mousme | Entries tagged with night shift

1-State of the Phnee

Okay, I missed a few days, there. I blame the sleep deprivation, because I just forgot about posting for three days and only remembered a few minutes ago. Oops? I’m going to give myself a bit of grace, there, because the last few days of night shifts were rough AF, as the kids are saying these days.

There’s actually not much to report since I last posted, at least. The State of Society worship sharing went well, even though I had some moments of frustration beforehand. The current set of Friends who are “in charge” of things are really bad at communicating with me. It could just be that my very neurodivergent brain is not picking up on all the neurotypical subtext that’s happening, but they act as if I should somehow read their mind and know when they are going to deviate from the standard operating procedure, which I cannot do. My ESP has never been as well developed as other people would like.

The same Friend who has been bitching about hybrid meetings suggested, less than half an hour before the worship sharing, that we should postpone it, because there was a clothing swap happening at the same time which had been “on the calendar for a really long time!” I had to forcefully remind myself that the Peace Testimony is an important part of being a Quaker, and that it would be very un-Quakerly indeed of me to reach through the computer screen and strangle her. Luckily another member of M&C who was there in person gave her a very firm “no,” because we have very tight deadlines for the SoS report. When the Friend pushed back, the M&C member gently but firmly told her, “If you would like to come to the worship sharing late, that is a choice you are welcome to make, but we will be starting on time.” Shockingly, she did not come late.

I tried to attend the Continuing Meeting of M&C in the afternoon, but the Zoom link didn’t work for me, and since it was right in the time that I needed to be preparing for work, I decided after 15 minutes of trying that I didn’t want to spend any more time on it. I had already been up for 26 hours by then and did not have the wherewithal to fight with emails and Zoom and what have you. I will try again next month.

I don’t think I mentioned it before, but KK gave me an Oodie for my birthday, which for those of you who are not immersed in American apparel companies, is basically an oversized hoodie made out of fleece that is extremely cozy. Mine is teal coloured and has lily pads, tadpoles, and frogs in various normal-to-weird poses on it. It is VERY cozy. Knowing that I was exhausted after not sleeping since the previous day’s threshing session on Israel and Palestine and the Apartheid-free communities pledge, I anticipated that I was going to get very cold at work. I am generally a person who runs hot unless I’m very tired or getting sick. So, I decided to bring it to work with me, which was both a genius idea and a terrible idea. It was genius in that I was very, very warm and cozy. It was a terrible idea in that I was so warm and cozy that I kept nodding off at my desk because the shift wasn’t very busy and so I didn’t have anything to work on to keep me awake. My shift partner was very understanding about it, luckily.

We had a mandatory Town Hall meeting on Monday, where our execs blue smoke up our asses and then pissed on us and told us it was raining. Okay, I am exaggerating ever so slightly, but it was 45 minutes of them patting themselves on the back for all their cost saving measures, and oh, by the way, we did sort of kind of lie a little bit when we said we wouldn’t be cutting jobs and your managers will be in touch with you over the next few days to tell you if you’ve been affected. Oh, but WE EMPATHIZE WITH YOU and we want to make sure you know WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER except that, of course, we execs are keeping our jobs, and it just sucks to be you, sorry not sorry. Blech.

Yesterday I got to sleep in a bit, then puttered around the house, then had a therapy appointment, and then I went for a walk with my friend Jan and her dog Lightfoot as well as Peggy and Pixie. It was a very nice walk, but poor Peggy was having a “clacky hip day” (she has hip dysplasia) and was struggling a bit by the end. We let them romp around in a field at the end of the walk, and Lightfoot and Pixie had a blast chasing each other through the snow, but Peggy was tired and sore and didn’t want to run, so she got quite cold standing still, and we called it pretty soon so that she could go inside and warm up. Next time I will bring the Brittanies’ winter coats with me to help keep them warm for longer. They’re usually okay in the winter, but I think we pushed Peggy a little too hard.

Today was a very quiet day too. I did some shoveling, took the recycling away from the curb because they changed the schedule on me over the holidays and so I’ve been putting the wrong recyclables out and my cardboard boxes were blowing all over the countryside. I spent most of the day hanging out quietly with the dogs, took some time to refill the quail’s food and water, and did some dishes. Nothing to write home about.

KK has bought herself a walker with wheels (purple, naturally) and is looking into acquiring a motorized scooter as well, for getting around outside the house. We’re not sure if our insurance will pay for both or only one, so she’s holding off making a claim until she gets the scooter and will go from there. Hopefully that will improve her pain levels while outside the house, because that’s been an increasing problem for her for the past few months. She got x-rays taken a few weeks ago, and the arthritis has progressed to her hips and her back, which is not good news. I’m hoping she and her doctor can discuss better pain management than what she’s been getting so far (which basically boils down to a lot of NSAIDs and Tylenol Arthritis). I don’t know at all what the future holds there.

2-State of the Smallholding

Apart from shoveling and quail, there’s nothing major on the home front. Given KK’s deteriorating health and pain levels, I am seriously considering talking to our local handyman about what it would cost to install a ramp in front of the house. Apart from KK my friend Amy is also a wheelchair user, and my mother’s mobility is getting steadily worse as well, so it would make a certain amount of sense to make the house more accessible. That being said, cost is going to be an issue, because I am not made of money, and while there are theoretically grants available for making your dwelling more accessible, I am above the income threshold where that would be available to me. The threshold is very low, meaning I would basically have to be unemployed or making minimum wage to qualify, which is luckily not the case. It’s one of those situations where I don’t have enough money to afford the thing, but I have too much income on paper to qualify for any kind of assistance in affording the thing. Oh well. So, yes, I will be taking to AJ (the aforementioned local handyman) and asking for an estimate and we will go from there.

3-State of the news

The entire internet is creaming its pants about Mark Carney’s speech at Davos yesterday, and all I can do is roll my eyes at all the people who apparently cannot see beyond the surface level of his words. The speech was a very pretty one, and definitely an understated “fuck you, we’re not playing with you anymore!” to the USA, so naturally Trump has his panties in a twist over it. However, anyone who knows even a little bit about Canada’s history, its current political state, and the current state of the world, would have to side-eye that speech quite a lot. It was a speech that was designed to comfort the comfortable, and all those comfortable people at Davos gave it a standing ovation. There have been a few very well written critiques already, and I may post or link them in future entries for future reference (because the internet is only forever for things you never want to see again).

