Me and the wife, July 2, 2021.
Welcome to July, and welcome to what will likely be (for now) the last post in The Isolation Diaries series. Onward.
Thursday, July 1:
Working from home, day 290.
The staffing for any holiday weekend at my job is simply insane. No matter how many years go by, and how many holidays occur each year, it's like nobody remembers the plan of calling for volunteers until the very last minute, or until it's too late.
I, as a responsible individual in leadership in that place, start making plans weeks in advance and always canvass my team for volunteers for every holiday with as much time to spare as possible -- it's not like they don't get incentives for it, they get time and a half (essentially, overtime) to work it, even if it's on one of their normal working days. I collect my list of yesses and nos, plot a schedule for the entirety of third shift After Hours, and send it off to my higher-up leadership (my directors and our executive director) to let them know who will be in and who will not. For July 4th/5th, I did this work in the background over the past few weeks, and sent the list this morning, on my way out the figurative door.
And then shit hit the fan.
This year, there are multiple variables for the July 4 holiday -- for one, I'll be working it, both the 4th and the 5th. For two, since the 4th is Sunday, the 5th is the "holiday observed" that everyone gets off, so we have to double-down on scheduling coverage as to who is going to work which day, both, or neither. Some folks working the 4th won't work the entire night, they'll leave at 12 so they get the full holiday -- others put in PTO for the 4th and are taking both days, others put in PTO for the 4th but plan to work normally the night of the 5th, still others from the later half of the week (the Weds-Sat shifts) are coming in to volunteer for the holiday OT, and some others just plan to work straight through normally, on their normal schedules, as if no holiday was taking place.
When you have seventeen people reporting to you, as I do, this gets confusing. And we need a definitive answer out of all seventeen of them as to whether they plan to be in or not and when, so that we can adjust for adequate agent coverage. It's a headache.
Generally, for the daytime scheduling, one of the daytime directors takes care of gathering volunteers for/from all of the teams at both our site as well as our sister site in El Paso. Said director usually starts way early to help coordinate everything, like I do -- and it's mostly put together a week out. The hecticness comes in during that week after it's done but before the holiday.
This time around, to my knowledge, no daytime director was engaged to put together a schedule, so my list of volunteers I sent over with their schedules for the overnight shifts was apparently the first they'd really thought of in actually making sure people were going to be working.
For fuck's sake.
While I slept this morning (as, y'know, Brandon must sleep during the day), seventeen emails went back and forth through the leadership ranks before 11am, everyone realizing from my first email -- setting off the chain reaction -- that After Hours actually has its shit together when it comes to coverage, but the rest of the teams did not.
Look, I don't pretend to be the smartest person in the world, and I don't pretend that I know absolutely everything in the world about the job I have or the processes that must be followed or the technical aspects that I work with our technicians on every night when I'm on-shift -- but when it comes to running my team and helping to run a full third of our entire program, I have that shit on lockdown. I'm not perfect, of course; I am simply very good. But, it boggles my mind how something as important as holiday coverage can slip the minds of everyone else in leadership, and worryingly enough, it shows me just how disorganized the rest of the program is.
For me, the holiday week will be business as usual -- I'm working all five days, straight through it. I was going to take Thursday the 8th off as a "comp day" for working the holiday, but one of my other management compatriots took that night off in advance with PTO, so I pushed my comp day back to the following Sunday, the 11th. It's fine, it still means I get to stretch out my weekend for an extra day, so it works.
Friday, July 2:
Day off. Payday for me.
Last night, Daisy wanted to take a walk through the Humane Society before I started work.
"I didn't think they allowed that anymore," I said.
"Today's their first day back open to full capacity," she replied.
"Okay, then 100% yes."
Truth be told, I'd already had an adventurous day even before Daisy arrived home; a rabbit had found its way into our fenced off garden, and I had to go downstairs to chase it out. Our security camera's battery was almost completely dead, so I had to unplug and charge that, too. Then I got texts from Daisy that everyone in her entire family, including the family who have lived in Alberta for several years, are meeting up in Deadwood, South Dakota in two weeks.
That one needs some unpacking, so let's backtrack a bit.
Daisy's middle sister lives in Alberta with her husband and their five children, ages 3-ish to 15-ish (I don't know their actual ages/birthdates because most of them were around long before I was). They moved up there from the northeast part of Nebraska about five or six years ago now; when they did, the husband (our brother-in-law) was the one to give me the big white Silverado I drove around for several years before I sold it shortly after we bought our house.
Aside from being incredibly grateful for that, I...I personally don't really have a lot of knowledge or feelings for these people one way or the other. I'm not saying they're not loved, because they are -- they're family, and the kids are very sweet -- I'm saying that I never really had the chances to get to know all of them really well before they fucked off to the Great White North for the past six years or so, and the kids were all very young when they did so. They even had another one after they moved up there; she's three or four now (again, I have no clue, because we've never met or even SEEN this kid outside of pictures). Ironically, I know our brother-in-law the most out of all of them, as he and I share a lot of mutual interests and have a lot of shared knowledge from various fields he and I have both worked in. I know that must be strange to hear, but it's true. He's also a preacher (part of why they moved to Canada was for him to go to a seminary school of some sort and to start up their own church), so obviously he and I don't see eye-to-eye on everything. His wife, Daisy's sister, has always been very kind to me but also very aloof in our interactions -- I can count on one hand the number of times I have had in-depth conversations with her, about anything, that lasted more than five minutes. It's not for lack of trying; I think it's just that she and I are vastly different people and I don't have the ability or patience for bullshit small talk outside of a work environment where I'm getting paid for it. Also, Daisy and I have been married for seven years and have been together for nine, and I saw her maybe twice a year in all the time they were here in the states and zero times since they moved to Canada, sooo....
Daisy's relationship with this sister is very strained. Daisy is the youngest of the three of them, and this sister is the middle sister. The oldest sister we see all the time as she comes to town with the family a lot (except, of course, when Covid was still a thing). Daisy and her middle sister were best friends for many years and I can't stress that enough. Their relationship sort of grew apart over the years -- Daisy said it started well before she and I got together, so I never saw the beginnings of this -- and grew much further apart after her sister's marriage, her multiple children, and then (of course) the move to Canada -- first to Vancouver, and then to Alberta. Daisy's sister -- like Daisy herself, her older sister, and mom -- are Canadian citizens. The girls are dual citizens, actually. Daisy's sisters' oldest children are too, because they were born before the laws were changed about that sort of thing.
But I digress. The overall point here is that since her family's move north, Daisy's sister really hasn't had that much contact with...well, any of us. Daisy has said that she's become the "holiday sister" because the only time said sister interacts with her is on a big holiday like Christmas, when ALL of us are called at the same time on a big group video call. This greatly distresses Daisy (and it should; it bothers me on multiple levels too) because that's not for lack of trying either. Daisy has tried, a lot, to keep their relationship going. On the rare occasion that Daisy's sister reaches out to her/us and it's not a holiday, it's a big deal and/or there's usually something wrong.
