general life update, including smoke shop stuff and anticipation of a guest

[edenfalling]

A big storm blew through from Wednesday morning through Thursday morning. It started as rain, shifted to several hours of "wintry mix" -- aka, a jumbled confusion wherein rain, sleet, and snow all fall from the sky in rapid succession, or even all at the same time -- and then solidly into snow by mid-afternoon on Wednesday. I think we probably got 6 inches in Ithaca, but the winds were so strong and the drifting so pronounced it's hard to say for sure. Anyway, I got home safely after closing on Wednesday. I walk, after all, and it's all basically flat instead of up any of Ithaca's component hills. Serenity left a bit early, as did Melodrama, since both of them have significant drives home (and in Melodrama's case, she's not the one driving; she has to get rides from her family since she has no driver's license).

I told Melodrama to call me Thursday morning if she couldn't make it in to work. She called me around 7:30am. We then both took turns calling Sweetheart at the smoke shop, and discovered that she sounded beyond awful and was in tears at the idea that Melodrama couldn't come in. I told her to just put a sign on the door saying we were closed due to weather and staffing issues, and go home. She sounded that bad.

But then Melodrama called and texted Boss Lady (who was up in Syracuse with her daughter's family), Boss Lady texted me, and the upshot is that Sweetheart stayed at the store until I arrived, I ended up taking Melodrama's shift -- 9am-3pm, roughly -- while Boss Lady drove south, arrived at the smoke shop shortly before noon, and closed. We had a brief confusion where she wanted me to get in by 9am, and I -- being only half awake -- completely misplaced an entire hour in my calculations and declared I couldn't make it in until 9:45, when actually I meant 8:45. *headdesk* Melodrama commented on how together I sounded when she called me, but while I can hold perfectly coherent and apparently rational conversations within thirty seconds of waking, it takes me significantly longer to boot up my math and time-keeping skills, and also if I return to sleep without making physical written notes, I will forget not just the substance of the conversation but the fact that any conversation even happened within a minute after I hang up or the other participant leaves the room. (This has been documented; my family can verify it.)

I arrived at 8:45, as predicted, took five minutes to punch in, change my boots for sneakers, and otherwise get situated, and promptly sent Sweetheart home. Boss Lady adjusted the Friday schedule when she arrived, so Sweetheart has tomorrow off as well. We hope she will feel better with some rest. (The problem is that... well, to summarize, she homeschools her son, and he's not old enough for her to feel comfortable leaving him home alone while she's at work, and she can't afford professional child care and has no friends with whom to arrange any reciprocal care arrangements, so she's stuck relying on her deadbeat emotionally abusive babydaddy. Which is a chronic source of stress, which means she doesn't sleep well, which means she gets sick, which makes her more stressed, and around we go again. I wish I was in a position to offer her child care help, but I'm not, and Sweetheart won't accept a gift of money, or even a no-interest, no-set-repayment-period loan, so... I dunno, I just feel generally awful for her. And wish she either got along better with her parents and could lean on them for help or would to send her son to public school, but neither of those are options she's willing to take.)

Anyway, I did laundry and some housecleaning when I got home, and then took a two hour nap because I was exhausted, and also sleep-deprived because of getting up two and a half hours earlier than usual. Now I am attempting to catch up on some internet housekeeping, after which I will try to go to bed earlier than usual.

And tomorrow night my friend Susan arrives for the weekend! Yay Susan! We are going to drive to Rochester on Saturday and do tourist stuff, and then on Sunday we'll visit a few wineries and attend another Finger Lakes Chamber Ensemble concert: the second of the Beethoven cello-and-piano works series. And probably hang out, and talk, and eat out several times, not to mention I will be making her sit through an RE lesson because she didn't demur fast enough when I offered to try swapping with one of my co-teachers, mwahahahaha. *evil grin*

I like getting to see my friends. :-D

Comments

[branchandroot]

My undergrad roomate did that. And her dad always managed to screw up the time zones and call at ungodly a.m. And I'd half wake up and ask at breakfast how her dad was and she'd blink a few times and ask 'oh, did he call again?'. Never remembered a thing, despite five to ten minute long, perfectly coherent conversations. When we were traveling during foreign study, it turned out she could walk and carry luggage like that, too, and would suddenly wake up an hour into the train ride and want to know where the hell we were.

I do hope Sweetheart finds childcare she can trust; that sounds like a /very/ stressful situation all over, poor thing.

[edenfalling]

It's always weird to have someone assume I remember a conversation and get annoyed at me for failing to do a thing I agreed to essentially in my sleep. Or sometimes I have said, "So I had a weird dream last night..." and when I get to the point where a friend or family member randomly interrupted the epic fantasy action/adventure with an off-topic appearance, the person in question will sometimes say, "But that wasn't a dream, don't you remember I woke you to ask blah blah thingy?" to which I will blink and go, "Uh... no? But I guess that makes more sense now." It's even odds whether the dream interruption will bear any resemblance to the actual conversation topic, though at least the existence of such a dream impression is progress over utter forgetfulness.

After a while my family mostly stopped expecting me to remember just-woke-up conversations unless I specifically promised I would write the key points down and they heard me get a pen and start doing so.

[eos_joy]

*butts in* Goodness I'm glad I'm not the only one! There are at least 3 of us out there! ^^

Once, I agreed to go on a date...and then I didn't show up because I didn't remember doing it. >.< I have agreed to drive people and help write papers - so, nothing too damaging, but unnerving and annoying nonetheless!

[edenfalling]

My lapses tend to be of the, "But why are you asking me about such-and-such, don't you remember I told you this morning?" nature, but there have definitely been a few times I agreed to do some minor favor and then failed to follow through because I didn't remember the request or the promise.

[rurounitriv.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you could make a deal with her to provide some kind of service for you in return for the cash for that child care? Do you know if she's a good cook, seamstress, knitter, whatever? That way, she'd get the cash to get child care, and she'd still feel like she wasn't accepting charity.

Heck, if you aren't the kind (like me) that gets twitchy about people being In Your Space, you might ask her to clean your place once a week or whatever.

Just throwing out a random thought..

[edenfalling]

Hmm. I don't think she does any craft-type things, and I'm not sure leaving home to clean my house would make anything better-- she'd still have to leave her son at home and would thus need child care for those periods -- but the general principal is sound. I'll see if I can think of anything that might work as a trade.