Sunday, June 21:
Working from home, day 48. Father's Day. I call my dad early in the morning before I go to bed, so early that my mother isn't even awake yet, and then I sleep. When I awaken, severe storms are predicted for the area. It rains a bit and remains dark, and there's a few rumbles of thunder, but nothing else happens. I eat and spend time with the wife, and afterwards she calls her own father and we talk to him for a while before I have to ready myself for work. One of my agents lets me know that a cockroach has crawled out of her work PC (the one she brought home from the office) and, freaked out, she puts the PC inside several trash bags -- peripherals and all -- and sticks them in the garage. This, of course, means she "can't work" and requests our company "send out an exterminator and pay for it all." After consulting with my leadership team and HR, she is told in no uncertain terms that our company is not paying for anything, and she won't get paid while she chooses not to work, but will send out an exterminator for a free inspection. Any necessary "treatment," however, is on her to pay for. She takes this information much better than I thought she would, and opts for the "not working" route while this is set up. Aside from a few internet outages for my team, the night remains quiet. My foot begins to hurt again, after it had previously completely stopped. This irritates me, because even though the pain isn't bad -- very mild, as mentioned before -- it tells me that I'll never be completely rid of this gout bullshit no matter what I do. I drink over half a gallon of water and take some ibuprofen, which seems to help it a little bit, and make hashbrowns in the oven in the night. Around 6AM, while talking to my cat who was laying on the couch next to me, I see -- out of the corner of my eye -- a shadow appear on the wall in the hallway at the foot of the stairs, a shadow of a head and shoulders, as if someone were coming down the stairs and had just stepped into the light. I immediately snap my focus to it, as I thought it may have been the wife coming downstairs for something without me hearing her...and it's gone. I get up and check, and the house is perfectly silent, the wife is still upstairs in bed, and the cats did not seem to notice or be bothered. So, it's a ghost, I suppose. I am slightly unnerved, but meh. I've seen stranger shit over the years; things like this don't really faze me anymore. I text Daisy's parents to tell them as I figure they'll find it amusing, and don't get a response. At the end of the night, I leave relatively on time, go upstairs to wake Daisy, not even bothering to tell her about the incident because I'm so tired, and go to bed.
Monday, June 22:
Working from home, day 49. No new comics in the mail. However, I do get confirmation that batches 10, 11, and 12 have shipped (I purchased them from the same seller as 7, 8, and 9 because they're good deals and I had a $10 off coupon code). My headset for my work computer and my new dandruff shampoo both arrive in the mail. It rains in the morning hours while I'm falling asleep, and storms very briefly in the evening when Daisy gets home. The foot still hurts, much the same as it did on Sunday, but no worse. Ibuprofen definitely helps dull it somewhat, but I'd rather not have to take it every day for a week until it goes away. If it's a gout attack, it's a very quiet and dull-achy one. We still have not heard from the washing machine repairman, and it has now been five days. I make a mental note to wait a full week before reaching out to see when he's going to return. Laundry slowly keeps piling up, after all, and if possible I'd rather not have to devote my full weekend to taking care of it. Daisy takes our old broken box spring, formerly on our bed, and strips it to the bare slats and sparse, bent wire springs -- then takes it out to the garden and stands it up on end at the edge of one of our raised beds. It is a trellis for our cantaloupe plants. This proves to be an ingenious idea and really shows off the woman's creativity. I eventually tell Daisy about the "ghost" experience, which she finds sort of amusing. While I work, she also makes a pesto-covered pizza and pesto cauliflower/broccoli gratin, both vegan (of course) which we eat before she goes to bed. My night of work is relatively steady, with rolling internet outages through the area taking out several of my folks for some time one by one -- only one of them remains hard down throughout the night. At the end of the night, I make her a pot of tea on the stove, go wake her up, and when she goes in to work a short time later I finally let my exhaustion overtake me and go to bed.
Tuesday, June 23:
Working from home, day 50. Still no new comics in the mail. The wife's birthday. She goes to work; she took last Friday off as her "birthday day off" and I am taking this coming Sunday off to get some extra time with her as well, so today is business as usual since it's in the middle of the week. Still no calls from the washer repairman; I've been staying up a little longer than usual in the mornings and keeping a bit of a closer eye on my phone in the event that he calls when he's on his way instead of giving us a prior heads up on it. At the same time, I also understand that ordering a few big, expensive parts can probably take a while, so I'm remaining patient. I find out that apparently my parents have sent the wife a package of some sort for her birthday, without telling either of us, as my mail tracker tells me it was shipped from the post office two miles from my parents' house, and will be arriving on Thursday. When I awaken in the afternoon hours, I find that it's in the low 70s outside (feels like September or October, and not June) and that Daisy's parents have made jam for her for her birthday. I shower and get dressed and start to feel marginally like a human again. I still have not shaved; it's been about a month. I keep meaning to trim up the beard and shave my neck down somewhat to help shape it, but when I shower it's generally in the afternoon hours when I first wake up (like, straight from bed to shower) and I just don't have the energy or mental capacity to do so. Foot still hurts, but I begin pounding water and take my Allopurinol for the day, along with four ibuprofen, and the ache lessens a bit. I tell the wife that I plan to wake up early if possible on Thursday and mow the grass. I check my work email to see more messages in my inbox than I've seen on any average afternoon in weeks, which is a bad omen for the overnight hours as it means it's been pretty busy today. As I am sort of susceptible to some advertising (and because I've wanted it for years), I purchase this shirt and can't wait for it to arrive specifically so I can wear it in public. Well, once we can actually go out in public like normal people again. The wife works in the garden and comes inside to tell me that there is a fist-sized wasp's nest attached to the overhang of the house right outside my office window. I go outside to check, and she is right -- only it is a yellowjacket nest, and it is an active one with several bees on it and several active egg cells that I can see are full. The 25-foot wasp killer spray will not spray that high -- it gets within a few inches of it but no closer. However, we have a garden hose with a power-washer setting on the nozzle. Because modern problems require modern solutions, I open up the hose full throttle on the nest from the ground, and take it out like a sniper in Mosul. I then proceed to stomp and grind the nest to death once it falls, and coat it in a generous layer of the wasp killer poison, doing the same with two of the living yellowjackets that came down with it. I feel like a hero. I also hate those fucking bees, and especially hate yellowjackets. Once I get settled in to work in the evening I keep pounding the water, in both regular and seltzer form, and eventually the foot pain mostly goes away again. We'll see if it stays gone. The night is steady but not overly crazy, and there's some admin stuff I need to take care of (coaching, time corrections) as well as a few major issues I help out with, and I end up leaving roughly half an hour late.
Wednesday, June 24:
Working from home, day 51. No new comics again today. The wife lets me know that we received an automated email from the warranty people for our washer machine, saying the repairman was trying to get in touch with us -- neither of us have had any missed calls. I call to inquire and am told that they didn't reach out to us, that was the warranty reaching out indeed in an automated fashion, but that our parts arrived yesterday and our technician could come out and install them on Friday morning. I told the receptionist that was great and had her put it on the schedule, so apparently that'll be my Friday morning. I look forward to having a good, working washer again. I also receive an email from eBay stating that I have yet another $10 coupon waiting for me, so (because I can) I order a for now, final batch of CDs -- lucky number 13. It is a 300-disc batch and from the same seller I ordered the previous 300-disc batch from (batch 6). It is my hopes that by the time I make my way through 10, 11, 12, and 13 that I will have burned out any interest I had in continuing this hobby, and/or life will have returned to some semblance of normal to where I don't have to use the CDs as a crutch to keep me going and give me something to look forward to. I fully realize how sad and depressing this sounds, but I suppose we all cope in our own ways. Some turn to drugs, I turn to music. I also think back to how 20 years ago, being able to scrape enough cash together to buy even a single CD (from a record store, no less) to add to my collection was amazing, and I'd listen to those albums start to finish over and over -- how times have changed, folks. Anyway, I wake up in the afternoon to find the house hot and stuffy. It is again in the 80s outside, and my allergies have come back, so for the first two hours I'm awake, I can barely breathe. I immediately go downstairs and make the AC run, and go get the garbage cans and recycle bin back into the garage. Batches 10, 11, and 12 have an expected arrival date of Monday, so says my tracking number. Let's see if that holds true. 13 will ship when it ships, and I'm given a preliminary ETA of the second week of July. My employee with the roach that crawled out of her PC is in the process of treating her home, though I don't know by what means, as once the PC was bagged up inside bags full of roach spray/what-have-you she found several more dead ones inside the bag once she reopened it. She expects to return on Sunday. I let our collected crew know on our internal trail, which includes our executive director as well as our site/program director and HR. As soon as I'm logged in for work, I am asked to jump on a call with the director of our sister site in El Paso, the site that handles the weekends, and I bridge on my escalation manager colleague as well. Within five minutes I am told that we need slight modifications to our working schedules as our overnight manager down there has accepted a new job that she starts on Monday, and we are asked what we can work and when. Mind you, I really enjoy my current Sunday-through-Wednesday night schedule, and I make sure this is known...along with my inability to work Fridays at this juncture. I am told that I need to shift from a 4x10 schedule to a 5x8 schedule and, well, basically to deal with it. I discuss this on the side with my escalation manager colleague, who brings up the good point that "a steady paycheck with a crappy schedule is better than no paycheck at all," which is indeed sound advice. I summarily switch to a Sunday through Thursday schedule, 10pm to 7am. I really don't want to do this, but it does offer some incentives...like extra sleep time in the afternoons and early evenings, less time per night chained to my desk, and more evening time with Daisy -- and the need to only put in 8 instead of 10 hours of PTO for any night that I take off for the foreseeable future. The drawbacks are that I will no longer have Fridays to get stuff done around the house as I always have, as I'll now be sleeping most of the day on Friday (or at least a good chunk of it), and it's going to make doctor's appointments and job interviews harder to schedule further down the road. Daisy isn't particularly happy with it either, until I point out the clear advantages and note that not a whole lot will change when it comes to the time we actually spend together -- the only thing that really changes is that I sleep on Friday instead of taking care of laundry and housework and the like. The new schedule goes into affect for me on Monday, as I am already out on Sunday night on PTO put in over a month ago for Daisy's belated birthday time. It is what it is, I suppose -- and it's far better than needing to spend an extra night in the office, now that I'm home. The rest of the night goes really slowly, slowly enough to where I can spend almost three hours of it without access to my email while I archive our shared mailbox, and I leave on time.
Thursday, June 25:
Day off. No new comics in the mail, yet again. Shipping for batches 10, 11, and 12 still have an arrival date of Monday the 29th. Or so says the shipping. Given the full month delay of the last shipment from this seller, I'm not holding my breath. But, also, that was a shipping label thing too, so meh. One of my two little old lady cats has had a big bump/fluid-filled cyst on the middle of her head between her ears for the past six months. It never seemed to bother her or give her pain, and she likes to rub it on us when she gets attention (it must feel good for her to get it massaged). Over time, it enlarged to the size of a shooter marble. Well, this morning, Pete -- my male cat -- gets into a fight with her and slashes it open, and it completely empties/deflates. I have no earthly idea where the fluid went, but it's not on her anywhere I can see. I rub some antibacterial goo on her to help protect her from any infection, but she seems fine -- not in pain, mobile and talkative (in meows, of course) as always. Against the wishes of the repairman but because I am going crazy with all of the laundry piling up without having a machine for more than a week now, I secretly (read: without telling the wife) run a load of whites to test it, using the last settings I left it on before. It completes successfully, normally, with no problems. With this knowledge in hand, and knowing that the repairman arrives tomorrow morning (so if it does go bonkers, at least it'll be fixed quickly), I say "fuck it" and begin washing things in the afternoon hours. My sanity and patience levels for waiting on things are at critical mass, and few things bother me as much as having things that I need to be able to do and not being able to do them, or being told not to do them for one reason or another. I am also not going to spend my entire weekend doing load after load of laundry because it's piled up. I shower, and finally break out my old school safety razor to trim up the edges around my beard (lower neck, upper cheek, mainly shaping maintenance, which is far easier to do with the single-blade safety razor). Daisy's birthday package from my parents arrives. As she comes home and goes straight into building two more raised beds for the rhubarb plants her mother gave us, and then works in the garden until dark, she does not open it yet. She later comes upstairs to find me running laundry, and gives me a panicked look. I explain my reasoning to her, and she sees the rationality in it. Two loads error out and I have to reset and run them twice, but the third runs without incident. This takes the amount of laundry that needs to be done down to about half. While Daisy decompresses quietly, before she showers, I sit down in my chair around 9PM and legit fall asleep. I wake up sometime after 3, groggy and in my daytime clothes, long after she has gone to bed. I have not eaten a dinner, I don't know if she actually ate a dinner, and I assume she showered, but I never heard any of it -- I was dead to the world during that six-hour span.
