The Tale of the Physical

 

(The story in this post takes place between the days of June 4 and June 10, 2021, though most of it happened on June 4 and 5. I've posted it here as an "intermission" post because it deserves its own entry due to the length and detail necessary), and because it's not an overall fun story to tell. 

As you may or may not know, Daisy and I are pretty hardcore about our health and about taking care of problems before they arise -- preventative care and all that. From the dentist to the dermatologist, from our primary care physician to our optometrist, my urologist, Daisy's lady-parts doctor and endocrinologist, etc -- we try to take care of ourselves and generally do a moderately decent job about scheduling regular appointments to get checked out and taken care of. Well, with the Covid-19 pandemic ongoing for the past year and a half, that threw a huge proverbial wrench into the works and we were forced to become, shall we say, lax on those regularly scheduled check-ups and appointments. It couldn't really be helped, the damn country shut down and routine non-emergency medical stuff basically went to the wayside after March 2020. 

Now that the pandemic is dissipating and the majority of folks in the state/country are at least partially vaccinated, Daisy has taken it upon herself to begin scheduling us our appointments again for our various preventative care stuff. The first and most pressing is our yearly physical/bloodwork, which is what the bulk of this post will cover. We have an eye appointment next weekend to get our prescriptions updated and order new glasses as well, and next on the list after that is...well, we'll get to it here soon enough. Anyway, let's begin our tale.

Because I work overnights and Daisy works normal daytime business hours, it's generally really difficult to schedule a time for us to both go to the doctor for almost anything. I could schedule an appointment pretty much anywhere at any time, but if Daisy has the car across town at her office, that doesn't help much. Similarly, if Daisy wanted to schedule an appointment anywhere at any time, she would be going it alone as I am asleep at home all day every weekday because of my overnight working schedule. So, most of the time, we will schedule appointments together, back-to-back appointments where both of us go at the same time, on Friday mornings. Why Friday mornings? Because Fridays are weekdays and I don't work Friday nights, so I can spare a few extra hours in the morning/daytime hours to go to the doctor without having to worry about sleeping fast to be able to get up and work the overnight shift. So, almost every doctor's appointment of any sort over the past five years that I've been on overnights has been scheduled for early on Friday mornings -- early as in, before 8am usually, as Daisy still has to work on Fridays. Minimizing impact on her own work schedule is just as important to me as it is to minimize the impact on mine. 

So, when she scheduled the appointments for Friday the 4th a few weeks ago, at 7:30 and 8am, I wasn't exactly fazed by it. I knew I'd be coming off a two-day work week where I'd take off an hour early on Friday morning in order to be able to get dressed and get there on time, I'd go to the appointment and then I'd come home and go to bed as per the usual. I've done it dozens of times before; it's no biggie -- I'm usually back home by a little after 9, eat a small/quick breakfast, and go to bed relatively at the same time as I normally would. 

As per the usual on appointment day, I gave my work folks the heads up that I'd be out an hour earlier than usual as a hard stop, and went upstairs to get dressed (and do the online check-in process). Once Daisy was up and dressed as well, we drove to the doctor's office and were soon called back into the room together. We were weighed, our blood oxygen and temperatures were taken, and then we were taken back to the exam room.

My Vitals:

Blood pressure: 128/86 (this is pretty baseline/normal for me; I have never had high blood pressure despite my weight).

Temperature: 98.1 F

Pulse: 98 (that's a little high for me, but eh)

Weight: 357 lbs, 12 oz (this is pretty damn accurate, legit very close to what the scale at home tells me)

Oxygen saturation: 96%.

We waited in the exam room for about ten minutes.

At that point, a nurse came in, asked us some baseline questions, and took our blood pressures (which is where I got the figure above). She also told us that there was a medical student onsite today, and wanted to know if we were okay with the med student sitting in with our doctor during the actual physical. 

"Sure," I said, after a quick glance at the wife to make sure she didn't mind. "The more the merrier, I guess."

"So I see here that you used to be [former doctor]'s patients," the nurse said. Not really a question, but a statement.

"Yes," I said. "Can you tell us what happened to her? Nobody we know seems to know anything about it."

Quick side-story here: our former doctor had been the "family doctor" of sorts for us as well as Daisy's parents (and probably her sisters, sometimes) since Daisy was fourteen years old. Daisy turns 33 this month. Aside from a single clinic visit in 2015 when I had Influenza-B pretty badly and had to see someone else, she has also been my primary care physician as well. All of us loved her; she was -- without question -- an amazing doctor, and the only doctor in my adult life I've ever been 100% comfortable with as her patient. About two months ago, we got a cryptic letter in the mail from our doctor's office saying that she was no longer employed by our primary care provider, effective immediately (letter was backdated, even); we would need to, basically, pick a new doctor the next time we scheduled appointments...and that was it. No cause, no "she's retiring," no "she's starting a private practice," nothing of the sort. No explanation whatsoever. 

"Nobody's really told us much," the nurse said, "other than confirming that she is no longer practicing medicine."

"Really," I said, rather surprised. "That's concerning; we were pretty distraught to hear the news."

"A lot of her patients were," the nurse replied. "Including me; she was my primary care physician too."

There was a very quick, sad pause in the room for a moment before the nurse finished up her questionnaires for us and left the room, telling us our new doctor (who Daisy and her mother both have experience with; she was the doctor who diagnosed Mama's heart attack a few years back when it happened) would be in to see us in a few minutes.

We then sat there for another ten minutes before...the med student came in. Alone. 

It was at that point I felt the mood/tone in the room change. When it comes to Daisy, I have a damn good "Spidey-sense," so to speak. It might be an empathy thing, it might be a "I just know my wife" thing, but I could immediately feel Daisy get irritated. Daisy wears a good mask, so it's not like she can't or didn't hide it very well, but I could feel it radiating off her. 

"Hiiiii," the med student said, introducing herself. "I'm [name] and I'm studying under Dr. [name], thank you for letting me observe, I appreciate it."

We then went through the same exact list of questions and concerns we'd already given the nurse once before, in the same order, taking the same amount of time. It was a Groundhog Day-like exam room experience, during which I thought to myself are we being Punk'd? Are they testing us to see if we provide the same answers and ask the same questions?

This was another ten-to-fifteen minute ordeal before the med student left and said our nurse and doctor would be joining us again shortly to do the blood draws. Once the door latch clicked shut and Daisy and I were alone again, I could feel Daisy's rage rising as she whispered to me under her breath.

"This is bullshit," Daisy said. "It's a lie, it's a con; I hate letting the students observe because they're supposed to come in together with the doctor and they never do, they always come in first by themselves, and then waste more time because they go back and tell the doctor everything we told her, and then the doctor comes in and we do it all over again! We have to tell the same stories and ask the same goddamn questions to three different people three fucking times -- our hour is now up and we haven't even seen the goddamn doctor yet!"

She was seething, but she was right -- it was now 8:30, a full hour after we'd arrived, and we still hadn't seen our doctor, still hadn't gotten our blood drawn for our yearly bloodwork, still hadn't even gotten into the proverbial "meat and potatoes" of our entire visit. 

A few minutes later, the first nurse arrived with her box of vials and needles, and said she'd do my blood draw first.

Now, here's where it gets interesting.

A fun fact that a lot of you may not know about me is that I hate getting my blood drawn. It's not that I'm afraid of needles (I once was, back in the day, but not now) and I can handle the pain of getting stuck -- it's the blood itself. I don't mind seeing other people's blood, and I'm not bothered by violence or gory movies or anything like that, but the second I see my own blood going down a tube into a vial, being sucked out of me -- forcibly removed from my body -- I...uh, have a tendency to...faint. 

Look, goddammit, I'm not proud of it. And it doesn't happen every time. Just, uh, most of the time. I'd say something like 80% of the time, roughly. And I cannot control it. If they stick me once and get the blood they need, great -- generally I'll be fine. If they have to stick me more than once or stick me in multiple places, well, it's bravo six time. It is terrifying, and frankly it is embarrassing for a 38-year-old man to faint when he has his blood drawn. 

Now, every year when we've had the physicals done up to this point, there used to be a RN there at the doctor's office named Derek, and Derek was awesome. He claimed to be the "fastest stick in the west," and could always find my vein to tap it and get the blood he needed from me really fast. He was quick, efficient, most of the time relatively painless, and he was great to work with. 

Derek has since been promoted up to the local hospital (the one down the street from us, where I got my urology work done and where I'll go back to again soon, but I'm getting ahead of myself) and is no longer at our office. Instead, I was now stuck with a nurse who did not seem to...eh...be really experienced in tough blood draws.

I know I can be a tough blood draw, too. I am fat and have relatively thick skin, but I've found that if I drink a lot of water/fluids in the 12-24 hours before my blood draw, it is far easier to get a needle into me and to get blood out of me. As I had to fast for 12 hours before the bloodwork -- nothing but coffee and water allowed -- I drank two 16oz cups of coffee in the overnight and two full liters of seltzer water from my Sodastream. I figured this could only help. 

For most people, it would. For this nurse lady, it didn't.

We have a plan when I get my blood drawn: Daisy stands next to me and holds my hand, and she keeps talking to me about something engaging to hold my attention while they take the blood, while during the entire time I am squeezing her fingers so hard I could break them if I'm not careful. Usually this gets me through it fine and we continue our doctor's visit normally once they take the blood.

Also -- they always take the blood out of the top of my hand. I have thick, visible veins there and even though apparently it's more painful (debatable, in my opinion) than the inside bend of the elbow, every time a doctor has tried to take blood from the inside bend of my elbow, I have fainted cold. Surprisingly, Daisy has not been there for those occasions -- it happened once when I was a teenager during a routine visit, it happened again when I had to get blood drawn for a TB test when I became a substitute teacher in Kansas (yeah, that happened, it's a story for another time) and it came very very close to happening (like 95% fainted) when they drew blood from that spot for my last STD test about ten years ago. So now, as a seasoned adult who knows this is a thing, I always tell the doctors about it in advance and request the butterfly needle on the top of the hand, also giving them warning that I might still pass out anyhow. 

Back to the present, and Daisy is standing next to me and I'm squeezing her hand tightly when I tell you that I can tell that it feels like this nurse is literally fucking the top of my hand with this needle, over and over, trying to get into a vein to take the blood. I start sweating. This is generally the first sign that I'm about to faint. They lay me down on the exam table, propping me up a bit so my back doesn't wrench itself. 

It is at this point when the actual doctor finally comes into the exam room, to see me looking like a mess and to see the nurse say "nope, can't get it out of the right hand, let's try the left hand." Doctor lady, who's probably about my age (hard to tell when she's wearing a mask) introduces herself to me while I'm halfway out of it and offers to help the nurse. Doctor lady takes me by the left hand, massages it a bit and says "right here," and bam, they're in and blood is flowing, with almost no pain whatsoever.

Daisy is talking to me about our garden to keep me occupied, and I am responding by helping to tell our doctor lady and nurse about all the things we're trying to grow, and I'm now squeezing Daisy's hand with my right hand, which has multiple puncture holes on it, no bandage, and is rapidly developing a bruise. I ask if blood is flowing -- meaning, if they're getting the tubes full of it that they need -- and all three of them reply "yes" in what sounds like in unison. I am still sweating and am starting to feel a little dizzy, but I am mostly okay. I look down at the vials and tube full of my blood. "Oh neat," I say, "this is cool, I can watch it." And then it hits me.

