Corner of Bourbon & Division

The "Q" Word

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 18:05:12 GMT

No, not THAT 'Q' word. ;)

It's a long-standing superstition/tradition working in emergency response (or any kind of call centre), that you should never, ever, comment on "how quiet" it is during a shift, because that's just inviting in the forces of chaos. If you're a dispatcher, it means there's going to be a multi-car pileup or a huge fire or some other cataclysm that will tie up your phone lines and keep you so busy you won't know which way is up right until the very end of your shift. If you're extra unlucky, you'll be stuck handling That One Call and have to stay past the end of your shift, and no overtime is worth that.

So, naturally, we've been having a very, err, uneventful week at work, and one of my colleagues just announced he was bored and then loudly started talking about how quiet it was. Seconds later, the phones started ringing. I can't swear that the superstition is true (the lines have died down again), but it certainly feels true.

I don't mind either way as a rule when it comes to work. A busy shift will go by quickly, and a quiet shift will let me get other stuff done, like reading a book or working on my knitting or what have you. Of course, this week I haven't brought my knitting for a few reasons. One, day shifts are usually very busy, and I am not a good enough knitter that my projects can survive the constant interruptions without suffering from potentially catastrophic error. Two, this week I am taking public transit home from work, and in the winter that is a dangerous proposition for knitting (and I am not a person who can safety knit on the bus, because again, catastrophic error). I had a third reason and now don't remember what it was, but I'm sure it was a very valid reason. ;)

( Why are you taking public transit, Phnee? )

Anyway, all this to say that work as been pretty dead today. I've been slightly obsessively checking my email inbox for a confirmation that my red wiggler worms will be ready today, and it's not looking good, I must say. The email I got did say they would be ready between today and Friday, so I may have a little while to wait yet. It's not that big of a deal--I can still go to Canadian Tire after work and pick up the Rubbermaid bins and the bedding I will need there. In theory one can use newspaper for bedding, but it can't be a colour newspaper, and these days I don't trust the papers that are available in my city not to contain some weird toxic substance in their ink, so I'm getting newsprint paper that's made specifically for packing and has no ink on it whatsoever. It typically is made from recycled paper, so I am hopeful that I won't be fucking over the environment too hard with it. Then I can put together my new worm-friendly environment and have it all ready and waiting for the worms whenever I get them.

In other mundane news, I have to put gas in the car later today. It's at about 1/2 a tank, and given the pretty cold temperatures we're having this week I prefer to keep it at 3/4 or more. Not having much gas in the tank causes a lot of wear and tear on the fuel pump, and also in the winter if you get stranded somewhere or even just stuck in longer than average traffic, you don't want to run out of gas and/or your potential only source of heat in the cold. For those of you who've been following me a long time, you may be amused to know that I still have my blue Yaris, aka the General Service Vehicle: Congenital Optimist, or GSVCO for short. I bought her in May of 2010 and she's still going strong, thanks to Steve the Wonder Mechanic. He gave her a makeover last fall, because she had developed a hell of a rust problem on her driver's side rear wheel well, and also needed her struts replaced. It was an expensive repair (body work is always a bit of a bitch), but he has breathed new life into her, and she's been purring along nicely ever since then. She's nearly 15 years old, has nearly 250k kilometres on her, and has been paid off for nearly a decade. My goal is to keep her as long as physically possible, because she does excellent mileage and I don't want to contribute another car to the landfill and use up even more resources for a newer car, even if it's hybrid or electric. In fact, KK's last car was a hybrid and has turned into the World's Most Expensive Lawn Ornament, because it would cost more to fix than the car is worth, but she still has to pay off the rest of the car loan anyway. Nightmare fuel. I'm sticking with my reliable little workhorse that doesn't have too many fancy computer bits in her until the bitter end.

Anyway, that's today so far. I have to think of something to make for dinner tonight. I've been slacking off on the meal planning of late, which is never a good idea. I will have to start that up again when I get home, and just plan for the next few days and next week while I'm at it. I always do better when I have a plan.

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Everything All At Once

Thu, 05 Mar 2020 06:53:49 GMT

It's been a busy time.

Work has been slammed by the simultaneous coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, and the protests and blockades taking place all across Canada against the installation of an oil pipeline on unceded Wet'suwet'en territory by Coastal GasLink. The latter has been incredibly frustrating for me, because, well, you can imagine that the RCMP members aren't exactly pro-Indigenous in their thinking. There is a lot of racist talk subtly camouflaged beneath a veneer of political correctness (the bad kind of political correctness), and it's exhausting. Luckily it's mostly not the people in my immediate office, so at least I don't have to argue with people all day longl

The COVID-19 business is so weird. I remember the SARS crisis from 2003 (also related to a coronavirus), and given what we know--that COVID-19 is a lot more contagious but less deadly--people seem to be divided between panic and indifference, when neither is a good reaction, really. The fact that the President of the US is spreading misinformation as fast as you can say "press release" isn't helping, either. Right now half the people are stocking up on whatever they think are "essentials," assuming all of society is going to shut down (it's not), and the other half are complaining that everyone is taking this way too seriously, that this is less serious than the 'flu (it is not), and that it's all an exaggeration.

The biggest problem is, basically, that there is too much information out of there, and a lot of it is inaccurate: either it's incomplete or downright misleading. So it's no wonder people don't know how to react appropriately. Contrary to when SARS hit, it feels like there's no solid plan in place to manage the spread of this virus, which is a lot more contagious than SARS and the 'flu. It also has been disproportionately affecting the elderly and immuno-compromised, and average people are taking that to mean that it's not a big deal. So you get a cough and stay home for two weeks, so what? Well, those few days you spent while you were asymptomatic, you probably spread it to dozens of people, and some of them will have elderly and/or ill family members. Anyway, I am super annoyed at the "Well, it's not really going to affect me, so why should I care?" attitude.

There's also the problem of unfettered capitalism. Basically all retail and food service employers have exploitative practices when it comes to their employees: very little or no paid sick leave, and the promise of losing your job if you miss even one day of work. So all those people are going to go to work sick: they're going to prepare and serve food, stock shelves, use the cash register. It's going to be even worse in the US, where people who are uninsured or underinsured will simply not be able to afford to go seek medical care.

Bleh. I am not impressed with society these days, not going to lie.

Next time I will post something cheerier, I promise. :)

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Bad family news and general minor mental health issues

Tue, 06 Aug 2019 05:31:05 GMT

( Trigger warning for cancer and death )

Moving on to stuff that's not about cancer and death...

I've been watching a lot of TV recently. Probably more than is reasonably good for me, but that's actually par for the course. The difference is that, rather than watching it during the down times on my night shifts, I've been doing it more at home. At work I've actually been working a bit more. But in the meantime, at home, rather than do anything productive, I've been watching Veronica Mars (among others) and playing an unhealthy amount of Stardew Valley.

Shockingly, I've been having a lot of trouble managing my time. It feels like I'm juggling too many balls at once (funny story, I can't physically juggle even two balls, I've tried), and so, true to form, I did what I always do when I feel overwhelmed and just kind of, well, avoided everything except the bare minimum of what I needed to do to get by.

The good thing is that I have a puppy, and she needs me to get out of the house every day. I haven't always taken her for long walks, but I have taken her out each day, and I try to work with her on her training each day, so that's probably been the best thing for my mental health. That, and the fact that she is the cutest, sweetest, most loving dog in the universe. It's all very helpful. :)

Otherwise, though, things aren't awesome. I think the trigger for this latest massive avoidance is the extra $1,500 I'm getting charged for university. There's nothing like financial stress to knock me for a loop and make me metaphorically crawl under my own bed and refuse to deal with the world. Is it productive? Nope. Is it my default behaviour? Yep. So, something to work on, I guess.

I'm heading to fearsclave 's this weekend for some romping around in the wilderness with Peggy, and introducing her to the joys of fishing. Or, more specifically, to the joys of fish. fearsclave has a long-standing tradition of letting his dogs lick the fish before they get taken back and cleaned (thoroughly!) for later consumption. Hopefully we will have an excellent day of fishing, which means actually catching fish. Not catching fish is still a good day of fishing, but I would really like to see Peggy's reaction to a fish. My guess is that she will go bonkers.

