blahandwhatever

[blahandwhatever]

A rattling noise from your car AC can mean a faulty compressor, blower motor, idler pulley, or serpentine belt. Or it can mean a pine cone.

Said noise had me avoiding the use of my heat or AC for a couple of weeks, worried it might exacerbate whatever the issue may be. Then it went away, but I was still concerned. Turned out to be a happy little accident that drew attention to bigger issues. There was a lot of debris in my AC, including the droppings of a mouse or other rodent, and the filter had been chewed through by said rodent. I also had an oil leak, oil apparently overfilled by the Hyundai dealership at my last oil change, and back brake pads that should have been replaced when I replaced my front ones last year, but I couldn't afford to do it all at once.

Now that's all taken care of, and I legit feel better in my car.

And so I had a carless Friday and an early morning yesterday to get all this taken care of before the Saturday closing time, and a couple of walks to and from the mechanic, and a long day punctuated by naps and filled with resolve to get things done. I did some shopping and a bit of work and a bit of cleaning and cut my nails, always a tedious chore. I wanted very much to cut my hair but didn't have a comfortable enough amount of time to do it without risking rushing and messing things up. I did my second independent Nielsen Neuro study, some things going better than the first time, some things going worse due to technical difficulties - mostly my slow internet, I think. Overall, the studies run fine, it's just that they need to be downloaded and then the data needs to be uploaded, and there can be some hitches there, but nothing that can't be overcome, and I'm trying to pin down the most efficient possible routes for everything to make this worth my while.

Now I'm trying to plant myself firmly in Spring Mode and enjoy all the flowers in the trees. Today I went to Glenview, as always leaving later than I should but not missing out on the sun too much. For the millionth time, I really need to get back in the habit of getting out of the house earlier, and going to bed before sunrise.

[blahandwhatever]

Inner and Outer Weather Report

Spring got going early this year, and I'm slowly trying to adjust from a winter hibernation mode I still don't feel quite ready to emerge from. Every year, I feel less and less of the dissatisfactions with winter I used to feel, less and less of the aversion to its onset, less and less hurry for it to end. There's always enough to be immersed in at home, and I never get through all the things I'd like to.

Weather-wise, this winter was exceptionally mild - almost alarmingly so for a while. Lot of warmer house clothes I hardly got a chance to wear because it just didn't get that cold in here. The heavy-duty winter boots I got so much use out of a few years ago hardly got any wear either. Once again, I never really got around to the snowy walks and activities I always hope to do more of - but there truly was so little snow. Then there were these periods of fog and humidity - the fog, kind of dreamy; the humidity, deeply weird combined with the cold.

In retrospect, the winter months are rarely the most memorable ones, yet I do think the healing and reconstituting and internal focus they provide abundant space for are important, and help set me up for a good rest of the year.

On the inside, things have mostly been good, with some ups and downs like always, and more chemical mysteries to unravel.

A while back, I had a weird period of those intense high-blood-pressure-like feelings and looking like shit. I'd experienced this before both when I'd run out of magnesium and when I'd taken too much iron at once. I was also having unusually frequent eye twitches. By this point, I was regularly supplementing magnesium again, as well as calcium; there was a possibility of excess calcium, but it didn't seem likely, given that the dose I was taking was pretty modest. Was it possible that my iron supplementation journey had finally reached a turning point? I decided to cease the supplements and see.

For the first few days, I felt a little better. Then I started feeling worse, and slowly, low-iron symptoms began to appear. Cautiously, I got back on the supplements, and things improved. I felt relieved the iron didn't seem to be the culprit - it had been so indispensable for years, I was nervous about the idea of stopping it, and skeptical that it was already time when I'd still been so sensitive to messing up my supplementation schedule not long ago.

Decided to drop the calcium instead and, temporarily, yogurt too. It was hard to see myself getting too much calcium overall, but then, I do take vitamin D, which increases its absorption. I started getting back to normal, and for a while, I felt pretty good.

Then in the past week, I started getting some low-blood-pressure feelings, feeling a bit lightheaded, having weird headaches, getting a bit of the old orthostatic hypotension, which I hadn't had in forever. And this seemed to get worse after I'd take my magnesium. Finally I ended up with the symptoms that made me start supplementing calcium to begin with: lot of numbness and tingling, increased clumsiness, trouble getting to sleep. For a couple of days, I had some unusually depressive/melancholy feelings for these times.

