It has now been two years since my eye problems were largely solved and over three since they began. I’ve mentioned it once or twice, but the original problem was mostly in the early stages of maintenance once my blog was up and running, even though it kept coming back a few weeks or couple of months after I finished treatment, despite my best efforts. For the last two years though, I’ve been taking a daily pill and putting in a sorta daily eye drop as the specialist I saw was completely unable to actually diagnose what had happened but did prescribe me the eyecare he determined I would need to care for the symptoms with the note that things would probably clear up on their own eventually, so long as I didn’t ignore the symptoms. Given that ignoring the symptoms could result in blindness (partial or full), I have been pretty motivated to keep up my routine over the years. After all, daily-ish eyedrops and an actually daily pill are a small price to pay to keep myself from going blind in one or more eyes, even if I still absolutely hate putting anything in my eyes despite the over three years of exposure I’ve had to the process. I’d rather confront that fear and discomfort every day than lose my vision.
Continue readingMusing
Warm Feelings And Even Warmer Weather
I’m doing better this week. I’m still depressed, exhausted, and burned out, but I’m feeling a bit better about it right now than I have in a while. Work is still busy as hell and I’m still struggling to get enough sleep most nights, but it all feels so much more manageable, even during a week when I did a bit too much over the weekend and didn’t end it feeling much more rested than the week prior. As I’ve gone through a very busy and exhausting day at work that has nevertheless felt much less emotionally taxing than previous similar days, I’ve been thinking about why that might be. Not that much has changed, after all. I’m still not getting as much sunlight as I’d like and maybe less than ever since the warm, almost-summery weather we’ve been having means I can’t take my midday walks at all and the time that the UV level has finally dropped enough that I can safely take my walks has progressed passed 5pm. Sure, I’ve had my tabletop games more regularly than usual, but that can also be exhausting. I haven’t had the time to figure out a solution for my desire to continue blogging without supporting a company that would sell my work to a plagiarism machine. I haven’t even gotten to the point of being able to fall asleep at a better time most nights since the rise in ambient temperature has made it more difficult for my apartment to feel comfortable and cool at night (and I refuse to turn the AC on when temperatures are dropping into the 50s overnight. It just feels too wasteful). So, if nothing has changed, why do I feel better about all of it?
Continue readingLasting Lessons And The Impermanence Of Memory
One of the things my parents taught me when I was young was that anything you saw was in your mind forever. This phrase was always part of a moral lesson since the idea behind it, at least as they (and their incredibly conversative religious beliefs) intended it, was that sin and temptation was best avoided entirely because once it had gotten into you, you couldn’t entirely get it out. The only way to stay entirely free of those things was to avoid them entirely. It was a core aspect of why I wasn’t allowed to watch a lot of TV shows on public broadcast television (even one glimpse of a swimsuit or bra, or even two people making out was enough to get it banned in our household the entire time I lived there), why I was only allowed to play video games that didn’t include Suggestive Themes (even though they were apparently just fine and dandy with violence of any kind), and of my complete failure of even an abstinence-only sex education (the perks of being home schooled is that your parents get to fail three times at teaching you about the birds and the bees, call it a complete education, tell you to Just Say No to touching women who aren’t related to you, and then never speak about it again). It even came up a bunch when I finally escaped the isolation of my home schooling and started asking questions about things I didn’t understand in high school. Better to avoid something entirely than to encounter it at all, since that’s how the devil slowly worked sin and evil into your once-pure mind (all of which is a pretty big contradiction of the orthodoxy behind the sacrament of confession in Catholicism).
