Hi, friends!
Today was a very productive day! I took the day off work, so right off the bat it was bound to be a good day.
I got my second covid vaccine shot today! And then I went grocery shopping at one of the fancier stores where the seafood counter can bake food for you on the spot (which is so damn convenient!), so lunch today and tomorrow was all set. Then I got fancy orange cauliflower and a pork tenderloin so weekend cooking is going to be awesome.
I cleaned the trash and clutter out of my car, and then also did more house cleaning. Nothing in the kitchen, because I am cooking tonight and I see no reason to clean a stove or countertop only to make another mess on it 2 hours later.
I got my annual bonus today, which meant I got the joy of feeling really fucking fancy for about 4 hours before I threw most of it at debt. While it would have been fun to go spend a bunch of it on something fun, (1) I don’t know what that would be and (2) the sooner I have the windows I financed paid off, the better.
And then! Earlier this week my local mutual aid group needed someone to help manage the outdoor pantry box I fill, and I volunteered. Apparently a church on the other side of my community does food drives and they said they can drop a box off on my porch once a week for the pantry. Which is awesome! They brought over 2 (!!!) boxes earlier and there’s some nice variety of stuff. I’m getting it organized to stock the pantry tomorrow morning.
Friends – did you have a productive day? What all happened today?
I enjoy days like what you had.
Me? I had the accomplishment of enjoying sound sleep after working a stupid shift of night shift. First sound sleep I’ve had in five miserable fucking days.
Made a meal (can’t call it breakfast) of pan fried chicken and ramen style noodles with green beans and fresh veggies. Even washed the dishes…
I got through work. That’s about it. Hopefully I can get important stuff (stuff I care about) this weekend.
Work. AAAAGGGHHHH! First thing this morning I find an email sent to me at 6:30 last night giving me a spreadsheet with hundreds of classes to review and categorize according to competencies they address. In addition, the email told me the individual who sent it needed it by close of business on Monday.
I carefully craft my reply, pointing out that this is a. a great deal of information requiring significant work and b. some of it lies outside my area of expertise and will require the input of another person who is currently out of the office with death in her family and c. I’ve got jury duty on Monday and thus will likely be unable to assist in this lofty goal beyond today.
No sooner do I press “send” than I receive an “out of office” message from the person who sent me the request. Yes, he literally threw the ball at me and sprinted away to take vacation time. How delightful it is to work with such considerate co-workers.
Well, then. Won’t he be surprised when he gets back from vacation and sees that you didn’t rescue him from his own shitty laziness.
Yes. Yes, he will.
Email! His! Boss!
Signed,
I’m petty as fuck
Oh, I copied his boss on all of it. ‘Cause I’m petty as fuck, too.
Worked and it was rather productive. This weekend is pretty wide open, which means I will probably spend most of Saturday fucking off. I do have an appointment for a haircut…but Mrs. Butcher has decided she likes it longer and wants me to keep growing it.
I shredded documents. Old bank statements. Old phone bills. Old insurance statements. Credit card statements. Receipts.
I usually throw all of that stuff into a box in case it’s ever needed (it’s not) and every few years purge it. Today was the day. I’m down to the last six months and the box is breathing easy. I realize somebody could be prowling the alley on recycling day and do an Argo* style job involving hundreds of child laborers and reconstruct my cell phone bill from 2019, but I strongly suspect that won’t happen.
*I was originally going to say that Argo is the least worthy of the Best Picture Oscar winners of this century, but looking back at the list there are a lot of forgettable contenders. A Beautiful Mind. Crash. Slumdog Millionaire. Hurt Locker. King’s Speech. The Artist. Green Book. They’re not really terrible, but I can’t imagine they’d make anybody’s top 20 list of the best movies of the 2000s. Of course I look at a lot of the other nominees for those years and I have to wonder what the Academy was thinking.