Anyway, a few days ago, she called Daisy to talk -- out of the blue, and talk normally -- and apparently mentioned something about them coming to Omaha at the end of July to visit while they made their way around the country to see some family and so our brother-in-law could attend some religious conference of some sort. Daisy mentioned this to me at the time, gave a floating list of days they'd be around (all of them working days for me), I told her I'd be delighted to see the kids and the like when they're in town and I could make time for it, and that was about it.
So, back to the beginning of the discussion -- Daisy's sister's family has a RV, and a giant monster truck they use to haul it around (whatever the Nissan equivalent of a Suburban is, it's one of those things) and a few days ago, dropped the master plan that they want everyone in the family -- the parents, Daisy's other sister/husband and their kids, and apparently us -- to come to Deadwood, South Dakota for a few days in about two weeks.
Daisy did not learn of this directly from her sister, but from the parents after they'd already been asked if they wanted to do it. That sparked a secondary level of irritation in me, but whatever. Daisy's parents are on board, as are her other sister and her family -- Daisy and I are basically the only holdouts, and only because we were never directly asked. This makes us both feel like we're afterthoughts, which...isn't a pleasant feeling.
Note that Daisy and I have been to Deadwood before, of course -- for our fifth wedding anniversary in 2019, the week the retaining wall collapsed in our backyard. It was a really nice little getaway for us, containing everything from casino gambling to touring an old gold mine to going to see the graves of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane -- and a bonus visit to Mount Rushmore, which is nearby. The entire area up there is beautiful, full of wildlife and gorgeous scenery you just don't see in Omaha, but South Dakota itself is very isolated, there's not a lot of what you would deem "civilization," cell service is atrocious or nonexistent, and I don't think any of them have any real concept of the internet as most of the cities and little towns up there appear to be about 25 years behind the rest of the country/world. I said it before when we were up there in 2019, but I'll repeat it again here now -- there are zero Trader Joe's or Whole Foods stores in South Dakota. At this point of my life, it's very hard for me to deem a city/state/area civilized without one or both chains having a presence there.
I found it peculiar that of all places to go, they'd choose Deadwood -- but apparently our brother-in-law's family has some history of visits to western South Dakota, and perhaps even some property up there somewhere, I dunno. It's also not the most...ideal? place to take a grand total of nine kids and expect them to not be incredibly bored or restless the entire time. I was a kid once, we were all kids once -- trust me when I tell you there's nothing for them to do up there aside from like, hiking and other outdoorsy stuff. Even for simple, very religious people (which both of Daisy's sisters' families are), it's boring.
Don't get me wrong here -- I loved the South Dakota trip we took two years ago -- but I loved it because it was somewhere I hadn't been in 30 years and I needed to get out of Omaha and experience something different for a few days. Aside from the touristy places though? It's not like there was a lot to do there. Most of the state really appears to be empty farmland, mountains, and high prairie.
Daisy, who is a ball of emotions about this entire scenario, asked me if it would be possible for us to make the trip, given my work schedule and my need to save all possible PTO for the WV trip. I told her that...well, I didn't really think so, at least not for me. I have to save every possible earned hour between now and August to have enough PTO accrued to take the trip back home to see my parents, and even then it's going to be close. Even if I moved my comp day to later in the month to compensate for the trip's travel time, I still would not have any breathing-space time to do...well, much of anything but constantly run, hardcore, to make the trip happen and then return to Omaha to immediately return to work -- basically meaning I'd be running for eleven days straight with no real weekend/downtime and zero sort of any buffer zone. Not to mention the money involved for the trip, which...well, we don't really have to spare with another actually planned vacation coming up in August. Even with my newfound energy levels, I can't make extra PTO appear on my timesheets to really make it work. I told Daisy that since it was obviously very important to her, that she could absolutely go and I would support her doing so to get that family time together that she so desperately needs.
"No," she said, "I don't want to go do it without you."
Really?
"The family time with the kids, that moment in time where all of us are together in one place for the first time in six years," she continued, "I don't want to miss that. I don't want you to miss that."
"...are they not legitimately coming to Omaha like a week and a half later anyhow?" I asked.
They are; this is a completely valid question. But, during the trip to Omaha, Daisy's oldest sister and family won't be able to be in town at the same time because schools are starting back up in Colorado at the end of July -- at least their kids' charter school is, anyway. This is, apparently, the one and only shot to get all of us together in one place at the same time.
I asked to table the discussion for a few days while I could think about whether we actually wanted to uproot our lives and go do this, with almost no notice -- if we could afford it, if there was a way for me to be able to get away from work to do it without getting penalized or to cut my WV trip short, or what. Daisy agreed, almost emanating a sense of relief when I asked the question.
So to get back to the present-present, Daisy wanted to walk through the Humane Society to see the cats.
When Daisy is upset, stressed, or depressed, this is her #1 go-to activity. Cat therapy. Seeing and interacting with all the shelter cats soothes her and centers her. Except for the past year and a half, the shelter has been on lockdown due to Covid restrictions -- and they were rebuilding their entire facility -- so we couldn't do it.
Well, it's not anymore. July 1 was its first day fully open to the pubic again, mask-free, no restrictions.
First of all, the new facility is gigantic and gorgeous. It is very clear they put a lot of money into it. We wanted to see it just as much as the cats. Also, we knew that cat (yes, that cat, the cat Daisy rescued) was still there, and we wanted to...I guess check on her? Make sure she was all right?
It took us a while to find her; the facility is sprawling and there are multiple levels to it as well as multiple rooms. Finally, we came across what appeared to be a "cat rec room" of sorts -- that legitimately had a sign posted on the door that said "[Cat's name] is an escape artist, so watch the door as you go in and out]" or something like that. Daisy and I exchanged glances, confirming our suspicion of how she wound up in the shelter in the first place, multiple times.
But there was something I noticed immediately upon entering this room -- she was in a room with multiple other cats. She was high up on a perch so that she could survey the entire room, but multiple cats were in there with her and she wasn't hissing at or fighting with them.
The little old girl was sleepy. I rubbed her and petted her smoothly, talking to her sweetly. She purred, but it was very clear that we'd interrupted her nap and that while it seemed like she knew who we were, she just wanted to sleep and didn't want to interact with us a whole lot. When we left the room I was even more sad and distraught. As we walked out, an older lady (probably my parents' age) and her daughter (probably around our age) were going in, and they were talking about this little gray cat they'd seen on the website who they wanted to meet in person.
"[Cat's name]?" I asked. When they replied in the affirmative, I told them "We rescued her off the streets and brought her here, we were just checking on her now!" and Daisy and I both told these two women the story and of how we couldn't take her, etc etc.
