dragonlady7

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well i’m back from vacation and farm work and time away. the snow has melted, so i don’t know how much there was in my neighborhood. at least one person i encountered at the farm could not believe that i would not have abandoned my obligations and driven 300 miles home into the snowstorm to make sure my house was all right. it’s snow? no? stay away from the state of emergency? if it collapses my roof it collapses my roof but i like just had a new roof put on it’s not exactly likely.

Rescued the cat from her imprisonment at the expensive cat spa yesterday and she has clung to me pretty much ever since, but then i had to leave her to come to work.

For some reason I don’t think Dude thought to take today off, though he could have. I cannot. It is Cyber Monday. And what’s more! I have not mentioned this but the only other person in my department at work, the Online Sales Department as it happens, suffered from a medical emergency while I was gone– Wednesday in fact– and so there’s a large pile of work left for me here but what’s worse, it’s in total disarray. And this is the busiest day of the year. And possibly the very worst part is that my coworker has been attempting to work from home during his extremely serious medical emergency, and like I get and appreciate that but I wish he would not do that, as it is stressing him out and I also am now unsure of what I am meant to be doing.

I came in an hour late to overlap a little more with his normal schedule but for the record I generally start at 6:30 am and he usually rolls in at noon, which means on days when i cover for him i routinely get calls from the warehouse guy when i’m at home at 4pm. so.

This week is going to be hell!! jazzhands Love it! (Your picture was not posted)

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so i’m doing a big VHS transfer order at work. the thing about the full-size VHS tapes is that the recorder doesn’t stop itself when they’re over. (The digital-8 recorder is perfectly happy to do so, it pops up a cheerful “imported 123 minutes from your cassette!” and sits there not filling the hard drive for however long it takes you to get back to it. Yes of course every type of video transfer runs in realtime, this is not science fiction.)

So I have one I run downstairs and I set a timer to check on it (because if you let it keep running, it’ll just fill the hard drive with a black screen at like 100mb a minute), but the one up here I run with a little mini ClearClick thingy and I… just leave it not-muted, so I can hear when the noise stops and it goes “FZZZT! click WHRRRR” and starts rewinding. if I hit ‘stop’ then, then I have zero editing to do, and save myself about an hour of computer time. Yes, it’s that much.

But that means that I have to listen to people’s home movies. This family has young children. The earlier tapes had a lot of screaming babies on them. For some reason one of the things this proud papa Camcorded was the newborn’s first bath, like right out of the womb, so that was some extremely distressing high-pitched squalling. I did not like that. I also hear a lot of tinny Christmas carols, which gets a bit old, but what’s been getting to me is group renditions of Happy Birthday. Like, I don’t mind that, but the local custom, which I’d never encountered before I moved here, is instead of the “how old are you now” verse, or the “you look like a monkey” verse, they do a verse that’s just “what’s your girl/boyfriend’s first name”, and I don’t understand it at all, but it’s like every fucking time? It’s clearly meant to tease a child too young to really be dating? But I don’t totally understand it, and there’s never a funny punchline, it just seems like a focused bit of mortification on the child who’s being singled out for positive attention, so they also get negative attention at the same time? Not sure.

So I don’t like that.

(Oh, this rendition is a lot of yelling children and they are doing the “how old are you” verse, so that’s something. Ah and a lone child is doing the “what’s your boyfriend’s first name” variant, and now they’re redoing the whole song but with adults this time… well.)

Anyway but what I came here to write about was how i’ve now sat through a bunch of really dire children’s school music concerts, virtually, and I’m starting to prepare myself for more of those in my real life, as the children in my life are aging into that sort of thing.

It can’t be this bad if you actually know the kids, right?? … right? (Your picture was not posted)

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I didn’t reblog it but there’s the post going around of the guy who has written a one-minute song about the Clifford Movie and sounds ex-fucking-xactly like John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats (”but I don’t want to tell you how to feel”) and that song is in my fucking head now and i deserve it for listening to it thrice and I don’t care about the Clifford Movie but the song is so funny. “They used this curséd hull to make the Clifford Movie, but I don’t want to tell you how to feel.”

Anyway.

[cut for length; rambling about my day and ongoing work schedule]

[edit: works better if you put in the cut tag, ya dingus]

My gambit yesterday worked out– came in at 7am, worked for four solid hours to get a huge transfer order done, went upstairs as it was exporting and managed to get a bunch of completed orders shipped before my coworker came in (he sits in the room with the shipping scale and label printer, so when he’s there it’s awkward to try to ship things what with distancing and all)– and he arrived before I was done but me being there meant he worked on repacking this in-store order we need to ship that had been sitting awkwardly in the hallway since the previous day, when otherwise I know he would have procrastinated on it.

So we both got a bunch of stuff done before noon, and then I ate breakfast finally, and then I ran downstairs to actually burn the disk of the thing I’d left exporting, and then holy fuck it was super crowded downstairs so I ran back upstairs and packed up the order to wait for its DVD, and I’d meant to go work a little more downstairs but between all the employees and all the customers I was like nope. No way.

So I worked a little more on organizing a few things, but then I left before 3, and so I’d done my 7.5 hours or so of work, and I was done, and I chatted with my coworker a bit before I left and got a few more tasks I could do in the future, and then I went home.

