Today, while I was stuck inside working and writing blog posts during all of my breaks, the snow melted. It hit the mid-50s and would have been an excellent day for a walk if a few inches of snow hadn’t melted and turned the entire world into a swampy morass of goop, mud, and salty grit. You see, until just a couple weeks ago (two, as of this being posted), we hadn’t gotten much snow. There’d been several incredibly light dustings and maybe an inch or two total of accumulation over a couple snow events, but none of it stuck around long and it was never enough to really blanket the environment. Two weeks ago, we had a couple snowstorm events over a few days and accumulated a proper amount of snow, enough for it to ACTUALLY feel like a proper Wisconsin Winter. Now, today, it’s all melting and will likely completely vanish over the next few days as the temperatures rise above freezing and stay there. Sure, it’ll drop down eventually and we’ll get that Wisconsin Classic, the good old Wintery Mix of snow, rain, and sleet that turns the world to slush, but this is probably going to be it for actual snow accumulation barring some strange late-March temperature drops. A week and a half of snow. Maybe three or four weeks of decently cold temperatures, most of it without much snow. And then a bunch of days in the fifties, tons in the fourties, and who know how many High Temperature Records. What a terrible excuse for a winter.
Continue readingMusing
It Was Bound To Happen Eventually
It finally happened. Between burnout and the depression I’ve been dealing with (which may or may not be related to the burnout), my buffer ran out and I could not drive myself to write anything even knowing I had nothing scheduled to post the next morning. I couldn’t even make myself get out of bed quickly enough in the morning to write anything before posting time. I’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel for months now and have only been actually caught up on my preferred “5 posts ready to go” amount of pre-written material once or twice since sometime latter last year, so it really isn’t that surprising that it happened. Between everything going on in the world, my lifelong growing burnout, the pressure and stress of work (ten days until the project I’ve been working on is announced and I can finally talk to people about it), my always not-quite-good mental health, and my growing feelings of isolation, I just am not operating at the level I’d like to be. I mean, I’m not longer taking that medication that made me miserable, but I’m taking others that require some pretty specific timing to manage and have enough mild side-effects that I’m once again no longer comfortable most days (though these side-effects should fade in time). It’s a mess, I feel like my life is a mess, and I feel like I am a mess. It’s rough being me these days and it really shouldn’t be, so I feel kinda bad about it.
Continue readingIdle Thoughts About Working From Home
I’ve had a few days where I’ve worked from home lately. One and a half due to weather and one due to a stomach bug that left me mostly fine but unwilling to share bathrooms/run the risk of not being able to find a toilet in time. These are the first days I’ve worked from home in a while and the first ones where I was actually able to work on my highest-priority work while working from home in a year and a half or thereabouts. You see, the project I’ve been working on for that time has necessitated me being in the office. I can’t exactly bring it home with me and, even if I did bring some stuff home, it wouldn’t be terribly useful for all the work I had to do. So, on days that I felt less than stellar, needed some time to myself, needed a mental health break from being around people, or just felt crummy, I still went into the office. That’s the job, you know? Gotta go to where the work is and do the work, at least as long as you’re not sick or contagious or putting yourself (or someone else) in harm’s way by doing so. And I was not, so I went into the office and suffered through a lot of days where I’d have much rather been working from the comfort of my home. Now that I’ve got a bit of a reprieve from that sort of work, though, I’m absolutely working from home every chance I can get.
Continue readingBuying In Bulk In These Uncertain Times
Eggs are expensive. They’re hardly a good barometer for the economy as a whole, especially now when they’re expensive largely due to scarcity resulting from bird flu running rampant, but it’s difficult not to look at a seven dollar carton of eggs and think about all the little ways that grocery buying has gotten kinda fucked up over the last couple years. These days, unless I’m not buying much or really skimping, it is rare that I make it out of the store without spending about one hundred dollars. I could probably get that down with cheaper products and really hunting bargains, but doing that doesn’t save me all that much money and, as someone who has done that more than a few times in the last half a decade thanks to COVID-19, I’m already buying the cheapest stuff I can without sacrificing flavor or quality. What’s worse is that I’m not even buying stuff in the quantities I was before. I used to buy the economy size of most of my staples since I’d definitely go through that stuff before it went bad. Certain spices, condiments, various shelf-stable food in boxes, rice, etc. All stuff I’d buy in the biggest container I could. Now, though, my grocery bill has gone up noticeably and I can’t even buy the volume per item I used to. I literally can’t find some items in the sizes I used to. If I could, I’d still buy them in that size, increased cost be damned, but a lot of brands in the grocery stores I go to have just stopped selling those larger sizes.