The old lady listened intently and told us that she had adopted a cat at the age of five and had to just put it down at age eighteen due to health issues, and said she thought this cat would be a wonderful replacement. We told her how sweet this kitty was and how much she just wanted a quiet loving home.
"Oh, and if you do adopt her," I said, "please change that stupid name they gave her."
The ladies laughed and then went inside to look at her. We continued through the facility and I was almost in tears because I was so relieved that yes, maybe someone who wanted that little girl could actually have her. When we left, she was still sitting in that room on the perch, and the ladies were gone. I became distraught.
"Adoptions are done for the day," Daisy told me. "They're closing in ten minutes." This made me feel a little better but I was still rather sad.
Saturday, July 3: Day off.
Sunday, July 4: Working from home, day 291.
Monday, July 5: Working from home, day 292.
Addendum to the above: when we got home from the shelter and I began logging in for work, I turned to Daisy and asked her, "if she's still there by the weekend...do you just want to go get her and take care of her, and we can just deal with it? Tough it out, let her get used to our cats, and just do it?"
"If you want to," she said, "yes."
Saturday morning, upon waking up, I booted up Twitter and was greeted with a featured post by the Humane Society about that very cat, which appeared to have been posted that morning. There were three pictures of her, all of her sitting on the same perch (I guess she really liked that perch).
In the past few days, I've nearly obsessively checked the website and she has always been on there. I began to lose hope that she'd be adopted out, and thought that perhaps the older lady and her daughter had not come back to get her the next day. The featured Twitter post had been shared nearly 100 times and had a ton of likes on it. So I loaded up the page and...
The cat is gone from the website!
Someone came and adopted her!
I called Daisy into my office to show her and there may have been some weeping, I can't exactly remember, as I was a big ball of emotion. It was not weeping that she was not ours, but because I was so happy that she was (hopefully) off to her forever home and hopefully with someone who would love her just as much as we would have.
"Are you sad that we didn't just go get her?" Daisy asked me.
I thought about it for a moment. "No," I said, finally. "I just want her to have a loving home, and all I ever wanted for her was to be safe and happy and loved."
So, so ends the story of the cat, I guess. Unless she escapes yet again, and we see her back on the NHS website yet again.
Saturday was a long day for me/us. It's a long weekend for the wife, of course -- she has Monday off because of the "holiday observed," but I have no extra time off so it's a business-as-usual weekend for me, and that entails getting everything taken care of I'm forced to do on any other weekend -- while also cringing every five minutes when the locals light off fireworks that are so loud they shake the windows.
Yeah, day or night, doesn't matter the time, apparently -- the past week has proven to us that the state of Nebraska is far too lenient on fireworks laws and ordinances, and especially within the city of Omaha. There's supposed to be a few-days-long period where you can light off fireworks in Omaha, and it legally ends at 11pm each night -- however, I have routinely heard massive ones still being set off past 1, 2 in the morning almost every night for the past week. Last night one was set off pretty close to the house at 2:15 AM (I wanna say on our street or the next street over), and it was loud enough to wake me out of my nap. Brandon was not pleased.
I also hate consumer-grade fireworks. I think most of them should be outlawed. Bottle rockets and roman candles and the like are fine, firecrackers are fine, sparklers and snakes and smoke bombs are fine -- anything above or past that should be outlawed at the consumer level, especially inside cities. You want to see big things explode? Go to a commercial fireworks display here in or around town. Sit and enjoy it. Stop making my neighborhood sound like it's being shelled for a week straight. There's no excuse for that horseshittery.
Because it's a holiday weekend, however, I expected there to be some sales and promotions going on at various shops, both online and in person. The grocery stores had some amazing sales this past week and into the weekend, but as I didn't really need anything, we didn't partake in them. I did, however, get an email from the Payne Glasses folks, saying that they were having a "buy 3, get 1 free" sale.
Oh goddammit, you've sucked me in.
Look, "buy 3, get 1 free" isn't a fantastic deal or anything, and of course the free one is going to be the lowest-price one just wiped off the bill, but it got me looking. I found out from several friends that I can get the lenses in my favorite older pair of glasses swapped out for new ones (see last month's post) but it can be expensive depending on where you get it done. While that may (eventually) be an option for me, I can get new full pairs from Payne for probably cheaper and get a free pair.
Oh hell.
I immediately went onto their website and found the pair I'd had my eyes on (hah! eyes on!) for a few weeks, a giant pair of thin-rimmed silver aviators. I immediately applied multiple options to them, including some higher-index blue-blocker lenses, and added them to the cart. Three more pairs to pick, I thought to myself.
I got another pair of browline glasses, very similar to the old 50s-60s style ones I used to wear all the time, but of higher quality, and applied the same options. I then found a pair of oversized round tortoiseshell frames that I just applied the basic options to (I knew these would end up being the free pair) and another similar browline pair that I applied photochromic lenses to -- so that they'd darken when I was out in the sun.
At that point I was done; I called Daisy into the room to tell her that this sale was taking place and asked her if she wanted me to put it on my own card or on our FSA health card. She said to put them on the FSA card, so I did, and forwarded her the receipt.
As you can see, the Payne Glasses aren't incredibly cheap, but they're a far cry from what you'd pay in a doctor's office. The aviators are, of course, the most expensive pair I did up, and they may be one of the most expensive frames/lenses combinations on the whole site.
I really won't need glasses for a while now, once these arrive. Also keep in mind that the "make good" order from them is still on the way as well, and should be arriving this week. They're delayed a day or two because of the July 4 postal holiday.
Still nothing new from the USPS, by the way.
Anyway, I hope they get here before we go to South Dakota, so that I can take at least one of the new pairs with me.
What's that, you say? Yeah, so I guess that's going to be a thing.
Over the course of the holiday weekend, Daisy and I crunched some numbers in regards to PTO necessary as well as for travel expenses -- gas, food, lodging -- and decided that we could conceivably make it work. It would not exactly be easy and it would still be fairly hectic, but we could theoretically make it work. Daisy began doing searches for lodging and hotels, and found us a Super 8 (ew) in Sturgis -- the town that Harley-Davidson built -- that was overpriced, but not godawful-overpriced. Sturgis is not that far from Deadwood and actually is a decent little centralized location to use as a base of operations for the few days we'll be there.
And, most importantly, we're going to be there several weeks before the giant motorcycle rally. So at least we don't have to worry about that.
How do I feel about all of this?
Meh, I guess.
I realize it's really important for us to do it, and especially important for family relations and goodwill, but it comes at a very critical time of the year for me to save PTO for. I once more pushed back my "comp day" for working the holiday weekend (with my boss's approval/halfhearted blessing) to two weeks away, and we did our calculations for my PTO -- I should have just enough accrued by the time we take the WV trip to put in one more day for this trip to Deadwood, to give myself some buffer time. It's not something I wanted to do, but it would not be possible to do this trip without it.
Tuesday, July 6:
Working from home, day 293.
