Well, since I’m writing this a day later than usual (on the 17th instead of the 16th), I’ve now made it through two increasingly demanding weeks at work. I got through my first exhausted weekend, started this week feeling fresh, and immediately pushed my limits as far as they could go every day I could. I spent four days doing a huge amount of testing, recruited anyone who was willing to help me, and made it through about fifty percent of the testing I needed in about a week. I also completely exhausted myself such that, despite sleeping pretty decently last night (thanks to choosing to work less and sleep more the morning I wrote this), I’m ready to fall asleep at my desk. I even forced myself to take a day off testing, to rest my poor hands, my give my aching body a break, and to focus on denying my ever-present desire to be horizontal rather than any amount of vertical, but I’m still struggling to stay conscious and alert today any time I’m not actively doing something and half of the rest of the time. It’s a nice exhaustion, though. I feel sleepy and ready for rest rather than uncomfortable and in pain like I was for most of last year. I can be still and the lingering pains will cease or I can move and stretch and feel my body loosen up. Truly, it is a remarkable thing to be recovering after so much time of just being miserable.
Continue readingMusing
Putting My Annoyingly Competitive Coworkers To Work
Last week, I wrote about how I was feeling better and how I was kind of excited about being able to actually put in some effort at work without feeling awful for a week or more. I wound up setting a personal record for testing cycles performed entirely on accident. I’d forgotten that my previous record was counted using only half of what I’m now calling a cycle (since I was testing something else then), so I’d only done thirty cycles in a single day back when I was still feeling fairly hale despite all the pain I was in last summer and on Friday I wound up doing thirty-seven (specifically to smooth out the total count to a nice round number). I paid for it all weekend, of course, but I was feeling mostly better by Sunday and back to about ninety percent by the time I hauled myself into work yesterday morning (or, well, a week ago yesterday as you’re reading this). I felt well enough to log another thirty cycles, even, and woke up today feeling mostly alright. My hands are in the worst shape, between the blisters, the muscle tightness, and the lingering tenderness from my burns almost three weeks ago, but even so I’m able to keep up the work and wound up logging an impressive fifty cycles. The problem is, while I’m making great progress on this testing, it will take me weeks to get to the total number I need to call this test finished. After all, even if I can keep up doing fifty a day–or even get it up to my target of one hundred–that’s still ten to twenty days of work to get to one thousand (the number we’ve picked for this test). I need it to happen faster than that and I’d really prefer to not be exhausting myself every day given how much OTHER work I still need to do before this project is finished.
Continue readingUnmasking Heroes And Tearing Down Pedestals
Content Warning for mentions of accused abuser and sexual-assaulter Neil Gaiman, non-specific mentions of the allegations against him, and the discussion of other figures in the public eye who have also been revealed to be terrible people (ex. Rowling, Musk).
Continue readingFighting Phantasmal Guilt As I Wait For My Turn In The Climate Disaster Zone
Most of the time, I feel pretty happy living in the Midwest. I may not seem like the sort, especially if you’ve been reading my blog over the last two rather miserable years of my life, but I really try to count my blessings, so to speak, and appreciate what I’ve got when I can. This week (last week, as you’re reading this), I’m feeling more grateful than ever to be living in the Midwest. While we’re not entirely immune to climate change and related disasters, we’re fairly insulated from them. I mean, tornado season is growing longer, strange weather patters are becoming more common, the weather bounces from one extreme to the other as polar winds fight unseasonably warm weather from the south, and all the while local infrastructure struggles to keep up with the varying demands places on it. We’re FAR from immune, especially as droughts worsen and wildfires become more common (I fully expect to see a fire tornado sometime in my life thanks to the confluence of living in tornado and prairie fire territory), but it will (probably) be a few years yet before any of the city-destroying mass disasters show up for my part of southern Wisconsin. So, from the comfort of my workplace and home, I’m watched with mounting horror as LA has burned. I still avoid the news most of the time and I’m not one to go look for videos of horrible stuff on the internet, but looking through Bluesky has proved to be a pretty effective window into recent natural disasters, which has me once again questioning the place that social media has in my life. And, you know, thinking about climate change.
