jebbypal

A few more days and another year gone. Hopefully 2025 will bring better for me on the health front, and at least maintain the status quo on everything else. Poking around at job hunt but with everything in flux at the federal level, the economy feels very iffy right now both staying and leaving.

Also, really hate that everything in the 2020’s seems to want to repeat the 1920’s from world stage, federal fuckery, and viral outbreaks. Have a feeling the rest of the decade is going to be a wild ride.

On the good side - enjoyed San Diego with fleshlycherry though we mostly only hung out in room at the end of the day since i was there for a work conference. The week was also a pain with PMS, and it was rough one. A little worried on the iron levels from the amount of pain I had, and then the continued fatigue this month, though nothing in the “danger levels’ of fatigue i was in the past.

Did some minor cleaning of the worst of 6 months of filth from having no time etc before my trainer who does organizing as a side hustle comes tomorrow to help me with price/spring clean

Hmm yeah my iron is definitely on the low side per my test 2 weeks ago.

Now I don’t feel as bad as I did when my hemaglobin was less than 10 where just the flights of stairs made me need to rest for 20 minutes, but definitely more exertion than that should be (which is likely every spare minute I’m not working I can’t make my self do more than couch rot)

Here’s to Mondays iron transfusion making me feel at least my age again physically (hopefully with none of the fun side effects)

I came across this by accident.

If I’m haunting you, you must be haunting me by Mardia

Not sure why the link isn’t working

https://archiveofourown.org/works/22042492/chapters/52607044

Amazing Knives Out story — voices are impeccable. And hot. :)

May it break the trend for the 20's thus far! In an effort to help it, I avoided any cleaning yesterday after a tiktok that said that was bad luck. Fingers crossed (especially since i can't eat black eyed peas).

Overall i had a blah holiday but sans any immediate health emergency or house cost. *knock on wood*

Had to work for a good portion of the 6 days (beyond the holidays) unfortunately but at least no meetings which was nice. And while my stomach had been very angry during most of that, and the week or so before, it seems to have calmed down this past week. Fingers crossed this is me cracking the code (aka, let's avoid dairy requiring milk pills as much as possible, actually do some home cooking, and my body decided it would take magnesium again).

Beyond that, a lot of TV and video games. Half bad on netflix was great, so disappointed that it was canceled, but now i can leave the TV-verse with the OT3 intact in my head

Loved Spirited as well. The Guardians Xmas special was okay (and a nice distraction on the day i felt like crud physically)

Played through most of Dying Light 2 - was more fun than i expected. Also purchased this indy game Highway69 that is heavy text based choice driven that is interesting.

Now just counting down the days till the Last of Us HBOmax show. should be good.

and my xmas present to myself was very practical in that I decided in the frigid snap that I'm tired of worrying about losing power long enough to prevent sump pump from working so i got an electric generator (ie, really electric. no gas). so that was delivered today so i can read up on it and make sure i don't blow my house up to charge it.

Dear 2022 -- Let's turn things around for the next 6 months (and take that as a request on both the personal and the global level please).

News: Ugh, Ugh, and Ugh. My heart hurts for everyone with children in the US who continue to have to play this game. Also burning mad about everything else in the news and the fact that 90% of people are happy to ignore the pandemic when infections are at levels as high or higher than this time last year. I do not like history repeating itself on either century based revolutions (infection, war, reproductive health) or week based ones (gun violence).

Me:
Good: June 2 get new a/c installed. Please please please. Because a) my allergies are completely fed up with the window open life style, and b) i really really can't sleep when room temp is 80+

Middling: The thing I've been thinking was trigeminal neuralgia for the past year turned out to be a molar with a dead necrotic nerve instead. As i found out after 4 days of bad pain during my vacation that ended on an emergency root canal that is officially my favorite medical procedure ever!

Weekend after that was 90+ for 2 days, and I was still in pain rebound from the infection healing. Got lazy on food and ate some martin's potato bread - that i typically get away with - and had bad GI allergy attack for that night right before my annual physical. So now we get to guess if my lab values that indicate anemia are from stress/allergies or something else so that will be a fun adventure for the month of June.

