The Holiday Rush
Dec. 3rd, 2020 10:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
taz_39Oy, it was a stressful week.
Work was just...(sigh)
Without email and proper communication channels some things have begun to fall apart a bit. We finally got payroll functionality back, and everyone rushed to start adding and correcting punches, but updates and information and minute-by-minute changes all had to be delivered in person or via hastily-printed directions. As a result there was a lot of confusion, and some work was done incorrectly.
I made soooo many errors. I felt like an idiot when I finally realized I had done things wrong, literally days later.
I was so frustrated that I was almost on the verge of tears. Most of the mistakes can be rectified, but still. This is someone's paycheck. This is a task that I was assigned that *I* completed incorrectly. I (and several others in my office) are literally having to redo our work. I hate, hate, HATE when someone places their trust in me to do a task right, or run an errand or help out, and I fail. HATE IT.
I usually enjoy my job, but clocking out at the end of each day this week was a relief. I am very thankful that I asked for December 1st off using some of my holiday hours. I really, really need just a little time to gather myself. This whole month has felt like I've been hanging on by the seat of my pants. My workplace has dissolved into a weird purgatory with no end in sight...I just want to be able to do my job and not be constantly playing catch-up or nervously waiting for the next set of do's and don't's. Stenography is stressing me out big time...it's starting to sink in that this is a new career I'm working toward, and as such I need to really take it more seriously and invest more money and time in what will be needed to succeed. Not just the money for my classes, but also for software and equipment I'll need after graduation. Not just time spent practicing, but also building my own working steno dictionary and studying medical and courtroom terminology. I haven't done enough, and I need to start doing more.
These things, plus my parents are becoming somewhat anti-maskers and causing a lot of stress for my sisters and I. Then I'm also putting way too much pressure on myself with cleaning and cooking and holiday activities. In every aspect of my life right now, professional and personal and spiritual, I just feel way more stressed than usual, like everything is a rice grain away from falling apart. One extra day off isn't a solution, but it helps. It helps to be able to sit still for a moment, take a deep breath, look at everything that's happening with some level of calm, and proceed with a plan for holding my life together.
I say all this with the realization that compared to others, I have very little to complain about. And I'm sorry to complain, but I'm human, and sometimes I feel overwhelmed.
And so, after a particularly stressful day at work and a stressful hour-long drive home through Orlando holiday traffic (f*cking tourists coming here to spread their germs around and then leave) it was nice to pull into the driveway and see this:
Jameson decorated our hedges for Christmas! He also put up some bows and a wreath on the door.
I love our little dinosaur! Right now I am calling him Bonk, Guardian of the Hedge. So freaking cute!
Another nice surprise was getting a teaberry plant!
You might remember last week I got some teaberry pasteles to use for Christmas baking, and that teaberry is a big nostalgia flavor for me. It had never occurred to me that teaberry was a naturally-derived flavor! Turns out it's from an evergreen plant, also known as boxberry or checkerberry or wintergreen. Being big into plants, I had to check this out! It was easy to find teaberry plants for sale online, and they're very cheap. So what the hell, I got myself one!
I wasn't at all expecting it to have berries upon arrival, but I guess evergreen berries are not the same as a typical fruit berry. It's a tiny little slow-growing plant and cannot survive in the Florida heat, so I'm going to keep it indoors and let it sit in the sun once in a while. I got the white metal "pot" from the edible arrangement Jameson got for his birthday...he insisted I keep the pot, and now I'm glad he did! The white offsets the dark green leaves and bright red berries so nicely. I feel like somebody's grandma when I say that, but it's true.
Of course I also wanted to try the berries and see what they were like.
They are pretty and small with a cool star-shaped pattern on the bottom.
Cutting one open revealed white flesh and some greenish seeds. The berry is very dry, this isn't some juicy fruit berry.
The smell was wonderful. It smelled minty and sweet and fresh, just like, well, teaberry! I broke a leaf in half and it smelled just the same. Eating the berry, it was dry and kinda grainy and not very flavorful. I think a lot of distillation/fermentation must be required to extract teaberry flavor, which is maybe why the wintergreen flavor we're more familiar with is synthesized, less fruit and more mint.