So I added the calcium back. And slowly, I've been getting back to normal.

Now I'm back to where I started, and I've learned nothing, other than reconfirming that I need the supplements I'm taking. I haven't quite fallen back into the bad states that started all this, so we'll see. I don't know if there are other possible culprits among the supplements I take, or if something else caused this.

Other than that, the only real sources of destabilization have been the good old parents and the good old money troubles. But none of it affects me intensely for long. The parents, I can't be bothered to stress about much anymore, and thankfully there isn't anything too intense going on with them these days. And the money - well, I do stress here and there, but life goes on; I've always gotten through these times somehow.

Work is still slow at the main job, compensated for only partially by work from other jobs, mostly also low-paying ones.

Friday my landlord texted me to pressure me a little about catching up on the rent I've slowly and steadily been catching up on, and let me know she'd be increasing the rent in June - if that's not okay with me, I can move out.

And just. What a thought. Yeah, I'm going to suddenly drop the life I've built here and turn all my near-future plans upside down because you're raising the rent in less than two months.

By this point, I am so deeply entrenched here, and have invested so much in this place both financially and emotionally, that the idea that this place is hers and not mine - hers to take away from me at will - feels viscerally wrong.

Yeah, I'll pay the damn rent. It's not an exorbitant increase, at least. And the fact that it could be feels criminal. The fact that people can, and do, just... lose their homes... feels criminal.

Been feeling some of the old outrage about the intolerably cruel joint forces of worker exploitation, price gouging, and absolute mercilessness about people not being able to fucking afford things. Sometimes you really have to remind yourself that the way things work in this country is actually insane, because god it's so easy to grow complacent, especially when times are good.

[blahandwhatever]

Today I had to get up at 9:30 and do another getting-ready speedrun for a morning study - which I rarely bother with these days, but I had a hard time getting studies at better times in Deerfield lately, so I sucked it up. Tasted six protein shakes, a couple of them good, all of them a much more tolerable consistency than the gross Muscle Milk samples I tasted a while back.

At noon, I had my Pinecone Research training, which went very inefficiently, partly due to my newness to and confusion about certain things but mostly due to a great deal of trouble understanding what my trainer was saying, as her voice, on top of having a foreign accent, kept breaking up and getting drowned out by static, which led to an excruciating amount of trying to puzzle out what she might have said and/or asking her to repeat herself. At first I thought it might be my connection - even though I had good internet for the time being - but later she called me on my phone and sounded the same, so it must have been hers. But eventually we got through everything. Now I have this whole-ass gaming laptop in my home indefinitely for the singular purpose of doing a Nielsen Neuro study once or twice a week.

THEN there was the eclipse, which as always I found out about a bit last-minute, and as always every damn place with eclipse glasses ran out of them early. My best hope was Sonic, which was offering free eclipse glasses with a purchase exclusively today - not much time to run out of stock, I thought. But run out of stock they had, by 2 PM, and at that point there was not much to do but give up. I drove over to the nearby Deer Grove, and took in the strange light, and the people taking in the sight, and drove back home. I didn't feel too dejected - at least I'd seen an eclipse before. Still felt like a neat thing for the world to get excited about; still left a warm feeling.

With all this, I expected this day to feel more jam-packed than it did - and myself to feel more exhausted. But I didn't have much work today, and I made up for the lost sleep with a couple of naps.

Thought I'd use the low-work day to apply for some jobs; managed to apply for all of one. Felt a low in the ebb and flow of my feelings about my current main job. How much I like it, how appreciated I feel. How sorely underpaid I am nonetheless, how unsustainable it is. At least, for the most part, it's had a steadier, more reliable stream of work than my other jobs - but not always. Last month there was a very slow week or so. Now things have slowed down again - don't know for how long, but I sure hope they pick back up in time to make up for this before my next paycheck.

The other day I heard back from a job I applied and did a test for seven months ago. Apparently their recruiting efforts had been put on pause by some shifting priorities, and now they were interested in doing an interview. I would have been interested without the interview and declined. Felt I had the luxury to be choosy now. Today, I'm not as sure - but the chances the interview would have served me well are slim. On top of my general weakness at interviews and the bullshit that they generally are, this was a sort of political organization - liberal, but not too liberal, because that wouldn't serve the people at the top - that was going to want me to convince it of how passionate I was about its mission and how devoted I was to nonthreateningly progressive causes. I did not have that in me.