I am told, after I recover, that the color went completely out of me, and that I was as white as a sheet and sweat began pouring off me, drenching my head, neck, and the pretty wolf t-shirt I was wearing. I felt the sensation of something under my head/neck, and learned a few minutes later that it was a cold pack -- like an ice pack -- which I'll be damned if it didn't feel divine, because the room suddenly felt like it was 120 degrees. I vaguely felt the doctor lady leap into action, felt the needle get pulled out of me and a band-aid with gauze get taped to my hand, and she opened an alcohol swab to hold under my nose like smelling salts, telling me to breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth. Surprisingly, this helped.

I don't know how long I was down. I don't think I ever went full bravo six, but damn was it close. I ask for water -- I am barely able to speak. Doctor lady tells me I can have some once she sees some of the color come back to my face, as otherwise I'd probably vomit it up. I tell her I'm okay, she tells me something along the lines of "not yet you're not, keep smelling the alcohol swab." Throughout all of this I don't remember whether I still have a death grip on Daisy's hand or not. I tell her I'm fine again and can sit up and she again denies me this action until she sees some color return to my body. She grabs a paper towel from the dispenser and hands it to me, and I soak it with sweat off my forehead and face/neck area -- sweat that I didn't know was there. 

"Why does this happen?" I ask her, while still pretty goddamn out of it. 

She explains something about it being an autonomic response, like a reflex, that can't be controlled -- the body sucks all the blood within it into the vital organs and, well, you faint. I didn't understand her explanation, as I was, again, still out of it. Daisy would tell me later that the doctor lady sympathized with me as she said it sometimes happens to her too. I didn't catch that in her explanation of it.

A few minutes later I am able to sit up fully and am feeling groggy, but otherwise okay. I drink the water in the little paper cup like it is the nectar of the gods. I do not vomit. Five minutes or so after that, I'm 100% okay and answering her questions about while I'm there and about the topics I wanted to cover, which include getting off the testosterone because my balls are shrinking, and making sure my allopurinol is refilled/renewed for another year. She asks me about my gout and flare ups of it (very few and far between, and very mild when/if it happens) and questions me about my sleep habits and fatigue. She orders a urinalysis to make sure I don't have any blood in my pee still, and schedules not only a referral to the urologist for a semen analysis, but orders a sleep study for me to address the fatigue (more on this later). 

I take the cup to the bathroom and ask the jabby-jabby needle nurse how much pee she needs in it, which sort of embarrasses her I think, but fuck it, I was recovering from a fainting spell and I needed an accurate answer. I go to the bathroom and fill the cup about halfway with pee, am like "eh, good enough," cap it and put it in the little door they have there to collect it. 

It was now time to do Daisy's blood draw. At this point, it was nearing 10am, and we had been in the doctor's office a full 90 minutes longer than our expected one-hour appointment. I come back to the exam room to find the jabby-jabby needle nurse now rooting around in Daisy's veins, trying to find one to tap. 

"I'm just not having great luck with blood draws today," she said.

"Perhaps it's our thick vegetarian and vegan skins," I mused, which did not seem to go over well with the nurse.

Daisy, who does not thankfully suffer from the same fainting affliction I do, went through three different nurses who jabbed her in multiple places six times and were never able to get a goddamn drop of blood. They're supposed to send you to the hospital's blood lab after three unsuccessful tries; Daisy told them to just keep going and maybe they'd get lucky with a thin vein. Remarkably, I could watch all of this with no issue -- after all, it wasn't my own blood this time. 

This took the better part of a half hour. I texted my work friends, with whom I have a running group chat, to tell them that I was literally going into hour three of being in the doctor's office and I wish I was kidding. 

They stuck Daisy over and over for what had to be close to 20 minutes before shrugging and saying yeah, she was just going to have to go over to the hospital's blood lab where they could try again. After that was decided, our visit wrapped up pretty quickly -- I guess there was nothing else to say or do -- and they gave us our "after visit summary" printouts and sent us on our way. 

Daisy and I were back home fifteen minutes later, where I was finally able to eat something after my long fast...but Daisy could not, since she still had to go to the hospital down the street from her workplace and get the bloodwork done there. It made her...bitter...to watch me eat, to say the least. She changed into her work clothes and off she went. I finished eating and was in bed sometime after 11am, where I remained dead to the world until after 6pm that night.

However, this story doesn't end there. 

Daisy was particularly interested in her bloodwork because she wanted to see if they could check for inflammation causes/factors/levels, as well as to see if she had a gluten or wheat allergy/sensitivity. To make sure she had a good bit of it in her system, the dinner we'd had the night before was pasta and garlic bread -- carby-carb-carbs, wheat, gluten, everything that would likely trigger inflammation in her so that she could give them a more accurate reading. The doctors actually said this was a fantastic idea. While I slept, she went to the hospital lab, they stuck her in the same place one of the nurses already had, and were able to get blood from her without any issue whatsoever -- an in-and-out trip. Imagine that, right? 

Most of her labs were available that night in the MyChart system before she went to bed, and she found that there were zero markers whatsoever in her system for any sort of gluten/wheat sensitivity or inflammation -- everything was within normal parameters. This frankly shocked both of us, really. I know how inflamed this woman gets when she eats bread and pasta, yet...nothing.

"I think I screwed myself," she said, "by taking anti-inflammatories every day to where they likely built up in my system."

While that may be the case, that parameter came up as normal, as well as pretty much every other test result she had near-immediate access to. 

Meanwhile, some of my own test results had become available as well -- some of the baseline ones, anyway. Uric acid levels are normal, testosterone in my bloodstream was low normal, but still well within the normal range, etc. 

Here's what my printout said -- I'm going to list them all first, as an overview of sorts, then go through them one by one in detail. And even then, there is still more to discuss.

Instructions from [Brandon's new doctor]

We will check labs today and notify of results

Order placed for a home sleep test for evaluation of extreme daytime sleepiness

Check a uric acid level today and notify of results, continue to take allopurinol as prescribed and we will notify of any necessary medication changes

Advised to work on improving overall nutrition and increasing physical activity

For semen analysis, referral placed to urology

We will check a UA today to rule out any persistent blood in the urine due to previous hematuria

We will check testosterone today and notify of results, he would like to stop the testosterone cream. Discussed weaning off of this. 

Mind you, there's some inaccuracies here on what I asked versus what was documented above, so let's go through these.

We will check labs today and notify of results

Several days later, I can say that almost all of my labs are normal. There's no blood in my pee, my uric acid levels and testosterone are decent and not a cause for concern. Basically, almost everything is where it should be and where it was expected to be. My cholesterol is a little higher than it was before, and my triglycerides are a fair amount higher than before. But, really, meh. If you think I'm leaving something out, I am, and I'll cover it below.

Order placed for a home sleep test for evaluation of extreme daytime sleepiness

The way this is phrased versus what I asked concerns/bothers me as a patient. For one, I work overnights -- of course I'm going to have "extreme daytime sleepiness." What I asked was what could be done about my fatigue, my near-constant "Brandon is always exhausted no matter how little or how much he sleeps" bullshit that I'm really rather sick of. I explained that yes, I do work a stressful overnight job, and yes, I do sleep 6-7 hours at most on most days -- with many days less than that. My concerns weren't "why am I tired," because duh, but "why do I never feel like I've gotten any real rest." The new doctor lady and her team added a Vitamin D test to my bloodwork, which showed me as slightly deficient (but higher than Daisy, so go figure) and said they wanted to rule out anemia and sleep apnea because of my weight, which okay, I'm fine with. As such, they ordered a sleep study -- the first test of which will be at home, and will rule out a number of different things, I guess. If anything pops up abnormal on it then I will indeed have to go in for a monitored sleep lab setting thing, per doctor's orders. I'm not really comfortable doing this, and really don't want to do it, but it is what it is. In the past few days since our appointments, the sleep lab has left me voicemails almost every morning to call and set it up. I'll also note that I've not been given any information on or any directions for this "home sleep test" at all, not a damn thing. From doing preliminary research it sounds like I have to wear a device with sensors and a mask, which...lemme tell ya, is gonna make it really hard for me to sleep period, let alone try to sleep comfortably when I have two of my three cats who love to cuddle up with me.

Check a uric acid level today and notify of results, continue to take allopurinol as prescribed and we will notify of any necessary medication changes

Gotcha, I'm fine there, see above.

Advised to work on improving overall nutrition and increasing physical activity

This one sort of bothers me too. Yes, I am fat. I have been fat my entire life. I'm also vegetarian, and while yes, I do like some "junk food," I eat relatively little and relatively cleanly the vast majority of the time. I take vitamins and supplements every day. I don't drink alcohol. I don't gorge myself on dumb shit (most of the time), I try to avoid a lot of sugars, I am conscious of and try to regulate my carb/bread intake at least a good chunk of the time, and I try to eat a lot of vegetables and some fruits. Anyone else who ate a diet like mine -- as I have said before -- would have weight melting off them and they'd feel like they were wasting away. As for "increasing physical activity," well, you try to do that when you work overnights five nights a week and suffer from chronic fatigue. A lot of the time, the only physical activity I have any energy for is being (mostly) awake and upright. 

For semen analysis, referral placed to urology

Okay, so there's a little backstory to this one. Eventually, the wife and I want to have kids. Well, a kid at the very least. We're both getting older and Daisy is entering "geriatric pregnancy" territory were I to even knock her up at this point. After seven years of being married and yes, having regular, unprotected married sex, we do not have a child yet (obviously). Daisy has also had PCOS her entire life, which makes it near impossible for her to lose any real weight and keep it off, and also has the double bonus of making it near impossible to conceive a child. So, I mean, odds are stacked against us here in many ways already...but I have no idea what the health of my semen is. I've never had it checked, and I have been on testosterone therapy for probably a little over three years at this point, which (I've been told) can also make it much harder to conceive a child. So, before Daisy decides to go through any more analyses, invasive or otherwise, I have to go jerk it into a cup. Sorry to be crude, but I mean, that's what it is. I have yet to schedule this appointment.

We will check a UA today to rule out any persistent blood in the urine due to previous hematuria

"Hematuria" is literally "blood in the urine." I didn't have any; I'm good and clean.

We will check testosterone today and notify of results, he would like to stop the testosterone 

cream. Discussed weaning off of this. 

Mentioned above. My testosterone level was like 252 or something like that, which is in the lower, but still quite normal range, especially for a man of my age. Last time it was 400-something, which is the highest I've ever had it in all my testings. The testosterone isn't a "cream," either, it's a gel. It's literally hand sanitizer with testosterone in it, and I hate it. If I could just take a daily pill, I'd likely feel much better about it and more comfortable with it. 

So, as mentioned before, I have been leaving something out this entire time, and that was the results of my blood glucose. For the past four years, my blood glucose has been very normal -- something like 80 at the lowest to 112 at the highest. 112 is a little high, but it's not "let's panic" high, and that reading was over two years ago (I've had lower results since then).

My reading on the morning of my physical -- after I'd fasted for 12 hours and after I'd drank a lot of water to get my blood flowing -- was 194. Which is crazy, sugar-attack bugshit high for no reason whatsoever. 

I did not get this result until Monday, when the test was on Friday. Needless to say, 194 is nowhere near normal for me. I have never had high blood sugar before. I've always been normal -- so normal, in fact, that I'd never been given an A1C test to check for any sort of diabetes symptoms or what-have-you. Daisy would later tell me that she thinks they probably should have called for an A1C when my reading was 112 over two years ago, but as the next time around it was much lower and still in the normal range, that's probably why they didn't.