-The Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz – it’s about a San Francisco 30something slacker/stoner/private investigator, who sometimes works for her dysfunctional family’s PI business. At one point in the series, she hires her kid sister to sort and assemble a couple trashbags of shredded documents. I find Lutz way too funny.
sorry, weird tangent, but I couldn’t let that slip…
I though Crash was especially schlocky Oscar-bait. I’m not sure if I’ve seen the rest of that list aside from Crash and Argo. And anyways, don’t the Oscars have a pretty long history of picking movies based on Hollywood politics and “paying dues” and not what is actually ground breaking or just really damned well done?
I spent most of my day driving. Left at 9am & got home a little while ago . We took my eldest to the town of her college next year to look at apartments. We could only tour one of the most expensive ones that I would love to live in! Mostly just drove around & said yay or nay by looks outside & took info. We did have lunch at a favorite brewpub in the area but I’m wiped from all the driving.
We did the second round of sheep shearing today. It went much more smoothly than the first round, which happened on the day of the big ice storm. We’ve got one more round in March, and then lambing season starts. We also have a pregnant donkey named Penny so I’ll get to see my first baby donkey soon. It’s coming on Spring here in the hills.
Sheep shearing — anything like this?
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/feb/25/mammoth-woolly-baarack-the-overgrown-sheep-shorn-of-his-35kg-fleece
No, our sheep our very well-tended. That guy grew out because he got wild.
I was reminded of that other lost sheep mentioned in the article, and am glad they referenced it.
I’m also really glad I have thumbs and can use tools…
If I recall, you’re in or near the Blue Ridge Mountains? It’s a beautiful area, a dear friend lives near part of the range and it’s so lovely when I get to visit.
I shore am on the Ridge. It’s real nice here. I’ve only been here on the farm about a year and lived in town before that. It’s slow right now because of the pandemic and I don’t get to see people hardly at all. Once we get vaccinated, we’re gonna open our doors.
@Luigi Vouto, can you figure out how to share videos of the baby donkey and baby lambs when the time comes?
I’ll see if I can figure that out. I would love be be able to share videos of this place.
work was one of those mildly frustrating days, because on paper it looks like I was super unproductive when I tally up my time spent on different tasks, but it’s just the nature of those tasks. I can get a lot done when I can work on just one or two things for a solid chunk of time. But all this week, I’ve been doing tasks that need periodic attention, so while I’m only working on it for like, two hours a day, it’s spread out in 15-minute chunks every hour, and I can only get so much done on other stuff in the gaps. And then there is always the other time sinks, unexpected stuff popping up, helping coworkers with something, looking for some piece of equipment that apparently grew legs since we last used it, etc.
Plus, I’ve been sleep deprived all damned week, so that didn’t really help.
oh well
Same. I look like I rarely finish anything because so much crap is ad hoc (see above). But if I deal with that then my team (currently of one) can use blocks of time to actually accomplish the day-to-day tasks that need to be done. So I feel like I’m defending a soccer goal or something so the balls don’t hit the people working in the … shit, that analogy completely got away from me. Maybe I’m like a linebacker protecting the quarterback. Still not right but better.
But a big chunk of my time involves solving what I call Scooby-Doo Mysteries, where someone didn’t receive an invoice or we’re coming in above forecast on expenses or somebody didn’t get their expense check and I have to figure out why and then explain it. We had to present an analysis of how our time is used a few months ago and I wanted to create a “solving weird shit” category but my boss preferred that I did not.
…one of the most counter-intuitive things about being mostly stuck at home on account of the pandemic (for me anyway) is how I don’t seem to have found my time to pan out in a way that allows for putting blocks of time to good use…it’s all been weirdly broken up by this or that thing cropping up & my never-great scheduling abilities have mostly been noticeable by their absence
…but my friday was largely spend fielding the aftermath of someone I know being hit by some low-down good-for-nothing scam artist trying to empty their bank account…on the upside they’re going to get their cash back…but on the downside I don’t feel like their bank did as much as it seems like they could to make it harder for it to happen again & I kind of wound up feeling frustrated by the whole situation…people who target vulnerable folks to try to rip off money they can’t afford to lose like opportunistic parasites are currently top of my list of candidates for what I gather the cool kids refer to as yeeting into the sun?