nap. 

***

So I took a nap, for a few short hours -- two, maybe three at the most. I woke up right as it was getting dark for the evening, with a text from the wife asking me if I still wanted the pizza for dinner I mentioned earlier this afternoon. Before I'd gone to bed, as I knew she'd had a long week and had cooked a lot yesterday, I asked her if she'd wanted to get the pizza from our local place (the pizza we were supposed to have last week, but didn't). If she didn't want to that was fine, but I told her I wouldn't be mad at it if she did, and told her the pizza I wanted -- keto crust, regular cheese, onions, vegan sausage. She said she would, and then I passed out for a few hours. She came home, we ate it, she watched some Netflix, and then came upstairs and went to bed.

I have reached a new level of fatigue. I don't know how much of it is being caused by my seasonal allergies (likely a lot) but it feels like a fight to stay awake. My sinuses are a wreck, my eyes are watery, and I feel somewhat foggy a good chunk of the time. Caffeine doesn't change any of this. It's possible I'm coming down with a cold (or maybe I finally caught Covid, despite my vaccinations), but very likely it's my flip-flopped sleep schedule over the past few days battling with my allergies to cause a good amount of fatigue and discomfort. It just feels like I'm never really all here, if that makes any sense at all. I'm sort of scared that I won't be able to shake this feeling even once I get my sleep schedule reset and back in the groove for next week.

Tomorrow is my last day of "vacation" before I return to work on a normal schedule from Sunday forward, all the way through December 17. Christmas is less than a month away, and feels like it's coming faster than ever this year. I have yet to fill out any of the cards -- they're all still in the box. Aside from some laundry and two loads through the dishwasher, and the (very few) gifts I got via Amazon's Black Friday for Daisy and her father...I got nothing accomplished today. The world, of course, has kept churning and grinding along; apparently the new Hawkeye series already dropped on Disney+, which I knew existed but I guess forgot that it was happening so soon, and my friend who lost her baby posted about it on Twitter and went hella viral, with literally thousands of people outpouring grief and support. I mean, it wouldn't be what I'd choose to go viral over, but it's good to see that the world still has some kind people left.

Saturday, November 27:

Thanksgiving vacation, day four.

 

We're now two days past Thanksgiving and already, for the most part, it's out of sight, out of mind for me. 

They're calling the new variant "Omicron," which I suppose is better than calling it B.1.1.529 if you want a catchy name that the news media can refer to and easily talk about. We thought we were getting out of the woods on this thing, finally, but apparently not. 

I am frustrated about that, obviously. Delta fucked up a lot of things, but this fall, with most people getting boosters, I figured (foolishly) that the worst of everything was over and that people could slowly return to a sense of true normal again -- that the taste of an out-and-about summer we got this past year would be back to normal summer, completely normal life again in 2022. Instead, for the end of 2021 we get massive supply-chain issues and will likely once again have muted versions of Christmas and New Year's celebrations and a winter-into-spring filled with uncertainty and dread over when Omicron will make its way into the US -- because trust me, it won't be long. The news dropped today that it's already in the UK.

Last night, upon reading the news, Daisy immediately logged onto Amazon and ordered a box of masks, a case of toilet paper, and more hand sanitizer. Normally I'd see this as jumping the gun a little early, but after the past two years I don't think anything is really jumping the gun anymore. I'm worried about these sorts of things now. I'm worried about being able to go to doctor's appointments to keep my pills refilled and my diabetes under control. I'm worried about the planet basically shutting down again, only this time not being able to get groceries and household supplies delivered because nobody has those items to deliver. I'm not trying to be an alarmist, but this is a scary prospect. It's not one I want to see play out anytime soon. Here I was hoping that it would be an asteroid or a comet that does us in, when in reality it may be the slow burn of multiple variants of a boring old respiratory virus. 

It is very windy today and about 60 degrees. I got some sleep last night and just got out of the shower about an hour ago. WVU plays its final football game of the season at Kansas in Lawrence in about two hours. I didn't really have any plans for the rest of the day/night, really. 

Well, that changed by mid-afternoon.

My escalation manager colleague at work reached out to me and said he was going to win the birthday/Christmas present contest this year, because he'd found the perfect gift for me.

"I'm game," I said.

Mind you as mentioned above, he doesn't usually get me anything. He doesn't have to; his friendship has always been enough, and I don't ask for things in return when I give people gifts -- I'd sent him a Conan t-shirt for his birthday, which was yesterday.

