These shots weren't originally black and white, but it just seemed appropriate this week. And just as a warning, this is a loooooooong one.
First things first, I don't have diabetes.
That's what I've been obfuscating about for the last couple of weeks... in amongst a range of other tests, my doctor wanted to check and make sure I didn't have diabetes. I'll be honest, I was more than half convinced that it was going to come back positive. My grandmother had it, and, well, I do like my sugar. But after waiting for two weeks to hear back from the doctor, he messaged me on Friday to give me the all clear.
The rest of the week has been a combination of crappy and emotional.
I'll be honest, I don't actually remember anything interesting happening before Thursday. Yes, I made roasted parsnip soup last Sunday, turns out if you roast the vegetables they do have a tendency to suck up a lot of the liquid in the soup, so while it was fairly decent soup, it was a little too thick.
And I mainlined the entire fifth season of Teen Wolf between Sunday and Wednesday.
But getting back to Thursday.
At the beginning of the week we had 25 staff in The Nut House.
On Thursday we lost 13 of those people. Now we have 12 staff.
I mean I knew it was coming... people's contracts all expired on 30 June, and there was a whole team that was cut, but we lost other people who I didn't realise would be going... including Newbie. I mean that position was advertised, and she and a bunch of other people applied for it... and I'll be honest, the person who got it I am much happier about. But it hadn't been announced as at Thursday morning, so I just assumed she would continue on until it was.
But then it was unofficially announced and she joined the list of people heading out the door.
We had both a morning tea and an afternoon tea... the morning tea was with the rest of the wider group we're attached to, people made speeches. I was fine while La Ninj spoke, I didn't even think I was going to get emotional, but then H-San spoke... and he's not that kind of emotional person, but there was just something about what he said that pushed me over the edge. After they'd both spoken and the big boss had spoken, I just needed to add something to what had been said. Both La Ninj and H-San had mentioned that we weren't just colleagues, we were friends. But that actually wasn't enough. Because we're more than that, we're basically family. I've always maintained (mostly because I don't have a lot of it) that family isn't the people you're born to, it's the people you choose. And if I had to choose people, I choose them (not all of them to be honest, there were people I was happy enough to see the back of, but most of them).
From that point of the morning it was kind of difficult to really get anything productive done... not only because I needed to run around and do a few tasks related to people leaving, but both of the two other members of my team were leaving, and one of them found out fairly abruptly, so neither of them was feeling overly motivated. Which I get, but it was still kind of annoying.
Sparkles, the other woman in my team who was on her way out to another job, actually bought me a present. She's the one leaving and she buys me a present. Yep, that's the kind of person she is. And she wrote me a gorgeous little note that made me tear up.
Yeah, that was a lot of that going around... Owlgirl, who was one of the people leaving, teared up like a dozen different times. Even Pixie, who is going on to a new job got a little emotional a couple of times. Herschel, another one off to the wide blue yonder, managed to avoid many of these human emotions, mostly because it was her choice to leave rather than a decision forced on her... but mostly I think because she'll feel the feels on her own time.
I did need to get out of the office at lunch time though... even though I had soup in the fridge, I just couldn't be bothered and wanted to get out of the room for a while, so I just went and bought Subway and ate it there.
The afternoon had an afternoon tea that was slightly more festive and less sombre than the morning tea.
And then it was time to go to the pub.
I hung around a bit waiting for Pixie and Owlgirl and Herschel to all finish up the last of their stuff and walked to the pub with them... I think it was around 5pm or so when we got there.
I left the pub at 1am. On a Thursday night. When I had work the next day.
It was a pretty damn good night though... there was probably a little too much oversharing, but that's been the hallmark of my relationship with a number of people anyway (#hostileworkingenvironment #inappropriatesquid), but with Pixie specifically we ramped it up to about 1100. But really, what do I care, I don't work with most of them anymore.
Fortunately there were things that in my very drunken state I didn't say directly to the people concerned, but yeah, I totally overshared.
Normally when we go out drinking I keep if not a careful watch on my number of drinks, I at least keep a tally... this time, I have no fucking idea. But it must have been a lot. I don't remember the last time I was THAT drunk.
People peeled off at various points during the evening, Owlgirl's boyfriend came to pick her up and I walked her out and also hugged him through his car window for being a quality man and sending her flowers on her last day.
