I forgot, I gave up caffeine, and I'm finally starting to not feel like utter
crap. I've known for a while that my Code Red habit wasn't good for my
health, but I didn't have the willpower or immediate reasons to quit.
Then a number of messages from the multiverse came in, and I decided I
needed to quit before I had big reasons to. Plus, caffeine + anxiety is
not a good mix. Along with that, I've cut majorly down on sugar. It's
been kind of rough. Last time I quit caffeine, I was in the hospital with
Stan, and well, amazing what painkilers can do. It's been a week and change
since I stopped all together, and about 3 since I started tapering down.
I do miss it, especially getting up in the AM (and Friday night movies fests)
but I think the physical foo is over. I've been drinking lots of water,
which is better for me both physically and on the budget. So that's the
addendum, I'm actually trying to be healthier. Go Me!
Not sure how long it's been since I did one of these. Probably not long,
but here it is. At the beginning of the month I posted about going to
the pshrink to up my meds. I go back next week, and I'm going to say
that while it's helped, it's not helped as much as I'd want. Maybe another
dose up, as I am doing better. Or maybe a different med will be the
answer. I don't know, but I'm willing to try. And that's a big change
from last year, hell, from a couple of months ago.
Work is good. Figured out why I was anxious at the job, even though I'm
working with some very cool people, and nothing has felt like the stressors
of the Shoggoth Pit. But I still find meetings and dealing with the boss
as a cause of anxiety, because for years I'm used to having bosses who
yelled, who enjoyed winding me up, who had no clue how to handle people.
I now have a boss who's helpful, and can say 'you did this incorrectly,
here's what you should have done' without making it a chances to yank my
chain. I just need to get used to it, and it's probably going to take
a while longer. But I see that I can, and why I feel the way I do, and
with that, I can change things.
Personal life is good. Been spending a lot of time buried in books.
Friends are good, friends are great. Even if I haven't been quite the
social butterfly. Château Innsmouth is as it usually is. Most everything
is pretty ok. Well it's overly warm, and my internet has issues, but
nothing I can't handle.
That's pretty much Vulpine's life here at Château Innsmouth. Hoping it
stays that way. Catch you all later, hopefully with a stable internet
connection. Ciao.
Well Saturday has been alright. Woke up after a weird dream about buying
and running a school. Futzed around the Château Innsmouth, maintenance
never showed. *sigh* Watched 1.5 Amityville Horror flicks, then headed
up to visit some friends. Who's AC was out, ick. Got to finally watch
'The Witch' with subtitles, which cleared up some dialog bits, but it
seems I grokked the general Puritan theology and 17th century English.
Also watched the original 'Poltergeist', always a fun flick. But after
that flick I was pretty much a puddle, so I headed home with the AC on
high.
Got Taco Bell for dinner, finished watching the .5 of the 2nd Amityville
movie. Got mail after the sun went down, which including my replacement
NecronomiPod. It's currently running through all the updates. And boy
is there a lot of them. Also watching 'Amityville 3D' which is one of my
guilty pleasures.
Probably going to make it a fairly early night of bed and book, getting
overheated will do that to a fox. Plus I have a ton of Mythos and Ancient
History to read. Tomorrow is keeping up the ghostness, the plan is to go
see 'The Conjuring 2' with Amythest. It's been a ghostly weekend I guess.
Catch you all later, unless the spooks catch me first.
Took today off, I had major issues getting out of bed Wednesday, and I had
a ton of social activity planned for the weekend. Plus I had errands
that I needed to get done during daylight hours. Boss was cool about it,
so were my fellow Carcosa geeks. Came home last night, did general
pick up around the apartment, watched some cheesy movies and in general
relaxed. Yay for pseudo Fridays.
Slept in today, went to my old bank and closed out the accounts. Yay
finally getting the great bank swap of 2016 done. Went to the store to
fill in a few gaps, and came home. By the time I got home around 10:30
it was already melting fox temperatures. I put in a request for my
complex to take a look at a water leak in my bathroom ceiling. Hung
around Château Innsmouth all day waiting on maintenance. (I hate strange
people in my apartment). Finally gave up a little while ago. Maybe
they will show up early tomorrow. *eyeroll*
Watched some more bad horror movies, then switched gears and put on
'Wanted: Dead or Alive'. 80's action flick starring one of my favorite
actors, Rutger Hauer. Probably going to watch another Hauer flick,
'Nighthawks' afterwards. Been doing my usual day off geekery. Just
ordered Chinese food for dinner. Nom nom nom.
