Author: wwducat

About: Writer, Technology guy, Photographer, Possibly EX-Software QA Engineer, Worker Bee. Interests: SCUBA, Working out, Friends, New Views, New Vistas, Photography
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Is this all there is?

I guess most people find themselves asking that question from time to time.

I’ve been asking it a lot lately. I suppose I’m luckier than some in that I’ve got a job and a home. But what I’m doing is so unfulfilling that perhaps I’m asking that question a little bit more than usual these days.

The unspoken part of the question is, “What would your prefer, if not what you have?”

(C) DKendal

That’s the really had part of the question.

What would I like to do in place of what I’m doing? The obvious answer, is being wealthy and not having to work.

Back here on Planet Earth…

We need to work, honestly we need something to keep us busy.

I get that, but shouldn’t something we spend so much time doing at least make us feel good about having done the job?

That’s the problem I’m having. The job I’m in is menial at best. There’s little thought that needs to go into it anymore. The issues can be categorized into really one of 6 or 7 common problems. Everyone describes their problem in the most obtuse manner and at first listen, it sounds very complicated. After you cut away all the bullshit the problems people contact us about always fall into the same 6 or 7 categories.

Hence the problem. Boredom

On a larger scale, beyond just the job I’m not doing a lot of the things that I used to do. Part of that is income related, part of it is friendship related, and part of it is simply that I’m tired.

I had expectations that at this point in my life I’d be winding down and charting my course for retirement.

Whoops!

Guess that plan is shot to hell.

I thought that even if I was heading to retirement I’d at least be doing something that I generally liked doing and if I put off the retirement date a couple of years I’d still be happy doing the job.

What I couldn’t see was the extended unemployment, and finally landing a job at a truly awful place that bores the crap out of me.

Try as I might, finding another job has gotten much harder. I’m wondering if it is due to my age, or if it’s just that California is played out.

Could be a bit of both… or Neither. I don’t have an endless network of friends to bounce those kinds of ideas off of.

What I do know is that it’s getting harder and harder for me to get up, get dressed, and come into this shitty place every morning.

Of course the fear is that “THIS” kind of mind numbing boredom is all there is. God, if that’s true… take me now.

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I do miss the silence

IMG 0865Made it to the mountain this week.

There’s a ton of stuff I should have done, but none of it really pressing.

I looked at the stack of paperwork on my desk and think, “I really should scan this stuff and shred the paper…” but I’m unmotivated. I have no desire to give any time to bureaucracy and documentation that serves other people’s purposes.

I’m tired but at peace. 

No sounds except the wind in the trees, birds and scurrying of small critters in some of the plants, those sounds are probably just lizards going about their lizardy day.

No traffic sounds, car alarms, sirens, or loud people. In short, bliss!

It’s a cooler morning, the sun has just crested the hills to the East and I’m sitting on the deck in a pair of ratty shorts with bed head and a cup of coffee.  The dog is checking out his yard making sure that nothing is amiss.

In just a few hours, it will be down the mountain to the heat, brightness, and chaos of the modern world. Ironic, since I’m participating to some extent in the modern insanity writing his blog. 

IMG 0864The neighbor’s dog is surveying his world from his outpost in his yard. He looks my way, recognizes me and focuses on something else, the king of his domain.

I used to be king, now I’m a slave to a time clock and petty, reactionary managers & supervisors. I don’t know why some people aren’t happy unless everyone else is miserable. For some reason, where I work has concentrated a substantial number of really petty, nasty, people in supervisory positions.

These people seem to go out of their way to make others unhappy and then delight in the ensuing discord.  Ahh, thinking about those people, and their insanity will wait until tomorrow. In its due time.

My phone is upstairs on my desk, having just shown me “Memories”. It was trying to be helpful but it failed. The “Memories” it chose were of my faithful pup who passed last year. It’s a bittersweet series of photos and feels a bit like having a wound reopened. I know in time, it won’t be as jarring at it is today, but I felt a little betrayed by my phone. So it’s sitting face down in a “Time-Out” lest it remind me of something else I don’t want to think about.

IMG 0863I’m just going to sit here a while, letting the cool breeze blow gently across my exposed skin and enjoy the fact that I don’t care too much what the neighbors may think of my sun starved pasty body. My pallor is a function of living life like a vampire.

As white as I am, they’d be blinded if they looked at me anyway. They should thank whatever deities they worship that I’m not completely nude.

