2020 Furlough

Day 6 of 56: Mental Health in Isolation

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Blog 1

Mental health! It’s important! We all know this! But a lot of us are sheltering in place! That’s rough! More exclamations!!!

Full disclaimer: I am an introvert who lives alone so I already love living my hermit life. I am also not a mental health professional, the thoughts below are what are helping me (plus some silliness), but if you need it I will always urge you to seek professional guidance. Always take care of yourself.

Another disclaimer, today was Turnip and I’s two-year anniversary of being together, but let’s be honest it’s the anniversary of me making a 13 hour drive with him screaming in the car. Tomorrow we’ll do a Turnip post, that also gives me more time to gather pictures. Cats make the Internet go ’round.

Anyway, here’s some things that I’m doing to help keep my mental health game strong during this trying time (seriously, don’t try to hand me an egg).

Take a shower! Regularly!

I don’t know if it’s just me and I’m just an oily sunuvabitch, but my hair gets nasty after a day. To the point where if I don’t shower for a couple days I can put up my fauxhawk. Nasty.

It’s easy to fall into the sneaky despair spiral. Don’t fall into the spiral, take a shower! If you live with someone, they’ll thank you. Even though I live alone and far enough from neighbors, the shower is the only place that I’ll full-on sing along to music, or even really listen to music, period, now that I’m not driving around in my mobile karaoke studio.

I guess this tip is a toss-up between feeling clean makes you feel better or singing along to your favorite songs is good for mental health. How about both?!

Open the windows!

If you’re like me, once it gets dark you close the blinds so peeps walking by can’t peep ya. In the morning, though, you need to open them blinds so your peepers can peep some things.

Since my job involves staring at a screen all day, one of the things they say to help reduce eye strain is for every 20 minutes of screen time look out the window in the distance for 20 seconds. For me, the same thing applies to keeping things interesting. I have a lot of squirrels and birds that run by my house, it’s always interesting to see things that are going on that aren’t on a screen.

Plus sometimes you’ll see some epic stuff. Like one time I watched two squirrels fighting and chasing each other across my yard. One gets chased to the top of this tall tree, goes to jump to another nearby tree and misses. Falls like 20 feet. Audible thud, thought he died. He gets up a couple seconds later, gives a cartoon head shake, and just runs off to do other squirrel stuff.

Chat with people!

I think this is the most important tip I can give right now. We’re all in isolation, it gets lonely, humans are social creatures. We actually need to interact with other humans, it’s just how we are. I’m an introvert and thrive in being alone, but every once in a while I just need some interaction.

Thankfully, we’re in the golden age of technology! If you’re working remotely I’m sure you’re using something like Zoom, GoToMeeting, BlueJeans, Skype/Teams, etc. for meetings and stuff. Do the same thing with your friends! Skype, FaceTime, Zoom, Facebook Messenger, Marco Polo… the options are plentiful. I actually had a Facebook Messenger video call today with a friend who was testing options so they could play D&D with their other friends remotely.

If you don’t want to do the video thing (or can’t), voice chat has been doing the trick for me! When I play Apex with friends, being able to just talk in the party chat is great with reconnecting to fellow humans. Call loved ones on the phone, video game chats, tin cans on a string… any way to regularly reach out to someone will do wonders.

And before you try to tell me to have a conversation with my cats, it’s not the same. They absolutely will not be able to respond in any meaningful way, don’t listen to their lies, they just want treats.

Reflections

I know there’s a lot more things you can do for your mental health. Unfortunately, it’s getting late and I want this up before midnight. These are the ones that I’m doing right now to keep up my mental health, and I’m sure as time goes on I’ll find more! We’re not even out of the first week, folks!

We’ll get through this together, it’s going to suck, but we’ll get through it.

Day 5 of 56: Distractions!

Posted on March 24, 2020 by Blog 0

Today was definitely the fifth day of an extremely long weekend, I just kept getting sidetracked by all these distractions! Mobile games, Tumblr, Facebook, “Mom, stop reading fake news,” Deep Space 9, and hot dogs. I figured by this point in time I’d be well on my way to cleaning up the house, re-organizing, homework, and just productive busywork in general. Nope… distractions.

