By Rocket to the Moon

Finally went to the doc about my shoulder, which hasn't really worked properly since I started working produce full-time instead of part-time. Honestly, I probably would have continued to let it slide, except that instead of just having decreased flexibility and feeling like the ligaments were rolling a bit oddly with certain movements, I had nerve pain shooting down from my armpit to my wrist and tingling in some of my fingers.

As it turns out, I have two mildly related things: the nerve pain is from a pinched cervical nerve (treatment: try not to do anything idiotic and get a soft cervical brace if the pain gets really bad), and the not-feeling-right is from some kind of rotator cuff sprain (treatment: PT).

So on the one hand, the prognosis is good that this is something which could get better without drugs or invasive treatment. I like that. On the other hand, I have a feeling that as long as I'm working produce I'll keep injuring my shoulder. Certainly there seems to be a high incidence of these kinds of injuries on the team -- I know of at least four people who have some sort of nerve or shoulder injury, and there may be more (I don't speak Spanish, and since that's the primary language of the cut-fruit crew, my conversation with them is limited).

I don't know whether getting a different job would make me any better off -- I still remember the damage that sitting in an office chair all day did to my hips and knees, and I'm not sure how well my eyes would react to that much screenwork. Still. There has to be something out there that would be better for my health than this.

I have not gotten as much done today as I had on my list, but the things I have done, I have done mightily.

Busted out many reps and a few quests over on Fitocracy. My shoulders would like to inform me that perhaps I should consider focusing on other areas from time to time. I would like to inform my shoulders that until they straighten up and 1. stop hurting from work, and 2. are capable of comfortably lifting a 50 lb box over my head, they're just going to have to put up with the rehab and strengthening exercises. Also, I rather enjoy the deadlift.

I have researched the internet mightily on a number of topics, mostly related to October in one way or another. And I didn't go to Wikipedia once, which makes it Real Research, right?

I have conquered Mount St Recycling, ironically taking it to the recycling center during the very half-hour that our new curbside recycling bins were delivered. But then I mightily lugged the new bins to the back, lifting them over Mount St Hose Reel. (Ok, so that's more like Molehill St Hose Reel. But I still lifted them mightily!)

I am about to attack the mighty Mount St Unfolded Laundry From the Past Two Weeks. Yeah, I've done the laundry every week, but I just keep adding to the clean hamper.

I expect that Mount St Taxes and Mount St Dishes will have to wait til tomorrow or Friday. But I also hope to make good progress on Mount St Unread Mail.

Heading home. It's been an eventful few days. And stressful, too. Some good stress, some bad, but all stress. I reckon I'll post about it eventually, but I'm going home straight into what will probably be 6 or 7 straight days, and I'd really like to spend some time with Princess while she has a couple of days off from work.

The short version is that the grandparents aren't doing well on an objective scale, but they are doing pretty well compared to where they were a couple of weeks ago. It's extremely unlikely that they will ever be as well as they were before this incident again, though. My aunt is moving them up to live near her in a couple of days, which doesn't please them because, well, NEBRASKA. But it'll definitely be better for them to be in a place where family can keep an eye on them and keep the staff accountable; they haven't been getting very good care here.

Anyway, time to head to the airport. Hope all of y'all are having good days. Mostly, I'm looking forward to curling up with my partner and having Safe Space to Process.

I wasn't really planning on reading The Night Circus, but three of my friends who don't even know each other had spoken highly of it, and one of my housemates happens to own a copy that was sitting out one day when I had nothing else to do, so I picked it up.

I'm unsurprised that the friends who liked it did so. Myself, well... it wasn't a bad book. The idea, the story -- those are great. I just found it incredibly tiring to read. I mean, actually physically tiring. So far as I can tell, this is because I don't like things that are written entirely in the present tense with the exception of their dialogue. Also, it jumps around in time a lot; I found it hard to keep track of the order of events because it jumped forward and back so often. And the beginning annoyed me because it wasn't very clear what was going on or what the rules were. (New bit of information there: not only do I dislike playing games where I don't know the rules, I dislike even reading about them.) I also dislike sentence fragments, of which there were many, but I already knew that. And there were a couple of blatant anachronisms which made me roll my eyes.

