Ash the Mighty

One of major selling points about my employer is the amazing (and I do mean Ah-Maze-ing) health benefits which are offered through the company, virtually free of charge. It’s through Blue Cross/Blue Shield and the things that we get, I truly shudder to think of how much they must cost my employer. Because seriously, wow.

And yet I hardly ever use this outstanding insurance (other than my monthly prescription for my migraine meds . . . which is plenty).

Why? Because big, burly, has-been-known-to-actually-walk-through-ghettos-because-it’s-shorter Ash is fucking TERRIFIED of doctors.

Like for realz. Hospitals are where people go to die. And doctors. Well, doctors know fuckall.

That said, I’ve been really sick recently. To be precise, I’ve been mentally ill for pretty much ever, I’ve had physical ailments for years, I’ve had a sinus infection for probably a few months, and I’ve had a chest cold for about two weeks. I thought I had kicked the cold and could go back to just ignoring the rest of it like I always did when I woke up a couple of days ago with my whole face a mass of pain. It felt not only like the sinus pressure and pain had gotten worse, but like the infection had probably spread into my jaw or something (which is likely, to be honest).

SO, I bit the bullet and called my doctor’s office . . . which was of course closed. Keep in mind I wake up for work at 7:30pm. So I suffered through it all until yesterday morning when I could make an appointment and sneak in to see my Doc.

Now there’s not THAT much about this doctor that makes him so very much better than any other, except that he’s an actual human being. I like this. I approve. When I first started seeing him and told him I knew I was fat and he didn’t need to belabor the fact, he didn’t. We talk music. A LOT. He dresses . . . well he dresses so much better than any straight man I know I sometimes wonder, but hey, you know I don’t judge. And what’s more is when I got sick two years ago BADLY with whatever the hell it was, he actually tried to help me figure it out and when my work gave me the run around with FMLA he got on the phone with the HR department personally and stood up for me. This was awesome.

So the Doc takes one look up my nose, swears and says that he’s shocked I’m even upright due to the massive infection raging in my skull. And then he sits me down and doesn’t so much offer as informs me that it’s time I go on to some blood pressure medication. This . . . this is not something I was thrilled about. I’ve always known it was coming. I come from a long line of high blood pressure (thanks MOM AND DAD!!) and my sister just had to give birth to a two month preemie baby because of high BP, but it’s still not something I want to do.

I let him write me the script though. I know that I’ve been known to be . . . well some less-than-charitable souls might describe me as “stubborn.” But I still recognize that maybe dying of a heart attack at the age of 30 might suck. So, let’s take his stupid pills. Let’s cut down on the salt (and apparently pseudophedrine? Really?!). I already have cut way down on things like fast food and crap like that. But caffeine? ALCOHOL?! FUCK. YOU.

There’s living past 30 and there’s wanting to live past 30.

~Ash.

Not so much sleepy as exhausted.

I used to look at people who would talk about them working on their twentieth plus day in a row of work or some such without a day off as if they had just grown another head. I had no clue how they could possibly do that. Heck, I voluntarily took an unpleasant work schedule just so that I could have an extra day off.

Well now I am apparently the king of this behaviour. I currently find myself right in the middle of a cycle which will not have me taking a day off until I will have been working for 5 weeks in a row (that would be 35 days, for those who can’t keep up with the math). Even that is only so little because I took a couple of days off because my niece was born and my baby sister was in the hospital! Were that discounted, it would be more like 7 weeks. My next days off will be two days off I’m taking mid-March for St. Patrick’s Day during which time I will be seeing Flogging Molly (and of course the day after I had to take off for recognition of National Hangover Day).

After that it’s the same ol’ thing for another two weeks. No rest for the wicked until Faire is over. After that, presuming I stay on the same schedule, I’ll get my weekends back and maybe I’ll actually have some recognizable time off. I’m planning on jetting out of town the absolute first weekend I can. I want to get out to California (San Diego, I hope) to feel the sand between my toes and to hear the waves breaking. It’s been far too close to a decade since I’ve stepped foot on the California shore. This bothers me.

Maybe I can even find a crazy-but-not-too-crazy blue-eyed pretty piece of work to come with me to keep me company. Hey, weirder things have happened! You don’t know!

~A.

