Silver lining comes tinged with BAH

Today at work it was announced that we're taking a pay cut effective yesterday.

I can't really afford said pay cut but at least I have a job, yay!

At least I have a job until the end of June, after that there will be heavy layoffs. Even through June isn't guaranteed.

I no longer have any TV channels because of that digital change over dealy, which doesn't bother me too much, but it still sucked to come home to a TV of fuzz.

I thought by now I would have saved enough to maybe get a good TV set (mine is a twee hand me down) to avoid losing my signal in the digital transition but in light of current economic times it is best if I keep my money under my mattress.

My family is still in upheaval.

But I exercised this morning before work :)

So to recap: family is in shambles, I am making less money in a job I am likely going to lose fairly soon and I don't have Simpson's reruns to comfort me.

But I'm making progress on my two week weight loss goal. And hell, when I'm living in a cardboard box by the river in a few months just THINK of how much weight I'll lose! Dysentery and TB totally give you that sexy runway model look.

woooooo

Stupid Freaking Idiot BAHBAHBAH

Today is my hide day yet I need an outlet and no one is answering their phone. Perhaps they are all nursing hangovers of love from yesterday and are resting? Hmmm? I was having a perfectly lovely day, staying in, napping, hiding, recouperating for the week ahead and then got the crappy news that my younger sibling had run away. Again.

Fun Fun.

I am sure they are okay and I know where they went but the weather they left in yesterday, with unreliable teenaged idiot drivers, is a hellacious mess. And the unreliable little bastard said they'd call when they got to their destination and they didn't. So it falls on me to try to track them down even though their cell phone is off.

I know said person is okay, I also know said person is a freaking idiot prone to intense whims on teenaged angst ridden stupidity which makes knowing that they are okay just that much harder. I wish I could be laid back and relaxed about this but instead I'm tense and freaking out and very, very upset. My younger sibling went to a place about a 10 hour drive from my parent's house and is probably doing things underaged people shouldn't be doing right about now and I swear to gob if they wind up getting hurt I will hit the roof.

So how is your relaxing Sunday evening? Since every single person on earth is currently unreachable and leaving me to fester in my craziness?

BAH

02/16 Edit
Got ahold of bastard at midnight last night, turns out they also stole I mean borrowed the family car to do this. They are alive but all is not well. Must...resist...urge...to eat and eat and eat myself into a coma. BAH

Weight Loss Update - Workout When?

I read something interesting The Happiness Project on blog today: In Stop Being Bored By Your Daily Routine the writer observed that “it’s often easier for me to do something every day than it is to do somedays” and notes that if she only does something a few times a week she winds up arguing with herself when it will get done. This is exactly my problem with exercise. If I tell myself I’m going to do it four days a week I wind up pushing it back or juggling it around when really, like work or brushing my teeth, I should attempt to incorporate it into an everyday thing so that it becomes routine.

My recent two week trial, the one I failed last week, has shown me that exercise is the missing key for me right now. I struggle with my eating (if you know me you know this as well as I know that nacho cheese is delicious on everything) but I’m doing a bit better with it right now (more on that to follow in another post). I have to find a solution to incorporating exercise into my life and since nothing has worked before it is time to explore new options.

Ignoring the fact that I can’t find the motivation to exercise, that most days I am in too much pain to do it, and that my evil inner voice says things like “you’re doing it wrong”, “you aren’t going to lose weight that way” and “what is the point?” the main issue with exercise is that I haven’t incorporated it into my scheduled routine. If it is something I do every day, or on a schedule, then it will be easier for me to stick to the time and just do it already. I’ve been muddling over the exercise issue for almost a year now. How/when do I fit in regular workouts around my work, eat, sleep, bathe, see boyfriend, try to be social, see family, schedule?

