Will You Do The Fandango?

Lazy day today. No longer having the pile of mail hanging over me in my thoughts, I guess I just decided to go with the easy going flow and do a whole lot of nothing today. Weekend was off and on this and that, so I don’t feel too bad taking Monday off. The cats seem to appreciate that I’m not moving furniture around or effing about with a half dozen stacks of papers… they definitely don’t like any change or fuss.

I mentioned that I had gotten back into IRC, getting myself used to a little socializing now and then… and today was nice because my buddy Nick joined the channel and we were able to catch up a bit. He was one of my main compadres at the last job I worked at… my singing partner when we were on the line, giving our best “Bohemian Rhapsody” performance for the rest of the crew as we all worked.

Now I just need to start poking my head out on Facebook. Anyone there that seems combative or overly-negative in the stuff that they’re posting… I’m gonna just have to mute or un-friend those folks as needed. Social media shouldn’t feel crappy… and the last time I spent much time on Facebook, it sure felt like a shit show. Maybe I can work it a different way this time. Judging from when I’ve popped in to lurk recently, it looks like there’s a good sized group of friends who’ve been doing well and have happy stuff they’re posting about, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed whenever I decide to do that.

But yeah, just wanted to drop in here for a short update… even though nothing’s really going on. I feel like this day off might allow me a little more oomph tomorrow when I get back to working on the stuff I wanna work on around here. As always, just trying to steer my twitchy ass in a direction where things start feeling a little less shitty. Past few days have been decent, so that makes me cautiously optimistic.

Oh, plus I threw some random photos from 2020 up to my Flickr link above. 🙂👍🏻

EDIT: One more thing. A little more than a month into my new endeavor of investing, and as of market close today my portfolio is up 8.03% from where I started. 😦😃 The news of Tesla being added to the S&P definitely accounted for a good portion of that, but still… 8% return over a month’s time… crazy stuff. And while I know that it doesn’t mean shit when it comes to what next month will be like, or the month after that, but you can bet that I’m gonna be a little bit giddy when being giddy should be understandable. 😏🤷🏻‍♂️

Are You Messin’ With Me?

It’s about 3:30am, and I just finished doing up all of my bills and mail from the past week and a half. I said that I wanted to get it taken care of before the weekend was over, and technically that’s what I did. I really gotta work on my mail anxiety though, especially considering that the last couple of times that I let it bulk up like this, there was actually some sort of good news contained within. (But of course, as soon as I let my guard down, that’s when something will flick me in the sack… heh)

This batch also ended up being fairly harmless. I tend to pay ahead a little bit on my utilities… a habit that I picked up from my Aunt Carol… so both the electric and gas bills for this month had a credit listed, with no payment due. 😎 That was a good start, and then the envelope from the BMV was easy to open, since I’ve been expecting a 2021 sticker for my plate. But I saved the potential worst for last. 😳 A couple different, thicker envelopes from my additional “add-on” Medicare insurer.

But nope, those were good ones too. 🙂🤷🏻‍♂️ The first was a bunch of official looking statements about having contacted them for manual refiling of claims for the different medications that workers comp has been stiffing me on, and then the other one contained a check for over $900. 😯😃 So between this check and the one that I got a couple weeks ago, that’s pretty darn close to the amount that I have paid out of pocket for most of my meds over the past three months. 🙂👍🏻 Really, really surprised that ended up working out, since despite all my calls and stuff that I mailed in – they totally could have ghosted me or just said “Nah, piss off.” and it’s not like I could have done anything about it.

Maybe I shouldn’t say that too loud, just in case I need to go through another prolonged, pain-in-the-ass process like that with them again for some other medication. 😏

Optimistic Stalling

I’m just about ready to start working on some of my to-do list tasks, but I wanted to take a few more minutes to stall… 😏 and this seemed like a good place to do that. I just slept like shit, haven’t felt great all morning, but by conserving my energy and not totally dwelling on what I’m gonna have to do all day – I think I’m gonna be able to bounce back pretty effectively for the rest of this evening. 🤷🏻‍♂️🤞🏻

I think I’ve psyched myself up successfully due to picking only the “fun” stuff out of the whole list… 🤨 at least for tonight. The stuff where I know it’ll let me go to sleep tonight, feeling better for having completed whatever I complete. 🙂 Actually, I’ve had five or six growing “piles” of various paperwork that have been sitting around the living room… and it was all basically organized, at least in stacks, so I never tackled them further…

• “Medicare Stuff” Pile
• “Workers Comp Stuff” Pile
• “Court Stuff” Pile
• “Investment / Estate / Health Planning” Pile
• Misc “I’ll get to it soon.” Pile
• “Notebooks / Journals / Office Supplies” Pile

But after dragging all that shit to the bedroom a few days ago, and working through probably half of it while I sat there in bed at 3am, it should be easy to wrap it all up tonight. 😊 And it all just happens to be stuff that will reward me with a feeling of accomplishment, like I actually “did something” for a change… 🤔 because, technically, I suppose most of it really is important stuff.

