Drunken Owls and Other Delights

This always happens around this time of year. The season changes, the days get shorter, the day job gets busier, and a new cycle begins. A few things have been nagging in the back of my mind. Surprisingly it's not entirely about better time management at work! No, I've been pretty good about that these days. I'll still scroll the socials, but at least half my break time at work is about playing Squaredle. I play that game a little bit throughout the day just to keep it fun and light.

No, once again it's about creativity. I mean, I'm doing pretty good lately, working on Theadia and whatnot, but that hankering to do more when I have the outlets and the ability is finally returning. I'm going to assume that I've finally settled into the New Digs enough that I can allow myself to add to my creative workload. I'm still hesitant to do that at work as I don't have nearly enough time (or physical space) to do so, but on the other hand I've also decided that maybe I don't need to put so much daily work-related stress on myself every single shift. [This is mostly my own fault, having a terrible habit of approaching jobs as 'I'd better do it myself because no one else will/because I'll do it right the first time' and never shifting them to others.]

I've got a notebook and a journal (and a work search magazine) in my satchel that are slowly gathering dust from disuse, and a 750Words sign-in that hasn't been used in some time, so perhaps it's time to make that change once and for all. I've been thinking about a few ideas that I haven't really let myself expand on for quite some time, and it's been a LONG time since I've started something this new.

Curious to see where this goes...

See, now this was the week where I actually planned to take multiple days off so A and I could frolic and relax for a few days before Q4 nonsense kicks in. [Read: we weren't planning on going on any vacation trips this year, so instead we take various days off throughout the year like this. One, the current political nonsense going on, and two, cats.] We do have a few destinations in mind, including an olive farm up in Petaluma and some shopping down the peninsula. Other than that, I had very little on the docket other than sleeping in a bit later than usual and enjoying the company of Juli and Cali! :)

Speaking of days off, I'm still getting used to not having to worry about wondering if I'll be working on Sundays or not, and not knowing until the last minute. It's a weight off my mind, and there's a much better chance of us deciding to visit a neighborhood we haven't visited in ages, or heading up to A's parents' house, or just a fun day trip somewhere. I don't feel the least bit guilty about having won that particular battle at work, though it is wild that I'm having to adjust my head around it still.

So long story short, I'm only working 24 hours this week instead of the usual 38-40. I'm not entirely thrilled about it, but I'm at least a lot less annoyed by it than I was when I first saw it on the schedule board. The boss informed me that the latest version of the scheduling software got wonky and dropped hours of several people, and unfortunately I was one of them and even more unfortunately he didn't catch it until I texted him with a slightly miffed 'WTF' on Friday. He did say that he'll ensure that won't happen again in the future.

On the sort of plus side, this will give me the next three days off in which I can catch up sleep, get a lot of writing done, do several house errands that need doing, and play with the cats! And I am definitely taking a few days off the week after this coming one, days I'd put in for and will be using some of my remaining vacation/floater days for. A's taking those days off as well so we can have fun doing little day trips and neighborhood walks. Woo!

Meanwhile, check it out: the Remastered Edition of A Division of Souls is now available for preorder at Barnes & Noble! Here's the link:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-division-of-souls-j-chaisson/1148097942?ean=2940182462112

 

Not much going on this weekend other than we did our occasional Costco run today to pick up household needs, and to head over to the garden to plant the several things we bought at Sloat Gardens the other day. I've been trying to keep up with my new habit of truly having a day off where I don't have to pile it up with several events, errands or whatever. Just do what needs doing and relax.

The storm, by the way, is that school is starting back up this coming week. As I've said before, our local high school is just a few short blocks away from my store, and over the last several years, five days a week and often twice a day, we'll get hit with thirty to forty noisy teenagers coming in to buy chicken tenders and sour gummies. It only lasts for about twenty minutes, but it's the most stressful part of the day, especially when we happen to be short-staffed. Each year I keep hoping that the next class will be a bit less obnoxious (and stop stealing) (and stop standing in the middle of the aisles in complete obliviousness), but we shall see. For a very brief time the school's principal kept them from coming over by citing the rule that they're not supposed to cross the major boulevard to get here. [They can always walk a few blocks in a different direction to a different shopping area to buy food.]

Alas, I'm not looking forward to it, but I'm going to try to keep an even calm about it.

 I'm kind of in an interstitial space right now creatively, I think. I've mentioned before that I've stopped performing a lot of the habits I'd had over the last several years in Spare Oom -- the whiteboard schedule, the logging of the word count, writing at 750Words, and so on. The main reason I stopped is that I wanted a fresh start here at the New Digs. For the most part it's been a positive choice as I haven't felt the stress of not hitting scheduled goals. It's helped me focus on current projects with more clarity.

Not that I'm complaining, however. I like being here at this time, because it means that I'm breaking away from old habits and yet to forge new ones. I'm allowing myself to try new things and approach current projects in a slightly different way. Perhaps this is why I'm also allowing myself to indulge in a wave of comic reading on Hoopla these last several weeks...I get to try something new, see what inspires me.

I suppose if this stage is anything like the one I had during the Belfry Years, this will (hopefully) mean that a lot of positive creativity will come out of it.

As you may have seen in the news (or not), Safeway has come to a tentative agreement with my union and there will be no strike! We kind of expected them to blink first, we just didn't expect them to take so dang long! Anyway, I don't know the full details yet of what we'll now be getting but hopefully it will be positive.

Semi-related, it looks like the Day Job has been able to follow through with my request to not assign me Sundays, and I hope it stays that way. Head bookeeper is currently on vacation but we managed to get a third-stringer to fill in so I don't need to worry about it. I am kind of surprised that I'm not filling in for him elsewhere in the week, but I'm not too concerned at the moment. 