I am a morning person so that would be the best time for me to fit it in but I can’t get over the mental hurdle of waking up at 4AM to do this. I’m already up at 5:30AM on weekdays for work and on alternating sleep-over nights I doubt my significant other would love it if I got out of bed even earlier. As it is I’m waking him up almost two full hours earlier than he needs to wake up which is damaging his sleep schedule. M, W, and F I have set strength rehab for two hours after work which are also the current date days with the boy, so I have to rule out running to the gym afterwards (providing that I somehow magically found the energy to do so, but we’ll ignore that for now). Tuesdays and Thursdays after work alternate other appointments: chiropractor, regular doctor, therapist, and my attempts at a social life with friend time. And I’ll be honest: Sometimes on Tuesdays and Thursdays all I look forward to is crawling home, taking a handful of muscle relaxers and passing out at 5:00 in the afternoon. I’m in pain most of the time and I can’t take muscle relaxers if I expect to function, hence, it is like a quiet restorative vacation to pass out mid afternoon in a pile of drool, even if it means my laundry stacks up and the only thing I have in my cupboards is expired alka seltzer and some questionable lentils.

Saturday or Sunday all day I have to hide. I have to do nothing. I have to lie on my couch or bed, devoid of thought or action, for many many hours. I know that this isn’t the best coping skill but it is the only way I’m able to manage my depression and social exhaustion. It is a relief, actually, to have figured this out because now I can be productive at least 5 days a week, maybe 6, whereas before I could barely function the majority of the time. I’m not kidding when I say I must do absolutely nothing: I can’t even schedule a work out or I get panicky and angry and resentful at having to do something. No cleaning, grocery shopping, blogging, socializing, nothing can be done on this day. I’ve learned through trial and error that I must curl up in a ball and sortof enter a stimulus and though free environment for a full 24 hours. Which leaves me with what, exactly? A promise to workout on Saturday, if I’m lucky?

Not good.

I’ve also toyed with pushing my work schedule back an hour so that I have that extra hour in the morning to get fit. I’m torn because I love being one of the first people in and since I’m at my mental peak in the AM I feel more productive. But really, what does it come down to? Do I spend my productive time working out in the AM because that is what is important to me or do I again try to fit in workouts after work which has been a glaring failure?

After writing this all out I think I’ll attempt pushing my schedule back to work out in the morning. I may not like being at work that late but why don’t I just try it? If I don’t like it or if it doesn’t work out I can always switch back.

Yes. I think I shall try it. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. I keep trying to go to the gym a few times a week after work but that never happens. I need to make exercise part of my routine so that it gets done daily and I’m not arguing with myself over when to do it.

I’m going to email my boss right now. And the significant other; I hope he can sleep through me grunting and panting in the other room while he tries to get in the last two hours of his sleep.

Belated Feb 07 Weight Loss Update

Um...

Well.

Let us focus on the positive: I didn't gain any weight. That is good, right? However, the goal was very specifically to lose 3 pounds (or 1.36 stone per LaLa) in two weeks. Which didn't happen.

I didn't lose an ounce. I weigh, to the tenth of a pound, exactly what I weighed two weeks ago. And people, my double chin would argue that this is not my "ideal" weight.

I could pretend that it is muscle gain but that is entirely unlikely. I can do a whole quarter of a pushup girl style (up on my knees) now but that alone would not burn three pounds of fat and replace it with three pounds of muscle.

So.

Yeah.

Meh.

The goal stands. Three pounds in two weeks. By February 21 I WILL be down three pounds. I WILL BE. I just don't know how...

Smells Like Budget

The daily grind of a 9-5* eventually wears on even the smallest of things. Take, for instance, the monthly budget. I find it rather disheartening to know that I’ll make exactly X number of dollars* every two weeks and there is not way that that is going up or changing. Don’t misunderstand: stability is a beautiful thing. What I am trying to say is that seeing it all on paper, the next twelve months, broken out into exact two week segments, with no wiggle room or space for change, is phenomenally depressing. I feel like a worker bee who has just been given an outside complete view of their life in the hive: Work. Gather pollen. Die.

That is my complete outside view of at least the next year (providing, of course, that I am not laid off): Work. Eat. Die. Fun, yes? Yet, structure and routine are very, very important for my ability to function. My depression is manageable when I have a semi rigid schedule to follow. If you start throwing things like staggered work time starts at me or closing grocery stores I shop at it seems that my internal leveler can’t re-balance as well or as quickly as other folks’. I crave a change of scenery yet without fail I always adjust miserably to such things.