I actually ended up putting this book down for a couple of weeks about a quarter of the way through. I picked it up again on a day when I was procrastinating, and found that once I'd slogged through the middle bit, the last third was much more interesting. I had trouble putting it down for the last few chapters, even.

Final verdict: it's good if you're into that sort of thing, but it's a taste I haven't really acquired. I think I'll stick with my third person omniscient, past tense, chronological-with-occasional-flashbacks narrative style, thanks. Or as I put it in my reaction to the acknowledgments: "[my agent], who saw something in what was truly a god-awful mess..." Good gods, you mean it was more of a god-awful mess?

My parents are maddening.

No, really. Amazingly and infuriatingly maddening.

Their latest trick?

I had noticed that my grandparents didn't send me a Christmas card or check this year, which was a break in a very consistent pattern. Now, being well-brought-up in the relatively Southern school of things, I did not mention this to anyone. I simply assumed that they had their own good reasons for not sending me a card (for instance, it was possible that they had found out about the fact that I'm bi and live with my poly partner and decided that they didn't approve), and that it would be rude to act as though I felt entitled to one.

As it turns out, they did send me one. It's just that between name changes and address changes somehow it got returned to them as "no such person." Obviously they couldn't contact me directly to sort things out, as they don't really do email and I don't think they have my current phone number. But they told my parents.

Who didn't tell me.

The only way I know about this is because my mother sent an email to my brother and myself about the fact that said grandparents are in the hospital after both falling. When I wrote back to inquire whether she or my dad had told my grandparents about the name change or girlfriend (not wanting to accidentally out myself if they didn't know, but also not wanting to have to hide things if they did), she replied that she assumed they didn't, and then proceeded to tell me about the card being returned.

I pose a rhetorical question to the VURD: if you knew that someone's mail was not reaching them, would you a) let them know that something was wrong so that they could go about sorting it out, or b) not tell them until a couple of months later, and only because they happened to ask a directly related question?

Struggling with "right action" today...

Today, one of my coworkers (not someone on my team) sweethearted me product. If I report, this person will be fired -- the usual Corrective Action Plan of warnings before discharge doesn't apply to cases of theft.

The economy here sucks. I don't wish this person out of a job, because they're hard to find. I like this person as well as I can for someone that I just don't know very well; they're not a bad person, I don't wish them ill. But I've suspected for a while, and after today I've had proof that this is what they're doing.

And so my heart is torn. I know that stealing is wrong, and it makes me feel sick to my stomach that this person involved me in it. But I also know that action without compassion can be just as wrong, and I'm struggling with what the compassionate action to do here is. I don't think that this person deserves to lost their job; I just want them to stop this behavior. But if I report them, they lose their job, and if I don't, I'm certain that the behavior will continue since I'm pretty sure it's been going on for at least most of the time I've been here.

Partly, I can't get past the old R-MWC doctrine of dual responsibility -- if you did something against the honor code there, you were supposed to report yourself to the Chair of Judiciary Comm. And if you knew or suspected that someone had broken the honor code, you had to discuss the matter with them in private and ask for an explanation, and, if after hearing their explanation you still believed that they had violated the code, you had to request that they report themselves to Judic within 24 hours, and then confirm with the Chair that they had done so. And, if you knew about an honor violation and didn't do anything, you were considered to be in violation of the code just like the person who broke it in the first place. Right now I feel like I'm just as guilty in this situation as the other person is.

Do others have thoughts? I know which way I'm leaning, but I'm curious to hear what others think about right action in this case.