Another issue is that teaberry contains a compound similar to aspirin, and it's possible to overdose on the extract and essentially poison yourself. I did a LOT of reading up on teaberry before trying one, and it seems that as long as you don't eat tons of the berries (who would?) or leaves you've got nothing to worry about. I would like to try making a tea from the leaves, and maybe even an extract, but for that the plant will need to be at least twice as big. Leaves and berries need to be fresh, as drying them causes the essential oils (where all the flavor is) to evaporate.
Anyway, that was a fun experience and I'm glad to have this cute little plant to enjoy in the house <3
Another nice surprise was this grass-growing pen! A coworker gave it to me after I tried to give him advice on getting one to grow. There's a little capsule on the end with grass seeds inside that will grow after being soaked in water! I'm excited to try it out!
Saturday was an especially rough day at work, because that was the day I found out I'd messed up a whole bunch of my assignments. I came home in a really crummy dejected mood, but once again my spirits were lifted by my little plants. I went outside to check on everyone before it got too dark, and found two cherry tomatoes ready to pick, two jalapenos, a strawberry, and a watermelon radish! I may have pulled the radish a bit too early but any longer and it could become woody and inedible.
My lettuce is looking way better, I should be able to enjoy it in a few days.
I also found some more zebra longwing eggs on my passion vine! There's nothing I can do to protect them from being eaten again, but I'll be rooting for them!
On Monday there was a cold front moving in...finally, I have been waiting for so long for colder weather!
The sky at 6am was beautiful.
My work day was actually pretty chill until the last ten minutes, during which everything seemed to go wrong. Lots of people clocking in all at once, and nowhere to sit because of the covid protocols in place requiring an hour before anyone can sit at a station once it's been used. So I had a big queue of people looking for stations, which I was able to assign but before I could even write down who was sitting where three employees returned to the desk to tell me they couldn't log into their stations. So now not only do I have to find them new stations but no one can use the stations they were just at due to the one-hour rule. ARGH!
I shouldn't have gotten frustrated but I was. Every day is like a game of Red Light Green Light, do's and don'ts that you have to navigate and tiptoe around and impose on yourself and others. I want to be considerate and I think we are all doing our best, but sometimes I am just so TIRED, you know? I guess that's pandemic fatigue. Of course I am still going to do everything that's asked of me, but that doesn't mean I don't feel stressed or tired by the changes and rules piling on all the time, more and more each day.
Then I had steno class on Monday night, where I felt very overwhelmed again by all that I don't know, and frustrated by how slowly I type and how many steno briefs I don't know. Although we went to bed early I had stress dreams about trying to take down steno dictation and accidentally typing on a regular keyboard instead because it comes more naturally to me. In the dream I actually hit the keyboard I was so frustrated.
On Tuesday it was cold out! It felt SO GOOD. Like 50 degrees or so. I put on my dinosaur onesie (judge all you want, it's my damn day off!) and spent a little time outside with my plants, then had a nice breakfast of oatmeal, flax seeds, ripple plant milk, and some of the bourbon caramel apples left over from the turnovers I made for Thanksgiving.
When that was done Jameson and I made plans to go get our Christmas tree! While he had a meeting with a student I moved things around in the living room to accomodate the tree, putting out the tree base and mixing up a jug of pine tree food, digging out the ornaments box. Since it is sunny out I also moved the indoor plants to the front of the house to get a little sun. Yes, that's a Christmas Story leg lamp :D And yes, that's a picture of me holding my niece <3
I had promised myself that Tuesday would be a time to chill, so even though I wanted badly to start doing chores I forced myself to chat with family about Christmas gifts, make my own Christmas list, and do a little online window shopping while waiting for Jameson to finish his work. In the afternoon we went to Lowe's to get our Christmas tree! It ended up being more of a chore than expected because we went at lunchtime and there was no one to man the tree tent outside. We had to run into the Garden Center and later Customer Service to ask someone to page for assistance. After nearly 30 minutes of waiting we finally got our tree and headed home.
