The Holidays, Part I

 So, we have now passed Thanksgiving and are officially into the Christmas season. 

To commemorate this, today -- November 25 -- Omaha got its first snowfall of the year. It came late this year, and coated everything in a layer of thick, fluffy whiteness that is still coming down hard as I write this. I remarked to Daisy that at least this year the weather waited until an appropriate time to snow -- after Thanksgiving. If it snows before Thanksgiving, I call bullshit, but anytime after Thanksgiving until early March or so, well, that's reasonable. 

We were lucky here in Omaha, where there's maybe an inch on the ground and in the grass. In Kansas, where I used to live (as many of you know or remember), they got almost a foot of snow -- 11 inches on the ground in the town next to where I used to live -- by 6pm. 

Of course, even the small amount we got will all melt off within a day or two -- temperatures are supposed to hit the 40s and maybe even the 50s later this week. Omaha is expected to have a "mild winter," so the predictors say. Whether that happens or not remains to be seen.

Thanksgiving was a rather muted and quiet affair, which is exactly what I/we wanted. For the first time in many years, I did not watch the parade, nor did I watch a single second of football. I took off the Wednesday night beforehand and slept for the vast majority of it, not even waking up before around 9am on Thanksgiving Day. Daisy's mother had let us know in advance that she was making a roast vegetable/roast chickpeas recipe that Daisy had actually sent her, involving squash, red onions, brussels sprouts, and a lime cilantro creamy dressing. Dad, of course, had gotten a small bird which he'd cooked/carved in advance and he was the only one who ate any of it. Daisy baked a blueberry pie for dessert, and Mom made her famous "Snickers Salad" for me because I'd specifically requested it (there's still a decent-sized tub of it in our fridge downstairs that I took home). It was just the four of us and the parents' cats, which honestly is my favorite way to celebrate the holidays. 

After dinner, we finalized the next trip to Nova Scotia. In 2024 it will be in late August/early September as expected, and the plane tickets are already booked. We are flying in and out of Bangor as expected as well. We'll need to figure out the rental car and lodging arrangements, but honestly with it being so far out we could likely wait until after the new year to worry about that, if necessary. If nothing else, the trip gives me something to look forward to for the next ten months while I build up my PTO again.

I have taken off December 19 (Tuesday) through December 26 (the following Tuesday) to give myself eight days in a row off during the holidays -- including my birthday, December 20. It took a few months to build up that PTO with the express purpose of using it for the Christmas season. I also took off New Year's Eve, which is a Sunday this year (so I only had to put in two hours of PTO for it). I will work New Year's Day as per the usual, as it's the one holiday I almost always work every single year. 

I will always take Super Bowl Sunday off (no matter who's playing), and I will have to save up some time to visit my parents in the spring -- whenever we plan that -- but otherwise, almost all of the PTO I save this year will go directly to the Nova Scotia trip. I need 13 pay periods to come and go before I'd have the full time I need to go to Nova Scotia -- which is, well, half the year. The other half of the year's PTO can be used for pretty much anything I need, including the trip to my parents' in the spring and next year's holiday season. So, I should be good, honestly. And that isn't counting if I get a bump-up in my PTO accrual once I hit my 10-year anniversary in August (which wouldn't really matter anyhow as I would hit it about four days before we leave for Canada). I don't know if I get a further bump in that or not, honestly. 

If not or if I don't have enough when that trip rolls around, as I told Daisy, I'm salaried, so I can either take it without pay or my boss can, well, deal with it because he's never really seemed to care much about PTO anyhow, and it is what it is. 

Anyway, that's done, and starting tomorrow, I have seventeen working days before I hit the Christmas vacation time -- and you best believe that I'll be counting down every single one of them. Likely, they will all be terrible and/or will move as slow as mud through a spaghetti strainer. 

This morning, after Daisy woke up (and after it was already snowing), she said she had a surprise for me -- though it wasn't really a surprise, because she didn't think I'd want to do it given the snow, but...about three miles from our house, a new Big Lots store had opened.

Big Lots has always been a huge holiday tradition for me. I don't really know why, honestly. It's one of those stores where I always went when I was growing up, well into my college years, a few times a year but always around the holidays because they always had so much stuff. It's a tradition I carried with me when I moved to the midwest and one that Daisy and I partook in multiple times over the course of our marriage, always getting tons of neat things -- decor, movies/CDs, food/snacks, etc -- every time we went there. However, Big Lots took a big hit during the pandemic, already being a discount/overstock store as it is, and the last one I knew of that existed in Omaha closed down about a year and a half ago with no publicity or fanfare -- one day we drove by it and it was just gone, sign letters removed from the building and everything. The building sat vacant for a year or so before it became a Ross Dress for Less.

Which, I mean, don't get me wrong -- we really like Ross -- but it's not Big Lots.

I was bereft; I was very sad and upset when it closed. To me it was the end of an era and another part of my younger years that would just become fond memories, never to be experienced again. It was like losing K-Mart all over again (don't get me started on K-Mart, I am still bitter).

So I guess Daisy shouldn't have been surprised this morning when I said "It's not snowing that hard, let's go."

"I'll get dressed and grab a piece of leftover pizza for the car and we can go," she said. 

And so we were off, over the forest and through the woods, to Big Lots' house we goooo...

I will say that the new store was fairly impressive in size -- larger than most others I've been in, but...I don't know, it was sort of depressing. Instead of there being massive, endless racks of CDs and DVDs/Blu-rays, there was just one small rack, like it was there as an afterthought, and most of what was on there was on there for a reason -- it wasn't anything anyone would want. The stuff that someone would want was very available/streamable on most streaming services. The holiday gift sets section was on point, as were some of the sales, but the snacks and other foods were also lacking, housewares were meh, their toy section was atrociously bad, and their prices in general didn't seem to be any better (and sometimes worse) than places like Walmart or Target. I'm glad Big Lots still exists in Omaha, but I left that store very disappointed overall. Don't get me wrong, we still got $100 of stuff, but still -- it lacked a bit of the magic that made it truly great when I was younger.

Maybe the 90s and early 2000s were just better, or maybe I'm slowly becoming a jaded old man more and more by the year. Perhaps it's both.

In the same shopping plaza as the new Big Lots was a Marshall's, a PetSmart, and (ironically) a Ross Dress for Less. Daisy wanted to go to Ross just to look around, and we did end up having more luck there finding stuff we actually needed/wanted -- we got a few Christmas presents, some decor for the house, and I got a new pair of sweatpants that are nice and look very comfortable. Ross doesn't generally carry a lot of "fat guy" clothing -- even less than Burlington does these days -- but they're good for plus-sized women like my lovely wife. I don't think she actually found anything today other than some socks, though. Usually at the very least I can find some underwear there (not that I need any at the moment), but nope. Still, sweatpants. 

We needed more clay litter for the pan upstairs that the Orange Lad™ uses, so before we went back home we went to the PetSmart too -- as they actually carry the litter we use and we can't order it online (I guess it's one of their store brands, and there's like three PetSmart stores here in town, so we don't mind just picking it up in person). 

And that's when she saw it. 

As I was trying to lead Daisy back to the cat litter area (and past the three very cute kittens they had there ready to adopt), she stopped dead in her tracks in front of one of the aisles, and motioned for me to come back and join her. 

"He stared at me," Daisy said, "and told me with his look that if I didn't rescue him, he was going to die in this store."

I turned and saw that she was looking at the rack of betta fish, little bowls stacked neatly on top of one another, and she was indeed looking into the eyes of a little white one. Plain white, nothing special about him by his looks -- actually quite small and sad-looking compared to the other multicolored, fancy-tailed fish surrounding him on all sides. Per his classification, he was an "exotic" betta, and his coloring was called "platinum."

His name is Ghost, and he is now our newest pet.

Daisy spared no expense on a five-gallon tank, neon gravel, the octopus decoration above, a fake plant,  water conditioner, premium betta food, and a tank warmer for this little fish.

To be fair, he is adorable and seemed very happy once we were able to slowly introduce him into his new home. His big heated tank, with a light in it as well, sits on our kitchen counter in the middle of all of the action -- so to speak. 

I'm not a fish guy. I've never been a fish guy. I like visiting the aquarium and I like seeing them in pet stores, but I've never been a fish fan, really. I have only ever owned one fish, and really only half-owned one at that -- his name was Spike and he was an angelfish. My ex had gotten him along with several other fish (all of which he ate, killed, or killed and then ate) in a ten-gallon tank, and he lived for about a year and a half or so before he went belly-up when he got sick or too cold or who knows what. That's been the extent of my fish ownership experience. 

