Welcome back, all.
So, in the time since we returned from Canada, there's been a lot going on -- as there usually is during any given summer. I'd like to chronicle the larger events here to catch up as we move forward. Since our return, we have:
- Gone to the eye doctor and have gotten new prescriptions
- Had our yearly physicals and bloodwork done
- Had a past-life reading done with a psychic (with Daisy's parents, and no, I'm not kidding)
- Set up a trip to visit my parents in NC
- I've gotten a new tattoo
- Gotten back into the swing of going to the gym 2-3 times a week
- Found out that my entire company is now work-from-home permanently
- I've been working on my writing/brainstorming new story ideas
- Enjoyed July 4th vacation days
Amongst some other less important things.
I guess I should start from the beginning and just slowly work down through my list of updates, right?
Before we left, I took the initiative to set up new eye exams for us, and Daisy set up the appointments for our yearly physicals. As a diabetic it is imperative that I have a new eye exam every year now so that they can check for macular degeneration or what-have-you. I don't have any eye problems, of course, other than my normal shitty vision -- but it's good that they actually want to check me for everything on a regular basis, and I'm also a sucker for new glasses frames/styles, so I've never put up a fight about it. An eye exam takes like half an hour and I can do it on a Saturday afternoon without any real problems, so it's an in-out thing for me. The worst part of it is getting my eyes dilated with those drops that sting like hell.
Well, about halfway through our trip to Nova Scotia, I got a text message (yes, we have full cell service in Canada) that said that our appointments had been abruptly canceled since our doctor would not be in the office on the day we'd chosen.
Normally I'd be like so what? Just schedule us with whoever's there. But apparently I would need to go through the full process of setting up new appointments for us. So, I waited until we were back home and I had access to my computer and keyboard again, and scheduled the exams for the following Saturday.
My eyes are fine; my prescription is only very slightly different than it was this time last year. I got the new prescription, went home that night and ordered five new pairs of glasses from my favorite glasses website (Payne Glasses, in case any of you were curious), charged to our FSA card. I received them in the mail earlier this week, and honestly cannot tell the difference between my previous prescription and my new one -- that's how close they are. I used this as an opportunity to go through a lot of my older frames with older prescriptions and box them up for donation to the local Lions Club, only keeping the ones I wanted/could not live without.
Daisy's prescription, however, worsened considerably -- and eventually I'm sure she'll order new glasses with her new prescription. I should probably bug her about that a bit so she does it soon before she puts it off too long and just forgets.
The best part of it all is that they have a new digital imaging machine that you can opt into using -- using it adds some dollars to your co-pay, but the bonus is that you don't have to get your eyes forcibly dilated with the drops anymore. It takes a hi-res picture of your eyes and they can scan that on the computer instead. So this begs the question of it's 2023, where was this a decade ago? If I'd had the opportunity to use this years ago I would have, as the dilation fucks my vision for far longer than it's supposed to, and it burns like hell.
So, there's that.
My bloodwork at the doctor wasn't great, but it also wasn't terrible. My A1C has gone up slightly, and my fasting glucose levels may as well be chocolate syrup, but everything else remains mostly normal. Or, well, normal for me, anyway. The statins I'm on have kept my cholesterol down -- in fact, it's a point or two below the lowest end of the normal expected range -- and I've lost a few pounds since I was last in the office. However, the nursing staff there doesn't have a clue about what's actually going on in my charts.
"Hi Brandon," the nurse said when I answered her call. "We wanted to go over your bloodwork with you. Dr. [Name] wants you to continue using the Trulicity--"
"I'mma stop you right there," I said. "I'm not on Trulicity. I've never been on Trulicity. I'm on 2000mg of Metformin per day and I was prescribed Glipizide, which I just picked up but have not started yet."
"Well, I'll have to talk to Dr. [Name] then to go over stuff with him then. He wants you to come back in six weeks to have another blood draw done to check your A1C--"
"Okay," I said, "I'm not doing that. A1C is a 3-month average number."
You know that and I know that.
"I can come back in September," I added, "as previously planned, to have it done again so that we can have an accurate, meaningful reading, but six weeks does not work for me."
"It's just a nurse visit," she said, getting snappy with me. "It's an in-and-out blood draw."
"Well, I will be out of town in six weeks," I said. "I can set up the three-month appointment for September."
"Let me talk to him and I'll call you back, okay? Bye." click.
I never got a call back.
