But I don't wanna!!!

Well, it's officially 2022 and I'm back at work. (I didn't actually take any extra time off, it's less "back at" and more "still here as everyone else comes back" but honestly? That is not making me feel any better about this.) I was able to take advantage of the break and the existence of YouTube to get a handle on a project that I've been putting off in no small part because the system I was told to develop it in was completely unknown to me, the interface was opaque, and the official training materials were useless. So, it kept getting set aside for other things that A) were more urgent, and B) didn't require at least three days of uninterrupted study to get started on. 

The project isn't done yet, of course, but it's off to a decent start and now that I've finally got a handle on how to do things for it, well... it's just a matter of pushing on through until it's finished. I might have a bunch of training in the second week of January, or I might not; I might have other projects interrupting (not so big a problem, now) or I might not; I might have time re-sort my To Do list and reassign priorities and start laying out plans, but I seriously doubt it. 

I'm still tired, y'all. I mean, I didn't try to do much over Christmas or New Year's, and I got a pretty fair amount of rest, and the things we did do were fun in way that refreshes the spirit, but I'm still tired. 

Still, we made it through 2021, even if... well...

...and I feel like that's something we should all celebrate before 2022 leaps on us from behind with claws and fangs bared. So stop and take a deep breath, maybe set aside a moment to think about where you are, where you need to go, and how you plan to get there. 

That's what I plan to be doing, anyway.

A farewell to 2021

So it's December and Christmas is Any Day Now and that means that somehow 2021 is nearly over and I'm sitting here in the Designated Writing Closet and wondering: where the hell did it go? 2020 was this horrible, slogging, torturous grind that almost culminated in a full-on fascist coup. 2021 was supposed to kind of ease back from that, give us a small chance to regroup and maybe start to repair some of the horror and mistakes and stupidities that were done. 

And maybe some of that did happen. 

Maybe. 

But holy hell, it feels like 2021 just went by in a blur and nothing much has changed. There was a push early on to get everybody vaccinated, and even some progress, but then Delta and now Omicron appeared and it looks like our deliberate stalling has pushed us past the point of being able to really get rid of this thing. Meanwhile, our politicians and especially the Republicans are studiously pretending -- still -- that there isn't a global pandemic going on, except when they switch to pointing out that there is and it's President Biden's fault. The schools are open more or less by mandate, a fact mitigated only slightly by the fact that vaccines are now available to everyone five and older; ditto restaurants, bars, nightclubs, concerts...

It will be... interesting [read: infuriating] to see if the spread of Omicron changes that at all. 

Climate Change is in much the same situation: we're confronted with example after example of just how bad it is and just how much worse it's going to get, and we're well past the point where if we'd acted seriously we could have avoided the worst of it... and yet we're still not doing anything about it. Oh, a lot of individuals and families are; but that's like trying to fend off an iceberg with a blow-dryer. We need large-scale structural changes, the kind of things that affect whole countries and industries, and every time someone tries to even look at doing that the Powers That Be immediately move to block and discredit them. 

Meanwhile, the would-be fascist coup is still ongoing and very well might still succeed; the Republican party has clearly decided that the best way to run a democracy is to prevent anyone who might disagree with them from voting. They'll do it legally if they can, but they'll do it either way. The anti-vaxxers and QAnon true believers and Big Lie promoters are all still out there doing their thing, and maybe even getting more virulent; I'm seeing more and more reports of the QAnon types assaulting hospital personnel for using actual medical procedures instead of snake oil. Some of the folks who besieged the capital back on January 6th (with the apparent intention of hanging the vice president and probably Nancy Pelosi and some others as well as trying to overturn the results of the election) have been arrested and some have even been given jail time, but the ones who were leading the attempted coup right out there in the open? Nothing but the distant chirping of crickets. And police reform of any kind? Dead in the water.

On a personal note, as I've said a couple of times already, 2021 feels as if it looked at 2020 and said, "Well, that was a good series of unrelenting disasters, but what if we tried it again and this time we made it personal?" I think we might be through the worst of that, but I'm afraid to say so; might be tempting fate, after all. And I sure as hell don't want to give 2022 any ideas.

::sigh::

Also from a personal perspective, so much of what I intended to get done in 2021 just... didn't happen. Write a book? I now have three pages and a really excellent outline, but it feels like it just got shoved aside by everything else that was happening. Finishing [Project A] and [Project B] at work? Sidelined by a weird combination of Other Projects and weird technical difficulties that I haven't really had the time or energy to properly troubleshoot, in no small part because of Other Projects. Career advancement? There's a joke. I have managed a few things -- I started studying Spanish and German again -- but they don't feel like much.

