Corner of Bourbon & Division

We're very short-staffed at work, so rather than working my "normal" 9-5 these past couple of weeks I've been back on shift, with few breaks because I don't have a normal schedule. I have to say, I did NOT miss working shifts, and going back to twelve hours at a stretch combined with night shifts has been super rough on my body. I am absolutely knackered.

We're all running on fumes at the office these days. We have three people on long-term sick leave on top of the vacant positions, and right now we're functioning at about a 35% level of staffing (8 people working out of a possible maximum of 24). It's not great, and we're all working a lot of overtime to compensate for it all.

I got used to working eight hours a day and sleeping at night over the past year and change, and transitioning back is proving a lot harder than I thought. I just don't appear to be as resilient as I once was. I had plans to immediately start on some self-improvement goals last week (in order to not fool myself into waiting for the New Year), but I've barely been able to manage sleeping, getting to work, and keeping the dogs more or less corralled. I'm going to have to figure out a way to conjure energy and motivation out of thin air if I want to accomplish anything, is the conclusion I'm coming to--either that or give up on my goals right off the bat, and I'm not quite willing to do that just yet. I want to end 2022 in better shape (metaphorically and literally) than I started, and that means figuring out a way to make it all work. Just how I will do that remains to be seen.

I have to go back to bed now, and I will drag myself out of bed tomorrow so I can get the garbage and recycling out before pick-up time, and then bring the dogs to daycare. I have grocery shopping to do, as well as plans for cooking before I go for another overtime shift at work tomorrow night, and somewhere in there I'd like to have a nap before work so I'm not completely fried.

Good night, friends. Catch you soon!

I have become a Busy Person, and I don't like it. I also don't really see a way around it for the moment. I am trying to keep a lot of plates spinning, and the net result is a lot of broken crockery and the occasional moment of juggling brilliance. Feel free to skip most of this, I'm just trying to get things down for my own records.

Here's what I've got going on, commitment-wise. (This is just for my own benefit, so that I can see it all written down.)

• Work, which is ~60 hours a week these days.
• University, starting up again after September 4th, 2 classes 1 day per week (plus readings and coursework(
• Dog training (once a week, but the new trainer I am looking at is quite far away, so we shall see about the frequency, I may try to arrange for every two weeks)
• Being the Clerk of Children's Meeting for Quaker Monthly Meeting
• Being the (temporary) clerk of Peace and Social Concerns for Quaker Monthly Meeting
• Streaming (this is on hiatus until I figure my shit out, but I really want to get back to it)

Other than my outside commitments, I still have to get my personal shit together. I am something of a human dumpster fire on the personal front these days. In no particular order, these are the personal projects I wanted to work on this year (and in general).