Continue readingI Now Have Proof That I’m Doing Better
So, I’m most of the way through my first week back in the office after my vacation and had my first physical therapy appointment since I started feeling better. While I’m definitely feeling a little strain from being back at work and being physically active again for the first time in a couple weeks, I had a remarkably different experience during my physical therapy appointment. Not only did I do enormously better on all the physical assessments than I did in my last appointment (a month ago), my therapist was so positive about my recovery that we put aside all the stuff we’d been working on in past appointments to address another problem I’ve had on and off for years. It was great to feel like things were finally working out for me after spending so much time in pain and feeling like I just wasn’t making any progress. I will probably go back to doing some kind of exercises once my recovery from that medication I was taking is finished, but it will probably be much more focused on taking care of my body and building good workout habits than on trying to fix my back. The more time that passes, the more it seems like that problem was tied directly to the side effects of the medication I was on and less on swapping mattresses. I mean, swapping mattresses was definitely a part of the issue, but I think that I’d have gotten through that relatively quickly on my own if I hadn’t been taking the joint and muscle pain and stiffness suite of medications. In retrospect, it feels almost kind of silly to think about how worried I was that all that pain and discomfort was a permanent problem.
Continue readingSigns Of Improvement
Well, my first day of work is done and while I feel like I’m way more tired than I should be from what felt like a relatively light day of work (compared to two weeks ago, I barely did anything), I’m not feeling as completely exhausted as I used to. I’ve actually recovered a bit from how tired I was when I finished the moderate labor portion of my day, which is the first time that has happened in months. Maybe more than half a year. That was the worst part of the medication I was on. Because my physical recovery period was so long, any tiring work meant that I’d still feel tired from it for at least a week. Now, today, I’m already feeling like I might be up for the household labor I’d planned for my evening back when I was feeling ambitious yesterday. I mean, it’s only folding laundry and maybe unloading the dishwasher, but I remember a time not that long ago when even those labors were beyond me on all but my best days after work. It’s good to finally be feeling better, even if now I have to keep pumping the brakes to make sure I don’t wind up pushing myself too hard during my continued recovery period. I have to make sure I pace myself and work out patterns and habits I can maintain over the next two incredibly demanding months. So, to that end, my plan for the rest of this week (last week, as you’re reading this) is to get back into the swing of things at work, stepping up my effort every day a little bit at a time. Then, next week, I’ll be doing that and trying to get in my morning workouts again. Or my evening physical therapy workouts, whichever the day demands. And then after that… Well, maybe I’ll go about trying to fix my sleep schedule. Who knows. If I can get the first two things down, I feel like anything will be within my grasp.
Continue readingA New Type Of Going Home For The Holidays
As scattered and ever-too-short as it was, it was nice to spend the holidays with family this year. I think, between finally making peace with my decision to separate from most of my biological family, processing all the emotions from that, and doing the work to start creating new habits and routines in my own life, this was the first time the holidays have felt “good” since… I genuinely don’t even know. And they weren’t even all good! I burned the shit out of my hand on Christmas Day! I overextended myself cleaning and cooking for my two siblings’ visit the weekend after Christmas! I even had to deal with the dwindling pain of a medication course that seems to have taken almost fourteen months for me to discover that it wouldn’t have any lasting effect beyond what happened in the first two months. It wasn’t a great holiday, but I’m already looking back on it fondly, which is a significant change from literally every other holiday season I’ve ever experienced where I immediately tried to forget it. I really enjoyed seeing my chosen family–the couple whose wedding I was in back in 2023–and my two remaining biological family members. I got to see friends on New Year’s Eve, meet some people I’d only ever talked to online, attend my first New Year’s Eve party in half a decade (I hadn’t gone to one since 2018 since I was feeling ill and emotionally exhausted after my first holidays away from my biological family in 2019 and then, well, because Covid for the rest of them), and got to have a great hour and a half chat with a friend after I picked her up from the airport. It was a great time, even if I’m incredibly bummed out that the demands of my work life and my careful recovery from the aforementioned medication I’m no longer taking mean that I won’t be spending much time physically around people until sometime in March at the earliest. I’m just glad I got to see so many people I care about.