Anyway, Ghost seems to enjoy his new home just fine. I told Daisy that if he dies, we can just get another one, or some other fish in general, since we now have the tank setup. It's high enough off the floor that none of the old fart cats will ever know it exists, and while Hank seemed to be mildly interested in looking at it from the floor, I seriously doubt he'll ever get up on the counter and stare at the fish inside it. The tank is so heavy that his little orange ass couldn't do anything to it if he tried. 

Also, if he dies, he's a fish. It's not like you can really mourn a fish, right? Scoop him out, plop a new fish in, begin the cycle anew. 

So now we have a fish. Ghost, our post-Thanksgiving fish. 

In other news, the first two batches of the year's Christmas cards have been mailed out. I started sending them yesterday with the first batch of about 30, and then today with the second batch of about 25. The final batch, with the remaining 20-25 or so, will go out on Monday. It took me great amounts of self-control to wait until Thanksgiving had ended before I began sending them out, as I'd had them stamped and addressed for almost two weeks now. 

My Christmas shopping is (mostly) done, and I've been done shopping for Daisy since late September. All I have to do is wrap her gifts now -- which I can really do anytime, as I got a new roll of wrapping paper for just that purpose this afternoon. I shipped my parents their gifts this past week, before Thanksgiving for the most part. For Daisy's parents I don't know what we'll do -- generally I get them each something small and inconsequential and then she gets the rest of the things for them, whatever those things may be. 

More to come. 

Cometh the Fall, Part IV: The Wrap-Up

Autumn is a busy time, and yes, there are still things I've not covered in this admittedly long-winded series of entries here. So, let's get right down to it and finish the story, so that we can then move on into the holiday season.

When I started this series nearly a month ago now, we were at the time prepping for the wedding of one of Daisy's friends and co-workers. I begrudgingly agreed to attend this wedding (it is not a secret that I absolutely loathe the bride -- the only friend of Daisy's who I outright dislike), but I wasn't going to attend it for her, it was to spend the time with Daisy and enjoy a weekend getaway together. The wedding was at a resort in rural Missouri, roughly four hours away or so, and the room we'd booked for that night was not cheap (and, I believe, non-refundable) so once we'd booked it, we were locked in.

The wedding was scheduled for November 3 -- a Friday, at like 4pm. That meant Daisy would not only need to work less than a half-day, but I would need to take off the night beforehand so that I could sleep/change around my sleep schedule and be awake, packed with my overnight essentials and wedding outfit, and ready to hit the road no later than noon. We'd planned to arrive, check in (if there was time), immediately attend the wedding and reception, possibly do a ghost tour -- the resort has a reputation for being quite haunted -- and then sleep, turn around and come home on Saturday morning/afternoon. So, about a month in advance, I put in the PTO for the night off, and dreaded the upcoming trip. 

I will say that when Daisy and I travel together and when we go on adventures of our own accord, it is almost always an absolute blast, and I look forward to it with excitement. When we're traveling on someone else's schedule for someone else's benefit, it's almost always maddening and/or excruciating because most of that travel and the timeframes involved are out of our control. Daisy being on the go from 7am to likely 11pm or midnight at the earliest -- with no real stopping whatsoever and a four-hour drive in the middle of that -- would be very hard on her. Likewise, for me to change around my sleeping schedule on a dime and attempt to make myself look and act presentable in an unfamiliar, uncomfortable situation would be hard on me as well. I told Daisy that I did not want to go, but I wanted to go at the same time so that she and I could get good quality time together and get out of Nebraska on an adventure for two days -- but it was clear that I was, shall we say, less than enthused overall.

Shortly before Halloween -- the week leading up to the wedding -- Daisy began getting sick. It had all the earmarks of Covid, which neither of us ever wanted to get again after how awful it was in February when we'd had it. Over the course of a few days, she got worse and worse; she was in and out of fevers, sore throat, couldn't breathe, headaches, etc. She then found out that one of the people she (and the bride of the wedding) works closely with in the office did test positive for Covid and had been at work, essentially spreading it around.

Daisy tested herself at least twice -- negative each time. I tested myself as well, because I also hadn't felt that great, and also tested negative. Daisy began feeling worse and worse as the week progressed. My own symptoms I chalked up to allergies or the equivalent of "sympathy pains," and I was overall fine. 

By the time we'd reached the night I'd taken off work, Daisy was so ill that she wasn't sure we were going to be able to go to the wedding. She'd been working from home due to her off-and-on fever and was frankly miserable. I, meanwhile, had everything packed and ready to roll, and was just waiting for the yes or no from her -- I'd already taken the night off work anyway, so whether we went or not, I still had a free day there. I told her I'd do whatever she wanted to do -- if she wanted to try we could try, and if she wanted to see if the reservation could be canceled or essentially gifted to some of her other coworkers who were going so she could stay home and rest, I was okay with that too. By this point it really didn't matter to me because I was mainly focused on how Daisy felt -- my own thoughts were inconsequential to the overall situation. When we went to bed the night before the wedding day, it was all still up in the air. 

Until 4am.

4am is when Daisy awoke so sick that she decided yes, she would cancel the reservations and that we would not go. What followed was an entire day of doctor's appointments to see if anyone could see what was wrong with her (results: inconclusive). During the first one, since I was there with her, I was able to successfully schedule my next blood draw appointment for January, so that was a small plus.

We spent the weekend letting her slowly recover. The wedding went on without us and her coworkers sent us videos of the ceremony, and it was nice. We went to the bride's apartment (because, of course, she and her new husband were out of town at the wedding) and made sure her two cats were fed and taken care of, even with Daisy being as sick as she was.

The happy ending to all of this? Daisy spoke with the resort management and they agreed to change the reservation date from the wedding day to our own anniversary in the spring -- our ten year anniversary -- so that we could have a nice little getaway then. It cost a bit of money to change it, but we also have those plans now fully locked in and ready to go.

Daisy eventually recovered, slowly -- it took close to two full weeks for her to feel really somewhat normal again. She did not apparently have Covid and it didn't appear to be the flu, but a really nasty cold or other nondescript virus of some sort that took her down. Throughout it all, I remained mostly okay and still am mostly okay. The night I took off before the wedding, giving me an extra day off for my weekend? It was spent in quiet leisure, giving me a bit of much-needed downtime after a horrific previous few weeks at work.

Anyway. moving onward.

With the wedding no longer something to worry about, we shifted our focus to the future and what was coming up for us both professionally and personally. Daisy has long been wanting to plan our next trip to Nova Scotia and to see if we could book plane tickets now as far in advance as possible while they are still affordable. I had no problem with this plan -- it seems that from now until her grandmother eventually dies, we're going to try to make a trip to Nova Scotia once a year -- and maybe/likely even after her passing as well. 

It's not a secret that I too feel the pull of the sea, and that I at this point have a very strong connection to Nova Scotia and to Canada in general. It genuinely feels like my second home, the extended family there love and support us, and it is a magical place to me -- something that the locals in the area would probably be befuddled by as to them, the little towns of less than 500 people probably seem very ordinary and boring to the people who have lived there all their lives, and to them the big city of Omaha would be exciting. One of Daisy's uncles made a joke about gunfire and shootings in Omaha, and I was like "oh, it's only once every few weeks something like that happens there, it's not very often" -- which I said partially as a joke in return as well as...well, it's sort of the truth. This town can be, but isn't often, a rough and tumble place.

Dad had let us know in advance that he did not want to go to Nova Scotia this time around, but Mom did, so we began planning the trip with her (normally we just plan for ourselves, and they plan for their own trips when/if they want to go). Traveling with Mom is something I personally have only done once, but Daisy has done a number of times. Mom is almost 70, handicapped enough to have a windshield placard and needs extra assistance when traveling, and on top of it all, is a Canadian citizen -- not an American citizen, so she is frequently stopped/questioned/screened, etc on every trip. She has been married to an American for almost 50 years, and has lived here in the states as a permanent resident for almost as long, but it always plays hell with her travel crossing the border one way or the other.

Because of this -- and because it is the easiest/smoothest way to get in and out of the country with the least amount of bullshit involved -- I suggested to Daisy that we go the route that has been the easiest for us: flying into Bangor, Maine and then driving up to the border crossing at Houlton into New Brunswick and across into Nova Scotia. The border crossing there is quiet, generally not crazy busy, and once we're in, we're in. The app is no longer needed, you don't need your Covid cards anymore, you just show your passports and you're on your way. 

We also did tracking of time spent compared to flying directly into Halifax -- it's about the same amount of time spent, generally a bit less expensive, and (the best part) there's no customs bullshit at the airports in Toronto or Montreal because we're not flying through them. The downside is it's a lot more time spent in a rental car -- but that's time we have control of, time we can stop for food or for the bathroom or what have you and enjoy. And, as long as the weather is nice, the drive is wonderful. It's peaceful and quiet for the most part, and aside from driving past Moncton there are no real cities to speak of or get in the way of enjoying the Canadian countryside. 