Dude was on his way out to run an errand (walking to his absent mother’s house to water her plants), so I went in the basement and did my workout routine I’m trying to get into (riding the exercise bike for the duration of an episode of the Untamed, maybe I’ll actually get through the whole thing?) and then I came up and took a shower and then I made dinner– a mac and cheese casserole, roughly, but also with vegetables and the leftover chicken from the milk chicken https://www.thekitchn.com/jamie-oliver-chicken-in-milk-best-chicken-recipe-all-time-80388 I made this weekend.

(Check out that recipe if you haven’t it is the fucking bomb.)

Dude had to go grocery shopping after dinner. I know! We worked so hard! I got us all stocked up before we left Rensselaer Co with its comparatively idyllic infection rate of 3% testing positive, but his mom had asked if he could do her grocery shopping before she gets home from her risky plane ride, so she can quarantine in perfect isolation. She did the same thing after she’d been trapped in California when the whole pandemic started, so it’s a good routine, it’s just. You know. It meant he had to go out to Wegman’s, here where our infection rate is more like 9% testing positive.

But Wegmans was deserted and he cruised through, and while he was going, I’d come up with a bunch of things we could pick up that would stock us up. (Including toilet paper; we haven’t bought any in almost a year, which is how I like to shop, because it takes us like a year to get through the big pack, and we bought one in like November of last year, so…)

NOT QUITE BONE! NOT QUITE FLESH! CANINE SARCOPHAGUS OF PLASTIC MESH! Fuck it’s really in my head, I apologize.

While he was out, I practiced banjo and worked on my spinning, and I made good progress on both. For some reason, I don’t like to do either while he’s in the room? I don’t know, it’s not like he pays attention to me. I just don’t! It’s weird.

It felt good to be busy. But the problem is that it was a lot. And then I got anxious about the dishes, so I had to go and wash dishes. He got home in the midst of this, and dropped off our groceries enroute to his mom’s house, so I dug out the eggs I’d brought from the farm for her so he could take them too, and then I put the groceries away, and then I mostly finished up the dishes and cleaned the kitchen but then it was 8pm and I hadn’t yet sat on the couch and I was just. So tired.

I was in bed by 9. And that was fine, I fell asleep, I slept well, the cat happily purred on my face, and in the morning I woke gently with her kneading my arm and we snuggled some more and I finally got out of bed and got dressed and was out by 7am.

But I’m so tired, and yesterday I flew through a 25-reel order by 11 am and today I’m struggling through this little 10-reel order like IDK how I’m going to finish it in time, and I’m worried about Unresponsive Coworker– Dude’s theory is that he hasn’t told any of us his COVID test results because he didn’t actually go get tested and is just waiting for us to forget or something, but fuck he’s the one who actually overlapped with the kid with the positive result, he is the fucking lynchpin of this whole endeavor and it’s really crucial that we know he doesn’t have it. Argh.

So that’s stressful. (Also I am worried about him; he is a cantankerous old fuck and he has been working here since 1987 I am not exaggerating that, and he literally did not understand about the shutdown and thought he was being fired and has been so bitter and confused about it all and he is not a bad dude and i don’t like him but that doesn’t mean I can’t sympathize, he was so upset when his sister died last year but wouldn’t take time off work because he has lived here so long and he wouldn’t let us take care of him and he’s just a fucking weirdo and I am also not exaggerating [it takes a particular variety of extremely deep eccentricity to work at the camera store equivalent of an indie record store for literally 33 years] but like, he’s not a bad person and I don’t want him to have coronavirus and I don’t want him to give us all coronavirus Jesus Christ Almighty.)

Whew. Anyway, if I finish these ten three-inch reels this morning, then the two seven-inch reels tomorrow, then the other two seven-inch reels upstairs pending a Paypal invoice for the balance the day after, that’s the rest of the week and all the outstanding 8mm orders, and we’ll likely have more on Monday. It looks like me working 7-2 or so works out for most people; I overlap a bit with my supervisor, I don’t overlap much with the girl working the VCR that shares a desk with the 8mm machine, whether we lock down or not probably doesn’t affect that much, and then I can do my workouts in the afternoon and, well, I’ll probably wind up cooking every meal and doing all the dishes forevermore henceforth, alas.

I just have to get used to it and probably once I do they’ll lock us down and I’ll have to switch it all around.

Oh, the other good thing is that Dude finally finished cleaning out the guest room (which I did the bulk of the work for in a single day about a month ago, but he’s been sorting papers one at a time since then) enough that he can use the desk in there and is now comfortably set up, and the best part is that the guest bed is the cat’s, and she’s delighted to be able to parade back and forth across his desk and then settle down next to it on Her Bed. It’s really ideal, for her, and she’s been yelling about how great it is, which sounds just like the yelling she does when she doesn’t like something, but, you know, whatever. She’s demonstrably happy.

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All weekend, my coworker said, he walked around using “Fuck your feelings https://www.quora.com/What-do-Trump-supporters-mean-when-they-say-fuck-your-feelings” as a greeting. He was like yeah I’d greet people, kinda wave and call out, “fuck your feelings!” all cheerful-like. That’s just become my slogan.

As I left tonight, I waved at him and was like “Hey, fuck your feelings!” and he was like “yeah you too,” and only then did I look over and there was a customer in the store.