the deep moans round with many voices

As the end of tax season draws near (REMINDER TO US CITIZENS & RESIDENTS: file your taxes) I start to feel like cloth worn a bit thin. It's not that I am failing to get enough sleep, or to carve out some time for activities I enjoy, but I basically spend three months working 7 days a week, and even if some of those work days are pretty short (4 or 5 hours), that is still a long time with no true break.

Ah well. Two more weeks and I'll be down to just the normal 40-hour 5-day business week grind.

Then I can swing back into planning and preparing for my move to Minnesota. *sigh*

I have decided to take the entire month of July as a vacation, during which I will road trip to Canada to meet some Narnia friends, possibly also road trip around the Pacific Northwest, and spend a week or so loafing at the family cabin. Absolutely NO work thoughts or housing search thoughts until August.

...I do want to do a bit of preemptive job hunting during April and May, though. If I can get something lined up in advance, that would relieve my mother's anxiety in a BIG way -- and the less stressed she is, the less she will inadvertently stress me. (That is particularly important since I plan to crash in my parents' basement (yes, ha ha, I know) until I have a job and an apartment lined up, and I know from long experience that I react badly when Mom frets in my direction for too long. I prefer to avoid snapping at her, so anything that reduces her reasons to worry is a plus.)

Got my last tax document yesterday so today I filed my taxes. \o/

I also had an actual client despite the vicious snow squall that blew through the area from 5 to 6pm, so that was nice.

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And now for something completely unrelated to work!

I spent pretty much the entirety of last night sweaty and overheated, to the point where I took off my pajama pants and kept shoving my comforter half off my body. No idea what was going on there, but I suspect it was the cause of the deeply unpleasant nightmare I had.

The dream was loosely based on Stephen King's Pet Sematary and ~helpfully~ featured my own nuclear family in the starring roles. (Context: Pet Sematary is one of the few books that I deliberately set aside rather than finish, not because it was in any way bad -- it's very well written -- but because I could tell EXACTLY where the foreshadowing was leading and I decided I did not want to go there. I stand by this choice.)

I am a semi-lucid dreamer, which meant I was aware that I was dreaming, but I am not a fully lucid dreamer and was therefore unable to successfully derail the dream or force myself awake. Any minor alterations I managed just fed back into the narrative, which of course made the whole thing worse.

When I did finally wake up, I experienced what I am pretty sure was a type of night terror/sleep paralysis. I will swear to any god you like that I saw the translucent, ghostly form of Catherine Tate (yes really. no, I have no idea why) hovering over me and rippling like smoke in the air, and I knew that she had caused the dream, and if she touched me I would get sucked right back into it. And I couldn't move. Couldn't even blink.

In the back of my head part of me was calmly cataloging this, all "This is a night terror, you are hallucinating, ghosts aren't real, there is a perfectly rational scientific explanation for this experience," but that did sweet fuck-all to convince the irrational gibbering occupying the majority of my brain for that handful of seconds.

Anyway I did eventually manage to blink, and then blink again and sit up and wake my phone to create a bit of light. And then I spent about 45 minutes reading about ancient Mesopotamia in hopes that I could create enough of a mental/emotional gap that my brain wouldn't attempt to recreate the same dream when I went back to sleep.

This mostly worked -- a bloodthirsty reanimated cat did appear in my next round of dreams, but my family was not involved and the emotional weight was gone.

I devoutly hope the experience will not repeat itself tonight.

Had my first shift at Not the IRS today. It was a little weird, as first shifts always are -- occasional computer glitches, figuring out what new nonsense has happened to the physical office, etcetera.

On the computer front, I could not log into the full version of our calendar/appointment program in Chrome, so I had to do that in MS Edge which is always annoying. Also apparently our NY state forms are not yet ready for efile, so I had to put my single client's state return on hold until that's ready in a week or two. *sigh*

On the physical office front, there was a leak in the roof sometime during the offseason and a portion of the drop ceiling tiles rotted and fell in. Fortunately this was over the desk we don't use because we never had proper equipment for it anyway! Unfortunately it looks incredibly cheap and unprofessional. Also the toilet in one of the two bathrooms is broken and we completely ran out of paper towels. *deeper sigh*

On a related note, the toilet paper holders in the currently functional bathroom are one of those annoying designs that doesn't have an internal rod -- it's like a paper towel holder where there are two arms that swing shut and each have a little disk that is supposed to slip inside the roll of paper. Except they were designed for a wider roll than the cheap-ass ones corporate currently authorizes us to buy, so the paper is always falling out.

I have ordered a 2-pack of cheap plastic spring rods from Amazon and will install them on Tuesday, because I am completely fed up with that and corporate will never in a million years spring for actual new fixtures. $6 is a low price to eliminate a persistent minor annoyance, tbh.

I have another 4-hour shift on Sunday, but last I checked I have no client scheduled. I may bring a cross-stitch project or a book with me, or I may write some Three Sentence Ficathon fills, depending on my mood. We shall see.

I have a mental stumbling block that hits me a lot on weekends, which is that I sort of halfway get up for half an hour (to eat some crackers and take my meds) and then go back to bed, and by the time I get up "for real" it's nearly noon or perhaps already past noon. And then I kind of don't want to get dressed for just the afternoon, but my brain has Opinions about doing tasks or eating meals before I have dressed, and also about dressing without showering, and it just kind of spirals and I lose the day.

But! Today I gave myself permission to just not shower or get dressed and do stuff in my pajamas. Which meant I got some assorted chores done and by the time 3:30 rolled around I decided I might as well take a shower and at least change my underpants. And then I did more tasks.

All in all a surprisingly productive day, and I short-circuited the weird guilt spiral over sleeping in and being useless.

Brains, man. So annoying, yet occasionally so easy to do an end-run around.

I have basically spent Sunday through today sleeping with intervals of reading, and I am so tired of being ill. Since I stopped working retail, I get sick much less often, but upper respiratory ailments still tend to hit me like a tractor-trailer. I am distinctly unfond of the experience.

However today I am definitely on the mend -- I had significantly more physical energy and mental focus, to the point where I pulled myself together enough to order Chinese takeout and actually go pick it up -- so I think I will manage to get ONE day at the office tomorrow.

I might then do a make-up day on Saturday to catch up on photo and video editing (I think tomorrow will mostly be emails and advertising updates), but if not, oh well.

I am also considering signing up for Get Your Words Out in 2025. I think that I will go for a habit pledge rather than a wordcount pledge, because what I need to do is build writing into my daily routine. We shall see.