Continue readingSpring Is Here To Stay And Other Weather Musings
After a bunch of temperatures bouncing between the sixties and freezing, the forecast has finally shifted into some proper spring weather. Some looming storms, days rising into the sixties and then falling into the forties overnight, an occasional day or two in the seventies, and some nice windy days. I’m looking forward to the weather continuing to improve, even if I can’t go on my walks at noon anymore because I get sunburn far too easily thanks to one of the medications I’m on (and will hopefully be off in another month or so). It’s nice to not have to run my heat or AC, to be able to leave my windows open all day long, and to be able to go to work in shorts and a t-shirt. And sometimes a zip-up hoodie. But mostly the shorts and t-shirt. Throw in how nice it is to leave work at half past seven in the evening while still having enough sunlight that I don’t need to turn on my headlights during my drive home and I’m honestly pretty happy with the weather. Which, you know, won’t cure my depression or anything, but it’s still nice to have and definitely won’t hurt it. Its a nice little thing to have at the end of what have become incredibly long and exhausting days at work. Turns out that things haven’t really slowed down since a couple weeks ago and while I’m less emotionally and mentally stressed because the sheer volume of Things To Do is lower than it was back then, the physical stress of the labor required to test the project I’m mostly working on has picked up the slack. I wish I got to do this work while getting fresh air and not wearing a mask to protect myself from what one of my coworkers insists is “just some Spring sniffles,” but I’ve found other ways to extract some fun from the work I’m doing.
Continue readingWell-Intentioned Peer Pressure In The Workplace
This has been an incredibly busy week at work for me. Tomorrow will bring some relief, since I’ve got to leave shortly after noon for an appointment and will be finishing the day by working from home, but the arrival of some of my foreign coworkers for their yearly trip into the main office has upended my usual schedule for my week. Not only do I have extra work to do now that they’re around–taking advantage of being in the same office to get some early feedback on the next version of the software and some early drafts of future features–I was able to figure out a way to get one of my big projects into a state where I could test it and that’s a high enough priority that I’m basically supposed to drop everything to test it the instant the project is testable. Plus, a testing report I wrote weeks and weeks ago wasn’t getting reviewed so my boss announced it was due at the end of this week to light a fire under the asses of the people who were supposed to be reviewing it, so now I have to also get that done this week, including incorporating feedback from my coworkers as soon as possible so that if I need more answers from them, I can actually get them in a timely fashion. Sure, my boss’ declaration worked and I’ve gotten more eyes on my report since he pulled this stunt than I’ve gotten on all of the previous versions of the report combined, but it’s a lot of extra pressure when I’m already swamped. What turns this from something I’d endure into something I’m writing about on my blog is how the team reacted to my decision to stay and keep working when the rest of the team went out to dinner.
Continue readingBasking In The Solar Eclipse
Yesterday was the date of the 2024 Solar Eclipse (the day I wrote this, anyway: it was a week and a day ago as you’re reading this) and I had the opportunity to go outside for half an hour to watch it happen. Despite my love for celestial events and cool space pictures, I was a bit unprepared for it, since I didn’t have the energy to figure out what glasses were safe to use and then acquire a pair but, since I saw it while at work, there were plenty of people around who were more prepared than I and who were willing to share their glasses, specialty scopes, scrabbled together lenses, and goggles. As much fun as the eclipse was (and I LOVE a Celestial Event), it might have been more fun seeing what all the other nerds in the R&D department I work in came up with to view the eclipse using only the stuff they had around their labs. The very nature of our mutual employer meant that we all had high quality stuff to work with and that a lot of people contributing to these handmade objects actually had the knowledge necessary to make them correctly. Despite a rather high number of cobbled-together viewing devices, not a single person reported being ocularly injured. No one at work here was googling “why do my eyes hurt” like so many other people in the US have been since the eclipse. The ingenuity of all these people–coupled with their willingness to share their knowledge, their crafts, and their company–made an already excellent event even better than I could have expected.
Continue readingSpring Weather In Winter And Winter Weather In Spring
I spent my most recent Friday (two Fridays ago from when this gets posted) spring-cleaning my apartment. Which feels a little funny to write today, given the blizzard conditions I drove in last night and the multiple inches of slowly-melting slush that still coat the ground today. A lot of which is only just thawing out from last night’s freeze. We’re solidly in April now and still getting wintery weather, despite much of our actual winter being much closer to what I’d expect of spring around this point in the year. It’s not unheard of for us to get a few late snows (as late as May, sometimes) as spring temperatures fluctuate, but we rarely get snow after we’ve had a day that has broke past seventy degrees Fahrenheit. Yesterday, two days of rain turned into about thirty-six hours of snow and while it only just barely froze while it was falling yesterday, that little bit of ice and tons of slush turned my evening commute from its comfortable fifteen minutes into an hour-long affair. It was horrendous and coming home to a still-clean apartment was only mildly comforting. After all, I had to turn my heat up again and figure out what I was going to do the next day if the roads proved too treacherous to risk (as it turns out, the roads were fine, but getting to them was nearly impossible because my landlord never plowed my parking lot and being in an underground parking garage means contending with a slippery, uphill drive that proved impossible on mornings like today’s). Which wasn’t a huge issue, but it’s still incredibly off-putting to have spent a solid ten hours with my windows open as I cleaned my apartment more thoroughly than I have since before I moved into it and then, just over three days later, see snow blowing in my still-open bedroom window.