January has been rough so far. Not in the way I expected, mind -- I was prepared, or at least as prepared as a delicate hothouse flower like myself can be, for the bitter cold that I remember from previous winter visits. And don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about the unusually warm winter we've had so far (::knocks on every available piece of wood::)

It's not even that anything is bad. It's just that precious little is going smoothly. For instance, my relationship with Princess is going well, and I'm pretty pleased with how we've handled the past couple of incidents where one or the other of us got upset. I mean, you'll get no argument from me: expressing things as clearly and calmly as I can when something is upsetting me, talking through what's going on and how we can change it, these things are infinitely better ways to have a relationship than the scream-and-yell-and-storm-off model that I grew up with. But dang, it takes a lot of effort to not fall back into the old, easy pattern, enough that I wake up the next morning feeling like I have an emotional hangover.

The job isn't helping matters. Again, it's not that anything is particularly bad (except the fact that sales are down, and so we don't have enough in the labor budget to pay full hours -- the whole team has been under 37/wk since October or so). Coworkers are fine, I feel like I've finally been finding my niche on the team, it's just... well, I'm getting tired of produce. Not even tired of produce, per se, but tired of doing the same thing day after day after day, and not even a particularly interesting thing. It's not so bad on the tables, since that's where most of the seasonal changes happen. But the salad and packages set really is the same thing day in and out. I feel like I'm not learning much of anything new, and that's the real killer in a job for me.

I am looking at moving around again in the company. I know that I don't want to move up through the management ranks, but there's a position called the In-Store Educator who's responsible for doing most of the training, including things like 15-minute class day and team member product tastings. That job, I feel I could do really well at. So the problem is setting myself up for that move, when my current boss isn't very supportive of anyone who wants to move out of the department. I'll manage one way or another, though.

So, the news which has been mostly under wraps for the past several weeks can be not-under-wraps anymore. In short, Princess and I are planning to have a commitment ceremony next fall!

"Ok, V," you might be saying. "What the hell does that mean, since you guys are in a complicated situation?"

Basically, she and I love each other very much and are in this for the long term, and we want to make that commitment "official" with a ceremony in the presence of friends and family. We aren't getting married (illegal in Illinois for several reasons) or becoming legal domestic partners (also illegal), although we do consider ourselves 'partners' in the social rather than legal sense.

Details to follow through the usual and appropriate channels as we work them out.

Words cannot express.

(ETA: J has also posted his account of these events, with photos.)

Well, this morning was a little epic.

See, Princess and I spent the night downstairs in my apartment, but since she had work this morning she went up to her apartment to get showered and dressed. On the way, she turned started the "freshen up" cycle on the dryer, since she had some clothes in there from the night before.

About half an hour later, I headed upstairs to partake of the morning pot of coffee. The door from my apartment to the laundry room was open, and I thought that I smelled something burning and possibly something gross. The smell was strongest in the laundry room, and nothing in the kitchen matched the gross undertone (not even the under sink trash), but it didn't really seem to be coming from the dryer either. I checked it briefly for signs of imminent catching on fire, but didn't see any, so I wrote it off as congestion playing tricks on me and headed upstairs.

After Princess finished her shower, she went downstairs to get her laundry. When she came back up, she said that something smelled awful down there and that she had closed the door to my apartment to keep the smell from getting any worse. We were puzzled, but suspected either the dryer or some kind of malfunction with the water heater that feeds the upstairs, since those were the only two appliances that had started running when the smell got bad.

Eventually, she headed off to work and... hmm, I don't have nicknames for these folks. Her husband, J, and his other partner, M, both came upstairs. We debated possible causes for the stench back and forth, including a hilarious bit where we were describing the stink as one might a fine wine. M took a shower, and it got even worse -- so bad that it could be smelled on the second floor's back porch, since Princess had left the door from the laundry room to the enclosed porch and steps open to help it air out. The majority was definitely a burning scent, but I really couldn't shake the feeling that there was a "dead thing" involved in there somewhere.