We wanted to set a time of May/June or August/September -- around the holidays of Memorial Day or Labor Day as it gives both Daisy and myself an extra day of vacation that we don't have to put in PTO for. I told both of them that it didn't really matter to me either way, to be honest; either one was fine to me. I've been in Canada during both times of the year and because of their weather cycles those times of the year can either be pleasant and gorgeous or cold, wet, and miserable, and there's not usually an in-between. When we were there in May this year, every morning it was around freezing up until the last few days we were there. When we were there in August/September 2015 they experienced a heat wave where it was almost 90 degrees every day and poured rain and stormed all night every night. When we were there in August 2022 for the funeral of Daisy's grandfather (Mom's father), it was very pleasant most days, but others were cold and rainy/stormy -- including the day of the funeral itself. It's the maritimes, it's Atlantic Canada -- the weather/climate at any point between May and October is going to be a toss-up, basically. Pack accordingly.

Or, I guess you can do what we do and pack lightly because if the weather changes we can always hit up Giant Tiger or Walmart and get a new wardrobe anyway for pennies on the dollar.

Anyway. 

Mom said she was leaning more towards August as the weather tends to still be cold/nasty in May, which I was fine with -- gives me more time to build up PTO, etc. When we go, it generally wipes out any and all PTO I have saved up, as we tend to stay more than a week (it's not worth it to make the trip otherwise, really). With our need to see my parents again sometime in the spring, hopefully, PTO in 2024 is going to be fairly tight for me, so here's hoping I don't get sick or anything like that which would wipe it out early. We'll figure it out as we go, I guess.

The last thing I wanted to mention here before we move on to the holidays this year is our youngest son, Hank -- also known as "the child," "the goblin," "orange lad" (like he's a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes or something) amongst many other names.

He is giant.

Well, I should say, he is becoming giant. Over the past few months he has rapidly grown in size and weight, and finally grew into his mammoth feet. He's probably (estimating here at best) at least eight pounds now and getting bigger. His goblin tendencies have greatly lessened as he's gotten older, though he is still very active and gets hyper sometimes (usually once a day or so) for a good stretch of time. He has fully integrated himself into the dynamic of the other cats in the house and all of them are comfortable with him. He hangs out with us, he sleeps with us, he...ahem...makes out with Daisy every day -- he loves licking her lips and face for long stretches of time -- and he is generally a very sweet, well-adjusted boy. 

He is, however, still a little nut with a wild streak, and will go from purring and loving attention to attacking and biting your hands and/or feet. He does not understand how socks work or that feet are still feet when the nearest human is wearing them. He only barely understands what the word "no" means, he has zero concept at all of what the word "move" means, and is slowly getting used to the concept of "forced love" (which is where, whether he likes it or not or wants it or not, he will be picked up, kissed, and cuddled). He knows when the squirt gun comes out that he's being bad and needs to stop, and he about halfway knows his name. He likes to attack/chase/halfway bully Sadie because she's old and frail and won't fight him back or play with him like Pete will. Other than a sniff/lick or occasional "I'm going to sleep here next to you" interaction with Maggie, he leaves Maggie alone. 

But he really is a sweet little bugger. 

We now have hundreds of pictures and videos of him, and he's proving to be one of the best decisions we've ever made. I wouldn't trade that decision for anything. He even features on the backside of the Christmas card this year, a spot usually reserved for a cute photo of Sadie or Maggie. This year will be his first Christmas, as we calculated his birthday to be sometime around May 1st. To celebrate, I've already purchased a tiny Santa hat and scarf for him.

 It's been a year of firsts for this little dude, and every day with him is an adventure.

He also frequently likes to sleep like this.

Orange cat behavior.

Anyway, that wraps up our series of posts for the fall. Onward we must go, into the holiday season...

Cometh the Fall, Part III: A Facsimile of Power

I covered the Christmas cards in my last note here, as well as taking the time off around the holidays -- but I haven't actually covered the events that led up to all of that, nor have I mentioned our actual plans for the holiday times -- so I wanted to backtrack a bit to fill in some gaps.

I'll start by saying the past few weeks at work have been brutal. October and November are always at least somewhat hectic, but these past few weeks have been, at times, downright hellish. Part of it is that we're training a new support team based out of Mexico, part of it is that this is the time of year where our clients experience a lot of planned maintenance outages, part of it is that it's "peak ordering season" when new services get turned on and old ones get turned off or transferred, and...part of it is personnel-based. 

Let me explain.

My director (read: my direct boss) has been out of the office a lot over the past month or two. He is currently expecting his first child in March with his wife he married over the summer, and he is quite active in the gaming community, so there are always events that he attends/hosts/travels for. There is but one night a week where his coverage overlaps with our other director -- that night is Monday. Any other nights of the week when he's out of the office, planned or unplanned, if that other director is not there covering for him (a rarity), I become the program director for the entirety of operations between 10pm and 7am.

That's a good thing, right? You might be saying. You've wanted to be a director for years and at this juncture it's one of the largest reasons you're still working there. Time to prove yourself, right?

Well, yes and no. 

Look, I've soaked up paycheck at my current job for almost a full decade. In that time I've been promoted twice (technically, three times) and have received four raises -- two of which have been substantial. I make around $17k more per year there now, roughly, than when I started in 2014. I am still grossly underpaid for what I'm worth and for what I do for that program, and most of the people who work under me have stated time and again that if that place didn't have me, everything would absolutely go to hell very quickly. On occasion, I've been able to get the people far above me on the paygrade ladder to admit the same thing. I don't want to sound arrogant about it nor do I want to overstate my contributions to the program, but I'm very close to reaching that point in the job where I -- with my knowledge base, experience, people skills, and reputation with both local and corporate leadership -- will soon be irreplaceable if they want the program to continue running as it currently does.

That puts me next in line, honestly, for the next time a higher leadership position opens up. The other director of our program has gone into high school teaching, trying to juggle both his current position doing that with his position as director over the weekend shifts, and my own director has become so jaded and fed up with the program that he's outright told me he's not going to sell his soul to it anymore. With the upcoming birth of his child, he's likely not going to stick around much longer, as he can't be a devoted father doing all of the father-things when he gets calls at 3am for dumb bullshit or has to work 14-16 hour shifts because someone on the dayshift -- hours before either he or I would start work for the night -- fucked something up so badly that C-level executives get involved. Someone has to be left holding the proverbial bag, and at the moment, most of the time that someone is him.

Yeah, I'd be sick of that too. 

So, again, I wouldn't be surprised if you're asking well okay, Brandon, why the fuck would you want that?

I don't, at least not that level of bullshit. I've worked for multiple directors at my job -- with my boss just being the latest in a decent-sized string of them -- and at my level of experience I now know how, and when, to put my foot down without it being trampled over. Most of the time. Far be it from me to tell other people how to do the job, but it's all about setting boundaries, resetting expectations, and knowing -- vocalizing when necessary -- what your responsibility is and what it is not. Some people are really good at that and others are really, really bad at it. Some folks are good at the technicalities and fail miserably on the personnel issues, and vice versa. Some folks can't say no or delegate tasks, believing everything is on them to personally own and accomplish. I've mentioned all of this here before. 

Yeah, I'm not one of those people; I know and understand my duties and responsibilities and what they encompass and what they don't. I see the bigger picture on things, I handle personnel issues with grace and class, and I have no problem instructing, delegating, or outright dictating what needs to be done and how/when it needs to happen, and I know how to do it without being a condescending dick. This is just who I am as a person. People think you need some sort of innate "leadership qualities" to be a good leader or to manage people -- you don't, you just need a brain and need to be able to use it. 

That all being said, my boss is not a bad guy. He does handle quite a bit and is decent at most aspects of his job. I've known him as long as I've worked there and I encouraged him to apply for the director position when it became available, because at the time he was absolutely the most qualified to lead the program. But I can also see what it's done to him over the course of the past five years he's been doing it. I don't fault him for it; I think he's done a fairly admirable job -- again, most of the time -- with the situation he's in. He has indeed failed in his endeavors many times and has made many egregious mistakes over the years, made the wrong call, said or done the wrong thing, or has otherwise shirked a responsibility (or many) that he absolutely should not have. And that tends to be what people remember.

I remember my former executive director, many years ago, telling me that one of the reasons he knew I was good at my job was because rarely did he ever see anything of mine cross his desk -- because he knew I was on top of it and handling it. But, similarly, again, he rarely saw anything of mine cross his desk because nobody ever said anything good or bad about my work ethic.