This time is mine!

It’s the only time for the next week where there’s not something or someone demanding my immediate, urgent, or mandatory, attention. 

Either I’m getting old, or I’m becoming more antisocial like Riddick. Perhaps it’s just getting old, but so much of what people think is important… Just isn’t. 

Humm, I guess I’ll go get my phone and take a couple of pictures for this post. My phone has been punished enough.  The dog wants his treat and my coffee is empty anyway.

Make some time in your life to just be, it will do you a world of good.

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Morning cup of coffee

Having my morning cup of coffee, waiting for a more civilized hour to go out and start with the yard work.

I’m on the clock again, and it’s my Sunday.  Sundays are supposed to be lazy, quiet, and slow, unfortunately that’s not my life anymore.

Seems like I’m always racing to the next thing these days. I miss being able to just relax.

Well, I guess that just means I need to keep working at normalizing my life again. Whatever “Normal” is. 

It’s funny, seems like the more I try to make my life simple, the more complicated it gets. It’s not just doing the physical stuff, it’s the encroachment of the digital aspect of all our lives.  If it’s not some website demanding that you change your password and add a PIN and give us your phone number and activate two factor authentication, it’s another service telling you that they don’t have enough people to answer your call and that you really should be using their overly complicated website for better service.

Altered carbon wallpaper 62904 64914 hd wallpapersReally? Since when did using my computer, or tablet, or phone make anything actually easier?

No matter what you’re using to access the digital services… you’re having to keep track of passwords, signs & countersigns and there’s a new trend on some websites where they won’t let you copy and paste that information. That means that if you’re trying to use your phone you can’t switch to your password manager, copy the password and paste it into the required field.

So now you’re writing the 16 character password down and entering it from a piece of paper then manually typing it in, praying that you get it right. So tell me again how this is making my accounts safer???

And of course if you work where I do, you’re doing all this in your car on a 10 minute break that you’re going to burn four minutes of just getting into and out of the building.

All of our lives are too busy and too complex. 

I miss the “Good ‘Ol days” when you could move at your own pace and not dance 24/7 to someone else’s tune.

2014 04 20 15 45 131I think the Amish folks may have it right.

Maybe we should start putting away our tech, keep it and be a technological society but get back to making things simple.

I think there was a StarTrek movie about a group of people who knew technology, but chose simply not to use it.

After all who doesn’t appreciate the craftsmanship of Amish furniture and goods?

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Well the Doc says I’m on the mend…

Yeah, I wussed out. I went to the doctor yesterday. I’m still running occasional low grade fevers. In fact I went into the office and my temp was normal, 15 minutes later when the Doc saw me, I was running a low grade fever, and my temp was climbing.

The Doc bled me, so he could run all the tests for sexually transmitted diseases and a variety of other things. He wrote me a note to keep my employers off my ass for a couple of weeks and told me to go home, rest, and not to go to work if I was running a fever.

I just got  off the phone with him, and the tests came back all negative. So on the one hand that’s good news, I don’t have anything really nasty, I don’t have any STDs and hey since I’m clean… I’m open for business! Anybody wanna come over and make a guy feel better?

Still no explanation about what I actually had, but the Doc seems to think I’m on the winning side of this and should start feeling normal in a few more days. 

I didn’t go to work today and I’m sure there’ll be hell to pay for that but I’ll burn that bridge when I fucking get to it. I’ll go to work tomorrow and Sunday then I’ll go back to trying to be a good little boy (A.K.A. a Slave).

But for the next two weeks, if I have a fever I’m not going to that shithole.

I was very tired yesterday when I got home, but this morning in addition to the fever I was also awakened by a man’s best friend. No, not a dog… Every man’s BFF! I take that as a sign that I’m getting better.

Hopefully when this passes, I’ll be back to my normal crotchety self and not have any lingering effects.

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Well that was completely UNFUN!

So my weekend plans were completely trashed!

I came home Tuesday after work and was looking forward to my two days off.

I was feeling unusually tired, but didn’t think much of that since we still have mandatory overtime in place.

UntitledI get the concept of mandatory overtime but don’t get the concept behind punishing you if you’re unable to meet the ever changing mandatory overtime requirement.

Anyhow, I laid down on the couch and then I was chilled. It was 78º at the time. I pulled a light blanket over myself and napped. Later that night I woke up shivering. The kind of shivering that I’ve only experienced when I’m really sick. I’m talking a fever of 104º or higher.