I didn't know what to do, honestly. I called Daisy upstairs once she got home from work, and I was panicking. There are many things that can artificially raise blood sugar, such as lack of sleep (check), stress (check check), and even some ways the test can be handled and processed that could give some skewed or otherwise inflated numbers. As my blood glucose had never been that high before, I had no clue what was causing it. My mind went to different factors -- we'd had spaghetti and garlic bread the night before for dinner, so there was possibly lots of carbs still in my body, etc. Nothing made sense. I was convinced it had to be a fluke, like they'd mixed up my labs with someone else's or some shit like that. I'm not a sugar guy, I don't like sweets and the bread I've been eating as of late is sprouted whole grain bread, which has the benefit of having a lower glycemic impact. While I have been drinking the full-sugar Pepsi Blue soda that Daisy was able to find for me, it's not like I was downing them like water -- it has taken me weeks to get through even two six-packs of them. It could be coming from stress and sleeplessness, sure, but to the extent where I'd hit 194? After fasting and drinking a ton of water? That was, to me, doubtful at best.

The doctor's office called Monday while I was asleep and told me they wanted me to come back in for the A1C test based solely on that glucose result alone -- I know this not only because they told me but because all of my other labs and bloodwork was normal, which is why the number stood out more than it normally would have; this is saying something. They were closed by the time I got up Monday night, but I called them back Tuesday morning once I got off work.

"Of course I'll come in for the A1C," I said. "I'd like to do it early in the morning if possible, but I've got basically any morning this week open. Can we try for Thursday?" 

Please note, I picked Thursday because we were to have a utilities person come out to the house on Wednesday morning to check our indoor gas meter (apparently this is an inspection that needs to be done once every three years) and because Friday Daisy had off for more appointments of her own -- not to mention that I just wanted to get the A1C over with to prove conclusively one way or another whether I needed to be concerned or whether I could continue on with my normal life.

"We don't have any appointments on Thursday," she told me on the phone. 

"Well, what do you have in the early mornings?"

"We can do it Wednesday morning if you'd like," she replied. "I have a 7:45 appointment open."

"Cool," I said, "book it."

I told Daisy this and she had to call the local utilities folks to push back the appointment window of the gas meter reading to a couple of hours later, but it was no big deal.

Tuesday night, I was frustrated and morose. I had to start fasting at 7:45pm, but I was determined to drive down the results of any retest and to get my baseline of normal back. For dinner I had a handful of Fritos, a few handfuls of trail mix, and a Monster lo-carb -- and that was it. In the overnight I drank 32oz of black coffee and this time downed three one-liter bottles of water -- not even flavored Sodastream water, but normal water. By the time the night was over, I was peeing every fifteen minutes and it was completely clear, with no yellow to it. I was primed. I had extra liquid in my blood/skin, and I didn't think there would be any problems getting blood. Moreover, I just wanted to settle the matter and go back to normal life. The week at work had already sucked, and I'd have two more nights to go (which would end up sucking as well, but eh). I'm not one to live with artificial anxiety; I wanted answers.

Of course, the A1C is another blood draw, so one of my biggest concerns was going all "bravo six" again. From my story above already, you know that wasn't something I was exactly looking forward to and wanted to avoid if at all possible. So, Wednesday morning I logged off work a little early, got dressed, woke the wife, and we went to the doctor's office.

We were called in very shortly after I arrived, and as this was a simple nurse visit (just for the blood) I was taken back into a tiny little room by a tiny little Latina nurse probably in her late 20s, one I'd never worked with before. 

"We want the best stick possible," Daisy said, before I even had the chance. "He might faint."

"Oh no, then we're going to the bigger room," she said.

"I'm fine," I said, "I can do it here, it's no big deal."

"No, no, no," she said, "come with me, we're gonna lay you down, and I have a trick."

A trick?

I was then taken into another room with one of the uncomfortable exam table beds, and was propped up on it, leaning back at about a 60 degree angle -- not too far back, but leaning back. I went through my normal blood-draw spiel -- out of the hand, not the arm, Daisy stays and we talk, etc.

"I don't want you to faint," she said. "It creates a lot of paperwork."

"Paperwork for what?" I asked. 

"Oh, like questionnaires, like what could you have done better to keep the patient from fainting and stuff like that, it's a mess."

Seriously? That's shitty. 

"But...it's not your fault when patients faint..." I said.

"Well, regardless, I have a trick."

From her pocket, she produced -- and unwrapped -- an orange Tootsie Roll pop.

"Suck on this, savor it, and look away," she said. 

I'll be goddamned if it didn't work.

She had to try twice, but she got the blood, a big vial of it, really quickly. It was almost painless. The Tootsie Roll pop was sweet, it was calming, it allowed me to focus on something else. 30 seconds later she was done and I was fine.

A lollipop. Jesus, it's like I'm six years old.

"This trick works for all ages," she said. "From kids to the elderly. I don't know why, but it does." 

She was the best nurse I'd had there in ages. Sweet, funny and jovial, willing to make jokes and laugh and with a fantastic bedside manner. We were back home shortly after Daisy would've normally started work for the day. I broke my fast and got something to eat -- I don't remember what -- and ventured back upstairs. I heard the utilities person come a short time later, it was a girl apparently, who checked the gas meter for literally two minutes and left again, and went to bed shortly thereafter. 

And then would come the waiting. 

For those of you unfamiliar, a hemoglobin A1C test is a blood test that attempts to track your blood glucose over an average period of about three months, because (I guess) it can do that. You're assigned an average percentage value, upon which you are either considered normal, pre-diabetic, or diabetic. 4.5 to 5.6 is considered "normal," 5.7 to 6.4 is considered "pre-diabetic," and anything over 6.5 is considered diabetic. I can't remember the last time I had an A1C test done -- it was likely in high school or early college -- so 20 years ago now or more. It was just never something that came up. Despite my weight, I was always in pretty damn good health.

But diabetes does run in my family -- my mother has it (moderately), and my aunt, her sister, has it badly. I'm also not unfamiliar with it; Daisy's mother has it, and for years Daisy herself has been in the pre-diabetic range but has actively worked to take care of herself because she doesn't want to be full-on diabetic. When they just did her bloodwork, Daisy had worked herself back down to 5.7, which is the lowest end of the pre-diabetic range. With some further work she will likely not even qualify as that during her next blood draw.

When I got up in the afternoon, my test results weren't ready.

Throughout the entire night of work I kept checking my personal email on my phone to see if I'd gotten the message that the results were ready. I didn't. When my shift ended at 7, I came back upstairs to see that just then, the results were available in my online chart. I logged in, apprehensively pulled up the page, and opened the results to find...

8.5.

Fucking 8.5. Two full points above the range that would consider me diabetic.

I, apparently, have diabetes. 

Diabetes that came out of the blue, with no prior warning signs or other indicators, no glucose in my urine, no high blood pressure or other problems (aside from the gout), diabetes that literally manifested itself out of nowhere over the course of the past eighteen months since my last physical, when the only thing that has changed about my life is the fact that I now work from home. 

I was incredibly angry and frustrated. I still am angry and frustrated. I didn't know how to process it and still really don't. I've always been the person that has been the poster child for "look, you can be fat and still be healthy, still be normal" and now I can't be that person anymore, because boom, diabetes. Daisy was upset as well -- not at me, not because I have diabetes, but because the doctors didn't catch it sooner, never did the A1C tests sooner or regularly because of my weight, and for basically dropping this bomb out of me out of nowhere.

"Answer your phone when they call you," she said, "because I guarantee you're going to get a call."

Soon enough, I did.

"Your A1C is 8.5, which is unfortunately considered diabetic," the nurse said on the phone, telling me what I already knew. "So we've called in a prescription for Metformin for you to start taking twice a day with your meals, and you'll need to check your blood sugar periodically to try to monitor it..." she droned on. 

I already knew everything she was telling me. Daisy is on Metformin not for diabetes, but for PCOS (because that really helps it, apparently) and I know the drill for the blood sugar checking with the meter and all that, Daisy does it a fair amount and her mother wears one of the monitors that periodically uploads her glucose level to an app on her phone, so it's not like I don't know these things. 

"Your cholesterol and triglycerides were a little higher than normal too," she added, "so we need to monitor those things and maybe get you on medication for those if they don't improve..."

Yeah, I knew that too. I also know that I'm vegetarian and the only cholesterol-containing food I eat is cheese, which tells me that the cholesterol is likely more hereditary than it is physical. While I do like cheese, I'm sure I don't eat enough of it to significantly raise my cholesterol and triglycerides that much. 

"[New doctor] wants you to come in again this week for a sit-down discussion of everything moving forward," the nurse continued, "no blood work or anything necessary, just a discussion--"

"No," I said. 

"No?" the nurse replied, surprised. 

"No," I said again. "Can't she just call me and give me the rundown? I already know a lot of what she's going to tell me, I have diabetic family members and know the ins and outs of checking blood and taking Metformin."

"Uh...well..." the nurse seemed genuinely surprised, like she wasn't expecting that answer at all.

It throws off my entire day to get off work, get dressed, go to the doctor, spend the time there that I need to spend there, and then come back home to finally go to bed hours later than normal. Most of the time I go to bed in the morning right after Daisy leaves for work or starts work (if she's working from home). I also can't keep making Daisy go in to work late because she needs the car to do that, and obviously if I'm going to the doctor's office in the morning, that requires use of the car. 

"I guess we can set this up as a telemedicine appointment," the nurse said. 

"Okay, I guess," I said. "Is that different than her just calling me?"

Whatever happened to the days where doctors would just call their patients to have a five-minute discussion with them?

The nurse got my details and said she'd call me back.

"I don't think I'm asking too much there, do you?" I asked Daisy once I hung up the phone. "Do I really need to go in there to sit down to have her lecture me about being fat and diabetic?"

"No," Daisy said, "you don't."

Again, Daisy is still mad they didn't catch this sooner too.

A few minutes later, the nurse called back. "Okay, we have the telemedicine appointment set up for Wednesday the 16th at 8am," she said. "Does that work for you?"

"Yes," I said, "that's fine."

"[New doctor] agreed to it this time but she absolutely wants to see you again in six weeks for another check-in and A1C," she added. 

"As in, you want to set up that appointment now?"

She set up the appointment for the third week in July, somewhere thereabouts. I don't remember the exact date and frankly, at this point I do not give a single shit. I'm burnt out by doctor visits, I'm stressed and frustrated, and I really don't want to deal with anyone in the medical field more than absolutely necessary.

While I slept for the day, Daisy worked, went to pick up the Metformin (and my allopurinol refill) and brought it home for me.

"I warn you," she told me that evening, "never, ever take Metformin on an empty stomach. It will wreck your bowels."

Mind you, I've heard horror stories about Metformin before, and about how it can and does cause gastrointestinal distress. If you have a sensitive stomach, if you don't stay properly hydrated, if you eat a lot of wheat/breads, it will fuck you with #thepoops. I already have occasional intestinal distress anyway, and for a long time thought I had IBS, so this did not fill me with a lot of confidence. Metformin is also one of those drugs that you cannot drink any alcohol with (reports vary on this, but most resources say that it's a pretty bad idea) and apparently if you're on Metformin, eating a shit-ton of fiber is bad too -- which means that while bread was already a bad idea, dark breads are doubly bad for me. 

"Read up on Metformin," my mother told me. "It's bad for you, and once you're on it you can never get off it."

Daisy and I rolled our collective eyes at this. My mother means well but her statements are patently false. 

I took my first dose of it on Thursday night with a light dinner. I've taken a dose with every meal since. It is now Sunday. I have experienced zero side effects and have had 100% normal bowel movements and no gastrointestinal distress whatsoever. This simply amazed Daisy and her mother. If anything, I haven't felt sick to my stomach at all, nor have I had excess gas, indigestion, stomach/intestinal pain or gas pains, or anything since I've been on it. I've felt completely normal. Maybe, for me, the drug is simply doing its job.