I've got a short list of things I want to get done before I leave on Friday. I'm working on keeping things realistic, because I have a tendency to over-plan and have a poor sense of how much I can actually accomplish in a given amount of time. Apparently that's a common thing with ADHD, the inability to properly gauge the length of time unfamiliar tasks will take. That, and forgetting that you need to plan time *around* the task. Also, I get overambitious about plans when I'm on nights at work. I have hours stretching in front of me, and it always seems like future!me is going to have tons of energy and motivation to do all these things, and in practice future!me is way more interested in catching up on sleep. So I hope I've worked it out correctly this time.

Okay, time to get back to work. These night shift duties aren't going to do themselves.

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Where was I?

Tue, 30 Jul 2019 17:47:06 GMT

My kingdom for better organizational skills.

Peggy is growing like a weed with teeth. She is still ridiculously adorable. We experimented with puppy daycare, and unsurprisingly she LOVED it, but alas came home with a case of Bordetella (kennel cough). Luckily she's vaccinated for it, which has made it a very mild case, even though it didn't protect her entirely. She's had it for just over a week, but she seems 90% better today, so I am hopeful she will be all better in another day or so. She's been bored out of her skull staying home and resting, and a bored puppy is a puppy that gets into mischief, moreso than she usually does.

( Peggy picspam below the cut )
The rest of my life has been a lot less adorable (although Peggy more than makes up for it). Work is a shitshow. We are incredibly short-staffed, and we are hemorrhaging people, because our management is terrible. I and at least four other people are looking for work elsewhere (some more actively than others). I can't really actively look for work in mediation until I take four courses in Third Party Neutral mediation. I wanted to take them this summer and ran out of money, and NOW the damned Canadian Institute for Conflict Resolution is stubbornly offering every course EXCEPT the first one, so I can't even start. Argh. I will also need to have a certain number of mediations under my belt, but I plan on volunteering at the Ottawa community mediation centre and hope that will count.

( Complaining about work under the cut )

Anyway, enough complaining about work. Apart from that, things are going just fine. It's just that work is a huge part of my life, and therefore occupies a lot of my thoughts. I try to leave work at work, but that hasn't been happening in the past few weeks, which is in and of itself a red flag.

The next thing I have to do is figure out how the hell to pay my tuition, because it's $1,500 more than what I budgeted for due to the fact that SURPRISE! full-time students get charged for a bunch of things I don't need, like a transit pass and insurance. I have a car, and I have insurance through work. I am going to see if I can get those knocked off my bill, because holy Hannah that is a lot of money.

I will be back with more Peggy updates soon, I hope! In the meantime, she is back in her crate with her lunch, because she was getting very barky with the cat and, bless her, she is incredibly shrill. So she gets to have a time out with some toys and her kibble and some treats, not that she views it that way. This way, though, we all get a break: her, the cats, and most importantly, me.

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Another day, another dollar

Tue, 02 Jul 2019 02:54:34 GMT

Happy Canada Day, everyone!

I am working overtime tonight. It's the National Capital, there will be fireworks, and so we're on alert in case someone decides to do something Symbolic and Memorable. It's unlikely in the extreme, but apparently we are exercising an overabundance of caution on this most festive day.

I'm working with a fun shift tonight: my old supervisor and two others. We ordered hamburgers from Five Guys, and one girl brought in 0% beer, which was a cute idea, if not especially tasty. Mind you, I'm just not a fan of Heineken, so maybe people who like that beer would have enjoyed it more. We've decided to do some admin training (both the other employees are aspiring supervisors), and otherwise probably not much is going to happen. I'm pretty grateful for that because, to be honest, I am quite tired today. it's my sixth shift in a row, and my fourth night shift, and I am getting too old for this shit. Still, I could use the money, so here I am.

Currently we're fomenting revolution against our current management. SEIZE THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION! Or, in our case, we are going to our union and weaponizing policy in our favour. Management have, uh, not exactly endeared themselves to us over the past eight or nine months, and people are getting really sick of their bullshit. I for one need to explore what unionization really entails for me, because I only have a general notion of it. If I'm going to be in a union, then I damned well better know what they can do for me, as long as I'm working here, anyway.

I talked to my therapist about the fact that I can't seem to pry myself out of bed with a crowbar on my days off in order to get stuff done. Even these days when I have to get up early so the puppy can pee, I often putter aimlessly about the house for several hours before I can really get myself to pull my act together and be productive. I was kind of hoping she'd have a magical formula or a cool life hack to make me spring out of bed like a young lamb, full of vim and vigour and ready to face the day! Unfortunately, it turns out that the cold reality is that you can't life hack your way out of chronic sleep deprivation. *sigh* I haven't been getting nearly enough sleep for... well, overall for years now, but moreso these past few weeks. Part of this is having a small puppy who needs to be taken out once per night and then early(ish) in the morning, but mostly it's my ridiculous job schedule, which means I go to bed at drastically different times during the week, and seriously messes up my sleep schedule. My Fitbit tells me I'm averaging about five hours a night, and I am a person who tends to do better on nine hours of sleep (rather than eight), so, yeah, I am living life as if I'm constantly jet-lagged.

With that in mind, one of the goals I have for the short term (and also the long term) is to try and protect my sleep better. It's extremely hard with 12 hour shifts, because on those days it's next to impossible to get even eight hours of sleep. If I choose to wake up at 4 am on a day shift to be able to get to work on time, that means I have to be in bed by 8 pm at the very latest. It's not often I manage this, and I usually count it a "good" night when I get to bed between 9 and 9:30 pm. I finish work at 6 pm (again, on day shifts), so I'm not home before 6:30, and that leaves me an hour and a half to have dinner, take care of the dog, and get anything else I need done before going to bed. So, you know, it's tricky at best. Still, that doesn't mean I shouldn't at least *try* to get enough sleep when I can. I find it more difficult in the summer, frankly. It's hot and very bright during the day, which means sleeping enough before my night shifts is next to impossible (I've had 2.5 hours of sleep each "night" for the past two days, for instance). I am going to have to find some workarounds besides my cute little sleep mask that comes off the moment I turn over in bed.

Starting next week I am going to come back from the hiatus I took from streaming for a few months. Between work, school, computer problems and puppy, something had to give, and I figured it should be streaming. It's the most expendable of my activities. I have been working with an artist and have a fun visual revamp of my channel planned, as well as several improvements to the overall production values of the stream. I'm looking forward to getting back into the swing of things with that.

On that note, it is time for me to get back to work. I shall (I hope) check in again soon!

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Whoops!

Thu, 04 May 2017 22:53:24 GMT

I ended up not coming back to my post, and now it's Thursday.

I will not, alas, be staying up for Critical Role tonight, because it's 18:30 and I can barely keep my eyes open. Better to go to bed early and watch tomorrow, when I'm fresh. Otherwise I'll just end up nodding off during the show and missing all the important stuff anyway. I'm pretty excited, because Vox Machina are all at Level 17 and above now, which means their story is ramping up toward the End Game of Level 20, and I can't wait to see what Matt has in store for them!

I've been lured into a new video game called Stardew Valley by fearsclave , who is responsible for so many of my bad habits that I have truly lost count. It's a fun little game, although I'm finding certain aspects a little frustrating. I spent a couple of days obsessing about it, and then I had to work, which generally put the kibosh on most of my extra-curricular activities anyway. I may go back to it tonight, or maybe tomorrow morning, depending on how soon I decide to be boring and go to bed.

Otherwise, life proceeds as usual. I have done no unpacking since the weekend, when my parents visited, and I should probably get on that. Living out of half-opened boxes ain't all it's cracked up to be, but I'm also a terrible procrastinator, and apparently I'm willing to put up with a lot of inconvenience to avoid unpacking properly.

I promised myself I'd be doing more in May, and yet this week I have been a mix of mysteriously extra tired and also pretty busy, video games aside. I'm still not settled into anything remotely like a routine here, inasmuch as I am able to have routines in my life at all these days. There's a lot of upheaval at work again: more people leaving, a couple of new people coming in, but more going than coming, and so now I'm probably going to have to go back to training newbies, which I really don't enjoy. Bleh.

I also am kind of dipping my toe into paying closer attention to hockey. Yeah, I don't understand it either, but there you go. My home team are out of the playoffs ("No, Habs, no!") but my not-quite-home team, the Senators, are still in it for now, so I'm rooting for them. Many, if not most of my online friends are Penguins fans, and although I can't quite bring myself to root for an American team, Sidney Crosby is at least Canadian and is, I must say, pretty magical on the ice. So it's fun to watch my Pens friends get all excited about their boys.

Okay. My brain has officially turned to mush tonight. Time to give it a rest. :)

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