I was going to take a few days off and my boss asked, “Why don’t you make it a week?” So now I shall attempt to enjoy my time away from the office… virtually speaking, since I actually live in my actual physical office (my bedroom).
And try not to stress about all the work waiting for me when I get back, since my boss decided to give me a by-year’s-end project knowing full well I will be losing 1/4 of the month to get it done in by being on the vacation my boss insisted on to begin with.
Dunno what I’m going to do or where (more like “if”) I’m going to go, but I’ll do my best to rest and revitalize. Hey, it could work. Maybe.
“We’ll go hang out somewhere, indoors, where there’s food. It’ll be great!”
And here I am, desperate for socialization yet diabetic as hell and guess what, COVID still exists and will still definitely do its best to kill me like it’s killing hundreds every week still yes even now despite what the official organizations are pointedly not telling you, and since keeping a mask on while watching other people eat and stressing constantly about whether my mask’s seal is good enough isn’t one of my favorite pasttimes, I’ll have to pass on that invite, which sucks because I don’t get invited to things hardly ever to begin with and turning down invitations is a great way to make invitations even less frequent.
Monday afternoon I got the second of the two parts of the “Shingrix” vaccine, a shingles preventative. The first round was a couple months ago during my semi-annual doctor check-up, and that knocked me on my ass for two solid days. This time? Only one solid day of aches all over and a head stuffed full of wool. That’s an improvement, right?
I also got my latest COVID jab and the flu jab a couple weeks ago. Am I getting used to needles? (No. Not really. I’m just less of a wimp about it now.)
All in a good cause, mind you. I don’t want the real thing, flu or Coronavirus or shingles or any of it. So, this is me, once again trying to stay out ahead of any of that garbage.
It’s a minor victory, but I’ll take it: This is the first autumn in at least three years when my shoulders have been in good enough shape to even consider trying to put on a hoodie. Previously, one or the other of my shoulders has been in “frozen shoulder” mode, preventing pain-free raising and turning of my arms to do any kind of constricted over-the-head clothing. (T-shirts are loose enough that I could carefully, gingerly get them on & off once I figured out “the trick” to doing so.)
Rockin’ my KGON hoodie on a brisk October afternoon? You bet I am.
(And I’ve lost enough weight that I look better doing so than I have in well over a decade, even.)
I took a few days off. I didn’t have any particular reason nor much in the way of goals (though I had some of those, mostly unmet). My boss keeps reminding me that I use the least PTO of all employees so, here I am, having burned a few days’ worth.
I suppose I should apologize to somebody for that post title, but it’s true in its own way, right? Right.
A couple of years back I threw some money behind the idea of a self-produced, non-Netflix-y 13th season of Mystery Science Theater 3000. And it was good! Very, very good. Albeit not without the sort of technological growing pains one might expect from cobbling together a whole streaming environment out of available parts. (Not entirely unlike using special parts to make robot friends, after all.)
But seriously. Several sets of hosts, some superb(ly bad) movies and top-notch riffing, exactly what one hopes for from another batch of newly-minted MST3K. I got what I paid for, no argument there.
Oh, but I also had signed up at a level which suggested there’d be… physical goodies. At some point. Well… it took a couple of years but today’s that “at some point.” Behold:
I never know what to do with stickers. It’s not like I have a car. Maybe I’ll look into some magnetic backing material and turn them into really big fridge magnets.
Stickers! A t-shirt! A popcorn bucket! A guzzler of a drink cup! Posters! (Not pictured in an unrolled state; they didn’t want to stay unrolled without heavy weights for eight corners’ worth, oh also they’re huge. Just trust me that they’re really nifty.)
It’s not like I signed up to back Season 13 specifically to have physical goodies shipped to my doorstep, but I’m sure not complaining. And I’ll definitely get some mileage out of that t-shirt if nothing else.
Maybe I’ll pour some non-popcorn-y snacks into the bucket and curl up with “Beyond Atlantis” some evening soon…
