Weekend report. Saturday was some chores, and then hanging out with
Amythest and Nymaz. Took one of Amythest's kitties to the vet, she's
going fine. Dropped her back off at home, and we went to the movies.
Saw the new 'Independence Day' flick, which was fun, but not as good as
the original. The magic of the original would have been hard to recreate.
The effects were good, and the background of the movie was actually pretty
positive. Plus aliens with tentacles are always good to me.
Post the movie, we went to a local sushi buffet. Nothing out of this
world, but it was pretty tasty. We then ran a couple of errands to kill
time before the second movie...'The Shallows'.
'The Shallows' was your basic woman vs nature, done rather well. The
shark, while it was acting kind of outside the norm for Great Whites,
wasn't completely off the wall like most shark movies. The actress,
Blake Lively, was good. The shark effects were really good. It was a
really good flick, and nice to show sharks as not utter demons, while
still showing them as a creature you should be afraid of. 8 or 9
fins in the water.
Came home after the movie, took forever due to construction on the highway
I didn't notice til it was way too late. Oh well, I had Lovecraftian podcasts
to listen to so I just made the best of it. Got home, went to bed with a
book. One of the 'Aliens' novels that originally came out in the 90's.
Nice bit of xenomorph fluff. Went to bed, slept, dreamed some weird
dreams, and woke up full on anxious. Tried to stay in bed, fail. Took
my meds, and I'm camping out at the Desk of Doom (tm) til things settle
down, then I'll go down and do laundry and stuff at Amythest's as usual.
So yeah, that's my weekend. The anxiety is starting to fade a little,
that's good. Hope it decided to bugger off for a while. I can dream
at least. At least next weekend is a 3 day weekend. Ok, enough rambling.
Catch you all later.
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 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.
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.
Well Saturday plans changed. Socializing for today was rescheduled,
which ended up being a good thing as I had a low tentacle count this
morning. Nothing bad, just am kind of glad to be home. I still need
to leave the house to go grocery shopping and do pet care, but that will
be towards the evening, with a side of take out on the way home.
Nyogtha is chugging along with backup restores. Like I said yesterday, need
to put the array on eSATA in the near future. I also moved Shoggoth
back to my desk, hooked it up to the spare monitor/keyboard/mouse, and
added an X desktop so it can act as a tertiary system, as well as a
display for monitoring foo. I also finished the reboots, nothing else
broke, yay. The rsync process is kind of eating CPU, so I'm trying to
avoid doing my usual updates on Dagon. Mostly I'm just editing things
and watching movies and trying to think of stuff I need to add to
Nyogtha that I had installed before.
Otherwise I've futzed around the house, done chores, etc. Currently
watching the first 'Final Destination' flick. Not my favorite, but
still worth watching. Not much else of note today. Guess I'll call this a
post. Laters gators.
And it's Friday, thank Cthulhu. Been an 'interesting' week. Boss was
in town from Wed-Friday, and that always makes me edgy. Nothing particular
he does or doesn't do, just my track record with managers kind of sucks.
But I got a good lunch out of it, and the manager is pretty easy to get
along with. So that's good.
Besides work, I'm slowly crawling out of the allergen infested swamp that
my life has been for a long while. But as I get past the allergies,
other things start flaking. My brainmeats aren't much better...between
the anniversary of Mom's passing and Mother's Day (even with the
fun of sending out Mother's day cards to people I know), I've been all over
the map. To the point that unless in the next couple of weeks I settle
down, my next pshrink visit will be a discussion of adjusting my meds.
(Which is one of my least favorite things, med side effect adapting sucks).
We'll see, but really this last few weeks have been unhappy brainweasel
territory. And that's not good for me.
On the brighter side, it's Friday. Friday the 13th, which means a marathon
of my favorite camp councilor slaughter. I'm also doing my usual
geekery, currently updating the Ubuntu Desktop VM horde. I had some
mental plans to do some more involved upgrades and moves and stuff, but
I decided I rather be social-ish tomorrow and Sunday. Best friend time
and all, with a possible side of reinstalling Uxía the laptop's OS.
I'm thinking of sticking Xubuntu (XFCE desktop) on it. Not that I use
my laptop much anymore, that whole not on call thing.
Not much else, trying to catch up on the to-read pile before a small
flood of Lovecraftian fiction comes my way. Yay for preorders making
appearances. Yay books with tentacles. On that note, since I've been
staring at this post for a while now, I'll call it done. Catch you all
on the flip side. *waves a tentacle*
Still not back to normal physically. This has been the worst season
for allergies I can remember. Stupid lack of winter this year. I'm also
having spikes of emotional foo. Last night in particular. I went to bed
to read, turned out the lights about midnight and my brain immediately
starting replaying things from my past I rather not think about. Pried
myself out of bed and dove back into reading. Went back to sleep about
1am, and that worked out better. Right now I'm ok. Well besides
coughing.
Saw 'Black Widow: Civil War' yesterday *wink* Was fun, lots of nifty
fight scenes, a little too much angst in spots. But it met up to the
hype.
Haven't done much this weekend otherwise, haven't had a lot of drive. Did
hook up the spare widescreen monitor to Hydra. Which was cool in a
plug+play kind of way, but it's not as useful as I thought. Oh well.
I may decide to move Shoggoth over, and add LXDE to the server and have
it run with a monitor as well. I dunno.
Going to go down to Amythest's in a while and do all the laundries. She's
offered to make her chicken noodle soup for me since I'm feeling puny.
Best friends rock. The work week will probably be a little stressful.
I have a number of things I need to get done, and our boss (who works
out of Kansas City) will be in town for part of the week. Not a bad thing,
but last visit kind of generated a lot of waves. Lets hope this is a good
week.
Not much else. I've got the TV on one of my haunting shows on as
background noise. I'll probably cook some lunch in a bit, then head
on down. Ok. I'm going to call this a post. Catch you all later.
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*