*sigh*

I’m hoping to get a good night’s sleep and get a bunch of stuff done tomorrow. I would like to get in a workout, do some tidying around the house, and I need to do a bunch of work on the State of Society Report and finish up my D&D character’s history to send to my DM. So much to do, so little time!

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: tired

1-State of the Phnee

I am at work, albeit very reluctantly tonight. The sleep deprivation is starting to take its toll, even though I went to bed reasonably “early” (shortly before 9:00am) and got up at 16:00, which means I got almost seven hours of sleep, which is way better than my average this week. Still, my eyes are sore in a way that tells me I can probably expect a headache later if I’m not careful. I do have Tylenol with me, so I will head it off at the pass if I can.

There’s not much to report on today, as I spent most of it sleeping. I didn’t get in a workout the way I’d hoped, so I will have to try that tomorrow at some point (ugh). I do have the treadmill out at work, and I plan on getting in a couple of miles tonight at least.

I will say that I miss the longer breaks we got at the RCMP during our night shifts. I’d gotten into the habit of taking a nap mid-shift, and that was a game changer in terms of being able to get through those rather grueling 12-hour shifts. We only have two 12-hour shifts at TC, but they come right after five 8-hour shifts, so the full effect is brutal. Sometimes I can get away with putting my head down on my desk for a few minutes with my eyes closed, but it isn’t at all the same as having a dedicated space for a full-on comfy nap.

2-State of the smallholding

I did manage to crowbar myself out of my very cozy bed at a halfway reasonable hour and went to the Martintown Market. The good news is that on Fridays they have an even better selection of fruit, and I was able to snag some celery, which I’ve never seen there on Saturdays thus far. I made myself a very tasty improvised “stir-fry” (I use the term loosely) of root vegetables from the market along with some garlic and soy sauce. I am quite pleased with how it turned out.

Otherwise, I didn’t get much done today on the home front. Night shifts are hard, and I’m really not sure why I keep expecting myself to be ultra productive during my night shift weeks. I guess it’s eternal optimism paired with perfectionism. 😉

3-State of the news

A poll has come out showing the results of the question: “If Canada were ever to face a situation in which the United States used military force against Canadian territory, what do you believe should be Canada’s primary response?” The numbers are surprising.

Nationally, 17% percent said they didn’t know/had no opinion, 24% said we should “avoid military confrontation and make concessions to prevent further harm,” and 59% said Canada should “defend itself militarily, even if the odds of success are uncertain.”

More interesting is how those numbers break down along political lines:

Liberal: 16%, 11%, and 73%

Conservative: 16%, 47%, and 38%

NDP: 14%, 8%, and 78%

Block Québécois: 23%, 31%, and 46%

I’m more surprised by how many people didn’t have a response than anything else, but it is VERY telling that the supposed party of law and order and military expansion are the very ones who want us to roll over and show our bellies to the USA. My belief is that it’s because they actually *want* the USA to take us over and make Poilievre into the governor of the “51st State.” Gross. Luckily the majority of Canadians still seem to have some common sense left. I may be a Quaker and a pacifist, but pacifism doesn’t mean letting fascists stomp all over you.

In further Canadian news, Carney has apparently brokered a successful trade deal with China. As far as I can tell the main deal is the removal of tariffs on electric vehicles from China in exchange for a break on tariffs for Canadian agricultural products. Gotta move that Canola oil, I guess! I think it’s overall a good thing that we’re moving away from dependence on the USA, even though China is potentially an iffy partner human rights-wise. But since our choice appears to be fascism down South or communism out East, we have to pick our battles.

Carney has also accepted to join the “Board of Peace” to rebuild Gaza. I am not holding my breath on that front.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: tired

1-State of the Phnee

Yes, it’s only been a couple of hours since my last post, but since I’m working night shifts I figured I would take advantage of the relative peace and quiet to do a bit of writing. As such, I expect this will be a short post, but it will allow me to feel less rushed when I update tomorrow night so that I don’t feel compelled to backdate my post. I know I don’t have to, but it feels weird and wrong to post on the “wrong” date. There’s probably some rigid thought processes in there that I should unpack at some point in the future.

This is another update from the treadmill at work. There’s a sign-up sheet for all the treadmills so that people don’t double-book during the day or keep the treadmills for longer than their allotted time slot, but so far this year my name is the only one on the sign-up sheet and I haven’t even been using it during the day, since I’ve been exclusively working evenings and night shifts for the past two weeks and change. I know at least one other employee is using them, but he apparently doesn’t seem to feel the need to use the sign-up sheet. I’ve been diligently filling it out because this is a pilot project, and collecting accurate data is important so that they will continue to provide the means for employees to be able to implement healthier habits at work. I want to encourage my work when they do good things! Anyway, I still like the treadmill at work. I can do a gentle 1 mph rate for a couple of hours without any difficulty, and although my personal data isn’t comprehensive enough to draw a good conclusion yet, I am tentatively hypothesizing that I feel a bit more energized after the shifts when I use the treadmill. Obviously more study is needed, but I am cautiously optimistic.

On an unrelated note, I’ve been wondering about recurring dreams lately. My dreams don’t recur in the classical sense, but I have noticed recurring themes over the years. I have a lot of dreams about travelling, about taking public transit (usually buses but sometimes the metro or a train), and about moving house. I also have a kind of recurring dream in which I discover a pet or multiple pets that I’ve somehow forgotten about that’s either died or else managed to reproduce (usually hamsters) and are now overrunning part of my home. I can trace all of these themes going back about 25 years, or ever since I moved out of my parents’ home and started living on my own. Also, I don’t know about you, dear readers, but I have lots of dreams in which I am watching events unfold like a story being told to me, rather than my being the POV character. Interestingly, in the dreams with recurring themes I am almost always the POV character, but not in the “stand-alone” dreams. I have also had a lot of the “classic” anxiety dreams of being in school for final exams and realizing I haven’t attended all semester, teeth falling out, etc., but those ones aren’t as common for me. I don’t know what any of it means, I’ve never been much into dream interpretation, although I do find it interesting in a vague way. I don’t think my dreams have any psychic or supernatural meaning but subscribe to the more common understanding that they’re just a way for the brain to process information it absorbed the previous day. That being said, I’m not sure how typical my experience is compared to others. Brains are weird, y’all.