2021 feels like it just went by in a sort of horrible blur because I've just spent most of the year being overwhelmed by thing after thing after thing. And yeah, I say that knowing full well that things could have gone a lot worse for us in a lot of different ways, because that doesn't really change anything. It's still been pretty horrible, and there's a particular sort of exhaustion that comes from having dealt with this shit for two years now, if not longer.

Goodbye, 2021. Good riddance. May 2022 break the cycle, even if it's just a matter of small steps in the right direction. And you, my lovely friends: take good care of yourselves, and take good care of each other. It's the only way through.

December 2021: State of Us

Last Thursday was the first of Beautiful Wife's follow-up surgeries following the mastectomy back in the beginning of September. This one was primarily aesthetic cleanup, and as a result more superficial... though it was still surgery under anesthetic, which is nothing to take lightly. Still, after about five hours of surgery and half an hour of recuperation, I was able to take her back home. 

Of course, I still had to set up the cot again -- the loft bed is a no-go zone for her right now -- and I'm back to being the Walker of the Dog, and I picked up Mediterranean food for us on the way home, and...

Yeah. 

We're doing pretty well, all things considered. She's recovering quickly (a couple of iron supplements and a lot of Gatorade made a huge difference in that), and she's already at that stage where she has energy to get up and move around and do things right up until she doesn't anymore. It won't be too long until I need to put up another round of "It's Important To Be Boring" signs. She's already allowed to drive, though I don't think the doctors really appreciated the intricacies of climbing into the van while it's parked in the garage. 

On my end, I'm back to running support for Beautiful Wife and not much else -- especially with the last of the holidays getting ready to fall on my head like a ton of bricks. I have no real news from work, no real progress on most of my writing, and no real expectation that either of those things will change any time soon. It's the nature of the season: everything that happens this time of year is both desperately urgent, and simultaneously on hold. I did get more sleep and I intend to continue that, both because it will eventually help and also it's about all I can do right now. 

Monday (tomorrow, at the time of this writing) will be a day of sorting through projects and assigning priorities, following up on things that would be done by now if all the forces in the Universe weren't conspiring to delay me, and just possibly buying a lottery ticket in the vain hope of deliverance.

Oh, and bacon. I need to buy more bacon.

Writing? What is writing?

This weekend has been a lot more relaxed than those from the last few weeks. Beautiful Wife and I managed to go see Dune -- with some friends yet -- and then eat together and discuss it afterwards. (I am not having much look persuading people that Dune is clearly a Christmas movie, though. Unfortunate, that.) This sort of thing was rare for us even before the pandemic began, and I'm very much afraid that it's about to become rare all over again as the next waves of the pandemic come around.

Hopefully I'll be wrong about that. 

Even so, December seems to be hurtling along towards 2022 at breakneck speed, and I am absolutely up to my eyeballs with projects at work even as the holidays and related vacations make it harder and harder to coordinate with the people I need for those. One of them, at least, we've simply rescheduled for mid-January; it would take one of our systems down for anywhere from twenty minutes to several hours, and we can't afford to do that right now. And I haven't seen any movement on job reclassification or the alternate position I applied for. I know people are aware that I've applied -- it's at least been mentioned -- but my employer tends to handle such things with a speed that might best be described as "glacial".

So taking the weekend and just... not breaking my neck trying to Clean All The Things and Run All The Things and actually just slowing down a bit has been good. Maybe not quite enough, but good. At least I don't feel like I'm balancing on the edge of collapse. It helps that 3/4 of the youth D&D game couldn't make it (finals and projects and grade, oh my!)  so it was basically just Firstborn and his friend hanging out for a couple of hours and playing videogames. I took a nap. (A nap!) 

And I've got another D&D game tonight (Sunday), rescheduled from its usual Tuesday night.  It very nice to feel like I'll get there with enough brain intact to play well and keep up with the math. (It's 3.5, which is a lot mathier than Fifth Edition.) Looking forward to that.

What I haven't gotten back is enough energy and focus to do more than minimal writing. I've added the next scene for Dark Armor for Friday, but the Magic School for Monsters project is essentially stalled. I need to start setting aside time specifically for that, but for that to happen I need to get a lot of things more organized, my sleep schedule chief among them. 