In this, as it seems to be in all other things as well, my life is a dichotomy. I could not function in an environment where I didn’t know the amount or originator of my next paycheck yet knowing the exact amount and originator of my next paycheck depresses me in some way. It’s like I’m trapped in a box of expectation, this precise box, and all I will manage to do, no matter how poorly or well I work, is make that exact amount every two weeks, pay these exact bills, eat this exact food and go home to the only apartment I can afford.

And heaven forbid I think this! For I could lose my job tomorrow and then what?!? I don’t know if I even like stew made from boots and fish skeletons; and I can hardly adjust when my couch is moved, how will I function when I have no couch?

I have no idea how my brain and I are going to work things out over the upcoming years. It is decisively split on nearly every level, and both sides of the split are always tinged with melancholy. When I make my budget out for this month, which is precisely the same it will be next month, and precisely the same it has been for a year’s worth of months, I will be sad knowing that there will not be any extra money coming in or any wiggle room. And now it has the added edge of not knowing if I will even get to make the budget out as it is for another year’s worth of months or if I’ll be hoping my state’s unemployment fund has'nt yet run out.

Am I particularly crazy in this? Does knowing exactly what the year has in store for you, two miserable and poor weeks at a time, all laid out exactly, sorta depress you? Does it make you feel trapped? Or am I not making my point clearly?





*Even more so when I know 40 hours a week is more than most other countries, except for the crazy ones (China I am looking at you) work in professional fields.

*Which may soon be X number of dollars minus X percent in an effort on my union’s behalf to keep all our jobs.

Internet Access At Work

They’re really enforcing the Internet Use policy at my work now. It was always strongly enforced at least, it was in my department, but they’re really cracking down now. Other departments’ entire job functions seem to be keeping Zappos and Macy’s online divisions in business. I get to spend hours cleaning up computers infected from hours of web browsing and clearing out literally tens of thousands of cookies per machine as part of my job functionality and have as yet, aside from online shopping and reading gossip sites, to figure out where their job functionality is.

In light of the tough economic times and the fact that things are only going to get worse the HR department has decided to milk every last ounce of productivity they can from every employee in my division, and to ensure that that is happening they are looking at our internet hit reports. Like most businesses my internet access is linked to a user name and password. Every site I visit counts as a “hit” in the proxy. Most sites I visit count as numerous hits because of all the embedded crap. I have never visited a dating site at work in my life yet my proxy hit report has recorded, due to embedded link, that I’ve gone to some singles place several times.

The proxy hit report is fairly skewed. The original determinations for acceptable, neutral, and unacceptable were never changed from the factory settings by the folks who implemented it. That means whereas personal email is considered totally unacceptable chat sites and social networking are acceptable and neutral respectively. I don’t understand why it would be okay for me to spend all day on MySpace trolling for hotties yet checking my gmail is totally out of line.

The report isn’t an accurate representation of what each of us is actually doing on the world wide web. It only tracks hits, not time spent per page or overall time spent on the internet. My department understands this because I work in IT. Other departments, however, don’t understand that total related hits are not the same as total time spent surfing the web. The one hit someone gets for visiting a shopping site and spending 6 hours finding the perfect penny loafers actually looks better to those departments than the 100 hits I take in 10 minutes for surfing tech forums embedded with crap trying to find a solution to an issue. I never visit youtube at work (and rarely at home, actually) but I still get hits on my proxy report for it because it loads with some of the trashier tech forums.

When the reports were ran in December I was number two for hits in my division. I swore to myself I wouldn’t let that happen again. About 20% of my web visits were entirely non work related. There is no way I can justify trashy celebrity gossip sites as being mission critical, even if I say that I need to clear my mind in order to focus on tasks better by judging starlet fashion choices in my head. I knew I could do better than that so I cut out all the *bad* sites in January and was looking forward to my proxy report for the month.

Well.

I dropped my total hits by almost 3,000. Good Job? No. My hit count for the month? Moved me to FIRST place. The hell? The bloody freaking hell? I know what my co-workers are up to. There is no way I’m number one in hits, even if I do rely on Google University to help me with the majority of my work. Yet, there it is, in black and white. Even worse, I’m way, way higher than anyone else in total hits. Number two is 1,300 below me. To have made it out of the top three I would have to have 2,500 less hits. And to add insult to injury, after avoiding trash for an entire month, my unacceptable sites jumped up an additional 7%.