It was also nice to see Sugarmonkey get out of his own way later in the night... especially when he was saying goodbye to Pixie. Their relationship has been... interesting... at times, and I didn't hear everything he said to her, but I heard enough, and I remember what he was like at his birthday party when he was well into his cups to know that he was at that stage of truth, and it was all good stuff, and if she remembers it, stuff she needed to hear.
There was also much hugging generally. I know that some of the people that left I'm probably not going to see again, or if I do it will just be them coming to the pub when we do that once in a blue moon. Others I will try very hard not to lose touch with (Owlgirl specifically, but also Pixie). I do know that I'm not good at that shit though. If somebody leaves, then I generally don't try that hard to stay in touch, especially if 90% of our interactions were purely work-based. Same goes with when I've left somewhere... you always say you'll keep in touch, but you never do.
Anyway, because I was pretty fucking drunk, by the time it was just me, La Ninj, Rockchick and Banger, we decided that it would be a good idea to head out into the beer garden where there was a reasonable crowd of (mostly young/uni aged) people and dance.
Yep. Dancing, after midnight, on a Thursday, with people I work with. Now I haven't actively danced anywhere other than my kitchen in the last fifteen or so years. And in part because of the alcohol, but also in part because when I dance, I dance... well, I danced.
I did learn that most of my dance ability is based on being able to balance really well. Guess what the one thing I didn't have was? Yeah. I didn't fall down, but I did lose my balance a number of times. But I also went kind of hardcore and danced like I haven't danced since I was in my 20's.
Clearly this is impressive, or people never expect someone my size to be able to move like I move. I say that because two different complete strangers, both women unsurprisingly, told me that my dancing was awesome.
Yeah, like I don't know that... and you should see me when I'm sober.
Of course it does mean that my thighs are currently killing me... because I do rock quite a lot of thigh work.
When 1am rolled around it was just me, La Ninj and Rockchick left... Rockchick dived into an Uber as soon as we hit the footpath, I stayed with La Ninj long enough to assist her to summon her own Uber and pour her inside, then I staggered (and for the first time I kind of mean that literally) my way home.
Sidebar, the first. If I had a 24 access card to work, I would have slept under my desk. And worn the same clothes two days in a row. And showered in the building. Sadly, or fortunately, depending, I do not.
Sidebar, the second. As I was walking past Torrens University, I happened to look into one of the windows, which was for a computer lab. And realised that there was somebody sitting at one of the computers, at around 1:15am. And my brain still won't comprehend what it saw. What I thought I saw was a person, dressed mostly in black, wearing a gimp mask, seemingly dozing off at one of the PCs. What I now believe it might have been was a person of African descent, wearing a hoodie, likewise dozing at the PC. Either way it was as weird as fuck.
By the time I got home it was 2:30am. And by the time I'd gotten my act together and rolled into bed it was pushing 3am. And my first alarm to wake up in the morning goes off at around 5:30am.
Suffice to say, I didn't hear the first two alarms (the "wake up" and the "no really, you should be awake now" alarms) but I did hear the third "get your ass out of bed now" alarm, which I promptly silenced, rolled over and went back to sleep.
I woke up around 7:30 or so, hung over as a wolverine (I don't really know what that means, but I like the expression and the visual image). I hadn't had much to drink, so I popped a couple of painkillers to deal with my thumping head and started getting ready for work very slowly.
By the time I got into town, stopped at Maccas to get a couple of Sausage and Egg McMuffins, because hangover food, and got to work it was 9:30. On the up side, Rockchick didn't get to work until 11am.
Friday was a very, very, very sombre day. The place was literally half-empty. And, yeah, I wasn't the only one with some degree of hangover.
It was very hard to concentrate on doing much of anything to be honest. I concentrated on trying to do some of the more experienced but not overly complicated stuff, and H-San, bless him, helped me out with some of the simple tasks. But he hasn't had that much experience with the system, so I felt like I spent a chunk of my day trying to get him up to some kind of speed. But given that they gutted my team the day before and there was still the same amount of work to be done, I really didn't have any fucks to give about getting everything done.
After work I had a chiro appointment, so I've decided to use that as my excuse to head to the mall once a month after work, buy stuff, poke around the shops, stuff that I may otherwise have done on any work night on my way home, but now has to be a planned event.
