scrubjayspeaks

Haha, oh no, I have just now realized that being on vacation from Lewisia means, you know, not having Lewisia stuff to mirror over here three times a week. Which! Whoops! Has been most of what I'm posting here.

Gaddammit, I tried to make a less-work and I made a more-work instead! Again! I am so bad at not doing things???

In other news, it's the last day of my day job vacation, and my stomach has chosen now to make vague and threatening gestures at me. *pokes belly* Why are you like this? Why are we all like this all the time?

I made the mistake yesterday of walking into a quilting store that opened in town a few months ago. They had about seven different patterns that consisted of whimsical mushrooms with one or more adorable small animals. So now I'm seriously thinking of going back on the weekend and buying a few hundred dollars worth of materials to make a patchwork quilt for the first time. I've always wanted to do that, though it's going to be all basic machine sewing and some hand sewing. I do not have fancy quilting equipment, which seems to be a thing?

If I ever announce I'm buying an embroidery machine, though, please, save me from myself. If I start making patches, there's going to be no coming back. It'll be pun-based clothing all the way down.

More repotting today. Moved the sempervivums to a shallow trough pot, since the one they were in was far too deep. Broke off some of them to add to the in-ground area as well--it's becoming the home for wayward and excessive plantlets.

Also repotted Spiny Norman II, a dykia that has been surviving in about a half-inch of soil, so now he has a reasonable amount of soil.

And repotted my lone gasteria, who is always a deep, traumatized red and whose soil somehow instantly turns into bone-dry sand no matter what I repot it in. It's now in a larger pot, with fresh soil, and it even has a little offset coming up that's actually green. So we'll see if it likes this arrangement better.

I also shoveled some soil and compost into the circle garden.

My back has been bothering me for a week, so I wasn't able to tolerate as much activity as I would have liked. Even so, I've made a good start on the pots in the west cold frame. The next few days will be for tidying in the house, so hopefully my back will chill out soon. Also, even though part of NaClYoHo is to listen to podcasts whilst cleaning, I've just been working in silence. I'm outside and the birds are carrying on, and that's been pleasant enough.

Well, they finally got me, friends. I have been bullied, cajoled, harassed, and threatened into obtaining a smartphone. I've got fucking Google devices littered around the house now. They keep prompting me to log in to my account. I don't know how to explain to them the degree to which one desktop computer and one tablet are MORE THAN ENOUGH ACCESS TO ME.

So the deal is, I previously had a sturdy, workman-style rubberized flip phone. It was, in a technical sense, internet-enabled, in that there was a browser programmed into it. The browser never once successfully loaded a webpage, though, so it was more of a theoretical thing, you know? That's the sort of phone that worked for the three of us: basic, tough, capable of being run over by a pickup truck and surviving the experience. (Ask us how we know.) My phone was an embarrassment to any normal person who saw it, and thus a point of belligerent pride for me.

I neither wanted nor needed a smartphone. Not to channel ysabetwordsmith, but just because a technology is new, doesn't mean it's good. I don't automatically adopt every new piece of tech just on general principle, and I resent the hell out of being made to do so anyway. A portable phone? Yeah, sure, good. I work and have elderly parents; I want to be able to contact them. A smartphone? Fuck right off into the sea.

My phone carrier a) got bought out by another company and promptly b) announced my phone model was too old for their new system. After the first of the year, they are going to essentially brick it: it won't even be capable of making emergency calls, which normally phones can do even if you haven't paid the bill, don't have service, and have been transported to Mars. So we have to upgrade.

This is not unprecedented. Every time we have upgraded our phones, it has been at a sort of gunpoint. Upgrade, or no more service for you. We, uh, we aren't exactly out here waiting in line for the newest model of iPhone, see? The last time we upgraded, it was a huge fiasco, because the old phones were so old, they couldn't even communicate with the new ones to transfer contacts and whatnot. One of them only had a built-in SIM card, so you couldn't even take it out and put it in something new or a reader.

So now, they've made it so the only phone models available are smartphones. Touch screens. Do you know what I'm going to go through to teach my nearly 90-year-old father to use a touch screen for the first time? Do you understand what that does to a person, trying to explain swipe controls to someone who predates the Second World War?



But it was all this or try to switch to a different service entirely. Find someone who offers flip phones for old (at heart) people. In addition to the hassle of finding such a thing, we also then have to hope that a smaller service like that will get, you know, SERVICE out in the sticks where we live. We have problems with that as it is. Plus, we would likely need to get new phone numbers, which poses its own host of switch-over problems. So. I have, reluctantly, identified this upgrade as the lesser of many evils.

Very, very reluctantly.