Friday, June 26:
Day off. Daisy has a 7:30am doctor's appointment to address some minor issues, so she gets up and leaves the house super-early (she's fine, by the way). By about 7:50, I get a call from the washer repairman. He tells me he'll be back to replace the parts between 8:30 and 9. He arrives at 8:29, comes upstairs, swaps out the parts, tests it, confirms it good, and is back in his truck on his way at 8:40. It legit took him eleven minutes to fix everything. I immediately strip the bed and, to test the washing machine myself, run an empty load on the "clean washer" cycle (as I've needed to do that for a while anyway). The washer runs as if it is shiny and new again. While he was here, I asked the repairman if he works on a lot of those particular machines, and he replies "Oh yeah, tons of them, and I've only seen them last about five years, max. They don't make them to last anymore." This is not the first time I've heard this from a service tech. My machine has a five year warranty that ends in February, and this is the third time we've had a service guy out to the house to fix it since we bought it. With its all-new internal components (all covered by warranty, so we didn't have to pay a dime on any of these service calls) I'm hoping that it lasts for another five years, seeing as it's basically a new machine now on the inside. On a whim, Daisy looked up how much the exact same machine is selling for now, and it has actually gone up in price by about $200 since we bought ours. Anyway, it works perfectly again, so that's one big stressor off my shoulders right now. In other news, today is 6/26 -- 626 for some reason has always been a weird lucky number for me. I don't really know why, but I've seen it pop up a lot of places in a lot of contexts for me over the years, in a mostly good fashion. I also generally get sick around this time of year too, almost every year, but surprise, that hasn't happened yet this year because (ironically) a pandemic happened. I take more ibuprofen for my foot, which isn't getting any worse but is still aching and not pleasant -- probably because my diet this week has been shitty and because I haven't drank enough water the past 2-3 days. I tell the wife I need to eat cleanly this weekend and drink as much water as possible to help flush this shit out of my system, because even though it's not bad and is a minor annoyance at best, it's still not fun, and I'd rather not have to take 12 ibuprofen a day (three sets of four pills) to remain mostly pain-free. As a sidenote, going up and down stairs is the worst part of it; stairs suck. This is the last Friday I have to myself free and clear for the foreseeable future, as my new schedule at work starts on Monday -- Fridays after this point will be spent mostly asleep. Well, asleep for part of the day anyway. I'd like to set up some sort of sleep schedule on Fridays where I'm in bed by 8 and up by around 1 or 2, so that I can still have the afternoon hours to take care of stuff around the house that I don't have any other real time to do (mowing the grass, doing laundry and dishes, etc). It's a good plan on paper, but putting that into practice may be harder than I think. [EDIT: this never happens.] In other news, cases of Covid-19 are surging nationwide, in many places far worse than before. Lockdowns are starting to go back into effect. The US had its highest ever one-day total for new cases yesterday. Not in March or April, yesterday. This virus is killing people by the thousands and it's not going away, and none of us are safe until there's a vaccine that works and is mass-distributed. I mow the grass and take a nap in the afternoon hours, and awaken shortly after the wife arrives home. We eat dinner and watch an episode of Supergirl before she goes to bed. Still no new comics in the mail.
Saturday, June 27:
Day off. All of the laundry in the house is done. I see a new message when I log into my comics' subscription accounts:
Thank you for your patronage throughout this COVID 19 Pandemic! We are happy to announce that most subscriptions have resumed shipping at this time! Publication was halted and has resumed for select titles as early as May 2020. We are still working to assist with any missing issues due to the pandemic. Please make any claims for any issues that released through March by 07/01/2020 for assistance. Thank you once again for your continued patience and we are happy to help and resume providing subscriptions.
I mean, that's nice, I suppose. It doesn't really apply to me; I have received no new books in the mail since the first week of April, so anything that would've shipped with March cover dates I've already received, and probably (for some of them) up to May cover dates at least. This gives me hope that I'll start getting my stuff soon, though. Getting new comics, as I've been hoping to get for well over a month now, will help with the feelings of depression and isolation that are slowly creeping in more by the day. We get up and Daisy makes vegan sausage and egg biscuits for us for breakfast, and we watch an episode of Supergirl. The parents are supposed to come over to visit us at some point in the afternoon to sit on our back porch for a bit, so she calls them to find out they're already in the car and on their way (with no notice to us, mind you). We scramble to get the chairs and tables on the back porch and to get the citronella candles lit, and they sit with us outside for two and a half hours -- during which we dodge bees and wasps, and I get bitten painfully, and forcefully enough to draw blood, by a horsefly which decides to make my leg its meal. A horsefly! They leave, we put all of our stuff away and change clothing, and I take a nap in my chair (though that wasn't originally my plan, I was just really tired from the heat). I awaken right around the time it's getting dark to find that Daisy has already eaten dinner, but she's made me a big (vegan) chicken wrap that she has placed in the fridge for when I wake up. I eat that and a few other things, and together we watch four more episodes of Supergirl in rapid succession. We could have watched more, but I was sort of done for the night. I come upstairs to work on my writing, and later she joins me on the top floor of the house to shower and go to bed. During this time a loud, strong thunderstorm rolls through the area, which finally makes the temperature drop below 75 degrees. I get up out of my chair and go to bed around 6AM.
Sunday, June 28:
Day off, because of PTO I put in a month ago. Payroll is already taken care of, so I don't have to worry about that, so my focus for the day lies in two things -- working on my writing and spending time with the wife. Batches 10, 11, and 12 don't arrive until tomorrow, all of the laundry is done, my foot still hurts but isn't getting worse (or better, really) and it's a day where we have no conceivable real plans because I'd normally be working on Sunday night. We get up between noon and 1, and both of us eat and watch an episode of Supergirl. Daisy decides to go out and pick up some materials from the parents and from Lowe's to fix one or both of the computer chairs we have in the house, and to keep myself occupied I begin the hours-long, once-a-month-or-so process of backing up my hard drive. After all, I have the night off and the new CDs don't arrive until tomorrow, so might as well use some of my time constructively in the interim. While I do that, I receive an email that tells me batch 13 has shipped and should arrive between July 2 and 15. This is a little slow for my tastes, but whatever, it'll take me at least that long to get through 10, 11, and 12. My Father's Day present for my dad was put in the mail yesterday, by the way (a week late, for which I sent my apologies) -- it's a 32gb flash drive, filled with all the best music (that he'd like, anyway) that I collected from batches 1-9, literally thousands of hours worth of records. This is why I needed to get through the archiving of what I had as quickly as possible and why I did not write about that part of the project here before, on the off chance he'd check out this blog in the interim. Part of my backup process today is to move the entirety of my music off my main backup hard drive and onto the one that I've saved all of the CD archives onto, so that I can have a backup drive for actual computer data and the other devoted to nothing but music. It is very hot and muggy outside today and looks/feels like it's going to storm again, so that pretty much kills any plans we had to go for a walk/jog this afternoon to help my foot feel better -- the more exercise I get, I've found, the better the foot feels. After I mowed the grass on Friday, my foot felt better than it had in days. This leads me to believe that my continual gout or gout-like problems are from inactivity -- inactivity of being cooped up in this house for over three months now with no real outlet for exercise. And, really, don't tell me "well you could exercise at home with all your free time now" because everyone knows that shit doesn't work; I barely sleep normal hours, it's not like I have the energy to do anything I don't have to. What I need is to be able to get out of this house and move around, need to be able to actually get some real exercise -- it's something I've been severely lacking since this pandemic started. Drinking a ton of water (some days easier said than done) and just taking my meds clearly isn't enough. I have one can of Monster left -- from the 24-pack I purchased almost three full months ago now -- and I plan to drink it tonight to stay awake in the overnight hours. This is a monumental achievement, actually. I used to go through a 24-pack of Monster in a little more than a week, sometimes two or three weeks if I was taking it slow. I made this case last three months, mainly because I think that drinking it constantly contributed to the gout as well as not being able to really get any good quality sleep. With my new eight-hour shifts starting tomorrow, I should not have much of a problem getting enough sleep anymore. Daisy tells me that when she switched from 4x10 to 5x8, it made a world of difference to her in a good way. She wasn't constantly exhausted anymore, she felt like she had more downtime, etc. While I don't think the latter will really be the case most of the time, I'm hoping that the former is. In the evening, Daisy makes us big stuffed burritos for dinner, filled with black bean salsa, cilantro lime rice, soy curls, and cheese -- and we watch two episodes of Supergirl. I return upstairs and by the time she comes up to shower and go to bed, I have (apparently) already passed out while listening to episodes of Joe Rogan's podcast on my mp3 player. I awaken around 2 and continue my overall overnight plan of writing (you'll see the fruits of that labor between this post and the next one; it's a top 100 record review from batches 1-9), and I run a load of the wife's laundry from the weekend. Before I know it, the sun is coming up.
Monday, June 29:
Working from home, day 52. Well, here we are, the first day of my new work schedule. It all seems very weird to me, even though the only real change is that I start two hours later every night and I'm on shift on Thursdays too. According to our sister site's director in El Paso, apparently Thursday nights suck for him just as much as Tuesday nights suck for me. However, this week we have a bit of a reprieve, in a manner of speaking -- Thursday night after midnight is July 3, the "holiday observed" day for our crew (since the holiday itself is on Saturday). That means it's treated just like July 4th and is a paid holiday. While I would imagine I'll have to work most of the night (working two hours from 10-12 isn't exactly helpful for the team) I might be able to cut out early if it's dead and there's nothing else going on. The thought crosses my mind that I could just put in 2 hours of PTO for the night and not work at all, but I'd rather not leave the boys high and dry during the beginning of a holiday weekend, no matter how busy or quiet it may be. It's not like I'm actually in the office anymore, so it's not like spending a few extra hours on my computer downstairs is a huge imposition if it means the job gets done; Daisy doesn't even get any holiday time off because the 4th falls on a Saturday this year -- which is a working day for the bank, but not for her. My team, at least, gets a paid holiday, partially because they don't work it. Anyway. I am informed via email by the USPS that batches 10, 11, and 12 will arrive today, and are currently in the post office here in Omaha, scheduled for delivery with the rest of today's mail. I get paid Friday (I did the payroll Saturday morning so I wouldn't have to worry about it during my night off), and it can't come soon enough. I have at least five bills that have to be paid almost as soon as that paycheck clears, and the rest of them due shortly thereafter too. After drinking 16oz of tart cherry juice and a lot of water yesterday, my foot now feels better than it has felt in a week. Apparently the cherry juice kills gout because of its anti-inflammatory properties. I don't exactly know how, but it works. And quickly. By the time I awaken in the afternoon the pain and (very minor) swelling is almost completely gone. The new CD batches arrive as promised, in a larger box than usual -- I open them to find not three, but four bundles of CDs. I dunno if the seller meant to throw in an extra one, but I'm not questioning it. So score, I've got batches 10-13 in this set, and the other set that's still coming will be a 14th. I crack open batch 10 and begin archiving, and immediately find a Savage Garden album I was secretly hoping would be thrown into one of these sets somewhere. At first glance, 10 seems like it'll be a decent haul. In the evening, the wife goes to our gym to cancel our membership (we originally planned to renew it later, once the Covid crisis passes) and they refuse to cancel it without her paying the "yearly fee" of $50 -- this is in addition to the $20 a month they charge us anyway. They tell her that to avoid that fee, she should've canceled it two months ago -- the gym was closed two months ago due to the pandemic, just reopened this month, and memberships can only be canceled in person or via certified mail, which is horseshit of the highest order. She gets the management's contact info and writes a strongly worded, but polite, email and BCCs me on it. Work is slow at the beginning and ramps up more as the night progresses, culminating in some weird email server issues in the morning as I'm getting ready to leave. Despite the hectic-ness of the latter half of the night, I must admit that the night did seem faster than usual, and I can get used to that -- even though I stayed half an hour later than usual finishing some stuff up.
Tuesday, June 30:
Working from home, day 53. Despite the rather large amount of water I drank last night in the overnight hours (and continued to drink this morning after I got off work), my foot is aching again and feels a bit swollen, again. I take some ibuprofen, which does really seem to help it once it kicks in, and wonder when or if this mild "attack" is ever going to just move off and go away once more. It took a good month and two different cycles of steroids to get the elbow/arm attack to fully go away, and I really hope that's not in my future every time I have a gout-like issue. The morning is already hot and muggy -- over 80 degrees before 8AM -- and it understandably makes me feel a little groggy. When I wake up in the afternoon (later than usual, at almost 5PM) it's even worse, and I begin having allergy issues to boot; the weather says we have the possibility of severe storms in the overnight hours, starting around midnight. This is, with my new schedule, right around when I'd get into the swing of needing to pay attention to my team's workload, so hopefully if it does storm, it doesn't knock out power or internet. I quickly shower and then continue archiving batch 10, to find that a good chunk of the albums are either too damaged to play or won't pull up in the CD identifier system (thankfully, most of what won't is either Jesus-y, or classical or Christmas music -- both of which I already have a ton of). The wife stops on her lunch hour to make sure I have more cherry juice for my foot as well as a few packs of the seltzer I asked for, and stops at her parents' on the way home to pick up some corn they got for us. Once she arrives home, the replacement part has arrived for the broken office chair her father gave us a few weeks ago. She bangs the shit out of the old chair's parts in order to get them removed, and she can't get them apart to put on the new parts. Neither can I, as they're wedged in really tightly and are near impossible to disassemble (even though Youtube videos show people taking them apart easily). She still needs to order the same part to fix my other chair I'm currently sitting in -- the one that exploded on me about a month ago in the middle of my overnight shift. I'm convinced that the chairs are at least partially responsible for the duration of the gout "attacks" I've been experiencing; they force me to sit in an uncomfortable position with my feet in likewise uncomfortable positions for very long stretches of time. At work, a few applications have come in for the newly-created "Team Lead" positions for our overnight crews (part of why my schedule has changed) and I spend part of my evening conducting two interviews -- of people currently on my team -- to help decide who will become my new Team Lead. The Lead position is basically a personal escalation manager and backup for when I'm out of the office, but it does come with a slight pay bump and it isn't a 24x7 position like mine is. It's generally considered to be a steppingstone to a full management position. The rest of the night goes fairly smoothly, and several large, loud thunderstorms finally roll through the area. Also, as a bonus, my foot basically stops hurting -- like, completely -- and while still a little swollen, feels otherwise normal.
Wednesday, July 1:
Working from home, day 54. I will mention that I still haven't received any comics in the mail yet, and this week marks twelve weeks I have not done so -- three whole months. I wake up late (well after 5) and go get the single garbage can from the front walk and bring it back inside. Omaha's trash people have decided that they're now only going to pick up recycling every other week, which is stupid. Our recycling bin is already overflowing (as is my own recycling in my office, which is in its own bag and can) and we have another full week, a week containing a holiday weekend as well, before we can get it picked up. This infuriates both me and the wife, who recycle everything we can and pay an exorbitant sum of money every month for gas/water/sewer and trash/recycling already. Like, get another truck, Omaha. Hire some more people. It is once again hot, and so humid you feel like you're drowning when you go outside and breathe in the air. However, the "Sahara dust cloud" that apparently blew over our area this past week never seemed to affect me in any way whatsoever, and it's not like you can see it blowing around or anything. I continue through archiving batch 10, but am not finding a lot that's worth talking about. This batch more than most contains a lot of Christmas music and classical stuff, along with a huge helping of country and Jesus, or (sometimes) country Jesus. It also comes with a lot of discs that just won't play, or are broken with big cracks in them (meh, it comes with the territory) or my database won't pull a track listing for, which is disheartening. At this rate I'll be able to start batch 11 tomorrow, which I hope is a better batch than this one. Daisy returns home from work after a trip to Lowe's to get more tools with which to pound the shit out of the chair to try to fix it -- and she succeeds. I now have a new, adjustable, rotating and rolling chair for my work computer downstairs, and while it's not perfect, it is far more comfortable than the dining room chair I had been sitting on before, which was wholly uncomfortable even with a blanket and a cushion on it for extra padding. At work, we are given the go ahead to offer one of the Team Lead positions to one of my agents in El Paso, one of the two folks I interviewed last night. The second one I interviewed is waiting in the wings, and I have at least one or two more folks who are planning to apply before the posting is taken down and we go with what we have. Because of the program changes, as of tonight I now have sixteen people reporting up to me, only about half of whom are here in Omaha. This doesn't necessarily sit well with me, but it is what it is. I learn how much it doesn't sit well with me when I begin receiving quite literally 100 emails per hour because of all those people, and the customers they're conversing with, on all of the issues they're working. I haven't seen an inbox like this since the old days of the job many years ago. The night remains hectic basically until I leave in the morning, and I'll have to issue some disciplinary actions to some of my team members later for a bit of it...but I decide to put it off until tomorrow or Sunday, because by the end of the night I am burnt out.
Thursday, July 2:
Working from home, day 55. Batch 10 is complete; from it, I got a mere 55 albums, most of them classical, country, or Christmas. It is, overall, a rather lackluster batch. I begin batch 11, which at first glance looks to be about the same level of quality, with very few real highlights in it. Meh, it gives me something to do, at least. And an occupied mind is not generally a depressed or stir-crazy one. On my lunch hour from work I do a load of laundry, as the wife asked if I was planning to do some. That's generally code for "hey, wash my clothes please" which I am happy to oblige her on. My foot has begun to ache again, which begins to slowly drive me crazy as I thought I was done with this horseshit. Like, this thing has to run its course and go away, because I've got a life to live here. Before I go to bed in the morning, I get a knock on my door; it's the local ISP folks saying they will be in and out of our backyard a few times today to run new fiber optic lines for their carrier. I tell them this is fine (they're actually legally entitled to do it whether I want them to or not, it's in our home's title policy) and I'm just so tired that I hope they do it quietly and don't screw up our garden while they do. I hear some minor noise from their work in the early afternoon hours, but by the time I get up and get out of the shower, they're long gone and I see new wire on the pole. So, I mean, I guess they're done. The neighbor texts me and asks what's going on, as her daughter is home and saw the workers, so I let her know. In the early afternoon and evening hours, I continue working my way through batch 11, and do another load of laundry -- my stuff this time. My foot, which was screaming at me when I woke up, seems to have been relaxed a bit by some movement and ibuprofen. The fact that it's still bothering me at all is concerning, though. I don't have much choice but to power through it. I'm convinced that at my age and my weight, I don't think I'll ever have a pain-free day ever again -- something will always hurt or be wrong. Daisy makes a homemade pizza for dinner, and puts fresh basil and chopped zucchini (both from our garden) on it. At work, the night is decidedly quieter than expected, probably because of the holiday weekend coming up. I work until between 2:30-3, can't remember exactly when, but until everything pretty much calmed down enough to where I could wrap up stuff with the team and leave a bit early to enjoy my "holiday observed," which is tomorrow -- but technically anything past midnight counts as the holiday in the eyes of the company. I come back upstairs and continue batch 11, watch my director play Magic on Twitch for a while, and then retire to my chair (that I haven't sat in once, all week) to play a game on my phone and listen to Joe Rogan's podcast. I pass out shortly thereafter.
Friday, July 3:
Day off. Finally. Payday for me, also finally. I wake up in a daze shortly after 9, finding myself in a very dimly lit room -- I'd pulled the curtain closed in the night because I knew I'd probably pass out. I slept through the wife waking up, getting ready, and leaving the house -- as in, completely slept through it, dead to the world (usually her up and moving about will wake me, and if that doesn't, the garage door will), so I panic and think that maybe she overslept and was still home. She wasn't, but that quick panic wakes me up completely. I take care of the cats' food and water, brew a cup of strong coffee, unload/reload and run the dishwasher, and make a breakfast of noodles and two small sandwiches on fresh rolls Daisy made last night. I begin a re-watching of The Shining, as HBO just got Doctor Sleep, the movie version of its sequel, which I want to watch as well. I haven't seen The Shining since I was a kid, and haven't read the novel since I was in late high school/early college (I also still haven't read Doctor Sleep). I come back upstairs and begin washing the sheets/blankets, as I generally do every Friday. My foot isn't going nutty on me today -- I think sleeping in the chair in the position I did helped it immensely, actually -- but it does still ache a bit. Movement and walking around doing chores and the like definitely helps, as does getting some good actual rest. I can't really do either of those during the week because of my work schedule, so I'm caught in an endless flare up cycle (or at least that's how it feels). Daisy does a little research and tells me that carbs/breads make it flare up too, and it's recommended that I eat a vegetarian diet (I do, obviously) with lots of apples and berries (I don't) and to drink at least two liters of water a day (I generally do). I continue languidly working through batch 11, almost as a compulsion at this point, but more than anything else, the day gives me a bit of downtime that I sorely needed. I'm going to start setting an alarm for 12:30 PM on Fridays from this point forward, so that I can get a few hours' sleep after work and then get up to use the afternoon to actually have a day off, instead of sleeping through one of my only two days off during the week now. [EDIT: I never did this because my sleep needs never allowed it.] Even on my old schedule, weekends were blink-and-you'll-miss-them affairs and the weeks dragged on forever. I expect until I get used to this new schedule, it'll feel worse. Anyway, as it's payday, I pay what bills absolutely need to be paid at this point and do a small Amazon order for some necessities, and run Drano twice down the bathroom sink to unclog some of the crud from it. I join Rakuten and order a new pair of shoes (Asics) which are usually $50+, for $30. I also order another four bottles of vape juice from my supplier, as I'm down to 1/4 left of my very last bottle. Feeling pretty accomplished with what I've gotten done so far today, I'm getting ready to take a nap when the wife calls me over the Alexa -- which I didn't know she could do -- to remind me that she was coming home early because of the holiday weekend and was basically pulling into the driveway. We are supposed to have friends over this evening for some socially-distanced social time, and as the afternoon leads into the evening, I begin getting more and more nauseated. Finally, I am so dizzy and nauseated that I tell the wife I need to lay down or I'm going to throw up (at least I think I told her that, I don't remember), laid down on the bare mattress -- since I'd washed the sheets and blankets -- and passed out for about two hours. When I awaken and attempt to gather my bearings, I find that our friends arrived shortly after I passed out. I also awaken groggy and dizzy, and my cognitive abilities are diminished somewhat. I dress myself and go downstairs to sit on the porch with everyone, only semi-aware of where I am and what I'm doing (but don't worry, I fake it well) and once they leave, I slowly begin feeling sort of normal again. The wife and I eat...something, I can't really remember -- yeah, I was out of it -- oh, it was corn, she got us fresh corn from the parents. We watch an episode and a half of Supergirl before coming back upstairs. I remain awake for some time, working through batch 11 more, before eventually passing out in the chair.
Saturday, July 4:
Day off. Independence Day. I awaken around 10 and already know three things -- 1.) it's already hot outside, 2.) I have to pee really badly, and 3.) I no longer have any foot pain whatsoever. I go downstairs to take care of the cats, closing the bedroom door quietly as the wife is still asleep, and make a small breakfast for myself as well as feed the aforementioned cats. I make a cup of coffee, drink about a third of it, and take a bottle of Diet Mountain Dew back upstairs with me, where I watch multiple videos of This is Not Happening on Youtube and finish batch 11. Batch 11 gives me 726 tracks on 67 albums. It is average at best, with a few winners, some fair-to-middlin' records, and a bunch of unknown or otherwise mostly uninteresting stuff. Daisy wakes up around noon and reminds me that eight years ago today was the day we first met in person. I mean, I knew this of course, but I'd completely forgotten it in the haze of the morning and the definite haze of the night before. I was a very outwardly different person in 2012 than I am now, of course -- but at the core of my personality, I'm pretty much the same guy. We go do our grocery shopping and focus on produce; I gained seven pounds in two weeks and I have no idea why, so Daisy offered to help me do a juice cleanse. I very quickly accepted this offer. Once we returned home, I took a nap and she made us rolls so we could have veggie subs for dinner, and queued up Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead for us to watch -- a documentary about people who have lost hundreds of pounds by...juicing. Not steroids, but actual juicing. By the time we were done with the film, I told her that I desperately needed to get my ballooning weight under control, and if the juicing would do it, I was down for it. I need to lose about 100 pounds before I would consider myself healthier, or comfortable in my own skin and body. Losing 100 pounds or so would put me where I was about ten or twelve years ago -- still somewhat overweight, but feeling way better and looking way better. In the night, I work through the beginnings of batch 12 until I'm too tired to sit at my desk anymore, then fall asleep in my chair for a while before getting up and going to bed.
Sunday, July 5:
Working from home, day 56. My oldest brother's birthday. Also the day that 22 years ago, my mother and I got a dog from the pet store in Century III Mall (no longer there) in Pittsburgh, a little shih-tzu that became her baby and lived something like 15 years. I unfortunately wake up around 11am and can't sleep anymore -- this is not good when you don't start work until 10pm. I wake up and eat what may be my last real meal for the foreseeable future, since I'm starting the juicing thing. I then go back upstairs to nap (a common theme on weekends, apparently) because I guarantee there's no way I'd be able to work all night without sleeping more, and sleep off and on until 7:30pm. I do not feel any more or less rested. During this time, the wife ventures out to several stores and gets us more produce to juice. For those of you unfamiliar with juicing, it takes A LOT of produce to get a few glasses of juice for a day. For a week or more of doing it, for one person, it's $100 or so, and that's being conservative. But, you can lose like 25-30 pounds per week, roughly, from doing it. Maybe. [EDIT: hahahahahah NO.] And apparently your energy levels are supposed to go through the roof (again, maybe). It's worth a shot for me because, as I get older and more tired and less energetic, my metabolism is also slowing down quite a lot, and my weight is going up again. Short of gastric bypass surgery, there's nothing else that's going to get this weight off me, ever. I don't eat that much, but I do need to eat. I also don't know how long I can go without having major health issues if I don't do something soon. Being stuck in the house (again, working from home) has done nothing but make me fatter no matter what I do or don't do, eat or don't eat. I have to be able to stop that. The wife makes juices for both of us for tomorrow, after I start work -- it takes about three hours for her to do so as the juicer is good, but slow. I should also mention that my foot no longer hurts at all, and it appears that the gout "attack" is now completely gone or close to completely gone. The juicing, I hope, will help prevent them moving forward. My plan is to do it for ten days this first time around, and see how I feel. After that we'll see what happens and play it by ear. At work, it is very quiet -- scarily so for the end of a holiday weekend after a full moon -- and I can take care of some admin stuff here and there. On my lunch hour, I come back upstairs to continue archiving batch 12, as a nice reprieve from being chained to my computer downstairs (also, if I'm going to work five days a week now, you bet your ass I'm taking a lunch hour every single night and stepping away from the computer as I do so). In doing so, I also check the status of my various orders from Amazon and a few other sites (like the shoes I ordered from Rakuten) to see where they are. Batch 14 -- the final-for-now 300-count batch, is scheduled to arrive by Thursday, and it's in Des Moines now -- about 90 minutes from here. No idea when the shoes will get here. No idea when my Onion t-shirt that I ordered on June 23 will be here either, as it hasn't shipped yet. The rest of my Amazon stuff is scattered throughout the rest of the next week or so. Luckily it does not contain any food, as food is now the devil while I'm on this juice fast. Finally, my next batch of vape juice is supposed to arrive by Thursday, but I'd be really surprised if it takes that long -- even with the holiday weekend now behind us I'm sure I'll probably get it on Tuesday at the latest. Checking the tracking at 3AM, I can see that it is already in Omaha, so there's a decent chance it'll arrive tomorrow. Upon return to work after lunch, I handle a few other small issues and perform an audit of the team's active issues before leaving, roughly, on time.
Monday, July 6:
Working from home, day 57. Day one of the juice cleanse. Current weight: 352.8.
I dutifully drink my 32 ounces of juice (spinach, tomato, celery, carrot, and apple) in my last hour of work and once I'm off for the morning. I'm getting a slight headache, but I think that's because it's supposed to get hot and then storm today. Apparently, it's normal to feel nauseated for the first few days of a juice cleanse, and also it's quite common to, well, get the shits. Some people also get foggy and/or otherwise just feel out of it due to the change from what their body has come to expect in the way of nourishment. I, however, have been a vegetarian for almost two years now, and have trained myself in the fruit-and-vegetable ways and disciplines. We'll see what happens, I suppose. I am excited and cautiously optimistic that maybe this will be it, maybe this will be the big secret plan that works. I may have also mentioned that the wife is doing this too, as she did not think I would succeed without her doing it with me. While I'm not sure that's the case (my willpower is a savage beast when I have an end-goal in mind) I also think she'll want to give it up before I do. If I see results I'm the kind of person who will push those results to their absolute limit in order to achieve my goals, even if it sucks -- keto sort of sucked after a while, too. I still lost 40+ pounds on it in the span of three months or so. I have nothing stopping me at this point and I have willpower to burn during this pandemic (for lack of anything else better to do). So, again, we'll see. I continue through batch 12 and finally come across a few albums worth listening to and/or keeping, such as a Doobie Brothers record and a Bela Fleck and the Flecktones record. My USPS informed delivery email tells me that batch 14 is supposed to arrive today, which is good (and three days faster than I was expecting). As the prophecy foretold, it is indeed there on my porch when I get up in the afternoon hours...as is my vape juice, as I also suspected would be. By early evening, eyeballing it, I'm about halfway through batch 12. The temperature outside is in the 90s again, and when I crack my window to help vent the vape out of my room, I feel the outside heat just pouring in. It's appalling. The wife arrives home earlier than usual, before 6 (which is insanely early for her) and...immediately goes outside to mow the grass in this godawful heat, wearing all black I might add. I don't have the energy for that shit. I don't know how she does. In the evening hours, I am very dizzy and hungry -- I haven't had anything other than the juice this morning in about 30 hours, and drinking water and seltzer isn't helping me. I drink half of my second 32oz jar of juice and go outside at the wife's request to knock down yet another yellowjacket nest with the hose and bee-killer spray, which takes a shit ton of time and work to actually do. I am successful, but it's not a pleasant experience. I then drink the second half of my juice. I do not feel well. I'm actually really tired, as if I haven't slept in days, despite having slept for over eight hours straight today -- one of the longest stretches I've had in a while. I can already see that the night at work isn't going to be pleasant just based on my email alone. I drink more seltzer to put something else on my stomach, and consider (but ultimately decide against) taking caffeine pills so make myself not feel so tired. If this juicing shit is supposed to give you more energy, it hasn't done so yet. I'm also not nauseated, but I do sort of feel like I want to vomit. When I do finally start work for the night, I'm thrown into a number of escalations and field multiple calls that stress me out, but instead of collapsing under the stress or feeling more tired, I sort of get...a second wind? I dunno, but I start feeling somewhat invigorated. By the time I take my lunch hour around 3, I have more energy than I had throughout the whole of the previous day and evening. I knock out a few big issues, run my reports, send emails to my executive director and site director to keep them abreast of some of the more pressing issues, and leave relatively on time. While the night overall sucks, I own it like a rockstar.
Tuesday, July 7:
Working from home, day 58. Day two of the juice cleanse. Current weight: 350.6.
Weight has gone down a bit from yesterday, so maybe this juicing thing is working a bit. However, the wife says she's lost twice as much weight as I have in the span of one day. I drink my morning green juice (this time it's spinach, carrots, ginger, green apples, and celery). Payday for the wife, which is good. As the (for now) final batch 14 arrived yesterday, I crack open the box to see what's in it -- it is full of great albums, including at least ten records each by the Grateful Dead and Phish, numerous soundtracks and one-offs I actually like, and some live albums and other various artists compilations that will go great alongside the rest of my collection. I have absolutely gotten my money's worth from it from one CD alone, because in the batch is a CD that's been hand signed by Andy Williams. And he's been dead for eight years, so...yeah. I'm now about 3/4 of the way through batch 12 and could probably finish it by tomorrow, though I'm not really trying to rush through it or anything. Anyway. How am I for not having an actual meal in two days? I'm remarkably good, actually. Energy levels are fine today, body seems receptive to the juice diet, and I'm beginning to think this may be easier than I originally thought it would be. The weekend days will be the hardest, which I already know. It may be easier to modify the juicing to only the days we both work, then giving ourselves a break on the weekends, but I'm also of the mindset that I want the wife to waver before I do, so we'll see where we are by Friday and Saturday, and see if she's going nuts yet. Still no new comics, no update on my Onion shirt order, no update on my shoes, but apparently I have toilet paper and tissues arriving from Amazon today, so I've got that going for me. When I wake up in the afternoon, that stuff has arrived. But, unfortunately, I wake up really early -- like 2PM early -- and cannot go back to sleep as much as I try. After laying in bed for an hour with the cats trying to sleep more, I eventually just say "fuck it" and get up. I do two loads of laundry. I unload and reload the dishwasher. I clean out the cats' disgusting water fountain, which I'd unplugged two days before because it was so clogged it was overflowing into the floor. I also drink two seltzers and two cups of coffee before my early "dinner" of my second juice of the day -- this one made from strawberries, ginger, two apples, a lemon, and two giant cucumbers. The wife tells me that people who are juicing tend to notice an overwhelming surge of energy as well as sometimes have trouble sleeping/bouts of insomnia, which does fit with what I've experienced so far. She also asks me how I'm holding up -- with my response being "perfectly fine." And this is true. I'm getting a shit ton of vitamins and nutrients, my joints aren't aching like they normally do, the gout is completely gone, and I've got a ton of energy (and apparently don't need to sleep as long). She looks at me skeptically and asks if I think I'll still feel that way at the ten-day point. I tell her as long as I physically feel as good as I do right now, I could probably do this indefinitely, at least for a while. But, I mean, we'll see I guess. It's the same sort of feeling I had when I did keto about two years ago -- the first two months of it were great, but after that I just wanted some goddamn bread or french fries, and was over it. Keto, though, isn't remarkably healthy by any stretch of the imagination; pounding only meats, cheeses, and fats helped me lose 40ish pounds, but wasn't winning me any health competitions. Conversely, it's hard to imagine a healthier diet than the juice thing. In the evening before work, I complete batch 12. From it I got 61 records, 696 tracks total. When I open batch 13 to look through it (the last batch I never opened), I find some gems but overall it's pretty standard/mediocre. While I'm looking through it, I go download all of my new podcasts for the week and ready myself for work -- Tuesday is usually the worst night of my week, and I'm already down one person (with a second having major network issues), so I brace for the worst. When I get on the clock, it's not incredibly bad, though it looks it -- last night was a far worse night. I handle a few little things, and then leave relatively on time.
Wednesday, July 8:
Working from home, day 59. Day three of the juice cleanse. Current weight: 348.0.
On day three, I'm still pretty good. My weight is slowly dropping on average of about two pounds a day. If I can keep this up at the same pace, I'll be down around twenty pounds, give or take, over the course of this ten-day juice cleanse. The wife asked me how much I was hoping to lose versus what would make me disappointed at the end of the ten-day stretch, and I told her that 20 pounds would be an ideal goal for now, but I'd be disappointed by anything less than 15 or so total. Aside from a 2-3 cherries and two smallish chunks of cucumber, I've not had any solid food since Sunday -- it's all been the juice (two or three 32oz jars per day), water/seltzer, and coffee. Remarkably, I'm really not hungry. I'm feeling pretty normal for a guy who's quite literally been on a true liquid diet. Today, however, I'm feeling pretty fatigued. That's possibly because I didn't sleep much yesterday, but also possibly because of stress -- the wife finds that the floor in the living room is wet near the utility closet (where the furnace, humidifier, and water heater are) -- we open the door to find at least half an inch or more of standing water in there on the concrete floor, water that has stood there without moving for some time as there are little molds floating on parts of it. The floor drain (which our AC unit drains through) is completely clogged up, and every bit of condensation that's dripped or ran down that tube for the past several months is now overflowing the confines of that concrete floor and is spilling out onto the carpet. The drain will need to be unclogged/snaked out, that's not necessarily a problem -- our home warranty will get someone out here to do that -- getting rid of the standing water is. I send the wife a link to the Lowe's webpage and tell her to go buy a Shop Vac today, one of the wet-dry ones, so I can suck out all the excess stagnant water and dump it in the backyard. I also confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt that the drain pipe for the AC is where the water is coming from, as running water/using the toilets/showering/doing laundry doesn't drain that way and we can do all of those things normally without anything backing up (I checked, plus, there wouldn't be presently-growing mold in any water that was actually moving/draining). Moreover, the water smells clean, it's not sewage or detergent/soap laden. And it's apparently been pooling up for months. We probably turned the AC on in late March, I can't remember -- that's definitely a long enough time for it to get where it is now with how hot it's been. I tell Daisy to get the Shop Vac today anyway because if it takes a few days to get the guy(s) here to fix it, I still have to suck all of the water out so that we can actually run the AC -- it's going to be around 95 today, and we have the thermostat set at 80 so that the AC doesn't run. We later just turn it off so that it doesn't run and wake me up and make me run downstairs while I should be sleeping. It won't be pleasant to sleep in the heat but I can deal with it for one day. As I'm going to sleep, Daisy finally gets a plumber to commit to coming to the house ASAP today, and then...he doesn't show up. By 11am, still awake, I have already put in PTO for the night at work and I can't sleep due to the stress and the heat. I am so angry that this shit is monopolizing my time and now keeping me awake hours after I should be asleep. He finally calls Daisy to tell her he's on his way, and it takes her so long to get here that she has to call and talk to him on my phone while she's on the way, because he's asking questions I can't answer. She finally arrives literally as they're pulling out of the driveway to leave. While they were here, they snaked out the drain in the utility closet and drained all of the standing water, and additionally replaced what appeared to be a bad valve on the water heater on suspicion (no, that wasn't the cause of the standing water). However, their high powered snake machine blew out the outlet they plugged it into in the living room, leaving a small black scorch mark on the wall next to it. After they leave and we turn the AC back on, and things return to a semblance of normal, I go to bed -- I have been awake 26 hours straight at this juncture and am nearly delirious. I am awakened a few hours later by the wife hysterical on the phone with her parents, as the blown outlet popped and shot out sparks, for no reason, while nothing was plugged into it, while I was asleep. Add to this that the drain appears to be backing up again, not completely, and nowhere near overflowing, but I can look down into it and see the water level in the bottom of it. By the time I actually wake up and gather my bearings -- which is quite hard to do on such little sleep and with such high stress levels -- she's already called the plumber again to relay the issue. I tell her that this is an overflow drain and it's working as it's intended, but if it's filling up, there's likely a main line clog that's preventing it from draining completely all the time, and he'll likely have to snake the main line, wherever that is in the house. He offered to come tonight but Daisy responded to him long after the missed calls and texts, and said morning was fine. As for the outlet, we figured out which breaker it runs to and it's the breaker for the entire living room -- where, obviously, my work computer and modem/router are. We turn off that breaker for the night and check the wall socket with our voltage meter to ensure no power is flowing to it (read: so that we don't have any more popping/sparking issues before it's fixed), and I have to run an extension cord for the modem/router to actually have internet in the house because it can't physically be moved from where it is. That's all I can run into it at the moment. Getting an electrician out to the house to replace the wall socket as well as any wiring it fried is also something that will have to be done tomorrow, and done ASAP. Daisy proactively takes the day off work as she saw what being awake for 26 hours straight did to me today. On top of it all, because of my new schedule, I still have to work tomorrow night, so I will get no peace and unstressed downtime whatsoever in the interim. Fuck this shit, man.
Thursday, July 9:
Working from home, day 60. Day four of the juice cleanse. Current weight: 344.5.