"Gift procured," he replied a bit later. "I need to wrap it, it's a combo birthday/Christmas present."

"Wow, that was fast," I said. Clearly he'd had something in mind, was able to procure it quickly, and was excited.

"[Executive director] helped," he said. "Just let me know when you want me to drop it off."

At this point I was intensely curious. And aside from waiting for a grocery delivery order, neither I nor the wife had any plans.

Also of note: my colleague actually lives with our program's executive director; the man practically raised him, and he's been their basement roommate off and on for many years. Our executive director has always been that sort of guy to offer a place to stay for those who need it, and I've actually had a few employees over the years who have lived there from time to time when necessary. He takes care of his people. A friend or coworker in need becomes family to him, and he takes that very seriously. My colleague is the same way. Remember this, it's an integral part of what's coming.

Said executive director is also the thrift store master -- meaning, this guy can find almost any deal on anything at a thrift store, knows how to haggle on it, knows where and how to track things down, etc. I trust his judgment and I trust these strong in the way of the Force-like abilities. 

"Anytime you like is fine," I replied; "it's not like I really leave the house unless I have to anymore."

"LOL, omw," was his reply.

Hm. 

So it's not even completely the end of November and this man has not only made plans on but had already enacted those plans, found my birthday and Christmas present, and was bringing it over at right that second.

I mean, shit, I know people like me but I didn't realize people liked me that much.

I had no idea what I was in for. 

I made a cup of coffee, took care of a few downstairs household things, and waited for my friend to arrive. My buddy has a heart of gold; I knew that whatever he was bringing me was super-incredibly-important to him and that while it could wait, he didn't want to wait on it. 

When he showed up, I came outside and we hung out on the sidewalk and driveway for a few minutes. Daisy joined us, as Daisy hadn't seen him in a long time either. In fact, aside from a picture here and there I had not seen my friend in person since the last time we were in the office all together, which was nearly two years ago now. 

"So I got your present here," he said, and pulled two PS4 games out of his coat pocket. One was the newish Spider-Man game, which was lauded when it came out as one of the best games ever released, and the second was Dragon Age: Inquisition, which I'd heard of but knew little else about."

"Thanks man," I said, "that's really thoughtful, you didn't have to do this."

It's true, he didn't; he's a good guy, and simply seeing him and hanging out with him for a bit is enough of a present for me.

"Do you have a PS4?" he asked.

"I don't," I said, truthfully. "But I'll--"

"I can fix that," he replied. "Come over here to the car."

"...you're fucking kidding," I said.

"I am not," he said, opening the door and taking out a box. "[Executive director] is a thrift store wizard, and helped me find this -- and got an amazing deal on it."

In the box, of course, was a used PS4, cables, and OEM Sony wireless controller. That OEM controller on its own is about $100 new. I was speechless. 

"It's the 1TB Slim model," he said. "Not the highest end one like the Pro but the normal model."

The 1TB Slim model is basically the top of the line normal model system, still in production. Unless you have a UHD 4K TV, this is the model you want as it's the most updated hardware and newest version without the step up to the Pro model (which is optimized for the aforementioned UHD 4K TVs). 

Like I said, I was stunned. At a quick glance, the hardware itself had seen some better days, but I knew with some cleaning it would likely be fine. I could also see a price sticker on it that had been partially ripped off so that I would have no idea of the actual price paid for it. I did not know what to say. 

Daisy, who had watched all of this transpire, was impressed. 

He was right. He'd won the holidays. 

I was crying a bit as I thanked him, I'm not gonna lie. He noticed, I told him, I wasn't gonna hide it. I was a bit overwhelmed. It's not every day that a friend comes to your house and hands you a high-end gaming rig. As you know, I'm not the person who goes out and buys all the new gaming stuff. The newest game-things I have in the house are the last few Pokemon games that were released in...2019? Ish? And the Switch Lite to play them on. It's been close to a year since I turned the Switch on, and it's been in its case waiting for the new Pokemon games this year. I figured I'd pick up one of the newer Xboxes or PS4/PS5 machines several years down the road when they were far cheaper than they are now, because that's just the type of person I am. 

 

"It also will likely need about six months' worth of updates when you plug it in and connect it to the internet," he added. "I think it's been sitting for a while."

 

Later, when I looked at it closer, he was right -- the shelf inventory sticker said April 2021.