Continue readingDon’t Be A Jerk On April Fools’ Day
April Fools’ Day, the day belong to the multiple fools of April, has always been a strange creature in my life. In my youth, it was a day of complex emotions for me. On one hand, my maternal grandfather–the one I was close to and cared about who passed five years ago–was a great lover of practical jokes and provided me with no small amount of delight by introducing all the little practical joke toys one could buy from a magic trick shop (that my grandfather frequented for much his adult life since his love of practical jokes and magic tricks was lifelong and much to the chagrin of my grandmother and their children) to my family. Whoopee cushions, little hand buzzers, flowers that squirt water, pop rocks, and so on. It was always a lot of fun when we’ve visit him around the end of March, usual for some Easter celebration, and he’d pull all these little pranks on his grandkids, none of which ever hurt and were always a delight because we got to keep water tools he used (which always came with instructions on how we could prank our parents at home).
Continue readingLooking Back At The Distant Peaks Of 2023
A year ago today, as I’m writing this, I was frantically double-checking my packing lists, my driving plans, and my flight details. I’d just had one of the most stressful months of my life, as I realized my original flight plans had been messed up, had to scramble to cancel my flights and book a new one in its place, and had to figure out how to change my plans to incorporate a thousand-mile drive into both ends of my first trip overseas. After all, I couldn’t afford to to get a convenient flight from anywhere to where I was going. I could, though, afford to take an extra few days off, drive across the country (there and back again), and sleep in my car (at rest stops, of course) during the long overnight drive. I had already budgeted for work on my car’s breaks, after all, so it was clear that the more affordable option was to spend time rather than money. I have more time than money, most days, so it was a pretty easy calculation to make. I also had to spend hundreds of dollars on new clothes since nothing even remotely nice looking fit me anymore, which made March of 2023 the most expensive month of my life. Even with some hefty student loan payments (ramped up as part of accelerating my repayment plans) and my much increased rent hitting my bank account every month this year, I don’t think I’ve topped out that monumental month of costs. I was stressed, barely getting enough sleep, and had lost some pretty significant chunks of my support network the month before, so I was barely scraping by. Still, I got everything done, didn’t have to spend money I didn’t have, and made it safely to the east coast even on the tiny amount of sleep I’d gotten the week prior. I made it, despite everything.
Continue readingDaylight Saving Time Is Bullshit And Other Monday Thoughts
Daylight Saving Time is back in the US and continues to be some absolute bullshit. My entire rhythm is fucked up. You’d think that, with how messed up my sleep schedule already is, that I’d be a bit less troubled by other disruptions. You’d think wrong. I’m just as susceptible to the disruption of having the sun’s position relative to only my external clocks suddenly change. So, despite getting a decent amount of sleep over the weekend, I’m still starting this week with less than I’d like thanks to having my sleep cut short by an hour on Sunday and then struggling to fall asleep later that same day. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to do some course correction as I go through this week, but I’ve got a lot of potential events on my calendar for this week (mostly in the evenings [and none of which wound up happening]), so there’s no knowing how long its going to take for me to sort this out [the answer was still “all week” though]. After all, a lot of my struggles around getting to bed on time are a result of trying to make some time to enjoy myself or play some video games in the evening and I might be even shorter on that time than usual. Plus, thanks to all those events, I have to make sure I’m getting out of bed on time so I can actually get my usual ten-hour days in before I have to leave work for my evening events, which means my usual release valve of “sleep in a bit” isn’t available until Friday at the earliest and even then I’ll want to avoid being too late to work on Friday since I don’t think I’ll be able to bank any extra time this week to balance out any days that have to end early.
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