I’ve been making my way through The Expanse audiobooks. I am really enjoying the series, even though it’s a little bit “crunchier” than what I usually read. I’m finding the worldbuilding reminiscent of C.J. Cherryh, although not the same at all in terms of the contents. It’s more of a vague vibe than anything else. I should do a C.J. Cherryh re-read after this. The Expanse novels have been a bit of a slow go, as the novels are quite long and I’ve been listening to them in audio format. I will confess to listening to them at increased speed, because the narrator is a bit slow for my liking, even if it does make the voices sound a bit odd and distorted. The novels themselves are compelling but often have parts that bog down seemingly interminably before the pace picks up again. I’m on Book 7 out of 9 (Eeeeeey, inadvertent Star Trek reference!), not counting any of the novellas, and this book began with a 20-year time skip, and I’m not sure what to make of it. Time skips can be tricky to navigate, and I’m only just starting the story, so time will tell. The skip probably means that my favourite character has died of old age, but there’s no confirmation of this and it is set in the future, so she might still be alive if people in the future have significantly longer lifespans (I don’t recall it being mentioned one way or the other in previous novels). I guess I shall have to wait and see!

2-State of the smallholding

Obviously, I’m still at work, so I don’t have any actual updates about the property. However, the new coworker who brought me borscht and I had a conversation about urban chickens and other poultry, because he’s thinking about getting some chickens. I warned him that I’m far from an expert but that I was willing to ask more experienced friends any questions for which I don’t have a solid answer. He then very generously offered to help me build the new chicken coop(s) I want to put in place this summer. Now, I don’t know whether he is the kind to follow through on this sort of promise, nor do I even know if we’ll still be in touch come the summer, since I may not be employed here anymore, but it was a very nice thought.

Our conversation reminded me that I’ve been planning to research more chicken coop plans online and find ones that are beginner-friendly while also meeting the chickens’ needs and my needs. And other poultry too, obviously, but my plan is to start with chickens. I’m hoping I’ll be able to snag a bunch of birds at auction over the summer. There are also plenty of Facebook groups that seem like they will provide some good leads on acquiring some lovely heritage breeds.

It's actually quite interesting to see how many of my coworkers have similar interests to mine in terms of growing their own gardens, acquiring a small number of livestock, and generally living a semi-independent lifestyle. It’s been nice to find like-minded people at the office. Several of them are also D&D geeks like me, which is delightful and hilarious when we all get going talking about nerdy things.

3-State of the news

You will be relieved to know that nothing of substance has happened in the past couple of hours, so I will leave this section to be update after I’ve had a chance to sleep and then do other things.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: calm

1-State of the Phnee

A shorter post tonight, I think. Yesterday’s got away from me, but today has mostly consisted of sleeping after my night shift. I was very, very tired after my OT because I hadn’t had the opportunity to take a nap right before work, so I got home, fed and watered the quail, and then (metaphorically) swan-dived into my bed for some mostly restful sleep.

Of course, I had to wake up early to meet with Mary from Ministry & Counsel to discuss the presentation we want to do reporting on the “Conflict in Meetings” workshop we attended last year, so I am not as well rested as I’d like. We had a really nice conversation, though, and have a game plan for the next week for how we’re going to manage the workload between us. Mary is a lovely woman, and I am hoping she and I will be able to get to know each other better in the coming months.

After that I improvised some dinner in the form of leftover goose, rice, and chicken broth for a not-quite soup. It was not as good as if I’d properly cooked it, but it was quick, easy, and tasted fine. If I have more time tomorrow, I may cook it properly in a pot, maybe with some aromatics, and see if that improves it at all.

One of my new coworkers is from Ukraine and he brought me homemade borscht for my late-night meal. I am very excited about this because I loooove borscht and rarely make it myself because KK doesn’t like it. My coworker makes his with pork, whereas my recipe is vegetarian, so I am very curious to see what it’ll taste like. As a thank you I brought him a carton of 18 quail eggs, because he’d mentioned before that he was interested in acquiring some from me. The girls aren’t laying super consistently because it’s winter, but I have more than enough quail eggs for now, so I’m happy to hand them out to folks who appreciate them.

My new treadmill also arrived while I was asleep! I haven’t had the chance to unpack it yet, so I will likely do that when I get home tomorrow and maybe give it a try in the evening after I’ve slept. I learned the hard way many, many years ago that trying to train or do exercise right after my night shifts is a recipe for disaster—I need to sleep before trying anything like that or I hurt myself. The last time, I was working with a trainer, and he was having me do the bench press. He put a weight on that normally I could manage with no trouble, and the next thing I knew, one of my arms buckled and I nearly brained myself with the bench press because the damned thing fell sort of backward. Anyway, the trainer was spotting me, so he grabbed the bar and all was well, but it was a definite learning moment. In short, I will sleep and THEN I will try the new treadmill. Yay!

2-State of the smallholding

I got seven eggs from the quail (in two days, I didn’t check for eggs yesterday, but still!) and Pixie stole one right off the table and ate it because she is a hooligan who can’t be trusted. *sigh* So far, the quail seem to be still doing okay, even though I am now super paranoid ever since the last female died because I just don’t know why it happened. With all the others I could make an educated guess (they got cold and wet, they overheated, they got snagged by a dog, etc.), but this death remains a mystery, so I don’t know what mitigating measures I should be taking. It’s all very frustrating. But yay, eggs!

I need to do some shoveling tomorrow if the weather holds up. I noticed things were warming up again today a little bit, which is perfect for shoveling because it means the snow will be wetter and I won’t have to fight with a layer of ice on the bottom. #CanadianProblems, amirite?

3-State of the news

It kind of feels like more of the same, which is both good and bad. Good, because it means there hasn’t been a new fresh hell to add to the previous fresh hells, but bad because the previous fresh hells are still going strong.

Trump has apparently declared the USMCA to be “irrelevant,” possibly forgetting that he took all the credit for negotiating it the last time he was in power. He’s basically throwing a temper tantrum because Carney is negotiating for trade with China, as far as I can tell

Iran is cracking down on protesters with a swiftness and ferocity that is breathtaking and terrifying. It has classified protesters and dissidents as “foreign agents” that need to be “dealt with.” Drones, CCTV surveillance, signal jammers, and a metric fuckton of propaganda have been their anti-protest tools of choice, according to CNN. They’re using the drones to spy on and record people in their homes, which is especially chilling, and managed a complete internet blackout almost instantaneously with military-grade signal blockers. State television also aired a report from a morgue showing rows of body bags, presumably as an attempt to deter more people from going into the streets to protest. And Trump, of course, is fanning the flames by posting inflammatory things on Truth Social, with no regards for the consequences of his actions.