Take care out there, my friends. December is shaping up to be wild, and not always in a good way.

Some Writing

So most of what I got done this weekend -- and why the actual fuck it "what I got done" a defining characteristic of my weekend? Like seriously, how fucked-up is that? Why should I need to feel like I'm working as hard on my "time off" as I am on during the week? Or harder? Where the hell is my time to rest and relax?

So most of what I got done this weekend was running and sorting laundry -- a solid eight hours worth, at least -- and running the youth D&D game, which isn't a chore but still requires spending some energy. Also? A database migration for a major application. And between the work I'm doing at work and the work I'm doing at home, I've managed very little writing. A bit for the blog, for Friday; and another pass through a short story involving a demon or two and a drinking contest with a human drinking partner. 

I do not want to be at work today. I do not want to be at work at all. I am behind on about six or seven major projects, I'm not getting paid enough for the work I'm putting in on them, I have no help, and I'm slowly realizing that for as much as I like my job, I really don't like my job. And I have a bunch of other stupidly-inconvenient things that I also need to do, like get my oil changed and clean the cage of the lizard-goddess. 

I shouldn't even take it easy. I should just push through and do as much as I can, and then go to bed at like 8:00 like the responsible adult that I will never in my life fucking be except by accident. And honestly I probably shouldn't publish this, because everybody wants everybody to pretend that everything is fine, but there is no goddamn way that I'm the only one here. 

::sigh::

Writing-wise? A bit more of Dark Armor, which I think is going off in an interesting direction, and a pretty good run through the short story, though I need to proofread and review before I show that one to anybody. 

Sleep? No, chronically underslept at this point. I keep trying to break that cycle, but look...

Oh, good. It's one of those Sunday nights where I'm completely depressed about the prospect of Monday morning and so I'm staying up hoping to find something that makes me feel better, which is going to make Monday suck even more.

— Michael Mock (@MockRamblings) October 18, 2021

And it would be wonderful if recognizing that offered any way to break the pattern, but it doesn't. 

Still... any writing progress is better than no writing progress, right? 

Also, as a general statement of philosophical outlook? Fuck capitalism.

Monday Medical Update: Progress

 So right yes, Beautiful Wife and I are still neck deep in the recover phase of her surgery. And frankly, she's recovering better and more quickly than she has any right to: she got her post-surgical drain shunts removed last Thursday, which was less than two weeks after the surgery. (The shunts were technically called something like Jackson-Pratt drains, I think.)

Which can also be a problem, because the doctor explained (and I'm paraphrasing): "So you know what happens next? You feel so much better that you over-exert yourself, and tear something inside, and then I have to do more surgery to fix it. So don't do that. Be boring."

This is why I now have have signs all over the house, extolling the virtues of being boring. "Ask yourself: am I boring enough?" "Boring is the new Black." "Boringness is next to Godliness. Be boring -- become DIVINE." And, on the dishwasher: "Ask yourself: could my husband be doing this for me? (Yes. The answer is yes.)" 

So basically, we'll be just fine as long as we can frustrate every single one of Beautiful Wife's most basic instincts. 

And she really isn't recovered yet; her energy's back up, but it doesn't last. Which means that I'm still trying to cover bases and spin plates and keep balls in the air and all that sort of thing. Which means we haven't been doing the kids' D&D games, and I can barely manage to play in the ones I'm playing in, and probably half of the last two weeks of work is just going to get coded as family-related sick time. Also, our washing machine is now semi-functional, but still in need of repairs and the laundry hovers on the edge of being out of control. 

We're trying to take time to do things we enjoy anyway, but it's one hell of a balancing act. I've been adding zombie gnomes to the front yard, and Beautiful Wife added a skeletal flamingo. (It'd be a flock of skeletal flamingos, but we haven't been able to find any more.) I'm taking a writing class to help me stay focused on my current project, and it's already proven worth the cost -- and not just because it helps me stay focused, either. 

So, I mean, it's not like everything's dreary; it's just that everything, together, is a lot.

Monday Medical Update

If you know me in real life then you're probably caught up on this already, but back in July Beautiful Wife found out she had breast cancer. On Friday, we went through with a full double mastectomy, complete with cosmetic replacement. Which is... not insignificant surgery. And things can definitely go wrong. And with 2021 being, y'know, What It Is... both of us were honestly kind of terrified even as we agreed that this was definitely the best way to deal with it. 