I told him, at the time, that if anyone had any problems with my work he would absolutely know, and the fact that he rarely heard anything good about what I did sounded like a lack of appreciation and gratitude from the parties involved whose proverbial asses I'd saved from the fire.

Or something along those lines, I'm paraphrasing. I may have said those exact words -- that executive director was the kind of guy you could be blunt with as long as he knew and respected you.

That is, however, a microcosm of the work culture in that place -- never get appreciated for all of the good one does, always be remembered sourly for anything one screws up. It's one of the many toxic things about the work environment in which I am employed. 

I will say that the gratitude and appreciation has increased immensely over the past few years, and it's likely increased tenfold from most levels of leadership since we've become work-at-home employees. I have been told that I am like the "Big Papa" (their words, not mine) of the team because I'm like the overnight team's father figure. My primary team lead, as an aside, is very much the "team mom." Yes, I know, the positions and dynamics are confusing. However, in that role that I frequently fulfill, I am generally the first person people come to talk to when they're experiencing problems or aren't getting along with (to put it mildly) their management, other agents, or the daytime/evening teams. Sometimes this is fine, and other times it puts a burden on me that I do not want. 

But Brandon, you may be saying, probably more than once now, you are there in that role, in that position, to do exactly that. You want to become a director? Knowing how to handle stuff like this is part of it. And you'd be right, and I do. But that doesn't mean I have to really enjoy it.

About two weeks ago, one of the agents under another manager came to me to report that she was basically being bullied by her boss. Her boss is my peer, so I can't really "coach" him directly. She described scenarios when she would ask other people for help -- namely me -- instead of dealing with him, and he would blow up at her about it and basically treat her like trash because she should have been coming to him first with any issues, as he's her manager -- not me, not anyone else. 

You know, I do see his point. I do. Do I agree with his actions? No, of course not.

As managers we're there to help anyone on any of the teams when necessary. We oversee, we manage, we assist and we lead. I don't care who comes to me for help because it matters not -- if I can assist, I am going to do so. I'm never going to refuse to help a struggling agent just because they don't report to me. I'm sure at times my own agents have gone to the manager in question for assistance when I've been busy or when I've not been in the office, and I am completely unaffected by that. Honestly I'm glad they ask for help when they need it instead of being prideful, keeping to themselves, and screwing something up.

Anyway, this agent described to me several different specific scenarios where her manager had blown up at her for asking for help -- even if she'd asked him personally -- but mainly when she had come to me for advice or assistance. 

"You just explain things better and in a way I can understand," she told me, via phone. "You have patience, you don't treat me like I'm stupid."

To be fair, this agent is not the best agent on the team but she is far, far from the worst. And even the worst ones I don't treat like they're stupid -- I treat them like people, because everyone has different learning speeds and skillsets, and what may be easy for someone else to memorize or process isn't that easy for them. Our agents come from all walks of life -- for some it may be their first actual job. For others, they may have worked in office or technical roles for their entire careers and this job is just another one of those. I don't expect everyone to know everything or learn everything -- I've been there almost a decade and I still learn new things every single day, almost without fail.

"Does he flip out on you when you ask [the team leads, other managers, or anyone else] for help?" I asked.

"No," she said, "just you."

"Okay, so it's his ego, then," I said. 

Mind you, her manager is my peer, as I said. I've always had what I'd describe as a good daily working relationship with him. We've never had any real disagreements, if he's ever said anything about me on the side or behind my back I've never heard about it, and most importantly, he himself never brought any of this up with me. Aside from a one-off conversation here or there from months or possibly years ago now, he's never been like "if my agents come to you and I'm here, direct them to me and I'll help" -- which is fine, well within his right, and I completely understand that.

And to be honest, there have been times over the years where I have done so, or my team leads have done so, especially if/when we're swamped or engaged on other escalations. There have also been times where all of us -- not just me -- have reported coaching points to him for his agents, including the one who was coming to me for help. This is pretty standard across the board -- my team isn't perfect either, and I get a fair amount of coaching point requests from other managers over the course of any given year (I estimate about 4-6 per year overall, generally -- it's not a lot). There are times I've sent that many to other managers in this place over the span of a week, so I think 4-6 per year isn't bad. 

She went on to explain that his treatment of her made her apprehensive to ask anyone about anything, especially me, and that she didn't want to even take questions to him for fear that he'd use it as ammunition to get her fired (she's been written up several times for other things and has been on the edge of that cliff for a while). And that is primarily where my anger point was laid bare. That was not okay. None of it was okay, really, but when your employee actively fears you and avoids you? That's a huge problem.

Given my position and my level of authority in leadership, when something like this is brought to me I have the responsibility to report it up to my own leadership myself, if not directly to HR -- and to offer that option to the reporting agent herself as well. I've received directives on this in the past -- and the last time someone brought an issue like this to me, the offending party was very quickly fired. It seems to be the only real way to very quickly fire someone in our place of employment. 

However, due to remarkably poor timing on the part of this agent (not her fault, of course) the night she brought this to me:

1. My director was out of office on an extended vacation
2. Our executive director was out of office on extended business travel out of the country
3. Our secondary director would not return to the office for two more days
4. Our secondary executive director had just had a new baby with his wife and was on his last real working day before he'd go on paternity leave. 

This left me as the only actual person in any sort of management power in the place for several days on end. And it wasn't even real power, it was fake power -- a facsimile of power that would go away once the real leaders came back. And of course, that bothered me to a certain extent, but I was the acting director on shift and titled as such during this time, so it was my job to do something. 

I laid out a plan with the agent where I would discuss it with my direct boss, then she could discuss it with him as she liked, or one or both of us could take it directly to HR. She shied away from the HR option as she didn't want to do anything to jeopardize her job (despite the fact that I assured her it wouldn't), and she also relayed that it had taken a lot for her to even bring it to me. I told her I understood that, but it didn't negate my duties to take it up the chain. She thanked me, I told her I would let her know what I found out, and the discussion ended. 

I sat on it for a day -- I didn't really have much of a choice. She had brought this to me at 6am -- an hour before I'm off shift -- at a time when nobody else above me was available to discuss and wouldn't be until the next night. The next night, when I saw that our secondary executive director was around and available, I brought it to his attention and told him the entire story (well, a Reader's Digest version of it, to be fair) and asked for his advice on it -- whether she needed to take it directly to HR, if I did, or if now that I'd run it up the flagpole, it would be dealt with at a higher paygrade than I am.  I was informed that all options were viable ones, but primarily now that I'd taken it higher up, it would be dealt with and was essentially out of my hands. I was instructed to document the entire story in a detailed, very lengthy email to both executive directors as well as my own (which I did) and they'd take care of it. I made sure the email had been read and acknowledged after I sent it, and when we returned to the office after the weekend I made sure to let the agent know all the actions I'd taken on it and to reassure her it would be dealt with.

And then I never heard anything else. Whether they "dealt with" the problem or not behind the scenes, I don't know. I haven't noticed any changes in the mood or dynamic of the overall team, my working relationship with the manager in question seems normal, and I never got an update from anyone above me whether it had been discussed and handled. Truthfully, it's not my business if it has been or not -- on the record I have done my duty -- but it would really, really bother me if it just got swept under the proverbial rug in order to not make any waves, because I've seen that sort of thing happen far too often in that place. 

So, there's that. And that's just one of many extra things I've been dealing with at work this month in addition to all of my other daily duties and tasks. Granted, it's much easier to do it all from the comfort of my own home, but it doesn't mean it's not stressful overall.

Next time -- we'll cover everything else happening in our lives....

Cometh the Fall, Part II

 When we last left our intrepid heroes...

There's a lot that happens from month to month in this place. "This place" meaning Earth, but also meaning my life and everything that revolves around it.

Wow, that sounds excessively narcissistic. Let's try that again.

There's a lot that happens from month to month around this house and in our lives. So, little things here and there sometimes get missed. Before I sit down here and write, I generally make a short list of things I want to cover in a rough chronological order, and then I cover each one fairly methodically. I don't write here much anymore (there are legit very few people who even care to read my musings anymore) so for those who do actually feel the need to occasionally catch up on my life, I want to provide some actual info and substance to them.

As an aside, and to be fair -- I'm not as great a writer anymore as I once was. One of my friends told me a few months ago something to the effect of that everyone's life has boring bits, and yes, she was correct. For me it feels like the opposite of that, though -- it feels like my life is generally one big boring bit, with smaller, more interesting bits scattered throughout here and there. I am not really an interesting person. Part of that is my personality and part of that is by conscious design -- if I am "less interesting" than others, more people will leave me alone. All of it as a whole, however, has seriously affected my writing abilities over the years -- and it has absolutely affected my motivation to continue writing almost anything, anywhere.

Daisy thinks that I'm headed towards another depressive episode. I haven't had one, not seriously, anyway, in about four years or so. Initially, I didn't think I was -- I've been more at ease with myself, content and stable in my moods and feelings than I've ever been in my adult life over the past few years. Now, however, I'm not so sure anymore. Depressives often talk about creeping thoughts, the kind that linger at the back of your brain for a long time that gradually become louder and more intrusive. And, I do have those. Depressives may have a "triggering event" that causes them to spiral, or it could be a slow buildup over time that eventually spills over the edge of the proverbial bucket. 

I've heard all sorts of theories on what causes depression or depressive episodes, or ways to stave them off -- vitamin deficiencies, lack of quality sleep and exercise, and stress are usually cited as causes. I'm not sure how much stock I put into any of those things. Sure. Maybe. Who knows for sure, really -- I don't know how deficient I am in any of those things, but generally I'm probably more deficient than most. I can, for sure, tell you that I am heavily affected by Seasonal Affective Disorder, which for years I thought was quack doctors making something new up to sell more pills:

Okay, sure. Whatever. I definitely have this.

Most days of the week I do not feel depressed at all -- in fact, I generally feel pretty great. I've got a wonderful wife, four loving cats, a stable job that I don't have to leave the house for, and a family -- both on my side as well as Daisy's side -- who truly love me and care about how I'm doing.

And then the headaches started.

For the record, I almost never get headaches. I had a giant bottle of Advil that sat on my desk from about 2017 to 2022, before it got down low enough to where I needed to purchase more -- and I just dumped the remainder (about 30 pills or so) of the old bottle into the new one. When I'm sick or injured and needed to cut the pain or lower a fever, that's when I took the ibuprofen. Daisy took far more of it over the years than I did. But for headaches? Rarely. I almost never got a headache for any reason that I couldn't immediately pinpoint, such as lack of sleep or dehydration or sinus issues. 

The headaches started at the beginning of October, and would occasionally be accompanied by dizziness or a distinct and almost total lack of energy. They always happened the same way -- I'd wake up for the day feeling fine, and by about 3-4 hours of being awake, the headache would slowly begin. It would build and build and occasionally be accompanied by light or sound sensitivity, dizziness, and/or the very strong pull/desire to go back to sleep, the inability to will myself to move, or a combination of all these things -- it would ebb and flow whenever I was awake, sometimes a dull annoyance and other times an almost screaming, blinding headache pain which I could not shake. Once I settled down and got ready for bed, it would slowly move off and I'd begin to feel normal, and I would sleep normally -- only to restart the cycle the next day.

I thought it was a migraine, to be honestly -- I do have the occasional migraine, and by "occasional" I mean maybe twice a decade or so. I think I've had one honest, true migraine since Daisy and I have been together, and it was crippling for about 18 hours or so. I've had headaches and I can tell the difference between a normal one and a migraine, or at least I thought I could previously.

Seasonal allergies, maybe? I wasn't sure. Allergy pills didn't touch it or make any difference in symptoms. I was fairly congested a lot, as the seasons were changing and the weather was flip-flopping between 80 degrees (or warmer) and 30 degrees (or colder). I purchased two boxes of Sudafed sinus+pain pills to supplement the allergy pills and they would barely take the edge off. Ibuprofen would take the edge off for a while, but I could absolutely tell every single time when the ibuprofen was starting to wear off, as the headache would ramp up again from quiet to loud.

This continued for days on end. 

And then the nosebleeds started.

This was where I started to get concerned about my actual health. I've long said that I have been given the worst mutant power in the world -- I can tell when the weather is about to change (whether a big storm is about to roll in, or if we're going to get a lot of snow; generally it's the latter) because I will spontaneously get a horrific nosebleed out of the blue, for zero actual reason. You can almost set your watch to it, and I don't even have to do anything to trigger it most of the time -- I'll feel my nose running and surprise, blood! And then it gushes. I've had them start while I've been asleep before, too -- which, if that's not terrifying, I don't know what is. 

But. I am a 40-year-old man. I should not be getting nosebleeds, almost ever. I've never had any nasal trauma and even in my wildest years I never did any of the types of drugs that you'd snort (I always considered that absolutely disgusting, to be honest). 

So, every day, along with the headaches, my nose would randomly gush for a few minutes. Usually I could get it stopped quickly. Some days I couldn't, and it would bleed a lot before I could make it stop. Always from the right nostril, always with the same intensity, and always with a lot of dark red blood. 

Daisy's sister came into town with her boys, and I couldn't go visit them at the parents' house because I was so incapacitated with the headaches and every time I blew my nose, it would bleed for ten minutes or longer. 

How I was able to work all night, every night during this time I don't know. On my lunch hours, when I got them, I would curl up on the couch under a thick blanket and try to nap for an hour, and was almost never able to get any actual sleep.

This process continued for almost two full weeks, and as it neared its end I was almost at the end of my rope. I wasn't under any more stresses than normal, my blood pressure was perfect (it almost always is now, every time I go to the doctor), I hadn't started/stopped any new or old medications or really changed my diet at all, and I was sleeping normally -- in fact, my FitBit recorded record high for me "sleep scores" during some/most of this time. My heart rate was normal, my weight wasn't really any different than the usual, and I was otherwise feeling fine except for the headaches and nosebleeds. So what was it?

I don't know.

Do you know what persistent headaches and nosebleeds are two of the top symptoms of? Brain tumors and/or brain cancer. 

No, this isn't my way of telling you I have a brain tumor. I don't. At least I don't think I do. 

Gradually, over the course of about another week, the headaches and nosebleeds subsided. 

I don't know what was causing the headaches and nosebleeds. Possibly allergies from the seasons changing, possibly a sinus infection, possibly a cold that didn't present any other symptoms -- who knows. I wasn't about to go to the doctor for it. Daisy offered to set me up an appointment, but with everything else going on in our lives and with my other health issues as it is, the last thing I needed on my psyche was something else to worry about that would consume me with anxiety.

I do occasionally get a nosebleed, usually at the onset of a sharp weather/pressure change, but am otherwise back to normal.

And that's a roundabout way of telling you why I don't think I'm as good of a writer as I used to be.

Kidding.

November is, however, NaNoWriMo, which is the stupid acronym-like-thing that academics call National Novel Writing Month, where people who write are supposed to take the month and write a novel. I have tried and failed at this in the past, because I don't know anyone who isn't independently wealthy who can stop what they're doing for a month to write a novel. 

Somewhere I read/heard/etc that Stephen King, in interviews, has said that he can write a good one-to-three pages a day, if he's really in the flow of things. Sometimes less, sometimes a little more. When I started my short story collection a couple of years ago, there were nights when I was really into a particular story and would write twenty or so solid pages -- pages that would require very little, very minimal editing (in my own eyes) upon a re-read. So, does that mean I'm a better writer than King?

No. Hell no.

King has the life I've always wanted -- he's been writing steadily as a career for fifty years, he lives in Maine, and is at the point of his life where he can write as much or as little as he wants because he's not hurting for money, not hurting for time, doesn't have to spend eight to ten hours at a desk working for someone else multiple days per week, and knows that when he writes something people will be clamoring for it and it will always be published, purchased, and read. 

Sure, there was that one time he was run over by a minivan, but small price to pay? You be the judge of that.

I haven't progressed much further at all in my short story collection since I last mentioned it here. I wanted to have it completed, manuscript locked, shopped around, published, and on shelves by the time I turned 40. I turn 41 next month, and of the five stories that will be in it, I have:

    1. One completed story that likely requires some re-editing

    2. One story that's 95% complete and in my own eyes is pretty near final

    3. One story that's about 5% complete

    4. One story that has a large amount of notes and plans, but 0% actually written

    5. One story that I have a title for and nothing else

    6. An image I want to use for the cover -- it was a photo I took myself

    7. A half-written acknowledgements page

    8. A table of contents that may change

    9. A half-written epilogue/essay that I may completely delete.

What I do have aside from the plans for that book are about thirty new story ideas -- concepts I've come across or came up with on the fly that would make wonderful stories, but no concrete plans for how or when I'll write them yet. I'm almost ADHD in my writing tasks -- I'll think something's a great idea, I'll start writing it and eventually become bored with it, and then I'll abandon it for either a short time or indefinitely because I've come up with another idea, and then the process repeats.

