My daughter-in-law spent the night in the hospital after receiving a blood transfusion for low hemoglobin. Waiting now to hear what that’s all about, and man, I should not have googled it.
Things may be improving at work. They might actually start listening to me. We had a very productive meeting this week in which I actually felt heard. Our CEO emailed our team today with effusive praise for how we’re all doing. Then my boss told me I can work from home on Fridays. I don’t know if HR knows, but oh well. I created a calendar of everything I submitted this fiscal year and every project for the rest of the year and the current status of all. I’ve been doing a lot. The board can kindly take it and shove it up their ass.
I still haven’t heard back from the job I applied for. But I’m in no hurry, I guess.
Oh, dear. Wishing her a speedy recovery.
Family: plans trip to Mexico soon
Mexico: implodes via cartels
Ugh.
I really want to go on this trip!
Not all of Mexico and not forever.
I hope you can avoid passing through the USA; the battle between congress and the criminal regime over ICE has spilled out and TSA & CBP are becoming shambles.
but pretty close - 20 of 31 states have seen violent clashes.
An adventure vacation to me is more base jumping off the Eiffel Tower than dodging bullets on a beach.
Oh I fully intend to avoid the USA in every way, shape, or form possible for the foreseeable future. The boycott is real and I sure as hell don’t plan on travelling there for fun (my job could maybe send me, but so far hasn’t).
We’re going to the other side of the country, nowhere near Puerto Vallarta, and we have some time before we go for things to calm down. I went shopping this weekend and bought new swimsuits, and so the headlines are definitely a bummer.
Going day to day on those plans, I guess.
My only time going to Mexico since I was a baby was a few years ago, where we went to Neuvo Vallarta. (Which I have just learned has been renamed since we left there, and is now called Nuevo Nayarit, which confused the shit out of me for a bit.) It’s extremely close to Puerto Vallarta; it’s a 15 minute drive away from the PV airport (and that’s the airport we arrived in and departed from).
It was okay, I was surprised that everything was so expensive, but it was nice enough. Our biggest worries were from flooding that was going on, and also having to deal with all the Covid protocols, since we were still technically in the pandemic. (It was when things were starting to wind down after the vaccine was available, otherwise we probably wouldn’t have been able to go at all.)
Now… I think we’d have bigger worries.
And apparently a couple from our local area is stuck down there, according to local news.
Now I’m glad we went when we did!
My neighbor is an a-hole. We have houses on both sides of the street but parking only on one side so there are many more cars than parking spaces in front of the houses. He treats the one spot as his personal spot. He’s retired, which means always home & rarely goes anywhere. If he does drive somewhere & someone parks in ‘his’ (at least in his mind) spot he will watch out the window & when they leave he’ll go out & move his car there just so it can sit there for another week until he takes his car out again. He also goes for daily walks so don’t think old = infirm.
Today, after the plows came, he cleaned off the car…into the middle of the street. Then he went out with his wife in her car, leaving his car parked where it was. Not only did he screw everyone else on the street, but by not moving his car, the other neighbor, whose driveway he was parked up against now needs to shovel the street because the plows couldn’t get to the curb because they needed to go around him even if they were to come by again.
No, MY neighbor is an A-hole.
We’ve had two storms this season that delivered 18+ inches of snow. My neighbor across the street doesn’t have a snowblower, but does have three relatively young men. A teenager, a kid in his 20s, and the dad who is probably early 40s.
Two storms in a row, I’ve seen them struggling with the snow bank and gone over with my snowblower to help. I did their driveway and the sidewalk in front of the house.
In fact, yesterday I was planning to do so once I finished my drive, and the teenager came over and asked me for help. Fine. Neighbors being neighbors.
But both storms, when I did my front walk (stairs up from the sidewalk, then a path, then front steps), which has to be done with a shovel since there’s no way to get the snowblower there, not one of them walked across the street to help me.
WTF?
Mother Nature is fucking with me again.
For at least the last 2 – maybe 3 – garbage and recycling pickups I haven’t put them out because of shitty snowy weather, and because the bins would be in the way of Snowplow Guy. I figured it would eventually let up and it couldn’t possibly be that the next pickup day would once again be snowed in.
Why not? Anything is possible if Mother Nature has a special grudge against you. Yet I just can’t let this stuff pile up any longer, so come hell, high water, or snow, I’m putting on snowboots, manning a shovel, and hauling out the garbage tomorrow even if it sits in the middle of the driveway in the middle of a blizzard. Snowplow Guy can move it himself. I can’t deal with this any more.
I haven’t seen a winter like this in the roughly 18 years I’ve lived in this location, which tends to get less snow than the surrounding areas, which themselves have been getting less snow than usual over the past decades due to climate change. This year everything has gone to hell.
About twenty years ago I was a new grad volunteering in pretty much all the areas that are currently being hit by violence. I started in Guadalajara and then moved to a ranch in rural Jalisco. I ended up taking a little bus trip by myself to Barra de Navidad which is just outside the main tourist area of Puerto Vallarta.