So yeah, I’ve got my to-do list already chopped up into dozens of teeny, manageable pieces for this weekend… and that’s the best way for me to tackle it. Not looking at the whole of what I want to get done, but knocking it out little bits at a time in a way that it won’t a) hurt my neck/shoulder, or b) suck all of my energy away. 🙂 Trying to keep a little in reserves, just in case I wanna leave the house for anything.

Okay, enough stalling I suppose. Oh, wait… here’s some more cat stuff. 😊😸😾

Poor Maggie… still trying to figure out how to get Maven to “play” but they just haven’t quite gotten there yet. The “instant submission” was an odd tactic, eh? 😄

EDIT: Something wasn’t sitting right with me when it came to the fonts I have been using now for months and months, so I made some slight adjustments. It may look a little weird to you for a moment, and the paragraphs of old posts may not end as neatly as I originally crafted them to… but yeah, just a slight refresh, in case your brain noticed. I feel like it’ll make it a bit easier to read now maybe, w/ the slightly larger, wider spaced font. 🙂🤷🏻‍♂️

Savin’ It Up

My sleep is still gonna be off, since I slept all kinds of weird hours over the past couple of days, but I just went out in the dark and the fog to fetch the mail from the past week – so I know that I’ll have more than a few things to deal with tomorrow. There’s already a couple of things on my mental list, so basically I’m just psyching myself up here to be able to get up at a reasonable hour and start treating tomorrow like a Monday, where I actually get some stuff done.

I’ve got at least one appointment towards the end of the week, so I kinda wanna take care of the other stuff as early as possible… on top of wanting to push certain things along to get them wrapped up as soon as possible. I was hoping that I’d get one more evening of messing around with the time-lapse videos, but the fog has ruled that out. Oh, and last night’s vid… while I struggle to see things on the laptop, it looks great on the TV.

But this past weekend wasn’t too bad. Laid around some, worked with my “shooting star” videos a bunch, enjoyed some ominous looking clouds, and kept most “business” out of my thoughts for the two days. Now, I fetched the mail… but I haven’t looked at the mail. Whatever annoying shit is in there, I don’t need to know about it tonight. I just have to be prepared to tackle it tomorrow.

Don’t Sweat The Uncontrollable

I’m glad the weather was nice this afternoon, because I had to go into Menard’s and order my garage door. Rick did all the measurements and research to figure out exactly what was needed, and at the lowest price possible… so that’s all good – but it’s still stressful to go out and deal with the weekend crowd, going to the counter and ordering something that I know nothing about, and swiping the credit card to begin the wait until it is finally delivered. 😕 I can’t help it… it’s just one of those things that I can’t do myself, where I just have to hope it doesn’t end up being a hassle for Rick, when now that we’ve gotten started on it – I’m really wanting it to just be done.

The door itself wasn’t that expensive, but then of course the labor for taking the old one out and putting the new one in is where it’s gonna get me. Obviously Rick’s not gonna screw me over… I mean, the “patchwork” stuff we tried first, he hasn’t even charged me for any of his time or effort on all that… so it’s just the sitting here and wondering if it’ll go exactly as it should, easy peasy, or if random shit will pop up to make it a pain in the ass. 🙄🤦🏻‍♂️ So going in town and ordering the door was about the extent of my plans for the day, and I’m gonna spend the rest of the afternoon and evening mostly away from the electronicals, watching football and trying not to stress about something that I’ve got no control over.

Gotta get caught up on the mail tonight, plus I’m actually looking forward to grabbing my notebook so I can start making a more official list of stuff that I either want or need to do sometime in the near future. 🤓📓 Not just the mandatory responsibilities like the upcoming doctor appointment, hearing prep, and work on the couple of things around the house – but also stuff that I just sorta want to do in order to keep things feeling like they’re moving forward. 🧔🏻👉🏻 Like, I had a pretty good phase where I was packing and sorting stuff for a theoretical / eventual move from this place, and I’d sorta like to get back into the habit of doing a little bit more towards that each day.