Effing EVERYONE that I work with is breaking up. Seriously. If I was in a relationship at all I would be absolutely paranoid that I would be next. As it is, I feel a little bad, like maybe on some level I caused it, or that at the very least I was that little starting pebble in the grand avalanche which is the disaster of my department’s love life. At one point in time not too long ago (OK, like four or five months ago) there was maybe one or two single people in my department. Now I believe there is maybe one or two people still in relationships.

And we’re not just talking little breakups here. We’re talking live in fiances splitting. Messy divorces (and/or people TALKING divorce). Things of that nature. It’s getting plain ol’ eerie.

Lately I also feel like I shouldn’t so much be getting paid for my expertise with computers as with my mad relationship skillz. Not that I mind trying to help people out, of course. It’s just yet another thing that I have to privately have a chuckle about, that the guy who can’t get a girl to stick around to save his soul is still really pretty decent at helping with other peoples’ love life. Story of my freakin’ life.

So THAT’S fun.

~A.

Well, Arizona is finally changing seasons. How do we know? Because I’m feeling like hell. Set in last night that I started feeling like crap, and then it just got worse. Me sleeping in did nothing to help. Well, it helped a LITTLE, but not recognizably.

So that’s fun.

In other news, I’ve started my new gig at work (and hopefully I’ll even be able to make it in come Friday). It’s interesting but HARD work. I am definitely learning so much more than I have basically since I first started in this department. Every day it’s something new. And we’re not just talking department procedural stuff. No, we’re talking these really intricate scripts that I’m learning how to modify and write myself which can make the servers and Plesk (the control panels that most of these servers run) do truly amazing things.

As usual, I can’t really go into too many details cause it’s work and all, but it is pretty cool. It would just be nice if for most of my week there were some more people there. Just the down side of working the third shift . . .

ANYWAY. That’s all I’ve got. Gonna go get take a short nap and see if that makes me all better . . .

Take care everyone,
~A.

There are all sorts of reasons, even some good ones, for people not doing their jobs. They’re being inundated with work (maybe other people aren’t doing their own for example), they’re untrained, circumstances beyond their control are causing their own jobs to be impossible to be completed.

But when it’s just flat out NOT. GETTING. DONE . . . Makes an AshMonster see red.

Now two things have happened recently which makes me a little angry. One happened to my dear friend Meggan, and it’s something that isn’t entirely the other person’s fault, and it’s something that actually happened to me as well, for all that I didn’t blog about it. For the last week, Meggan and her family (including her darling newborn, Ruby) were in Hawai’i for the Ironman Triathlon finals which her father was competing in. When trying to return home, her flight was delayed by over 24 hours, and she was told she would need to sit in the VERY warm airport lobby with a small baby. This. Just. Doesn’t. Work. Like I said, this exact thing happened when my family was in Hawai’i two years ago and they similarly just kept us there despite knowing it would be HOURS. If you know of this delay, you arrange a cheap motel or SOMETHING. If there’s a small child, you DEFINITELY figure something out. Don’t just shrug your shoulders, you heartless cows.

Then there’s me. I can’t get into TOO many of the details because it’s work related, but suffice to say I will not be spending ANY money for the next two weeks due to a paycheck SNAFU, at which point I will get a HUGE one. Has there been an apology? No. Was ANYONE prompt in addressing the situation? No. Did anyone even address the situation at all until I went in and raised hell four days after I originally pointed out there was a problem? Um, no. I was of course livid and am only slightly less so now. Really . . . it’s a timecard. It’s NOT that hard to mess up. I ensure I punch in and out. You just have to ensure that it’s not been messed up in any other way, people.

SO ANYWAY. That’s just some of the hi jinks that ensue when unmitigated incompetence is allowed to roam free. So please, lock up your incompetence. The person it hurts may be someone you love.

~Ash.

So you may have noticed that I was gone.

Oh. No? Not at all? Not even a little bit? Well that’s somewhat disappointing.

Well I’ve been gone for a while. Trust me on this. The reason? Well, the reasons have in fact been oh so many. One of the main ones is that I had found myself a really truly wonderful girlfriend who I enjoyed spending time with so much that I didn’t really feel like blogging all that much. Plus there’s the fact that her parents seemed to be a little on the overtly curious side in the “we’re going to stalk and/or hire a PI to investigate you” kind of way, and so not only did I not feel like blogging, the more observant among you may have noticed that my old blog was taken down.

