This post was originally written on the 10th, but additions/edits were made afterwards

Howdy y’all, long time no see. A lot has happened in the past month, so this is going to be a long post.

Apollo

The Great Freeze of 2021

From February 13th through February 17th the United States was hit by a Winter storm of unprecedented savagery

Texas didn’t handle it very well, to say the least. Our infrastructure wasn’t prepared for anything like this on account of similar events never occurring. Many folks from the sinister caucous were taunting and belittling us on Twitter and other social media, and blaming our elected officials for the poor response. Ted Cruz, who I’m not particularly fond of also got lambasted for leaving the state during the crisis. What I failed to understand about the whole situation politically, is what the fuck could mortal men have done? And how the fuck could anyone justify “winterizing” our infrastructure if we’d never experienced such a harsh Winter in the first place. Unprecedented means unprecedented. If there were a precedent, we could’ve or would’ve acted. In absentia of any justification, why should we have gone above and beyond?

Digressing, many of my friends were without water/electricity/internet, it was pretty bad. Many of my company’s stores were also closed on account of having no power. However, despite that I was still being assigned to stores that did have power, and they were rather far from me. I was holed up in Garland with one of my mates (Bert) who had a generator. Unfortunately, my car isn’t particularly rugged, and I wasn’t confident that I could’ve made such far trips on the snow and ice, so I ended up using the last of my sick days.

In a sense, the whole thing kind of felt like a vacation for me, because I got to spend a lot of time with my localmost crew.

We watched the whole Nintendo Direct together, live. It was tepid/milquetoast, but enjoyable.

I punked out of giving chocolate to my favourite mate as a kind gesture, I guess I kinda thought it’d be too gay so I relented.

Health

One worrying thing that happened during the snowpocalypse, was that I started pissing clear fluid out of one of my nostrils, and the drainage got so bad that it began to feel like I was drowning in my own juices. The symptoms seemed to line up perfectly with a CSF leak, so I began to worry that that was what I was suffering from. I safely ignored the symptoms and prescribed myself the most simple treatment (lots of water, caffeine, and rest) but the drainage persisted. Eventually after the snow/ice thawed and I returned to work, and on one day my headache got so debilitatingly bad that I sucked it up and just went to the hospital.

After explaining to them what my symptoms were, they decided to a CT scan, and it turned out that I had a ludicrous amount of infection in my sinuses. As I’m writing this, I’m about to take my last dose of antibiotics. I will say, they’ve made a tremendous difference and the drainage and headaches did go away.

Turns out between returning from India and now, I’ve lost ten kilogrammes. Noice.

Additionally, seems like my brain isn’t particularly fucked. It’s in better shape than I thought.

Unfortunately, in between February and March, I was unable to pay my health insurance bill, and that really concerns me.

Now when I say “was unable to pay” I don’t mean for lack of funds of lack of trying, I budgeted for this, and I tried to give BSW my money, but they wouldn’t take it.

• I called their phone number to pay, they told me my account number didn’t exist.

• I logged in to their online service to try and pay, although it recognized my account it won’t show me the option to pay or a balance.

• I tried to contact their customer service and could never get a hold of anyone because they’re always closed when I’m not at work

• I still haven’t received a paper bill from my insurance or the hospital I went to, I confirmed my address with both.

I’m hoping that my trip to the hospital was covered, and I can use the money I save by not having insurance to pay that sum back. At the very least though, I now have peace of mind knowing that my mind’s case isn’t in pieces, and that’s all I really wanted from healthcare in the first place.

Edit 20210317: Turns out that I finally did get my insurance bill, that’s sort of a relief. I’m still debating whether or not to pay it

Living Situation

Well, immediately after the snowpocalypse, returning to work, and going to the hospital, I ended up learning that I’m being kicked out of Ducky’s place at the end of the month (March). Awful timing, isn’t it?

Thankfully after asking around, it seems that Bert’s family is willing to take me in for a while as I try to get back onto my feet. I’m extremely grateful to them for that, especially because my original plan was to be self-sufficient by Summer, and not Winter or Spring.

Additionally, after talking to Jolicoeur it seems like our plan to get a house together is still coming along well. It seems all I need to do is focus on saving money and staying alive and it’s an eventuality.

Work

I put in my application for the NA position at some point in February, and I heard recently that I should be getting a call about it either this week or the next. I’m hoping that means that I’ve got an interview, and not merely telephonic platitudes.

Aside from that, I think work has been pretty chill, frankly I have no complaints about the company.

It does suck that I’m without sick days for the time being, but they’ll start regenerating in about 7 months. Frankly, I’ve been making more money since I haven’t been abusing days.

I also resolved to try and pick up extra shifts on one of my days off, or perhaps work doubles before my weekends. Hopefully that’ll make a significant enough difference to enable to save a bit more.

Life in General, Misc. Happenings

• I think in the past month or two I hung out with lae a few times in the D/ai/llas crew at least once. But honestly, the days have been blurring together.

• I helped Monty build a PC, that was an ordeal. Somehow it works. I’m not confident that he ever thanked me for my efforts, I basically assembled it myself while he went and prayed and did other stuff.

• I’ve been trying to pack up my shit and find places for all of my extraneous stuff, and minimize what I keep on me to only the things that I need/use.

  • To that end, I’m actually consolidating the PSU from my current PC, and all of my HDDs back into my old workstation. The idea is that it’s going to be co-located in Bert’s room, and I’ll use it remotely (and perhaps locally, while I’m posted up over there.)
  • I’ve started carrying around a keyboard and mouse in my main backpack as well, and using my laptop predominately for all of my computing/entertainment needs. Turns out, 8 GiB of swap on an SSD is more than plenty to do a lot of stuff
  • I got a vacuum jar and a bunch of dry goods that I can prepare with nothing else but hot water so I can always have access to food regardless of where I am

• Been trying to do a better job of keeping up with my oath brothers: Kenji, and Vaporub. Those two cats are my oldest friends, but Kenji is in another state, and Vaporub’s schedule runs opposite of mine. Seems that I may make Tuesdays my days to keep up with those cats, although I text Kenji intermittently.

  • In fact, on the 16th I actually did finally end up catching up with Vaporub in person, that was quite nice. It was somehow a harrowing experience, though. Felt as if I was forced to confront some internal daemons that I had shelved until then.

Dionysus