Continue readingA Mixture Of Hope And Frustration: The Story Of 2025
As I spend time during the last few days of my vacation rebuilding my buffer and trying to get myself some breathing room to write (and some breathing room to miss a day of writing by loading up some posts that could be dropped in as-needed, though I’m struggling to come up with enough topics that can be dropped in without any acknowledgment of the day they were written), one of the things I’m noticing as I consider the end of this period of rest is that I’m kind of ready to be doing things again. I think I’m going to get a couple weeks in and be exhausted again, since that’s just how the last few years of my life have gone, but I am trying to convince myself that I’ve got reasons to hope for something better than what was going on before this break. After all, as of the day I’m writing this, I’m three weeks of the medication I was taking for almost all of 2024 and not only can I walk down stairs again without needing to brace myself, I’m back to healing pretty quickly and my back rarely hurts the way it used to on a “good” day. Hell, barely any part of me hurts or aches in comparison to how I felt even a month ago. My muscles and joints still ache, sure, but it’s a 1-3 ache rather than a constant 5 (numbers are out of 10 on the pain scale). It’s a VAST improvement and it is giving me hope that I’ll be able to actually feel better and rested in the upcoming busy months. Or that I’ll at least not get progressively worse every day.
Continue readingLooking Ahead At 2025
I’ll be honest: my main goal for 2025 is to make sure that all of the people I know and love are still breathing at the end of it. With the way the world is turning, bureaucracy’s inertia or not, I’m mostly concerned that people I know and care about will be targeted for simply living their lives as their most authentic selves. Pretty much everything I have in mind for the rest of this incredibly fresh year is geared toward doing what I can to make that happen. It isn’t much, given the relative imbalance of myself and the systems that might be leveraged against them (and, of course, the inability to shield anyone from the random misfortunes of the world), but I will be doing what I can. Effective activism is often a subtle thing in this day and age, especially compared to the performative stuff that fills social media. I’m not going on diatribes about what I’ll do to anyone who hurts my friends, but I am calling my senators. I’m calling my state and federal government representatives. I’m doing what I can to directly support people in dangerous positions with direct financial contributions, at least when I can afford them. It never feels like enough, it is rarely lauded, and it almost never feels even remotely effective, but at least it beats sitting on the internet, joining the chorus of voices who say they will kill/die for those being targeted but can’t be bothered to try organizing locally.
Continue readingOne Last Check-In Before The End Of 2024
Today, (the day I’m writing this, which is the 23rd of December), I had to run into the office for a little bit. There was a test I’d left running of the weekend that I needed to shut down, collect the data from, and then clear out of the test chamber. It’s a shared resource, you see, and while there’s a good chance that no one else is going to be using it in the next two weeks (no one has reserved it as of the last time I checked, a few days ago), it would not do for me to leave all that crap there in case someone else wanted to sneak a little testing in during a historically quiet time at our employer. So I went in the early afternoon, wrapped up my test and put everything away, and then left the building. Took all of half an hour, plus fifteen minutes for adjusting my time card to reflect the fact that I’d shown up and worked for forty-five minutes rather than spent a full day’s worth of vacation time. In, work, and out. Still, in that short amount of time, I still managed to run into every single one of my coworkers who was still working at that point, have a couple conversations about the project I’m working on, and get sidetracked for a few minutes as one of them tried to shove good intentions under my fingernails. It wasn’t that bad, but it was a bit annoying to be trying to quickly finish something and leave only to get bogged down in conversation. Typical, but annoying. Once I was done with it, though, I’d hoped to be able to finally relax only to still feel just as tense and keyed-up as I felt this morning while I procrastinated going to work.
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