I wanted to decorate right away, but the tree needed time to get settled; the branches were stiffly upright from being wrapped in netting for probably days during shipping. So we gave it tree food and let it rest.
The rest of my day was spent doing nothing, as promised, except making wings to go with our pizza for dinner and dusting because I got bored while waiting for the wings to cook. After dinner I practiced steno for two hours, wanting to avoid any stress dreams at bedtime.
I still slept pretty poorly, probably because I was thinking of all the stuff I've got to do on Wednesday.
I got up at the usual time and had breakfast, then ran some errands, sending a package of my teaberry candies to my sister in New York and dropping by Target to use up a gift card. Back home I picked up Jameson and we went to Publix together for groceries, unpacked at home, ate lunch, and got to work on various projects.
Jameson practiced for a while because he was recently asked to be the Musical Director for a production of RENT to take place next year. It's great that some theater companies are being optimistic and making plans. I just hope they can go forward with it.
While he was doing that, I went out again to Michaels to begin the process of gathering stuff for my Christmas baking. I'm still kind of unsure how much of what I'll need, but if I hesitate any longer there'll be no time. So I got little 4oz jars for the apple butter I plan to make, tags to put on various things, treat bags for either the cookies or caramels, a much-needed large cookie sheet, paper gift bags to use for my coworkers, and some plastic food-safe 16oz jars for the granola.
I guess I should have shared what I'm planning to make:
The thing I'm most worried about is water canning the apple butter. I've never done it before and the last thing I want is to give people botchulism or have a bunch of hot jars explode because I don't know what I'm doing. Argh. I'm sure it will be fine. But will it? Argh.
When I got home Jameson was in the studio playing a new guitar, the acoustic Brian May model that came out this year. It's a beautiful little guitar and has a huge sound for having such a small body.
In the evening I made us turkey-stuffed sweet potato skins with cheddar cheese and avocado. We had leftover pumpkin pie for dessert. Then we decided it was time to decorate our tree. It looks nice. Amazing how decorating a tree can bring such a warm feeling.
To my surprise, Jameson asked if I would make the "magic window cookies" again this year. I hadn't planned on making them because they're rather bland, but they do make good tree ornaments and when he's specifically asked for them I can't say no! So that will be a nice project for this week :)
Thursday I took a moment to appreciate the third day in a row off. Because I'm not going to get another at least until January, maybe not until February.
Prayers of thanks complete, I got up and got to work. Eat breakfast. Make egg bites for the week using the sous vide. Make overnight oats. Separate out some apple turnovers for my coworkers and label each one with directions. Vacuum. Clean the bathrooms. Water and fertilize my tiny garden (it looks like I'll be making jalapeno poppers soon!)
Do a load of laundry. Clean up. To the grocery again because I forgot a zillion things: hard candy (for the window cookies), an orange and ginger (for the spiced tea), bourbon (for the apple butter), cookie boxes, an 8x8 baking dish for caramel, more egg whites, Christmas-themed stickers to hold the goodie bags shut...why is it that making things yourself involves buying so much stuff? Lol.
Back home, put everything away. Eat lunch. Prep meatballs for dinner. Move the indoor plants away from the window. Peel the orange and ginger, put them in the oven to dehydrate. Chop up a cinnamon stick for the tea. Start cooking the meatballs so they have time to simmer in the sauce for an hour or so. Put away laundry. Etc etc.
I needed these days off, but they went by so fast. I dread going to work tomorrow, but only because things are so weird right now. It was weird enough with all of the covid sh*t, now it's even weirder. It'll be a weight off my shoulders when we can just do our jobs again.
I'm going to have a hard time balancing my work and home life this December. But if it means I can bring a little joy to my friends and family, I'm more than willing to be a little stressed. The last ground shipping day is December 15th, and I expect things will take even longer than expected due to covid, so starting next weekend I'll be baking or candymaking every single day. So for now, here is me in a dinosaur onesie. Because life is short and sometimes you've just got to do little things to help yourself out.