The holiday weekend was rather quiet. I would rather not have been at work on the clock for it, but I don't know if I could've picked a more relatively peaceful holiday weekend to work. There were no huge incidents, no major outages, no major staffing concerns that weren't almost immediately dealt with, and workloads were light. Here's hoping the rest of the week will be as nice (though I somehow doubt it will be).
So what else is going on?
Daisy finally ordered her glasses -- she used both Zenni and Payne to get deals and got something like 6 or 7 pairs, I don't know how many. She even did "express" shipping on them to see if they'll arrive before we leave for South Dakota. My own glasses may not, but eh. It's in the fates' hands now -- I ordered mine before we knew we were going on the trip at all. I know at least one pair will -- the "make good" pair arrives tomorrow, provided that the USPS can actually deliver them to the right address this time.
There's still been no updates whatsoever from the USPS on my two missing package claims I've filed with them -- they will not respond to my multiple email requests to give me an update on their findings. Today I researched who the postmaster general was in the Omaha area and obtained his email address and phone number, as well as the email address and phone number of their "customer relations coordinator." I will give the USPS another 48 hours or so, and if no contact, I'll light them up. My job at work is to escalate on technicians and workcenters -- you bet your ass I have no problem doing so with the postal service as well. I was born for this. I don't want it to have to come to this, mind you, but when nobody seems to be properly doing their jobs (if at all), well...
This afternoon, I got up and did some laundry, both for peace of mind as well as to try to make sure the smaller chores around the house are done as much as possible before we head northwest. In preparation for the trip, I looked into duffel bags on Amazon -- I'd rather not have to lug my suitcase up to South Dakota when I really only need about three days' worth of clothing. I found a few cheaper options but haven't pulled the trigger yet; the one I really want won't be in stock until after the trip, making it pointless. I'll mull it over for a few days. Meanwhile, over the weekend, I purchased something like $45 of various trail mixes so that I can have something to eat that will sustain me but will not fuck over my diabetes while on the trip. We learned a few years ago that South Dakota really doesn't have a lot of...well, options period for most vegetarians or vegans, so we have to be creative. With my diabetes now as well, we have to be even more creative and I have to be mindful at all times of what I am eating versus what I'm not, and how often, so that I can take my Metformin without it wrecking my stomach.
[EDIT: I did go back and get a duffel bag for $11, two nylon dirty laundry bags for $10, and a day/night pillbox for $5.]
As an aside I've grown rather fond of my new diet -- lots of nuts, trail mixes, salads and other green vegetables, with limited carbs and lots of fiber to offset the ones I do ingest. In the overnights, if I'm not particularly hungry for something else, I'll eat a few sticks of string cheese or some nuts and chug a can of V8, to put something on my stomach so I can take the pill. V8 and I have become close friends over the last several weeks. I've always loved V8 anyway, it's good for me, and it's like drinking room-temperature soup. I can get a case of the low-sodium version on Amazon for $15 or so, and 6-packs from Walmart for $4 if I'm in a hurry. It generally hits the spot, gives me the vegetables/vitamins I need, and won't make me fatter -- all of which are a big plus.
I do need to do an order soon from Walmart to restock on string cheese and a few other essentials, like Powerade Zero and the like for the car trip up there. I'm always going to feel like I've forgotten to get something or do something, and generally that's just my stress or anxiety talking.
In other news, my mother reached out to me today and asked if we were willing to postpone our trip to WV until sometime in September. We are -- I absolutely am willing to do so as it will give me more time to accrue more PTO, and if I do it around Labor Day I can legitimately save myself from using at least ten, if not fourteen or sixteen, PTO hours to make it work. The downside to this is that I won't be there for my parents' birthday (yes, they share a birthday, but not the same year). My mother, on the other hand, doesn't think over Labor Day is a good idea because she doesn't want to travel around that time and doesn't think it's a good idea for us to do so either, what with everyone on the roads. I told her that if we're pushing it out to September, that's about the only time I can do it and have enough PTO hours to put in for it to cover it. So at the moment, we're at an empasse. Daisy has already informed me that she is free and clear to take that week for our trip to WV and that it's been approved by her boss, and I'll need to let my own work folks know as well. Luckily, I had not yet submitted any PTO for the WV trip because we were trying to lock down the days for it.
Plus side, pushing out that trip until then means I can put in hours to take Sunday, July 18th off, and give myself a buffer day once we return from South Dakota, meaning I get an actual "weekend" day here at home with nothing to do but rest and decompress instead of immediately going back to work once we get back from the trip. We're returning Saturday the 17th. Nobody at work has to know that; they can think I'm not getting back until the 18th and returning to work on the 19th, that's perfectly fine with me.
So much to do, though, between now and then.
I did do some other stuff over the 4th of July weekend -- we had a cookout at the parents', where I ate some of Daisy's mother's bread for the first time in a few months -- and I went to Burlington and picked up five or six new pairs of shorts to work out in and be comfortable in. We went to the gym twice, on Friday night and again last night before I started work (they were closed on the 4th, and on Saturday we were pretty busy). Last night I beat the hell out of my arms and upper body on the arm bike at high resistance, and worked to get my stamina back up on the treadmill so that I can, eventually, do it at jogging speed again for a half hour or more at a time. It's all a process, and a process that I like getting back into the groove of.
I don't expect my A1C to be much lower when I go back in to get it checked after our South Dakota trip -- it will likely be somewhat lower, as should my blood glucose, but I don't expect it to be substantially so. Any progress whatsoever will not disappoint me, but if I were to show the doctors great progress then I could prove to them that I actually give a shit and have been working to rid myself of this diabetic bullshit.
Wednesday, July 7:Working from home, day 294.
Thursday, July 8: Working from home, day 295.
I wasn't on the computer long enough to write either of these days. This week has been a mess.
Friday, July 9:
Day off.
As mentioned above, this week has been a mess. It has been hectic, it has been crazy, and there's been an ungodly amount of shit that we've just had to take care of, both inside and outside of the house, at work and at home, before we can fully prep to go on our semi-impromptu "vacation" to South Dakota next week.
Daisy's new glasses from Payne arrived in the mail today. I got my re-shipped pair from them earlier this week, and have been wearing them ever since; they are very comfortable and lightweight, and exactly what I expected them to be. I actually think the Payne prescription seems less...harsh? Like yes, it's still very clearly my correct prescription, but it doesn't seem to hurt my eyes of make everything feel shaky/wobbly like the optometrist's glasses or the Zennis did. I dunno. Maybe I'm just more used to it now. The other pairs I ordered over the 4th of July sale arrive on Monday, so there's that. We'll have them before the trip.
The duffel bag, laundry bags, pillbox, and all of the trail mixes I ordered have arrived as well. For $11, I thought I was getting a standard-sized duffel bag -- not small, but not something overly huge. Oh, hell no. What I got was a bag large enough to stuff all three cats, a 24 pack of soda, all of the clothing and toiletries I'd need for a month, seventeen laptops, a bookshelf of DVDs and a small child into all at the same time. It is HUGE.
Like, I'm not mad, it's giant and will be more than adequate for our trip to South Dakota, but...it's bigger than my actual suitcase I was planning to take, and I wanted something half that size. For $11 though, well, it can't be beat I guess. It's fine, it is what it is. If nothing else I'll find a use for it around the house after the trip, and find a more sensible duffel bag for gym and short-travel use at some time later.
I also did a Walmart order (it arrives in about two hours) for more string cheese, some Powerades and V8 for the car/trip, and a few other essentials as well. I told Daisy that whatever she wants/needs for the trip we'll have to get soon, but my needs are pretty well-covered at this juncture. I even plan to wear my new-ish (I bought them last year during the pandemic) trail shoes for the outdoors walking/hiking/whatever activities, so I'm really set, even.
Earlier this week, though, Daisy decided that she wanted a new phone, and that it needed to be done now, right now, couldn't wait.
"Why would you want to take a very new, very expensive phone with you on vacation and risk it getting lost, stolen, or broken on the trip?" I asked.
I asked this because I need to get a phone upgrade too -- my iPhone 7 is ancient by tech standards these days, and the battery on it is failing on me. The phone itself works fine, but if I can't get the battery to last longer than an hour or so when I'm running an app/playing a game, and when it drops about 10% per hour when it's not even doing anything...it's time to get a new phone. I'm never too far from a charger, but still -- the last thing I want is for the phone to eventually not work at all unless it's plugged in and drawing power from an outlet. I may as well have a landline in that case.
I also am wary about getting a brand new, very expensive phone only to possibly break it, lose it, or have it be stolen on a vacation.
I should mention that a few nights ago, after over seven years of being married and having separate phone plans, Daisy and I combined our phone plan into one. I had to "relinquish" my number and transfer it to her account, and she had to accept it and add it to her account. After that, the change order had to be accepted and updated by Sprint/T-Mobile before it would solidify us as one unit, one account, with two lines and two phones. We had to wait to do this because it would not let us do it while we were still under contract with them paying off our current phones -- my phone was paid off about a year and a half ago, and Daisy has a Galaxy S8 -- which was paid off well before that because that phone is ancient as well -- though, ironically, not as ancient as my iPhone 7. Were we to upgrade our phones separately we would not have been able to combine our plans while one or both of us was still paying off said phones. Since then we've basically just been putting it off.
Daisy, however, wants the new phone for pictures of the family and of the kids next week on our trip, and because she's extra, wants the highest end phone possible -- the new Galaxy S21 Ultra. Daisy has also broken the screen on every phone she's owned (some phones she's done it more than once on), so I'm taking bets on how long the screen on this $1400 phone will last before she cracks it, at the very least, if not shatters it completely.
I, meanwhile, just want a fairly basic phone with the newest and most reliable hardware and battery, on an operating system I like to use and want to use (which is not Android, because Android phones make no sense to me), so I chose the iPhone 12 Mini. Why the Mini? Because I need a phone that will actually fit in my pocket, won't take several hours to charge, and I loved the size of my old iPhone 5 -- the Mini is only slightly larger than the 5 (it's actually slightly smaller than my 7).
Over the course of the past few days, I've heard from no fewer than five people something along the lines of "why someone would want a tiny phone in 2021 is beyond me." Because I don't want to carry a goddamn tablet everywhere I go, that's why. I like what I like.
As a side note, I would have likely picked the iPhone SE (which has the hardware of the 11 in the case and form-factor of the 7/8) were it available for the promotional discount/trade in we're doing for our plans, but it's not -- only the 12s qualify for the promotion we're doing. And, as a further side note, I did consider getting the 12 Pro Max, because it is indeed a very nice phone -- but upon checking it out in the store last night, I did confirm that it is huge and would not, especially inside a case, fit in the pockets of most pants/shorts I own in any sort of comfortable fashion. And I just don't want a phone that big. A phone to me is an appliance and a time-waster for games and the like, I don't need something crazy, I just need something that works.
So, with Daisy settled on her extra phone and me settled on the iPhone 12 Mini, we made our plans to go get the upgrades done tonight -- they do a phone-to-phone transfer in the store that moves everything on your old phone to the new one, so apparently the old way of backing everything up on your own is no longer an issue...except...
Daisy takes pictures. A lot of pictures. And she saves almost every one of them. Over the four years she's had her Galaxy S8, she's taken something like 12,000 of them. Do you know how long it takes to back up and/or transfer 12,000 high resolution photos to a computer or Google Drive or what have you? A very long time. Daisy did not want to risk something going wrong with a phone-to-phone transfer in the store, nor did she want to sit there waiting for what the store folks said could be up to 90 minutes, so for the past two nights she's been trying to back up the photos herself so that she can get them off her old phone and the phone-to-phone transfer goes quickly and seamlessly. She's not had great results.
I, meanwhile, only put a bunch of memes on my phone and I did a thorough cleaning of its "hard drive" last night to delete and eliminate almost everything that I could that was either taking up extra space, was no longer used, or I could go back and get later if necessary. That includes apps, pictures, files, messages and attachments, etc. I spent a few hours doing this as meticulously as possible and I'm not sure I got it all, but I got most of it. On an iPhone, most of the drive space is used up by the apps and system themselves, and not by the actual media you put on it -- at least on mine, anyhow. Maybe I'm an atypical iPhone user, I don't know.
So, anyway, as I write this I am waiting on Daisy to decide whether we're actually going to be able to go get the phones tonight (looking more and more unlikely at this juncture) because of the slow file-backup time, or if we're just going to have to go back in the morning to do it then. The T-Mobile store closes at 8pm, and it's now currently 6:15. The Walmart grocery order is being delivered between 7 and 8 (I set this up several days ago before we decided to do the phones thing tonight) and Daisy wanted us to go to Trader Joe's afterwards to get what she needed/wanted for the trip...sooooo yeah, my guess is that most or all of this is going to have to wait until tomorrow.
Saturday, July 10: Day off.
Sunday, July 11: Working from home, day 296.
The events of these days are covered in the "intermission" post "The Class III Killstorm" that you really need to read before continuing here or you will...ahem...not understand a lot of what's to come. Thanks.
Monday, July 12: Working from home, day 297.
Tuesday, July 13: Working from home, day 298.
A return to normalcy after the events chronicled in the "The Class III Killstorm" post above for two nights of fair-to-middlin' normal work before the South Dakota trip. During this time there was lots of packing and finagling involved to get everything taken care of before leaving the house for four days in the middle of an Omaha summer, so it was rather hectic (and sometimes expensive) to do it all.
Wednesday, July 14
Thursday, July 15
Friday, July 16
Saturday, July 17
Sunday, July 18.