Hence: Arbitrary.

I shouldn’t be reading trashy gossip sites for any number of reasons period, and especially not at work. But I’m not going to stop checking some of my personal email, and I like to see my bank balance daily. I know I could totally cut these things out as well and only do them at home but they fall within acceptable time use of the internet policy, even if they are considered unacceptable by the proxy report. I also know that there is no way I’m ever going to drop out of the top three highest monthly hitters in my division because I rely on the internet for work related answers. Well, that, and I’m not spending 6 hours a day surfing the web on the secret unrecorded DSL line the, er, more seasoned folks are tapping into.

I couldn’t understand how some people could spend hours a day on WoW forums and reading Fark headlines while my two minute Netflix visits were tagging me as an internet inhaling time waster. It’s because I’m at least honest with my misuse of company resources, others have just rigged a way around it. Which: Great. There are plenty of obnoxious and crappy things I get to deal with daily and this is just another. I’m number one in internet hits on the proxy report yet in reality I’m probably number 33, and our division only has 20 people…

At my old job I was the proxy monitor and I won’t say I didn’t abuse it. Can anyone remember my old blog? And how much of that was posted directly from work? Now nothing blog related happens at my job. As a matter of fact most of what happens at my job is…job related. Go figure. In the meantime I’m trying to cut my proxy hits again for the month of February, just as a game to compete against myself. I want to see, with absolute work use only, how much of my hits will still come up as “unacceptable”. It isn’t easy, I do enjoy taking mini mind breaks during the day and just checking to see what is happening in the world but those need to stop now. I’m going to call for my bank balance daily and only visit one or two of my personal email accounts every other day.

If it ever comes down to me being counseled for my over-use of the internet it will be easy to justify the number of hits and the sites I visit. In a way, however, I wish my department would be fair before it ever came to that and crack down on the folks who are circumventing the system. But in the grand scheme of things, does it matter? It surely isn’t fair, and withdrawals from celeb gossip gave me the shakes last month, but should I waste energy on it? I guess I should be happy I have a job and focus on the positive; like evening things out. Maybe I will start letting the air out of the tires of the jackasses who are on the secret DSL all day so that they get to suffer a little everyday too. I’d like to see the HR policy on that.

I'll just...naaa

Just ranting, nothing to see here, move along. Come back in a few days when I post something substantial.

I'm tapped people. I'm tapped and I need a nap. Or Twelve. Work is a bitch right now (for those of us lucky enough to have jobs they are bad but I can't even begin to pray and hope enough for the unemployed), my apartment needs a good deep cleaning (plus whereas my holiday decorations made it down in a timely manner the boxes are still in my living room) my car is filthy both inside and out, I am in desperate need of a major shopping trip (light bulbs have burned out all over this place and all I have left to eat are uncooked lentils and, um, alka seltzer), I'm not fitting in the workouts I would like, I haven't seen my immediate family in 6 weeks and I need to go see my grandfather like yesterday. My sheets need to be changed. I need to figure out why, even though I don't leave out rotting garbage and I dump bleach in my sink drain daily my place still smells sour when I get home. I need to dust. I only managed to steam half my carpet the other weekend and I need to do the rest. My closet needs to be cleaned out. My CD player has been broken for months and since there is no way I can afford a new one I need to dismantle it and see if I can fix it, or, more likely, render it fully useless so I feel accomplished. The stuffing is coming out of the bottom of a chair I need to fix. I have filing to do. There are stacks of papers and books and odds and ends all over my desk that need attending to. I got four new to me books to read. I'm SINGLE people. I don't have pets. I don't have children. And I STILL can't keep on top of things. Plus, I was social no less that THREE times last week, not even including time with my boyfriend. At this point I don't quite know how to explain to the boyfriend that yes, I adore him, but sweet jebus, I need to hide and hide now. I think I've mentioned before that I hope he takes a week long work trip so I can have guilt free time to myself again. I have to shower, brush my teeth, do my hair, dress myself, eat, drive to work, be productive and functional like everyday. When does it stop?

blerg.