Corner of Bourbon & Division

 I need to do some mental work on, well, working on things I don't want to do.

I set aside Friday to work on employee evaluations, and I got almost nothing done, for a couple of reasons. The first is that I got interrupted a fair bit by stuff that I did need to address. The second reason is that I worked on an employee evaluation for two hours, and when I tried to save it in the web portal where I'd been working on it, the whole thing refreshed and took me back to the start and wiped everything I'd written.

What I should have done is just started over. Instead, my brain refused. Here is a pictorial representation of what happened:



Today I was in meetings part of the time, and the rest of the time when I should have made the best of a bad situation, my brain continued to sulk, and I let it. So tonight I am going to go to bed at a reasonable hour (which I super succeeded at yesterday, I am happy to report: I had the lights out at 8:25!) , and tomorrow's "thought work" homework will be working through why my brain is yelling NOPE about employee evalutations, which I've never had THAT much trouble with up until this year.

 I hit a wall today at work right around 2pm. I developed a headache, and try as I might, I could not summon energy from anywhere. I plodded through the rest of my day, and even contemplated leaving early, but I ended up leaving right on time (which is actually early by my standards) after I pushed myself to finish a couple of more time-sensitive things.

I also pushed myself a little bit to go to the grocery store, which had been my original plan, and I didn't want to push it to tomorrow.

I started feeling a bit better when I got home. I took some Tylenol anyway, and the headache is 90% gone, but I feel a bit like a wrung-out dishcloth. I have my Mage game tonight, and I don't want to cancel because it's been pushed back once already and I don't want everyone else to be disappointed, but ugh, I'd rather go to bed. I may ask for an early-ish stop to the game if I'm still crashing this hard after we get started.

I did manage to talk to my Director about talking to our DG about the Sergeant position, and he said he will bring it up at tomorrow's HR meeting, so that's good news, at least. :)

I had a productive day that didn't feel productive, and I ended up leaving the office well after 7pm, which is not ideal. Tomorrow is recycling day and I haven't actually dealt with the recycling yet, which means I have to do it before bed. I SWORE to myself I would do it today, because every time I put it off to the morning of, it never gets done, and now I am breaking that promise to myself because it's already past 9pm and because I went to bed so late last night I feel like I've run out of energy.

I will report back here tomorrow night, and if I haven't put out the recycling, you may ALL tell me "I told you so!"

Today is Peggy's birthday. My baby is two years old! I can't believe she's no longer the roly poly puppy and is instead a lean, long-legged grown up! She got a birthday cookie (shaped like a bone and which had "Birthday Girl" on it written in dog-safe icing), a new squeaky green ball, a new Kong Wubba, and a beef shoulder bone the size of her head. She has been very excited about all of her presents, which is very gratifying. I know my no-longer-a-puppy well, it seems.

In other news, my current NCO i/c (Non Commissioned Office In Charge) stopped by my office today to chat about our HR issues, and he brought up a thing which happened on Thrusday, which was kind of neat. So, background: he, my Director, the other sergeant and I were having an impromptu chat about something that had come up, and we all happened to be at the office in person that day. Anyway, my NCO i/c made a joke but in a way that made both me and my Director think he was serious (in the "no, no, I was pulling your leg!" sense, not in the "Schroedinger's Douchebag sense). Now, I have ALWAYS been the perfect mark for that kind of joke: if you tell me something with a straight face I will fall for it 9 times out of 10 if it's not patently absurd. So I pulled out my favourite "dad joke" that I used for situations like that:

"For a queer girl, I make a great straight man."

Anyway, that got a chuckle out of people, and we moved on. But today he made a point of mentioning it, and that he felt really happy and proud that I felt comfortable enough to say that out loud in a room full of policemen who in theory have a fair bit of say in how my job and career will go in the near future. He actually got a little teary, which was sweet. He's about 10 years older than I am, but we both remember a time when being "out" was a recipe for ruining your life. He also told me really proudly that his daughter's best friend (she's in high school) is a gay boy who's the most popular kind in school (and has TWO boyfriends!).

It was a nice moment, I must say.

In other work news, I am trying to plan out my days and my weeks better. Today both did and didn't work out the way I planned, but so far I'm managing to view everything that goes off-course as a learning experience. Forgive me while I toot my own horn for a moment, but I am pretty impressed with how well I have been managing my emotional and mental state these past four months. I am not sure that I would have been able to do this job as well four years ago: I would have tied myself into knots with anxiety, and second-guessed myself into paralysis. I'm not doing everything perfectly (that's impossible anyway), but I've kept all the important plates spinning, and there's been a minimum of broken crockery for the less important plates. I feel that I'm always making at least a little bit of progress, or learning something new, or making a new connection, and it's been very rewarding.

Tomorrow I will make a new attempt at planning out the rest of the week.


And the most exciting news of the day is that my mother got her first COVID 19 vaccination today! I am so relieved, I can't even begin to tell you. Now we just have to wait for the next appointment. My father is under 80 years old, so he will be in the next "wave" in their province, which I guess will be next month, maybe? Either way, my mother is the more vulnerable of the two, so this is a weight lifted off all of us. I am hoping she won't experience too many side effects, but no matter which way you slice it, this is excellent news.

 I got home about 15 minutes ago, after what I have to declare a very productive day. I didn't get everything I wanted to done, but I didn't procrastinate too much and I caught up on a bunch of things that had kind of dropped off my radar.

I am going to TRY to get to work early tomorrow. For one thing, the GSVCO is ready (YAY!) and I have to pick her up after work, and I don't want to "accidentally" work until nearly 7pm again, especially since I would have to pick up KK so she can come with me and then drive her car home. Plus I have a meeting with my current supervisor to go over our Business Continuity Plan and to discuss Worst Case Scenarios because we are one COVID 19 case away from losing literally half our staff for a minimum of two weeks. And I do mean literally.

Anyway, fun times ahead.

 Tonight is D&D, so it's time to put some food in my face and then go roll some dice! We are officially Level 5 this week, baby!

The week is over, I hope. The car has been delivered to the car vet, and things at work are more or less under control, even if they're not great.

I ended up going to bed late yesterday just out of sheer inertia. I didn't play Stardew Valley, but I just didn't pry myself out of my chair in time to go upstairs and to bed at a reasonable hour. Oops.

I had a nice chat with my therapist today: she let me rant about this clusterbang of a week, and we focused on how I can try to "allow" myself to take proper breaks during the day without constantly being eaten alive by guilt and the feeling that I *should* be productive at all times, or something. She also gave me some ideas for better handling delegating tasks to others. I am getting better at delegating, but I am terrible at keeping track of the things I've delegated, which doesn't help much.

So I have some homework to try out for the next two weeks, to see if it helps, and to see what needs tweaking. 

In the meantime, I am going to finish my dinner and head to bed. No Stardew Valley for me tonight, but I will likely treat myself to a few hours tomorrow.

 Yesterday's gif applies here too. 

It feels a little bit like the universe was listening last week when I was telling people how much I enjoy the challenge of problem-solving at my job and decided to double down and give me ALL of the problems to solve this week.

The week is more than halfway over and I have gotten nothing done of the things I planned and/or needed to do. It's been all putting out fires, all the time, and I am over it at this point. I am toying with the idea of taking Friday off, if I can manage it. On one hand, there aren't enough hours in the day for me to get my job done as it is, so taking time off sounds like a really great way to fall even further behind, but on the other hand I actually have leave in excess of the allowed maximum that I can have by the end of the fiscal year. I feel guilty about taking time off while I'm in an acting position, because I only have a tiny amount of time in which to get all this work done, but all work and no play, etc.

*sigh*

Tomorrow I will need to get groceries, since I won't have the car this weekend. Planning ahead is not one of my strong suits when it comes to my personal life, but this is something small enough that I apparently remembered to do it. ;)

Now I am going to watch more Death In Paradise, maybe play a little bit of Stardew Valley, and turn in for the night. Exciting times, am I right?

 A pox on IT people who design things without consulting the ACTUAL USERS. A plague on all their houses!

ARGH.

The new system installation is going... not well. The fiberoptic cable is faulty, so two workstations can't be installed until Tuesday. We only have two printers instead of three because one is backordered. One printer isn't showing up on the network. The other printer keeps getting uninstalled every time people log off their computers. The distribution lists and Outlook address books are still MIA. The scanners aren't configured because it was assumed we wouldn't need them. That's not even counting all the "security improvements" that are actively making our lives harder because they are incompatible with our other systems, or slow down our process to little more than a crawl.

*beats head on desk*


Combine that with employee drama, and I am glad today is over. People at work are tired and frustrated and overworked and emotions are running high these days, especially with the employees who are all being medically accommodated working days. And since they're working days (thus all together), they tend to clash directly with each other. My father said it sounds like I'm running a circus these days, and he's not entirely wrong.

I am looking forward to my bed. :)

What. A. Day.