Work was just...(sigh)
Without email and proper communication channels some things have begun to fall apart a bit. We finally got payroll functionality back, and everyone rushed to start adding and correcting punches, but updates and information and minute-by-minute changes all had to be delivered in person or via hastily-printed directions. As a result there was a lot of confusion, and some work was done incorrectly.
I made soooo many errors. I felt like an idiot when I finally realized I had done things wrong, literally days later.
I was so frustrated that I was almost on the verge of tears. Most of the mistakes can be rectified, but still. This is someone's paycheck. This is a task that I was assigned that *I* completed incorrectly. I (and several others in my office) are literally having to redo our work. I hate, hate, HATE when someone places their trust in me to do a task right, or run an errand or help out, and I fail. HATE IT.
I usually enjoy my job, but clocking out at the end of each day this week was a relief. I am very thankful that I asked for December 1st off using some of my holiday hours. I really, really need just a little time to gather myself. This whole month has felt like I've been hanging on by the seat of my pants. My workplace has dissolved into a weird purgatory with no end in sight...I just want to be able to do my job and not be constantly playing catch-up or nervously waiting for the next set of do's and don't's. Stenography is stressing me out big time...it's starting to sink in that this is a new career I'm working toward, and as such I need to really take it more seriously and invest more money and time in what will be needed to succeed. Not just the money for my classes, but also for software and equipment I'll need after graduation. Not just time spent practicing, but also building my own working steno dictionary and studying medical and courtroom terminology. I haven't done enough, and I need to start doing more.
These things, plus my parents are becoming somewhat anti-maskers and causing a lot of stress for my sisters and I. Then I'm also putting way too much pressure on myself with cleaning and cooking and holiday activities. In every aspect of my life right now, professional and personal and spiritual, I just feel way more stressed than usual, like everything is a rice grain away from falling apart. One extra day off isn't a solution, but it helps. It helps to be able to sit still for a moment, take a deep breath, look at everything that's happening with some level of calm, and proceed with a plan for holding my life together.
I say all this with the realization that compared to others, I have very little to complain about. And I'm sorry to complain, but I'm human, and sometimes I feel overwhelmed.
And so, after a particularly stressful day at work and a stressful hour-long drive home through Orlando holiday traffic (f*cking tourists coming here to spread their germs around and then leave) it was nice to pull into the driveway and see this:
https://instagram.com/p/CIHPPCZg0uv
Jameson decorated our hedges for Christmas! He also put up some bows and a wreath on the door.
I love our little dinosaur! Right now I am calling him Bonk, Guardian of the Hedge. So freaking cute!
Another nice surprise was getting a teaberry plant!
You might remember last week I got some teaberry pasteles to use for Christmas baking, and that teaberry is a big nostalgia flavor for me. It had never occurred to me that teaberry was a naturally-derived flavor! Turns out it's from an evergreen plant, also known as boxberry or checkerberry or wintergreen. Being big into plants, I had to check this out! It was easy to find teaberry plants for sale online, and they're very cheap. So what the hell, I got myself one!
I wasn't at all expecting it to have berries upon arrival, but I guess evergreen berries are not the same as a typical fruit berry. It's a tiny little slow-growing plant and cannot survive in the Florida heat, so I'm going to keep it indoors and let it sit in the sun once in a while. I got the white metal "pot" from the edible arrangement Jameson got for his birthday...he insisted I keep the pot, and now I'm glad he did! The white offsets the dark green leaves and bright red berries so nicely. I feel like somebody's grandma when I say that, but it's true.
Of course I also wanted to try the berries and see what they were like.
They are pretty and small with a cool star-shaped pattern on the bottom.
Cutting one open revealed white flesh and some greenish seeds. The berry is very dry, this isn't some juicy fruit berry.
The smell was wonderful. It smelled minty and sweet and fresh, just like, well, teaberry! I broke a leaf in half and it smelled just the same. Eating the berry, it was dry and kinda grainy and not very flavorful. I think a lot of distillation/fermentation must be required to extract teaberry flavor, which is maybe why the wintergreen flavor we're more familiar with is synthesized, less fruit and more mint.