I don’t know how much has changed in twenty years. I don’t remember feeling unsafe. There was some talk of corruption. Certain places I wasn’t supposed to go. I went to Barra de Navidad by myself anyway. I spoke the language pretty well. I ended up making friends with a cop but it pissed off his girlfriend. I am kinda naive and more trusting than I should be, I think. He was probably trying to get in my pants. There was another couple there that bought me dinner. Super friendly.
Weird to see places that are so ingrained in my memory completely turned upside down by this violence.
When I was there in October 2021, so it wasn’t that long ago. (I checked the date stamps on photos I took when I was there to be sure I had the time frame correct.) Everything seemed pretty peaceful, the area around the airport going toward the resort was a bit run-down looking, but not that bad. (In fact, it reminded me of places I’ve visited in small towns in Washington State, except seeing more things in Spanish.) There was definitely nothing that made me feel unsafe.
Again, the big news was about how they’d recently had exceptionally heavy rains in the area, and were dealing with the aftereffects of flooding, which had hurt tourism a bit. Nothing like what we are hearing about now, which is basically a war zone.
The office restroom situation - previously addressed with a cutesy sign - has gotten so bad that the building manager had to send out an email today essentially saying “please flush your poo and use the provided cleaning tools if you wreck the toilet.”
I spent most of the day waiting for some numpty to do a ‘reply all’…alas, nothing.
I did some major grocery shopping yesterday which involved hauling in a couple of heavy bags. And while I was bent over putting some tomatoes into the lower crisper shelf, something painful happened to my lower back. Maybe triggered by carrying heavy stuff – who knows. But it just got worse over time and this morning I literally could barely walk.
I was so desperate that I staggered to the bathroom meaning to take some ibuprofen tablets that I knew I had even though it was three years expired. But before taking it, I did a quick scan of the medicine cabinet and lo and behold – a fresh unopened package of ibuprofen gel capsules!
And that stuff works wonders! IMO, better than a couple of prescription Tylenol-3s. A conversation on this board suggested that ibuprofen is better for toothache, too, and I believe that’s true.
I’m spinning out today. Work is a brave new world of AI hell and corporate micromanagement. I don’t want to work for a corporation. If I wanted to work for a corporation I would not have gone into nonprofit work. The deal is I get paid a fraction of what I’m worth to not have to deal with corporate bullshit. Now people are going back on the fucking deal.
Physically I feel like shit. Emotionally I feel like shit. Wondering when my career is going to become obsolete. I feel that intense energy drain like right before you come down with something. I haven’t even had any decent energy to play with my kid. I’m so physically fatigued it hurts.
My husband is stressed and tired in his own way. By the time we finally get home to one another we’ve got nothing in the tank to figure out how to get out of this.
Trying to get some work done and now the Internet is down. The internet is down because we’re using ancient infrastructure because we can’t afford to replace it. I’ve been trying to get the money for the technology but it’s hard to find. But it doesn’t help that every time we have an infrastructure failure I think: well this is my own fucking fault for not finding the money.
I know, it will kill me thinking this way. I need a break.
I am a photographer, I’m a master of the ‘long shot’. I took one photo that took me 2½ years to get & another that took me 5 from idea to execution & luckily, I got that one on the last opportunity in 2019 because we didn’t go back again until 2022 due to Covid. When a shot is only available a couple of days a year, & you need Momma Nature’s cooperation (that sunrise ‘henge’ shot doesn’t work out so well on a cloudy day) you can see why it takes so frustratingly long, which brings us to today. I got up at 4:15 & drove almost 150 miles to not get my photo; I might, possibly get one more crack at it this year but probably need to wait until next February to try again. As for the bonus-photo-since-I-was-in-the-neighborhood, I misread something so trying to shoot into the morning sun. The bonus one I can at least go back & shoot another time; it’s just not exactly nearby, though.
Just chiming in here to say that not only did ibuprofen quickly suppress the agonizing lower back pain, but by the time it wore off my back pain was completely gone. As far as I’m concerned, ibuprofen is a miracle drug that cured it, and I don’t wanna here anyone telling me otherwise! 
Someone’s got your back
It’s good stuff. I’ve found a couple of pills help me sleep wonderfully, although I’m not having any issues with pain.
An hour ago, I was sitting at my computer in the basement and I hear water dripping in the other room. I investigate, and see water coming out of an overflow hose on the main sewage drain line that goes out of the house. We’ve lived here since 2001, and I think this is the first time I’ve seen this.
I went outside to the back of the house. There is a cleanout between the house and septic tank. I can see a little bit of water coming out of the threads where the plain/head plug screws into the cleanout.
I’m thinking two possibilities: 1) clog between cleanout and septic tank, or 2) clogged up leach bed.
I called Roto-Rooter. They’ll be at our house tomorrow at 11 AM.
Right now it’s just our 28 year old daughter and I (wife visited her sisters & mother in Singapore and will be back tomorrow evening), and she can’t live without a bathroom. So we’re at the Cobblestone Hotel in Urbana, OH this evening as I type this.
I really hope it’s just a blockage between the cleanout and septic tank, and not the drain field. If it’s the latter, then crap…