In the interim since I've been diagnosed as diabetic, I've been taking a long, hard look at my lifestyle and diet. I have been eating a lot more breads and snacks lately -- that will now be heavily limited and eventually mostly stopped. I have begun watching carb levels and sugar levels in my foods much more closely now. Anything sweet and/or sugary or carby is pretty much off the table. It's the gardening season, so I'm going to be eating fresh vegetables now pretty much every day for the rest of the summer, and when I don't, I'll be eating steamed ones. Gone are most pastas and ramens, with the exception of some rare and appropriate times, and gone are the pizzas I'd order were I so inclined. Real cheeses, containing real cholesterol, are being phased out for vegan cheeses that do not have said cholesterol in them. I can't eat most cereals, I have to avoid most crackers, and basically most processed foods are pretty bad for me in general. I need to eat cleanly, I need to exercise more, I need to consistently be active, and I need to get (or try to get) consistent, restful sleep. Some of these things are (obviously) harder to do than others. 

To her credit, Daisy is being wonderful about the entire situation. She told me she needed to get some groceries to help cook more diabetic-friendly meals, and I told her to do what she needed to do and get whatever ingredients she wanted, as she knows this stuff far better than I do. She responded by purchasing close to $250 of groceries on Friday night. We also plan to sign up for a new gym membership tomorrow at the gym down the street from our house so that we can start working out again four days a week (her idea for the "four days a week," not mine) now that the pandemic is basically over. It's summer now, so I'd also like to plan some more outdoor adventures for us on days where it's not ungodly hot, but what those adventures will be remains to be seen. Even working in the yard is active movement and more exercise than I'm regularly used to. 

So, we shall see how it goes. Now, without any further ado, back to your scheduled posts. 

The Isolation Diaries: Groped by a Ghost

Me and the wife, May 1, 2021.

Hello all. Welcome to May.

Saturday, May 1:

Day off. 

Immunity Day.

Well, here we are, two weeks to the day after our second shot. We can now apparently safely consider ourselves to be at "full immunity."

Except nobody is really at full immunity; the vaccine isn't a "cure," it doesn't overall prevent you from getting Covid-19, and it's only marginally effective at stopping you from spreading it to others if you do get it. All it does is make your reaction to it -- if you do get it -- far less severe, and will very likely prevent you from being hospitalized by it or dying from it. So, success? I guess?

Hell if I know, man. I'm just here trying to survive. I'm here for a good time, not a long time. 

It is now May. May in Omaha tends to be the most violent month of the year for weather; well, May and June, really. Mostly from mid-May to mid-June seems to be our wheelhouse time for severe thunderstorms and tornadic activity; if it doesn't happen during that window, we don't generally get much of anything for the season. It's supposed to be almost 90 degrees today and then storm tomorrow night when I go back to work, so we'll see. 

To me, May this year seems and feels like an open door of opportunity and hope -- punctuated at both ends by today being our "immunity day" at the beginning of the month and by a week off (for me) at the end of the month to celebrate Memorial Day and our seventh wedding anniversary. 

As mentioned, Daisy's interactions with the landscaping company predicated that our delivery of river rock for the landscaping in the back yard would be delivered last night, and it was. 1.5 tons of 2-to-3-inch rocks were dumped about halfway down our driveway (the delivery dudes learned their lesson this time) and to the side as much as possible -- meaning they didn't terribly obstruct Daisy's ability to get the car in and out of the garage. Our plans for this morning were to get up, quickly eat something, then go out and begin moving the rock with shovels and the wheelbarrow. On Saturdays my energy is limited and I have limited time to use it before it runs out, so in the spring and summer this energy is generally used to do yard work or run errands and then I have to nap so I can stay awake in the overnight.

Well, we got down to it this morning -- Daisy laid out the landscape fabric and tacked it down, we mulched around our peach tree and berry bushes, and then we began moving the rock...one wheelbarrow load at a time. We were making good time, we were both full of energy and we'd moved three loads of rock, when on the fourth load the weight of the rock in the wheelbarrow blew out both wheelbarrow tires. Yeah, both of them, at the same time. 

Yeah, so we don't have the ability to move the rock anymore. We don't have the ability to move anything anymore, I guess, not until we:

1) replace the tire tubes, 

2) replace the wheels entirely, because fuck it, or 

3) I do a full examination to see if the tubes actually blew out or if they were just "forced flat" by the rock's weight -- at which point, if they're just flat, I pump them back up with a bike pump that I'll likely have to purchase from Amazon and we only load the wheelbarrow like half full from this point forward. 

None of these prospects are particularly fun ideas. Frustrated, we just moved around the remaining rock in the driveway a bit to give us a little more of a clear path, and then came back inside. Daisy cleaned a large chunk of the kitchen, and I took a shower.

We then -- because we actually can now without any real worries -- went over to the parents' to see them for the first time in well over a year without having to socially distance at all. All four of us have our vaccines, and all four of us are now past the two week immunity point (the parents reached that point about a month ago). This is now a huge chunk of our lives that has now returned to normal: weekend visits with Daisy's parents. It's during that visit where we took the two pictures above, at the very top of this month's post.

Afterwards, as my energy was beginning to run really low, we came back home and I passed out in my chair for a few hours' nap, as is customary on Saturday nights. Daisy got some decompression time of her own while I slept, and when I got back up, I ate a small dinner while we watched some Star Trek reruns, and when she went to bed, I returned to my room for the night.

Sunday, May 2:

Working from home, day 250(!)

Payroll Sunday. 

My 250th night of working from home was incredibly busy and punctuated by me working three issues on my own, two members of my team unable to get online (one had no internet, and the other had a power surge that blew out his router during bad weather), two more who left early because they felt ill, an operations bridge that got canceled, an ongoing customer troubleshooting bridge that our escalations manager and our former director, now daytime escalations manager -- both of whom are off on Sundays, normally -- ran until after 3am. 

Additionally, I ran payroll, filed my weekly one-on-one reports, sent out a detailed team email regarding my upcoming PTO and Memorial Day coverage, sent out two other detailed segment reports covering all the issues worked by each segment over the entire weekend, and (if that wasn't enough) still helped out my agents as much as I could. 

We had a decent thunderstorm with a lot of rain, but not a lot of super-loud thunder, lightning, or wind -- just a moderate, pleasant amount, and the storm moved off peacefully an hour later. 

Meanwhile, Tupelo got smashed by a monster tornado. 

Monday, May 3:

Working from home, day 251.

I keep having these weird, alternate history/timeline types of dreams where I'm reliving some aspect of my life, but everything's slightly different. For example, the one I had today focused on the 9/11 attacks, but in the dream's timeline, the attacks happened in the early '60s (like, Mad Men era 60s) and I was living in the towers, which were apartments and not offices -- and the attacks weren't airplanes crashing into the towers, but terrorists (white dudes, even) on the ground shooting rifles and anti-aircraft guns up through the towers at an angle. 

My dreams are weird, man. I'd like to think they're because I'm a writer and I have a huge love of alternate timeline stories, but I probably have dreams like that because I always constantly feel sleep-deprived, and any time that I can actually hit real REM sleep my brain just goes haywire/crazy because it isn't used to it anymore. Because of the rain and storms last night, it was actually really dark and gray this morning as well, which helped me go out like a light this morning when I finally slept. 

The night at work is not crazy like Sunday was, but it is very steady. The end of the night going into the morning hours is hectic, and I end up only getting a 20-ish-minute lunch and am stuck there close to half an hour late just wrapping up loose ends. 

Tuesday, May 4:

Working from home, day 252.

May the 4th be with you.

I have a story to tell.

A few weeks ago, maybe a month ago, my friend April -- who I've known going on close to twenty years at this point, and who was in my groom's party in my wedding, even -- texted me to let me know that she'd found the perfect gift for us, and wanted to send it along for an anniversary or "unbirthday" present (since she knows my birthday is in December). She "warned" me that it would be expensive that it would really, really seem like she was going overboard, but it's something that she wanted to do for us and was well aware we'd see it as extravagant. I said okay. April gonna April. 

April and her husband (who I'm also friends with, but am definitely not as close with) have been very, very good to us over the years -- friends are family you choose, and all that -- they have, many times, gone above and beyond the realms of normal friendship and have sent us many things, many care packages and the like, simply out of the goodness of their hearts. They have been in our home (remember, April was in our wedding) and I check in with April and talk to her quite a bit, probably more than most of the rest of my longtime friends at this juncture. The pandemic has intensified that as we check in with one another to make sure we're all okay, offer assistance and the like as necessary, etc. A few years back, I edited April's book for her. Suffice it to say that we're close, and have been for many years running. I only wish we could do monetarily and gift-wise for them what they do for us. 

So, anyway. 

April told me a few nights ago that it was on its way, and should arrive on Monday. It did not; it was delayed, and she then updated me last night that it should get here today and that she was so excited to see our reactions to what it was. 

Mind you, at this point, I'm apprehensive a bit -- if April says it's a big, expensive thing, it is. For us, an expensive purchase for one item would be like $100. For them -- who are considerably more well off, in a manner of speaking -- I know that number is in turn considerably higher. They know we know this as well and know that we may have a reaction of "oh my, this is too much" or the like. 

This morning, after I got off work, I came upstairs and collapsed into my chair; I was tired, my allergies -- which have been terrible this week -- were giving me some pretty nasty body aches and fatigue, and I just wanted to decompress and rest. I had almost completely forgotten about the present being set to arrive today when our doorbell rang at about 8:15 this morning.

I pulled up the video on the Ring to see an Amazon delivery guy placing a very large box onto our front porch, a box that it really looked like he was struggling with. Our Ring camera covers our entire porch and its viewing area extends out into our yard and driveway. Just sitting on our porch, the box took up about 1/4 of the viewfield. Daisy, who is working from home a few days this week and was just logging in for the day upstairs, went down to get it and bring it inside. 

"Can I open it?" she asked.

"No."

"Do you want to open it together, like tonight?"

"Yes."

I then thought about it for a moment and knew that I would not be able to sleep well knowing that it was down there and not knowing what it was, so I went downstairs to open it with her. The box also had giant labels on it proclaiming that caution needed to be taken because it contained lithium ion batteries. 

"Did they send us a robot or something?" I asked aloud. 

Truth be told, the box was big enough to contain a droid of some kind, if it were folded up into the fetal position or something.

 

You know, like you do...

So, with great anticipation of what was inside, I took out our knife and cut the box open, lifting the flaps to reveal....

A snowblower. 

But not just any snowblower -- this was the 18-inch wide, cordless battery pack, high-end electric snowblower that Daisy and I had been looking at last winter and the winter before, but never bought because we could not justify spending the almost $300 on it. Yes, this was the top of the line model. 

Daisy and I were stunned. But it all made sense.

April and her husband live in Portland. It snows very little in Portland, but when it does, it's a bitch and a half. Meanwhile, in Omaha, in the winter it can snow a lot, as you're probably aware from several posts here I've written about it. If you're friends with me on Facebook -- as most of you reading this are -- you've seen my posts in the winter about how much we hate shoveling snow. It's not something we enjoy, to say the least, but something we have to do now that we own our home and because of city ordinances. Also, because we do have to leave the house sometimes. April saw that, felt our pain (because she hates shoveling snow as well) and waited until we were in the off-season and prices went down before jumping on the snowblower and shipping it to us. 

Daisy and I are overwhelmed and blessed; it's not every day something like this happens to us.

Wednesday, May 5: Working from home, day 253.

Thursday, May 6: Working from home, day 254.

Friday, May 7: Day off. Payday.

Saturday, May 8: Day off.