And if I'm being really honest, I should have left the 'kind of' out of that last sentence. 

I'm not going to describe the ordeal, except to say: 

Fortunately, the surgery seems to have gone every bit as well as that sort of significant bodily trauma possibly could. Beautiful Wife was... worn down as she came out of post-op recovery, and spent most of Friday night sleeping in the hospital room (and being awakened roughly once an hour to be examined by the nurses). By Saturday we'd gotten her some chicken broth and a lot of water, by noon on Saturday she'd been able to get out of bed and go to the bathroom (which she did quite a lot; we were putting plenty of water and a bit of gatorade into her). At lunch she was finally able to order solid food, and by the end of the day she had gotten up and shuffled around the ward twice, supervised but unassisted. 

I write this having gone back home on Saturday night to resume parenting the boys, who have been with their mother-in-law; with any luck, we'll be able to bring Beautiful Wife home tomorrow. If you're reading this, then that hasn't changed; I'll only update if something goes wrong or we have to bring her home later. 

The recuperation phase is going to take a while, but fortunately we have some very good friends; we've got meals covered for at least the next two weeks, and probably three, even if I don't so much as touch the stove. (Thanks, guys!) And it will be at least a week before we get the tests back to confirm that the cancer hadn't gotten into the lymph nodes, which (if you know nothing about medicine or biology) "would be bad" in a very Ghostbusters sense of the phrase. 

But at the moment, it looks like everything has gone just about as well as it possibly could. 

So naturally the washing machine broke down. 

Seriously, fuck 2021, y'all.

Are you kidding me?

So, last Thursday was my crash day; I hit the end of my rope and more or less collapsed. Friday would have been a good day to take things slow, but... no. Instead of methodically working my way through projects, I had a lot of things coming at me; my interruptions had interruptions. That kind of day. 

And by the time I got home I was... overstimulated, overwhelmed, and done. I literally walked in the door, put my pack down, climbed into the bed, and planted my face in the pillow for... an hour and half? Maybe two. 

And then I got a call from work, because some of the forms in our document management system weren't opening, and the document management system is my baby. At eight o'clock. On a Friday night. For a system that we don't have after-hours support for. 

So I rebooted servers, checked disk space and system resources, looked for errors. The first error seemed to indicate that it was a problem with the ODBC connection to the SQL database, but of course by then it was after nine on a Friday and nobody was answering their phones; I finally got somebody to confirm that we hadn't been upgrading our SQL setup or anything that would blow out the ODBC connections, which was reassuring on one level and frustrating on another. 

And then at ten o'clock I got a text from someone else, explaining that none of the documents were opening. It wasn't just the forms anymore; it was everything. And we still don't have after-hours support, and I can't get ahold of anybody at our vendor's office. By then I'd started notifying people higher-up in the IT hierarchy, starting with my boss and the co-worker who also works on this system. I'd also tried a different client and gotten a better, more detailed error that seemed to indicate that the problem was with a particular table in the database.

I swore off it at a quarter to eleven, told the assistant CIO that I'd call our sales rep first thing in the morning and see what it took to get us after-hours support, and that I'd keep everybody posted. Fortunately, we don't have a lot of people in that system on the weekends; unfortunately, the people who are tend to be 9-1-1 operators and the Judge. 

So there I was, on a weekend when I desperately needed to be resting and getting my shit back together, waking up at 7:30 in the morning to call our sales rep directly. Fortunately, she answered. Even more fortunately, she was willing to hook us up with support and bill us later, and by eight o'clock I was back to troubleshooting and probably ten minutes after that we'd determined that yeah, we definitely needed to get the software company on the line. I'd also managed to send follow-up messages to the folks I'd left messages for the night before, saying that never mind, it was something fairly specific and I probably didn't need them unless we had to restore the database from a backup, gods preserve us. 

So it was... 9:45 Saturday morning, I think, by the time we'd fixed the issue and I'd confirmed that things were working again and started notifying people. The issue was in the table that I'd thought it was, and it was basically that we'd hit a maximum number of records within sequel and needed to reset the count. So this issue might conceivably come up again, in a decade or so. Basically, the table tracks document histories: when the document was created, when it was modified, who looked at it, etc. And it was effectively full, so when someone tried to open a document the system would try to write a record of that transaction to this table, and the table would basically reply with, "Phphphphphphphphbt! No room!" 