Continue readingFixing One Problem So I Can Work On The Rest
After a few sessions without much in the way of stuff to work on, my physical therapist and I decided to change our appointment schedule to every-other-week (starting with a three-week skip due to scheduling issues). Since I stopped taking that medication that was making me physically miserable, I’ve had fewer and fewer problems that I’ve needed to work on with my physical therapist. At this point, as I’m coming up on two months off the medication, I’m still dealing with some lingering stuff, but most of what I’ve got going on is due to the physical demands of my job and the somewhat uneven muscle usage those demands result in. Other than stretches and starting up my exercise routine in earnest again, there’s not much to do for now. Thus the every-other-week appointments. We’ll let some time pass, see if getting back into my exercise routine helps fix my lingering problems, and then hopefully either end our appointments or set me up with a better workout and stretching routine and THEN end our appointments. Either way, I suspect I’m less than half a dozen appointments from being done. Which is great, let me tell you. I still remember just how awful last fall was, even if a lot of those days blur together in my memory, and no matter how tired or sore I feel nowadays, I can take comfort in knowing that it will pass in a couple days if I stretch and get enough sleep. And destress a bit. I’m still struggling with that part, but I always have so I doubt I’m going to fix it any time soon.
Continue readingCatching Bugs On The Weekend: Then And Now
Last weekend, on a Saturday (the first of February, 2025, for anyone reading this disconnected from when I’m posting it), I woke up after barely five hours of sleep to the calming tones of my alarm and hauled myself out of bed so I could go to work. I had to work for at least a few hours that day, thanks to someone else’s fuckup (or, to hear them tell it, me not being able to properly anticipate that they would take my testing equipment without a word to me), so I hauled my way through my morning routine as I did something I hadn’t done in about fifteen years. It was difficult and I did not enjoy needing to cut myself short on sleep in order to go into the office to do work that I’d have had ample time to do if someone else hadn’t messed up my week so horribly. As I went through the motions, prepared my coffee, and made myself ready to stop at the pharmacy on my way in, I had the strangest feeling that something was missing from my morning. I eventually figured it out as I got into my car to drive away, since the feeling eventually grew into the faintest echoes of a song I would know anywhere from its opening notes alone. It was a bit of music that had once featured prominently in some of my more recent playlists as a calming instrumental piece but that I’d recently moved away from, as I shifted into new playlists that better matched how I’ve felt this past year and am feeling today, which made it easy enough to reclaim. It was the National Park theme from Pokémon: SoulSilver (or just Silver).
Continue readingI’m Not Always Making Progress, But I’m At Least Not Getting Worse Again…
Another week (mostly) down the tubes and another update on how I’m doing. Physically, anyway. And a little mentally and emotionally, of course. That’s part of it these days, given that the reason I’ve stopped making much progress in physical therapy is that I’m exhausted from work and stressed beyond my ability to easily handle. Turns out that having your entire week knocked off course by someone else’s fuckup really sucks. To put it briefly, since I’m writing this late, one of my coworkers took crucial parts of my testing apparatus without telling me, rendering it incapable of being used for the testing I originally built it for. When I found out and confronted him, I was told to just build up my gear again and fix up the testing setup that he’d dismantled and only barely begun to put back together again in a “nice” way (despite me telling him a couple days prior that I was going to need it that week and that “working” was better than “pretty”). Which means that my plans to leave work “early” to play video games with my friends got thrown to the side so I could spent seven hours fixing what he’d messed up so I could run my goddamn twenty-minute test to verify that the latest version of the software, that the developer had put out that day, was good to go so that we’d have time for fixes and more testing if it WASN’T fine. I spent most of Wednesday apoplectic about that and had the rest of the week completely disrupted by this eight hours of work and software updating I wound up needing to do outside of my already busy plans for the week.