• De-clutter the house. The Great Marie Kondo Experiment of 2019 came to a grinding halt after I got the puppy (especially at the beginning she was NOT conducive to getting anything done beyond Pay Attention To The Puppy and basic chores), and then once that calmed down there always seemed to be a reason/excuse to not keep going. Still, my house is full of crap I don't need or even particularly want anymore.
• Related to above, get the house back into good enough condition to have people over again. I think I've already posted about the Basement of Neverending Cat Pee, and all summer I've been trying to get hold of a specialized cleaning company to come give me an estimate to rip out the basement carpet, get rid of the smell, etc. That finally happened this morning, and they are scheduled to come in on September 11th. With that in mind, I want to get rid of as many things that are taking up space in the basement as humanly possible. I have a stack of things packed into the boiler room (several stacks, if we're being accurate), and I am confident I can get rid of at least 1/3 of it all, possibly 2/3 if I am stern with myself. The cleaning people need unfettered access to the whole floor, and I don't want to just haul things upstairs and have them clutter up the house.
• Organize my clothes/laundry. I Marie Kondo'd my clothes, but still haven't got them all organized into a nice, usable system, mostly because I got distracted. So, that's on the list.
• Improve my mindfulness practice. By which I mean, remember to practice mindfulness more than once every two weeks. *rolls eyes* Ideally I'd like to do one mindfulness meditation every day, even if it's only for a few minutes.
• Walk every day. This one has been a little hit and miss, more hit than miss, but taking the dog for walks has been less effective for me than I'd like. Peggy doesn't really walk politely on leash yet, although we are working on it, which means we don't actually go very fast. Every time she pulls, we stop, so she learns that pulling won't get her places. Combine that with the natural stops she makes (to pee, sniff, and generally do dog things), and it essentially means we're going at a snail's pace. Normally I can easily walk about 5 km in roughly an hour, but now I'm lucky if I get 1 or 1.5 km in an hour with her. Is it better than no walking? Absolutely. But it's not quite where I want to be. Hopefully I will start to see more concrete results soon with the training. Ideally I'd like Peggy to become my running buddy.
• Be more present at Quaker Meeting (both physically and spiritually), especially when it comes to the Children's Meeting.
• Start living more in line with my values, which means a few things:
  • Being thriftier with my money. I have been terrible about budgeting, pretty much as a direct result of a) not managing my time properly, and b) not correctly anticipating several large expenses since May. I am trying to put money aside to buy my own place, and have the financial wriggle room to be able to afford the move, the closing costs, and not be house poor once I'm in the new house.
  • Drastically reducing the amount of waste I produce. I've been trying to limit plastics, and eliminate single-use plastics wherever I can, but I haven't been consistent about it at all.
  • Actually have people over. I enjoy entertaining, and I haven't done that much at all because of the Basement of Neverending Cat Pee. I really hope that after the work gets done, I will be able to invite people for tea or a meal without cringing in embarrassment at inflicting one of the grossest smells in the world on them.
  • Cook everything from scratch, and start making preserves/canning food again. That practice fell very much by the wayside, and I need to figure out how to carve time out of my schedule to get that done.
  • Practice self-care. I suuuuuck at that. What I'm focusing on as much as possible is sleep. There isn't enough in the world, and so I've been trying to incrementally increase the amount of sleep I've been getting. I will never, as long as I am at my current job, get an average of 8 hours a night. It's just not going to happen. 12 hour shifts guarantees I can't get all my stuff done AND get to bed in time for 8 hours, so either stuff doesn't get done or I don't sleep, and it's not like you can tell a puppy that she'll just have to wait another 8 hours to go pee and have food. That is just cruel. However, I've been aiming for 6.5-7 hours a "night" ("night" meaning "the time when I sleep," regardless of the actual time of day), and I've almost sort of got it, on average. I have lots of nights of 4-5 hours when I'm working, but when I'm not working it's more like 8-9, so it's been averaging out to about 6-6.5. Not great, as I always do much better on 9 hours of sleep, but that's a pipe dream.
  • Finding some kind of volunteer work to give back to the community. I am living a deeply selfish life, tbh, and it bothers me. I used to love working at the soup kitchen a few years ago, but had to stop because that and work was exhausting me. So I have to find a different way to give back that doesn't involve a fair bit of physical labour for 8-9 hours, especially after my night shifts. I don't have any ideas on that front yet, and am open to ideas, if people have them.

That's about it, for me. Peggy continues to be a delight, and is growing so fast she's unrecognizable from when I first brought her home.

In other news, the outside world is a shitshow. The Amazon rainforest has been ablaze for three or more weeks, and fuck-all is being done about it. Refugees and migrants are being detained in literal concentration camps in the USA. Citizens are being illegally detained without recourse primarily on the basis of their race "just in case" they're undocumented. Canadian politics are taking a hard turn to the right, and a lot of the rhetoric is scarily similar to what we're hearing from south of our borders. Racism, xenophobia, unfettered capitalism, deregulation, and catering to the one percent.

You kind of have to go out of your way to find news that isn't horrifyingly depressing. Speaking of which, there is now a cure for Ebola! Isn't that cool? That is some really nice news in the sea of shit in which we've been swimming for the past three years. I'm trying to channel Mr. Rogers and not only look for the helpers, but also to BE a helper, and it's that latter bit that so far has been my main challenge.

So, onward!

I've reached the point in my night shifts where I hate pretty much everything and everyone. It usually happens after midnight on my second night shift, but this time around it actually only struck on the third night a couple of hours ago. Now I only have an hour and a half or so before I can go home, so it's not so bad.
 
I've been procrastinating on my term paper, which is due... I was going to say tomorrow, but I guess technically it's today. It's 1/3 done, but I still have the other two parts to write. The first part was the group work component, but I did about 90% of that anyway, so it feels as though I worked on it alone most of the time. It reminded me of why I hate group work. :P I need to sleep when I get home, but the plan is to get up early-ish and finish writing it after that. It's not due until midnight, and I only need to write 4-6 pages, which is eminently doable. I am trying to be better about the procrastination, and I *was* doing a little better, right up until this final paper was due.

I will have to work harder on that next semester, because the further I get into this new degree, the more complex and difficult my coursework is going to get, and I won't be able to get away with last-minute work like this anymore. Not to mention that I work 60-hour weeks, so with school on top of that (plus I'm still streaming on Twitch as a hobby, which takes up another 12-15 hours a week), time is a scarce commodity these days.

