Hopeful Hump Day

Up ahead of 7. Downstairs at half past 7 and made a delightful breakfast. Ate with my new bunny friend. That only lasted until the neighbour’s dog got let out and went ripping around. Poor little fella bailed. I like this bunny, focusing on the dandelion leaves rather than nipping my grass off to the soil surface and killing it. I hope the little fella makes it and continues to help with my disgusting weed issues.

Started work by listening into a pair of information only calls. It was a nice mental break to start the day. Email traffic was noticeably down today. I wonder if people are avoiding me because I’m currently under the gun. I had a pair of short calls that both ran over time. I didn’t get any heart crushing news in the second one that is always a concern for me. The success of my week will be contingent on how the afternoon goes. To break up the day I put together a fairly typical lunch. It consisted of a can of Campbell’s Chunky Beef soup from a Leafs can. It is game day after all. The sandwich portion of the meal consisted of some Stouffer’s Bistro Crustini Meatball and Mozzerella paninis. I had a pint of water and capped it off with the last two Viva Puffs. Filling and tasty.

The afternoon started off with me trying to get my part of the extremely complex puzzle done. I had to wrangle the lad responsible for customs paperwork and get him to work on our stuff. He actually responded and said he’d go on it right away. I’m too wise to let myself hope but we haven’t hit a major snag today. It is critical to get this paperwork done so that we can book a carrier as soon as possible. The warehouse is unable to ship after tomorrow so my load needs to be rolling tomorrow. I didn’t have much hope of booking a carrier on the day of pickup so we needed to get a hustle on. I had given him the details before lunch and updated him with some information after lunch. One piece was incorrect and I updated them an hour later, at 1:50pm. I wanted to confirm that the mistake was noted and they were using the correct information. I didn’t get a reply. I also wanted them to understand that all three components of the load should be combined and moved in one truck, rather than trying to ship with three differenct carriers. And I wanted them to understand that FedEx was not an acceptable carrier for this load, they take too long. We need a real truck to pick it up and bring it straight to my customer. I didn’t get a confirmation. I didn’t get any response. I tried with email, Microsoft Teams message and I called. It was becoming clear that this person was ignoring me. I could see they were online and just not answering. I was starting to get frustrated by the end of the day but I was also hopeful that they were working on it. I had earlier helped push to get things back to being automated so I felt like it wouldn’t take all afternoon to get this done. I was sending a request for information every hour or so and getting nothing back. It was around six when I powered down. I kept my phone open on Teams in case there was a reply but nothing came. Disheartened and frustrated I made my way to the kitchen for a meager snack. The meal board dictated that I make cardboard pizza. This one was Great Value brand four meat pizza. I only buy thin crust now, so it had that going for it. I added some Great Value brand nacho blend shredded cheese over the top and let it cook. About halfway through the cook time I added some spinach leaves. I know, I wish they were basil too, relax. I added some Cholula when I pulled it out. It was delicious. This trend of dressing up a lower quality item is working nicely for me. I skip the bulk of the labour to make a great meal but get there anyways.

Despite the fantastic dinner I was still feeling down and defeated. I was holding out a modicum of hope and hiding behind the fact that it was on someone else to deliver but in reality I know that it’s going to come down to me. My name will be on the customer’s lips along with a tirade of cusses. I needed a break, some kind of release. Luckily for me, it was D&D night. I’d done some studying this week and found out some details about my race that should be woven into my backstory. Maybe someday I’ll share that, but likely not until the campaign is over. I talked it over with the game master (GM) and also mentioned that I learned of a fancy sword. He was thinking I’d have had that from the start and apparently was hinting in the first session (the zero session) that I should be asking if I was sure about my sword. I was very green and had no clue what was happening. So we talked about a potential scenario where I could get access to something like that. We had a good session, some things were getting set up for later. There was one memorable moment though. As the party travels the GM will ask someone to roll a die to choose a potential encounter. It’s usually a decent roll so it’s not a big deal. When it came time for my turn to make this roll I rolled a virtual 100 sided die and got a 1. The worst possible outcome. We had to face one of the toughest enemies in the game as a result. And to make things worse, we all kept rolling comically bad checks to see if we got out of it. As a result a lot of the non-player characters (NPCs) of the party died. I guess that’s on me? Whoopsy. It was all in good fun, I’m sure we’ll laugh about it for weeks to come. I was in bed at half ten but didn’t fall asleep until eleven, obviously too wired from our fun.