The events of these days are covered in the posts "South Dakota, Part 1: Live, from Sturgis" and "South Dakota, Part 2: Live, from Deadwood" that were put up before this one, so read those first to find out about our South Dakota adventures....and then come back here.
Monday, July 19:
Working from home, day 299.
After returning safely from South Dakota, everything is nearing normal again. I have now done all of the laundry from the trip, and the cats are now used to us being back home. Life has basically returned to status quo. We went over to the parents' yesterday afternoon (they'd returned from South Dakota on Friday, a day before we did) and I delivered to them the knitted blanket I'd picked up for them from Wall Drug. Today, Daisy returned to work and tonight I will return to work via my "office" downstairs. Bills are paid, groceries are in the house, and the power and internet are both working (though the internet went down for a bit last night in the overnight hours -- glad I wasn't working then). I even ordered another pair of browline glasses I'd wanted before but hadn't purchased, and got the wife and I two wireless charging pads for our new phones -- since those phones support wireless charging.
During the week I was out of the office (well, six days) I had over 2500 emails come in to sort through -- most of them just issues being worked, with very few that I actually need to pay attention to once I return tonight, and even fewer still requiring something actionable on my part (maybe 1-2% total). The house remains fine and I am actually energetic and alert for once.
What's upcoming for the rest of the week? Well...
Tomorrow night after 7pm I have to enter a fasting period again, as my next check-in for my blood glucose and A1C is 7:30 in the morning on Wednesday. I will once more have my blood drawn and the tests ran to see where I'm at, so to speak. After six weeks of Metformin and a lot of drastic changes to my diet, I'm hoping to be in better territory than I was at the beginning of June. I've lost about ten pounds (net), though my trip to South Dakota and the foods I ate there during that time didn't help me much on that weight loss/carb-counting journey. Still, I feel better, I think I look better, and I am not incredibly concerned about the trip to the doctor either way -- I'm not even nervous. It is what it is, and there's no reason to stress out about it. I have to be doing better than I did before, at least. If I'm not, I'll be incredibly surprised. I don't plan to make a big "event" post about this doctor's visit because I expect it will be pretty quick and pretty normal.
I'm also looking forward to the first regular weekend I will have this month -- even though it's only Monday. I crave some real downtime at home with nothing to do, really. The family comes into town at the end of the month, the first weekend of the month was July 4 weekend, the second weekend of the month was the storm, and this past weekend was South Dakota -- I look forward to this being a normal weekend without incident and I hope that's what it is. There's no rain or storms in the forecast, Daisy and I don't have anything on the docket to do, and Brandon just needs some breathing room.
Tuesday, July 20: Working from home, day 300(!)
Wednesday, July 21: Working from home, day 301
Thursday, July 22: Working from home, day 302
Friday, July 23: Day off
Saturday, July 24: Day off
Sunday, July 25: Working from home, day 303.
July sucks.
Most of these days were spent working and sleeping and not doing much else. We returned to our normal lives, we went back to the gym (occasionally), we got groceries and paid bills. I spent the vast majority of my writing time here not updating this post, but writing the massive two-part South Dakota posts "Live, from Sturgis" and "Live, from Deadwood." I haven't had time for much other writing as I need to get those stories out while the details are fresh in my head -- and even a week later, some of the details are starting to fade, which I don't want to allow to happen before they're written and on the page. Here's a brief rundown of everything that's happened over the course of the past few days:
1. My doctor's visit on Wednesday morning was fine. I am still diabetic (of course) but I lowered my A1C from 8.5 to 6.8 in the span of six weeks. I was thrilled, the doctor was thrilled, and she told me to keep doing what I'm doing -- basically diet, regular exercise, and Metformin -- and that I can return for the next check in and A1C blood draw in six months. That would be January, and around the time we'd try to schedule our yearly physicals anyhow, so I'm very okay with this. With some discipline I'm hoping I can get the diabetes basically reversed over the course of the next year or so, to where it's no longer a true health concern for me.
2. Daisy has begun gathering quotes for repair or removal of the splitting tree out front, which I covered in the second South Dakota post. Various folks have gotten back to her, none of them with any true estimates for how much it would cost (or any possible timeframes). A few of them will be coming out to take a look over the course of this next week or so. I've asked Daisy to schedule these people for evenings if possible, or on days she's working from home, so that I can actually sleep during the day.
3. It's been unbearably hot this week and is projected to be over 100 later in the week, with heat indices reaching around 110 or so. We've kept the house closed up as much as possible and our AC unit has been working almost around the clock to keep the house pleasant, but every time I step outside for anything, I almost faint. It is simply miserable.
4. Last night, as Daisy was cleaning up the last of the kitchen dishes, our kitchen sink clogged. We spent hours unsuccessfully trying to plunge out the clog with two different plungers, as well as using Drano, and while it drains, it drains very very slowly. We also found that our garbage disposal is leaking water down under the sink -- possibly from our plunging efforts but also probably not, as the machine is ancient and has sounded for months like it's trying to die on us anyway. We put in a claim with our home warranty folks to get the clog snaked out (it's not the first time this has happened) as well as to likely get the garbage disposal replaced. That was $107 we'll never see again, with the bonus that they can't do anything outside of Monday-Friday business hours, so at bare minimum it'll be sometime tomorrow before they come out to the house.
I'm trying to remain positive about everything, but man, it has been hard. Shit will get fixed and everything will be okay, yes, but that doesn't make it any less stressful right now, not when we're bleeding money from every pore and when we can't use the kitchen sink, and when it's too hot outside to breathe. It's all so goddamn frustrating.
Monday, July 26: Working from home, day 304
Tuesday, July 27: Working from home, day 305
Wednesday, July 28: Working from home, day 306
Thursday, July 29: Working from home, day 307
Friday, July 30: Day off, payday for me.
I will once again reiterate that July sucks.
Sunday night, when I went downstairs to work, I turned on my computer and as it booted, it began making a very loud fan noise, with a slow ramp up to deafening sounds, almost like it was a 747 trying to leave the runway. I messed around with it and opened the case, and found that it wasn't a case fan or the CPU fan, but the power supply fan -- which was on and blowing at full blast.
Knowing a bit about computers as I do, I used some canned air to blow out any dust inside the box (remarkably little), blew out the inside of the fan, and did some exploratory surgery on it. I unhooked one of the PSU's three plugs -- computer died. I plugged it back in, computer came up. I unhooked the second plug -- computer died again. I plugged it back in, computer came up. I unhooked the third plug, computer died a third time, began beeping at me for some weird reason, and then came up normally again when I restored the plug.