We hung out for a bit outside -- as mentioned, it was a gorgeous day. I would've loved to have had him come inside and given the tour of the house, but our house is a goddamn wreck and I do not want my friends to see just how badly we need to clean still. After a while we had our hugs and said our goodbyes, and he left.

It took me a bit to process everything. Dude bought me a PS4. Like, holy shit, man.

 

I texted my executive director and thanked him for the help in finding it, as well as for his unparalleled thrift skills, which he acknowledged but didn't say much else about, and a few hours later, I unboxed the machine itself to give it a good cleaning with some alcohol and cotton pads. It cleaned up really well; I got a lot of the dust and dirt and the like off it. "Shelf crud," I call it. Physically, the machine looks great. I haven't plugged it in yet or turned it on (that will likely be an experiment for tomorrow or Monday, depending on how much time and energy I have).

However, upon cleaning the controller, I turned it over to find a price sticker that my buddy had missed -- the sticker price for whatever pawn shop/game shop they'd gotten it from had it listed for $229. Knowing my executive director's skills, he probably got that down to around $200 or so, but still, holy shit that's an expensive gift. I doubt Daisy would spend $200 on me for one singular item this year, and I've been married to her for seven years. 

So I mean, I know I can't win this year's battle, but this also means I've gotta give my buddy something hella cool for Christmas this year. I'll figure something out, but it may take a bit.

Sunday, November 28:

Working from home, day 383.

 

Last night, I began doing a little game-planning as I now have a high-end gaming system still in the current generation. Yeah, the PS5 is out now, but almost nobody has one as they're nearly impossible to get. The first thing I did was figure out how to charge the PS4 controller, which just plugs into anything that will charge via USB-micro. This is nice, as due to the vape habit I have a fuckton of USB-micro cables. 

The second thing I did -- before I even hooked up the machine to see if it worked properly -- was to quickly go to Amazon and purchase a used copy of Star Wars Battlefront: Ultimate Edition for $6, and began price-comparing controller charging docks and a spare controller. I also added a few games and peripherals, including subscription cards to the Playstation online network thing, to my lists to purchase later. The Battlefront game will get here sometime next week, which gives me plenty of time to get it hooked up, test it out, and see what the system is capable of, I guess. Since it has an integrated Blu-ray player, I guess I can just swap out my Blu-ray player that's in the living room now, and use the same inputs and power plugs (as well as spot on the TV stand) for the PS4 without having to rearrange much. Once I connect to the wifi, I'm off to the proverbial races. 

This'll be interesting. As mentioned, I'm not a big gamer. I don't really have time for a lot of gaming and it's just never been a big thing for me, not since I was a teenager. When I do play games, they're almost always the same sorts of games -- games like the Battlefront games, racing games, or fighting games. On my PC, I play strategy games, but far less than I'd like to. I have probably ten games for the PS2 that I haven't played yet and likely won't. I haven't even turned on the PS2 in several months. We'll see if any of this changes, or if it changes by a little or a lot, once I immerse myself into the world of the PS4. Just because I have a new gaming system doesn't change my energy levels or the amount of time I have in any given day.

As we approach the end of the month, I am finally realizing how much I really have to take care of in December between now and my birthday/Christmas. I need to at least start the cards and get the first batch of them sent out this week, with the overall goal of getting them all mailed by around December 10. Some of them have to travel quite a long way, including to other countries, so I need to get a jump start on that. Then I need to plan and take a day or so to wrap my gifts for Daisy, make sure all of our Christmas plans are on track, see if I need to schedule my birthday tattoo or if I can just walk in like we did pre-covid, etc. Also, my student loans got moved to a new provider/servicer, so I need to go create an account with those people and Daisy and I need to get the application in and renewed again for the income-based repayment plans for when payments restart in February. Likely we need to do that soon. 

Oh, and tonight when I start work I need to sign up for open enrollment/insurances for the next year. Fun!

Monday, November 29:

Working from home, day 384.

 

I still haven't hooked up the PS4 yet. It's about time and energy, and Daisy works from home today and tomorrow -- I can't initiate 15GB of OS downloads/updates when she is using the internet upstairs for her VPN for work (nor can I do that in the overnight hours when I'm doing the same thing). It'll likely be Wednesday before I set it up at the earliest, maybe Thursday.