Continue readingBlogging Through The Horrors
I kind of expected shit to go sideways as soon as Trump took office. I’ve been readying myself for it for a while, after all, so I had a pretty good idea of what his government would do, how’d they do it, and how that would go. I didn’t expect it to be as grand and sweeping a shitstorm as it is, but we’re still within (the admittedly far end of) my projections. What has surprised me, though, which maybe it shouldn’t have given how the election went and how the party behaves over all, is how the Democrats don’t seem to be doing anything at all. And not only are they not doing anything, but they’re actually supporting some of the confirmations of Trump’s horrible, unqualified, and incredibly disastrous government. They’re not trying to reformat themselves into an opposition party. They’re not even trying to PRETEND to be acting against him! What they’re actually trying to pretend, with a few exceptions, is that this is a normal governmental transition. Which is whack! It’s fucked up, even! This shit isn’t normal and the fact that they literally made a goddamn vote deal so they wouldn’t have to work on the weekends is abhorrent, ESPECIALLY after the first aerial crash that came as a likely result of Trump attempting to gut the FAA. This isn’t normal! They should try to do fucking anything at all! Literally anything! People’d be lining up to support them if they did! No one likes this and even the people who like this are going to stop liking it as soon as more air traffic accidents start happening, disease via food contamination runs rampant, and the next plague breaks out! The first two are a foregone conclusion [I wrote this on the morning of the 31st, before the second collision, so I feel kinda bad but also very justified in writing this, even as SOME Democrats have begun to do something that still falls short of what feels like the minimum I’d expect from an opposition party] but the last thing seems increasingly likely as bird flu and fucking tuberculosis start to pick up and the systems that might have warned us they were coming are being dismantled by a mixture of pettiness destructiveness and incompetence!
Continue readingA Late Night Mission Statement: Why I Write
I’ll be honest. I’m writing this at midnight the night before it’s supposed to get posted. I had a poem planned for today, but I haven’t had the time or energy to do a proper recording of myself reading it, so I don’t want to post it yet. I want to give it, and myself, time to breathe so I’m not cramming out subpar work just so I can have something ready to go. Getting anything done right now (this blog post included) is a struggle because I worked twelve hours today and the only reason I didn’t work a longer day was because I had to go to a doctor appointment this morning. I also worked fourteen hours on Wednesday (which isn’t yesterday anymore, since I started writing this after midnight), so I didn’t even start my day feeling any kind of fresh. I’m worn out and worn down by the stress and effort of the last few days, which is probably why I’ve written and deleted several partial and complete opening paragraphs. None of them felt right. Sure, there’s a lot of stuff on my mind as the world continues to devolve, as horrible things happen to people, and only the rich shitheads seem to be getting anything positive out of this state of affairs, but it’s difficult to put any of that into words that feel worth writing here and now, at my desk as I’m fighting the urge to sleep.
Continue readingRecovery Is A Process
Well, after pushing my limits as far as I could pretty much every work day for two weeks, my physical testing is one day from being done (well, for now. No testing is ever truly “done” and there’ll be more physical testing coming as soon as new parts show up and I’ve got so much software testing that needs doing that I’m starting to think about working on future weekends) and I am exhausted. My arms are sore, my hands are stiff, my forearm muscles have gotten much larger than I ever expected them to be, and I’m ready for another weekend of rest. And maybe another few days past the weekend. I wouldn’t mind some more time for my hands to recover, for my muscles to rest, and for my joints to get some relief. Even keeping my goals modest by sticking to fifty test cycles a day rather than aiming for my previous target of one hundred, the toll this work has taken on my body is considerable. My physical therapist, though, thinks it’s all a good thing since my problems seem to all be muscular now and that I’m as generally resilient as I am about it. I feel better each morning. I’m capable of moving in ways I couldn’t when I was on those medications. I actually got up from a laying-down position using core strength alone and It’s been a good nine months since I even attempted that. I just, you know, ache from repeating the same strenuous activity fifty times a day every day, on top of all my other laborious work. Normal stuff. Anyone else would ache as much, if not more than I do.
Continue reading