I'm still losing weight, slowly. I don't know how much of that, exactly, I can attribute to stress. Still, a 3.5 pound drop in one day is nothing to sneeze at. I sleep for a few hours in the overnight, and the plumbers come in the morning first. They snake the drains again, really hard this time, while we run water from every faucet and repeatedly flush every toilet in the house...no issues are found -- they cannot repeat the overflow experience, which tells me that their first snaking got rid of everything it needed to, and the second one was just good measure. I confirm with them that the little amount of water I see in the closet drain is indeed normal (as expected) and they're sent on their way with our drains being really clean this time. Daisy remains home as we're expecting the electrician to come sometime within the afternoon hours, so I go to sleep -- only to be awakened half an hour later at their arrival. The outlet is indeed blown out, but no overall wiring is damaged. Apparently there was a nick in the wire coating that was touching a piece of metal in the housing, and when the plumbers plugged in their snake machine the overflow of power to it tripped it, moved it, and blew it out (or something like that). We also learn that the breaker for the entire room is a 20 amp breaker, not a 15 amp max breaker (as it should have been), which is why when it blew out it didn't trip the breaker itself. The electrician guys swap out the breaker with the correct one quickly and free of charge, but it worries me that this outlet and the breaker for the room could've blown out at any time for that reason and we never would've known, because it was the wrong one -- and that could have been a fire hazard ticking time bomb. So, $200 later, three visits to the house from two different companies, and numerous calls to our home warranty folks to finagle all of this together, everything is fixed -- from the water to the electrical system. For now. I unhook the extension cords and we run everything through the living room breaker again, and everything seems fine. So, I go check the mail before I come upstairs to finally sleep, and find that finally, I have the first of my new comics in the mail -- both DC books, which I subscribed to in probably January, Action Comics (Superman) and Detective Comics (Batman). Here's hoping those two are the first of many, as I've got a lot of stuff coming my way soon now that shipping has resumed. I sleep from around 2 until shortly before 8, which makes me recharged and ready for the night (or as recharged as reasonably expected, anyway). When I start work in the evening I begin to feel actually delusional, as I feel sort of thankful that everything is back to some semblance of normal. The first half of the night goes fine, and when I come upstairs on my lunch hour, I continue archiving batch 13. It is a terrible batch overall, with almost nothing in it I actually care about or want. But, you win some, you lose some, I guess. I should finish it in the morning hours and be able to start batch 14 tomorrow. The rest of the night remains mostly uneventful and I leave on time.
Friday, July 10:
Day off. Day five of the juice cleanse. Current weight: 342.5.
Another day, another two pounds lost. I'm not progressing as much as I'd like. It's frustrating. I mean, I've lost ten pounds, yes, but that's....not a lot. I can keep going without it bothering me more than some minor annoyances and cravings for solid food here and there, but I'm just not satisfied with my progression thus far, even though I'm on track to lose the amount of weight I was angling for (20 pounds, ish) by the end of the ten days. This is also lighter than I've been in some time, but I don't really feel it or feel different. At Daisy's suggestion, as she is losing more weight than I am on this cleanse every single day, I have incorporated a little solid food back into the diet. For example, yesterday I had an avocado. Today I had a single serving of cashews (23 nuts, in case you were wondering). Daisy is starting to waver a bit and not feel so great. I told her if she wanted to, we could stop for the weekend, but I'm definitely continuing throughout the work week again next week and quite possibly indefinitely during the coming work weeks, at the very least, because even if it's slow, it's still results. The jury is still out on whether she wants to do this, whether she wants to continue straight through, or continue at all. I tell her I can go either way, and she says it'll depend on how she feels by the end of the night when she gets home from work. I've got 12.5 pounds to go before I cross the threshold of most weight lost since I drastically changed my diet in 2018 -- I never made it below 330. 331 was my lowest point, and try as I did, I could never hit 330 or go under it. Now is as good a time as ever. In the mail today, I don't receive any more comics, but I do receive, weirdly enough, one of our Christmas cards I sent to my aunt and uncle seven months ago that was just now returned with an "address unknown, unable to forward" sticker on it. I...yeah, I dunno. I complete batch 13; true to form for it being an awful batch overall, I only get 46 albums (584 tracks total) from it.When Daisy returns home from work, she lets me know that her willpower did indeed crack, and she ate some cookie butter today. She's still feeling miserable and would like to pause the diet. I tell her that's fine, as by the evening I am sort of "hangry" myself, and we decide to pause the juicing for the night, at least. She makes us a homemade stuffed crust pizza (that I only eat two slices of) and I almost immediately feel nauseated and sick afterwards. That feeling dissipates as I digest it, but I tell her before bed that nope, not doing that again, I'm back on the juice starting tomorrow and probably continuing for the foreseeable future. I needed to eat something substantial, physically and psychologically, and doing so made me feel ill...so, whether or not Daisy plans to continue it, I'm going to continue the juicing and see how much weight I can lose and how much I can handle of it before I get burnt out on it. Daisy goes to bed shortly before midnight, and I try to get some decompression time in my chair before falling asleep at some point shortly thereafter.
Saturday, July 11:
Day off. Day six of the juice cleanse. Current weight: 342.4.
No real weight loss from yesterday, probably due to the meal I ate. That's fine; I can deal with one day of no real loss in the grand scheme of things, but today it's back on the horse. Er, so to speak. This also tells me I can do a meal or two every week without it completely wrecking everything, which is nice. So, we'll see how this continues to go. I begin batch 14, which was shipped in a big box with CDs in 30-or-so-disc chunks inside it in individual padded mailers (I guess this is easier for shipping and protection), and within the first 20 or so discs I already have a better collection of stuff archived than I got out of the entirety of batch 13. Batch 14 is 300 discs, by the way. So, I'll be working on this one for a bit. After last night's meal, my foot is hurting again (it was aching a bit yesterday when I got up, but eh). I legit drink 40 ounces of water in the first 90 minutes I'm awake, and immediately take my allopurinol and ibuprofen to help get rid of this shit before it really starts. I'll have to pound water all day in addition to my juice. My allergies are also horrifying this morning, due to the rain and storms that blew through (but didn't really do anything) last night, and the ones further expected today and over the next few days off and on. I attempt to re-download and reinstall the client for Magic The Gathering: Arena, as the old one was outdated, and I still get crashes and errors when I try to run it, so I just completely uninstall it for the time being. Oh well. It'll work eventually and I'll still have my account when it does. Daisy awakens and tells me she gained something like five pounds just from eating that one meal last night, so while I truly do sympathize with her, I'm still "winning" the battle of the fat. Even though she weighs significantly less than me, but whatever. She says she'll consider what I say on the matter when I weigh less than her, so...I have a new goal, I guess. Because this is my only real day off anymore (again, Friday doesn't really count since I sleep through most of it) I let her wake up and become a functional human being before she goes to her parents to quickly pick up a branch saw so we can take down some limbs above our garage and in the backyard, something that she tells me will take "20 minutes" -- it ends up taking several hours in the godawful July sun and heat. In the midst of it, the inflatable yoga ball Daisy is sitting on in the garage -- while chopping the massive pile of branches taller than me into smaller pieces to put into lawn & garden bags -- catastrophically blows out and she lands hard on her tailbone, possibly bruising/fracturing it. While she can't help this, I am already becoming overheated and sick from the heat and sun, and now it becomes my job to take care of the massive pile of branches because she is basically immobilized. I can do little to help her. She manages to shower and lay down in bed, and I bring her an ice pack, oyster crackers, water, and ibuprofen as she requests. Apparently the ibuprofen helps. I force myself (and believe me, it is indeed force) to work on the pile of branches one by one until it is taken care of, several hours later, at great physical cost -- I give myself heat exhaustion, badly, and I'm so overwhelmed, hot, and nauseated from the heat and overexertion that my heart rate remains over 120bpm even while I'm at rest, and I don't seem to be able to do much to bring it back down even after I take a relatively cold shower and keep drinking water. She is able to get up sometime after 6 and go downstairs, and do ...some stuff, I guess, I don't know, as once I am stationary in my chair and I can feel my heart rate finally slowing a bit, I pass out -- I don't know if I was so exhausted I fell asleep or if I genuinely fainted. When I come to, it is very dark, I see no light and hear no sounds, and I check my phone (which was next to me) to see that it's well after 11pm. I find that Daisy has gone to bed, though it must've been relatively recently because she's still awake and lucid when I talk to her. A broken or bruised tailbone, she says, can really only be managed with pain meds like ibuprofen and the like, and can take 1-3 months to heal. I let her sleep and go back to my room to continue batch 14, stopping an hour or two later to go downstairs and juice some more. 90 minutes later I have two bottles of juice, the equipment has been washed, and we are almost completely out of produce in the house. Juicing takes a long time and a lot of produce. I still feel very wobbly and weak, so I try to drink as much water as possible before I retreat back to my chair once more, and eventually, to bed in the morning.
Sunday, July 12:
Working from home, day 61. Day seven of the juice cleanse. Current weight: 342.6.
How I actually gained .2 pounds yesterday after drinking only one juice and ate/drank nothing else but water, and after working my ass off in the yard, is beyond me. I can only assume it's because my body is retaining all of the water I drank because I was dehydrated and am still feeling the effects of it. I sleep in my chair until around 9am, then get up and go to bed, where I sleep until close to 1. Daisy is a little better, but not by a lot. I inflate my rubber hemorrhoid cushion for her so that she can actually sit, which helps her a lot (she's finally able to sit fairly normally). She takes the day off work tomorrow, and I will more than likely take her to the doctor in the morning if it's not any better. There's not a lot they can do for tailbone stuff but maybe a shot for the pain and advisements to get as much rest as possible. My new Asics shoes arrive in the mail (on a Sunday, which is surprising) and they're really nice. Too bad it may be awhile before I actually get the chance to wear them on a regular basis outside the house, because, y'know, Covid. While she's injured, I have some more chores and the like to do around the house that would normally be things she does, like clean the cat pans and make sure the dishes are washed/put away, which is fine; I just want to make sure she's okay. I may grumble or bitch about it in the moment, but I am her husband and her partner and it's not only my job, but my duty to take care of her. As for myself, I feel...weird. I am achy and burnt-out. While the other affects of heat exhaustion (like "constantly feeling dehydrated" or the whole "rapid heartbeat over 120bpm for no reason") have subsided, my back, joints, and muscles all ache fairly badly, despite the large amount of sleep I got last night and today. Daisy says that I probably have lost actual weight, but because I'm so inflamed from the work outside it won't actually drop off until that inflammation goes away. Which, I guess, I can't really do much about. Ibuprofen, basically. I would like to note, however, that my foot -- which felt like it was getting another gout-like flare up yesterday -- is now 100% perfectly normal again, as if nothing happened. Silver linings and all that. My stress levels are still supremely elevated though. Regardless, I continue to down water and seltzer and work my way slowly through batch 14 in the afternoon hours -- coming across a lot of stuff I am excited about: Fiona Apple, the Allman Brothers Band, Neil Young, Frank Sinatra, Fishbone, etc. Those alone, in addition to some of the other things I found earlier, possibly make this the best batch of all of them. Fitting that it is the last one I'll be doing for a while, more than likely. In the afternoon, I (reluctantly) order more coils for my vape tanks as there's only one place I can find them anymore, and I also order more seltzers, wet cat food, and canned tuna (also for the cats) off Amazon as all three items are things we're running out of. I don't know when the wife and I will be well enough to venture to the store again. If I have to take her to the doctor tomorrow, there's a Fresh Thyme grocery store in the same plaza, so we'll at least be able to get some produce to juice (even if she has to stay in the car while I do so). At work, my emails already tell me in the afternoon hours that I'm going to get thrown into a situation where I have to deal with a large outage, so I think to myself wow, there's some more stress I'll have to deal with. I'm really, really getting sick of stress. As the evening goes on, I begin to feel progressively, well, more sick I suppose? I get really hot and sweaty, and begin to feel progressively nauseated despite the fact that it's not really hot in the house (and downstairs it's downright cold). I don't know how much can be attributed to stress and how much can be attributed to the juicing. Work is relatively slow, despite what I would've guessed earlier in the evening, and the wife juices a few more jars of juice for us during the first hour or so of work. I continue working through batch 14 on my lunch hour and attempt to stay as hydrated as possible. The night ends without any real incident, thankfully.
Monday, July 13:
Working from home, day 62. Day eight of the juice cleanse. Current weight: 341.4.
I've lost a little more than a pound in the past 24 hours, but I'm so nauseous that it feels like my stomach is trying to eat itself. I am exhausted. My body still aches from the yard work. I feel like I've done some damage to myself, somehow, though what damage is currently unclear. Daisy calls the doctor's office before I'm even off work and gets an 8am appointment for me to take her in, so, almost as soon as I'm off work I change my clothes and we're in the car, me driving (obviously). We're ushered in immediately and after some routine questions, they give her an x-ray...where we find out that she indeed does probably (they couldn't tell for sure, but they were pretty confident) have a fractured tailbone. It will take 6-12 weeks to fully heal and, well, there's not a lot they can do for it -- it is what it is. They give her some muscle relaxers, the same ones they gave her a few years ago when she was in a car accident, and said that while they won't do anything for the pain (but ibuprofen will), they can help with her movement and perhaps help her rest a bit without everything in her ass and lower back being tensed up. The nurse who saw her also mentioned that it'll suck for awhile, but eventually it'll start feeling a little better every day. She can barely sit upright without being in extreme pain, and can only really do so with the hemorrhoid donut cushion I bought a few months ago. Once we return home I purchase another one for her on Amazon. Her boss tells her that she can take tomorrow as well if she needs it, and I encourage her to do so in order to get some actual rest. I don't know how she's going to be able to function, truthfully. I worry immensely about her and there's nothing I can do to fix the problem. More than anything else, she just has to heal. On the way home, since we're already out, we stop at Fresh Thyme and reload ourselves with produce in order to continue juicing. Once we get home and put it away, she showers and I drink the rest of my carrot+strawberry+peach juice before I finally go to bed around noon. When I get up, I hear her downstairs watching Netflix, so I shower and go downstairs shortly thereafter to find her putting the car in the garage as a test to see if she can get in and out of the driver's seat by herself and operate it (also because we're supposed to get storms tonight). She could, and did, but obviously she still hurts. I can do little for her but try to take care of her and do the chores around the house she would normally take care of. We talk to her parents via video call, and she goes back to bed to lay down. She decides to make the decision on whether she'll work tomorrow in the morning when she wakes up, as sleeping/resting today made a big difference in her overall feelings of well-being. I check the mail to find that I am finally getting new Marvel books again -- three of them -- and they picked up where they left off (read: the ones that arrived today are books that are more than two months old). Because of that, I expect a near-avalanche of books to arrive within the next week or two, probably 3-5 per day to get caught up with everything I subscribe to. How do I feel overall, now? I mean, mostly okay. I'm tired, probably from being awake until almost noon, but I'm okay. It's nights like this that I'm grateful I only work eight-hour shifts now, because in the morning I guarantee you I will desperately want to go to bed almost as soon as I'm off work. Most of the nausea has subsided, though every once in a while I'll get a wave of it again, but the sleep today felt like it reset most of my sore muscles, or at least helped to do so somewhat. I slowly continue working through batch 14, and once it's done, as mentioned before, I don't plan to get any more for a while. At work, it does not appear to be an awful night based on my email alone, though looks can be and frequently are deceiving when it comes to that. It's not awful, but it remains fairly steady for most of the overnight hours. Around midnight, Daisy comes downstairs to make juice and get something to eat -- her presence is delightful, and she finally goes to bed shortly after 3:30 or so, when she tells me she's set her alarm for 7 regardless to see how she feels and/or if she wants to go to work, even for a half-day. On the way to bed, she breaks the toilet seat -- luckily, I have a spare I can replace it with, it'll just take a little work. As the night goes on, I get progressively more beat down and tired, due (I'm sure) to my lack of sleep during the day. I go to bed almost as soon as I get off work in the morning.
Tuesday, July 14:
Working from home, day 63. Day nine of the juice cleanse. Current weight: 342.2.
Yeah, I've actually gone up in weight today, and I do not know how. I've lost 10.6 pounds, net, on the first nine days of this experiment. I'm beginning to get frustrated -- that's just not enough for me. There's not much else I can do to make the diet more liveable without sacrificing efficacy; I eat a handful or two of nuts everyday to help get some healthy protein in, and maybe a little celery, cucumber, or an apple slice or two as we're juicing -- but that's really it. Again, I'm legit starving myself and my daily caloric intake is far lower than it has been in my entire life, and for several days of this diet I've been not only active, but highly active...and I'm seeing 1/3 of the weight loss others see from it over the same timeframe. It is so discouraging. It's depressing. Daisy still thinks it's working remarkably well for me, and others I've told about it do too, but for me it's not good enough. Daisy calls out from work in the morning. I pass out in my chair almost as soon as work ends, and am awakened by a text message from our realtor (also a friend of ours) who said she left us a "goodie basket" on our front porch to help Daisy feel better. I stumble downstairs to find that it is a massive elongated bucket full of fresh fruits and vegetables, including a watermelon, a cantaloupe, and an entire large bag of rainier cherries. This is so thoughtful and so sweet of her. I return upstairs, let Daisy (who is just waking up) know that she has a surprise downstairs, and pass out. When I awaken, it's around 3pm. I immediately jump up and get dressed, because we are entirely out of cat litter and we need to go get more. The wife also wants to test out driving, to see if she can do it without immense pain, in order to be able to return to work tomorrow. So, that's what we do -- she gingerly gets into the car and we drive to PetSmart to get the litter, then quickly run up to Walmart (where so many people are not wearing masks) to pick up another set of screws for the toilet seat and a second spare, before we come back home, clean all three litter pans, take out the trash, and quickly go through the garden to pick off the cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and zucchini that are ready before the storms roll in for the night. I am exhausted by this time, it's in the 90s and I'm dripping sweat, and I can finally sit down now...but we have clean litter pans, garbage cans at the road, a new toilet seat, and the wife can drive without being in immense pain, though pain is still there. I'd call all of this combined a solid win. Storms did not roll through last night (they dissipated before they hit the Omaha area) but they are widely and strongly expected tonight, with rainfall predictions of an inch and a half or so. This is good, because it's been really dry and unbearably hot over the past several days, and all I want is a good rain so that everything cools down and it's dark in the morning so I can sleep better. I continue working through batch 14 and estimate that I'm probably a little more than halfway done at this point. I expect to finish this weekend, given my time and energy levels. Another Marvel book arrives in the mail today, one that had a publication date of April 1 -- so yeah, there's a LOT of backdated stuff still coming soon. Like I said before, I expect a few books a day for the next several weeks, really, until they get all caught up. [EDIT: this does not happen.] Work looks very quiet from my email, but I'm down at least one person tonight (vacation), maybe two (possibly sick), so I can't really trust that. When I log in, it is not bad, just simply average. As the night progresses, it gets busier and busier, to the point where I'm stuck working on stuff almost a half hour late before I can leave, and only avoid further entanglements by making myself "invisible" on our company messenger program.
Wednesday, July 15:
Working from home, day 64. Final day of the first ten-day juice cleanse. Current weight: 342.0.
Well, here we are, day ten, and I'm down a total of 10.8 pounds. I mean, that's all well and good, but again, disappointing and disheartening. Today is also weigh-in day, and I find when I write my weight on the board in the bathroom, I'm down 15 pounds total from July 1, though I wasn't juicing for five days of the interim. This gives me a little more perspective, I guess. I drink my final juice of this phase of the cleanse when I get up in the evening (instead of in the morning), and have already informed the wife that tonight and for the next day or three moving forward, I plan to actually eat meals again, meals consisting of actual food on a plate, of things I want to eat, and will pick up the juicing-only stuff again after that. In the interim, I do still plan to juice and drink it, just not by itself alone and not as a replacement for actual foods; we do have a lot of produce to get through, and it does indeed give me a good amount of energy. I'm hoping to get a little relief from the near-constant heartburn/reflux the juicing gives me too, as the types of juices I like are full of acid. I am awakened in the afternoon by the wife climbing into bed with me, at like...4pm, after having already come home and showered without me hearing one single peep. This tells me that I sleep hard, but also tells me that I'd probably sleep through someone breaking into the house, a tornado siren, or someone pounding on the door. All of that troubles me, to say the least. She worked most of the day and came home, and apparently her boss is working on something to let her work from home (finally) at least some of the time, partly due to her injury but I'm also sure partly due to the ongoing pandemic, which doesn't appear like it's going to slow down anytime soon. We decide on (vegan) sausages and "popcorn tofu" for dinner, which is like popcorn chicken, and she has a recipe for it. She is mostly functional, but it still hurts her to move and to drive. I tell her that like the doctor said, it'll slowly get better a little more by the day. Upon doing some research, the fractured bone isn't the tailbone itself, but apparently the bone above it that it connects to. While I am intelligent, I'm not a doctor so I don't know the anatomy or the name of said bone, but that's apparently the one. This is good in some respects, as it may or may not take less time to fully heal up. In other news, I don't get any new comics in the mail today (which is surprising, but I'm less concerned now that I know just how backed up the distributors are), but I do subscribe to two more Marvel books -- the new run of Iron Man and a new Ultraman limited series. Neither start publishing until September, so it'll be awhile before I see them. I continue slowly through batch 14, estimating that I'm about 2/3 of the way through it now, give or take. So far, it's given me 108 albums, some of which I'm really excited about (I don't remember if I mentioned it before, but there's a set of recap/countdown posts coming). For work, when previously Wednesday night was my most chill night of the week and the jump-off point for my weekend, it is now a ponderous grind, as I have 15 of my 16 employees there on shift. You'd think this would make everything easier, but it doesn't -- instead of 7 or 8 people I have to watch over and help out and answer questions/work escalations for, my workload effectively doubles as I have to pay attention to every single thing in order to avoid those not-so-pleasant calls from my executive director at 9am. Wednesday is the only night of the week that all of my team is there at the same time -- it's an overlap night. As it's also after 7pm as I write this, I additionally expect to start getting texts anytime now from the folks in El Paso, telling me that they're not coming in, etc etc, making excuses why they can't work. While the job is what it is, I am getting more and more frustrated by the day that my workload keeps growing while my support staff and other workcenter resources keep shrinking, all in order to save a few bucks for the company bottom line, and I'm not the only member of management/leadership who feels this way. Believe me, if I had any other imminent options that I could pursue, I wouldn't be where I am. Sometimes I fantasize about the pandemic getting way worse and the government forcing some sort of universal basic income for a year or two in order to make people stay home and not go outdoors, and using that time/money to do something I actually want to do with my life instead of being a wage slave. It's pretty bad when I see that scenario as more favorable than the status quo of my current job. Remarkably, while I'm kept pretty busy, the night isn't too terrible, but I'm plagued by a fatigue that won't go away throughout it, one that only continues to make me more tired as the night goes on. At the end of it, I'm barely lucid enough to log off and go back upstairs.
Thursday, July 16:
Working from home, day 65.
I don't know that I'll ever fully get used to working Thursdays. For the past almost four years it's always been a day off for me, it's always been a day/night of rest. Now that it isn't anymore, I just feel more burnt out and frazzled. On Thursdays, my give-a-shit tank is so dry there's sand in it. Part of this is because I've had a really stressful past few weeks, but part of it is also a subconscious rebelling against the "new status quo" of that job -- i.e. me doing work someone else should be doing, managing a team someone else at my level should be managing, and getting double the scrutiny on everything I do or say. I wake up in the afternoon hours to find the wife downstairs on the couch with her laptop, finishing the second half of her workday from home. I am again frustrated that I've been so exhausted that I never hear her come home, come in, make food, talk to the cats, or do anything else when she gets here. I am also at least a little low-key frustrated that aside from about a 30-minute stretch in the morning when she goes to work but before I go to bed, at almost all times when I'm awake now, the wife is home. I understand she's injured and slowly recovering, yes, but part of my downtime is, well, alone time -- not having anyone else around, needing the solitude to decompress and not be bothered. It's not her fault, and she knows I need this alone time to a certain extent, but I don't think she understands just how deeply I need it psychologically. The night at work passes without incident.
Friday, July 17:
Day off. Payday for me. I pay my bills and the wife and I go to Whole Foods in the evening hours. I otherwise barely touch my computer and therefore don't write here aside from this.
Saturday, July 18:
Day off. I make six bottles of juice with some of the produce in the house; this should last me a good chunk of the week. I'll make more tomorrow. My goal is to survive primarily off the juice again and nothing else (or, very little else), and to couple the juice with my green tea fat burner pills -- I think of this as adding nitrous to the proverbial gas tank -- to see how far I can get and how much weight I'll actually lose. The green tea pills will also help me stay awake more during the overnight hours, too. The wife goes to Aldi and Natural Grocers for more produce. We barely even see each other throughout the day. I nap in the evening and get up as she's going to bed. I've been sleeping a lot this weekend; I've just been too exhausted to be awake and moving around. I've now fully realized that I'm suffering from extreme exhaustion, not just physical but also psychological and mental-health wise. The summer heat has gotten to me, the new five-day workweeks have eroded away even more of my downtime/recuperation time, the forced isolation and social distancing because of the pandemic is making me go stir crazy. I can't turn on the news or read through social media anymore without becoming incredibly depressed about what our country is becoming because of the amount of sheer stupidity that is coursing through it. My anxiety for everything is at an all time high because it feels like nothing is getting better and one small misstep or unexpected problem/expense could completely ruin or end our lives, and all I want is to be/feel normal again. We were planning to visit WV again this fall; it was on the books and I had the PTO pushed aside and ready to go for it -- it would be the first time I was home in three years -- and my parents canceled that trip for us due to Covid. I have not been home since a few months before my grandmother died, or, to put that into perspective, over a year before we bought this house. I haven't left the city of Omaha, let alone the state, in almost a year. Nothing feels good anymore. Being alive feels like a chore.
Sunday, July 19:
Working from home, day 66. Day one of the second juice cleanse. Current weight: 343.8.