The Narwhal is suing the RCMP in BC, alleging that they violated the rights of Amber Bracken, a photojournalist, when they arrested her in November 2021 while she was covering the RCMP trying to evict protesters from a camp on Wet’suwet’en territory. Alert readers may not even remember these protests because they were overshadowed by the [censored] Freedom Convoy’s antics in January of 2022, but for a couple of months this was a really big deal. The RCMP had tried to impose an “exclusion zone” that tried to bar people from the camp (including journalists, importantly) so that Coastal GasLink could build their pipeline without being bothered by pesky water protectors and other indigenous people. They arrested Bracken and seized all her equipment (camera, computer, etc.) and held her for three days before releasing her without laying any charges. This is going to be a precedent-setting case about people’s right to protest and the press’ right to cover the protests, so I will be watching the outcome with some interest.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Oops. In my defense, I was sleeping after my night shift. I've been out for over 20 years now, which feels wild to me. How has it been that long?

Coming out these days seems more fraught than ever, which breaks my heart. We went through a honeymoon period for a while there, where it was becoming safer for 2SLGBTQIA+ people to be open about who they are and have the same shot at happiness and safety as cishet people, but that's been increasingly less true for the past ten years or so. I'm hoping (although I'm not super optimistic) that this is just a brief hiccup and that people will start coming back to their senses before the end of the decade. Right now the flavour of the day appears to be transphobia, but as others have pointed out, our trans siblings are the canary in the coal mine: they are being targeted first, but we're all kidding ourselves if we think that the rest of us won't be next.

Once my weight has stabilized a bit after my surgery, I am planning to get myself one of these t-shirts:https://steviesafespaces.com/product/you-will-have-to-go-through-me-tee. It was made famous by David Tennant, and is actually made by a queer creator who lives in my province! I am very excited about this.

I've only been buying the bare minimum of clothing for a few years now, and I don't plan on changing that a lot, but I am likely to need a lot of new clothes by this time next year. I'm going to mostly stick with my work "uniform" of black pants and a solid-coloured polo shirt, but I think I may invest in some fun t-shirts to wear when I'm not at work. I seem to recall that, when I've lost weight in the past, I've gotten cold more easily, so I want to pick up some flannel shirts to wear as a second layer, too, which is something I've always wanted to do. I've resisted it up until now because I've never felt comfortable wearing more than one layer of clothing at a time due to body image issues. Wearing layers has always made me feel bulky and awkward, but I'm cautiously optimistic that I will be able to get over that hang-up so that I can embrace a bit more of a butch look. I won't be able to replace my entire wardrobe in one fell swoop, but I am looking forward to a bit of a reset in that department. Once I'm confident I won't need my larger sized clothing anymore, I will donate the stuff that's still wearable and cut up the rest for rags.

Anyway, enough about clothes. It's not my usual thing, but occasionally I like to think about what I wear. ;)

I am just past the halfway mark of this night shift, and after that I have only one 12-hour shift before my time off work officially starts. I am officially Extremely Tired(TM) and cannot wait for this week of night shifts to be over. I've had stuff to do every single day this week that cut into my sleeping time, and the weekend has unfortunately proved to be no exception. I am really looking forward to sleeping as much as I want to on Monday. It's Thanksgiving Day here in Canada, so all the stores will be closed and no tradesperson in their right mind would schedule anything that day. Whenever I get up I will make a batch or two of soup to freeze in anticipation of my surgery. Tuesday the plan is to make even more soup, and all that should carry me through to the end of October.

For now, I just have to survive until the end of this shift. I will, of course, but it's going to suck.

Current Mood: tired

My schedule is such that the week of night shifts has the unenviable feature of having the bulk of the week's hours scheduled in the last three days of the rotation. Because I work seven nights in a row and the weekend shifts are twelve hours long, it means I work thirty-two hours from Monday to Thursday, and then thirty-two hours from Friday to Sunday, and so that last weekend stretch is pretty brutal. The good news is that, since we are now early Sunday morning, I have made it past the halfway mark, and am now at roughly the 3/4 mark. Five-ish more hours left tonight, and then tomorrow's twelve hours, and then I am done!

Starting Monday morning, I will have two weeks to get my shit together before I go back to work, and sixteen days before KK's surgery is scheduled. That means getting the house fully unpacked and functional, but also getting to the old house in order as well. I need to bring over the rest of the stuff that's still there, get the place cleaned from top to bottom, and find someone to fix the walls in the basement that my cats damaged back in the day, and the wall that KK put a hole in when we were moving.

I also need to book my car to get my wheels aligned *again*, this time at Canadian Tire, at the suggestion of Steve the Wonder Mechanic. Hopefully they can get it done, unlike the dealership who were content to let the misalignment wreck my brand new winter tires and then gaslight me about it. If it does turn out that it can't be done, then I have to consider whether it's worth it to get the car fixed (the dealership quoted me about $6,000, which I think is inflated bullshit), or if I might finally have to bite the bullet and get myself a new or new-to-me car. I cannot emphasize enough how much I DO NOT WANT another car. 1) I love my Yaris. 2) I haven't had to make car payments in 9 years, which has been really good for my finances. Having to devote anywhere from $300 to $600 a month on car payments would take a serious chunk out of an already incredibly tight budget (I honestly don't know where I'd get the money), and I'd really rather not do that the same year I bought a freaking house.

God, being an adult sucks sometimes.

Because I'm on night shifts, I need to resist the temptation to draw up a Grand Plan(TM) for how I'm going to get everything done in the best and most perfect way in the next two weeks. My reach always exceeds my grasp, and then I just give up when things don't go to plan, which I can't actually afford. I need to get stuff done and can't let myself get paralyzed by whatever nonsense my brain decides to come up with in the meantime.

I don't want to curse myself, but so far tonight's shift has been on the calmer end of things. I've been listening to audiobooks again this month, after falling off the wagon for a couple of months. I started with the King's Lake mystery series, continuing with the stories that originally only starred D. C. Smith and which now feature most of the supporting cast from those novels. In the last couple of days I allowed myself to be "influenced" by advertising and started listening to a horror/mystery series called Oracle and narrated by Joshua Jackson, which has been surprisingly a lot more enjoyable than I thought they might be (which is why I'm still listening).