Fox is doing ok. Still getting used to not having caffeine daily. *looks
back* Oh, I never noted that here. I'm cutting out caffeine (aka Code Red)
and cutting way back on soda and sugar. Which will be good for my health,
but ye gods and little fishies it's been hard. Especially in the AM. But,
it will get better. That whole getting healthy thing, and living til
Cthulhu rises and stuff. And a lack of caffeine should lead to less
anxiety, or so I'm told.
Well that's about it for my day off. Tomorrow is fun with friends,
and Sunday is hanging out with Amythest and stuff. Good way to
spend a weekend. Will catch you all later. *waves a tentacle*
I was feeling quite blue today, no real big reason, just feeling a little
useless, and out of sorts. Then I was reminded that I work in a (fun kind of)
looney bin. One of the developers decided on a whim to dye his goatee blue.
And on our internal chat channel, me and another developer shared a brain
and both commented about using the blood of smurfs to dye it with.
It's nice to work with people who are as nuts as me. Also, boss is in
town, and took us out for tacos. Yay free lunch.
The other big mood reset was I went back and read my offline journal for
last year, for the 3 months around when I quit the Shoggoth Pit. July
through September. And it sunk in how utterly miserable I was there,
the stress, the ex-boss from hell, along with trying to rebuild my life
after Mom's passing. I'm kind of surprised that I didn't end up in a
psych ward by late August. There was a lot of ick in those entries.
But I do remember one thing, towards the end, when I'd already written out
my plan to deass the job (aka Operation: Leng), I wrote something in the
vein of 'My dream is to be in a better place by next year, financially,
professionally, etc'. And here it is, 9 months later and I've got a good
job where I feel appreciated (and get paid pretty well), I don't dread
every morning, nor do I have horrible dreams every night. It's not all
rainbows and unicorns, but so what ? I'm actually comfortable enough to
say to my pshrink 'Ok, things aren't as good as they could be...what can help?'
vs my traditional 'it's working well enough, don't change'. And that means
a lot.
So yeah, I'm doing better. It's good when I can catch myself, and reset
before I spiral way down. I'm also glad I took that leap 9 months ago,
even if it scared the fhtagn out of me, and there were a bunch of times
that I thought I'd screwed up royally by leaving the 'Pit. But I didn't,
and things got better, and life got better, and huzzah for me and stuff.
Well, after a crazy week of working at Carcosa, I've gladly lazed most
of last night and today. The Thursday night maintenance went much better
than Tuesday. Less servers, more help, more planning. Still didn't get
enough sleep, so come Friday night after work I pretty much ate dinner,
and went to bed with a book. Was asleep before 10am, and I pretty much
slept til 10am. Had some unpleasant dreams about a former friend, and
some weird ones about blood relatives and submarine bases (reading
wiki articles on subs probably contributed to the later. Also, somewhere
there was sabre fencing. *shakes head* My subconsciousness needs a deep
cleaning.
Got up today, got moving. Cleaned out the car finally, went and did critter
care, got meds, got packages, and ended up coming home due to a lack of
tentacles. Been watching a collection of 'Devil Worship Horror Movies'
mostly from the 70's. Epicly cheesy and fun, definitely got my money's
worth. Done some chores, done some VM updates, mostly just have been
vegging.
My Nexus 5 decided to flake out, so I migrated back to my old 4, and put in
a RMA request from the company I bought the 5 from. Very annoying. Glad
I hung on the 4 for experimental purposes. Did manage to pull a backup,
and reset it to factory default before sending it off. Still a pain in
the tentacle.
Ok, going to call this a post, and keep on watching the wild fun of
bad movies. Catch you all later.