I have finished batch 14, leaving me with no more CDs to archive for the moment. After eating normally for the day (well, ish) I begin juice cleanse #2 in the overnight hours. It is likely that I won't show any weight loss today or tomorrow until my body re-acclimates to it, and that's fine. I currently have six juices already made; that will get me through a good chunk of the week, and I'm sure the wife will juice more throughout the week as well (we still have a ton of produce in the house to go through). My Father's Day present for my dad arrives back at our house in the mail, with a label on it that says it can't be delivered or forwarded. I sent it to the same post office box my parents have had back home for the past 22 years, so I don't understand why. When I tell him this, he gives me another local PO box to send stuff to, one they recently opened at the post office down the street from them, and I relay that I'll re-send it. At this rate I doubt it'll even get there before his birthday next month. It is a very quiet night at work, and I'm done with almost all of my pressing tasks before 2am. These are the kinds of Sunday nights I really used to enjoy back in the day, because nothing's blowing up, I can sit and play on my phone or listen to podcasts (or both) and just let the hours tick down. For the first time in a week, as she's starting to heal more and more by the day, the wife may work the entire day tomorrow in the office -- she doesn't know yet and it will heavily depend on how much pain she's in. As for my own pain, my back still aches but is no longer spasming -- I got that to stop with some muscle relaxers -- but I'm still mostly exhausted. I've started watching Star Wars Rebels on Disney+, as it's a series I've meant to watch for a long time but never had the chance to get into. It is remarkably good. I don't get to watch much television anymore, so this is sort of a treat for me. I make the decision that if I want to purchase another batch of CDs, I'll wait until sometime next month before I decide to do so, to give some time for all of my comics subscriptions to catch up and once I clean off and reload my mp3 player with everything new. Because of the city of Omaha's new recycling schedule, I'm backed up on recycling all of the CDs themselves -- I probably have discs from batches 6 and 7 ready for the recycler still in the house. In the overnight hours, some hard rain and light thunder rolls through, and drops the temperature substantially (finally). Ironically, it is now cool enough outside to mow the grass, but now it's also too wet to do so. I try two new AHA Sparkling Waters -- Blueberry+Pomegranate and Apple+Ginger, and like them both. After all, I've gotta keep my fluid intake up so that I don't have another gout attack. In the middle of the night long after Daisy has gone to bed, I clean the cat boxes and put some orange oil into the diffuser to make the house smell nice. When morning rolls around I am able to end my shift without incident, though a little late, and go to bed shortly after Daisy leaves for work -- in the dark of a rainy morning.
Monday, July 20:
Working from home, day 67. Day two of the second juice cleanse. Current weight: 344.6.
Yes, as mentioned, I expected to weigh a little more today due to eating normally for the first half of yesterday. Today starts the new, supercharged juice cleanse with vigor, with last night's juice paving the way for it and getting my body prepped. I didn't mention yesterday the haul from batch 14 -- from it I got 180 albums, 2,387 tracks total. I was disappointed in some of it as some of the records I really wanted were scratched/disc-rotted beyond playability, including several of the Grateful Dead records. That was rather disheartening but not a whole lot could be done about it, obviously. I sleep for a very long time in the day -- I've been sleeping much longer and harder than I did before for some reason, and I don't know why. When before I was getting 5-6 hours, max, on workdays now I average about 8, and on weekends around 12. I don't know how or why. I don't know if I'm literally just that exhausted and my body is trying to get me to slow down, if I'm getting sick, if my allergies are putting me into a coma, or what. I mentioned before that when the wife would come home early in the afternoons so that she could rest her fractured tailbone, I never heard her come in and her arrival and movement around the house never woke me. What's more concerning is that I don't wake up feeling particularly well-rested most of the time -- I mean, sometimes I do, I did this weekend, but most times I just don't. Maybe this is a symptom of depression; I really don't know. Many years ago, when I was at my lowest point and living alone, so depressed I could barely move, I slept a lot too. But I was much younger then, and I'm pretty sure my metabolism was much different (and better). I can't tell you what it is now. Overall my mood seems...fine, I guess. I just don't really have anything to look forward to or be excited about anymore. I try to stay positive but that's much easier said than done these days. I crave normality again more than anything else. I don't know how much longer I can do this socially-distanced quarantine shit. Between that and the diet that -- yes, I am fully aware that I am imposing upon myself because it's the only way I'll ever lose weight -- it feels like I'm in prison. I just want to feel like a human again. As the night goes on, I begin to feel better, slowly -- I even gather enough energy to do some laundry and to unload/reload the dishwasher, and make the wife tea for the morning. I eat two handfuls of raw almonds and a handful of salt & vinegar almonds, but consume no other food. The night at work starts out super-hectic, slowly calms down as the overnight hours wear on into the morning, and then explodes around the 5am hour. For the two and a half hours that follow (because yes, I worked almost half an hour late), I field any and every hot issue, answer every question, and write every email I can both internal and external. I'm glad I'm no longer a smoker, because I would've burned through half a pack in that time alone.
Tuesday, July 21:
Working from home, day 68. Day three of the second juice cleanse. Current weight: 344.1.
Half a pound lost from yesterday is decent enough, I guess. It's probably mostly water weight anyway. It'll take a few days to get back into it again and to get some more weight dropped, I'd imagine. I also venture a guess that I'll have to make more juices roughly Thursday, or have the wife make up a few for me in the interim. It's fine, it is what it is. I just feel lucky that I have energy and that the increased fluid intake is making me feel like a brand new person -- oh, and that I don't have the gout issues at the moment. I'm drinking seltzers like they're free, though, which they are not. All I can do is focus on my end goals, which -- at this point -- is to get below 330 first, and then from there below 300 again. I am hopeful and optimistic that with careful planning and multiple weeks of juicing off and on, I can be below 300 by the holidays. I'm not going to kill myself to get there, though -- if I do, I do. It would be great. If I don't or can't, oh well, I'm still doing what I can to be healthy and am taking steps to ensure that trend continues. It's also pure coincidence that my two year anniversary of being vegetarian is coming up next week (or the week after, I can't really remember the exact date, but it's around the beginning of August). In the afternoon, the wife comes home early to finish her day from home (she actually wakes me up this time when I actually hear her), and I learn that apparently two days maximum is the length of time that juices will keep in the fridge, as three of the remaining four I made on Saturday are now, well, rotten. The wife makes me more. I take out the trash and recycling (including a large chunk of the CDs) and help the wife pick a lot of vegetables out of the garden. The sky gets very dark and ominous, and storms are expected in the overnight hours (it thundered a little this morning, and rained a good bit, but that's it). I eat two pieces of vegan cheese and some almonds, and have a spoonful of peanut butter, but that's the only solid food I consume. Truthfully I only do this because when I ate nearly nothing during the last juice cleanse, I constantly felt dizzy and lightheaded, and it felt like my stomach was trying to eat itself with the heavily-acidic juices. As batch 14 is now complete, I go through all 14 batches and add tracks to my mp3 player to update it and trim out some of the stuff I didn't really need or want on there. This takes hours, and even with all 14 batches archived I probably only add around 200-300 tracks. I formally decide to put the archiving project on hold for awhile and focus my money and energies on other ventures. I haven't gotten new comics in the mail for a few days, which probably means that later this week I'll get 5-10 of them, given what I got last week. I also get an email today that my subscription to X-Force is in the process of automatic renewal, so it appears that even on the financial side things are moving again (normally this would've happened in March or April). At work I see that at least two of the issues I worked on pretty hardcore last night are still active, meaning that dayshift barely did a damn thing on them or did any sort of attempt to resolve them even after I left them detailed notes and set them up for success. This is becoming more par for the course every day in that place, and it deeply angers/frustrates me. But, again, I'd much rather be working at home and vaping/listening to podcasts at my desk then stuck in the office surrounded by (mostly) idiots, so things could be worse.
Wednesday, July 22:
Working from home, day 69 (ayyyy). Day four of the second juice cleanse. Current weight: 339.8.
There we go, now the diet is kicking in again -- down over four pounds in one day and nearing my lightest weight yet in several years. I'm sure this is aided a bit by my green tea fat burner pills I'm taking in tandem with the juicing. I'm feeling pretty good, actually. I'm not hungry, I'm not dizzy, I'm keeping adequately hydrated, and my energy levels are pretty high as well -- most of the time. Sometimes, and it's not often, I just feel myself crash and I feel like I just need to sleep, or eat, or both. Daisy said that's likely because my blood sugar is tanking. I don't necessarily think so, because five minutes later I'll be fine. That wouldn't be the case if it were blood sugar, I wouldn't think. At work, I learn several hours before I even start that I'll be down two people tonight right off the bat. One of our site directors sends out a survey asking questions about our work-at-home experience and how it could be improved, and I light them up over the fact that I as well as our overnight escalations manager have had to change our schedules and that my team, and workload, has doubled in size over the past month simply because one single person left the program for another line of work. I was very calm and very professional about it, but I let them know in no uncertain terms that I didn't think any of that was okay. If they get indignant or come to me about my answers, I'll also be happy to tell them that I'm pretty sure I'm the only manager in our entire program at my level who has employees in the office all seven days of the week, even though I only work five days (and would much prefer to be working four again, like I used to). There are management coverage gaps that having a "team lead" or an "in charge" simply does not make up for, all because the company's bottom line is more important than providing adequate support and backup for its employees and even its leadership, of which I am part. I have sixteen people currently reporting to me -- more than double what I should have for someone at my pay grade. I have not received a pay bump for taking on double the workload or for sacrificing one of my previous days off, nor has my escalation manager colleague or my 2nd shift managerial counterpart (who was also put into the same situation as me with double the team thrown under him, though he already worked a five-day, M-F schedule). Again, I was professional, but all of my concerns are indeed valid. Almost as if in retribution, the night of work is legitimately hell. When it ends, I feel like I'm suffering from a bit of mild PTSD.
Thursday, July 23:
Working from home, day 70. Day five of the second juice cleanse. Current weight: 338.4.
Because of last night's trauma, I sleep until well after 5pm today, and when I awaken I am filled with a depression and dread that no matter what, I still have to work again tonight. It's almost crippling and I feel like a slave. The very last thing I want to do all night is sit there and be under incredible, crippling stress again for eight hours when I have so many other things I need to take care of around the house because the wife physically can't. I just want to sleep and cry and be left alone. I've built up enough PTO to give myself an entire week off any time I want, though I'm saving that for the holidays. I'll have enough to where when Thanksgiving rolls around, I'll be able to take a few days off that week and still have a full week or more around my birthday and Christmas. Planning in advance, I also submit the time to take the night before Labor Day off so that I can actually get a real holiday weekend. I don't get any new comics in the mail today, and haven't gotten any this week, in fact -- which is odd because I was getting them pretty regularly for about a ten-day span. Now, when I log into my Marvel account, I can literally see the release date as well as mailing date of the comics I subscribe to, which was never there before. It looks like a good chunk of them are mailing every two weeks -- 7/15 was the last big push of them, with the next one being 7/29 (and a smattering more on 8/5). I generally get books 2-3 weeks after their shipment date (yeah, it takes that long) so that explains part of it. Marvel's stuff usually arrives in a few chunks and only very rarely have I ever had a problem getting books roughly when I expect them to arrive. DC's information isn't as in-depth, but it's telling me that books released in late March and early April were shipped to me, and....none of those books arrived but one issue of Action Comics and one issue of Detective Comics, over two weeks ago. Maybe I'll get a big stack of those back issues in the mail in a few days or a week or two, but who knows. This pandemic has screwed everything up and I'm not even sure what I'd be missing at this juncture, as all of the DC subscriptions were new and were just going into processing when the pandemic ramped up and production stopped. I could look through the "logs" and send an email claim, I'm sure, though DC specifically said to file claims for missing subscription issues by July 1. Well, as it takes three weeks for books to arrive, how are we supposed to know what we're going to receive by July 1 when distribution didn't even really go back into effect until June 20 or so? DC alone tells me they've shipped me eighteen issues of the comics I subscribe to, and of those eighteen, I have received two issues. TWO. The shipping address isn't wrong. Our mailman is a good one who takes care of our stuff, and he does so well. So where the fuck are they? I could work myself up about this and get angry about it all night if I wanted to, but that's not a good use of my energy and wouldn't put me in a good headspace for work. To combat this, I sit down and watch three episodes of Star Wars Rebels back to back before work and while Daisy showers. Once at work, I log in to find that I am pleasantly surprised by the night's workload, as it is very quiet overall. I needed this, because last night almost made me quit. Daisy makes us a tomato soup for dinner with the tomatoes and fresh basil out of our garden, and I use it to gently break my juice fast for a few days to reset myself and enjoy a few actual meals here and there. She also still makes me another juice for the morning (or for when I get up, more than likely).
Friday, July 24:
Day off. Break day from the second juice cleanse.
I have received a Philatelic catalog in the mail from the USPS, as I support the shit out of them and buy stamps with what could be called, at times, reckless abandon. This is because Trump is doing everything he can to defund the postal service and they are rapidly running out of funds (last I read, they'll be flat broke by September). In the past few months I've spread the word to friends and family to buy as many stamps and other supplies as they can reasonably afford, and to hoard them -- because if we support the USPS as much as possible, they might be able to make it through the rest of the year when (hopefully) Trump is voted the fuck out of office. Anyway, in this catalog I find a set of NASA patches commemorating milestones in space flight as well as a Sally Ride commemorative stamp portfolio. I go online to purchase the patches to find that they're not available as the catalog says they are, but to still support the postal service I purchase a US Mail t-shirt -- something I can wear to subtly thumb my nose at the people who want to take it away from us:
I don't own many pieces of white clothing (aside from tank tops, which I don't really count) and can count on one hand probably how many. I don't even own white socks. I also generally hate white t-shirts because they get stained or dingy somewhat quickly. When I was making tie-dyes all the time, I used to purposely keep a container of black or gray (like, athletic gray) dye on hand at all times, because if I couldn't bleach a shirt white enough before tie-dyeing it, I would just let it soak in the black if it was really bad (which would generally make it mostly black or very dark gray) and call it done, or gray dye it (to get rid of any discolorations in the fabric) beforehand, whether or not I was adding other colors. I'd love to begin tie-dyeing again, but it was a very expensive hobby and it required a lot of space and time to do. Anyway, the reason I wasn't opposed to the above shirt in white is because it supports a worthy cause and one I am passionate about. It is scheduled to arrive on Monday.