Future: June 8 getting the 2 problem trees removed (*bye bye rest of bonus*) since the way my luck is going this year they will come down one way or another, and hopefully this will be the least expensive way.

Okay, i'm ready to go back to the early 90s when it seemed like the world made sense, i didn't realize we were in a corporate feudal society, and WW3 wasn't constantly on the horizon. Sigh.

Beyond that everything is going. In addition to the luxury car $$ equivalent siding, i also got to replace the roof. yes, you heard that right, not the shingles, the roof because under the dead shingles and completely shot waterproofing were apparently 1920 boards including gaps etc. whee. which = 2 weeks of extra benadryl as the plywood replacement offgassed.

And during said replacement they managed to put a hole in ceiling in one bedroom somewhat which was another 2 weeks to get fixed, and no thank you, i'll paint it myself instead of suprise drivebys when its raining and your crew has time since i will have to have windows open again for fumes.

Finally last week got the first week to breathe in 2022 between hiring 3 new people and work calming down to a dull roar. New guy is......interesting in all the wrong ways the word means. spent a month redoing everything he did because he couldn't not have it be perfect despite having the scope defined multiple times. Then a month getting him to agree to work in process and not do graphics work because he's colorblind. And he can't let me have the last word and always follows up with a final "we strive for perfection but rarely achieve it" *shakes fist*

Seriously after this past year i'm this close to just saying that hiring men over the age of 35 to report to me is a losing cause since they seem to be untrainable.... *head desk*

Healthwise okay - body calmed down after the 2021 of vaccines. Nurtec continues to be godsend for migraines. Starting to suspect that the tooth thing that started after the dental fracture repair is intermittent trigeminal neuralgia, and trying to decide if it's worth the hassle to get it diagnosed or not. (almost always goes mostly away after 12 hours -- eating drinking are an adventure at that point, but if i don't set it off bad again, gone in another 24).

Fandom wise - I've reached that age i think where i start rewatching stuff. definitely mostly been rereading things frequently. Currently on a binge for Travelers rewatch. Excited about ST: New Worlds. Trying to decide if i'm going to watch the back half of most recent ST:Disco - was very unexcited/disconnected from this most recent season. :(

Really annoyed that Survivor Australia got taken down so fast in Jan with no notice. Had managed to watch 6 episodes of most recent season until the stream got taken off youtube for violations :( There's something about it overall that I just find more relaxing and enjoyable vs the US version for the most part. Also Jonathan LaPaglia > Jeff Probst IMO

Looking forward to summer though as college sister has bought a new house that has a pool :) Hoping to take advantage of 3-day in office mandatory for lots of summer trips down there.

Seriously, think this is not a good sign to be missing 2021. Especially not in February.

Forget if I mentioned we had 2 people (on same account) leave in October, which left me running 1 huge account with some freelance support
Then end of December, we lost another, though at least I was able to backfill those accounts with people not me.
Then in January, one of my direct reports - who had honestly been having performance issues that was stressing the team - also resigned.

So yeah, 2021 was nice in that I was able to actually clock mostly 40 hour weeks for majority of it. So far that is a thing of the past, though i've finally gotten into the groove of it so that at least 50 isn't killing me so long as I get full night sleep on Wed.

We do have a new hire on team to help me on the problem account that is experienced, but onboarding him has been interesting thus far. Not bad, just he's very eager and it's caused problems when he's done too much work on projects that were almost final that I had to spend time reverting to make sure there were no approval issues. Sigh.

In between this, my counterpart - the SVP Entitled White Male (SEWP) - continues to be an ass. And can I just say i don't like this era of not being able to blame this behavior on someone being a boomer cause now it's my elder fellow genXers. I embrace the Oregon Trail generation label more and more.

Anyways, he's being his unhelpful SEWP self of "that's not high strategy enough for mme to do", I need medical support on this account (that has no work, he just doesn't want to go the standard client/internal status meetings because it's *gasp* not high strategy enough), and continually surprising his team with new work that is there responsibility with no notice. NO serious, in past month he's informed one of his reports - AM - that she's presenting at a pitch or moderating a workshop with 24 hours of notice.