I could plan multiple books with the story ideas I have, plot out character arcs and plot out how each story would flow into the next, come up with a title for the collection(s), create a table of contents and plan what I want on the cover and then never actually write anything because that's how my brain works. If I could publish endless lists of ideas and nothing else, I'd be a billionaire. But writing an actual story from start to finish? One that makes sense and has a good flow, one that people will actually want to read? That takes time and energy, both of which I have in very short supply these days. I used to look forward to having some days off in a row -- like around holidays and the like -- because I'd devote a full day (at least) of that time to writing. Generally there are more holidays like this in the fall and winter, so...

Yeah, well, there are always household chores and cleaning to do. I have 140GB of podcasts I haven't yet listened to, some of them going all the way back to 2014 or so. There's always a new game coming out for the PS4 or Switch that I want to play. In the fall months, of course, there's always football -- college or NFL -- that will sap my time. And then, of course, there are the holidays themselves and the events surrounding them -- travel, meal planning for the big days, Christmas shopping, trying not to have a stress-related mental breakdown, Gravy Season™, vet appointments, doctor appointments, holiday parties, and everything else that eats up any bit of free time I once had as an actual functioning adult. 

To those ends I have saved up some PTO and have taken a couple of good swaths of time off around the holidays this year. I took off the day before Thanksgiving, which gives me a four-day weekend, and I took off from December 19 to 26 and the 31st -- which gives me eight straight days off and New Year's Eve off. Now, three of those days are my birthday, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day, but still. Daisy has already let me know in advance that she cannot and will not be taking all of those days off with me -- she I think she took my birthday off and that's it -- and I told her that was fine, she didn't have to, it was more so that I could have a breather, a real true break at the end of the year between my birthday and Christmas, with a day overlapping on each side. I usually use those days to relax, sleep in/sleep when I want, order a pizza and watch a movie or two, wrap Christmas presents, and enjoy what I can of the holidays.

In normal fashion, this year I have already finished Christmas shopping for Daisy -- I finished well over a month ago (today, as I write this, is November 12th). I still need to figure out something for my parents and her parents, but that's about it. I'm not doing gifts for everyone at work this year, as I have done several years in the past -- I don't really have the spare money and now that student loans have started again (I made my first payment on them this past week), I have another bill to worry about every month.

The Christmas cards were designed and ordered in September -- the week after we returned from visiting my parents in NC -- and were delivered shortly thereafter. I spent several hours over the past two weekends -- in the overnights -- filling envelopes, stamping them, and putting our return address stickers on all of them, then individually addressing them and readying them to go out. They are now complete, and ready to stick in mailboxes, around the week of/week after Thanksgiving. 

This year's batch of special stamps -- because I always order a few new books/sheets of stamps every year for the cards, and I drum up excitement about it on social media -- include the new Ruth Bader Ginsburg stamps, but also some mainstays like the STEM education stamps, endangered species, Star Wars Droids, American muscle cars, and the new run of James Webb Telescope stamps. There's even a few normal American flag forever stamps thrown in for good measure, primarily because I found half a book of them from like, 2012 buried in my stack of address labels from many Christmases gone by. This year's international/global stamps (because not only do we send cards to Daisy's family in Canada, but I have some friends in other countries too -- like Brazil and Germany) are poinsettias and what appears to be chrysanthemums. I come well prepared.

There are 70 Christmas cards this year. I've addressed 65 of them to send. I always order a few extras in the event that someone new joins the list or if one of them gets damaged, or if any get returned due to an outdated address (happens with at least 1-2 cards a year, because people neglect to provide updated addresses). Most of the cards go to family, friends, or family friends. Some go to Daisy's friends. A large chunk of them go to Canada. Many go to my relatives and Daisy's relatives. Some go to people I haven't actually spoken to in well over a decade, but I guess their address is still the same because I don't get cards "return-to-sender, address unknown" from them. 

I generally send 60-65 cards a year. It's not a cheap or easy undertaking to do so -- this year's cards, plus the stamps purchased for them, was likely around $200 total. It is, by and large, a thankless effort. Daisy thinks it's ridiculous to spend that much on greeting cards, such an old-fashioned and antiquated tradition from before the 21st century. But, she also knows it's important to me and doesn't interfere. Rarely do I even show her the photos I've chosen before I design and print the cards; this year I chose a photo of us from Nova Scotia, from our trip up there in May, for the front -- and a picture of Hank for the back. The cards will always follow that same general format: a picture of us on the front, and a picture of one or more of the cats on the back. Since Hank is the new baby of the household, this year it's him. 

Sometimes the design changes; occasionally I'll design a small postcard-sized card, and sometimes it'll be long and narrow like a business envelope. Sometimes I'll do crinkle cut edges or rounded edges, sometimes I won't. Sometimes I'll spring for the pearlized coating on the card that makes it shimmer like glitter (I did this year) and sometimes I'll apply a subtle filter to the photo to either mute or make the colors pop more (I also did this for this year's cards). Sometimes -- again, like I did this year -- I'll change up colors and shades of the actual cards themselves to something far less traditional than red and green. Also, it's always Happy Holidays and not Merry Christmas because I have many friends who are not Christian -- and neither am I. Some of my closest friends are Jewish, Pagan/Wiccan, or are staunch atheists like myself. 

But it's still a mostly thankless endeavor. While I do have some family and friends who are very excited to see the yearly cards, and send me pictures of them being displayed or hanging off their Christmas trees like ornaments, for the 60-65 cards I send, I get about 20-25 from people in return -- a number that seems to be dwindling more and more by the year. Even the people who send us cards generally send the generic, 20-to-a-box of $5 cards from Walmart. There are about ten people/families who go all out and get the custom cards made like I do. My parents do, a few friends of mine from high school do, and a few members of Daisy's family do -- and that's it.

But that's not why I do it, of course. I don't see the vast majority of these people in any given year. Of the ones I have (very few), I've seen maybe once or twice in the past several years. A good chunk of the people on my card list I've only ever met once, and some of them I've never met in person. The cards are primarily for those people, the faraway friends and family I haven't seen since our wedding, or long before that. People who aren't on social media or who use it very rarely, elderly relatives who likely won't be with us much longer, friends in other countries on other continents. The cards are for them more than anyone else. It's not about trying to elicit a response -- it's about letting people know we still think about them and still care. Either I or Daisy, or both of us, have a close personal connection of some sort with every single person or family on the card list, even if those connections have loosened or otherwise grown apart over the years. I want those people to know yes, we know you are still here, and yes, you are loved.

And, for everyone I'd love to send cards to but don't have addresses for -- because there are a LOT of those folks and frankly, even if I had the addresses for them it would double my card order and cost/postage costs every year -- I post high-quality photos of the front and back of the year's card on  social media on or around Christmas Eve, so that everyone can see. I've probably talked about this before. I thought I'd posted them on here before as well in previous years, but apparently I have not. Maybe I will this year. I haven't decided yet.

Anyway, there's more to come, of course. Stay tuned for Part III.

Cometh the Fall, Part I

Well, hello again everyone.

In the time since we've returned home from North Carolina, a lot of things have transpired. Some of it was in process or happened right before we left on the trip, and some of it flew under the radar and I never got the chance to really cover it due to the fact that life moves forever forward at its own pace. Things that were very significant at the time become part of the new normal and so forth -- I'm sure you all understand what I mean. 

To those ends, fall has started -- obviously, it's almost November now. This isn't that significant to a lot of people because, well, to them the unofficial start of fall is the end of Labor Day weekend, or when the kids go back to school, or when Starbucks begins selling their Pumpkin Spice Lattes again. Truth be told, I haven't given a shit about fall for many years. I don't live in WV anymore so I rarely get to see any good fall foliage (Nebraska does have a lot of trees, but it also does have Nebraska weather, which means it's fall for a week, then it's winter, then it's summer for two more weeks before a wind/rain/ice storm blows all the pretty leaves off the trees and it goes cold and snowy for four months). 

I still get a bit of residual excitement for fall, and I don't know why. I think it's because of hoodie weather, football, Halloween and Thanksgiving, and the leftover feeling (from my days in education, both as a student and as a professor) of something new starting. As a kid, and even into my college years, I remember feeling both excited and apprehensive about the beginning of a new school year -- not for the work, mind you, but for the social/show-off aspect of it all. In grade school/high school, it was all about appearances and acquisitions -- showing off new school clothing, whatever new Magic cards or video games I'd gotten over the summer, discovering and sharing new music (it was the 90s, so there was a lot of good still happening back then). In college the new clothing thing was still a small part of it, yes, but it was also reconnecting with friends you hadn't necessarily seen or had been able to keep in contact with over the summer -- plus, at the beginning of the year, I had money -- refund-check-from scholarships money, sometimes thousands of dollars of it. I vividly remember going to the record store/convenience store/smoke shop on campus, The Den, and slowly building my music collection disc by disc -- sometimes new, sometimes used -- and picking up a carton of Camel Turkish Golds when they used to be about $28 a carton about once every two weeks or so for a few months on end, until the money began to dwindle down and I'd more closely have to budget it. 

