Days to Months

Work

It's Monday--Tuesday morning, actually, just before 3:00 a.m. I'm at work. I'm not usually at work at this time, but I agreed to trade shifts with someone and so here I am.

I've been dealing with some increased vertigo the last couple of days. Sometimes it's hormonal. Sometimes it's weather-related. This time, ugh, who knows? But I hate feeling this way, especially when I have too much time to think about it, as I do tonight. I took my blood pressure here at work and it's a bit low for me (the first time it was 117/80 and the second time it was 126/72 so who knows how low it is exactly). I've been eating extra flax meal, but maybe I'll hold off on doing that until my BP comes up a bit just to see if it is BP related.

So I'm drinking a ton of water, too, just in case, as that is something that gets BP up. (I may also be getting sick, courtesy of one of the kids, who was sick over the weekend and spent the night coughing in my face whenever I spoke to him. So we'll see how well my immune system does at fighting that off.)

I came in early tonight for a meeting and now I regret having done so. I was talking to one of my coworkers who has been here for about eleven years and she was, like, I never come to those things and no one ever says anything about it. So maybe I'll adopt that as my policy, especially now that I'm off probation. (Yes, I've been here longer than five months--probation being five months long.)

So I don't have much to say. I've been working, sleeping, working, sleeping....

We went on Sunday, Dave and I, and had dinner with my mother and brother. We went to the middle eastern place that we like so much and I had my usual. It's kind of a mistake that I can't help but make, because their hummus is delicious--and it gives me the worst gas I've ever had in my life. So I only ate, like, an entire cup full of it. Now I'm suffering. And everyone who walks into the office tonight will suffer with me, I imagine.

My must-get-done work is done, but I have a lot of doesn't-need-to-be-done-ASAP work to do...but I'm taking a quick break before starting in on that work. The soonest any of it is due is three days from now. Most of it is not due for a month or two. It's hard to get motivated to get it done at 3:15 in the morning, especially when it's not due for days to months.

Since I don't usually work on Mondays, most of the crew is only tangentially familiar to me. Of my two techs, I work with one regularly and the other rarely. I trust both of them, luckily. A few nights ago, I had two new techs, which is fine if everything goes well, but which is not ideal if things go poorly.

Yikes. One of the higher ups just wandered at 3:20 in the morning. It's the second time I've seen her on a graveyard shift in almost six months, so....that was kind of a surprise. We ended up talking for about forty minutes. I don't really need to do that more than once every six months! Not that I don't want to talk to her, just that I'm used to being all by my lonesome here at night in the office.

 This is still work.

Since I can't really show my workplace, here are some pictures of things I can show, like the backpack I take to work every day:

And my "lunch" bag:

And my computer, with this entry on it:

And the paper trash bag (we use paper because plastic bags are contraband and hard-sided trashcans can become projectiles) in the bathroom:

This is what the bathroom sinks look like:

This is the ground and sidewalk just outside the door of the cottage where I was working:

That's my life, the 3:00 a.m. work version.

After the higher up left, around 4:00 a.m., I had a bit more work to do, including some online competency modules that are not challenging, just time consuming. I had gone into work an hour early (making my shift thirteen and a half hours long instead of twelve and a half) and hour after hour of staring at the computer screen was making my eyes burn. I ended up having to douse them with fake tear eyedrops a couple of times. I finally made it home, almost fourteen hours after having left.

I slept awhile--maybe four hours?--woke up tired and spent a lot of the day just lying in bed on my phone. Around three in the afternoon, my therapist texted me and I had completely forgotten that it was Tuesday and I had a five o'clock appointment. (I cancelled.) I napped on and off and then Dave and I ordered pizza (for both of us) and wings (for me) for dinner. I changed into some more street-clothes looking pajamas to go with Dave to pick up the food and then we brought it back and ate and then I went back to bed. (This is the magic of street-clothes looking pajamas: You can finish your dinner and get right back into bed.) I ended up napping some more. Which is fine, I needed the sleep--only now it's almost one in the morning and I'm way too awake. I should sew or something, but The Brain isn't into that right now.

Dinner was so salty that I ended up eating an avocado and a banana as a midnight snack for the extra potassium. Now I'm drinking loads of water. Maybe I'll watch a movie on Netflix or something. Or try to sleep some more. Wouldn't that be novel?