Which is beyond unhelpful with our short staff situation because then that means the rest of Am's team has to completely reconfigure their priorities to let AM have ability to do these things.

Just ugh. I'm tired. But i decided i wasn't going to be like other years and wait till May-July for first vacation, and have booked some time in March off. Now to see if I feel safe enough to fly to OK to visit Dad for his birthday or not. It's been since St Paddy's day 2020, and he is turning 74 so ... yeah. and my aunt is in her 80s.

So yes, Virginia, I was well and truly calcium deficient. Within days the muscle aches were much better. A month later and I haven't had a single night insomnia, I can wake up in the morning after sleeping, my PMS was loads better, and I just feel a lot better.

Plus side 2, either that and/or body finally adjusted to no coffee as body just feels loads better all over, and actually feels right when I exercise.

Oh, yeah, I gave up coffee. 1) nespresso didn't work when i was having the breaker issues with the sump pump an dI was too lazy to move it to working plug. 2) stomach started really not liking it even when i was doing pour over. 3) I like how low my blood pressure is with no coffee. 4) my overall mood is much more even and manageable without the adrenaline high and lows that coffee caffeine gives me compared to tea.

After 2 months of it, I did finally go and buy some nice teas instead of lipton (since all my stocks of good Peet's teas is gone and Peet stopped sourcing their teas from same places causing poorer quality but same or higher prices).

Got my 1/3 of furniture delivery. Got reminded the benefits of a pre-WW2 house with lack of VOCs in it as I can smell the new leather chair from across the room. Given how that is, and potential to get rest of it in mid-winter when opening the windows to periodically air out won't be an option, bought a air purifier in advance.

Oh, and in the "surprises 2021 has in store" i was not anticipating the "your water main is about to be beyond its useful life so we are spending the month of november replacing it" one from the township. Which i almost missed as one of our storms blew the notice off my front door and so it was an accident i saw it when getting a package outside.

Here's hoping to a smooth process. And maybe, if i'm really lucky, this will mean I will have much better water pressure maybe? (I'd assumed it was my old pipes which i'll just keeping patting nicely and tell them they are doing a good job as long as water moves and they remain water tight).

Hope everyone else continues to be safe and not in too much bother for the supply chain issues. I'm going back and forth on whether I should head to OK to visit family post-thanksgiving but the ICU status still looks very very high there..... Maybe I should get a booster instead and then plan maybe in February? Ooh. or 1st week of march and be there for my dad's birthday for once. Hm. decisions.

Since I avoid using work computer for DW, and I prefer to type, I'm doing this a lot less than I intend as I put the PC away and then don't pull it out and charge it like I do with iPad. So few updates missed.

( 43rd birthday )

( blood family )

( health )

( work )

( house )

So post-shot 2, after the 48 hours of "WTH is this new pain and fever", I kept having a lot of pain in my right knee -- which is the one I tweaked on both of my 2 falls in the winter. I was starting to worry it was NEW because none of my other injuries were bothering.
( Read more... )

But yesterday and today have been remarkably much less painful, so I'm starting to have the hope that my nice overactive immune system finally got bored with attacking the most recent spot of inflammation and I have a few more years of functional knees available.

Work has started to pick up, and this week I've managed to reengage my brain and most of my drive, so that's good to be synced up some. And managing has continued to evolve with new challenges, but none dire. So that's good.

One thing with the work is the executive coach they've hired for me. Which has been a nice neutral 3rd party to talk through some of my concerns with my managing style and other things, and when complaining about how badly my procrastination had reared its head, the coach said "Hmm, you know it sounds a lot like a pretty good case of burnout". Which was totally accurate.

Which so part of my assignment now has been to identify and reconnect with things that bring me joy. Which, well, I've made progress on the original task of making time for myself by taking time to workout with the oculus workout app several times a week and prioritizing my sleep (even if procrastinate enough i think i should pull an all nighter).

And I know joy does not encompass my typical "watch lots of TV and binge fanfic to completely avoid thinking that might lead to depression". So yeah, this is my yearly "i need to figure out how to write for fun" again promise. Which I suppose might start with actually rewatching the eps for some of my actual WIP in fandoms I've had luck with the frogmuse in the past.