I hit Zing, then Greenlight Comics... and just as an aside... I've never been in a comic book store before that feels as queer friendly as Greenlight. Okay, I've also never had a relationship with a comic book store the way I seem to be having a relationship with Greenlight. But after I'd mentioned something about there being less gay content in the indie comic realm (compared with lesbian content for example), they'd slipped a gay indie comic in my packet for me to take a look at, as well as the Northstar gay wedding hardback graphic novel. I mean c'mon... that's pretty fucking awesome. I ended up buying both of them, because why the hell not.
Originally I was intending to go straight home, but I decided on a whim to head into the sauna, if for no other reason than to unwind and spend some time in both the spa and the steamroom. Let's just say that I got exactly what I needed... and I also ran into Marc and he gave me some serious massage therapy across my shoulders and upper back. It's good to have a friend who does massage, even if you only run into that friend when you're both wearing a towel, and that friend can be a little tiring in large doses.
It did mean that I didn't get home until around 9:30 though.
Today has been a little slow. Between the emotional week and the dancing and the sauna, my body was a little bit done. Especially my thighs, but that was mostly the dancing I believe.
When I got home last night I discovered that there was a parcel notice waiting for me... my prize from the Big W/Pixar competition, so that had to be factored into today, as did the fact we had to go and vote.
For all the years I lived in North Adelaide, we always went to vote at the primary school, and there was usually a long line but also a sausage sizzle, so you know, good and bad.
Today I had no fucking clue where to go, and none of the sites to help you find a polling place are particularly mobile friendly, or don't display data on a map. But I figured there had to be one in Norwood, so we just went there, otherwise we would have called into one of the schools or churches on the way back.
Now every year I'm pretty across what my voting strategy is... and to some degree this year was no different... except this is the first time that I was aware that I fucked up on both ballot papers. Not in a way that will make my vote invalid, but I didn't realise that the independent in my zone was a religious whack-job and put him entirely too high on my sheet, and based on their website and their policy information, I didn't realise that one of the parties I was putting in the "teens" section of the big ballot looked good on the web, but they also put up vaguely racist and homophobic posters. So yay me, I done fucked that right up.
Seriously though, why do they even let all the single platform whack-job parties exist, let alone get on the fucking ballot. Work out what the hell it is that separates the parties that aren't asshats from the ones that are and find a way to move the line in the sand so they fuck off. It'd made voting so much easier for a start, but it's stop shit like my fuck ups from happening.
I'm thankful that a) I don't actually give a fuck about politics anyway because it doesn't matter who's in power, everything is pretty much the fucking same (ie lying bullshittery) and b) the asshats I fucked up over have no damn chance of getting anywhere anyway.
The best thing about the voting in Norwood was that because it's between the Adelaide zone and the Sturt zone, which is where I am now, it has stations set up for both areas, but it's in the Adelaide zone, so the Sturt line was two people long and I got in and out pretty damn quickly.
Hopefully I won't still be in this apartment when the next election comes around, but if I am, I'll try and remember that trick. They didn't have a sausage sizzle though, which sucks.
From there we did the shopping (this week I'm mostly improvising a minestrone soup from out of my head and possibly the internet if I can be bothered), then came back here and went to the post office to get my parcel.
I had wondered why it had taken so long to be delivered, even with Australia Posts new "we'll deliver this when we feel like it" rules, but what I didn't realise is that it was actually coming from Disney's Australian offices. I just expected a box of movies from Big W...
what I got was the movies in a Walt Disney Studios gift bag with a plus Dug (the taking dog from Up) and a nice little note from they Disney people. So damn cute!
I do need to assess the difference (beyond the covers) between the copies I already have and the new ones... I mean I have some of them as two disc sets, and these are all single, but I kinda need to go through and work out what has what and how I'm going to end up storing the new ones, since they're all nicely numbered and ordered and whatnot.
From there we headed off to IKEA. I needed some replacement glasses because I have now broken more drinking glasses in the six-ish months I've been living here than I did in the previous ten years I'm pretty sure. Fucking ceramic sink.
As usual we picked up some other random bits and pieces along the way, but nothing particularly exciting to be honest. Mostly it was just a bit of a slow wander around the store.
Then we headed back here, wandered across to the Village to grab something to eat, we watched some questionable television and then Ma wandered off home.
So yeah. This week everything changed massively... next week everything changes again in a slightly different fashion when other people come and join us in our now very empty office space. I feel like this time next week I may be very nostalgic about the "good old days".
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