The remainder of the week at work was horrific on multiple levels, where almost everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong in regards to workload, staffing, internet connectivity, job duties, job satisfaction, etc. I got so little sleep and had to deal with so much dumb bullshit that by the end of the week and weekend I was a shell of a man and mostly broken/dead inside. I did not write here. I did not want to write here.

But, I mean, what's the difference between that and normal, right?

Sunday, May 9:

Working from home, day 255.

Mother's Day.

Many factors over the past week have caused me to need to fight really hard to keep everything together. Yes, the snowblower from April was awesome, and I do feel very lucky and blessed, but there's just so much that I do not have the patience or energy -- nay, spoons -- to do or deal with. I frequently feel physically ill, and I know it's from stress and exhaustion. I've been doing the five-day schedule for almost a year now, and not having that third day of downtime I used to have when I worked 4x10 is slowly killing me. I can't get used to it. I blink and take a nap and my weekend is gone, without it feeling like it ever existed in the first place. I know I say things like this all the time in these posts, and I apologize for that as it seems that it's probably pretty repetitive...but it truly seems as if nothing's really getting better. Ever. And my patience and energy for it is really getting worse. It's getting to the point where simply being conscious can be too much for me some days, where the first thing I want to do upon awakening is to just start sobbing because I do not want to be awake -- being awake means it's a new day and I have to do everything all over again. 

I do not start sobbing, mind you, but I'm wondering how far off it is before I do. Is this going to be a regular thing now? Who knows. My life feels like a Groundhog Day-esque sort of cruel joke most of the time, where all that really changes is the weather and temperature. Oh, and the aches and pains.

I should probably explain that. At age 38, it feels like my body is beginning to break down and fall apart. I have a lot of joint aches, muscle pain, and definite inflammation throughout my body on almost a near-constant basis now. Changing up my diet and "activity levels" doesn't seem to help this a whole lot. If you want to know what it feels like, the closest description I can give is that it feels like my body is, very slowly, eating itself. My knees, elbows, hands, feet, shoulders -- it feels like they're just done and are grinding bone on bone to move sometimes. My heart will occasionally feel like it's collapsing in on itself or eating itself too. My muscles feel like they're starved for nutrients, or something -- despite the fact that I eat well (okay, well-ish, but far better and more healthily than most other people I know) and take multivitamins and supplements every single day. They are not starved, nothing is starved -- I have tried to keep as balanced a diet as possible and drink plenty of fluids, and it still feels like my body is saying give up, stop fighting it, succumb to the land. 

I know there are some nutballs out there who would be like "See? this is what happens when you get the vaccine, you sheep," and to them I say a hearty go fuck yourself; I have noticed this slow decline over the past year or more, before we were within the pandemic times.

Anyway.

Today is Mother's Day. Daisy and I went over to her parents' yesterday to provide a meal of noodle-less lasagna (basically, vegan eggplant parmesan) and key lime pie, as well as to deliver the new plants and pots she'd purchased for Mama for Mother's Day. This was done yesterday as I (obviously) wanted to be part of the festivities and we couldn't do that today, since I have to sleep during the day to reset my sleep schedule for the coming week of work. By the evening hours I was really starting to feel sick and fatigued (due to needing my normal Saturday nap), and we returned home, where I slept for six hours or so. 

For Mother's Day for my own mother this year, I sent her a case of K-cups, a 3-pack of face masks (because, I mean, we all still have to wear them everywhere), and a golden retriever t-shirt -- which sort of matches the blanket I got her a few years ago for Christmas. I stayed up "late" in the morning hours to call her and let her know she is loved and appreciated. 

Work, in the evening hours, was dead quiet -- for everyone but management. I was engaged on two ridiculously dumb issues for most of the night and ended up working a half hour late in the morning to personally address one of them as a favor for our dayshift folks.

Monday, May 10:

Working from home, day 256.

I slept until well after 5pm -- I was still in bed when Daisy, who is working from home today and tomorrow, got off work this evening.

I have been exhausted. I do not understand why I can't seem to ever get fully rested. I feel like a cell phone battery that gets run down to 1% or 2%, then put on to charge, only reaching 55% or 60% before being yanked off the charger to be used again. This is actually a really good analogy the more that I think about it. I'm doing exemplary work every night that I'm in the office, of course -- I believe my own work should be the gold standard everyone else points to and says "that dude, he's doing this job right" but trying to be that person, trying to do and be the best at everything is no doubt part of why I feel so constantly run-down. I can't help that I care about my job so much more than so many other people -- it's called having honor and a sense of duty.

I would've made a fantastic naval or air force captain. It's a shame I'm too old to join the Space Force, too. 

The overnight hours at work suck, yet again. I get stuck on an issue as I'm literally "walking out the proverbial door" at around 7:10, and am forced to make a few phone calls because a sales rep couldn't be bothered to do so himself. This means that I was stuck on the phone until around 7:40ish. 

Tuesday, May 11: Working from home, day 257.

Wednesday, May 12: Working from home, day 258.

Because it's back in stores and in production for a limited time (something like ten weeks, I can't remember exactly how long), the wife picked up four 6-packs of Pepsi Blue tonight; it's been discontinued for over 15 years and is, really, likely my favorite soda of all time. I was distraught when it was discontinued and haven't tasted its sweet nectars since I was in college -- and probably not even halfway through college, at that. I remember searching like crazy when it stopped being made and never being able to find it. Blue Raspberry Crush came along a few years later and it was similar, but it wasn't the same. That was eventually discontinued too, rather quickly.

All of my favorite sodas have been discontinued over the years, with only a handful that have ever returned even for limited runs. Mountain Dew Pitch Black and Surge were the notable ones, but I doubt we'll ever see Josta, dnL, 7UP Plus, or Mello Yello Melon ever again. While that's a tragedy, we'll all soldier on. 

I was awakened early this afternoon by the cats fighting downstairs, after I'd already had a lot of weird dreams throughout my sleeping hours today. Afterwards, my big male cat came upstairs and flopped against me in bed, headbutting me in the face, etc. It was clear I wasn't going to get to go back to sleep, so I just got up and began doing chores. I did three loads of laundry, including the shower curtain and bathroom rugs, I opened up the house, I fed the cats and brought in the mail, I brought in the trash and recycling bins from the road, etc. The wife came home with the groceries, I put those away while she worked a bit in the yard, and I put on to cook the vegan chicken tenders she purchased. She came inside and then we tried the chicken, and she put on a bag of waffle fries. She showered, I ate, she came downstairs to eat later, I started work. 

I can't tell you how many spoons all this took, but I do know that I have four 6-packs of Pepsi Blue to further fuel my desperate addiction to caffeine. 

Thursday, May 13: Working from home, day 259.

Friday, May 14: Day off.

Yesterday, the CDC announced that fully-vaccinated people can now stop wearing masks in almost all places, in almost all scenarios.

It is too soon. It is far too soon. 

I don't like disagreeing with the CDC. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. But this is not right, and there's no way this decision/announcement wasn't made for purely political or economy-based reasons. How could it not have been? There are multiple more dangerous/virulent strains of Covid-19 out there now; we are nowhere near out of the woods on this yet. 

Not to mention that telling the public "yeah, it's fine now, take off your masks and resume normal life" puts everyone who works with the public in face-to-face scenarios in immediate danger, because it's not like the people who refuse to get the vaccination are going to care. Infection rates are about to explode again.

I'm not taking off my mask in public places. I just purchased three new masks for my mother for Mother's Day, too, and I hope she and my dad never take theirs off in public either. Maybe, maybe, in another few months, if new infection rates are basically nonexistent, will I feel safe. 

Saturday, May 15:

Day off.

Something also happened to me this week that I can't explain, and I would've written it off as sleep deprivation and stress -- and otherwise would've forgotten about it completely -- had I not thought about it a little more tonight and talked about it with Daisy. 

Three or four nights ago, while I was working in the overnight hours, I was walking between rooms from the kitchen to the living room. Our house is set up to where there is a very short hallway between the two rooms -- in this hallway on the left is the coat/storage closet that is built into the space underneath our central stairwell, and to the right on the opposite side of the hall is a very small half-bath with a toilet and sink. So, it's not really a hallway, just a several-foot passage between the two rooms.

As I walked through this very short hallway, I felt a hand reach out and gently squeeze my left shoulder. Not in a rough or forceful way, as I told Daisy, but in a gentle "hey, I'm here" way. 

It was a light squeeze, lasting maybe a full second (perhaps a little less) and then it let go and was gone.

My thought at the time, in my stressed/sleep-deprived state in the middle of the work night, was "huh, that was sort of creepy and weird. Oh well, gotta get back to work, so much to do."

Yeah, seriously. On my work nights I'm mission-focused and I don't have time to get freaked out or ponder if I was just groped by a ghost; I have too much to do at work as it is, so I tune everything out. When it happened my immediate thought was that I'd bumped into the wall or that I'd brushed up against our swiffer-like hardwood floor mop, which has an angled handle that sticks out and is right next to the hallway on the kitchen side. 

Nope. I did have the sense of mind to look, as a reflex, to see that I was probably three feet from the mop and that I was a good eight inches away from the wall in the hallway -- enough time and sense to register in my head "nope, that was a ghost" and then go back to work.

It wasn't until much later where I realized/remembered that there's not a wall in the hallway -- the "wall" I was at least eight inches from was the door to the closet under the stairs. From where I was at the time my shoulder was grabbed and squeezed, the unseen hand would have come from directly inside that closet -- that closed closet, reaching straight through the door and out into the hallway. 

Upon this realization I got a little spooked, I'll admit, but as I told the wife, I didn't feel any sort of violent or malicious presence. Just a quick, greeting-like squeeze, the kind you'd give someone if you were both in the kitchen cooking together and wanted them to know you were right next to them or right behind them, so they wouldn't make any sudden moves and knock you over or something. I don't know how to otherwise describe it. 

So I went back to work and continued my night. I was busy, and the entire event took maybe 2.5 seconds, so it quickly went out of my head and I focused on the tasks I needed to complete. So many people I know would've been absolutely terrified at this experience, and my own reaction was like "meh, probably a ghost, it's cool."

Anyone who's followed this blog for some time knows that I'm not a stranger to weird or otherwise paranormal occurrences, especially not when it comes to this house (or my house back home in WV). In this house alone, Daisy and I have both experienced the sounds of people walking around upstairs when we've both been downstairs -- with all three cats downstairs with us. Daisy experienced that alone one night before I was working at home, as well; it sounds like someone walking around in my office upstairs when clearly nobody is. I've also seen the shadow of a person's head and shoulders on the wall at the bottom of the stairs before for a few split seconds, our smoke detector has gone off in the hallway outside our bedroom when we were both asleep, early on a Sunday morning, with no trigger for it whatsoever (no smoke, and I'd gone to bed hours before, so it's not possible my vape had somehow set it off), and some Christmas-decoration jingle bells we had hanging on the lip of the bottom of the stairwell began jingling on their own one night -- stuff like this. Always little things, fast/brief, with no perceived ill intent or maliciousness behind them. There's probably other little things I'm forgetting too, that I just don't remember. 

This house is 45 years old, but the original house that was here before this one is obviously older; we don't know what that house looked like or how much of it was simply repaired after the Omaha tornado of 1975. We also don't know what sort of building was occupying this property, if anything, before a house was built here. What we know is that the original house was built in 1973, the tornado destroyed it in 1975, and it was rebuilt into what it is now in 1976. There were likely other houses, domiciles, or businesses around the area on this property prior to 1973 too, of course -- but good luck finding pictures or records of it. The cleanup and rebuilding from the 1975 tornado was extensive, but not very thorough -- in digging a few inches down into our yard for landscaping purposes as well as for gardening/planting, Daisy has dug up a bunch of broken glass shards from windows and the like, glass that has been in the ground for decades. It is spread through the entire yard several inches below the sod. We've also dug up paving stones and a good number of broken or intact cinder blocks buried just as far down, when we had to demolish our shed and backfill upon replacement of our retaining wall (ironically, that's where our new rock bed of landscaping is now). It is very apparent that our section of the neighborhood was goddamn destroyed and that heavy equipment just ground it all down into the earth and leveled it off for new construction/rebuilding on the same site. 

