Hello folks! I wanted to apologize for my long absence. As many folks know, I work in a call center for a retail business (as do my brother, and now my sister, now...in the same office!) and under ordinary circumstances, this would be an extraordinarily busy time of the year for me. Overtime, shrieking beat-downs by howling-mad customers ("where's my order, you @#$*&!s!!"), but the brutal nature of 2020 took an additional toll. I've got pen pal letters piled high that need to be answered--I have NOT forgotten you!! I'm sorry about that--and an apartment that is in desperate need of deep-cleaning, but I've not had a real day off entirely to myself that wasn't spent in an exhausted stupor since before Halloween.
I work for an Outdoor Outfitter company that includes "emergency preparedness" items in it's repertoire, such as camping equipment and emergency foods that can be stored for extremely long periods of time, among other things. So in a year that included cities burning down and toilet paper panic-buying, along with major metropolitan areas being locked down by government order, you can just imagine how much of a beating we poor office drones have taken from furious customers when those products sold out immediately, or when orders got jammed up in the warehouses from the sheer colossal volume of them we've taken, and well, I'm just absolutely worn out. And I am a single fellow (aside from my two hairy little office assistants) with no spouse or kids to watch out for. I can only imagine what this year has been like for single moms right now in jobs like this, working long hours of abuse from shoppers, like my dear friend Shiny Blue Fish in Florida (as superb a human being if there ever was one!) or my poor sister, who again had to take a similar job at the office where I work, whose increasingly selfish, self-centered husband just walked out on her and left her with all the bills to pay & two kids to support by herself. To you folks who are shouldering this titanic burden alone, I salute you.
So I just wanted to let everyone know I'd not fallen off the face of the Earth. I'm just so incredibly worn out and tired...if I hear "where's my order, you <bleepety-bleep bleep>!!" one more time, it may just finish fossilizing my brain. So...I decided to put in for a week of my saved-up vacation time in January just to get some badly needed down-time. Who takes vacations in January? Well, you'd be right to ask that. I decided that after the last few months of this utterly disastrous year, saving those vacation days for something else was kind of pointless since everything's going to be closed anyway, seemingly forever. I'm going to take a week off...in bitterly cold January...and spend bits of it cleaning my apartment. And it'll still feel like a relief.
That being said, I am not unappreciated by this job, which seems to have understood the pressures we're under. They even named me "Employee of the Month" this December, with a few rewards that I was pretty thrilled to get (like a reserved parking spot near the front door of the building, during the cold weather and the meanest month of the year!), and a few other little rewards that, unlike such things at past jobs I've had, I've taken to be actually sincere by our immediate management, believe it or not. Some might disagree, but if you've seen the work-place brutality I've seen, my current job actually seems like a relief, 2020 or no 2020.
The first day or two of that vacation will likely be spent getting caught up on sleep, or sitting zombified and reeling, on my sofa, drinking coffee or tea, longing for the quiet that my poop-throwing, booze-swilling, shaved-ape neighbors will deny me. (Ever been to the primate exhibit in a public zoo, where the infuriated monkeys hurl handfuls of their own, uh, droppings at you through the bars of the cage? I seem to attract such types as neighbors, for some reason. But I digress.) And then I'll finally get my pen pal letters caught up! 😊
Speaking of tea, look at what my sister gave me for Christmas:
This, I believe, is the classic British "Brown Betty" tea pot (well, her Green cousin) used by the sturdy, working-class Brits of the 19th century, and it looks wonderfully antique-y in my kitchen...along with a huge package of Murphy's Irish Builder's Tea which is delicious. I'm going to see if I can find a matching sugar bowl (which will be filled with artificial sweetener; the only time I really ever use it, as my zero-sugar diet seems to slowly be working) and creamer for it.
Kindly disregard the ancient, heavily stained pot holder it's sitting on, atop my kitchen counter. How embarrassing. My sister has become enamored of a BBC television show called Downton Abbey, and I have to admit she's got me to enjoying it as well. This has turned her into an English and Irish tea aficionado. I give her fountain pens & inks in turn, so I understand this. 😀
Us three siblings, and my sister's kids, had Christmas dinner at her house this year, and I decided that I'm tired of missing my favorite casserole dish at these family gatherings: the ubiquitous broccoli-rice-cheese casserole, so I decided to make my first ever attempt to create it myself! Hooray for entrepreneurialism! Well, um, it didn't go well. By the time Christmas morning rolled around, I was so exhausted and brain dead from weeks upon weeks of holiday work that I hazily misread the instructions. I took the ingredients list's instructions of "3 cups of cooked rice" to mean "3 cups of rice, then cooked..." Yeah, you can imagine what happened. I made enough rice to fill a Star Destroyer, and didn't realize my mistake until I'd finally gone, "Gee, golly, this is sure a lotta casserole" and stuck both pans in the oven...
...and had made enough "casserole" to fill BOTH of my casserole pans. This made a huge quantity of rice that only tasted vaguely as if it had once been within shouting distance of either broccoli or cheese (despite it's tasty appearance in the photo). One is covered in foil which I took to my sister's house, and the other stayed in my fridge. AND, on my way to my sister's house to deliver it and enjoy the holiday...sigh...I ACTUALLY DROVE HALF-WAY TO WORK...FOR TEN MILES...IN AN EXAUSTED MENTAL FUGUE-STATE before realizing my tired brain had defaulted to "auto-pilot" and I realized I was actually off work that day! I'm soooo tired...I just wearily went into "better get to work again" mode. I turned around and drove back and in so doing had driven 21 miles for a 1-mile
I doubt anyone at work would have enjoyed the casserole. Meh. Their loss.
So that's my life right now, but it'll get better. To all my good friends and siblings who read this, I *will* get my act together and upload blog posts more often. Thank you folks! Happy New Year! I'd say we've earned it.