The universe heard me worrying about my Big Important Meeting and decided to put things into perspective for me, it seems. ;)

Nothing dire or life-threatening, luckily, but as soon as the meeting was over all hell broke loose in my office. IT issues, employee drama (minor but annoying), and last-minute revelations that the secure network migration this weekend is going to be kind of nightmarish.

Ha ha, universe, very funny.

It's all fine, for the record. Nothing I couldn't handle, and for the most part I really enjoy the problem-solving aspects of all this ridiculousness. But I am TIRED tonight.

Also when I got home I found that Peggy managed to Houdini herself out of her (STILL LOCKED) crate, and had had accidents all over the upstairs carpet (and not downstairs which is all easily cleaned hardwood floor, *sigh*). Otherwise, though, she didn't destroy anything, and while the cats are DEEPLY unimpressed they're also not traumatized and have even come out a few times to test the waters. So I'm letting her have the run of the house this evening as an experiment to see if I can get rid of the baby gate entirely and just let her do her thing. She'll still have to be crated during the day when I'm at work, but it would be nice to not have to keep us both confined to the living room and kitchen the rest of the time.

We shall see.

 I am having kind of a tough week, work-wise. I did get to bed early yesterday, but I'm (not surprisingly) still feeling the effects of all of last week's poor sleep choices, and I think it's brought down my tolerance level for frustration. I have a Skype call with my parents tonight, and after that I am going to dive directly into bed again. The only way out is through, so I am just going to keep reasonable bedtimes, especially while I'm still feeling this drained.

In the meantime, without going into too much detail, I figure I should write down what's been bothering me about work.

1. I didn't get my weekly report for last week done yet. Normally I get them done on Friday afternoon, but we've had something of a "crisis" which has eaten up a lot of my time.
2. Said "crisis" is that we are being migrated from an old email program (Groupwise) to a new email program (Outlook) on one of our secure networks, and the IT people/migration team didn't take my unit into account because we are a tiny handful of people and from the outside we seem insignificant. Unfortunately we work very differently from the majority of the organization AND we are also a vital part of making sure the organization communicates with all other government branches. Cue clusterfuck.
3. My employee's pay woes continue. I mentioned them here before, I think, and while it looked like things were resolved right before Christmas and that she would be seeing back pay at the beginning of January, none of it materialized. In fact, in some instances we appear to have taken several steps backward. My Director and I got hold of the Director of National Compensation Services yesterday, and he has promised to take care of it personally, so I guess we'll see. I am incredibly frustrated on behalf of my employee, and she is understandably nearing the end of her rope. Her credit is suffering, her mother has been buying her groceries, it's a damned mess. The Director of National Compensation Services said we ought to hear back from him before the end of next week, and I intend to hold him to it.
4. My Staff Sergeant went on long-term leave after committing to a fairly big project for another unit, and now I am left with it even though I have no idea what I'm doing and it doesn't come under our purview, per se. I've spent quite a lot of energy trying to chase  down people who can actually help me with this thing.
5. All of the above has made me "fall behind" on other work that needs to get done, because I've been making an effort to leave work closer to on time than before. I'm still not leaving on time, but much closer to actual quitting time, and that's resulting in stuff not getting done. Part of this is poor time management on my part; it's never been my strong suit, and I have trouble evaluating how long some things will take, and I still procrastinate on tasks I'm not sure how to tackle.

In short, bleh. I'm hoping another night or two of good sleep will let me handle the work frustrations better and procrastinate less on the tasks that have felt too big or too complicated. 

We didn't TPK last time but we're about to start another fight that could prove just as deadly. Our poor, tiny, squishy party with no healer. XD  

Working from home sucks, and I am going to avoid it in the future. I am bad at it. I let myself get distracted constantly, and between than and the VPN constantly crashing, I got next to nothing useful done today. I am frustrated at myself, and it's obvious to me that being physically in the office puts me in the correct mindset for work. It might be a different story if I had no choice but to be at home, but I can go to the office in a manner that is safe: I am physically isolated from almost everyone else, and we have strict disinfection protocols in place. Since I am lucky enough to have this, I am going to take advantage of it and not try to reinvent the wheel working at home.

Tomorrow Peggy goes back to her trainer, and I'm both sad because I won't spend as much time with her and pleased because she'll be getting tons of exercise and training and run joyfully through the snowy fields every day. :)

Starting tomorrow I'm going to try to do a reset on the week and actually be productive the next few days. I am not at all pleased with how little I've gotten done since last Friday.