In the meantime, I've got a few days off in which I'm hoping to both get a lot done and also chill out. I have no major plans as I've already taken care of most of our weekend errands -- wash is running, home is vacuumed (and cats temporarily traumatized by it), things put away and other things cleaned. It's been extremely damp and misty these last several days so we're not too worried about our garden plot drying out, though we might head over there at some point later in the week.

I'll also be honest, I've been feeling my age the last couple of weeks, partly because of the stress of moving and partly the weird work schedule (and also doing the job of at least two people due to budget constraints), so I'm thinking it's high time I start doing something about that. I was doing really good for a while doing my stretches and whatnot, but that fell by the wayside and now my joints are aching. Perhaps it's also time to go see the doc for a checkup just to make sure I'm not actually falling apart, but I'd like to think that right now I'm just at the 'wear and tear' part of my life and just need to be better at taking care of it, heh.

Even though my weekends are pretty much only a day and a half of free time (I open Saturday mornings and get out at 2pm), I'm happy with the fact that I still manage to get a lot done in that time! And I even got to sleep in this morning!

Yesterday we headed over to the Petco to buy a new cat tree as the old one is getting quite worn out and flimsy (verdict: Jules is quite happy with it, but Cali is yet to give it much attention). This one has a slightly different footprint so we were able to slide it up against the window, giving me a lot more room behind my desk chair and the ability to access my filing cabinet. And as for today, we did a very-much-needed trip to the grocery store (not mine, but an affiliate) to restock. The great thing is that we're both under the same corporate umbrella so my hard-earned rewards points and associate discounts work there as well, and we ended up saving a ridiculous amount of money. Sweet!

And now it's time for me to get cracking on the writing session. I'm about twenty pages from finishing off this cycle of 'remaster' revisioning of A Division of Souls, so I'm well ahead of schedule for getting this one ready for release. Go me!

The rest of my week isn't so bad...there's only one midshift this week and the rest are opens, and I have Thursday off in which to relax a bit before A and I go on a little midmorning roadtrip down the peninsula to a lovely garden park!

So last week for the hell of it I looked on the Seagate site just to see if there were any external drive sales going on, considering the one with my music library was swiftly approaching critical mass, even despite my attempts to thin it out. As luck would have it, they were indeed having a sale and I purchased a Ridiculously Large External (14TB, almost double the other big external I have, and for a surprisingly cheap price at that). It's taken a few days and a few snags, but said music library has now been moved with lots of breathing room surrounding it. Right now I'm updating the Plex server so it's pointing towards the correct location so it can be shared again!

Meanwhile, we're finally gathering all the artwork we want to put on our pristine white walls! We've been using a prints-from-museum theme for a while now, so we've been buying a few from the local museums (and a few from the MFA in Boston) and elsewhere. Alas, I've run out of the specific size of hooks I need, so I'll need to swing by a local hardware store to pick up more, but eventually we'll be all arted up!

 I finally have a Sunday off after multiple weeks of working through the weekend! Yay! I was looking forward to spending a bit of time with A walking through the park, getting some coffee at one of our favorite places, then heading over to the farmer's market. Sure, doing a bit of shopping for fruit might be uneventful, but it's always fun to head to the top of Clement Street and work through the stalls, check out all the tasty foods and try out the free samples. Plus, whenever we do go, we always stop for brunch somewhere. Today was at Cafe Bunn Mi for, yes, banh mi's. In this case, crispy duck! So filling that our plans for dinner are now essentially salad, bread and cheese!

I've been talking with my boss about marking me as permanently unavailable on Sundays recently. Right now they've got me listed as available on opens and midshifts and they manually try to avoid putting me on Sundays, but that isn't always the case. I wanted to clear it with the head bookkeeper as when I do work on Sundays, it's most often because he's taking the day off as well. (His schedule is Sunday to Thursday, and I do the bookkeeping on Fridays and Saturdays.) He's fine with it, so at this point it's a matter of getting a third-string person that we can trust and not have to worry about, just for those occasional days where we need someone else to fill in. He's brought up a few names, so we'll see how that pans out.

Point being, I'd really like to make it permanent that I have Sundays free so A and I can plan to do things without having to wait for me to see the schedule on that Friday morning before the weekend. I've been there since 2022 and even the boss says I've more than earned it. Also, this might also mean that my second day off will most likely be midweek, and I certainly enjoy breaking up the work week like that. It gives me a break so I'm not exhausted by week's end!

I'm trying to get into a positive habit of getting off my duff when I'm not working. Most of the time it's me heading out to do some grocery shopping or some such, but I'm thinking I should also add Errand Walking as well. We're only three long blocks from Geary (and we live at the corner of a street that's got an easy incline between here and there), and we're close enough to many places we frequent down that way. So I'm thinking either Monday or Tuesday I'll head down there to buy some ice cream and get an updated passport photo taken. And in the process I'll get my exercise!

Not that I'm not getting a workout at the Day Job, far from it. I must have done at least five miles' worth of steps today (per my Fit app, at least) because I processed FAR too many Home Shopping orders before 11am which had me walking all over the dang store. This is partly why I drive to work now, even though it's only just shy of two miles away now -- while it's an easy gridded-street walk, it's the hills in between that would be too exhausting to handle. And given my schedule of 6am opens, the bus doesn't always run on a frequent schedule that early in the morning. And this has often been why I end up not doing much of anything physical on my days off.

I'd like to change that, however. I don't need to do all the walking all over creation, mind you. Maybe head over to water the garden (now only two blocks away!), or head to the corner store or the coffee shop. Just so I keep from getting too lazy!