So I spent the morning getting three phones activated, contacts and photos transferred over, and settings wrangled. This after a 50+ hour work week, when I really quite needed to get a bunch of writing done. Also, cleaned the ducks' run in there for a couple hours. So it has been a less than satisfactory day.

I have to figure out where I'm going to charge this, this...device, because I don't want it in my room. The tablet can spy on me--gods know I've resigned myself to that--but the phone has to sit in the corner and think about its life choices. I, sadly, will be over in another corner, doing the exact same thing.

Oh, friends, I have been laid low. I thought over the weekend that my vague malaise was due to having gotten my regular flu vaccine on Thursday after work. Oh, you naive fool. You precious idiot child. You thought your body was doing something normal.

No, it turns out the earache I woke up with Monday morning was just the next stage in the brewing Hell Infection developing in my ear for several days. It was a sneaky approach from behind, and then straight in with the cosmic curb stomp to my immune system. By Tuesday morning, I was a ruin, a shattered remnant of my former self.

Y'all think I'm joking, but understand: I felt so sick, I left work early and then went directly to the doctor. Two behaviors that are basically contrary to my primary protocol. I missed two goddamn days of work! In a row!

Now I'm on antibiotics and steroids, which I guess is what you get when the doctor looks in your ear and then visibly recoils. I didn't think they let ANYBODY have antibiotics for ear infections anymore. All the exam rooms have posters up these days, explaining how a) it's probably viral and won't respond anyway and b) you're the reason we're all going to be conquered by super bacteria, you dirty, ear-having beast*.

The doctor warned me it would take a couple days for me to feel any improvement, which was both disappointing to this maniac who wanted to get back to work and also depressingly accurate. Two days later, I'm not so much feeling better as resigned to taking truly unacceptable quantities of acetaminophen to manage the pain. I did go back to work, an experience I only survived because things were quiet. My trainer was on vacation anyway, so there wasn't much I could do and no one I much had to talk to.

Also, it turns out being mostly deaf on one side of your head is very disorienting in the constant noise of the production floor. I feel like I'm hallucinating machine motor noises from all directions, and I'm not even there anymore. At least now I'll have a few nights in which I don't have to worry that I literally won't hear my alarm go off if I roll the wrong way while sleeping.

(*This is both a sharp departure from my youth and an inevitable conclusion to it, when my insistence on existing solely in a water-based medium for approximately seven months out of the year meant I was perpetually fighting off either swimmer's ear or a full-blown infection. They rotated me through every antibiotic they could source, trying not to have any repeats. I ended up having to take liquid ones. They had the texture of roughly-ground chalkboard chalk in slightly watered-down white glue. I thought I would die.)

I have a little frog in my PPE. Not really, sadly, but it definitely sounds like it. The very first thing I do in the morning is clean the machines with a compressed air and dry ice machine. The air stream, if it hits particular parts of the machine, makes a truly disastrous whistling noise, fit to kill megafauna at a hundred paces. So I am equipped with ear protection and a face shield.

I have discovered that some parts of this getup are rubbing on other parts in a way that, on rare occasions, makes precisely the sound of a little frog croaking. The adorable sort of croaking, too, just a precious little gwak of a noise. Because it's transmitting through the ear covers, it sounds as close to my ear as my earbud does, rather than like something out in the muffled room beyond. Little frog riding around in my ear. I am amused by this endlessly and look forward to hearing it just as though I had a real frog keeping me company on my rounds.

The full story is too elaborate to recap here, but I had such a good end of my day at work. I got to be gloriously right about why a machine was malfunctioning. It took an hour and a half before we entirely figured it out, but I had called it from the start and figured out what would actually solve it. So now I am flush with righteous smugness. I am a master of the universe.

Also, I have my first battle wound from the new job. Yes, fine, it's just a scraped knuckle, but I'm in such a good mood, I'm even happy about that.

*helpless laughter* Oh my god, my life is a farce. Halfway through my first day as setup tech, my trainer and I are informed our lives are about to get way more interesting. The person who does setup for swing shift? For whom I was going to be much-needed and eagerly-anticipated backup? Yeah...that person is out for the next two weeks.

I can--and did--speculate as to WHY this person would be out for that specific length of time. But honestly, it makes no difference. They won't be there. I now need to get up to speed and working independently even faster than anticipated. I mean, my trainer isn't planning to abandon me (might like to, but...), so it's not as though I have been thrown to the wolves entirely.

But goddamn. Yeah, I mean--this might as well happen.

Every year, my work insurance has this third-party ~health~ service that creates fun hoops for us to jump through. It's a way to make getting your annual physical both more inconvenient and less avoidable. Presumably, their end goal is to make the annual physical both mandatory (instead of just imposing a financial penalty for skipping it) and a week-long torture session, at which point they will have reached the pinnacle of American healthcare.

