Where did the week go?

What a shitty week this has been. Work continues to light fires in unexpected places and expects me to put them out. I've been doing that for the most part, but the last time they did it I got very fed up and sicced my boss on the perpetrators. He schooled them but good on how message transmissions work, what you can and can't send on which systems and by what designations and under what circumstances. He may have insinuated that a lack of preparation on their part did not, in fact, constitute an emergency on ours. If they didn't plan ahead to make sure that the people they were sending to Faraway Place X had a way of receiving their messages, well, that's really not our problem. We can help to the best of our ability, but we can't perform the impossible.

Oh, and the lack of means to communicate with said people in said very faraway place is directly the fault of the government. Enough said, but it's yet another reason for me to loathe them. Bah.

In much better news, Bean does not have an infection of any kind. Just a cold that is thoroughly kicking his ass. I understand that he is going back to school tomorrow, which is very good for everyone. I'm pretty sure he must be missing his friends and activities, and pdaughter must be looking forward to some time to herself without having him doing Limpet Performance Art on her all day long.

I don't think I mentioned this yesterday, because I believe I posted before it happened. Anyway, I lost my house key for my place in Ottawa on my way to the dentist. This has happened before, as I keep my keys in my coat pocket, and they have a way of falling out sometimes when I sit in the car--something about the angle at which I bend to get in, I guess. With my car keys and regular house keys, this isn't an issue, because they're both on rather large key chains, and my house keys are nestled next to about a dozen other keys, making for a very impressive key ring, all told. My Ottawa house key, on the other hand, is all by itself on a tiny key chain given to me by my landlord. So when it falls, it tends to slip under the driver's seat of the car, which makes it a pain to retrieve. Still, I figured this wasn't that big a deal, as I've contorted myself into shapes that would make a pretzel envious in order to retrieve them in the past.

Except this time, my house key vanished. Into thin air. I have no idea where it could have slid to, but it's gone. I checked the driveway and all other places it might have conceivably fallen, but no luck. I know I heard it fall in the car, too, so I can only guess that there is a tiny opening into The Rift somewhere between my car seats. I spent a good two hours going over every inch of the car, complete with powerful flashlights, and nada. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Zero.

Luckily when I got home this morning my landlord's car was there. I texted him, since it was still pretty early (6am, for those who might be curious), and informed him of the situation and asked if, pretty please, he could let me in. He was still asleep, so I waited outside in my car for an hour and ten minutes until he awoke, showered and dressed and then came to open the door. At least the car was mostly warm, though my toes were slightly frostnipped by the time I got inside.

I'm going to get a new key, and when I do I am going to go straight to the nearest dollar store to get myself one of those spiral keychains that look like phone cords, so that this never happens again. It never occurred to me that my car would eat my danged keys, but now that I know, I can take steps to prevent it from reoccurring.

In other news, for some reason on the computer at work LiveJournal is incredibly messed up. I can't see or edit my tags, there are giant white boxes obscuring my view of a number of fields, and it's rather frustrating to use. I can't think why this is. The computer isn't all that old, it's running Windows 7 (I think), so it's all very perplexing to me. So, apologies if I accidentally use weird tags or something. :P

Commute day

Commute days are the worst. I lose two days a week this way, wherein nothing gets done except packing and travelling and maybe an errand or two. The worst are the days when I go home to Montreal, because I'm coming off a night shift. So I get back to my room at 6:00 or so (sometimes 6:30), and get some sleep. I've tried not sleeping on these days, and all it does is make me nearly fall asleep at the wheel of my car on my drive home. I know lots of people can manage on little to no sleep, but I simply don't have the constitution for that, given that I have to commute roughly 600km a week and generally don't get much sleep during night shifts.

So I have to sleep after a night shift. I usually get 5-7 hours of very broken sleep, because it's the middle of the day and the room is quite bright in spite of all the measures I've taken to darken it (light-blocking curtains & an eye mask).

Then I get up, have food, do some tidying, pack up my bags, and drive home. On the days like today when I have errands to run, it means I get home well after 19:00, usually closer to 20:00, and then an hour or two later, it's bedtime. It's not much better on the days when I go to Ottawa. I get up with the household, do laundry, try to get some chores done, maybe run an errand if I can, then drive to Ottawa, invariably hit rush hour traffic, buy groceries, go to my room, unpack, and by then it's nearly 20:00 which is bedtime before a day shift. As it is, I'm taking time out of that schedule to meet my commitment of writing a post for today, because it's not like I'll be able to do it when I get home, but it also means I'll be getting home later, as usual.

So that's two of my days off basically wasted for work, when I'm not getting paid for it. It's frustrating and demoralising if I let myself think about it too hard. All that time is spent doing basically nothing, when before I would have used it for other pursuits. Spending time with the family, writing, doing proper chores, running errands, seeing people, taking the dog for a walk, whatever. I know that my time at home is already not spent productively enough as it is, so having this time taken away from me is so frustrating.

All righty. On that note, I have bags to pack. I'm heading to Michael's after I leave, and to Shopper's because I'm pretty sure we need more milk at home. (Small child = we always need more milk, it's a rule) That means a late(r) night for me. Again.