Lemme tell you a liberal cause I'm passionate about; I think we need to overhaul the American workplace altogether.

[blahandwhatever]

Eating lots of vegetables makes me feel so powerful

[blahandwhatever]

This morning I slept through some alarms and woke up 15 minutes before I was supposed to leave for a Mars Wrigley study. 90% of me was ready to throw in the towel and go back to sleep, but a fiercely hopeful 10% took charge and powered through the compressed timeline. I did the most cursory tooth brushing, put on some sunscreen and minimal concealer, threw on some trusty clothes that required no thought, made coffee, grabbed a Kind bar and water and essentials, and managed to get out right on time. I'd pulled this feat exactly once before, for another study earlier this year, but that one was closer to home and the drive more predictable. This was more of a gamble given the widely varying times for drives to Chicago and the bigger waste that failure would amount to.

I managed to get there early, in fact, without too much hurry, and wait around even longer because most people were late today for some reason (maybe the rain). I tasted fig bars, for reasons unclear to me, as I surely would not have indicated in a survey that this is something I regularly eat. Many a time have I been disappointed by an otherwise promising snack bar that turned out to contain figs. It's not something I hate, but it's not something I ever actually want, and it will downgrade a snack by one or two letter grades, especially if it's not even otherwise fruity.

In any case, I did my evaluating duty, got back home reasonably efficiently, and got paid by the end of the day.

Next week I have training with Pinecone Research, the new remote incarnation of Nielsen Neuro, which pays less per study but has a lot more studies available. Hope it'll work with my slow internet connection - I deliberately scheduled the training for the small window before my speeds tend to get throttled, but after that, I don't know. I'm still on mobile hotspot data. Getting internet alone could be doable at this point, but the obstacle is the TV + internet debt I have with Comcast that I have to pay off to restore service (and I don't want to get a new provider, I just want to pick back up on what I had, when I can).

Money is still tight, and even with a solid amount of work, it's just never enough on these wages, so I have to take what extra bits I can get. My father sent me some money for Easter (he's gotten more prolific with these gifts - maybe overcompensating), which I can't deny was immensely helpful, but I still need so much more, so much more.

[blahandwhatever]

Easter. My mother and I continue to do holidays on our own. I went a day early because she works tomorrow. Hadn't been since mid-February - not on purpose, just how it worked out, though I did like it that way, and didn't really even feel like going today.

My father's birthday was last week, and I wasn't sure what to do about that. Usually he'd have a party. Now, not only are he and my mother not talking, but apparently he had some kind of fight with his family a while back, and now they're not talking to him either. Feeling a little sorry for him, I thought about offering to take him out to eat or something - if I had money. I did not, however, have any money at the time. I also still felt bad about the mess he'd made last year and the ongoing unresolved situation between him and my mother. I just texted him birthday wishes and that was that.

Then it was his mother's birthday. I tried calling a couple of times, to no answer; never heard back.

Again, I never heard anything from his family about Easter.

I was mostly happy with how all this worked out. In the worst of times, I'd get saddled with a sickening amount of family gatherings this time of year. This time, I hardly had to have so much as a conversation about any of it.

With my mother, things can go all kinds of ways, of course. But one day with her is a much smaller minefield.

As always, I ran a little late, though within a tolerable zone. I didn't get as much sleep as I needed, a bit depleted by a busy week I'd partly but not entirely recovered from yesterday. I was about as efficient as I could be, but, broke again (I'd worked so hard to get a long project done in hopes I'd get paid for it Friday! but guess it'll be Monday), I tried to squeeze in a couple of online surveys to give me enough points to redeem in case I needed to stop for air or gas (didn't need to, waste of time).

My father was there, which felt a bit awkward and wrong but not entirely unexpected. My mother had mentioned she wasn't sure if he'd be there or not. I wondered why she would even consider it - there's no reason she should need to include him in her holidays at all. I reminded her of how upsetting his presence was to her on Christmas. She said she was over it. He wasn't really bothering her anymore, and she didn't feel as stressed.

They acted oddly everything's-back-to normal, both in relatively good spirits, talking to each other even. I asked my mother if they were talking again...? She said no, it was just a truce for the holiday. I wondered, given the way that he was, if this could be a slippery slope.