To say that I dread this--more than I already dread all doctor appointments--is an understatement. And people wonder why my blood pressure goes up twenty points just by stepping foot in a doctor's office. But I got it done, leaving work early to accommodate their increasingly restrictive hours of operation. The third-party service has added even more metrics than the one we used last year, so I also had to suffer through the indignity of a slender white man taking my waist measurements with a paper tape measure that was barely long enough to calculate my ring size, to say nothing of my glorious girth. Got the paperwork all filled out and, allegedly, faxed in.

Went home and began my yearly shame spiral. Then discovered they screwed up on the paperwork. Spent my lunch break today on hold (because gods know, they were gone from the office by the time I got home yesterday) to find out they were "pretty sure" they had scanned in the paperwork, but they couldn't find it. So I had to go in after work--again--to take them my copy, so they could check the ticky box they missed. They then faxed it while I was there. Which was interesting, because I got an email confirmation that the third-party service had received it timestamped within minutes of that. So I now know they abso-bloodly-lutely did NOT fax it yesterday like they said.

On the plus side, the seething rage I feel toward the doctor, his staff, the third-party service, the insurance company itself, and *checks notes* all of humanity has gone a long way to dispelling the murky depression of my shame spiral. Nothing more clarifying than being reminded that other people are, in fact, shit and not to be used as a metric against which to measure my worth.

Unfortunately, the doctor wants a follow-up in six weeks, during which time I am expected to magically fix my blood pressure by way of weight loss. Just block off the middle of October for shame spiral #2. Go ahead and pencil that shit into my schedule.

I'm buying myself a set of decent dumbbells as a consolation for putting up with this, and no one can stop me. *grumbles* Not that they pay any blessed attention to how stronk I might be, no, no, just wanna know if I've eaten chips today, tedious motherfuckers...

The agricultural annex of the local college and the teaching garden associated with it had their first seminar since last year's lockdown. The topic was fruit trees, and mum and I were eager to attend. Our fruit trees have had an assortment of issues this year, from eternally unripening fruit to insect infestations to discolored leaves.

This, as it turns out, is by no means limited to us. The very first words out of the speakers was, so, who here has had a terrible year for fruit? Which was very cheering, because it's always nice to find out your problems are not solely the product of your own incompetence. In fact, our problems are mostly due to drought, either as a primary cause or due to knock-on effects from the trees getting water-stressed. That, and an iron deficiency in one, but I suppose I can't blame climate change for everything.

A lot of the problems are in the category of "try not to let that happen next year." The fruit that didn't set, or didn't ripen, or grew in deformed isn't going to get any less fucked up this year. But if we get another miserably dry winter (please no, pleasepleaseplease no), we'll have some idea of what to do and when to get better fruit set next year.

Also, they had a plant sale. Because of course they did, and of course I bought a bunch of plants. Only one for me--a Russian sage, which isn't really sage but will apparently grow on the surface of the sun if need be--but I bought a bunch for mum. She's been on the hunt for manzanitas for years, but mostly never allows herself to have any even when we find them. And her new fixation is ceanothus (California lilac). Both are native here, thus drought-tolerant, and make attractive living walls. Admittedly, these are all currently small enough to be living walls for the six-inch-and-under population, but, well. Had to start somewhere, and it was a hell of a lot easier than driving down to Riverside or whatever to get to the native nursery I found that sells them in 45-gallon pots.

Plants! \o/

Lolsob, oh, right, we're at this stage of the job-change proceedings. Having gotten my signoffs submitted yesterday, I am officially available for the position I already said I would take. Which means suddenly, everyone is taking this very seriously. Because whoops, everyone always forgets that me taking a new position means I'm not around to do the old role.

I am training not just one person on a particular job at the moment, I am actually training two. One of the people on second shift came in early to learn from me. There aren't that many people who know how to run this particular part, and there seem to be even fewer people who can effectively train others on tough jobs. My reputation as some kind of training wizard is holding strong, more's the pity.

I expect the next [x] weeks--however long this transition period ends up being--to consist of more of the same. Oh, shit, no one else knows how to do what you do, quick, teach them! At least it's not as bad as it was when I left the restaurant. In that case, I was literally the only one who could reliably make the computer system work and I had to leave multi-page walkthroughs and troubleshooting guides when I left.

Someday, if we're lucky, businesses will finally figure out that having one person who knows how to do a thing isn't enough. No matter how dependable, sometimes *gasp* that person might not be available. You might *double gasp* need to cut into your productivity stats by allowing more people to train on the skill.

In fairness, my current employers are far better about this than others have been. Might even be better than most. And yet, and still.