Daisy is going to schedule the follow up appointment for September -- as it should be.
I'm not doing this "every six weeks" blood draw bullshit for the foreseeable future. It's not happening and it's pointless. My diabetes isn't at the point where I'm goddamn dying or anything, I don't have an A1C of 12 or 15 or anything like that -- it's just a point and a half higher than what they deem "ideal." And it varies greatly from time to time based on stress levels, diet, and exercise. I went from getting bloodwork done every six months to every three months to now, where they're trying to get me to do it every six weeks. No. I'm not doing that and it's overkill. I would desperately like to go back to the "see you in six months" plan we had going before. That was a good plan. I liked that plan a lot.
I have not yet started the Glipizide. It was free; it's covered by my insurance. But, it makes the blood sugar drop really low, you can't skip meals or snacks while you're on it, and one of the side effects of it is weight gain. For someone who has lost fifty pounds in the past five years, the last thing I want is weight gain. I work overnights and eat once, maybe twice a day. I can't go on a medicine where I have to constantly be within arm's reach of something to eat, with the alternative being "pass out from low blood sugar" because I can't be chained to my fridge or pantry 24/7. I have a job, I have to sleep, and I'm not going to start packing weight back on. I would like to discuss it further with my doctor, but...they haven't called me back after they said they were going to.
So, for now, it is what it is. To those ends, Daisy and I have returned to the gym and I've been working out 2-3 days a week. I've also put myself on a fairly strict diet, so that when I do go back into the office in the fall for further bloodwork, maybe my blood won't be so much like gravy.
In other news...
So as I mentioned above, about three weeks ago we (meaning me, Daisy, and her parents) went to see a psychic medium to get a "past life reading."
Yeah, that's a thing. You sit down with a psychic and he tells you about all of your past lives. Well, most of them, anyway. The ones he can "see."
I know. I know, okay?
I am a skeptic of most things supernatural. Yes, I have seen/heard/felt ghosts. Yes, I have seen UFOs more than once. I'll tell those stories here eventually, I am sure. But, in all my years on this planet, I have never met a real, true psychic. And I've seen many famous ones be debunked or otherwise outright come out and say that what they do is all parlor tricks -- "cold readings" and the like.
I am not one to be impressed by such tactics, or one to be swayed by them. As a lifelong skeptic, I feel that I need to clarify this before I continue forward with this story.
We had to make an appointment to meet with this guy -- named Andy -- a few months in advance. He's apparently famous in the psychic circles for what he does, has hundreds of podcasts, has written multiple bestselling books, etc. I'd never heard of him, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything since I don't really follow or generally even give purported psychics a second thought. So, when Daisy's mother mentioned that we should do the visit together, all of us, I sort of rolled my eyes about it and agreed to it because at the very least, it would be interesting, right?
The group session was $450 and was set for the middle of June. We would pay our half and the parents would pay theirs. Pricey, yes. Ridiculously pricey, yeah, I'll go ahead and say "yes' to that as well. But I thought, in the end, the hell with it -- maybe I'll get a good story idea or two out of it.
I'll also preface this by saying that I don't exactly know what I believe when it comes to "past lives." Do I believe in an "afterlife"? Eh. I don't really know. I do know that ghosts are a thing -- I 100% believe in ghosts because I've seen them and experienced ghostly encounters, but if we're talking about some sort of religious, heaven-and-hell afterlife? Angels and demons and the like? Hell no.
No pun intended there, of course.
I don't know if our consciousnesses continue to exist somewhere in the ether after we die. I'd like to think they likely do, in some respects, but I even have trouble believing that. I have an open mind about a lot of things, but that openness only goes so far.
"Don't you feel like you've been here before?" Daisy asked me, as I was talking to her about my skepticism. "Or that you somehow know things you shouldn't know?"
"Not really," I said with a shrug. And that's the truth. Not really. "If I have been here before I have no recollection of it, and I absolutely never experience the phenomenon of 'knowing something I shouldn't know' because I...well, I don't. I do not recall any times where I have some strange, unknown knowledge that I just inherently know or feel, without a rational explanation."
So, to be a good sport and for the sheer adventure of it all, I signed the digital consent form and the appointment was set for a Friday morning a few weeks after we would return from Canada.
