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.
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.
Quick state of the fox post. I was kind of feeling overly anxious
Monday, having a ton of stuff to do at work, and not a lot of motivation.
Today I managed to flip the switch. Got to work, dug out all my security
audit notes and converted them into one file with details and notes
and my ideas for correcting them. My two meetings went pretty smooth.
I also got stuff done for Operation: Survive Mother's Day, aka getting a
bunch of funny cards and sending them out to people. This year I sent out
8, I'm already pondering next year and ramping it up. I think Mom would
appreciate it, and it turned a possible landmine day into something to be
positive about.
Besides work and mail, I had a good weekend with the HPL Film Festival
(livestreamed for those of us who couldn't make it). Mood has been pretty
good. Looking forward to Saturday, and 'Black Widow: Civil War' (lets
be honest, I'm Team Natasha). Lots of books to read and movies to
watch. Life is feeling pretty ok right now. Hope it stays that way.
Going to try to post more often, don't want to let my blogging skills
get rusty. Catch you all later. *Waves a tentacle*
Well, this Friday was a good day. Work was pretty good, even with a
very long conf call. My mad skills at system monitoring came in handy,
as I figured out a quick organization fix for Cacti, and came up with a
'in theory' way under Nagios to alert for processes that A. use 95% of
the CPU, and B. last more than 30 min. And I could do it with the
built in plugins. I've never DIY'd my own Nagios scripts before, but
between my brainmeats and Nagios having good documentation it was a 5
min to have a plan. And since I'm working on a Nagios setup here
at Château Innsmouth, I'll test it over the weekend before testing it more
on the devel and stage networks at work.
I also volunteered to help a fellow Lovecraftian in Hungary with a thesis
he's doing on HP Lovecraft. He had a ebook copy of Joshi's epic 'I Am
Providence', and had about a dozen citations, but he was worried his
committee would argue that the citations didn't match the physical page
numbers (which I've heard of before). So, I have the 1st edition hardbacks,
so he sent me a list of quotations and their chapters and general location,
and I verified the page numbers (which were way different than the ebook).
Didn't take long, maybe 30 min. Felt good to help another adept of
Grandpa Theobald. *gains 2d6% in Library Research*
I've also watched some really bad horror movies. I'll post one of the
reviews later (I did some of my best writing on Facebook ranting about this
flick). I've moved on to 'The Descent', one of my favorites. Ubuntu
released 16.04 yesterday, so I'm updating my test VMs. Tomorrow
is hermit day, with a side of organizing, and possibly a marathon of
the 'Hellraiser' flicks (random idea I had). I've got to move Dagon
and Shoggoth onto the UPSes, as the last power blip showed me I oopsed
there. There will probably also be a labeling fest, along with more
VM updating and the aforementioned Nagios experimenting. Probably will be
other experimenting, I have a list. Sunday is back to normal, laundry
and TV and Amythest time. Then back to work. I have a meeting/lunch
with my recruiter on...Wednesday? I definitely have to give my recruiter
company this, they keep up with their placed minions. I also have a bunch
of work to do, still playing catch up from being sick, and I keep coming
up with ideas on how to do things, that lead to me getting assigned the
deployment of said ideas. But, instead of freaking out (well for long)
I take it as the challenge it's intended as and go with it. So I expect
the next 3 months to be interesting, and not in the Chinese curse sense
of the word.
So that's the most of the state of the fox. I'm still feeling fairly
meh physically. Worst allergies ever. Mood is better, then again given
how low I swung for a while, I kind of have to be better. Looking forward
to a number of book pre-orders and future geeking and well, stuff. Catch
you all later. *waves a tentacle*
Well, I had a rough night last night. Talked to Amythest and got a shower
and went to bed with a book as normal. All as normal. Turned out
the lights, curled up in bed...and my brain slammed into overdrive thinking
all kinds of negative thoughts. Trapsing through my past and all kind
of mistakes I've made, people I've hurt, decisions I've regretted.