As I mentioned yesterday, I want to start splitting my time stuck at home between the two cats in the living room and bedroom. I also want to reorganize the house, converting the spare bedroom back to a home office and streaming studio; then I can bring Athena in there and spend quality time while still being able to do stuff.

None of that happened today, because like I said, I kept getting distracted! That inspired today’s post.

Here are 5 of my biggest distractions and how I’m sometimes able to avoid them! (today excluded)

  1. Facebook

    Facebook is by far and large the biggest time-suck out there. We get it, Facebook takes up all your time. I know this, obviously, but I get a warm feeling in my dinosaur brain whenever someone likes, comments on, or shares one of my posts. Which is their entire point.

    Obviously, the easiest way to avoid this distraction is to uninstall the app from your phone. That won’t necessarily stop you from visiting on your computer or through your phone’s browser, but removing that icon removes that muscle memory of opening it when you’re bored.

    Sometimes I’ll move either what page it’s on (page 4 right now), or put it inside a folder. If you don’t keep it in the same spot then you can’t develop that muscle memory.

  2. TV Shows / YouTube / Videos

    This is one of the hardest ones for me. I’ve always been enamored with video whether it was Cartoon Network growing up, or YouTube now. At one point I even considered a career in television production. Part of my problem is I’ll turn something on to be background noise while doing something else, but then I end up only watching it and not doing what I’m supposed to be doing.

    I don’t really feel qualified to provide any sort of guidance on this one; as I’m writing this I’m watching some Jenna & Julien Podcast on YouTube and reading my palm. Earlier today it was Deep Space 9.

    Perhaps the easiest way to avoid this distraction is to designate an area solely to TV and videos separate from the rest of your space. This is one I’m working on: once I rearrange the house I’ll have the consoles and work area in a room with the main TV in another. My living room right now is where everything happens; I eat, watch TV, game, blog, and do homework in this one chair. Creating a space dedicated to gaming, work, and blogging would definitely reduce the time I’m distracted by TV and videos. If possible, give that a shot and let me know in the comments if that works for you.

  3. Mobile / Console Games

    Here’s another one that’s really hard for me: games. As I’ve said before, I play this really dumb mining game and right now there’s an event mine and basically you have to keep your screen on to get the most points to be able to spend to upgrade your mine. Right now next to me my phone is on and I’m keeping an eye on the points so I can upgrade my mine to win this event. Earlier tonight I stopped working on this very post to play Apex with a friend for an hour. I’ve been known to start up Minecraft on the console (my PCs are slow and can’t play it well) and that’s all I do for 10 hours.

    Again, not really qualified at the moment to provide guidance, but I’m really pushing for the separation of areas to sort of help with this. I do know that when I was working I would pay minimal notice to games on my phone because I was doing stuff, and weeknights I could play for an hour or two before I needed to stop and make dinner or do something else. Let me know in the comments if you have any other advice. Until then, I’m gonna keep mining away.

  4. Tumblr / Reddit

    Tumblr and Reddit are two distractions I have in the middle of the day that don’t last too long, I get bored after a little bit with them, but they’re distractions nonetheless. In the mornings, Reddit is something I check after the news just to see another point of what’s going on.

    I got a little disgusted a while ago with Tumblr, so for me it’s easy to ignore and check Reddit or Facebook for memes. Reddit, since it has so much information, causes me to get overwhelmed easily and navigate away.

    Some potential fixes for these distractions are the same as Facebook: uninstall or move it to another folder on your phone. Also prune the subreddits and blogs you follow to make sure you’re getting only information you want and not a lot else.

  5. General Tech Problems

    This may be an IT guy or tinkerer thing, but if I’m on a computer and there’s something I need to do and a problem comes up, I’m going to focus on that problem and any sub-problems that come up. For example, yesterday I got my home Linux server going again. It needed about 400 updates since it’d been offline so long. I quickly got that resolved and my day continued; today I logged into it, noticed it was running a 4 year old version of the OS, and got sucked into figuring out how to upgrade it to the latest version. Then I cleaned up old packages that I no longer needed and started working on hardening some security measures. Did I need to do any of that? No. No, I did not. Did I do any of that? Yes. Yes of course. Because I have a problem.