The Den does not exist anymore; it closed its doors over a decade ago, and when it did it felt like the final nail in the coffin of many fond memories of my college years.

Now, fall just feels like it gets colder and I spend more time indoors in more layers of clothing than I'm generally used to. Daisy does not care for football, despite me trying to get her into it over the past decade or so. Starbucks will deliver Pumpkin Spice Lattes to me, if I want them to, in all of the hours of the day, except the ones where I'm awake and working in the overnight. I don't have anyone to impress with any new/exciting fall clothing, or new music/video games/etc, since I'm no longer in school and I work from home. Fall now feels like a time where I have to begin preparing for the holidays, experience the holidays and somehow come out alive, and then spend three months of miserable winter inside growling about the cold and the snow, while also trying to stay active and watch my diet to keep my diabetes under control. Oh, and paying down the bills from the holidays.

Last month marked five years in this house -- since we bought it, closed on it, received the keys and moved into it that very same day. It does not feel like it has been five years in many respects, and yet in some others it feels far longer. I love this house for its many features and its many improvements we've added to it (or made into an improvement by removing something from it) -- when we bought it, we had a flat backyard with string lights going across it, connected to the tree and the porch, had a recessed stairway in the corner of the backyard with a large storage shed, and had two giant silver maple trees in the front yard, separated by a cute little walkway. 

Now, the string lights are gone, the shed got taken down and the recessed stairway removed when the retaining wall collapsed (there's a rock bed and a bonfire peach tree there in that corner of the yard now, put in after the retaining wall was rebuilt), half of the back yard is Daisy's giant garden, and both of the giant silver maple trees were removed from the front yard due to storm and carpenter-ant damage. We need some major landscaping work done around the house that we can't really afford or have time to do ourselves, and the house itself needs some little odds-and-ends sorts of TLC that we also don't really have the time or money for either.

However, I will say that over the course of the summer, we began upgrading some of the things in the house one by one. The first of those, as I mentioned a while back, was the microwave -- the old one blew up for the third or fourth time, and Daisy said she was done with getting it fixed over and over, so she just took it upon herself to get a new one ordered and installed.

Following the microwave was our bed. 

Now, we bought our last bed in 2017. It was a Sealy, Serta, something like that, and it was about $800 -- which at the time we thought was ludicrous. Within two years or so, the box springs began breaking down; Daisy removed them, stripped them, and turned them into trellises in the garden. We put the mattress directly on the bedframe (which was a solid frame, not a skeleton frame). Then, per Daisy, the sidewalls of the mattress on her side of the bed began breaking down. We turned the mattress a few times over the following years but to Daisy it didn't seem to help much. 

Throughout all of this, I was perfectly fine with our bed. I didn't feel like we really needed a new bed -- it was comfortable enough for me. Before we'd gotten that bed we'd slept on a mattress quite literally from 1988, the year Daisy was born, a bed that I'd gotten third-hand at least and had used almost ever since I had moved out here from West Virginia. It had gone from Missouri to Kansas to Nebraska in every move I'd made, and I was not necessarily sad to see it go. That bed definitely needed replacing. But, the 2017 mattress that was barely six years old? Eh, I was fine with it.

Eventually Daisy's uncomfortability got to be too much for her and she declared that we needed to go buy a new bed because she couldn't sleep on it anymore without being in pain every day. So, I relented, and told her we could go look.

Do you folks have any idea what a new bed costs these days? Unless you've bought a bed very recently, I doubt that you do. You probably think you have a ballpark number in your head that's accurate, and I'm here to tell you that you're wrong. You're not close. You're not even in the ballpark and your favorite team has sold the franchise and left town. 

For starters, the low end mattresses now start around $1100. Start. That's not including box springs or frame, adjustable or otherwise. That is the starting price of a low-end, plain-jane mattress, made by some foreign company you've likely never heard of, but not a name-brand one. I say they start at $1100 because I saw zero mattresses priced lower than that in the store, and I was purposely looking for the cheapest one I could find so that I could come here and write about it later.

After two store visits and many beds we laid upon (in a non-biblical sense), we decided on a Purple mattress with an adjustable frame. It was the highest-end Purple mattress the store carried, firm, and an electric/remote controlled adjustable frame. Remember those old Craftmatic adjustable bed commercials from the 80s? Yeah, that's not a novelty anymore, or just for old people who can't get in or out of bed easily -- that's basically the norm now when you are looking to purchase a new bed. You don't have to get an adjustable frame, but most people buying new beds these days will do so. This wasn't a thing a decade ago -- hell, it wasn't a thing six years ago when we bought the last bed. The Purple also came with two pillows made of the same material -- pillows that were normally about $150 each -- because we were making our purchase during some "pre-Labor Day" sale or something.

The final cost of the entire new bed setup -- over $6,000. I wish I were making that up. I'm not. I'm very much not. 

But whatever Daisy wants, Daisy gets.

To be fair, it is very likely the best bed I've ever slept in. When you lay in it, it almost feels like it grabs you, supports you, and you sink into it as it wraps its big purple arms around you. I no longer have any back pain, and most of my joint pain is gone. I sleep harder and more deeply in this bed than I think I've ever slept in any other bed, as does Daisy. It took her some time to get used to it, but when she can go to bed on a weeknight after I've started work, and I hear her snoring within ten minutes, she is sleeping well and sleeping hard. So overall, we're very happy with it.

The same night we purchased the bed, we ventured over to the other side of the building to look at dishwashers.

Our old dishwasher came with the house, and it was not awful -- I will stress that -- but it was old. It did occasionally leak all over the kitchen floor due to a sometimes faulty door seal, and the plastic buttons on it were getting crushed in -- crushed in to the point where you really had to press on them hard to get them to work. Adding to that, the dish racks were cheaply-plastic-coated metal, and over the years the coating had worn off in many places, the tines had broken or bent (they were just, well, iron underneath I guess), and the tines that were not breaking had begun rusting away to nothing. New racks for the dishwasher were something like $400 by themselves (we looked them up) and given the age and the other problems with the leaking and the buttons, we just wanted to rip it out and get a new one put in that wouldn't have those problems.

Because I'd let her take the lead on the bed problem, Daisy gave me full reign to pick out the replacement dishwasher. Her only request was that we not get the cheapest one available and end up having the same problems in a few years. Well, you don't have to worry about that with me, because when I'm in charge of getting something I want to last, I spare no real expense. 

The cheapest dishwashers in stock were about $300. They were small, mostly plastic, and looked very cheap. I, instead, picked out the $1,400 KitchenAid stainless steel model, with three layers of  non-rusting racks, multiple cycles to choose from, multiple high-pressure sprayers, a high-heat dry option, a "scour/heavy wash" option, and a door that may as well be a hermetic seal. It was installed four days later (while I was asleep one day and Daisy was working from home), in less than an hour, and the old one was hauled away. It has worked flawlessly ever since, and I can't remember ever seeing cleaner dishes in my life. 

Knowing our luck, our refrigerator will be the next thing to die.

Anyway.

While I believe Daisy actually lost weight during our trip to see my parents, it was almost impossible for me to not eat like an asshole while I was down there, and thus when I returned, I'd gained nine pounds. I do not exactly know how that happens; I did eat some healthy meals when we were down there, but I also don't know that I ate nine pounds of food total during the week. I don't know that or if the food I eat during any given week at home physically weighs nine pounds either. As soon as I got home and got back on my normal sleep/work/eating schedule, I immediately dropped five pounds. Almost two months later, I'm still working to get back down to my pre-trip weight and continue losing, if I can. I'm about twenty-five pounds away from my first real goal weight.

I'm still injecting myself once a week with the Trulicity, with varying degrees of pain when doing so. I did my weekly injection yesterday and I barely felt it at all, but other times it hurts like hell for the 2-3 seconds that it's happening. Nerve clusters, I guess?

When I started writing this story, in the previous 48 hours I had been stuck with various needles six times -- I had my every-three-months blood draw appointment, and they had to stick me three times in order to get blood out of me. Then, the next morning I did the Trulicity, and that afternoon I got this year's flu shot and the new Covid booster. 

I am about done with being stuck by needles for the time being. I have no desire to get any more shots any time soon.

I didn't have any issues or sicknesses with this year's Covid booster, and my arm is only slightly sore where they stuck me. However, on the other arm -- where they administered the flu shot -- was so tender that it hurt without me doing anything to it, and moving the arm or flexing the muscles in the arm ached like hell. It didn't swell up into a big welt or anything (as it has, at times, been known to do in the past). Daisy noted that she experienced much the same effect. 