After the Canada trip, I had no real PTO left remaining. But, the week of the appointment was especially hectic at work, and I did not get a lunch hour the entire week. Due to that, I felt justified in saying "hey y'all, I have a morning appointment that I have to sleep for beforehand, so I'm leaving at 2am on X day." Which I did -- I made sure my team knew in advance, and the night before the reading I turned off my stuff at 2, put up a temporary out-of-office message, and went upstairs to bed.
That morning we arrived at the psychic's "office" of sorts -- which looked like a cult leader's rec room -- he greeted us and we sat down at a conference table. We were told that it was a 90 minute reading, with each of us getting a little more than 20 minutes of individual time. We'd all be in the same room -- as in, nobody would leave the room, we'd all hear each other's readings. Okay. Fair enough, I guess.
There were things I expected him to say -- or, rather, things I "wanted to hear" when it came to my past life reading. I expected him to tell me that I was at one point in time a sailor, a commander/captain/general in some sort of army, a powerful leader, an artist, a musician, a revolutionary, etc. I expected those to be threads throughout my past lives, given my love of the sea, my need to be in authority/control freak-ism, my dream to always live on a coastline, etc.
Those -- at least most of those in some fashion or another -- were things that he said Dad had been in his past lives.
What did he say about me?
Well...
In my past lives I was apparently a wizard, a hermit who had a not-quite-tame hawk as a pet, an antique store dealer named Henry who wrote science fiction stories/novels and had fathered a wonderful daughter with a crazy woman, a court jester in medieval times, a French soldier (I guess during a renaissance-like period, so he said), and one of two leaders of a failing tribe in Africa -- that one I shared with Daisy, who was the other leader. The hawk is my spirit animal (or one of them, anyway -- he didn't tell me about any others), and I have two spirit guides -- Julia, who gets me out of my comfort zone, and Antoine, who tries to make me laugh. I have apparently lived something like 27 lives, though I can't remember the exact number. He can't give you a full rundown of every one of them, but he described what he "sees" as akin to a montage of scenes, events, etc and draws details from those things, and some lives don't show up in what he sees.
Do I believe any of it? Ehhhhh. I don't know. I really don't know. There are certainly things he touched on that I believe have been long-running threads throughout my life -- the need to make people laugh, my love of writing and science fiction, but there's also things that he could not have possibly known that shook me a bit -- like about the hawk being my spirit animal guide. I have always felt a special kinship of sorts with birds of prey for some reason -- hawks, falcons, eagles -- they've always fascinated me. But I could say the same thing about turtles too, and he didn't bring up anything about turtles. My favorite bird is the Blue Jay, which he also didn't bring up (but I now have a tattoo of, which I'll get to).
After the reading when we were back at the parents' house, we discussed the amount of stuff that we felt was "possibly accurate" versus things that given enough time and diligent searching, this psychic guy could have pulled from the internet about each of us. There's a lot of publicly-available knowledge out there about a lot of people, and while I try to keep my own online self locked down as much as possible, a lot of people don't care to. Some people have a much larger online presence than others, for example -- about 20 years ago, I was very internet famous for quite some time and had one of the most popular blogs in the world. That's not bragging, a joke, or an exaggeration -- it is true. While that blog was taken down and scoured from the internet about 18 years ago, I don't know what's still out there on some server collecting digital dust. I haven't a clue.
Adding to the apparent realism of the entire experience is that he could, if he is actually a hack, have told us anything that he would expect we'd want to hear. Because, of course, everyone wants to hear they were a famous rockstar, actor, author, Alexander the Great, Patton, Napoleon, Cleopatra, etc. He didn't do that, for any of us, which made me think okay, perhaps there's a shred of legitimacy here. But as I've said above, I've seen a lot of things in my life, but I have never met an actual psychic with actual, bona-fide psychic abilities. I'm honestly more convinced that they don't exist more than I'm convinced they do, because as the old joke goes, you never see the headline "psychic wins lottery."
So, I left the experience about the same level as skeptical as I entered it. I did find it interesting though that he used to be one of those "talk to the dead" medium people, as in people would come to him and he'd talk to their dead relatives and tell them what they were saying, etc. He apparently stopped doing that because it was too traumatic for him and mentally taxing -- to the point where it's written in bold letters on his website that he does not and will not do it anymore. That is intensely interesting to me.
So yeah, that was a thing we all did.
In other news, shortly after returning from Canada, we booked a trip to visit my parents this fall in NC. It will be the first time I've seen them in person in six years, and only the second time we will have seen them since Daisy and I were married. As I write this, it is July 5th. The trip is in two months. I am already about 85% packed and ready to go now.
