Month: Jan 2020

Ah, That Would Be The Problem…

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My partners and I often joke that we’re often surprised that I don’t rattle, given the number of medications I take on a daily basis. Nearly every day there’s some variation on a theme of “have you taken your meds?” or “do you need to order more meds?”. Once a week we also have a chorus of “have you injected today?”

Yesterday I realised that my erratic grumpiness and energy levels, and irregular sweats this week may have in part been down to forgetting to actually take my injection on Monday.

Oops.

So my injection day is now a Thursday rather than a Monday. What fun. Because what better to do with a compromised immune system and a race inside my body to see what will fail first than to not take the medication that helps keep me operational?

Yay! Now I’m tired and want to sleep. But it’s only lunchtime and I’m at work, so that’s not an option.

Oh, and it’s still January.

And Somehow It Is Still January

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I get paid a week or so before the end of the month, which automatically throws me out of synch with the usual dash to the month end that many people have – but even so this never ending January seems to be looming. I could almost be persuaded that 2020 is just going to be a year-long January – and it would be somehow entirely appropriate that it would then extend into January 2021.

It’s still going to be January tomorrow. Perhaps we’re all actually caught in the dystopian and existential horror of Scarfolk and just haven’t noticed how expensive the office supplies have got.

I Get Bored

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Some routine is a good thing, allowing for a stability upon which to have the flexibility to interact with and influence the world around me. But I also get bored incredibly easily – mostly I think out of a sense of how many other things there are to be doing and exploring.

I therefore try to keep a middle ground between order and chaos in my life so that I can slide between them for respite. Sometimes that manifests in a frenzy of cleaning and reorganization that you may think is imposing order, but is in fact shaking things up when they’ve been static too long.

I see elements of this around me at work when I observe the effects of changing or moving displays. People notice and react to the change for a short while before tuning it out as the new normal. At which point we change things around to grab people’s attention again.

This is generally why I embrace change whenever it happens. My romantic and platonic relationships are constantly evolving as we ourselves change and grow both in relation to each other, our lives, and circumstances. Sometimes these are scary as they challenge assumptions, and sometimes these changes ease things. The same goes for work and my relationship to it and it’s demands.

Today I am fairly mellow towards work, even with its challenges (did I mention that I had to call the police toy?) – but who knows what tomorrow will bring. It’s unlikely to be boring, and I’m thankful for that.

Cleanup Crew of One

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I’ve been having a bit of a clean out today. For the first Monday in a while I haven’t been travelling or ill so it’s been quite productive. We were offered an upgrade on our BT TV box a week or two back, and we finally got our hands on it after shenanigans with the Post Office at the weekend. Getting to the electrics meant battling through piles of art supplies, so it was as good an excuse for a tidy as any.

Two large bin bags of detritus later – which includes a mass shredding of materials, address labels, and moderately confidential odds and ends – and the new and significantly smaller TV box is installed and configured. The XBox can see it and control it too, so in theory that sidesteps keeping a close eye on an additional remote. We shall see.

No doubt our cleaner, the redoubtable ex-Lady M – will be bemused to find an area of clear floorspace that wasn’t there before.

What’s worse?

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Is it worse to have no working IT systems, or to have most of a working IT system? After today, my vote is for the latter as we could work around most issues with alternatives, but then feel frustrated on our customers’ behalf at the inability to wholly resolve one or two types of interaction.

It also meant that it took longer and more convoluted routes to answer certain queries – which was somewhat irking as we’re all about providing or at least pointing the way to information.

What today did prove, reassuringly, was how well we know our stock. A great number of book enquiries were resolved by being able to walk to the exact section with the customers – and in some instances to reach for the exact thing they had asked for.

That was deeply satisfying. I may have appeared to be almost supernaturally knowledgeable – especially with my growing beard and tendency to silently appear beside people just as they started looking lost.

Fly you fools!

Okay, I may enjoy making people jump. I am a sadist, after all.

January 326th

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There’s still another month of January to go, Christmas was three years ago, and nobody knows what’s happening any more. That joke, more or less paraphrased, is all over my social media feed at the moment and it’s definitely resonating strongly.

I can’t even claim that it’s nearly the weekend as I’m working tomorrow, and timetabling in my head stopped me sleeping until the early hours of the morning. I was convinced I’d made a grevious error yesterday in who I’d asked to be in certain places for tomorrow. As it turned out when I got in to work an hour early today, that wasn’t the case, but it was just as well as there was a photocopier engineer waiting at the door for me.

Time? A meaningless construct? It certainly feels that way

Minor Plague

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Today hasn’t been wonderful – mostly due to one of those lovely hiccups that diabetes brings and that people don’t mention most. In this case it’s an upset stomach and nausea called diabetic gastroparesis – where the rate of the emptying of the stomach, and therefore digestion of food is affected. Not to put too fine a point on it, food starts to rot in the stomach and it’s deeply uncomfortable.

So I took advantage of having some time owed and went home early – and have been taking it easy while it sorts itself out.

Hopefully I’ll be back up and running properly in the morning. Yay.

Living in the Future

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Back in the early nineties my regular tabletop gaming group and I loved messing about playing the R.Talsorian Cyberpunk 2020 game. From one-shots to complex evolving campaigns it was a good system to dip into as we took breaks from our Dungeons and Dragons.

I usually ran the games, but that wasn’t always the case – and I went in on as many expansion books and elements of source material as I could in an effort to make things as immersive as I could. One thing that I remember saying at the time that has stayed with me though was telling my players to consider that technically the corporate warlords and elder non player characters would have been born in our age – or that in other words it was entirely possible that they could find that the Big Bad of the campaign was just as likely to be one of the players say round the table as anyone else.

So anyway, life has happened, and has swayed away in many instances from the cyberpunk excess of that game – and yet is in other ways even more chillingly aligned – and find myself considering that Greta Thunberg would be a good match for the Rockerboy archetype from the game. She would even be the right age give or take a couple of years. It does make me realise that I wasn’t that far off with my glib statement all those years ago.

I’m not sure whether bemusement or horror is the appropriate reaction at this point.

Darts Night

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The cub has recently discovered a new activity that has gripped his attention – playing darts. He’s now old enough to be trusted with proper sharp darts rather than the magnetic set that has adorned the door next to his desk, so lady s has registered him with the local darts academy.

His grandfather is of course extremely pleased, and has invested in a high end board and a selection of flights and components so that everyone in the house can have their customised setups to suit their play style. The cub has a practice routine to do every day and so it was that we ended up in a mixed doubles series of darts matches last night. I was in a team with lady s, and the cub was in a team with his grandad.

It was just a lovely quiet family moment of playing together with quiet banter, promises of being dumped if it ended up needing a double one to win, and hardly anyone being hit by rebounding projectiles. I suspect there may be more this afternoon while lady s is at work.

Oh, we played best of three, and we won 😉

Pleasant Nonsense

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We’re a little late to the party but after seeing a cheap bundle of all three films we’ve watched all three John Wick movies and delighted in their glorious B-Movie schlock while trying to identify all the well-known faces that pepper the assault course. The relentless drive from brutal set piece to frantically kinetic set piece was exhausting at times, but the quiet world building also impressed with its shorthand approach. Once you accept the world’s premise of ridiculously stylised seedy riches, glamour and violence, the deadpan charcoal black humour positively sparkles.

If you’ve been hesitant about trying them, take this as the nudge off the sidewalk you were waiting for.