Did I mention our house doesn't have a basement? All of this could happen again at any time.

I bring all of this up to say that we have no idea what was on this land before the '70s. The house could be built on top of an Indian burial ground or something, and we'd never have a clue. Official records we can access in regards to the property are few and far between, and any info on them is sparse. Even finding a list of previous owners for this house from before the last owners we bought it from -- translation, anything before the '90s -- is nigh-impossible. 

So, it is what it is. I got groped by a ghost, I guess. Maybe. 

Sunday, May 16:

Working from home, day 260.

Payroll Sunday.

The weekend has flown by once again and, once again, I have little to show for it. Truth be told, last week at work was pretty awful -- always seems to be a string of more awful days than good ones -- and I only had one lunch hour all week last week. That lunch hour was on Thursday night at 1am, when I was so tired I was starting to fall asleep at my desk, and I was lucky that nothing else was going on at the moment, so I took a quick one-hour nap on the couch.

I haven't talked about our health much this month, so we're gonna do that for a bit. Thursday, coincidentally, I believe I was suffering from a mild migraine. I was dizzy and somewhat nauseated, and lights hurt me. This accompanied the roaring headache I'd had for several hours. When I took the above-mentioned nap, it seemed to reset myself and I was okay afterwards. I get a migraine once about every 4-5 years -- they are very rare and uncommon for me, and when I get them they're usually terrifyingly bad -- to the point where I have to hide in a dark room curled up into a ball because everything spins and makes me nauseated and my head feels like it's being crushed for about 12 hours. The last one I had before this past week was one night at work in probably 2017 or so, and it got so bad throughout the night that I threw up my hands, put in the PTO and said I was done. I hopped in my truck (yes, it was back when I still had the truck) and drove home at like 4am. 

Daisy and I have both felt very inflamed over the course of the past several weeks, and for her a large part of it is likely consumption of gluten/wheat products. When she doesn't consume bread or gluten, she doesn't swell up and ache/hurt/retain water. For me, the same can happen, but generally for me it's foods with lots of salt or dairy (because yes, I'm only vegetarian, I still eat dairy). And both are two of my weaknesses. 

We have both recognized this, though, and part of my "diet" push for this summer is to eliminate most bread from my diet as well as most actual dairy. Salt is really difficult for me because it's literally the only thing that makes food less bland and weak when you're already a vegetarian. Different spices or flavor combinations can only go so far if they're not backed with saltiness, so it's something I struggle with a lot. Bread is difficult for me as well, but at least I have similar options like tortillas or crackers that seem to not affect me as much as eating a loaf of bread every few days will. 

Daisy has offered to make us protein shakes every day, and I've told her that I'm 100% on board for that, but it also has to replace a meal -- I can't just drink one as a drink in addition to a meal, and when I want to eat, I want to eat something, not drink a shake. I eat so relatively little anyway (in comparison to how much I used to eat in my very unhealthy days) that when I want food, I want actual food and not a shake. It reminds me of the juice cleanse I did last summer -- I just felt so unfulfilled most of the time, like a deep nagging in the pit of my stomach to give it something that wasn't liquid, to give it something to actually digest and burn. 

I have gravitated back to vegetables and vegan/vegetarian meat substitutes for the most part, with a lot of nuts and seeds thrown into the mix too. Salads, the occasional soup, some chips and crackers sparingly, but overall -- I have a really good diet, honestly. Anyone else my size who followed a diet like mine would be wasting away to nothing.

"The only reason you're not losing weight is your hormone imbalance," Daisy said.

Ah yes, there is that.

As you likely know, I've been on testosterone replacement therapy for a little over three years now. At this juncture, I really can't tell you how well it's working or not working, because I haven't a clue. I've never felt markedly different either before or after being on it -- maybe a little ebb and flow here or there, but nothing transformative. People say it's supposed to up your sex drive or give you so much more energy or I dunno, "make you feel more like a man" or what have you, but I have noticed approximately none of these effects. At this point I need to wean myself off it and end it entirely; I don't want my body to get so used to producing so much less testosterone that it is unable to make any of it in the future, which is a genuine fear I have. There's a deep-rooted drive within me to be the most natural person I can be without the use of any sort of pharmaceuticals, and that's a big goal for me. I want to get off the gout meds too, and just be able to live a clean life without having to take pills every day and not need them. I don't know if that's ever going to be something I can do at this age/juncture anymore, and that makes me deeply sad.

Anyway.

The night at work is mostly quiet. I get stuck on an issue that by all rights, should have been worked by my boss (as the client leapfrogged over me and engaged him directly) that I was forced to own all night. I did not get a lunch hour. I did not get any downtime to read the news or decompress with my phone between tasks -- I was all-in on working this stupid issue all night long, with technical groups full of union technicians who only work when they want to -- which leaves my (non-union) workcenter left holding the proverbial bag. At 7:10 this morning, I logged out -- disgusted by "process" and feeling, once more, that my team's job is to be the whipping boys between the clients and the technicians. 

Monday, May 17:

Working from home, day 261.

I got a really odd email over the weekend from this website, saying that my post covering the month of February, "The Skunk of Misfortune," had been flagged for malware/spyware content and had been removed.

The fuck?

A day later I got a correction email, stating that upon further review, my post had been reinstated.

It had not.

I had to go back into my drafts on here, find it, and re-publish it on the correct date. In doing so, I read it word for word from top to bottom -- there's nothing in that post that could have ever been spyware/malware related. No links, no mentions of anything questionable, only a few pictures here and there, mostly of weather and screenshots I'd taken from my computer or phone. Nothing questionable, nothing out of the ordinary, just...a post. 

I have kept this blog in one form or another since its original inception in 2007. That was fourteen years ago. Not once has any post I've ever written been flagged or removed by Blogger, and in that time I guarantee you I have written thousands of posts here, some of them quite incendiary -- the blog was started as a place where I could bitch about my then-current grocery store job in an episodic, day-to-day format. In 2011, when Alley and I broke up, I "reformatted" the blog, so to speak, and removed the 2007-2010 posts to edit them together into a book (which I wrote and self-published for a short period, but desperately need to go back and re-edit again) and changed the blog's content to focus more on graduate school, my own life and relationships, and -- much later, of course -- married life. 

So yeah, I don't know. It's whatever, I suppose.

2021 is a year of milestone anniversaries, I've found, both good and bad. I didn't really realize it as much when the year started, but I've definitely got a lot of milestones coming up this year, some that have already passed, that I never really thought about before:

March 6 -- my sister's 30th birthday (1991).

June 2 -- 20 year anniversary of graduating from high school (2001).

June 28 -- 10 year anniversary of purchasing my first car, the venerable 1996 Monte Carlo Z34 (2011).

July 31 -- 10 year anniversary of the end of my relationship with Alley (2011). 

Mid-August -- 20 year anniversary of my aunt's death, and the last time I saw my actual father in person (2001, can't remember exact dates). 

Late August -- 20 year anniversary of starting as a freshman at WVU (2001, can't remember exact date).

September 11 -- 20 year anniversary of 9/11 (2001), duh.

I'm sure there are others, and I will likely cover all of these in detail when we breach these dates, even though some of them I've covered here before in this blog. As you also may know, the wife and I celebrate our 7th wedding anniversary at the end of the month, but that's not a "milestone" for anyone but us, really. It's a different type of milestone for me personally, because my mother and father got divorced at the seven-year point (1980-87), so being able to say I'm able to surpass that track record in my own marriage is a point of pride for me, as strange or warped as that sounds. I don't mean it in an insulting way, not like a "haha, my marriage lasted longer than yours did" or anything, especially not since my mother and my "dad" (read: the man who raised me, but they never married) have been together coming up on like...27, 28 years now?  Something like that. No, it's just a point of pride for me that my life is stable and I'm in a relationship with a woman I love, and who loves me, who also just so happens to also be my wife. 

Tuesday, May 18:

Working from home, day 262. 

I am slowly counting down the days to when my PTO kicks in next week for my mini-vacation at the end of this month. I have nine more days -- seven working days and two days off -- before I'm off for six full days in a row, including the Memorial Day holiday itself and our wedding anniversary.  I always thought that my days in which I would be so desperately counting down to an upcoming vacation would have been left in my youth long ago, because by age 38 I thought I would have my collective shit together enough to where a vacation wouldn't be something I'd have to save up time for or look forward to so much. 

But, I mean, life is life. 

Daisy's mother had a heart procedure done today. Outpatient, I guess. It was to install a "watchman."

"Which one?" I asked. "Is it Dr. Manhattan? I hope it's Dr. Manhattan."

It was not Dr. Manhattan.

A "watchman device" is a little thing doctors stick in the heart to prevent the risk of stroke and Afib. It blocks off something someplace, I guess. I don't know, I'd never heard about it until last week. 

Huh. Well, there you go. 

The procedure was successful and she's recovering at home. Truthfully, I'd forgotten all about today being the day for the procedure until Daisy reminded me this morning as I was halfway falling asleep in my chair, and then I forgot about it again until this evening when she told me she was stopping at the parents' on the way home to make sure everything was okay. 

I don't know what this says about me as a person or what it says to my selfishness at this juncture. There was a time where something like a surgery like this would have been on my mind all day long, with little reprieve. Today, I don't know how I could've forgotten about it not once, but twice. She is okay though, so that's a plus.

I must also mention that last night I believe I had another, ahem, spiritual encounter. 

Look, I don't like writing about this stuff. I think it makes me sound somewhat crazy. And truthfully, in the middle of the night, when I'm already sleep-deprived and stressed beyond belief due to work, I don't know if I'm hallucinating or just having tired eyes, muscle spasms, or what. Because of that I'm even more reluctant to talk about what happened last night because I really just don't know anymore, I don't know how much I can trust what I see and feel when I'm so exhausted and so stressed all the time. But, for the sake of clarity, I'll tell you.

I was sitting at my work desk, turned slightly to the side so that I could pay attention to my fat old cat, Maggie, and was turning back to face my computer screens when I got the briefest glimpse possible of part of a head and face looking at me from around the corner of the stairwell into the living room. It was a flash in my peripheral vision, maybe a fifth of a second, but I saw pale white skin of a face and black hair in a moptop, '60s Beatles-esque style. I did not see it long enough to make out any eyes or features (thankfully, as this would have made it much more creepy), and as soon as I looked back a second time, maybe another fifth of a second later, it was gone.

Because I'm not afraid of a goddamn thing, especially not my house, I got up, walked across the room, circled the stairwell, looked up the stairs, looked into the other dark rooms of the house (the living room, where I work at night, is the only room with lights on for the vast majority of the overnight) and saw nothing.

I will note that my eyes have been sort of blurrier than usual over the course of the past few days, probably due to allergies, and I was struggling to stay awake a good chunk of the night anyway. I can't be sure what I saw now, even though in the moment it felt very real. I told Daisy this morning and she sort of rolled her eyes at me and dismissed it -- probably due to my own insecurity about the incident. 

Anyway. Onward.

Once Daisy got home from the parents' and I went to work for the evening, the night went mostly smoothly, I guess. 

Wednesday, May 19: Working from home, day 263.

Thursday, May 20: Working from home, day 264.

I didn't write here either of these days.

Friday, May 21:

Day off. Payday for both of us.