I also haven’t done much of anything “just for fun” lately, so I wanna inventory whatever goodies I’ve got that I haven’t taken advantage of just yet and hopefully get them on the schedule. 🙂 (You know, hobbies… like normal people have.) For example, Genesee got me two different gifts last Christmas that I haven’t put to use like I’ve wanted to… one being a music box where you can punch holes in a strip of paper to create your own songs, and the second being a ViewMaster type photo slide-reel viewer from a place that will turn your own photos into reels to view. I actually have a 3D digital camera, so I could make true 3D reels for that thing – but I’ve felt so buried by other stuff that I’ve just never allowed myself the time to just go shoot some pictures and make some reels. 🤷🏻‍♂️😟

But the “cancer concern” stuff is basically on an extended pause at the moment, so once the furnace is confirmed 100%, once the garage door is replaced and working with the new opener, and once I get through the upcoming workers comp hearing (yet to be scheduled / whether I win or lose) … once I get through some of those “heavier” things I wanna have an idea of what lighter, fun stuff I might wanna spend some time on. 🙂 I know there’s always gonna be something heavy, whether it’s my stuff, a friend’s stuff, family’s stuff… so getting organized in a way where I can still allow time for some of that frivolous stuff anyway – it’s something that I have to keep working on when it comes to myself.

But there’s a good game coming on at 4p, then the OSU game later in the evening, and between watching those two, doing up the bills, and working on a couple different to-do lists of varying importance – honestly I’m hoping to be comfy in bed (and possibly even falling asleep) before the Buckeyes game is over… at long as they’ve got a comfortable enough lead. 😏 I’ve noticed that the days following the nights where I’ve gotten a ton of sleep actually do seem to be a little easier, so I’ve tried to make that the norm rather than the exception over the past several weekends.

Shufflin’

I’m sort of feeling guilty for taking a day off when I was feeling good, because today I had to take the day off because my back is fucking killing me. 😣 I don’t think it’s anything to be concerned about, because it seems to happen every couple of months, but I do have to be careful how I sleep tonight so that I don’t aggravate it. 😳 Odds are good that I’ll just sack out in the recliner, which rarely fails to give me a decent night sleep… at least in so far as it doesn’t injure me during the middle of the night.

I just got back from Aunt Sharon’s though, because I told her that I’d go over there tonight to work on her PC a bit. 🖨🖥🔍🤓 Someone gifted her a spare printer, so I took one of my extra USB cables over for her – and then her BIOS was reporting that one of her fans wasn’t working, so I took it all apart to check the boards and connections. Nothing looked burnt or broken, but the rear exhaust fan simply won’t spin up. 🤔 There’s an additional exhaust fan on the front, and one mounted directly to the heat sink on the CPU, so as long as she doesn’t leave it running day and night I think she’ll be okay.

I’m walking all gimpy due to my back, and I think it accidentally made her feel bad for having me come over in that condition… but it’s not a big deal. It’s one of those pains that I’m used to having every now and then, so at least on “day one” it hasn’t got me feeling too twitchy yet. 🤪 Now that I’m back home and settling in I’m gonna grab the heating pad and start working on a to-do list of what I want to accomplish tomorrow. 📓🖊🤨 It’s almost all stuff regarding medical stuff, appointments, medication approvals and such – and I’ll have time to do all of that while I sit in my car and wait for Cassi at her doctor appointment.

I know this one is falling pretty close to her mama’s appointment, but this is her first time back after quite a while – since she got her insurance activated again and wants to make the most of it. Something that I definitely encourage. 👩🏻‍⚕️👱🏻‍♀️👨🏻‍⚕️ I’m also sitting here looking at the list of “free slot play” on the calendar that Hollywood sent me, and it works out that a few of them combine to be a decent amount tomorrow, so I think I’ll take her there afterwards to play. 😃🎰🎰🎰 Plus we can use up the $30 in food credit that I’ve got as well. 😀🍔🍟 That should make the drive up to Columbus feel less like a “have to” and more like a “want to” hopefully.

Alright Then

Ended up staying up for most of the night last night, so after seven hours of sleep it was well into the afternoon before I woke up today. But at least I woke up feeling decent. I’m responsible for screwing up my sleep schedule this time, but I’m gonna try to fix it by going to bed early tonight to stop the bleeding before my days and nights are completely inverted.

Gonna start doing some work around here in a little bit, but I’m also gonna try to use today as a jump point for getting my shit together a little better again in general. Things aren’t bad, but I just need to find a flow again, and find some purpose again, to keep my mood pointed in the right direction. That’s why I sometimes like having a significant backlog of “to-do list” stuff that I can tackle at any given moment, because sometimes I need a handful of those smaller things that I can actually accomplish and then feel decent because I “did something” that day.

The only real plan plan that I’ve yet to make for this week is when I’m gonna go over and visit with Mom and Dad. I hate going when my mood is crap, because I feel like my “meh” about things and myself will be obvious and contagious, so I’m mentally gonna aim for Friday – with today and tomorrow going towards helping me feel a little more human. But I’m gonna hop off here and see how today goes… not gonna pin myself down with a bunch of “YOU MUST GET THIS DONE!” stuff, but yeah… heh