So on that note, I shall go back to my listening and wait for this night shift to finish. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: working

There's a lot of emphasis put on various practices these days that are meant to lend themselves to being a healthy, functioning person in society, and I am bad at all of them. You're supposed to have a number of personal practices: mindfulness, gratitude, journaling, the works, and I have yet to be able to do any of these things regularly or consistently. I don't consider posting to DW/LJ a journaling practice for myself, because I don't write these entries with a goal of better understanding myself or anything.

I think I'm lacking something fundamental that allows other people to do this. I find breathing/mindfulness/meditation horrendously boring a lot of the time, and even when I try to do it regularly, I inevitably forget after a couple of days, even with alarms set on my phone. The thing with setting alarms is, if I set too many of them to remind me of things, they just become more background noise after a while.

I've also never had any of the skills that other people seem to have. I can't keep house, I don't enjoy exercise or indeed a lot of other things that most people seem to find enjoyable. I don't cope with stress in socially acceptable ways. Some people compulsively clean, or go for a run, or channel their stress in positive ways. I just overeat or disappear into some storytelling medium (books, movies, video games, television, whatever). Ignoring reality is a lot easier than doing anything about it.

I don't even like people the same way that other people seem to. Many years ago I came to the conclusion that I'm asexual, but recently (somewhere in the past five years, maybe?) I've decided that I have to be aromantic as well, because I don't think I've ever experienced romantic attraction in the way that other people describe it. Have I been romantically involved with people anyway? For sure. But I feel the same intensity of attachment to my friends as I do to my romantic partners, and I don't particularly differentiate between the two.

Anyway, it's 3am on a night shift, so I'm thinking weird thoughts. Usually 3am on night shifts results either in weird thoughts or else in grandiose plans to change everything about my life for the better, usually in the form of new planners or to-do lists, but I think that since I moved I don't have the brain space to create brand new plan to live a perfectly organized life.

So right now I'm just wondering how the hell "normal" people can have their shit together the way they do. It can't be THAT hard if millions of people do it every day without thinking about it, but also I appear to be incapable of getting my shit together in a meaningful way, so it does appear to be pretty hard. I don't know, I just find it all very perplexing.

I've been fighting a headache since I got to work, and although Tylenol is taking the edge off, I am really looking forward to going home in a few hours. I still have two twelve-hour shifts ahead of me this weekend, and I am tired just thinking about it. The longer commute has been a challenge because I've been so sleep-deprived for so long. I'm hoping that, since I have ten days off work starting Monday morning, I'll be able to "catch up" on some sleep and get myself better rested, just in time to be relegated to the cot in the living room for three weeks, but beggars can't be choosers, I guess.

So, yeah. Apologies for the very disjointed entry. Maybe tomorrow I will have something better and more coherent to say. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: sore

Happy post-Canada Day! I had to go to work in the midst of the craziness that is downtown Ottawa just as the fireworks were ending. Absolute madness, but I was able to get through thanks to a letter from my manager explaining that I'm an essential worker and a (mostly) understanding police officer. Now I just have to get through this night shift without falling asleep at my desk.

The building of the Murphy bed is an ongoing saga. It is a huge undertaking for people who aren't accustomed to doing such things on the regular. My friends Dylan and Sarah came over on Saturday to help me build it, and by the end of the day only the upright cupboard part of the bed was built and anchored to the wall, so I had to sleep on the cot one more night. Sarah came back on Sunday and we got the bed part built enough that I was able to sleep in it that night, but we still weren't done. She came back today, and we were able to add the "doors" that make the Murphy bed look like a wardrobe when it's folded up (they are not functional doors, for the record), and also put together the shelving portion of the built-in desk part of it. We are still not done.

I'm on nights this week, so I got about two hours of sleep before Sarah came over, and then KK let me take a nap in her room later, so I'm chugging along on about four-ish hours of sleep in total. I haven't been much help in building my own bed, mostly because Sarah kept kicking all of us out of the room, preferring to work on her own for most of the time, but also because I've been trying to get a million things done at once, which is working about as well as you'd expect.

I'm cautiously optimistic that once the Murphy bed is completely built I'll start getting more on top of things, because I'll be able to fully unpack my bedroom and hopefully get it set up for maximum efficiency, and from there I'll be able to keep going in the rest of the house. The kitchen and living room are a bit more unpacked now, but we're nowhere near done.

I also need to take several days to go back to the old house to clear out the remaining stuff from there, clean the place from top to bottom, and then hopefully find someone relatively inexpensive to repair the basement walls. Longtime readers will remember that my cats did not react well to the stress of moving many years ago and had peed extensively in the basement, damaging the walls to the point where the bottom of the drywall had to be cut away in many places. I may try repairing it myself, since it's just a question of getting drywall cut to the correct dimensions, screwing it in place, and then screwing some shiplap over it (I think it's called shiplap, it's basically cheap white wooden slats). It doesn't have to be done well, it just needs to be done.

All right, time to get back to work. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: busy

I have one of those twice-weekly reports to write for work tonight, and it's time-consuming and annoying, so I can't spend too long updating this journal just in case work gets busy later and I don't have time to get the report done. I do not want to have to explain that I didn't get my work done because I was blogging. That would look bad. ;)

I probably shouldn't stress too hard about it, because I routinely take, like, five hours or longer at work to update because I keep getting interrupted anyway. So I'm sure I'll get it all done. This report in particular stresses me out because there are no explicit instructions for how to prepare it, but it's somehow still extremely important to get it done exactly right. *headdesk* Also, I only write one once every four months or because it's specifically a night shift duty and my shift partner and I take turns to do it, so I am woefully lacking in practice. Nothing stresses me out more at work than being asked to do something I'm not familiar with AND for which I have no reliable blueprint. It is objectively the worst.

Tonight is my last night shift, and then I am off until my day shifts next weekend. So far no coworkers have agreed to a shift trade, although I am waiting for that one coworker to get back to me tomorrow (he won't be in until 3pm, though, so I won't find out until late in the day if he's accepted the trade). If he says no, which he likely will, because going from an evening shift directly to a 12 hour day shift with no break is goddamned brutal, I will simply have to suck it up and go to work next weekend.

That give me five days this week and four days next week to get everything packed. Normally I would spend the Monday after my night shifts sleeping, but obviously I can't waste all those precious packing hours on something as silly as sleep, so I'm going to take a brief nap when I get home and then get up and start packing. I have asked KK to help me with packing tomorrow because it's a statutory holiday, but I'm not sure how much help she will actually be. Tomorrow being a stat holiday means that I won't be able to go to U-Haul to buy more boxes, because I'm 99% sure they'll be closed for everyday purchases (albeit likely not for van rentals and that sort of thing), and rightly so. Employees deserve their statutory holidays, and should have the day off like everyone else.

So, yeah. I should probably make some aspirational packing goals for this week, so I'll know how hard I failed by the time the weekend rolls around. ;)

Okay. Report writing time! Wish me luck. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: stressed

I have spent all of this shift halfway convinced that it's my third night shift instead of my second. I think it's the fact that I've already been working for nine days straight that makes it feel like it's later in the week than it actually is. I still have five more nights to go, including the 12-hour weekend shifts. I am not really looking forward to any of it, but it is what it is.

I managed to get about six hours of sleep and probably would have slept longer had I not had to get up early for my therapy appointment. I have made the grievous error of agreeing to multiple meetings and appointments this week. I keep trying to not schedule stuff during my evening and night shifts, and I keep failing abysmally. It's just never a good idea, but sometimes there just isn't another choice. Alas.

So later today I have a meeting with tow members of Ministry & Counsel about a small worship group one of them wants to start centered around chronic illness, and on Friday I am going to my new credit union to sign my life away in order to qualify for a reduced interest rate on my new mortgage. Okay, I exaggerate slightly for effect, but essentially I have to switch over to a checking account with the credit union and have my pay direct deposited there in order to qualify.

I've sent out feelers to my coworkers to see if anyone will trade my weekend day shifts in 10 days with me. Getting the weekend off to be able to focus on packing would be a godsend, but I'm not going to hold my breath. People are pretty accommodating at my workplace, but we're getting into summer vacation time and people are a busier with kids and commitments and stuff. Fingers crossed, anyway.

Okay. Time to wrap this up. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: awake

Unsurprisingly, my mother has come down with the same symptoms as my father. She's taking her meds and being a good patient and resting a lot and drinking a lot of fluids, and so far seems to be doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances. I spoke to both my parents yesterday evening, and they're both being pretty good about things. My father is always more motivated when my mother's well-being is very obviously on the line. I wish he were able to project that into being more careful the rest of the time, but that's probably too much to hope for. Neither one of them is particularly good at risk assessment or management, alas.

I've been harbouring a headache and a slightly sore throat since yesterday, and I cannot for the life of me tell if it's Covid or if it's just the stress of the week catching up to me combined with the truly terrible air quality at work or the cumulative effect of using the CPAP without the humidifier (because it was way too warm). Am I paranoid? Maybe. But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face. KK is going to be picking up fresh Covid tests tomorrow if we can find some, since ours are expired and therefore unreliable. It's been increasingly difficult to find Covid tests in Ottawa in the past couple of years--no one seems to carry them anymore. Shopper's Drug Mart apparently sells individual tests for $7.00 each, which is an absolute rip-off, but I expect nothing less from the Galen Weston Jr. empire. The main reason I don't know if it's Covid is because these symptoms do not at all match my parents' symptoms, which are mainly extreme fatigue and some gastrointestinal stuff. So headache and slightly sore throat? Who knows?

Work is going by very slowly, partly because of the aforementioned headache. I'm glad it's not busier, though, because I've already made a pretty regrettable mistake this evening which my shift partner caught, luckily enough, and it's been a pain in the ass to fix. I hate making mistakes at work, even though objectively I know that they are unavoidable. It triggers my impostor syndrome like nobody's business. Oops, make that two mistakes. My coworker is saving my bacon tonight. The second mistake was when I was trying to fix the first mistake, and I didn't realize that there was a new SOP for fixing the mistake and I followed an old SOP for fixing the mistake. *lies on the floor*

I am really looking forward to my bed, which I will be in in about four hours if everything goes really well. I got relatively little sleep today, because we got home from KK's endoscopy shortly before noon, and then I had to wake up in order to be on time for my phone call with Brian, my birth father. He actually sent me a text message saying he'd caught a cold and could we postpone to tomorrow? To which I thought "Sweet, I can go back to sleep!" so I agreed, but I then had to field a call from work asking me to come in early and then changing their minds because the supervisor in question hadn't done the math properly and my coming in early wouldn't actually help anything. After that I had to field a call from my mortgage specialist because the auditor apparently decided that the mountain of paperwork I provided was not, in fact, enough to meet all of my financing conditions for the house. *headdesk* So I have had to send even more paperwork to prove I am not an evil money launderer trying to get a mortgage to launder the rest of my ill-gotten gains through a rural property in Southwestern Ontario.

So, yes. Very much looking forward to my bed now.

Okay. I am going to go heat the last of my lunch and wait for the shift to be over. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: sore

The quail hadn't laid any eggs yesterday when I checked on them, but clearly they got busy afterward because I got five eggs when I checked this evening before going to work! This is exciting news because it means the third lady quail is probably getting in on the action as well now. I think tomorrow night it will be omelette time. Om nom nom.

The night shifts are going by kind of slowly, and I have a headache tonight that the paranoid part of me is trying to convince me is the beginning of Covid. I forgot to call my parents yesterday evening and I feel kind of shitty about that. It was 10pm when I remembered, and I didn't want to risk waking them if they were asleep. They are notorious for going to bed much later than me normally, but this week it wouldn't surprise me if they were trying to get to sleep much earlier than usual. I hope they're doing okay. I'll probably call them when I get out of work tomorrow morning, maybe around 8:30 or so.

I won't be getting much sleep tomorrow anyway. KK has asked me to drive her to the hospital because she has an endoscopy at 9:00 that she has to be sedated for, so she is not allowed to drive herself back from the appointment. So that means I won't be getting to sleep until at 11:00 at the earliest and more likely noon. Normally that would be fine, and I'd just sleep until 8:00pm, but I also committed to a phone call at 4:00pm that I don't want to miss or reschedule.

I think I mentioned that I'd started looking for my birth parents last year, right? Anyway, my birth mother wasn't super keen on staying in touch after a few emails, which I understand, even if I'm a little disappointed that I won't get to know her any better. At least I got some answers to the questions I had, and that's good enough for me. I actually found a 2nd cousin through ancestry.ca, Cousin Karen, and she is VERY invested in helping me find all of my birth relatives. She and I are Facebook friends now and chat pretty regularly. She seems super nice. So, once I learned the identity of my birth father and, more importantly, his parents, she was finally able to pinpoint how we were related (we share a grandmother on my paternal side). The social worker on my file wasn't able to locate my birth father, but Cousin Karen is apparently far more resourceful. She recruited Cousin Suzie and they found him on Facebook under an alias (the way many people don't use their full name on Facebook, it's nothing nefarious). So I relayed this information to my social worker, she got in touch with him, and he is open to communicating with me.