Okay, so there's no way to cut power to the fan itself without cutting power to the rest of the machine. Well...shit. The PC (as well as the power supply and the hard drive) were ice cold, so it's not like it was oveheating or anything like that. I began doing research -- apparently the fan will kick to high/full speed for a number of reasons, such as:
1) the BIOS settings on the machine were screwy, usually after a Windows Update accidentally glitches/resets something
2) one of the heat sensors on the PSU itself has burned out and thus, the machine thinks it's constantly at a high temperature, so the PSU fan compensates
3) the PSU fan itself is going bad (like, the bearings in it and the like)
4) the hard drive is going bad and overheating from boot, and thus the fan runs as hard as it can to compensate (unlikely, but we'll get to that)
5) the motherboard could be dying -- a common problem on older HP desktops, like mine
6) the capacitors on the motherboard may be going bad and/or holding a charge longer than they should when the computer is powered off, so when it's powered back on, the PSU kicks on the high fan in response to a power drain, or
7) who TF knows?
In most cases the quick solution is to -- yes, you guessed it, replace the power supply. I've done this before on a few of my machines in the past, and it's not difficult. It's the three plugs, and four screws -- remove the old one, screw in and plug in the new one. The replacement takes about 2-3 minutes. It's exceptionally easy to do for these mass-deployed machines that we have for my job. They make those machines incredibly easy to work on and swap parts for. Part of the problem, however, is that I do not own this machine, it's owned by my job. I can't just go buy parts and swap them out willy-nilly, even if (and I do) I know what I'm doing.
Well, I mean, I can, but I'd rather not go out of pocket for it, so I tried a few troubleshooting solutions I was able to find first -- I first did what techs refer to as a "power clear," which involves unplugging the power cord and holding the power button to drain any and all power from the motherboard and capacitors -- this worked for some people to clear the issue if it was a problem related to #6 above. It did not work for me.
I then tried to get into the BIOS to check the fan speed settings and change them back to low if they were stuck on high -- this did not work either, as access to my system's BIOS is admin-locked out by our company (this surprised the hell out of my boss). I then tried to get into Windows Update to make sure that I had the latest and/or roll back to a previous version, if it was an update installation that had caused the problem. That unfortunately didn't work either as Windows Updates are -- you guessed correctly again -- admin-locked out by the company. I then researched ways to manually run/check and install Windows Updates from the command line (hey, I've gotten really good at command-line stuff from running Linux on all of my machines for 15 years) only to find that wouldn't work either.
By the end of Sunday night at work, with what sounded like a 747 roaring in my ears from two feet away on my desk, I was beginning to reach my wit's end because of the noise and had already researched replacement power supplies online.
I will stress again that these HP desktops my entire team uses for our jobs are old. They are the same HPs that we had in the office when I began working there seven years ago, and over the years as long as the components inside them work, they upgrade them as necessary (about once every 2-3 years, max) to add new RAM, upgrade the OS, etc. I started out there in the office on a HP very much like the one I have now. At the time it had 2GB of RAM in it and was running Windows Vista. Yeah, Vista, in 2014. I swapped computers for the first time in 2015, to another HP machine running Windows 7 on it, and had 4 more GB of RAM installed and upgraded to my third machine in late 2018 or early 2019, which is the one I brought home with me. It's been a remarkably good machine since I brought it home, now that I'm only constrained by the VPN we use to access our client tools -- it's been fast, reliable, and (until recently) quiet. I had no real complaints about it.
Replacement OEM power supplies on newegg, for my exact machine (and the exact same model number as the one currently in there) were $25. I began to wonder if it was worth the hassle of just doing that.
Why would I wonder this when PC repairs are covered and taken care of by the company, you might ask? It's the process.
I've had multiple agents reporting to me need to get their PCs swapped out over the years, and the process for it is what kills me. A ticket has to be opened, then you have to chat or email the IT group, who opens another ticket and sends that to our local group here in Omaha, then that group has to build and/or otherwise ready a new PC -- at that juncture, a timeframe is scheduled for you to bring your machine up to the one remaining building our company has in Omaha in order to swap it out. It's a process that usually takes several days, multiple emails, and a lot of finagling to make it happen -- and since Covid hit, the restrictions on folks, who can and can't enter the building, mask policies, etc etc -- are all that much harder.
"If you swap it out yourself," my boss told me, "be damn sure to yank it right back out of there and replace it with the shitty old one when you leave the job and turn the computer back in to the IT people. Don't let this company get any of your money and parts."
That's actually one of the smartest things my boss has ever told me.
"I actually have a few PSUs that would work in that machine just laying around," he said. "I'll even give you one if you want, I don't care."
My boss is, most of the time, a really good guy.
Daisy was not thrilled with my plans to spend money to fix a part on my work computer, at all.
"If I can fix it myself, the small bit of money is worth it to me to not have to deal with the process of trying to get our IT folks to fuck around with it on their time, not mine," I said. "It's always on their time and it's always a process that takes forever."
Still, on Sunday night, I started the process.
Five days later -- today, as in this morning, I could finally take the machine in at 8am after I got off work. That meant for every night of work this week I was forced to listen to that fan noise, all night long, from 10pm to 7am. I felt like I was going to go insane. It was so loud. It droned out everything else. It was unrelenting, it was awful, and seemed like it got louder and harder as the night went on (likely, it did, as the computer became more and more taxed).
So this morning I took it in to the only office building my company has left in this town -- and the oldest one of all of them we once had, I might add. This was the building I did my training in back in 2014, and we were a completely different company then. I also noticed maybe 50 cars outside, in a lot with probably 300 spaces. It was very clear that the vast majority of our corporation was still working at home.
I took the computer up to the door and swiped my badge -- the badge that literally hasn't been around my neck or used anywhere in well over a year -- and it didn't work. I swiped it again, it didn't work. I didn't exactly expect it to, since I'd never actually "worked" in that building, but I wore it so that I could be identified as an employee and not a creeper hanging out with a PC under his arm.
An electrician (also with a badge) who was going in and out actually let me in, kindly, as he saw I was an employee -- he actually should not have done that due to our security standards,- but I wasn't going to complain. I talked to the security desk guy, who I've worked with time and again via phone over the years, and he called upstairs to our IT department to let them know I was there.
At the same time, another employee had come in to get his computer swapped out -- not anyone I recognized, of course -- and the IT guy I work with frequently came downstairs at the same time. He took the other guy's computer first and then told me he'd be back down with a new one for me.
"Uh..." I said, "to swap out the hard drive and/or the power supply?" I asked. "Because there's no way for me to back up the stuff on this machine, it's here and it's what I have."
This wasn't exactly the truth -- I could back up some of it, my important personal files and the like, but I couldn't back up the tweaks and settings/config changes I'd made over the years, I couldn't back up all of my saved logins and saved Outlook configs or anything like that. The important stuff I was able to back up in a folder on our shared network drive, but if I got an entirely new machine I'd have major issues getting everything else set up again before the weekend was done, and I knew that.
Guess what?