I'm not doing so hot. Last night's maintenance was stressful and ended up
having a bunch of issues in the AM, things I was told would just work
after reboots. But before that, I went to the pshrink and admitted that
my depression cycles are getting worse, my temper is short, and I spend a
lot of time thinking about regrets and sad memories. It started during the
build up to the anniversary of Mom's passing, but it didn't really go
away. What really sucks, I looked at my journal entries from a year ago,
and it's like nothing has changed. Same moody, same easily frustrated,
same pondering of new monitors. *shakes head* So we're upping my
original med to see if that helps, and I go back in a month (actually
28 days) to see how it's going. I hate changing meds, as side effect hell
is well, hell. But this is a med I've been on for years, so upping it
shouldn't cause too many. At least that's the hope.
Work was insane. Trying to make Sybase databases work, when I have almost
no experience with them. I made some progress, but I had to wait on the
senior admin to get in to show me how to fix the weird development setup.
WHich I ended up arguing with all day on and off. Add to that lack of
sleep, and a phone that was in a reboot loop and I was pretty close to
having a fit. On the plus side, other than one testy email, no one gave
me grief, even got thanks from one of the devs for leaping on to things
and fixing them quickly. Was going to leave exactly at 5, but there
was one last dev database missing, and since I had it down to a science,
I stayed a little late to bring it up. Which verified my notes are good,
so I'll try to write it up in detail tomorrow for the company wiki.
So yeah, I'm very tired, I'm stressed, I'm anxious about tomorrow's foo,
because there's a ton of servers, and they're production machines, so not
much wiggle room. With the experience last night it should be better, but
I'm still worried about a career limiting move. So we'll see what I can
do for better prep tomorrow. Also see if I can beat my phone into
submission so it stops rebooting on me. Or contact the seller and get a
replacement, since I'm still in the 90 day refurb warranty. But for now
I'm going to chill out, got to bed early and hopefully feel better tomorrow.
So today was meeting up with the Musketeers and going to see XMen:
Apocalypse. But first, as is traditional for Memorial Day Weekend, I
raided a couple of Half Price Books for 20% off savings. Got a couple
of 'loaner' copy books to hook friends on favorite authors, a horror
collection of randomness (with a T.E.D. Klein story I've never read),
another book on HPL I didn't have, and a DVD copy of 'Ravenous'. Yay for
snazzy and cheap stuff.
Went to see XMen. It's pretty good, though kind of over long and slow in
spots. My favorite XMan is there, Nightcrawler. They need to give him
a saber and some swashes to buckle though. Psylocke was epicly yummy,
and the big battles were fun to watch. Not the best Marvel flick ever,
but worth watching on the big screen.
Ran some errands after the movie, hung out for a bit and was amused at
cats stalking the wild ice cream back at Chez Amythest's. Came home,
cranked up the AC, and started watching Deadpool, because who doesn't
like Deadpool ? Going to stay up for a while, probably watch some more
superhero flicks. They are one of my favorite non-horror genres.
Tomorrow is knocking my TODO list down to size. So much laundry... But
hermit time will be good. Still trying to think of a good marathon of
movies to watch while doing chores. We'll see. Catch you all later.
Three day weekend. So much yay. Though next week will be kind of crazy
making up for extra day off (down side of a contract position). Weekend
plans are going to see the new X-Men movie tomorrow, and helping with
a certain Amythest organizing a home office. (No, I'm not setting up a
minifridge full of Code Red and a Cthulhu statue...not my idea of a home
office). Sunday and Monday I'm planning on hermiting mostly, and doing
some chores. Mostly down time though. I'm feeling a little kerfrazzled
and I think I need me, my bad movies, my computer horde and my books to
relax. A little stressed about next week's weird hours and pshrink visit.
Given the rough time I've had, I have a feeling we need to tweak my meds.
And that's something I dislike, side effect adjustment sucks. But, I
could be better. And hopefully I will be quickly.
Otherwise things are decent. Been reading a lot which is kind of a given.
History and Cthulhu, it's been a bit of a bonanza the last few weeks with
Mythos stuff. Work stuff is good, will be working my first maintenances
at Carcosa, the above mentioned weird hours to make up for the day off.
Which honestly, I'm looking forward to. I do not like making other people
do work that I can do. Silly contract limitations. Not really much
else for the week. So I guess I'll call this post done. Probably ramble
more tomorrow. Catch you all later.
