October 2021 – Barrelhaven

Well at least I found out

It turns out that I may not be as ready to go back to regular work as I thought I was. Tuesday night was fine, I felt a bit more tired than usual but it was also my first full night shift in several weeks. Wednesday I felt like I’d been put through a wringer and I most certainly didn’t feel like I could go back and do it again. My new proposal is going to be working on the unit, say, Tuesday and Thursday, and in employee health on Wednesday and Friday. I think that might work. Once again, though, the only real way to find out is to try it and see what happens.

To be perfectly honest, part of the reason I felt so drained on Wednesday was that I spent a couple hours of it fighting with Verizon about phones. Our phones are old enough that ~~Apple has started throttling their data speed and battery function~~ their performance has really started to suffer, so we decided it was time to get new ones. Verizon, as I’m sure most carriers do, has a deal to turn in your old phone and get an upgrade (with an extra two year contract to stay with Verizon of course) so we did. Ordered two phones, one for Shannon’s number and one for mine. This was maybe the first week of October. For a couple weeks everything looked fine, then I got an email from Verizon saying that one of the phone orders was cancelled because it had been “confirmed as fraudulent”. This was news to me. I don’t recall anyone actually asking me if the order was fraudulent and the other order had gone through without a hitch.

I called Verizon’s customer service line and, after slightly more than the usual frustration navigating through their automated system, and after spending 75 minutes on the phone with three different people, the “fraudulent” order was cancelled and a new order put in. Good. This was late Wednesday morning.

That afternoon I got another email from Verizon saying that a recent order had been flagged as fraudulent and that I needed to contact the fraud prevention department.

So after considerably more than the usual frustration navigating through their automated system, and after spending 45 minutes on the phone with two different people, the “fraudulent” order was cancelled and a new order was put in.

I did give serious consideration to cancelling everything and switching carriers but after making some inquiries it seems like all the carriers are approximately equally awful.

First world problems…

Updates

Updates are called for;

House:
- The basement floor project is still in a holding pattern. Last word was that everything should be in place to have it done by the end of the month
- The new plumbing leak is also in a holding pattern. There is slightly better news than I expected here. Not good news, but not as bad as it could be. The leak was from the seal on the toilet in the bathroom upstairs. It was fast and (relatively) inexpensive to fix. We are waiting on hearing back from the people who are going to come and fix the floor and/or ceiling to find out exactly what is required there.
Work:
- I’m going back to work on the unit starting next week. With the most recent covid surge settling down, Employee Health isn’t as busy as they have been and don’t need as much help. There are certainly other things I could do for light duty but the fact is I’m probably recovered enough to just go back to work. I’m never going to feel ready and the only way to find out if I can do it is to do it.
Health
- Health is also in a holding pattern. No news has been good news.
- Mental health is honestly as good as it can be under the circumstances. The previous post announcing the bathroom leak is typical of how I’ve been reacting to new difficulties recently. I’ve been feeling very brittle; when something hits I kind of break into a thousand little pieces and can’t see anything but crisis and my brain does everything it can to persuade me that things are as bad as they can possibly be and they will never be fixed. This is a known issue. I haven’t had much luck moderating my initial, disproportionately negative, response but I have been getting better at pulling myself together again.

The fact is, in spite of everything I, right now, today, I feel pretty good both physically and mentally. There is still a lot on my plate and I’ve been ready for all this shit to be done for about 6 months or so, but the struggle can continue.

Yeah, this is about what I’ve come to expect

Remember, a couple of times now I think, I mentioned how everything suddenly got much worse right after I started feeling like I was getting a few things off my plate? Well the basement floor is almost done (just ignore that it is still “almost” done after two months of wrangling with the floor people), I’m on a term break from school until the end of the month, I’ve got a three month break from cancer treatment, and I’m still, for the time being, working from home. Things are settling down and maybe, just maybe, I can come out of crisis mode for a while.

Yesterday, I found this in the downstairs bathroom –

That would be a leak in the plumbing somewhere in the ceiling. The bulge was not there two days ago and as for the (what are hopefully) patches of mildew (and not black mold) I couldn’t say how long they’ve been there. I don’t routinely inspect my ceilings because I am a shit homeowner, apparently.

The plumber is supposed to arrive in about fifteen minutes and then we get to spend a few thousand dollars and FSM knows how long having at least one bathroom destroyed (maybe both bathrooms if our usual luck continues) and then we get to spend another few thousand dollars and FSM knows how long getting it put back together again.

We made a big mistake when we bought instead of just continuing to rent.

Brain Radio

A somewhat different impetus for this episode of brain radio, in that the song running through my head reminded me of an album that I had (almost inexplicably) forgotten about entirely.

For a few days I had a song by Laurie Anderson running through my head. I couldn’t remember the name of the song (it turned out to be Langue D’amour) so I went to my music library, sorted by artist, Laurie Anderson, and totally failed to find what I was looking for.

This was puzzling to me. I’ve been a fan of Laurie Anderson since I was in my early teens and I was reasonably sure I had all her music from the mid-‘80s to late-‘90s in my library. So I went to [$online_music_store] and my jaw dropped. I had totally forgotten about the album Mr. Heartbreak.

Somehow, at some point in the remote past, during a shuffle of data from one hard drive to another, Mr. Heartbreak fell out of my library without me noticing and it’s existence just slipped from my mind. The oddest are thing about the situation is that Mr. Heartbreak is still probably my favorite of Anderson’s studio albums.

The album was released in 1984, which was probably about the time I discovered it. Unfortunately I have absolutely no memory of how I got connected with Anderson’s music. I’m almost positive I didn’t hear it on the radio, although c. 1986 the song O Superman (For Massenet) from her first studio album Big Science did get a little airplay on the new wave station in Seattle (KJET 1590 AM). Anyway, the album has vocals by Peter Gabriel and (of course) William S. Burroughs in addition to Anderson and is about as mainstream as her material gets, in the sense of being considerably more accessible than, say, some of her spoken word/poetry performances with John Giorno. Which is sort of like saying an airport is more accessible than the high security areas of the Pentagon; the former you can get in to, but it takes work, whereas attempts to get in to the latter will, best case scenario, result in nothing but frustration and, worst case scenario, may result in serious head trauma. But I digress.

There is still a share of surreal imagery, experimental sounds, and examples of Anderson’s fascination with Bible stories and literature, but they’re hidden a little better. On some tracks anyway. The whole album is amazing, but this is the track that stuck in my head;