I don't have a huge amount to report right now, mostly because I am so tired my eyes are crossing. I am compiling a list of, well, I guess New Year's Resolutions is not a misnomer in this case, although I like to think of them more as goals, because resolutions tend to go by the wayside starting in February. In this case, I'm trying to make my goals as specific as possible, so that I'll have as good a chance as any to make them happen. So I will probably write up an entry with those goals later on, sometime this week, but not until my paper is finished.

Honestly, I will probably have to talk with my therapist about all of this, because she is pretty good at helping me come up with strategies for not crashing and burning. Okay, time to start doing end-of-shift things. I've posted twice in the past three days, so I am moderately optimistic about my odds of keeping on with the posting. Onward!

I promise not all my entries will be about procrastination and the iProcrastinate podcast. However, today is not the day I won't be talking about that. Double negatives for the win!

I've been thinking about time, and procrastination, and what I'm doing with my life. Time is the one resource all humans have that is truly finite. It was Bob Dylan who sang that "he not busy being born is busy dying," and that rings very true. It's why laziness and sloth seem to be universally considered a grave sin—it's the waste of our most precious commodity.

So the question I've been asking myself is what I want to do with the time I have. I never seem to have enough, and yet I procrastinate on a lot of things, most of them work-related, but some of them life things that I need to deal with (usually government stuff, or things like organising my paperwork—always tasks that I usually find aversive).

The guilt we feel when we procrastinate, according to Pychyl, stems from the fact that we are not being authentic to ourselves. We know we ought to be doing whatever it is we planned, but instead we're doing something else to avoid the task we currently find aversive. In order to mitigate the dissonance we're experiencing, we lie to ourselves about why we're procrastinating.

In my case, 90% of my procrastination stems from anxiety, usually because I'm convinced I won't do it properly. This ranges from my translation work all the way to filling out official forms. Yes, I know it's not rational. With forms I'm always convinced that after I send them in I'll end up with irritated government officials landing (metaphorically) on my doorstep to tell me I've done it all wrong and now they're going to take away all my things as punishment. I'll lose the house, or the car, or my job, or whatever. IDK, I did say it wasn't rational, right?

It's what my father always called la pensée magique. If I don't do it at all, then I can't do it wrong. What could possibly go wrong with that plan? ;)

So the order of the day is to make use of all the time I have. This is not a prescriptive thing, per se. There will be no melodramatic declarations of never spending time in front of the TV again when I could be outside climbing mountains or white water rafting, or whatever. I just want to make sure that I spend my time doing the stuff I actually planned to be doing. If I'm watching television, I want it to be because I want to watch television at that moment, and not because I'm putting off filing my taxes or avoiding my writing because it's stressful. If I'm surfing the internet, it's because that's what I want and planned to do, and not because I don't want to be shovelling the balcony.

In short, I want to try to use the few hours I have to myself every month to do things that I find useful and/or fulfilling. I don't want to be one of those people who finishes life with a boatload of regrets concerning things I never got around to doing.

( Unrelated planning stuff under the cut )

Stay tuned for more posts later. I want to do one on weight and body image and health and What It All Means to me. Right now, though, I have writing to do. I have a little under an hour and a half before it's nap time.

I'm not sure it's worth updating if I feel as though I have nothing to say, but then that's the kind of thinking that made me stop posting to LiveJournal completely, so maybe I will blather on witlessly for a while.

Tomorrow I shall make a quick Christmas recap post. For some reason, on the computer at work, the LiveJournal interface is absolute crap no matter which browser I use. I get weird overlapping white windows that prevent me from seeing drop-down menus (like for selecting a mood or a userpic) and the tag selection box, and whenever I try to add in pictures it doesn't show me the code at all. So I'm at once perplexed and annoyed and have no idea how to fix it. At least on my own computer these things don't happen. So tomorrow there will be a more picture-ful entry with details about Christmas.

Overall we had a great day yesterday. I was up first at 7:00 in order to take a shower, and pdaughter got up at the same time. Bean was up 15 minutes later, so she was able to capture his reaction to the Christmas tree and all the presents on film. The morning was spent very pleasantly opening presents, and pdaughter's father showed up around 9:30 or 10:00 to make the gathering complete. Unfortunately I had to leave for work by 1pm, but the morning made it well worth it. I'm just sad I wasn't able to stay longer to watch Bean play with his new toys.

Work, thankfully enough, has been pretty quiet. I've been finishing up the Soopar Seekrit Prodgikt, which, as some of you know, was the 4th Doctor's scarf, which I was making for pdaughter for Christmas. I'm busily weaving in ends, and once that's done I need to attach the tassels. This has to be by far the longest project I've ever worked on, including the Baby Blanket of Doom of 2009. Thus far, because I am a slow knitter, I think I've put about 70 hours of work into this thing.

( Boring planning stuff behind the cut )