I'm still going to have deal with the "and bill us later" part of getting support -- the very idea makes me tired -- but the system's up and working again and my weekend is only sort of all shot to hell. 

...Or, at least, that's what I said on Saturday, before we woke up Sunday morning to find that the air conditioner wasn't cooling the house. In Texas. In August. 

I'm so tired. 

Fortunately, we know a guy in our area who's very, very good at such things, and he was able to swing by at noon. Turns out some sort of supplemental component in the outdoor section of the system had quit working, and he was able to replace it on the spot, in less than half an hour -- and for a very reasonable price. And while it took most of the afternoon, the house did get back down to its normal temperature. 

Then the dog ate a plate of bacon I'd prepared as a snack, while I was on the other side of the house sorting school pick-ups and other bits of logistics; but by that point I didn't even care. I just made myself another plate. Dog's gonna dog.

So that's where I am right now. I need to pick up Secondborn from school on Monday and Tuesday, and I'm almost deliriously unfocused. I'm still going to go into work, because there are still several projects I need to get done...

But there may be a day or two this week where I just let a lot of things go to voicemail while I tackle things at my own pace.

Burned Out

I finally crashed yesterday. I'd been trying to do it Tuesday night, but my body didn't cooperate -- possibly because I got a lot done at work and was still riding an adrenaline high. I could feel it coming, I just couldn't get ahead of it enough to make it happen overnight. 

No, instead I woke up Thursday morning to the realization that the CPAP machine had somehow gotten unplugged during the night, which meant that I hadn't been breathing as well or sleeping as deeply as I needed, and that I had nothing left. I got up, got Secondborn up, put food in front of him, and then fixed the CPAP machine. 

And then I sent an email to my boss and went back to sleep. And despite a couple of work-related interruptions, I slept until about 1:00. And it was good sleep, with lots of weird dreams and rapid eye movements. So I checked to make sure that nothing else was on fire, helped a couple of people who needed guidance with one thing or another, and other than that basically didn't do anything. I think I did maybe an hour of total work; the rest of the day was just me being useless. 

Well, I say that. I collected the boys, got them dinner, and walked the dog... because Beautiful Wife wasn't doing any better than I was. But she made it through her day, got home, and went to bed -- and honestly that's the best idea I've seen in years, so I'm going to go do the same. 

So here, have some Halestorm for the occasion:

And here, if you want something a little... lighter... Thomas Benjamin Wild Esq.:

I am tired of these people

 

 

Yeah, I'm... "having a moment" over here. We're right back where we were last year in terms of COVID-19, except that by now we should know better... but we still have several Republican governors who clearly want people to get sick, and at least one who's decided that it's more profitable politically to offer a more-expensive "cure" to sick people than it is to keep them from getting sick in the first place. 

I don't even have words for this; just rage. This is my family that these assholes are willfully endangering.

And unlike Dr Manhattan, I can't even teleport to Mars. Even more tragically, I can't teleport our governor to Mars.

I want them to face consequences; I hope they do. But I'm not holding my breath for that.

I am so tired.

Fuck 2021, too

 So 2020 was a shit year, all the way around. 

But holy hell, 2021 sure as shit seems to want to make it personal. 

My father-in-law died of liver cancer back in May. The funeral was in June. Beautiful Wife found out she had breast cancer in July. We're doing a full double-mastectomy in August. The boys start school again in about a week and a half, in person, masks optional because the Governor of Texas is a murderous asshole. At my work, we just delayed -- again -- a major software migration because the goddam application has too many problems and we haven't been able to get it ready. And last week we learned that we had very possibly been exposed to COVID, because you can't vaccinate kids under twelve and the newer variants can still infect vaccinated folks even if they don't seem to do them as much immediate damage. 

We got tested over the weekend, and the tests came back negative, but still. Avoiding people for another week, just to be sure.

Also, it's raining outside -- I'm writing this on Sunday -- which I normally find comforting but right now? Here? In Texas? In August? --feels like the bell that tolls for the end of the world by way of climate change. 

And we could solve this. We could solve all of this. We could solve this, except we can't because of all the people who keep insisting that we shouldn't be worried about it in the first place. 

I've said before that it's probably a good thing that the gods don't grant me Vast Supernatural Powers because I'd actually use them, but I've reconsidered. Give me that sort of power. See what I do with it. And let the powers of this world weep, because I'm sick to death of doing that myself over issues that shouldn't be issues.

Burn it all down.