This is who I am as a person, I suppose.
We've been trying to plan a trip to visit my parents for a few years now. Covid stopped it twice, in 2020 and 2021. Last year we would have been able to do it if Daisy's grandfather hadn't died, which made the trip to Nova Scotia on much shorter notice much more expensive and time-consuming. This year, we had some planning time and the means to actually schedule something in advance, book the plane tickets and rental car, and just do it. Plus, as you know, we've already gone to and returned from Nova Scotia this year already.
We have never seen my parents' house in North Carolina. My mother has been trying to get us to visit them there for some time, but my pushback was always that I wanted to visit home, which for me is West Virginia -- where my friends and family are. But, over the years, times have changed -- my parents will be selling the West Virginia house, probably sooner rather than later, as they now live in North Carolina full-time. Most of my friends back home have moved on in their lives, started their own families -- some (read: a lot) have even left the state, died, or dropped off the face of the earth. As such, there's not a lot left for me there but memories and ghosts of memories. Sure, I have a good chunk of family there in the area and a handful of friends I would love to see again, but as time has passed (it's now been 17 years since I moved out of West Virginia) my thoughts on it are that it feels less like home now and more like, simply, where I'm from. My home now is wherever Daisy is, where her parents are, where our cats are. My home has become, of all places, Omaha. My parents' home has now become North Carolina. To a certain extent I feel like a nomad, but to another extent I also wonder where my final home will be, because I can tell you now that it will not be Omaha. I do not want to live here forever, and really do not want to live here any longer than Daisy and I have to.
Anyway, everything's booked and we'll be flying down to North Carolina in two months to spend a week with my parents at their beach house, on the coastline, a stone's throw from the Outer Banks and Myrtle Beach. My suitcase is already packed (as I mentioned) but it'll probably need some revisions in the intervening time, so to speak, and I'm looking forward to seeing my senior-citizen parents again -- if only for a few short days.
That may be the last big trip we have planned until next year, honestly. We're likely going to spend a weekend in Chicago this fall, and will likely spend a weekend in Denver before that as well, but as for big, expensive travel...we're done and I want to keep it that way. It is very expensive to book trips, and it's time-and-PTO consuming. I have not yet put in the PTO for the trip to see my parents, but I will be doing so soon enough.
Speaking of PTO...
So, about a month ago -- right after we got back from Canada -- I was informed by my job that our parent company was finally closing down our last physical brick-and-mortar building here in Omaha. There are multiple "line groups" that work out of that building, most -- but not all -- of whom went work-from-home when Covid hit, and later returned to site. My line of business was one of the groups who never returned to site, as it was the largest line of business here in Omaha with about 300 employees. In the interim since we went work-from-home, the building that my team was in was closed down, torn down, and the property was sold to the nursing college next door to build a mental health facility -- something that all of us who worked in that building found extremely ironic and amusing.
At the time, that building and the "home office" of sorts, where I did my training waaay back in 2014, were the only two buildings left in town that the company owned. Now, they're selling off that building and all employees in it are now permanently work-from-home, along with my team/my program.
To recap a bit, my line of business has been work from home since Covid started; it was done as a temporary measure in the beginning (read: we all assumed we'd be returning to site once Covid was done), and then they sold the building we were in -- so at that point it was assumed that we were more or less permanently work-from-home, though nobody came out and flatly said it.
Last summer, there was a security breach and the giant conglomerate telecom company that we actually work for decided that it would be a good time to bring everyone back to the office. The employees basically rioted -- of the 300ish employees we had at the time, only about 5% were willing to go back to the office to work. The rest said they would either quit on the spot or would put in their two weeks' notice on the day they were forced to return. Of my team at the time, only two were willing to go back to site to work -- both of them very begrudgingly, and one of them was in El Paso, not Omaha (about half our teams, roughly, operate out of El Paso).
So, faced with the prospect of our entire program shutting down, that plan was quietly abandoned and new, stronger security measures were put in place for our teams. El Paso's physical location was quietly shut down a few months later, to the point where even if they'd tried to force hands and make our agents down there go back to work in an office, the El Paso agents couldn't physically do that anymore. It was at that point where I was able to relax a bit and realize that this job would really be permanently work-from-home.
Now, with the closure of our last open office here in Omaha, that has been completely cemented. As long as we're under contract with our parent company, unless said company gives us the funds to buy another building and mandates we move into it, we are all absolutely work-from-home forever.