    If you don’t tinker, this isn’t a problem for you and I wish I could be like you. If you tinker, sorry but you need to figure this one out on your own. Maybe if you tinker enough you’ll eventually come back around to the task at hand, but I just Always. Have. To. Tinker.
    Sorry.

Reflections

I realized while making this post, being distracted and all, that I get distracted pretty easily. I think most of my problems would be fixed if I created a dedicated work/play area (spare bedroom) separate from the relaxing/eating area (living room). Again, like I said yesterday, I already want to change around the house so I’ll be able to report back on that soon. I think part of the problem, too, is that I have a laptop and can use it wherever. Since its charger is in the living room, I’m hesitant to unplug it and move it to different rooms. Either I unplug it all the time or purchase another charger for the different areas; either would allow me to be in different rooms while still using my primary computer.

Shopping list

I didn’t leave the house today, Governor Brown issued a stay-at-home order yesterday, but just for posterity here’s what I will need to get within the next few days.

  • Creamer
    • Cold Stone sweet cream, baby!!!
  • Trash bags
  • Milk
    • Starting to smell a little bit, have half a gallon left
  • Buffalo chicken strips
    • I had the last of those tonight, so good…
  • Cheese
    • About a third of a block left
    • Craving some quesadillas tomorrow already
  • Propane
    • Been out for a while, but if the snow stops soon I’d like to grill some chicken I have since I gross myself out when I cook chicken on the stove
  • Peppermint essential oil
    • May just order on Amazon
    • I have a mouse under my sink, I heard him again last night.
    • I want to get rid of it without killing it, what I’ve found online suggests that peppermint essential oils sprayed around will keep it from coming back.
  • Rubber gloves
    • Cleanup after aforementioned mouse

That’s it for today, sorry for the weirdness.
Stay well, stay home, stay weird, stop them distractions.
Joe

Day 4 of 56: Splitting The Difference

Posted on March 23, 2020 by Blog 0

Have I talked about my cats? I can’t remember, I don’t even really know what day it is. I have two cats, each with their own personality. I don’t spend a lot of time in my room, so today I decided to try splitting the difference between them.

Athena

Athena is my baby, I’ve had her for coming up on 4 years. We just… connect. One of my old roommates noted once that it’s like we have our own language and just have entire conversations. (To be clear: I’m not one of those weirdos that will meow at their cat. She meows at me, I answer in English, and we just seem to know what the other wants/needs.)

Turnip

Turnip is an asshole. All cats are assholes, Turnip more so. He meows constantly for no reason, shreds all my furniture, and just is an overall asshole. He meows when he’s in the sitting area and I move to the kitchen, I call it early-onset Kitty Alzheimer’s, but that’s not really relevant to anything.

Turnip also doesn’t get along with Athena, no matter what I do. Because Turnip is such an asshole to her, Athena stays locked in my room and he gets the rest of the house. That’s not fair to her or me because she’s my baby.

Splitting the difference

Today I decided to just split the difference. The time amount asleep doesn’t count, so let’s say 16 hours to split. And then I have to cook and eat food, so let’s take another 2 hours off, which leaves me with 14 hours to split between the two cats. I got out of bed a little after 10, unemployment FTW, so I figured starting at 11 I’d change rooms every two hours.

I did fairly well… for the first couple hours. At 1 I moved to the bedroom. I have a server from an old computer that does DNS, workgroup management, and is like a dev server when I’m building sites and tools. It was throwing errors at startup about 6 months ago so I turned it off; today I finally took a look at it. Just needed a filesystem check. Felt pretty stupid.

Anyway, got that fixed and a little after 3 moved back to the living room. Turned on the TV to have some noise and BBC America is having a Deep Space 9 marathon. Needless to say, I’ve been in the living room ever since. So much for splitting my time!

Reflections

Today was a good first step in splitting up my time between my cats. Since I don’t really have anything to do with my time it’s difficult to stop doing nothing and go elsewhere. I’ve been toying with the idea of livestreaming or starting a podcast for a while now, and now that I don’t have a roommate I can easily reorganize the house. If I move my computers to the spare bedroom, including my game consoles, I could effectively create a streaming studio and workspace that I could bring Athena in for the time that I need to spend with her.