So after M left, J and I went down to the basement to see what we could figure out. We'd hoped at first that the venting from the hot water heaters would go outside directly enough that we could just pop off a vent cover and have a look inside from the outdoors, but no dice -- it went up to the roof through the old chimney system. Then we decided to narrow down the possibilities before taking things apart. So first we ran the dryer (no problems) and then we turned on the basement's hot water (because each floor has its own water heater, and if that caused a problem then we'd know that it had to be further up the line where everything comes together -- but again, no problems). I went back into the apartment to turn the water off, and was saying something to J about going upstairs to try that hot water, when he cut me off: "Oh god. Oh god oh god oh god, we know where the problem is."

"What?" says I.

"There's fur sticking out from the duct -- don't you see?" And it took a moment for him to point it out, as he was cowering in one corner of the tiny room. But there, poking out from the vertical piece of duct right above the water heater, was a little bit of grey-black fur.

"Aaaaahh!" I yelled. "Ohgodohgodohgod!" And jumped back to cower in the other available corner.

After a couple of minutes of cowering, crying out in disgust, and generally say "Oh god oh god oh god!" we collected ourselves sufficiently to go upstairs and plan the next move. Options we considered:

1. Calling the HVAC guy, saying that we had some kind of weird burning smell coming from the ducts but no idea what it was, and letting him discover it for himself and sort it out.

2. Extremely small tactical nuclear warhead.

3. Not using any hot water on the second floor, then when the smell got worse not using any hot water in the house at all, and finally when it became unbearable moving out and burning the place down.

But finally we suited up in our best ad hoc hazmat gear and went after the job with a screwdriver for the ducts and a bucket lined with plastic bags for whatever we might find inside. I'll spare you the precise details of that, dear readers. Suffice to say that it was... well, had been a squirrel, and that the lower bit was in fact a bit charred from the heat off of the water heater. And J is a big damn hero, because while I was moral support and opened doors for the exodus, etc, he was the one who actually took off the duct, carried it outside, and separated the constituent bits of pipe to get the critter out. (He's also the homeowner and my landlord, so I don't feel too terribly bad about that division of labor.)

One particularly horrible moment:
Me: (with no context) No, it's okay, it's the wrong season.
J: (baffled) What?
Me: Well, I was just thinking about when you guys cap the chimney off, it could be really bad. Except it's the wrong season. They're going into hibernation.
J: (realizes where this thought train is going) Oh god, babies!
Me: Yes, but wrong season! Wrong season!

And that, my friends, is the tale of Oggie. Short for the critter's more formal full name, "Ohgodohgodohgod That's Disgusting."

Actually, since I'm home from work I suppose it's T-day minus negative one-half.

I have Chicago all to myself this weekend. Nearly everyone I know has headed to various Thanksgiving celebrations in places other than here. I find myself a little more bummed about this than I thought I'd be, but such is the price of working retail -- if you don't work in grocery and have to work the day before a holiday, you work in some other retail and have to work the day after. And either one, you may get stuck working day-of.

Work was ok today. Mostly. Busier than I'm used to a Thanksgiving day to being; we were a little busier than a normal weekday, whereas I remember it being pretty dead at the store in KC. The real problem, though, was our idiot buyer who didn't order enough of some key items. Like brussel sprouts. I had several customers swear at me because we ran out of them yesterday. On the one hand, yes, it's insane for a grocery store, especially one as produce-heavy as WFM, to run out of brussel sprouts at Thanksgiving. On the other hand, saying "I can't believe fucking Whole Foods doesn't have fucking brussel sprouts!" won't make them magically appear. Believe me, lady, if I knew a way to make them magically appear, I would have used it already.

But now I've got the rest of the day off, and no commitments other than stabbing a diabetic cat for one of the out-of-town friends later on. I do have an invite to a T-day celebration from the chick who picks up the store's food kitchen donation, but I'm not sure whether I'm going to take her up on it. From what she said, she was intending a wild party. I just don't feel up for that right now. Perhaps I'll watch a movie and do some reading. I haven't had so much time for pleasure reading since starting the Greek class, but that's nearly over, too, so I've got time now if I want it.

Anyway. A very happy Thanksgiving to all of you, and remember this holiday season: it's a grocery store, not an ER. Nobody will die if you don't have brussel sprouts. Just sayin'.