Time Shifted

Late to bed, late to rise. The old addage stands true. It was a serious struggle to wake up and get moving. My fool body thought it was ahead of six and refused to operate normally. I barely made it to work on time. No walk and no food. My walk streak is officially snapped and I’m scared I won’t get it back on track. This is what I do, this is what happens. I make a little progress and do some good things and then it doesn’t happen once and my mind give up completely on it. I hate it. The day started really rough. Meeting initially and then a bunch of emails from people asking me questions I don’t have the answer to and the people that do won’t respond or can’t possibly, I don’t even know. I hate being in the middle on things like this but I guess that’s why I get paid the big bucks. I didn’t bring any water up with me, mostly cause I never went down to get it. I basically powered through things until a colleague called to vent on some items and move a couple issues forward. He’s more frustrated than I am with the challenges facing him and that sucks. I got some work done and then my old assistant Gerbs called me up out of the blue. He announced that he’d just got a house and wanted to ask my advice on a number of issues. It was reassuring and nice to have someone that you haven’t worked with or interacted with much over the last few years reach out with news like that and to seek some advice on things. We had a good chat that led into lunch. I had a nice lunch of pizza buns and Campbell’s Chunky Chicken and Wild rice soup. While I was in the kitchen I noticed the board hadn’t been updated for the week. Here is where I landed last week, not very successful at actually making the meals I planned, even the easy ones.

After lunch was a series of meetings until half four. When they wrapped up and my OneNote was brimming with notes I tackled a few issues with immediate importance and wrapped things up at half five. I’d put in a gruelling nine hours on a day when I lacked a considerable amount of vim and vigour. I was feeling down and a little bit sorry for myself. That is not a recipe for a dinner requiring much in the way of effort. As such I made two cups of Minute Rice in my microwaveable pot (added a dash of salt, pepper, pepper flakes, and butter) and dumped a can of chili (cooked) on top and mixed it all together. It takes less than ten minutes to make (lied about the minute rice eh) and it comforting, filling and all the things a bummed out dude like me needed. I gorged on that and proceeded to do nothing of consequence. I more or less went to bed. There were clothes in the dryer still from the weekend that I meant to fold but didn’t have the jam to do it. This time because of the heavy gut more than the lack of sleep. I finished my audiobook in the dark and dabbled in some Musings before the big event. A couple former colleagues that didn’t make the transition to the new company had organized a bit of a reunion. The former marketing lead has her own outfit now and she wanted to test some digital tools and had been playing with this idea for a long time apparently, and then she chatted with a sales rep that now works for one of my customers and they made it happen. They rented a massive digital hall and we had ninety people join the reunion. You could flit from virtual table to table and catch up with people and chat. It took me a few tries to get my camera and audio working once I got on the platform. I eventually had to open a new browser but got settled and caught up with a colleague I haven’t interacted with in a year. He wasn’t keen on being a social butterfly and that’s not my style either so we made small talk about the pandemic and changes in our lives, the usual. We got pulled into a presentation to the entire group and we played some Jeopardy games. It was super competitive and quite fun. The trivia covered a lot of years. There were people on the call who were with the company back in the seventies all the way through to current employees. It was a great mix, and very well organized and executed. They will likely do it again due to the overwhelming success of the event. It was all based in Central Time which felt appropriate for a number of reasons, so it ended late in the evening for me. I tried to burrow into my blankets at half ten but that didn’t take and it was nearly eleven when I winked out. I really need to get my sleep cycle back on track.