Another issue is that teaberry contains a compound similar to aspirin, and it's possible to overdose on the extract and essentially poison yourself. I did a LOT of reading up on teaberry before trying one, and it seems that as long as you don't eat tons of the berries (who would?) or leaves you've got nothing to worry about. I would like to try making a tea from the leaves, and maybe even an extract, but for that the plant will need to be at least twice as big. Leaves and berries need to be fresh, as drying them causes the essential oils (where all the flavor is) to evaporate.
Anyway, that was a fun experience and I'm glad to have this cute little plant to enjoy in the house <3
Another nice surprise was this grass-growing pen! A coworker gave it to me after I tried to give him advice on getting one to grow. There's a little capsule on the end with grass seeds inside that will grow after being soaked in water! I'm excited to try it out!
Saturday was an especially rough day at work, because that was the day I found out I'd messed up a whole bunch of my assignments. I came home in a really crummy dejected mood, but once again my spirits were lifted by my little plants. I went outside to check on everyone before it got too dark, and found two cherry tomatoes ready to pick, two jalapenos, a strawberry, and a watermelon radish! I may have pulled the radish a bit too early but any longer and it could become woody and inedible.
My lettuce is looking way better, I should be able to enjoy it in a few days.
I also found some more zebra longwing eggs on my passion vine! There's nothing I can do to protect them from being eaten again, but I'll be rooting for them!
On Monday there was a cold front moving in...finally, I have been waiting for so long for colder weather!
The sky at 6am was beautiful.
My work day was actually pretty chill until the last ten minutes, during which everything seemed to go wrong. Lots of people clocking in all at once, and nowhere to sit because of the covid protocols in place requiring an hour before anyone can sit at a station once it's been used. So I had a big queue of people looking for stations, which I was able to assign but before I could even write down who was sitting where three employees returned to the desk to tell me they couldn't log into their stations. So now not only do I have to find them new stations but no one can use the stations they were just at due to the one-hour rule. ARGH!
I shouldn't have gotten frustrated but I was. Every day is like a game of Red Light Green Light, do's and don'ts that you have to navigate and tiptoe around and impose on yourself and others. I want to be considerate and I think we are all doing our best, but sometimes I am just so TIRED, you know? I guess that's pandemic fatigue. Of course I am still going to do everything that's asked of me, but that doesn't mean I don't feel stressed or tired by the changes and rules piling on all the time, more and more each day.
Then I had steno class on Monday night, where I felt very overwhelmed again by all that I don't know, and frustrated by how slowly I type and how many steno briefs I don't know. Although we went to bed early I had stress dreams about trying to take down steno dictation and accidentally typing on a regular keyboard instead because it comes more naturally to me. In the dream I actually hit the keyboard I was so frustrated.
On Tuesday it was cold out! It felt SO GOOD. Like 50 degrees or so. I put on my dinosaur onesie (judge all you want, it's my damn day off!) and spent a little time outside with my plants, then had a nice breakfast of oatmeal, flax seeds, ripple plant milk, and some of the bourbon caramel apples left over from the turnovers I made for Thanksgiving.
When that was done Jameson and I made plans to go get our Christmas tree! While he had a meeting with a student I moved things around in the living room to accomodate the tree, putting out the tree base and mixing up a jug of pine tree food, digging out the ornaments box. Since it is sunny out I also moved the indoor plants to the front of the house to get a little sun. Yes, that's a Christmas Story leg lamp :D And yes, that's a picture of me holding my niece <3
I had promised myself that Tuesday would be a time to chill, so even though I wanted badly to start doing chores I forced myself to chat with family about Christmas gifts, make my own Christmas list, and do a little online window shopping while waiting for Jameson to finish his work. In the afternoon we went to Lowe's to get our Christmas tree! It ended up being more of a chore than expected because we went at lunchtime and there was no one to man the tree tent outside. We had to run into the Garden Center and later Customer Service to ask someone to page for assistance. After nearly 30 minutes of waiting we finally got our tree and headed home.
I wanted to decorate right away, but the tree needed time to get settled; the branches were stiffly upright from being wrapped in netting for probably days during shipping. So we gave it tree food and let it rest.