I will confess to creeping on his Facebook beforehand, to get a sense of who he is these days. My birth mother had explained to me that he was very emotionally abusive with her, and basically abandoned her to be homeless during her pregnancy. He adamantly didn't want children, and she says he gave her an ultimatum: him or the baby. Since she didn't have a job or a place to live, I was a medically very fragile baby, and she wasn't ready to divorce him (they were married), so she gave me up for adoption. So, you know, he sounds like he was a world-class asshole.

His online presence has led me to believe he may have changed for the better over the years. Very shortly after he and my birth mother split up he met another woman (name unknown to me) and they remained together until her death last year, by the looks of it. He also became a registered social worker after, I assume, giving up on his dreams of going to acting school. He doesn't post much that's very personal, but then again, neither do I on social media, but his politics appear to be very left-leaning.

The social worker gave me his cell phone number, and he and I texted briefly today and agreed to talk tomorrow afternoon. Well, technically this afternoon now, since it's well past midnight. I'm very interested to hear his version of events, to see what kind of accountability he's willing to take, what work he's done on himself, and to learn if he's ever attempted to make amends, or what. He may have done a lot or nothing at all, but I'm interested to know.

Anyway, yeah, it has been a week, and we're not even done yet!

I'm going to go heat my "lunch" and wait for this shift to finally end in a few hours. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: sore

It's the first night shift of the week, so I haven't yet descended into the usual madness of trying to revamp my entire life and making plans to become a whole new person by next Monday morning. Night shifts do that to me every time without fail, but usually the urge to create new calendars and to-do lists and coloured charts doesn't strike until a few nights in. We'll see how long I last this time. I might go a little longer this time because I have the professional organizer coming starting next Tuesday, so that might already serve to scratch the itch since re-organizing my whole kitchen does kind of have a similar feeling to re-organizing my whole life.

I really hope that we can get the kitchen into a properly functional state. Trying to cook in there is making my soul shrivel these days. All of my cupboards are topsy-turvy, I have almost no floor space, no counter space, and I can't stand directly in front of the stove because of the storage rack thing I put in because I couldn't figure out how to use the space well enough to store all of my kitchen equipment. So, yeah, we have four days of four hours each to get the kitchen whipped into shape. I would love to be able to just open my cupboards and grab what I need without things constantly falling over or on top of my head. Part of it is an organization problem, but mostly it's a clutter problem, and that is why I am paying the professional organizer the big bucks. Although to be fair, for almost an entire week of work she won't exactly be making a killing after taxes. I think her hourly wage comes to more than mine, but I don't know that I'd be chomping at the bit to do her job.

I've got two hours or so until I can go home. Today is the only day before Friday when I'll be able to get a decent amount of sleep. Tomorrow I have an appointment (virtual, thank goodness) with the dietitian from the bariatric clinic at 8:30am, and then I got roped into a separate meeting with two members of Ministry & Counsel at 14:30, which means I'm going to get about two hours of sleep at best between those two meetings. I might be able to get away with going back to bed after that, but I'm not super optimistic. Then on Thursday I have a follow-up appointment with the naturopath (also virtual, thank goodness), so that means I won't get much sleep then either. I hate scheduling things during my night shifts, but in all these cases I had very little say about the timing. Blargh.

And, of course, somewhere in all that I have to get over my weird psychological block and get my seeds started for the garden this year. I'm reluctant to sacrifice my sleep today, but maybe if I leave KK to fend for herself for dinner I can sleep late and then start the seeds between the time I wake up and the time I need to leave.

In unrelated news, I've been watching Chicago Med in my spare time, partly because I do like medical dramas (I was an early adopter when ER came on the air in the 90s and have never looked back), and it's not exactly good, but I can't seem to stop watching it because it's like a train wreck. There isn't a single character in this show with an ounce of moral fibre, and they all seem to spend their time making terrible, selfish, impulsive decisions based on their whims, often at the expense of their patients. All of these people are walking disasters who need multiple years of therapy and have no idea how to communicate. Chicago Med differs from most medical dramas that I've watched by having a pretty strong emphasis on emergency psychiatry, and one of the main characters is Dr. Daniel Charles, head of the psych department.

Now, I honestly don't know many heads of psychiatry who routinely hang out in the emergency room (Dr. Charles lurks around corners and observes patients), but apparently for the purposes of the show he does just that. That, and conduct wildly unethical "experiments" on patients and colleagues alike (giving out placebos to patients to "test" whether their problems are medical, lying to coworkers about the status of patients, egregiously violating his daughter's explicitly set boundaries, etc..). He's a weirdly likable character, mostly because Oliver Platt is a gem and plays him as an affable, cardigan-wearing father type with a penchant for collecting autistic-coded young women to be his protégées. I do understand that the show has to come up with drama because real life medicine doesn't make for good television, but if this were real life none of these people would still have their medical licenses.

Anyway, I think that's enough talking about television. It's just this weird little micro-obsession with a TV show. Definitely not enough to want to join the fandom or anything, but enough that I want to keep watching, apparently, in spite of the fact that the show is ridiculous in the extreme.

Okay. Time to wrap this up. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: thoughtful

I clearly have developed some sort of psychological block about the seed starting. I've heard it referred to in some ADHD circles as The Wall of Awful, in which you develop such an aversion to a task that you build a metaphorical wall around it that prevents you from accomplishing said task. In theory there should be nothing preventing me from doing this, except that there are several pre-tasks that I keep convincing myself I need to do first, so basically I am letting perfection be the enemy of "good enough."

Of course, I'm running out of time to start my seeds, so I need to find a ladder and get over myself if I want to have a vegetable garden this year. I've decided to plant my tomatoes, peppers, and probably lettuce in my back yard if I can get some raised beds in in a reasonably timely fashion. I have plans to wrap the raised beds in a barrier of some kind (I'm sure there's a name for it, I just can't think of it offhand) to keep both my doggie hooligans and the enterprising neighbourhood bunnies out of my vegetables. Tomatoes tend to ripen all at once in a big old cascade, and since I'm not as diligent about visiting the community garden as I could be, I don't want to risk them rotting on the vine. I also want to plant a lot of Roma tomato plants so that I can make enough marinara sauce to last us through the year. Last time I made the sauce I had a half-bushel of tomatoes I'd gotten from the store and that made enough to last about six months, so I'm thinking four to six plants just for that. The lettuce also makes more sense to plant close to home, because it bolts easily and I'd want to harvest a few leaves at a time as it grows anyway.