It has been cool and rainy for the past several days until today, when the rain stopped and the temperature jacked itself back up into the low 80s again. For the better part of a week, we were told by the weather folks that today was supposed to be the #1 day for possible severe weather/tornadic activity in the area -- and then amazingly, within 24 hours, that forecast had changed and it has now been pushed out to Sunday/Monday/Tuesday.

Because that's Nebraska for you.

I'll remind you that two years ago around this time is when we got the godawful thunderstorm/hailstorm that took out our retaining wall (which cost us literal thousands of dollars to fix), so any damaging storms can go ahead and fuck right off -- I just want the sights and sounds of mega-lightning and mega-thunder without it destroying things. 

Daisy's mother is recovering just fine from her "watchman" surgery, though she and Dad are both sick at the moment (intestinal stuff, not Covid-related) and have warned us to keep away until they're feeling better. So, it looks like we won't be visiting tomorrow as we normally would on a Saturday, and have no real plans (for once). 

Yes, I did say normally would. After vaccines and after most mask restrictions have been lifted (though, again, I still think this is mostly a bad and premature idea), life is slowly returning to the normal status quo in our little Nebraskan bubble. The only major difference for me is that yes, I am still working from home -- in a job that should have always been work from home, something I'm realizing far more now with each passing week/month in doing it -- and that I still get most of my groceries delivered to the house. But, I'm seeing gas prices return to nearly normal again when I'm out, and I'm seeing a LOT more traffic than I have in the past year as well. Schools are ending for the summer, people are planning vacations again, gardens are being planted not out of fear and necessity, but for fun and fresh produce, etc. Daisy spent a good chunk of time tonight in the garden harvesting a lot of our lettuce (!) and getting a lot of different plants into the actual ground. 

I am less than a week out now from my end-of-the-month, holiday/anniversary vacation. Daisy and I were originally planning, roughly, to go to Denver to visit her sister and family over that time -- provided that they weren't getting any freak snowstorms and pending very heavily on the state of the nation and Covid-infection rates. We figured that if we could do it, it would be a nice little getaway from us being cooped up in the house all the goddamn time as well as give us some much-needed decompression. The only times we've been out of this city as well as this state in the past year and a half is when we drove to Iowa, twice, to get our first and second vaccines. Yes, believe me, getting the hell out of here for a few days is needed.

Well, our very, very preliminary plans were changed for us, when Daisy's sister announced that since she and her husband were now vaccinated and schools are ending for the year (she's a principal at a charter school she started), they would be coming to town for the first time since Christmas 2019. 

Now, mind you, I am excited and delighted to see them and their four boys after so long, and it was they who we were going to Denver to visit -- but that trip was going to be on our own terms and while they were a focus of it, seeing them wasn't going to be the only focus of it. There are a lot of things I wanted to do in Denver when we were last out there that I just didn't get to do -- things to see, places to go, more Voodoo Doughnuts to eat -- any trip we'd made out there was going to be an anniversary adventure for us. And no, of course, we hadn't set it in stone, hadn't booked hotels or any other happy horseshit like that, or anything along those lines as it was very likely we weren't actually going to do it, but it was a very nice thought.

As an aside, I'll want to go to Denver when I can plan around certain events -- Denver has a thriving comedy scene and many of my favorite comedians travel through there on very regular intervals (well, ahem, they did before the pandemic). It would not be out of the question for me to buy tickets and plan around one of them coming to town -- none of the people I'm interested in ever come to Omaha, and if they do, I hear about it long after the event is over. 

[EDIT: I found out shortly after this that Christopher Titus is coming to the Omaha Funny Bone in July.]

So, because they're coming to town, Daisy gets the bright idea to invite everyone over to the house for dinner. 

Please note -- our house is a goddamn claustrophobic wreck. We haven't done much cleaning of substance in almost two years, and our front room and long, beautiful dining room table is filled with mail, Amazon (and other companies') cardboard delivery boxes, all of our rugs need a good washing, there's dirt and cat hair and cat kibbles and cat vomit all over the floors both upstairs and downstairs because we haven't properly vacuumed in weeks, every kitchen counter is covered with stuff that either needs to be put away or thrown away, and the living room isn't much better. Our house is very lived in, to put it mildly, and we never have people over. Like, I can count on one hand the number of times we've had anyone come over (aside from Daisy's parents) in the almost three years we've owned the house. 

Now granted, I make it sound much worse than it is. But it's still pretty bad. We so rarely have time to clean because neither Daisy nor I get a lot of downtime at all. The vast majority of my hours spent awake are either at work, winding down from work, or waking up to go back to work. Daisy, who still leaves the house for her job half the time, can't clean the place when she's working from home any more than I can, either. So over time, the house deteriorates more and more, slowly.

Anyway, in order to have people over -- especially family -- the downstairs of the house will need to be mostly gutted and scrubbed. Ah, the old gut-and-scrub. 

So I guess Daisy and I have some work to do over the next week...

Saturday, May 22: Day off.

Sunday, May 23: Working from home, day 265.

Entering Memorial Day week at work is always weird, because not only do I usually have time off around these days (I could, if I wanted to, take the entire week off -- I just wouldn't have PTO for a trip back to West Virginia later this summer) but many others take off time too. It's the first holiday of the year since New Year's Day that people aren't required to work normally (we don't get MLK Day, Presidents' Day, or Easter off work) and it's the beginning of the summer after a year stolen from us by a pandemic. People understandably want to get the fuck away from their desks and get some time off, and I absolutely do not blame them in the least. I've got a few people on my team, including myself, who are either traveling or taking some time off around the holiday for family things, and the clock is ticking down to those days off.

But, in addition to the vacation time people take around this week, we also seem to get a multitude of really bizarre or just plain stupid/difficult issues to deal with. I don't know why, I don't know if it's a beginning-of-summer, tornado season thing, or what, but some of the most soul-crushing issues I've ever worked have been during the Memorial Day week. Yes, Memorial Day is a week from tomorrow, and no, that doesn't matter -- it's some sort of sick fate or karma that the time leading up to any time I have off is never going to be fun in that place. This is evidenced this year by there being a full moon on Wednesday night -- the last night of the week I will work -- and by me needing to join a Zoom meeting for training at 5am as well (because yes, that's now a thing). 

Daisy works from home the next two days and then spends the rest of the week in the office. Our upcoming schedule throughout the holiday weekend is, basically, as follows:

Monday: we both work from home.

Tuesday: we both work from home.

Wednesday: I work from home, she's in the office. Full moon. Early morning Zoom training for me.

Thursday: I'm off and will be asleep all day; she's in the office.

Friday: the only real alone time/downtime I'll get during my vacation -- I'm off and home alone, she's in the office, and her sister/family arrive in town. The gut-and-scrub kicks into full effect, since I can start it while she's working. 

Saturday: gut-and-scrub continues. 

Sunday: Final wrap-up of the gut-and-scrub, as the family dinner is at our house this evening.

Monday: Memorial Day, our actual anniversary, for us to do whatever we choose with (hopefully).

Tuesday: Daisy returns to work, likely in the office (if she's still on the same rotating schedule).

Wednesday: I return to work for a two-day week of Wednesday/Thursday.

Protip: ALWAYS take a buffer day after a holiday off, if you can -- especially if the holiday falls on a Monday. I learned this a long time ago. If you don't, every asshole who had to wait to get his issue worked on over the entirety of the holiday weekend will become your problem as soon as you clock in for the night. I have vacation time and by gods, I'm going to fucking use it in order to avoid that insanity. 

Monday, May 24: Working from home, day 266.

Tuesday, May 25: Working from home, day 267.

Wednesday, May 26: Working from home, day 268.

This week at work has been a nightmarish hellscape from which there has been no reprieve. Monday may have been one of the top ten worst nights I've ever worked in my job, a list that is likely going to need to be expanded to a "top twenty" sooner or later if my team continues to get buttfucked on a regular basis. 

In the midst of all this, however, last night I received a call from my executive director. This is odd because he usually calls me in the morning if I'm needed, or reaches out to me through messenger or something -- generally his calls are important ones, along the lines of "I need you to login right now and help out" or "what was [agent's name] thinking, and why didn't you catch this?" I have been heavily coached or otherwise chewed out by my executive director more than anyone else in the company, and most times I can't say it wasn't warranted on at least some level -- I am only good, I am not perfect. But, the man has personally saved my job on more than one occasion and has repeatedly gone to bat for me on an individual level, as well as my team/agents and our program as a whole on more occasions than I can count.

Not to mention that he's the reason I have a Playstation 2 right now, so there's also that. 

The call was to inform me that I am receiving my first merit-based raise since 2019. 

It is not a lot of money. It is not "Brandon gets to buy a new car" money. It is a 4.1% raise. To put it into perspective, over the course of a year, were I still living in our old apartment, it would be like getting a free month of rent. It's the rough equivalent, doing the math, of getting 42 more cents per hour. I know that sounds horrific, but hours and cents add up, and it sounds worse than it is.

"I know it's not a lot," he said, "and I know you all deserve so much more, but this is what I can get you right now. It went into affect at the end of your last pay period, so you'll see it reflected beginning with your next check on the 4th."

I graciously thanked him and the call ended. 

I only wonder when and if my agents are going to get raises themselves. Nobody below the management level has been issued any form of raise, in our program, past what we call the "one-year bump" -- after an agent works with us for a year, they get a dollar-per-hour raise. I have to manually process it via Oracle, and it is a bitch to do. But that's it -- there are no sweeping across the board, cost-of-living or merit-based raises for the people who work for me, and the hourly rate for my agents has remained the same for the past seven years I've been working there. I enter year eight in August. 

They do get the occasional bonus -- such as they did if they came in to work overtime in the aftermath of the Christmas bombing in Nashville -- and that's about it. That's part of why I'm a strong supporter of the national $15 minimum wage proposals...most of my agents don't get paid anything near that, and it's a goddamn travesty they don't. Working a job at Burger King would be far easier and would carry far less responsibilities than the jobs they work with our company, and they'd likely make better money.

But I digress.

Tonight is my last night of work before I'm off on PTO for almost a solid week. It is also the night where -- "we're really sure of it this time" -- we're supposed to get horrific thunderstorms, per the local weather folks. I will note that they've said this for days on end at this juncture, and we have only gotten a few sprinkles of rain and maybe a soft, far off rumble of thunder in Omaha here and there. I need the storm front to roll through, personally, so that my allergies hopefully subside. My sinuses have felt awful for the past week, and I've been having burning/itchy eyes as well as multiple sneezing fits every day because the weather never, ahem, reaches orgasm. Lots of weather edging going on in Omaha, if you get my drift. 

Let me tell you, I am so ready for my PTO to kick in, too. My director (read: my direct boss, not the executive director I mentioned above) already took tonight off and has already vacated the proverbial premises without even telling any of us aside from putting up his out of office message on his email. My team knows I'm out and knows not to bother me after today, too. It's Wednesday, so the night will likely be another nightmare (Wednesdays usually are now, as I have 14 of my 16 agents in and on shift), and... it's also a full moon.

Full moon, predicted severe storms, the night before my vacation starts, and a Wednesday. 

I'm sure it'll all be fine.

Thursday, May 27 to Monday, May 31:

Vacation days 1-5.

It's much easier to write about all of these as a whole instead of on individual days, simply because all of the days blend together, and it was only near the end of them when I felt like I was actually starting my vacation.

Thursday, I slept most of the day, I woke up to the message that Daisy was going to go out with her work friends for drinks after work, and would be home late. This was fine; we were entering a holiday weekend and I needed a little decompression time as well. 

