In which there’s a blog post! Because I still blog! Occasionally!

Fat:

On a diet now, again, again-again, started weekend before last. Basically a combo of calorie-counting and slow carb. Haven’t had any pasta or baguette, pizza or flour tortillas, but have had a couple of potatoes. Mashed last weekend, and roasted tonight. They do have vitamins and minerals, after all, your potatoes do.

Doing the tiniest little exercise routine, but doing it daily! Have a couple of old wine bottles filled with water for weights for curls and arm lifts. Weird thing is that squats are easier when fat; something about balance, I imagine? It’s the smallest exercise routine ever, but it’s 100% more than the nothing I was doing before!

Have already lost a full inch of my thigh and breast measurements, and a quarter inch off my ankle. Maybe more, but I’m only measuring on Sundays. Don’t happen to own a scale. Feeling distinctly better, even. My feet look less like dead fish! More energy, even!

Sol:

The light is getting better, of course, as our gorgeous planet tilts the way she does, but it’s still in the 20’s here with absolute piles of snow all over. The weather doesn’t matter much to me, as I go weeks on end without leaving the building, but I love that it’s still light out now when I sit down at my desk to login for work at five o’clock.

Employment:

Work is, well, stupid. I work for a call center who contracts with cable company, very large. Many employee-facing policies are, for the most part, absurd, and the produce of management who apparently have little to no idea what’s really happening on the ground, and their training videos are absolutely cringeworthy corporate bullshittery trapped in a past of long-term employment and employee-employer loyalty. Their flagship software suite is forever being updated to be less useful, constantly rearranged to make it harder and harder to deliver service to their customers.

Most of what I do is secretarial. In the main, my job is comprised of clicking Next and copying and pasting blurbs. Once in a great while I have to think, briefly, about a customer’s issue and actually solve a problem, but mostly? I just follow a flowchart. Any competently produced piece of software could do 90% what I do (they pay me for that extra 10%, I imagine). Fucking Alexa could do what I do, were it tied into the appropriate data.

My direct employer is, as far as I can tell, very broke and very struggling. Stock value is a downhill slalom since 2013. I’ve been there two years and have seen various functions removed or outsourced, and have never had a raise, plus, well, I sense that peculiar kind of urgency failing companies exude.

But they did, at least, move me off phones into a chat pilot! Chat is better, by a lot of markers, than getting screamed at by infuriated customers, but management has the chat platform software set to feed us as many as three chats at a time, so it makes it impossible to deliver excellent, or even good, service when it’s busy.

Not that it would be overtaxing to chat with three customers at once; could do that easily if the goal were just to fix things, solve problems, give the people what they want. No, it’s the required logging/documentation and abysmal tools we’re also using that make it a nightmare.

It’s been busy lately because a lot of the team are out for a variety of reasons: illness, internet outages/weather, time off. Oh, and because management can’t seem to figure out how to stagger breaks and lunches on the schedule. It’s a disaster, when five agents all go to lunch at once, and your team’s down to a dozen.

Received my tax refund so I currently have more in savings than half of America. I’ll use the bulk of it to see Amma this summer, of course, and am contemplating what else I might want. Set of sheets, maybe, or a new office chair, since this one is sprung.

Input:

Bought some old treeware vedanta and have been doing daily readings of the Yoga Vasistha and the Bhagavad Gita. Only takes a few minutes but I’m really enjoying it; does help to keep the head right.

Have also sucked down a few fiction novels this year, after hardly reading at all last year. Spend a shitload of time watching streaming TV at my desk in the evenings after work, which is fine, but after all my years being pro-reading and anti-telly I feel rather full of it.

The Dread:

Still suffering from anxiety, but (knock on wood) haven’t had a full-blown panic attack since Walla Walla last September. Although, hmm, my anxiety is so bad, and has been for so long, that maybe I now consider what I once would have called a full-blown panic attack just “anxiety.” I’d probably be on meds if I had to work outside the home, but I’m just so resistant to the idea of going to get some, for some crazy fucking idiot reason.

Actually, I know the reason: the idea of going to the doctor for anything but the flu gives me anxiety. I’ve been meaning to go in for a checkup since I got insurance, but I keep blowing it off because WHAT IF I’M DYING. It’s batshit, I know, but hey. I’m batshit. I often sit and twitch for hours while I’m at work. Cool with it.

The Boy:

The relationship is solid and wonderful and the best I’ve ever had. I don’t deserve it, but hey, there you are. God is good.

The dead fish:

I made a delicious dinner tonight: parmesan encrusted salmon, oven roasted potatoes, cabbage gratin, cucumber salad, and homemade tartar sauce. I used a lot of parmesan! Here’s an unflattering photo: