Month: June 2020

Work

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With work, we are still working from home. Things are starting to re-open and I am guessing they’ll want us back in the office in the near future, which I have to say doesn’t really excite me. My sister’s employer have announced they want her back in her office next week. This seems slightly dubious because the official government advice is still to work from home if you can. More relevant to me, the trains are still running a reduced service so I don’t know how practical it is for me to get to work anyway.

So I’m a little bit apprehensive about that, though I haven’t yet heard anything.

I’m also a little bit apprehensive about the fact I am overdue a salary review. I was contractually owed a salary review after six months of employment, which was the last week of May. So really the review should take effect from June’s salary. It seems unlikely that’s going to happen now as the payroll has probably already been processed. I don’t particularly want to have to bring it up, because it’s hassle for me, and I just shouldn’t have to. I will make sure it happens at some point though and I’ll make sure it’s backdated to June, too (easily done since it’s in my contract). So in that respect there is no real urgency, and, of course, with the uncertainty of the pandemic, it might be better to wait a bit anyway until some of that uncertainty has passed before putting them into a position where they have to decide whether to be generous or not.

But… the main thing I learnt from my last employer is that I should seek quickly to terminate employment relationships where I can’t trust my employer to behave as they should. Things are strange right now with the pandemic, but when things start returning to normal, this is the kind of thing I’ll be thinking about.

Solstice

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So, the thing is that I like sleeping. Lots of people don’t get enough sleep. I’ve been there and done that too. It doesn’t kill you, and actually, you start getting used to it so you don’t really ‘feel’ tired. But it dulled my cognitive abilities without me really noticing, and, overall, it’s just not great.

So I try to get lots of sleep. Especially with all the running I do. Recovery is good, you know?

But it does feel a bit weird at this time of year. Lying in bed at 9:30, trying to feel sleepy, but it’s still daylight outside. Hmm. For most of the year it feels very natural to be in bed at this time. At the moment though… it doesn’t. Maybe I should move to Scotland.

Dreaming

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I have had a recurring theme in dreams lately of being back at university and not knowing my timetable. The setting changes a lot, but the detail that I am not in full knowledge of my timetable is persistent. I kind of resign myself to not attending all the lectures and think it’s probably OK because I’ve done well enough in other areas that it won’t affect my grade, but I feel quite anxious about it. I’ve dreamt variations on this theme four times that I remember in the past month or so.

I don’t know why this keeps coming up. It’s been over ten years since I was at university.

Strangely, last night all the people in the dream were from secondary school. The main one is a girl I probably never spoke to and probably haven’t thought of once since I left school. Yet, there she was in my dream, getting annoyed with me for not knowing my timetable(!).

Life!

~ e.v. ~ 6 Comments

I haven’t posted for a while because I haven’t been spending much time lying in bed with my laptop. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not? We’ve been spending evenings doing things instead, like watching Downton Abbey from the start, playing a ridiculous computer game called Overcooked, and trying to protect my poor plants from Very Hungry Caterpillars 😟. Also, with working from home, I suppose I just don’t have quite as much interest in spending my free time at home on my own with a computer.

I’m still reducing my Citalopram but very, very slowly. I went down to 15mg (from 20) by alternating 20 and 15mg doses then kept it on 15 for a while. That seemed OK, so now I’m going down to 10 by alternating 15 and 10mg. It seems to be working because I don’t notice any withdrawal issues apart from occasionally being a bit irritable. I’m not entirely sure how I expect to feel when I’m off them; will I continue feeling how I’ve felt for the past few months, or will anxiety start creeping back? Although I started on them because I was having trouble with life circumstances which have now passed, the truth is that I’ve always had more anxiety than was healthy or desirable, and it’s only been in the later part of my life I’ve really understood that it was a medical issue that was treatable.

Maybe the medication and all the counselling I went through will have reshaped my brain and my thought patterns enough that that’s no longer who I am. I won’t know until I’m off the medication, but it’s possible that in a few months I’ll want to go back on it. We’ll see.

When I was prescribed the last set, the Doctor put it on repeat and I think she said that I’d need to go back for an appointment after two issues. Confusingly, the app has still shown it as being available for me to request, so I have tried it… but it doesn’t tell me when it’s ready. It just says “you can collect it from your pharmacy in 48 hours, your GP will contact you if there’s a problem”. And tomorrow morning it’ll be 48 hours. I’ll probably give it a few more days. I don’t need them for a few weeks anyway, I just wanted to figure out if I need to arrange an appointment or not.

In other medical news, I have something called a fixed retainer on the back of my teeth (a brace, basically), which I’ve had for many years, since I had my actual braces removed. Every few years the glue comes off on one of the teeth and I have to go to the orthodontist, who charges me £40 for the thirty seconds it takes him to glue it back on. He always remembers me though.

JUST MY LUCK that while dental care is severely disrupted due to COVID that my retainer happens to break. It’s not that the glue has come off, it’s that the wire is in two pieces. This has never happened before! I keep catching my tongue on the pointy ends. Then some food gets jammed underneath the end of it, which is very uncomfortable. I phoned them up last week and they said they’d put me on the emergency waiting list… but that’s probably quite a long list when they’ve got patients who are months overdue for brace adjustments. The receptionist advised me to try filing it down with a nail file if it causes me problems. How I’m supposed to get a nail file on something behind my front top teeth I am not quite sure… It’s not really causing problems though, it’s just a bit annoying.