My bloodwork, by the way, was surprisingly great -- my A1C dropped a point and a half, and everything else was in normal ranges for the first time in ages. The doctors cleared me to go back to once-every-three-months check-ins. My guess is that if it remains really good when I go back around the new year, I'll drop back to once every six months again. 

I will pause for a minute and say I don't know how this happened, as I've basically been eating like an asshole for half or two-thirds of my meals, but I guess the Trulicity actually works. 

Speaking of work -- almost as soon as I arrived home from the Carolinas, I got a new work computer in the mail.

This requires a little bit of backstory and some explanation. When we all went work from home in 2020, we left our computers on our desks in the office and were issued VPN logins -- we would login to our desktop computers from home and would be able to work normally. The specifics of this changed a few times. Three months in, our company lost the lease to the building, and we went to site (masked up, on certain timeframes to minimize any Covid exposure) and picked up our machines to physically bring them home. We were issued a different VPN that was installed on our machines via network before we brought them home, and once we got them home we logged into that and it allowed us to access client tools. Fair enough, right?

That VPN got hacked in May 2022 by evildoers, and we switched to another one. Then they changed the login/authentication method to the new one at least twice -- to two different methods we need to use any time we login to our work PCs, both of them requiring your cell phone to be working and in your hand (and both of them will seriously fuck up if you get a new cell phone and don't know how to transfer/reset it up). This frustrated a lot of people, given the fact that all of the actual computers were almost a decade old -- some of them were older -- and they didn't mesh that well with the new VPN/authentication methods. There were lots of login issues, dropped connections, etc.

And if it wasn't that, the machines themselves were beginning to fail across the board, one or two at a time every week or two. 

We still had a hub office here in town, as did our sister site in El Paso. Our teams operated remotely from that building (all of our servers were there, and there were some skeleton-crew teams onsite during the pandemic as well as afterward). If one of our computers failed or were in its last gasps of life, we opened a replacement ticket and shot an email over to the IT leadership, and they imaged one of the computers in their warehouse with the tools we needed and left it at the security desk. We'd take in the old tower, swap it out for the new one, and go home. We have roaming profiles and all of our files are backed up by OneDrive, so anyone who knows what they're doing would have no issue plugging in the new machine, logging in, and resuming work as normal. I had to do this once when the computer I'd brought home from the office blew a fan and it sounded like a jet engine ready to take off. The replacement they gave me was manufactured in 2014, but it worked really well and to this day was my favorite work computer I've ever had.

This is how things went for some time, until we were informed around this time last year that they'd no longer be doing swaps onsite (the El Paso building closed down around this time, so they likely made it a blanket policy for our site up here as well). Instead, when we opened a machine replacement ticket, it would be sent to a third party company who would load the profile onto a new machine and then ship it to us via UPS. In turn, once we got the new machine and set it up, we took the old one to the local UPS store, gave them a code and our employee ID, and it was shipped back to the company. I had numerous agents on my team who had to do this process -- some of them multiple times because the company would keep sending them machines that either weren't configured properly or were faulty/failed within a few weeks. I didn't have a lot of high hopes or faith in this company after seeing that happen multiple times.

In June, it was announced that our last remaining hub building here in Omaha would be closing down in July, making everyone who worked there 100% permanent work-from-home employees. I covered this before here at length. However, what they didn't tell our teams (and wouldn't have, had I not asked about it a month or so later) was that all of our IT help here in town -- the guys I worked with a lot and had a good working relationship with, the ones who saved our asses many times in crisis scenarios when all of our systems went down, or who had the admin access to fix a program issue that was small, but crucial, on one of our machines when we needed it the most -- were all summarily shitcanned without warning. Our best IT tech was on vacation, and the day he returned he was told to pack it in and get the fuck out. From all accounts he was not happy about it.

IT support for our company was then transferred to a 24/7 team in the Philippines that we'd access via the help desk chat. Our teams began calling it the "No Help" desk, because their teams would either a.) blame the issue we were reporting on "user error," b.) tell you to reboot your PC and/or change your password, c.) claim that the team who could help would not be back in the office for 12 hours, d.) had the IQ of a glass of water, e.) would push back on the simplest requests, or f.) all of the above. 

So, we -- and I'm using the collective "we" here, meaning the vast majority of our entire program -- hated having to deal with these people and would frequently work with our one remaining program OPS specialist who hadn't been shitcanned (which I am very grateful for) to get the minor things taken care of. He and I became fast friends over the course of a few months.

In the early spring, we were asked to get all of the computer IDs and mailing addresses for our agents so that we could get their new computers ordered and shipped out to them -- the company had finally decided that machines a decade or more old were no longer gonna cut it, especially when we were all at home, so they were just going to do a blanket sweep/replacement of all old machines. We were told this would take place for both sites and that we should expect it to all be complete by May. I told them I didn't need a new machine, as I'd just had mine replaced less than a year before and it worked wonderfully. Tough, they replied, in a more professional way, you're getting one anyway. 

May came and went. No new machines.

June, July, and August came and went. No new machines.

By the week I was on vacation (so, Labor Day) -- out of the blue, my team began getting emails with tracking numbers for their new computers. No warning, no heads up, just "oh, your new PC is on its way, and it'll be there tomorrow. Make sure you're home and/or awake to sign for it and when you get it, make sure you set it up with our IT folks ASAP during your next shift, because if the old one isn't shipped back to us within three business days -- with tracking -- you'll be docked $540 out of your next paycheck."

I wish I were making that up.

A reminder here that $540 is laughable for those old machines. My desktop that I'm typing this on I purchased in 2021 as a fully-assembled, ready-to-go refurbished machine with Windows 10, a DVD-RW drive and a 2TB HDD, Intel Core I5 vPro and 16GB RAM for less than two hundred dollars. Most of the machines that were getting shipped back were many years older and far lower power than that, virtually useless hardware of questionable quality/specs that wouldn't even be useful in most business applications or deployments today, and would end up being parts machines at best. There's a reason -- multiple reasons -- many of them catastrophically failed for my agents over the years.

I was close to begging the IT guy to not replace my perfectly good machine that worked wonderfully and needed zero changes or upgrades to it, until he told me the truth behind it all -- because our building here in Omaha closed, we would no longer have our local server to operate from and/or VPN into. Instead we'd need to be switched to our company's corporate server, which required a completely different network mapping/login system -- one that apparently could not be network-installed on an older computer after the fact, but had to be built into the profile at install (I know how computers work, so I still think this is absolute bullshit -- but whatever, that's what you get when you fire your IT teams and offshore your support to the Philippines). 

The El Paso teams had already been using that system for some time, since the last network upgrade, and they weren't getting new computers because (secretly) most/all of them were "going away," except our After Hours teams, by the end of the year anyhow. I'll let you read between the lines as to what they meant by that, but I think it's pretty obvious. 

Now, here's the other thing they didn't want to tell anyone before the new computers were shipped -- the new machines were locked down like a bank vault. Meaning the normal user couldn't do hardly anything on them but work tasks. 90% of the internet was blocked from them, you can't save files to the desktop or hard drive, you can't have fucking bookmarks/favorites, you can't even pin a program to the goddamn taskbar. And that included manager-level machines too, like mine. 

You're fucking kidding me, right?

I get blocking some, or even most, websites -- that is understandable in a business sense, at least -- can't have folks reading reddit all day or scrolling Facebook (which, hilariously enough, is not locked down on these machines, because corporate has a social media team who updates all their accounts). But not being able to save files, or have bookmarks, or pin anything to the taskbar? That's taking security way too far. As a manager I have need for all of those things, the least of which being a giant folder full of documents that I saved over the years for managerial purposes -- a digital filing cabinet. I've worked there for almost a decade -- I have accrued/acquired a LOT of items that benefit me or the team during normal daily life running the show on 3rd shift. 

Luckily, fate shined a loving gaze upon me once again -- my IT guy friend heard my complaints and took control of my own computer replacement personally, making sure it had installed on it the same expanded profile/accesses he had on his own machine. In doing so, the machine that was shipped to me was even less locked down in many key areas than my old one had been, and where it is not I experience minimal security issues (instead of like, 90% of the web being blocked, it's like 15-20% at most). I can save items to my desktop or anywhere else. I have all of my bookmarks. I have everything I need pinned to the taskbar. Functionally it is 98% exactly like my old PC, except lightning fast because it's much newer. 

I was told never to mention that I have the accesses and abilities I do. If I'm asked I can use the statement "I can do that because I have a manager profile" or something like that, and leave it at that.

This is likely the best stopping point for the moment, but yes, there is a part II coming, so stay tuned....