(Yes I know adults aren’t supposed to run fevers that high. Well you can talk with God about my many design flaws.)

I was shaking so bad and muscles cramping that I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to get off the couch to get to my bed. After a long time I managed to coax my body to be compliant enough to get to the pantry and grab a bottle of water then made it to my bed.

IMG 0853Thus began what my sleep application shows as a 34 hour broken sleep cycle. I wasn’t asleep the whole time, but I wondered at several points if I was going to simply die. I don’t honestly know what the upper limit of high fever is before you experience brain damage and organ failure but I did wonder if I was going to find out the hard way.

When I woke up sometime on Wednesday I cancelled my planned weekend on the mountain. And then I went back to bed. That was how I spent Wednesday and much of Thursday. Late Thursday I got up feeling a little better. I now had a mission, I needed to get to the grocery store, do laundry, and drop by the pharmacy to (Now here’s an Idea…) buy a thermometer. Guestimating from the kitchen meat thermometer pressed in my armpit wasn’t giving me the kind of accuracy this situation required. 

(Hey ya work with what ya got!) Besides it’s washable! I took using the meat thermometer as a sign that either my brain wasn’t damaged and I was thinking about and trying to work the problem, OR my brain was damaged and I was behaving like those folks who take off all their clothes in the snow when they’re suffering from hypothermia.

By the way, I HATE CVS! $14.00 for one thermometer, $56.00 for another? With nothing in between? Are you fucking kidding me? give me the good old days of a standard mercury thermometer. OH RIGHT, we can’t have one of those anymore because mercury is dangerous…

I grew up with mercury thermometers and I think the entire time I was growing up,  there were maybe 2 that got broken. I can remember my Dad putting piece of paper on the floor and using a small bit of tissue to coax the shiny metal onto the paper then folding it up and tossing it in pill bottle. Nobody DIED, and I’m betting if there were such things as recycling or hazardous waste disposal facilities that the 1/2 gram of mercury would have been disposed of properly. It wasn’t, because there weren’t. Turns out that Dad did reuse the mercury to make mercury switches. He serviced electronics, and when he couldn’t get parts for an old piece of equipment he was working on, he’d fabricate the replacement part himself. Back then, repairing something was recycling. I’d bet I could still fabricate a functional mercury switch. Two steel contacts, a glass tube and a blowtorch. DONE! No waiting for 4 weeks for parts to be shipped in from Japan.  

Of course saying that on a blog will probably get me on a watch list somewhere. So be it. You can scrub the internet of useful information (A.K.A. Potentially dangerous information), You can edit the libraries, but you can’t take my knowledge from me.

I digress, It’s just that I’m old enough to remember being taught how stuff worked and that being able to repair something was honorable. This disposable society sometimes bugs the crap out of me. More often than not, the simplest, cheapest solution is one that is also durable and involved repair, not replacement.

Anyhow, armed with my snazzy new thermometer, breakfast in my belly, and some staples from the grocery store, I returned to my apartment which smelled like wild kingdom by this time and went back to bed, where I remained for the next 24 hours.

I didn’t go to work on Friday, I was still running a fever of anywhere between 102.5 to 102.9 and spent much of Friday in bed jackhammering with chills and sweats. Saturday I went to work for 1/2 day (Doubtful that the company will appreciate that) Sunday I was at work for 4.5 hours before the shivering became intense enough to drive me back to my bed.

Monday I flat called out. Sometime around 5PM I had my first normal temp for almost a week.

It was then that I started wondering about the last time I actually ate. Then it hit me. For the previous 7 days, I’d had 2 meals. I wasn’t snacking or anything else I flat out hadn’t eaten. Nothing sounded good, in fact food was the last thing on my mind. That was when I decided it was time to eat something. No wonder my body was pissed off. Not that I don’t have a bit of a fat reserve to burn, but not eating is not good.

Tuesday, I was tired but functional, but I looked rough. Even my normally self absorbed supervisor said I looked like I’d lost weight.

I’m glad whatever this was didn’t kill me, but I’m pissed that I was so out of it I lost an entire week that would have been better spent looking for a new job.

Anyway, now you know why I was perhaps ignoring phone calls, text messages, and the like. It wasn’t personal, I just didn’t have the energy.