But I’m back. Alas this is not because I have reached an accord with said lovely lady’s parents, but instead because she and I have parted company. Those of you who run across this blog are probably already aware of this, but it wasn’t exactly my idea and I’m utterly heartbroken by the fact . . . but to be honest at this point I really should be getting used to it. Just time to put up some walls again, up the cynicism levels once more, and spend some time bitching online!

So LOTS has actually changed in the few months since I wrote, and I can’t really get in to all of it. At least not in the first entry. But suffice to say that I’m alive, I’m still gainfully employed, though erratically scheduled, and I greatly look forward to irritating you all with my Idle Ramblings once again, in a whole new and fresh blog environment (yes, yes, for the record I am once again moving venues. I’m shifting away from LiveJournal, which I’ve not made good use of for years, and have just installed a version of WordPress on my server. Possibly a bit dangerous, but I was getting EVER so irritated with LJ, so we just all have to deal, don’t we?).

Hope you are all well and I look forward to hearing from you soon . . .

~A.

So I finished that training that I was working on. Mostly. I actually ended up having to go home early on Friday ill (thanks a lot, sweetie. The girlie passed on a little post-nasal thing she had. What a giver!). I then turned around and went back in at 8:30 on Saturday night and have worked through the weekend doing 11 hours shifts with one hour lunches. Let me tell you, it is rough. Not like work in the hot sun doing labour kind of rough, but still. And of course the fact that the closest thing I’ve had to a break has been going home early with a head cold doesn’t really help.

That said however, it’s all over now! I’m off of work until technically the 26th of June 19th of June (not so much with the math), though I may come in and do a day of work on the 15th. As I mentioned, I’ll be making my bi-annual pilgrimage to our neighbours to the north(east) for to deliver one Jaguar, visit with the Meggan, and pay truly ridiculous amounts of money to huff and puff around the Colorado Renaissance Festival. This year, a variation on the theme is that my good friend Michael Turney will be coming along and we will be dressing up as Archie and Reggie. Colorado will truly never know what hit them. Especially since we won’t be participants and so we will no longer have to PRETEND to be rich and drunk. We’ll just have to pretend to be rich!

That’s just about me for this one. I’m going to post this before I fall over asleep on my keyboard and I just end up posting a long line of bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb’s

Take care of yourselves (and each other),
~Ash.

I have been schooled to the fact that it has been a revolting amount of time since I’ve updated this thing, and seeing as it is the only forum which even resembles a semi-permanent record of my thoughts and what’s going on in my life (twitter isn’t exactly permanent, and I’ve not even been updating that recently), I really should be a good boy and stop letting, oh, two and a half freaking months pass between posts!

So, Things That Have Happened . . .

. . . Well, during the intervening months and a bit I have continued to work in the same position at GD and only just recently got a promotion BACK to where I was originally hired on (though this time I should be getting a pay hike as the position is now technically higher). I’m in fact currently working the day shift in order to get trained in a refresher course for the gig before heading back to third shift power (which is just lovely).

I have also during the intervening time begun dating a truly amazing young woman who I cherish. You know how gun shy I can be about jinxing things so I’m not gonna name names, and as usual there is drama involved (honestly who would I be if there wasn’t at least some drama involved in my life, both love and otherwise), but for this girl, I would happily put up with any amount of troubles! ***and it should be pointed out that this post was full of typos until she came back and nagged me to fix them. Is it bad that I’m totally turned on by dating an ultra-literate?!?***

Other than that, the Ash really does just abide. I’m leaving next week for a couple of days in Colorado as per usual around this time of year. After that, it’s right back to work where I’m gonna try to not get fired or do something REALLY crazy like, you know, work.

Take care everyone,
~Ash.

P.S. She keeps threatening to bite me. Should I be worried? Ow. See?

Random Stuff in Passing . . .

Well, I’m still alive. Those that follow me in Twitter are probably more aware of this than they are comfortable with as I update that on a frighteningly regular basis. What can I say? It’s a lot easier to “blog” when you’re limited to 140 characters. My life has been rather insane recently, and while there’s been very little that has been truly momentous that has occurred, there’s certainly been enough to keep me busy . . .

