Category: health

More Time Off

When we came home from vacation in… June? May? Early June, I think, we immediately planned another trip for the early fall. We were going to go to San Diego for a few days and then go to Los Angeles for a day or so and then come home. Just a massively huge, yet very short trip. We both booked time off from work and then right afterwards cancelled the whole thing in favor of another Florida trip in January.

We kept the vacation time on the books though. We thought maybe we’d go on a short trip somewhere closer to home. New York or the mountains in New Hampshire or something. Then as we got closer and closer to the start of the vacation time we started thinking about cancelling the time off and just waiting for the next big trip after the new year.

Then my father went into the hospital. Then my father passed away. Then we had the wake and the funeral. Now we’re down to one more work day before the start of the time off and there is no more talk of cancelling, despite having taken time off for my father. No. We’re going to have a staycation. We’re going to spend a week flaking on the living room couch watching Star Wars movies (Jen’s idea, not mine, I swear) and just ignoring civilization for a week.

I speak for myself when I say this, but I know Jen feels the same. I am not taking this time off from work because I want it. I am taking it because I need it. Physically and mentally. I need to shut down for a bit. I need to recharge my battery. I need to recover from the last month or so.

I have one work day left. Tomorrow is Friday. After that? One week’s worth of staycation. I am so ready for it. Give it to me, now.

More Playing Time

I was able to sneak in my full day’s worth of exercise after work tonight. It was borderline miraculous and my legs are killing me.

I also snuck in more guitar. I put rhythm tracks onto one song and leads onto two.

Bonus. Now I am going to hang out and wait for my step daughter to come home. She’s on her way.

Bonus indeed!

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4/365

Oh yeah, and I also uploaded those photos I forgot to upload this morning before I left for work. That second one is 4/365 for the photo a day thing. Let’s just call it a complete day and pat ourselves on the back a little.

Frustrated

Dude, you need to calm down. I know you’re in a fragile state right now, what with the impending wake and funeral, but you have to relax. You have to stop stressing. You have to stop letting everything get under your skin.

So what if the person sitting behind you in the open concept office space doesn’t have their laptop muted and you can hear the alert every time they get a Google Meet chat message, and so what if that alert is happening 2-3 times a minute all day long.

So what if that other person sitting near you doesn’t have their phone muted and it keeps ringing at 100 decibels and it also has the same ring tone you use on your own phone and every time it rings you simultaneously jump through the ceiling and reach for your own phone to answer the call that isn’t coming to you.

So what if two hours ago you asked someone to move an escalated issue they are looking at to another application, where it clearly belongs, so that management doesn’t start hounding you with questions and requests for updates that you will not be able to give and they ignored you (why?) and now you are both getting hounded by management with questions and requests for updates that you cannot provide because the issue does not belong with you and yet still they haven’t moved the fucking issue to the other application.

So what if the only thing on this Earth that you want to do is leave this fucking office and go work from home but you cannot for at least another three hours.

So what?

Just calm down, you psycho. Calm the frick down.

Screwed Up Routine

I overslept a little. I had a bit of an issue first thing. Nothing major, but it threw off my morning routine enough that I dumped the whole deal down the crapper. Instead of doing my 50 minutes or so of morning exercise I did 30 minutes of guitar playing. Bad for the physical health, but good for the mental health… or something like that.

I still managed to mess up the timing a little so that I had to rush through some of the morning routine things that I didn’t skip. I’m in the office today so there’s a bunch of office-day-prep things that need to happen.

I got in on time though, and I wasn’t planning on having time for much on the musical front today and I ended up with a song’s worth of guitar parts recorded. I’ll take that as a win.

I’m off tomorrow for my dad’s wake, but I have the morning to myself. I might get a hair cut. I will definitely iron a couple of dress shirts. I might play a shit load of guitar. I will definitely do about 50 minutes worth of exercise.

Which Me is Real?

My sister in law started a shared Google Photo Album where we can all add pictures of my father. One of my brother’s friends is going to make a slide show out of them that we will have running at the wake on Thursday.

I was looking through the album and I had a weird moment where my memory and reality sort of broke apart from each other. There was a picture of me from a couple of years before I had my weight loss surgery. I wasn’t even close to the 450 pounds I weighed when I finally decided to go under the knife, but I was probably 380 pounds or so. I was huge, though not quite as huge as I would eventually get.

Seeing that picture didn’t phase me in the least. I kept scrolling through the album and I eventually got to a photo from earlier this year. Father’s Day, to be precise. There was a picture of my father with my brother, my sister, and some other guy. I did a double take. The other guy was me. I didn’t recognize myself. It was the same me that I see in the morning now. It was post-surgery, 215-220 pound me. The current me. The new normal, real me. I didn’t recognize me.

I did recognize the dangerously overweight me as if it were the “real” me.

That didn’t bother me quite as much as being asked about my mother while talking about my father’s funeral did (as mentioned in a post from earlier today), but it disturbed me a bit.

Like… who am I? Who is the “real” me? Do I even know? Will I ever know?

Dad

My father passed away last night. My brother and sister were in the room with him. He went at almost the exact moment that the Red Sox finished off a win. That is literally the best way it could have happened. I didn’t say anything to anyone about it but I had been hoping for the last few days that when he did go, he would go with a Red Sox win.

My brother called when it was getting very close and Jen and I ran over there. He was gone when we got there, but that was okay. We were there earlier in the day and got to say our goodbyes.

I miss him already. Love you, Dad.

No Change

I’m at home. My stomach has been a mess the last two days, probably because I’ve had protein bars for almost all of my meals for over a week and now it’s fighting back. I had to go home and eat something real, and I’ve just been dealing with an acidy stomach that is churning and bubbling and a little nauseous and being weird. Last night I had a full on foamies as well. Tonight was a little better but I am afraid to be too far away from a safe and secure bathroom. Sorry about the TMI, but there you have it.

I was planning on going to work tomorrow but now I don’t know. They are not expecting me to come in (thank you for that) but I might work a little in the morning. Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know. I simply don’t know what to do. Maybe I’ll just wake up and go back to the hospice place and wait for however long it takes. I just don’t know.