Some of you are probably screaming at your screens reading that, but truthfully I just want to take my time and be at peace with enjoying things like this, instead of trying to rush through them and getting impatient, or only being able to do them in a narrow window of "this is the only time I have to do this task" -- go with the flow some more, man. Not everything's gotta be a race. And truthfully, I don't have the first clue about setting up a PS4. I'm sure it's not too hard to do, but I'd also like to do it right and not feel frustrated or pressured by it. 

Also, as it's been cleanly wiped and has an empty hard drive in it, I don't want to fill it with games that I...well, don't want to really play or have take up hard drive space that much. I'm sure the Spider-Man and Dragon Age games are fun, but they're back-burner until I get the Star Wars game, or until I can see what's out there for free on the Playstation network (or whatever they call it). My gaming time is limited, so I'm going to use it wisely for the time being. 

I also don't want the PS4 to take me away from other important tasks, like the Christmas cards or the novel. I haven't written anything on the novel since the Acer died, and I'm not even sure anymore that's the novel I want to write. I think it needs some more major fleshing out, and I've had several other ideas rolling around in my head for a number of years that I think would be better suited to become my first novel. There's one in particular that I've been excited for for a while, and the only description of it I can give here is that it's my own personal love letter to the 90s. I originally wanted to write it as a screenplay but I think I could adapt it quite easily into a novel, I just need to get the narrative voice down. Maybe I'll write the screenplay first and then adapt that into a novel. Who knows. I just know I need to get writing or it'll never get done.

It is for this reason that I've decided that December's post here will be the last one for a while, and (for the moment) will end the Isolation Diaries. I'll likely put this site on hiatus until sometime mid-to-late 2022. 2022 is the 15th anniversary of this site (it went live in its original incarnation in August 2007), so I have some big stuff planned for the coming year -- but the novel and other life priorities (obviously) come first. 

Tuesday, November 30:

Working from home, day 385.

 

As we close out the month, I found out today that one of the professors I sort of knew at WVU, but never took any of his classes, apparently died recently. Good guy from all accounts; I didn't really know him personally but I did interact with him around the department from time to time...like, 20-ish years ago. I guess he retired in 2017 but was still teaching at the honors college. I guess I'm getting to be around that age where all of my former teachers, professors, and older colleagues in academia are going to start dying, which is...really depressing on many levels, actually. I haven't kept in close contact with a lot of my former professors, but I'm in sporadic contact with some of them, and most of them...well, aren't young. They weren't young when I was their student and they're very not young now. I expect a decent number of them to die off within the next 5-10 years, if not most of them, and that fills me with a deep sadness. Most of them I still have a deep respect for (note that I said most, not all) and I will be distraught when I hear of their passing(s). 

The PS4 is up and running; it was a very fast, relatively painless process that I was able to do last night during a lull in work duties. Only one system update was necessary -- which took less than five minutes to perform -- and I just had to set up my profile and get everything squared away with a username and avatar and etc etc. I've not yet played any games on it, but that will change in the next few hours before work starts tonight, as Daisy is going out to get falafel with a work friend. 

 

As for some reason the PlayStation store didn't like two different cards of mine (this is apparently a common problem), I went to Amazon this afternoon upon waking up and bought myself a $50 gift card code, and loaded that into my PS Store account. I immediately purchased Star Wars Battlefront II and Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite, spending about $20 total of the gift card, and I'll download those onto the actual PS4 when I go downstairs in a bit. The "ultimate edition" of the first Star Wars Battlefront arrives on physical disc to my house here in the next few days, but the two I purchased digitally above were on deep, deep discount through tomorrow only, so I had to pull the trigger now. 

I'm sure that just like every other toy, I'm going to enjoy it for a few months, maybe a year, before I begin using it less and less, and eventually it will age out of being super-useful anyhow, but for now I actually enjoy having a current-gen console, not a handheld, for once. 

But Brandon, you may be saying, the PS5 is the current gen, and PS4 is the last gen. Sure it is. Go to a store today and tell me you can purchase a PS5, or tell me you can find one online for less than a grand right now, especially less than a month away from Christmas. Now walk to the next aisle and tell me how easily you can pick up a PS4 for almost the same price. No, the PS4 is gonna be sticking around for a while to come yet, I would imagine. Pandemic chip shortages and low-stock price inflation have pretty much cemented that as a given at this juncture.

As November ends, I do look forward to December and its holidays (and even, dare I curse myself by saying it, its snow) to end a year that has been stressful and tiring, filled with more bad news than good, but not as bad as 2020. I guess that's all we can really hope for, right?

Anywho. Onward.