FAIRE is “in season” which means that I’ve given over my weekends, such as they are (more on that in a moment) to dressing up in a variety of ever-escalatingly environmentally inappropriate clothing to entertain visitors to the Arizona Renaissance Festival. When I returned from grad school all that I really had from my old costumes was my much-worn kilt, which while warm, could be worn in such a way as to minimize the heat. Then came the velvet doublet. Then our new Entertainment Director decided my doublet needed sleeves. THEN I decided I wanted to try being a Musketeer. Do you KNOW what a Musketeer wears?!? THREE LAYERS OF BLACK VELVET!!! (Photos) In short, the heat has made me functionally retarded. But at least I’ve had company as my brain has been fried in the person of Michael, the giant ape standing there with me in those photos. He’s a very old friend, since pretty much my first year at Faire 15 or so years ago, and we happily split our time between wandering around complaining about these young whipper snappers who don’t do anything right and hitting on the female whipper snappers who don’t do anything right.

Hey, they’ve gotta learn the hard lessons somewhere. May as well be from us.

PHOTOGRAPHY has continued to be a passion and is becoming a possible revenue stream/future profession. I try not to think along those lines too much however. Doing what you love as a job always seems to translate into learning to hate what you love, so I’m kinda holding back. That said, I’ve continued to develop BlackHole Photography.com and have added gigs and gigs of photos to it, including some of a celebrity who I’d say at least classifies as B List ranking (Chris Noth of Sex in the City/Law and Order [IMDB]). This weekend I’ll be helping to photograph my cousin Adam’s wedding, which will be all new and exciting.

WORK has been, well, work. In a moment of likely ill-conceived impetuousness, I agreed to go back to 3rd shift. The department needed it for all sorts of reasons, and I rather wanted some peace and quiet and to be on a shift that wouldn’t have me jerked around all the freaking time. This was about a month ago and it is indeed what I got. I still have not entirely adjusted to the schedule, but that is at least partially because of Faire. Hopefully once the season is over and things settle down a bit I’ll be able to really get used to things and get my life back into something resembling order, even if it is at the opposite end of everyone else’s order.

And finally, my LOVE LIFE has pretty much been chaos. I’m not going to say anything more than that because, well, my grans read this stuff. Hi Bama, hi Gigi! The rest of you pervs can use your imagination.

And that’s just about me. At least all I can think of. Hope you’re all well and I’ll try to talk to you soon . . .

Lovies,
~Ash.

Long(ish) Time

At least since I’ve made a proper blog post. I’ve been Twittering like a madman. It’s just entirely too easy to jot off a quick note about something I find amooozing and then boom, yer done. Alas, the lasting record of it is not there however. Which makes for a sad Ash. I do so like the last record. History geek coming out.

And SPEAKING of history geek, yes, the Arizona Renaissance Festival has once again taken over Arizona/my brain/my life. We just finished the second weekend and despite low turnout (this will be the year to go, folks!), it’s been a lot of fun. My costume has continued to grow and mutate. The blue doublet now has sleeves and I wear a very froufy white shirt along with my normal tights and my new Windwalker boots. In short, Lord Archibald “Archie” Agincourt, the Earl of Bath is even more of a fop than ever before. That said, I’ve only been Archie for two of the four days I’ve been out. The second day of the Faire, Michael and I went as the Musketeers Aramis and Porthos, respectively. While we didn’t have women exactly falling all over themselves to get to us, this may have been at least partly because there was no one there . . . the rain fell hard and fast that day and the air was cold. We were just fine however. Those black tabards with captain’s coats underneath — all in velvet — really do the job in keeping the heat in!

Then yesterday (was it two days ago now?) I was asked by our Entertainment Director to come out in my civvies (plain clothes) with Roxy to take photos of all the participants at the Faire (up to and including the Medieaval Baebes). I did so, and while it wasn’t nearly as much fun and easily just as exhausting, I still got quite a few decent pictures which I’ve already posted at BlackHole Photography in the AZ Rennies section. Enjoy, just don’t steal without giving credit. And REALLY don’t go making a profit on other people’s work/image. Not cool to me or them. There, that’s done. Moving on.

Last bit of news, really. I was in one of my boss’ office last week just talking and somehow the topic of my shift came up. Again. Then the topic of another rep’s shift came up. Turns out this rep, who I’ve known for a long while, has been really unhappy stuck on third shift and wants off. They asked me to take his spot as I get along with most people and I put up decent numbers. I thought about it for a while, but when it really comes down to it, while I’m not happy on third, this guy is actively unhappy there and if I can help him out, the least I could do is give the guy a reprieve . . .

So if you’re wondering why the weirdly rambling and very chatting posting, that’s why. It was my first day on third last night and I am . . . punchy, to say the least.

We do what we can.

~Ash.