And nothing seemed to snap me out of it. Nothing I was looking forward
to, nothing happy. Ugg, I hate my brain. Finally I got up, made myself
go take a xanax to slow my spinny brain, and I ate some chips and read some
more til things got fuzzier. Got to sleep, and I slept okish. Had
better dreams, weird ones, like I was trying to wake Cthulhu via a
Rube Goldbergian device involving blankets and a hand grenade. No, I
don't know what that means, other than I'd like Cthulhu up and moving around.
Got up, took a while to get moving. Got to work late, but I got breakfast
as well, hashbrowns fix things. Work was...challenging. Mostly not
directly involving me, but frustrating. Not going into it. On the
plus side, 3 month anniversary (or half way done with the contract). Went
to Walmart at lunch, because I knew I'd be lacking in energy by going
home time, and I needed to get away a bit. Weird Wally World, my
large amount of eggs started the cashier on a conversation about flatulence...
why me ? Came back to work, ended up cutting up one of the packs of eggs
for lunch using my multitool. That's probably a sign it's a challenging
day. Finally left late (making up for longer lunch than usual, and being
late), came home to find that half the parking lot is blocked off. Oh
yeah, I remember now. Have to leg it across the complex to Château Innsmouth,
put up groceries and decide that no, Mac & Cheese is too much of an
energy investment. Nuke food it is.
Tonight, I have no idea what's the plan? I'm more than a little worried
about sleep, given last night's thought processes. I'm going to see
about trying to get things on a more positive keel before bed, even if I
wasn't too negative before the lights went out. I don't know, hopefully
I can work something out. At least I get donuts tomorrow. Wish me
luck on tonight.
Another week has ended. Been a less than stellar week. Bad. stressful
dreams, anniversaries of bad things happening to good people, and me
finding myself low on cope and temper. At least I managed to knock
out a ton of out of date tickets today at Carcosa Corp.
I've been more vocal on Facebook, it's easier to spit out a one liner. And
since I don't have ssh access to remote from Carcosa, my usual workflow for
LJ/Wordpress doesn't work. Plus I spend a lot more time writing these things
than I do FB. Not leaving here though, it's just probably going to be a
weekend posting vs daily the way I was. We'll see.
Had my quarterly pshrink visit, things are pretty normal. I do need to get
a yearly physical before my next visit. Shouldn't be a problem. I may
even try to find a GP vs going to Carenow for everything. Need to take
better care of myself I think.
I've also offically decided to turn my gamer system into a new Linux
workstation. I've picked up some additional RAM, and a new SSD and platter
drive (6 TB for the price of 5). Next weekend I'll put my friends at
Dallas Computer Consulting to work and have them install all the bits and
test things, then I'll do the OS side of things. Then I'll probably
spend the next weekend tweaking all the tweaks, importing everything and
testing. If all goes according to plan, it will be a nearly seamless swap
of systems (I'll leave oldDagon running for a while in case my plans fail).
Then oldDagon will be repurposed as a home/backup server. Yay nerdery.
For those who care, I'll be moving back to Ubuntu's Mate flavor from
Linux Mint. Mostly so I can play the newer stuff coming in 16.04 next
month. I'll probably reinstall Hydra at some point to go back to Linux
Mint. Note, this has nothing to do with the security issues they've had.
I just feel a need to move stuff around. I'm also pondering going to a
more cutting edge kernel, instead of sticking with the Ubuntu defaults.
We'll see how everything works first.
Weekend plans? Tonight is my usual, with a side of laundry to catch up
on bedsheets. Tomorrow is a few errands,then social time with friends.
Bad movies and pizza and stuff. Sunday is more laundry and more friend time.
High content of resting. I also have books to read, so many books.
So that's the state of the fox, I'm not my best, but better than say a year
ago. Hopefully after this weekend things will swing up again. It should.
I have faith.