He left pretty quickly after dinner, which was ideal. I don't know if he's still playing poker, but he is back to work and busy with that.

My mother and I had dessert, went for a walk with the dog, and looked through some old pictures, mostly from Italy. I collected some of them to take home and scan to my computer - I hardly had anything from Italy. Felt a bit defensive when she wanted to see what I'd selected, not wanting her to judge my choices, and waved away the attempt with assurance I'd bring them back. I should've not worried and let it be - a little something to work on still.

As she went through the box, picking and choosing what was and wasn't worth showing, she passed over a picture of a sunset I'd taken when I was ten years old. It was outside a store, and we'd both marveled at it, and I'd grabbed her camera to take a picture. She snapped at me about why I was wasting film on a picture like that. I didn't understand. It was beautiful, as she clearly agreed. But for my parents, pictures were supposed to be of people, or at worst concrete places (and then, restricted by certain standards of significance or conventional beauty). The same thing came up when I asked for and got a camera in high school - and then never used it to take pictures of the family. They made so many completely normal things about me feel like something weird and wrong. Needless to say, I don't share my pictures with them.

[blahandwhatever]

One thing I hate about packaging made from recycled materials is the random out-of-place green circle or whatever that will show up and mar an otherwise harmonious design it doesn't go with.

Can you just not. Can you just put it in the back, or just put some fine print in a neutral color. I mean I know you want to advertise this element but god.

As it once was. Pure and pristine.

Still offended that they did this. Right over the flower. Fuck you.

What the hell are you doing. NO.

[blahandwhatever]

Thank you, Wikipedia, for. helping me get to the bottom of this.

[blahandwhatever]

I have fallen victim to a tragedy called No Spicy Snacc. Pray for me.

[blahandwhatever]

My mother and I have both been praised at work for taking ownership and pushing for good resolutions - albeit in contexts with much different stakes. She works in medicine and may have saved a patient's life. I work in words and ideas - at most, I might make a medical article clearer, more helpful, more accurate. Doubt it'll save any lives, but then, it's hard to calculate the impact of something so diffuse - something small that might reach thousands, maybe millions, versus something big with a clear and definitive impact on one person. (And in truth, most of us do a bit of both.)

[blahandwhatever]

So many $80-100K full-time jobs in my field, so few $40-50K part-time jobs (or freelance equivalents). WHY.

[blahandwhatever]

Guys. Companies. What is with the marketing choice of sending out your email campaigns at 10 PM on a weekday. Do you think this is when I'm in Doing Business and Purchasing Products and Services mode. Do you really think I'm going to interrupt my Relaxing at the End of the Day (well, it's far from the end of my day, but in any case) time to explore the exciting possibility of purchasing renters insurance? Please.

Also I think it should be illegal for companies to use the same email address for promotional purposes that they use for essential account updates.

[blahandwhatever]

I didn't think too much at first of the chocolates my job sent me by the fuckton, but I am having a Journey with these fuckers.

Just opened a new box. Who will it be today?

Almond.

I keep telling myself I need to finally try the raspberry ones, but it keeps. not happening.

P.S. Those countertops are darker and nicer IRL than they look in these pictures. Love my kitchen. 🥰

[blahandwhatever]

Um excuse me, daylight savings time already? Felt like we just changed the time a few months ago. Which I guess... we did. Only just occurred to me how much more of the year we spend with daylight savings time than with 'standard time'.

Man! I got pretty on top of staying on top of this in November but did not yet internalize that it already changes back in March.

[blahandwhatever]

According to one of my jobs' stock photo search results, the epitome of 'manly' is either a lumberjack or a suave man in a suit.

Which will it be? The big-city businessman fiance from a Hallmark movie, or the rugged country boy from a Hallmark movie? You must choose a path, aspiring manly-men.

Also some pictures of just axes:

One way or another, you're clearly going to need an axe.

[blahandwhatever]

God I've been so stuck in Work Mind Quadrant 2

It's great and not great

[blahandwhatever]

Just made a broccoli-cauliflower-carrot frozen vegetable mix that turned out to be 65% carrots, 30% broccoli, and 5% cauliflower, RIP

I'm gonna be generous and assume the universe has calculated I am currently in greatest need of carrot nutrients