Saturday, July 25:
Day off. Second break day from the second juice cleanse.
I spend most of my day sleeping and doing various chores. The wife and I go to the grocery store and pick up some necessities, and drop off some stuff at the parents'. I otherwise don't touch this computer and don't write here.
Sunday, July 26:
Working from home, day 71. Day six of the second juice cleanse. Current weight: 346.8.
After eating normally over the weekend (and perhaps eating a little more poorly than I would have otherwise wanted or liked) it's back on the juice and water for me for the workweek now, as I gained eight pounds between my last weigh-in on Thursday to now. Even if the Covid crisis is getting worse and our country is becoming more of a fascist dictatorship every day, the least I can do is try to continue to try, at least, to make myself healthier. The wife and I have a long discussion in the overnight hours about just how frightened we are at the state of the country and current events unfolding, as well as what will happen after the election -- if anything recognizable about our country still exists after said election. She also shares my fears about community spread of the virus once schools reopen, and I begin to resign myself to the fact that for the next year or so at the very least, nothing is going to really get better or change. Holidays won't happen, there will more than likely be food shortages, there will be once more problems acquiring other basic necessities (like toilet paper, remember that?) and healthcare supplies, and the vast majority of the country will get this virus sooner or later. Daisy is at a higher risk for it because she leaves the house every day for work and spends the day in an office physically handling documents. I am terrified of this, as well as terrified of getting it myself because of my other health problems (problems that aren't just going to "go away" because I'm at home). We may as well plan for the worst now. Far be it from me to be a "doomsday prepper" or anything like that, but I've taken mental stock of the food and household supplies, and we could be "okay" for about two months or so if necessary based on what we have now. Three months would very likely start to stretch things thin, and longer than that we'd be pretty well fucked without basic supplies or further necessities. I told Daisy we need to prepare for that somewhat, because it very well could happen that we won't be able to leave the house at all more than once a month or so for any supplies or other necessities, due to lockdowns or other possible events. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, etc. When I sleep, I have really strange dreams -- this has been par for the course for the past week or two. I dreamed that I'd awakened to find Daisy crying downstairs, and when I asked what was wrong, she told me that Queen Elizabeth II had died. I acknowledged and went back to sleep. This one was so realistic that when I woke up for good in the late afternoon hours, I did not know that it had been a dream, and thought that it was actually real (a quick glance at my phone and a query to Alexa told me that yes, she was still alive). My dreams as of late have been incredibly bizarre, bordering on alternate-universes bizarre shit. None of them have, fortunately, been nightmares. Daisy told me that she's concerned I might have sleep apnea, as she watched me wake myself up by gagging and coughing a few times today (before she got out of bed, of course). I don't remember this, but I told her "yes, that's because my allergies are godawful right now, and there's no way I can sleep comfortably without snot draining down my throat and/or into my chest." I also don't believe I have sleep apnea because I sleep really well these days, as evidenced by the crazy dreams I have (those only happen during sustained REM sleep). "Well," she continued, "you're always tired and say you have no energy." Yes, I am always tired because I'm constantly burnt-out, stressed, and fatigued. If I could have a few days with nothing to do, no responsibilities around the house, and no work -- where I could sleep 12-15 hours straight each day -- it would reset my body and I'd probably feel a lot better. I know this because it's what I used to do when I was single, lived alone, and had a mountain of papers to grade, papers to write, courses to design and implement, and books to read while in graduate school and while I was teaching at the same time -- leading me to working fifteen or sixteen hour days for a few weeks straight on a regular basis. I used to feel then like I do now, and when that time was over, I'd finally be able to take a few days and reset my body and I would feel normal, even energetic, again. I don't have that luxury anymore; there's no longer any such thing as real "downtime" unless I burn some PTO. And even then I don't get solitudinal (if that's a word; if it's not, fuck it, it is now) downtime because I don't live alone anymore. That's not Daisy's fault of course, but I mean, if I started sleeping 12-15 hours a day I'm pretty sure she'd think something was seriously wrong with me and might want to take me to a doctor. I decide to extend this series of posts pretty much indefinitely, and to start and stop them at the beginning of each new month (meaning this one will go now until this coming Friday). At work, after not checking my email since Friday afternoon, I find 370+ messages waiting for me -- this almost sends me into a panic attack until I see that most of them are simply just bullshit that I don't have to deal with or make into my problem. There are less than ten of those that I actually have to pay any real attention to. My boss approves my request for the night before Labor Day off, and I am overjoyed at that even though it's a month away. I just wish for the actual night of work to go quietly, as tonight is payroll and the stormy weather around the area (yet not hitting me) has give me a massive allergy/sinus headache. My wish is...sort of granted, I guess. It is not a bad night, but there is a lot of stuff to be done, mainly administratively. I drink a juice, have a little of a protein shake smoothie, a handful of almonds, and a few bites of the wife's homemade granola, but eat nothing else.
Monday, July 27:
Working from home, day 72. Day seven of the second juice cleanse. Current weight: 345.2.
Weight slowly starting to go back down again, even from my first day back on the juices. I pay my two outstanding bills (my cell phone bill and one of my credit cards) as we roll into payday week for me -- I get paid on the 31st. This is helpful for us because my paycheck on the 31st will go entirely to our mortgage, and at least I don't have to go grocery shopping anytime soon (nor do I have any other bills to pay coming up). I have this irrational want to spend money, to give myself some retail therapy to help myself feel better, but I don't do it. I'm tired of feeling so empty all the time, and tired of feeling like I need to do something to feel fulfilled or better about my station in life. Archiving the CDs was indeed helping, it was giving me something to do and to focus on in my off hours when I wasn't sleeping -- I just can't keep spending money on those things, though. At least not for a while again. Like I said, I'll reassess where I feel on the matter of archiving in a month or two, because doing it indefinitely and continually spending the money on them is at best an overall losing battle with little return. While I love my comics subscriptions too (when they actually show up, that is), I'm going to let about half of them expire, if not more. I've got boxes of comics I've read that I would otherwise be getting rid of by giving them to my dad, except that I am not going to be able to go home anytime soon in order to do so, so they're just going to continue piling up after they're read. When I have the time to read them, that is. However, this is pushed out of my mind, as during the night I start feeling bad, then worse, then progressively worse. I get dizzy and nauseous, and break out into a cold sweat. I begin to get wobbly. The room spins a bit. I don't know what's going on, but I feel like I'm about to pass out. After a few minutes, the feeling subsides a little, and I stagger into the kitchen. I feel like I'm going to die. I put a little food on my stomach -- a few Pringles and some nuts -- and I begin to feel a little better. Still out of it, I text the wife that I think I need to stop the diet for the moment, because I think there's something wrong with me as I have suddenly become very ill. I eat a small burrito and some chips and hummus for breakfast -- nothing too heavy, just something to put on my stomach to see if it makes me feel any better, but it really does not. I begin to worry that maybe I'm getting actually sick. I get off my feet and go to bed earlier than usual, still feeling ill. When I awaken I feel...mostly okay, I guess. Still a little weak, still a little strange. I shower and wash the bedsheets and blankets, and try to shake off the sick feeling. The wife arrives home and says she wants to make a vegetable soup for us for dinner, since I am now stopping the juicing for the time being. I agree to this and tell her it's fine. At work, I begin receiving texts and messages from my team just logging in, telling me that all of their connections are either dropping repeatedly or not letting them in at all. Five people in all are affected by this just in the evening hours alone, which tells me there may be a larger issue at play (or a major coincidence that five people are having problems all at the same time). I also receive two emails from two counterparts on dayshift asking me to personally own a total of four issues in the overnight hours -- several hours before I'm even on shift for the night. Guess what happens if I can't get online, folks? Yeah, those issues won't get worked. Well, I'm not that lucky, as by the time I get in, the connection issues are (mostly) resolved, but I realize I should've just taken PTO as the night very rapidly begins to suck. There is a massive outage in Tampa that I am told, in no uncertain terms, that I must get on a call for at 6am -- resolved or unresolved (it resolves by around 2:30). Like, whatever, I guess, it's part of what the job is, but it's stupid. My team is fairly busy and fairly focused for the night but I'm just burnt out on this shit, man. And I've got over a month before my next scheduled vacation day. I'm not sure I can wait that long without burning a day or two, because I might lose my mind if I have to keep doing these five-day weeks with no real reprieve in sight until Labor Day.
Tuesday, July 28:
Working from home, day 73.
I'm feeling a little bit better today, though I don't exactly know what was wrong with me in the first place. Sleeping as much as possible helped, but I still just feel...off.
My USPS shirt arrived in the mail yesterday, but I still haven't gotten any more comics in over a week. I can't shake the feeling that something's not right, that something bad is going to happen, or that I'm just waiting for the next crisis to unfurl. The wife's tailbone is healing more and more by the day, but she's still nowhere near 100%. My back is now mostly healed but occasionally still locks up, especially if I'm trying to relax it (like when I sit in my chair or when I go to bed in the morning). I don't have a desire to read, or play on my phone, or even listen to podcasts. I checked the weather tonight for the first time in several days -- usually it's something I do multiple times every day. I've stopped paying attention to the news or most of social media. Forcing myself to come here to write is a little bit harder every day, yet I know I need to do it. The chores I need to do loom over my head and would otherwise give me anxiety, but I really don't even care much anymore. I barely feel like a person. My dreams yesterday, when I slept, were boring and I don't even remember them. I just feel so empty, like a void that can't be filled. I think I'm just overstressed and suffering from exhaustion, and if that's the case, thanks, I hate it. I don't touch my computer again after the morning hours, as I wake up in the evening and within an hour or two I'm already at work dealing with work shit. It feels like that's all I do now.
Wednesday, July 29:
Working from home, day 74.
Daisy wants to refinance the house while interest rates are so incredibly low, so my entire evening is spent getting this set up and getting the information she needs. I barely touch my computer otherwise. Also of note: this is the day in history where Donald Trump suggests postponing or otherwise delaying the Presidential election for the first time "until it's safe." This is partially because he knows he'll lose (he's double-digits behind Joe Biden right now in the polls, which is something I thought I'd never say). Everyone on the planet other than his supporters see this as a dictator trying to fully rise to power. Also, virtually everyone on the planet other than his supporters point out that he does not have the power to do this, only Congress does.
Thursday, July 30:
Working from home, day 75.
The refinancing of the house is being processed now, as the wife has spent numerous hours on getting it done over the course of the past two days. Four new comics finally arrive in the mail, two from DC and two from Marvel. This is still just a tiny fraction of what's supposed to be on the way at this juncture, but they're still slowly rolling in, so I'm doing my best to continue to be patient about it, even if there are some delays. Daisy and I pick an entire basket full of ripe tomatoes out of the garden tonight, along with some eggplants and some peppers. We are rapidly approaching peak tomato. Daisy makes us curried rice with oven-roasted vegetables for dinner. It is amazing. She also makes me soy curls (basically like vegan chicken strips) so that I have something to eat for the next several days and so that we can attempt to avoid going grocery shopping this weekend. I haven't weighed myself all week, and I'm almost afraid to do so on Saturday (the next weigh-in day). I order a set of six Tommy Hilfiger bath towels from Macy's for less than $30 before tax, so that I can refresh our bath towel collection and slowly transition the old and shitty ones to their new duties as rags and cleaning towels -- this is something I've been meaning to do for the better part of a year or two. Work is mostly quiet, and for once on a Thursday, I have everyone on shift who is supposed to be there. This is frankly stunning, and I take advantage of it to...well, do some admin stuff and watch more of Star Wars Rebels on my phone, because by Thursday (as mentioned before) my give-a-shit tank is so dry there's sand in it. On my lunch hour, I go upstairs and do laundry, and grab my recharged mp3 player with about fifteen new podcasts loaded onto it. I drink a grand total of five seltzers during my overnight shift, which also tells me that I have a seltzer problem. But, it keeps me hydrated and keeps the gout away -- I haven't had so much as a stray ache in weeks now.
Friday, July 31:
Day off. Payday. The last day of the month, and the last entry in this post before I move on to the next one. I'm feeling...okay, I guess. My stress levels are manageable at the moment, and I don't think they would be had the past two nights at work not gone well. I desperately want to order a pizza. I don't know how much longer I can wait before I just break down and do it. I sleep most of the day, getting up shortly before 6pm to get in the shower and shave. By the time I'm out and have fed the cats...Daisy is still not home. I have no idea where she is. She finally arrives home around 8. Trump says he's going to ban TikTok. Uh huh, sure, okay Mr. President, because that is the most pressing matter going on right now. By the time the later evening hours roll around, I am so depressed and frustrated with the world that I can barely move, and being alive feels like a chore. I watch five or six episodes of Star Wars Rebels back to back to try to feel better. It mostly fails. I hide this depression from the wife and I try to put on a happy face. I fail miserably at this and basically end up ruining our night. It feels like everything I am, everything I have, is falling apart. I eventually end up passing out in my chair at some point, and the miserable fucking month of July finally ends.