I had several Amazon orders arrive, and amongst them was supposed to be a new box of "puppy pads" (you know, those training pads you train dogs to pee on) -- we put them in front of, inside of, and underneath the cat pans, as one of our cats has arthritis and frequently has trouble peeing inside the pan -- she climbs in to pee, and then her ass sticks outside the pan and she ends up peeing in front of it or down the front of it. The pads catch that and are quickly replaceable. 

Well, everything else showed up in these Amazon orders except for the puppy pads. Instead, I got a delivery confirmation that the pads were delivered in Plattsmouth (a town 20ish miles south of here). In addition to everything else I ordered, I also received -- randomly -- a box containing two expensive wicker storage baskets that I did not order. I checked the address label on the box as I thought maybe Daisy had ordered some decorative baskets (this is not out of the question for her), but no, it was addressed to me. Amazon's policy when you receive something you didn't order is that you get to keep it, you don't have to return it (this has always been their policy) so my thought process was "cool, free baskets, Daisy will like these" and set them aside. I filed a claim with the seller of the puppy pads (since the tracking said they'd been delivered to the wrong address), ordered two new boxes of them from Walmart and had them delivered that evening, and didn't think much else of it.

Daisy got home around 10-11ish and we spent a little bit of time together before she had to go shower and go to bed, as she still had to work on Friday. I ended up staying up a bit longer before falling asleep in my chair.

Friday started by me waking up around 9am in a daze; I had lots of aches and pains and I knew two things -- I needed to go to the bathroom and I needed to eat something, as I was starting to feel sick. Friday was my day to get stuff around the house done as much as possible while Daisy was in the office (read: gut-and-scrub), with my focus for the day being on the kitchen/dining room area as well as mowing the grass and doing string-trimming.

Friday it was also in the forties in the morning, and was only in the low fifties by the afternoon, with dark skies and wind, but I digress. 

I got up and realized that it was a Friday, Daisy was at work, and the pandemic is basically over now (yeah, I mean, it really is -- Omaha hasn't had a single new case of Covid reported in days) so I decided...it's time to finally order some pizza again.

Now, mind you, I have ordered pizza once or twice over the course of the past year and a half; last time was I think in January or February, and before that it was last summer, but we've tried very hard not to order pizzas or much of any other food at all, really, just to cut down the risk of contamination. I am still not comfortable eating indoors at a restaurant yet, for example, and am still slowly warming up to the idea of seeing a movie in a theater again. Yes, even though both Daisy and I are fully vaccinated. Why risk it, why tempt fate, y'know?

But still, I'd been craving pizza for a while, despite my attempts to not eat as much bread or bread-adjacent items as I have been. Sometimes the heart wants what the heart wants, and on Friday it wanted pizza. So, I spent $40 at Dominos and got two pizzas, stuffed cheese bread, and a sandwich -- all of it vegetarian, no meat involved. It was amazing, and I would continue to eat it for the next two days afterwards with no ill effects. I told Daisy on Sunday night that I was tempted to do a repeat order of it (like, the exact same items) again sometime in the next week or two as well, because it was really good.

After the pizza, I did indeed mow the grass and do the trimming outside in the cold -- yes, cold, because it was about 50 degrees with whipping winds and no sun, which meant that in the last week of May, when doing yard work outside, I legitimately had to deal with wind chill. It completely boggles the mind, man. The yard work needed to be done and the outside of the house needed to look presentable because (at the time) we were still planning to have the family over on Sunday night for dinner -- more on this later.

In the late afternoon, as I was taking a short power nap in my chair, Daisy called me to let me know that she was going out with her work friends again that night, to decompress (there's a reason for this, I'll get to it in the June post) and that they were likely going over to one of the girls' houses afterward to "continue the party," so to speak -- and that all the girls wanted me to join. 

My answer to this request was "not only hell no but fuck no."

Look, Daisy's work friends are very nice and they've always been sweet to me, but that's Daisy's domain and I would be an interloper. I really don't know any of them hardly at all. I'd also not showered in two days and had mowed the grass and done the weedeating that afternoon, so I was not just normal Brandon-sweaty, I was he's done work outside-sweaty. Daisy said that was fine, and came home to change clothes and spend some time with me for a while before venturing back out to whoever's house it was.

She did not come home until 3:30 in the morning. 

Like, I know Daisy, I trust her, we've been married for seven years and have been together for nine, so I know she's not doing anything underhanded nor would I ever suspect that she was. Many other husbands would absolutely assume they were being cheated on or what have you. Daisy sends me snaps of them playing party games and hanging out in her coworker's basement with dogs, drinking various alcohols. Daisy doesn't even really drink; she had part of a can of hard seltzer and nothing else. My only concern was that it was Friday night of Memorial Day weekend and she was a full county away, driving home in the middle of the night with drunks and cops on the road everywhere.

She got home safely, we hung out for a while and then we had our "dinner" together at 5am, before both of us went to bed within fifteen minutes of one another as the sun was coming up for the day. 

During the night hours while Daisy was out and about, her sister, our brother-in-law, and their four boys arrived in town for the first time in a year and a half at the parents. Their plan was to stay Saturday and Sunday and then leave on Monday morning. We'll cover this more shortly.

Due to some...extraneous circumstances, we did not do much of any gut-and-scrub of the house. We just didn't have the time or energy for it, and even if I'd gotten up at the crack of dawn on Friday and worked on it until Daisy got home at 3:30 in the morning, it still likely would not have been presentable enough, even if we decided to work on it all day on Saturday (we did not), to have everyone over for dinner on Sunday night. So, by Saturday afternoon when we awoke and went over to see the family, we'd already 90% made up our minds that we'd just make/take the food over there on Sunday for dinner, where we would have more room and less additional cleanup, because there was just no way we would have enough time and energy to make the house presentable.

So Saturday afternoon, we went over to visit and kind of laid out that plan. Daisy remained adamant that we'd make a final decision on Sunday morning, but we knew long before we left the parents' house in the evening that we'd just be doing it over there -- we did not need the added stress or work of having a full family dinner at our place when our house was just so awful.

Not to mention that it's our holiday weekend, our anniversary weekend, and our vacation time off as well. Let me tell you, with something to do every single day I was off up to this point (some days even multiple things), it did not feel like I was getting a vacation at all. It was time off from my job being replaced with other work that needed to be done. A vacation, to me, is not doing a goddamn thing -- enjoying downtime, watching movies, playing video games, etc. It's all about having time without responsibilities. 

I told Daisy this as we were in the grocery store at 10:55 at night, rushing through self-scanning the items we needed to purchase to make the family meal the next day (tacos, nachos, and other Mexican-themed foods) before the store closed at 11PM. Aside from the time spent alone while Daisy was at work or out with her friends, it did not feel like my vacation had actually started because the rest of the time, I was running around from one task to the next. 

In the interim, the seller of the puppy pads had gotten back to me, and told me they'd given me the wrong tracking number (a fact that UPS had already confirmed with me, as I'd opened a claim with them as well). They gave me the "correct" tracking number as well as photo proof of the Amazon delivery of the boxes sitting on my front stoop.

"This tracking number," I replied to them, "says that the puppy pads were delivered May 26, and that photo is indeed of my house and my packages, but I 100% guarantee you that the puppy pads never arrived at my home; these were other orders delivered at the same time."

The new tracking number they gave me for the puppy pads was a USPS tracking number, so I let UPS know they could close their case and summarily opened an investigative case with the USPS. The seller said that if it still couldn't be found, that they'd issue a full refund for the purchase order.

I was so exhausted that I don't know what time I fell asleep Saturday night, and don't even remember if it was in my chair or if I'd actually gone to bed with Daisy at some point. No, wait, I remember -- I did go to bed because when Daisy woke me up at noon on Sunday, when she'd already been awake for a while, I was in the bed. 

Daisy had told the family that we'd be over with the food around 3 for an early-ish family dinner. We didn't actually get there until almost 6. This is because of -- and I'll revive this phrase here again because I haven't used it in several years -- Daisy Standard Time, or DST for short. 

We had a delightful dinner with the family and hung out with all of them for many hours afterwards. The kids, as they're kids, were sent to bed one by one as it got later and later. Then the parents and our brother-in-law went to bed. Soon it was just me, Daisy, and her sister getting the adult family bonding time -- during which I even fell asleep for a while in Dad's recliner in the living room as Daisy and her sister talked. 

It was also around this time where I realized...the baskets. The tracking number was probably correct, but instead of shipping me puppy pads, the seller (or Amazon, who knows) had shipped those two expensive baskets in their place. Whether someone else got the puppy pads, who knows. I have a feeling that the seller figured out they'd messed up on their end somewhere, though, as I got an email a few hours later saying the full amount had been refunded back to my card -- and it had; I checked my balance.

So uh, that's that, I guess. Full refund, free baskets, but no puppy pads. It's likely USPS won't find anything wrong, and if that's the case I'll 100% tell them to close out their investigation so I don't waste anyone's time. 

Anyway.

It was close to midnight before we got home on Sunday night, and by that time we were hungry again, so we had a small "dinner" of sorts before Daisy went to bed. Me, fueled by my short power nap in Dad's recliner, stayed awake for several more hours before succumbing to sleep in my own chair while listening to podcasts.

Which, finally, brings us to the last day of the month -- Monday, May 31 -- our seventh wedding anniversary and Memorial Day. 2021 also marks the parents' anniversary as well (Daisy's parents, I mean; we chose May 31 as a sort of tribute to them). While we celebrate our 7th, they celebrate their 46th. That in itself is remarkable to me. 

Daisy and I had no hard and set plans for the day; there's nothing we had on the docket to actually do in any sort of constructive fashion, especially not after running around all weekend prior. It also marks the first year that we didn't get each other some sort of anniversary present, even something small.

Hey Google, what's the traditional 7th anniversary present?

Thanks Google!

Well, Daisy is vegan, so wool is off the table, and I don't think either of us need any plate armor at the moment, so copper is sort of useless to us at this juncture as well.

For those of you wondering, the 8th anniversary gift is supposedly linen, and the 9th is supposedly pottery. Both of those are actually useful. The 10th "modern" anniversary gift is supposed to be diamonds at this juncture, which yeah, that likely isn't going to happen. The diamonds, I mean. Not the anniversary, which I fully expect to happen.

Anyway, I already told Daisy that for our 10th anniversary (read: three years from now) her present will be for us to go to the humane society and finally adopt another cat. My current cats, if they live that long, will be 17 at that juncture and likely won't put up much of a fight about it. 

Much of our morning/early afternoon hours involved us asking each other repeatedly if we wanted to go out and do anything. Daisy said that since it was a gorgeous day, she wanted to go out and walk on a trail or through a park or something along those lines. Now I, exhausted after the past several days of constant running around, told her in no uncertain terms that the last thing I wanted to do was go on a nature hike through the woods.

So we compromised, and went on a nature hike through the woods on a trail in a local park. 

Look, it's her anniversary too.

I told her what I really wanted to do was to go pick up the parents and take them to dinner for their own anniversary to the local pizza place we loved, except there are a few problems with that:

1. that pizza place closed like two years ago

2. the parents hadn't answered our texts all day

3. I still don't want to eat in restaurants (see above).

The nature hike through the woods was very nice, and the lighting was perfect to get some selfies of both of us celebrating our anniversary in the park. Afterwards, we came back home and made a nice quiet dinner of falafel wraps and fries/onion rings, and Daisy went upstairs to shower and go to bed. I remained downstairs and watched the full first season of the new Transformers series on Netflix:

It is really good.

Once I finished that, I came back upstairs and ran a load of my laundry, talked to Daisy for a little while (as she'd awakened when I came upstairs) and finished this post here.

So there you have it, folks. May.

Onward to June....