I also realized that when I went shopping yesterday I didn’t get enough ramen. Only got two packets of hot and spicy beef, should have gotten much more.

Another realization is that I’m posting these either at the end of the day (boring content), or in the middle of the day (interesting stuff happens but then I forget by the next day). In the comments put some ideas for posts that you’d like to see! I’d like to keep up the daily log format at least through the end of the quarantine, but if there’s content you’d like to see or thoughts of mine you want to see, I am always open!

Day 3 of 56: Venturing Forth But Also Not

Posted on March 22, 2020 by Blog 0

Last night I was pretty good as far as falling into alcoholism during this crisis, but also not really. I had about 2 glasses of wine left of my fancy box wine so I finished that off after dinner. Unfortunately, I was also playing a really stupid game on my phone and by the time I knew what was going on it was 2 in the morning. So I really didn’t start day 3 until almost noon.

The majority of today was playing that same stupid game on my phone, not gonna lie, and also watching the Jenna & Julien podcast. The game is called “Idle Miner,” and it’s really dumb, but they have these event mines that expire and this mine only had until 8 tonight to finish it. I didn’t get anywhere near complete. This is absolutely not a sponsored post, I advise you to steer clear of this game because it is highly addictive and a complete time-suck. **goes to upgrade his moonstone mine in the meantime**

Around 6 today I started getting hungry and knew I was out of wine. Even though I knew this would be a bad idea, I took a shower and went to the store.

22 March Shopping List:

  • Wine
  • Soda
  • Hot dogs
  • Bunzzz (hot dog buns)
  • Mac salad
  • Hamburger
  • Mustard
  • Chaaaaps (chips)
  • Queso
  • Ramen

I swear, I shop like a college student. I still technically am, so yeah whatever.

Joe Ventures Forth

Bringing my bottle of hand sanitizer with me (can’t be too careful), I trundle off to the store. This is the first time in 4 days that I’ve listened to music so I’m having a good time. I hit the first roundabout by the store and there is at least 40 cars there. Nah, that’s too many people given the current situation, I’ll just drive around for a while; it’s nice out, and it’s just great to be not in my house.

Swing by work and the parking lot has maybe 5 cars in it, there’s nobody around, everything is just abandoned and empty. Surreal is the word I used to describe it to my coworkers in the group chat. Everything was empty, except for the volleyball court (20-ish people), and the large park at the center of the resort (PACKED / 50-ish people and pets). The way my resort works is it’s basically its own town and the resort manages a fair amount of homes and condos. There are people who live in the resort full-time, and a lot of the homes are managed by other property management companies. Because my resort suspended operations, of course there’s going to be significantly less people. Beyond just being mostly empty, it was also boggling how many people were still taking their spring break vacations in spite of the situation.

Despite the surrealism of both the resort being empty and yet still bustling with activity, I return to the store. There’s maybe 20 cars, so it should be a little better to head in. I’m able to quickly grab all the items on my list while staying away from other people.

When I got to the checkout line, the cashier finished with the lady in front of me, turns to her coworker, holds up a block of cheese and asks, “Where did this come from?” Her coworker doesn’t know, so she puts it back on the counter to be returned. I’m all like “Hey is it still cold? I could buy that!” She holds it out to me to check the temp because she’s wearing gloves (GOOD FOR YOU, STEPHANIE!!!) and it’s pretty warm so I turn it down. I have half a block of cheese at home that’s still good, I don’t need to buy some warm mess.

Joe Returns Home

I finish checking out, take my items to the car, and re-sanitize my hands and the steering wheel with that bottle of sanitizer I brought. Have you noticed that when you need to not touch your face is when it itches? Yeah.

From the time I left to when I got back home: about 45 minutes. That includes travel time and driving around the resort. Approximate time to be exposed: 10 minutes. Shabooyah.

Then I made dinner (top sirloin and mac salad) and started blogging! Some more Jenna & Julien, some Vine compilations, and of course some wine. I refuse to learn any sort of lesson.