Yes, after an hour of waiting, and then another hour of actually setting up the machine to work properly in the little lab area they have set up downstairs for that sort of thing, I did get an entirely new machine -- a new Dell Optiplex of some sort. Smaller, super quiet, and with a solid-state drive in it. My work computer is now new(ish), state of the art, and goddamn lightning fast. I thanked the team, brought it home, and hooked it up. After about a half hour of configuring things, I have about 90% of everything I need to work normally again on Sunday night when I return to the office -- the only other stuff I need is some settings to be manually applied here and there (some of them to likely be applied by my management), and my softphone to be activated and fully set up again for the new machine. I could not believe how fast the new machine was -- it was a night and day difference. It'll also really help my stress levels at work, as half the stress that I experience is because I have to wait so long for everything to load. That's not a problem on the new machine. Oh, and the new machine has at least 8GB, maybe 12GB, of fresh RAM in it too. My regular powerhouse desktop upstairs (you know, the one I am typing this post on right now) has 16GB and I don't think it's as fast as the new work machine is because of the solid-state drive.
So, in hindsight, I have to admit that the wife was right in the sense that I should follow the process and just do it their way instead of spending money on the old HP to fix it and be socially avoidant. And I'm glad I didn't buy the new power supply and mess with it myself, since I got an awesome new computer out of the deal.
And so ends that story, which has been my primary cause of stress over this week. However, it's not been my only cause of stress.
The sink got fixed on Monday morning shortly after I went to bed; Daisy got a very early call from the plumbers contracted through our home warranty, who told her that we'd be the first ones on the docket for the day since nobody else was answering their phones. They came, snaked out the drains downstairs and cleared any and all clogs we had in there, and as a bonus -- since we had watched it leaking -- they fully replaced and swapped out the garbage disposal with a new unit as well. That plumbers' call alone likely made our home warranty pay for itself for the entire year -- a new garbage disposal isn't cheap (most of the ones I've seen are between $85 and $120 on their own, just for the unit), and snaking out drain lines isn't cheap either, but when you talk parts, installation, and labor altogether...without our home warranty we would've likely paid $500 or more to get that taken care of.
So yes, when/if you buy a house, purchase a home warranty, you WILL need it. And re-up it every year as long as you can. Ours covers all major appliances, plumbing -- including toilets and our water heater -- electrical, heating/cooling (so, our furnace and AC unit), our garage door/opener (I think) and our washer/dryer. It's like $60 a month, but let me tell you, it does pay for itself.
As for the rest of the week, it's been a long slog at work, punctuated with 747 noise rattling through my skull, long hours, agent stupidity, customer stupidity, and my shift this morning (before I went to replace the computer) ended with some mild power hits as a small thunderstorm rolled through the area. Another, stronger one with more rain rolled through in the overnight hours as well; these are not storms I'm concerned about because they're not severe and there's not a ton of wind with them to where I would have to worry about the tree(s) out front -- it's more rain than anything else, and we do need the rain.
Saturday, July 31:
Day off.
The Canadian side of the family is still stateside for now, in Iowa. They're supposed to be rolling through Omaha by the end of the weekend on their way back up to the great white north...however, most/all of them have been sidelined with being sick.
Sick with what, you might ask? Who TF knows. As mentioned in my previous post(s) here, none of them are vaccinated -- not a one of them. Daisy has been in contact with her sister, who mentioned this afternoon something along the lines of "I'm feeling better, my sense of smell and taste are coming back now" which throws up huge red flags to me when we're supposed to be seeing them again in 2-3 days. Mom and Dad called us last night, very late for them (going on 11pm) to tell us that they just talked to their scentless, tasteless daughter and she had confirmed with them that she was not out of the woods yet and had a fever of 102. There are seven people traveling cross-country in that van together and if even one of them has Covid, all of them will and do -- there's not really any way to avoid that.
For now, everything's up in the air with them. Daisy made it very clear that she will not see them upon their return to town, if they even stop here at all now, without negative Covid tests. I won't either, as much as it will pain me to not see the kids, especially my shadow niece. Dad offered to let them use the house in Omaha has a base stop for the RV if they still plan to come through here, so that he can help them as he can. All of us -- the parents, and of course Daisy and myself -- are vaccinated, but the Delta variant is not fucking around and all of us are in at least one, if not more, high risk categories. I match up with three high risk categories, actually -- former smoker/current vaper, obesity, and diabetes. The Delta variant is infecting a lot of people, even the immunized, and the most current data that just came out today says that it doesn't matter if you've been vaccinated or not, the Delta variant is equally transmissible between all people -- which means the vaccinated can act as carriers without experiencing any of the actual effects of the virus and not even know they have it. I don't know how that sounds to you, but that is fucking terrifying to me. Not knowing whether you have the virus flowing through you? Not knowing if, upon being face to face with someone, your presence could be signing their death warrant? Holy shit, man, WTF.
Now mind you, there's a point of concern here for us too. The Canadians began getting sick very early this week, which was about 8-9 days after we'd last seen them in South Dakota. Do you understand how many people all of us interacted with in South Dakota, almost all of them maskless? Holy Jesus, we took six children to a very crowded and insane Mount Rushmore. Plus, all the people at the lake, the campgrounds, the Spearfish Canyon trails, grocery stores...everywhere. Just from the time they spent in South Dakota alone, the Canadians could've picked up Covid from virtually anywhere, and even more scarily, likely whoever passed it on was a vaccinated person.
Daisy and I have not had any ill effects since we returned from our trip, and have gone about our lives as normal. I still smell and taste normally (allergies not withstanding) and due to my diet and Metformin routine -- along with the gym when we go -- I am feeling really good most of the time now. I haven't felt sick at all, of any sort. Daisy really hasn't either, nor have the parents to my knowledge.
During the time I spent swapping out my PC yesterday morning (with an IT guy who seemed very anti-vax in conversations with him), he told me that they were making plans to move 300 people back to site, back to the building we were standing in -- don't worry, none of them were me or my folks -- but that they'd now basically canceled plans to do that because of how fast the Delta variant is spreading and how states like California (where our home company is based) are going on lockdown again.
While I'm worried about my own health, of course, and the health of the populace, I do have to admit that more quarantine lockdowns are good for business for my current job and position of working from home. Lockdowns mean that my team isn't so swamped with issues that they can't breathe (because nobody's opening trouble tickets because they're not in the office to physically notice issues, our ticket loads had a steep dropoff for most of spring and summer 2020) and that the status of our program remaining work from home for the absolutely foreseeable future/forever is basically guaranteed as long as we're all employed under our current contract. It also likely means that Daisy will be transitioning back to more working from home than working in the office as well, and her new position with the new company taking over her firm may be entirely remote. We'll have to wait and see on that, of course, but damn would that be nice.
However, because it looks like a lot of our current quarantining/social distancing activity is about to resume again, and because it looks like stuff is gonna start sucking again -- at least for a while -- I have decided that this will not be the last post in the Isolation Diaries series, and will be writing at least one or two more to cover the next couple of months...as the world descends (or spirals into, possibly) the second wave of Covid-19.
Once more into the breach, my friends...