There are other looming issues on the horizon, though -- we know that there are staffing cuts coming. Not everyone will be keeping their jobs, and not everyone will be doing what they are doing now after new changes roll through. Not everyone will be happy. It's coming and I've known it's been coming for quite some time. I feel relatively safe in my position and in where I am, what I do, etc -- because I have some inside knowledge on a lot of what's going to happen. However, there are likely a lot of others who also feel safe in their positions who absolutely shouldn't. And when the hammer falls, it is likely to become very ugly very fast. The timeline we've been given is about four months or so before all of this stuff starts going into effect -- so, right before the holidays.
I have said before that I do not like my job, but I do not overtly dislike it either. There's a lot of toxicity in the job I have, and I have to navigate around it and through it. There's also a lot of good as well. I wouldn't have stuck around so long if it weren't for the people I work with and who work for me. I wouldn't have stuck around if we were forced to go back to the office, either -- that is a hard no for me. I've gotten bonuses, I've gotten raises, and I've garnered a lot of respect and thanks from not only my own peers and leadership, but from C-level corporate leadership from time to time as well. I would love to believe that I am fully safe and that I am not going anywhere; I am likely near the top of the list of "safe" employees, and I know I'm at the top of the list for promotion to a program director or what-have-you -- but I can never fully validate that or not at least be a little wary. All I can do is do the best job I can when I'm there and on the clock.
Finally, the last thing I wanted to talk about in this already-lengthy entry is that this past Saturday, I finally got a new tattoo. Behold:
It was $200, plus a $40 tip to the very sweet, kind and talented artist who took time out of her afternoon to sketch it up and put it on me. It took a little over two hours to do from start to finish, while we had some of the heaviest rain I've seen in many years pour down outside the entire time I was in the studio.
It is larger than it appears in the photo -- it takes up about 80% of my outer left forearm. It's larger than the roses I had done about two years ago (also at this same studio). I am very happy with it.
Yes, it hurt -- in some places, at some times. The actual line art didn't really hurt at all, but some of that coloring and shading was painful in many places. It wasn't unbearable and wasn't any worse than the roses on my other arm. For a good chunk of time I actually had to lay down on the table (it gave her a better angle to do the art) and I could have -- realistically -- slept through it if I'd wanted to. I did not.
In the five days since I got the tattoo, I have been meticulously taking care of it, and it's gone through the normal processes of healing as expected -- first, sensitivity and soreness, with lots of ink loss from the top layer of skin, then a few days of healing where that ache/sensitivity/soreness slowly fades away, and now we're at the stage where it has to be kept moisturized/lotioned heavily 24/7 because that top layer of skin is now drying out and will begin to scab and itch. Scabbing is bad, obviously, so keeping balm or lotion on it while that top layer of skin is coming off (think of how a sunburn peels) is crucial in the healing process. If you've never had a tattoo and get one, especially a larger one -- yes, after a few days it will start to dry out and itch. Do not scratch it. Get some good tattoo balm like Hustle Butter or the Viking Revolution stuff and slather it the fuck down multiple times a day until it's greasy. Rub it in multiple times over multiple hours until it absorbs fully into the skin, and you won't really scab up -- the skin will be so soft and moisturized that it'll basically just dissolve in the shower. Do that for a week or so and you'll basically be healed and can go about your life without needing to keep close tabs on your new body art.
"So what will your next one be?" Daisy asked me.
"I think I'm done for a while," I said.
"Didn't you say you wanted to get a new tattoo every year on your birthday? What happened to that?"
Note: it is NOT my birthday -- but on my birthday last year the temperature was like -15, we'd gotten a snowstorm the night before, and the internet went out for like three days...so it wasn't exactly the best time.
"I know," I said. "But eh, I think I'm done for a while unless something else pops up that I know I want. The Blue Jay is the last thing I wanted for some time."
This is true. I had the roses on the right arm and wanted something on the left to complement them. Now that I have the Blue Jay, that should be enough for now. I don't really have a deep desire to get any more art on me anytime soon. For one, it's expensive, and for two, I feel like my needs for expression have basically been met at this point.
So, that's about all that's been going on recently. There's some other little things happening, of course, but nothing major and as they say, "nothing to write home about." I return to work tonight after taking a few days off over the 4th of July, and I'll be back in the groove for the foreseeable future -- at least until our trip to North Carolina.
Onward!
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