Last 10 days amount of time in public

22 March – Store – 10-ish minutes
19 March – Work – 30 minutes to clean up/out my office, nobody was there…
18 March – Store – 5 minutes, needed stuff for dinner
14 March – Starbucks & Store – 10 minutes total
Store was for creamer and small supplies
13 March – Pizza – 2 minutes to pay for the pizza, they already were takeout-only!

I think this section is good to include whenever I leave the house now for tracking’s sake. Don’t think I’ll put it in every day, but at the very least whenever I leave the house.

Day 2 of 56: The Hangover: Part 1

Posted on March 21, 2020 by Blog 0

Okay, first of all, don’t come for me. I didn’t drink enough water yesterday so it’s all my fault that I have a hangover. I’m usually pretty good about staying hydrated, but that’s usually during the week when I’m in the office. The last couple weeks I’ve been home and therefore lax on water.

Yesterday after I got the site up and the first blog posted I took a shower and then started playing some Apex Legends. Total trash player, but I have fun so that’s all that matters. 0.37 KD/R. Don’t come for me. Played a few rounds, had my first glass of wine around 6. Me and the friends played until 7/7:30, broke for dinner, wasn’t feeling up to cooking a full meal so I threw some buffalo chicken stripes in the oven and made mashed potatoes. Few more rounds of Apex, another glass or two of wine because hey it’s a really long weekend!

Finally logged off the PlayStation, poked around Amazon and Honey for stuff to maybe do a livestream or to start the podcast, realized I need to save money so put a stop to that. Let’s be honest, though, I’m probably going to find a screamin’ deal and go in. Hit me up in the comments if you have good and cheap audio gear recommendations.

Anyway, long story short, somehow I ended up watching our cast recording of Avenue Q and I was singing along really loudly at midnight, and there was wine. Don’t drink your feelings, folks. Because you’re gonna be hung over in the morning. You’re also going to forget to plug in all your things when you go to bed so it’s just an all-around bad time.

That’s been my morning so far. Today I’ve been chilling, drinking water, playing some Apex, and just listening to Jenna and Julien videos. I’m out of soda, snacks, and ramen, but I have enough food for lunch and dinner for a few days so it’s really hard to justify leaving just for snacks. I’m also somehow for some reason low on wine, no idea how that could have happened. I know I say this every time I wake up with a hangover but maybe I won’t drink for a few days. Give the body a chance to recover. Probably not going to happen, but it’s nice to dream.

The video I’ve been listening to while tapping this out is one of Julien’s, the one where he makes tamales. Now that’s literally all I can think about. I’m a terrible cook, so I hope the store has tamales. Or maybe the Mexican restaurant will still be open.

Since all I can think about is food I’m going to go ahead and just end this here. While I don’t have tamales, I do have stuff for sandwiches. Nowhere even remotely close, but it’s something.

Day 1 of 56: The Beginning

Posted on March 20, 2020 by Blog 0

Okay, take 2 on this now that I got permalinks working…

I’ve forgotten what the wind feels like, the sun on my face, the smell of juniper and petrichor, even what my friends and family look like.

Just kidding, it’s just been a long and cold winter. Good news is the cheeseburger birds are back!

So to start, the topic on everyone’s mind right now is the coronavirus, COVID-19. It’s been a weird last few weeks, and it’s only going to get weirder. My county has 8 confirmed cases as of this writing, and three deaths in the state. The governor has ordered restaurants to be take-out only. As a result, my work decided to suspend operations for 8 weeks (56 days) since we’re a resort. Not only was it a good business decision (rapidly declining tourist levels, no sense paying a lot of people when there will be little to no business) but it was a good social decision to help limit the spread of this virus. I’m an IT guy, not a doctor. I won’t make any claims about this virus, just urge everyone to listen to the professionals and stay home. So while closing the resort is good to slow down the spread, it does suck for the employees. In the end it’ll all work out, we just have to keep a stiff upper lip.

I started working from home about a week ago, and yesterday (Thursday) was my last day of employment. I’m already going stir-crazy because I’ve been limiting my outings for some time now. I figured the best thing to do would be to try and blog every day during this. I’ll be staying home so this seems like the most constructive use of my time. I’ll share thoughts, things I’ve done, pictures, and whatever else pops into my brain!

It’s going to be a bumpy ride, so strap in. We’ll get through this together!

Until next time,
JoDrRe