The Christmas and New Year Aftermath

I realize it's been well over a week since I last wrote here, but that's mostly because the past week and a half or so has been fucking nuts, and when you have a job that doesn't actually give you any time off but the days of the actual holidays (Christmas Day and New Year's Day), not only do you have very little time to do anything but work, but your work/sleep cycles and patterns get majorly fucked up as well.

Plus, of course, it's the holidays, so there's all sorts of holiday-ish shit to do.

Ahem. Anyway. Happy New Year, folks. 2015 marks the eighth year that this blog has been in existence, as I started it in August 2007. And 2014 was a strange year for me, with lots of good and lots of bad. It was a year of change and upheaval, as well as a year of many, many stresses. I am not sad to see it go, nor am I (for once) happy to see it go, either. It was simply average for the most part, with the good balancing out the bad.

I'd originally planned to write a further recap of Christmas here in the blog, and tried to several times over the course of this past week, but I never had the time to really do so. I've barely touched my computer in the past week, to be honest with you. If I'm not at work being bored or stressed (you know, depending on the day and all) I'm at home spending time with Daisy or sleeping. There aren't enough waking hours in the day to do everything I want (or need) to do, and as a result, work around the house is piling up and I'm constantly tired.

Of course, this could've been avoided had our workplace actually given us more than the two actual holidays off, y'know, like a lot of companies who care about their workers do.

Anyway. Again.

Christmas was very nice and very quiet; Daisy woke up at 4AM and called the rest of us "lazy bums" (in a joking way, of course) for daring to wake up at 6 or 7. We had breakfast, we had presents, it was nice. Even now, as we go into January, there are still two of Daisy's gifts and one gift for Mama that have not yet arrived. I may have mentioned earlier that I received a postcard from the company I ordered said gifts from telling me that two of them had been backordered and would not be available for 4-6 more weeks. However, the third gift hasn't gotten here yet either, and there are still several more things I've ordered that are still on the way as well. We came home on Christmas night by 6PM, and since Daisy had gotten up so early, she almost immediately went to bed. I spent a few hours completely zoning out playing on my phone and/or 2DS before I joined her, as both of us had to work the next day.

Work, even though it's work, has been really quiet since around my birthday. This is (obviously) due to the holidays, and now that the holidays are over, we should expect a ramped up number of issues again -- probably close to our normal numbers and steadily increasing until we plateau at those normal numbers. Today, I'm working 1-10 instead of my normal shift of 3-12 or 2-11, because I'm gatekeeping this afternoon. This means I woke up early this morning, will be getting a shower soon, and will have to wake the wife by a little after noon so that I can get to work on time.

New Year's Eve was fine, though there's a bigger story behind the events of that day that I'm saving for my next post here. We both had to work on Wednesday night, as we usually do, though as the offices were closed all day yesterday for the 1st, we all got off at midnight. Because of this, our overnight staff worked 2nd shift hours with the rest of us, so we had fifteen people there when, normally, we have about eight to ten. We were so quiet that people who had PTO and wanted to use it were going home early just because there was really nothing to do. I had all of my work actually finished by 8:30, and sat on it for a while in the case that anything would come back to us before we all left (as if anything came back, well, they were SOL until this morning, pretty much). I had a live stream webcam of Times Square running in the background on my work computer, which allowed me to watch the ball drop live and in real time (at 11PM central time, of course). When midnight hit, the power went out in our building as someone on the hill above us quite obviously hit a transformer/power line with one of the thousands of fireworks which were being shot off at midnight. Power was out behind our building and on the other side of the street for a good stretch, but the good thing about our workplace is that it has backup generators.

After that, of course, I don't know what else happened; we came home, ate dinner, and watched Gilmore Girls before going to bed around 3.

In other news, I didn't mention earlier (though I probably should have at some point) that one of my closest friends, Rae, moved to Omaha last week. For those of you who have been reading this blog for a long time, you know that I went to grad school with Rae and the two of us are very close -- I have always regarded the woman as family, as a sister, and she was even in my wedding (in the groom's party, of course). Rae moved here because her boyfriend is here in Omaha and works for the university here, and the distance between them was too great. The plans for her move had been set in motion for many months, almost since our wedding. She solidified those plans earlier in the fall, and she finally made it out here last week -- with her dog in tow, and in a brand new car.

As an aside, at this point I can't help but be a little jealous of anyone with a new car, for obvious reasons.

So she made it to town safely and has spent the past several days unpacking/setting everything up here in Omaha, and yesterday we had lunch with her and her beau (partially to celebrate the new year, partially because we were all off work, but mostly because I missed the hell out of that woman). She seems to be settling in fine and getting used to the Omaha landscape, and it's very nice to finally have one of my own friends here in town with me. If you've never left your hometown, or you otherwise live in reasonably close vicinity of most of your friends and family, it's probably difficult for you to fully understand how hard it is to live in a town/city (or several of them over the course of the past nine years, for me) where you know -- and have no connection with -- anyone. Part of why I was a hermit for so long was choice, yes, but a larger part of it was because I knew virtually nobody in the towns in which I lived after moving here to the midwest. The only friends I've ever had in said towns were people I worked with, and after I would leave said job(s) I would very quickly fall out of contact with those people most of the time and for the most part. Rae is one of the few friends I've kept in regular contact with over the past five years or so now, and one of the closest friends I've ever had. She and Daisy love each other as well, so it's a huge comfort that she's here in town. I don't feel so alone anymore.

In other news, the cold and snow -- with the exception of yesterday and today -- has been unrelenting. It's not so much the snow as it is the cold; the high temperature earlier this week was 5. Five degrees. The low was well below zero. This pattern is supposed to repeat again this weekend as well, with the possibility of more snow tomorrow/tomorrow night. As you probably know, I hate winter and everything about winter, and desperately wish it would go away more quickly so that I can break out the t-shirts and flip-flops again. As it's only January 2, I have serious doubts of that happening anytime soon.

We return to work today, as mentioned before, and our normal work schedules of five days a week continues from now through...Memorial Day? Something like that? I don't think we have any other days off work until then, which is really goddamned depressing. We don't even get Martin Luther King Day off as far as I know, though as it's a Monday neither myself nor Daisy would have to work it anyway.