Of course, most of these plans will come to naught if I can't get my act together and actually start my seeds. I can direct-sow lettuce, of course, but tomatoes and peppers and most other plants will need to be started ahead of time if I want them to actually produce before the cold sets in and stops their growth.

Tonight is the first of a long week of night shifts, and I am not super looking forward to it. My energy levels are already pretty trash even without adding in more sleep deprivation, which comes with the territory of night shifts. Nothing to be done about it, of course, except just power through. I've also had to accept several daytime appointments this week, so I expect I am going to be very cranky about things

Okay, it's nearly time to get ready for work. If things are quiet (and I know I've jinxed myself by using the 'Q' word) I will probably write a longer update later. I do have other tasks I want to work on during my shift as well, so we shall see.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: cranky

I forgot to report on the house KK and I went to see on Wednesday, mostly because it turned out to be totally not right for us.

( Read more... )

Anyway, as is my wont during night shifts, my brain is making a ton of plans. Or, more precisely, it's writing out a whole bunch of cheques that my body will not be able to cash later on, when it's time to actually execute those plans.

I learned this about myself many years ago, that when I'm a little sleep-deprived and the world is quiet and dark, I absolutely lose my mind and start planning all the ways in which I'm 100% going to turn my life around and become a completely different person--a better, more organized person, one who isn't constantly tired and has no energy, the kind of person who will voluntarily get up at 5am on a Saturday to go outside and get some exercise and then come home and spend several hours cleaning the house and cooking meals for the week and maybe do a little socializing with friends! I will become an unrecognizable, motivated version of myself who has all her shit together! This time will be different, because I have a Brand New System, I swear!

In practice, of course, this magical transformation never happens, because reality sets in pretty quickly once my night shifts are over. The sleep deprivation makes itself felt, and my usual brain fog/lack of energy takes over again. Tasks which I thought would take 15 minutes take three hours, and suddenly all my plans feel like A Lot of Work and I execute maybe 1% of them, if I'm lucky. I spend all of my down time doing the bare necessities to continue existing, and my projects never materialize.

So I have learned that it's fine to allow my brain to have wild fantasies about my future productivity, as long as the rest of me understands that this is all night shift-induced delirium and that I shouldn't actually expect to get most of it done. It's what my mother would call "Building castles in Spain." That way I can enjoy the fantasy and not feel like an abysmal failure when that fantasy doesn't become reality.

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!

Current Mood: tired
Crossposts: https://mousme.livejournal.com/1232427.html

Today's highlight was the dentist. Again. I know, I know, but you must try to contain your excitement, okay? I spent the better part of two hours with my jaw forced open at a rather uncomfortable angle while the dentist did her thing. It was not the most enjoyable experience, but I came out of it unscathed.

Mind you, she froze me but good. When I got out of there half of my face couldn't move. I looked like Jean Chrétien when I tried to smile, or maybe as though I'd had a stroke. Terrible. Eating and drinking is a heck of a challenge, too. I managed not to dribble anything down my front, but it was a close thing indeed.

Work, after a quiet holiday season, has picked up in earnest. My colleague and shift partner has been diagnosed with a tumour in his kidney, and is going under the knife on February 7th. He's off work from now until April, leaving me alone to do the job. His prognosis is good, for which we're all grateful, but I'm a little stressed at having to shoulder most of the work when I've only been in this job for four months. My boss is backing me up when he can, but he has his own job to do and can only do so much to help me.

So it's a little stressful, though not, of course, anywhere near as stressful as having, say, kidney cancer. :P

In less exciting news, I forgot my Kindle at home. I miss my books already, even though I generally don't get to read much these days. Just knowing it was there in case I found the time to do a bit of reading. I don't know, I just like having it nearby. I'll get it back Monday, though, so all is not lost. I can also read on my computer, or an actual book made of paper, too. Shocking, the variety of things I'm exposed to on a regular basis. ;)

Tomorrow is another day shift, then I switch to nights for the weekend. The roller coaster of thrills never stops.

They took away my internet at work.

WOE!

More specifically, they took away the stand-alone internet that I used to access LJ. My boss told me that I was specifically not to use LJ from my work station, because apparently it constitutes some kind of minimal security risk.

Fine. It's their show, and they pay me to work, so while I am sad, I will acquiesce without too much complaint. I'm just mildly peeved that other people are still apparently allowed to go onto their comics sites and car sites and sports sites, and that it's only LJ that's the supposed breach. All theoretical, for that matter.

Meh.

Anyway, that means that, for the most part, I won't be on LJ much when I'm working my night shifts. I usually come home, go to bed, and get up in time to eat and go to work again.

I missed some important news as a result, which suck. Congrats

toughlovemuse and

chibipunkdemon! I am not surprised, but I am thrilled! Of course, now I have more knitting to do...

In other news, Supernatural is still eating my brain, but I'm spreading the joy. I got two other coworkers hooked on the show. Hah! I am now at six conversions and counting. Bwah!

Gotta run. Be good, everyone!

Current Mood: rushed

Two more days of night shift, then I'm on days for the next little while. Woo!

My colleagues all signed a birthday card for me, which was sweet, only they got my age wrong, which I thought was hilarious. It was full of "Congrats on turning 30!" notes, and "Welcome to the new decade!" etc. Which, of course, I already did last year.

I giggled madly until they forced me to explain myself, and then they were all sheepish.

None of them believe that I'm much over 25 anyway. I have a baby face. I got carded in places until I was well into my mid to late twenties.

Still, I appreciated the card. It was a nice gesture.

Current Mood: content

It's my birthday!

24 HOURS OF ALL ABOUT ME!

Too bad I'm working night shift, eh?

Still, I have my computer, and a cool night shift partner who's willing to turn down the lights (fluorescent lights = ick!bad!bright!), and things are pretty quiet on the Eastern Front.

So.

Current Mood: happy

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Corner of Bourbon & Division

Her Words of Wisdom Scratched Into The Door

Entries tagged with night shift

January 21st, 2026

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I missed National Coming Out Day

Past the halfway mark

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First Night Shift Thoughts

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