The rest of my day was spent doing nothing, as promised, except making wings to go with our pizza for dinner and dusting because I got bored while waiting for the wings to cook. After dinner I practiced steno for two hours, wanting to avoid any stress dreams at bedtime.
I still slept pretty poorly, probably because I was thinking of all the stuff I've got to do on Wednesday.
I got up at the usual time and had breakfast, then ran some errands, sending a package of my teaberry candies to my sister in New York and dropping by Target to use up a gift card. Back home I picked up Jameson and we went to Publix together for groceries, unpacked at home, ate lunch, and got to work on various projects.
Jameson practiced for a while because he was recently asked to be the Musical Director for a production of RENT to take place next year. It's great that some theater companies are being optimistic and making plans. I just hope they can go forward with it.
While he was doing that, I went out again to Michaels to begin the process of gathering stuff for my Christmas baking. I'm still kind of unsure how much of what I'll need, but if I hesitate any longer there'll be no time. So I got little 4oz jars for the apple butter I plan to make, tags to put on various things, treat bags for either the cookies or caramels, a much-needed large cookie sheet, paper gift bags to use for my coworkers, and some plastic food-safe 16oz jars for the granola.
I guess I should have shared what I'm planning to make:
- Homemade bourbon apple butter
- Homemade granola
- Homemade smoked salt caramels
- Homemade hibiscus spice tea
- Spicy gingersnaps
- Chocolate shortbread cookies with white chocolate decoration
- Lemon zest Santa face cookies
- Cream cheese Christmas wreath cookies
- English toffee (if there's time and if I don't lose my absolute mind)
The thing I'm most worried about is water canning the apple butter. I've never done it before and the last thing I want is to give people botchulism or have a bunch of hot jars explode because I don't know what I'm doing. Argh. I'm sure it will be fine. But will it? Argh.
When I got home Jameson was in the studio playing a new guitar, the acoustic Brian May model that came out this year. It's a beautiful little guitar and has a huge sound for having such a small body.
In the evening I made us turkey-stuffed sweet potato skins with cheddar cheese and avocado. We had leftover pumpkin pie for dessert. Then we decided it was time to decorate our tree. It looks nice. Amazing how decorating a tree can bring such a warm feeling.
To my surprise, Jameson asked if I would make the "magic window cookies" again this year. I hadn't planned on making them because they're rather bland, but they do make good tree ornaments and when he's specifically asked for them I can't say no! So that will be a nice project for this week :)
Thursday I took a moment to appreciate the third day in a row off. Because I'm not going to get another at least until January, maybe not until February.
Prayers of thanks complete, I got up and got to work. Eat breakfast. Make egg bites for the week using the sous vide. Make overnight oats. Separate out some apple turnovers for my coworkers and label each one with directions. Vacuum. Clean the bathrooms. Water and fertilize my tiny garden (it looks like I'll be making jalapeno poppers soon!)
Do a load of laundry. Clean up. To the grocery again because I forgot a zillion things: hard candy (for the window cookies), an orange and ginger (for the spiced tea), bourbon (for the apple butter), cookie boxes, an 8x8 baking dish for caramel, more egg whites, Christmas-themed stickers to hold the goodie bags shut...why is it that making things yourself involves buying so much stuff? Lol.
Back home, put everything away. Eat lunch. Prep meatballs for dinner. Move the indoor plants away from the window. Peel the orange and ginger, put them in the oven to dehydrate. Chop up a cinnamon stick for the tea. Start cooking the meatballs so they have time to simmer in the sauce for an hour or so. Put away laundry. Etc etc.
I needed these days off, but they went by so fast. I dread going to work tomorrow, but only because things are so weird right now. It was weird enough with all of the covid sh*t, now it's even weirder. It'll be a weight off my shoulders when we can just do our jobs again.
I'm going to have a hard time balancing my work and home life this December. But if it means I can bring a little joy to my friends and family, I'm more than willing to be a little stressed. The last ground shipping day is December 15th, and I expect things will take even longer than expected due to covid, so starting next weekend I'll be baking or candymaking every single day. So for now, here is me in a dinosaur onesie. Because life is short and sometimes you've just got to do little things to help yourself out.
