Category: Uncategorized

This evening I had to turn my alarm back on which made me sad. After about three weeks of being away from work, I have to “go back” tomorrow. I’ve been away for so long, I think I’ve forgotten how to do certain things. I guess that’s how you know you had a long break.

Tomorrow is my last day of freedom before I have to go back to work after the holidays. It’s been three weeks of time off but I gotta admit, this business of getting my apartment painted has been a real pain in the ass. I’m still cleaning up my living room and only half of my living room stuff has been put back into place. My bedroom is back to normal thankfully.

Yes, my newly painted apartment looks great but the lazy side of me wonders what else I could have been doing for the last week and a half instead of dealing with all this painting crap.

I received my booster vaccine shot today. When I became eligible for the booster shot, my initial appointment was for the 29th of January, which meant I was going to need to wait almost a month for it. With the pandemic going the way it is, that seemed too long to wait. I kept refreshing the available appointments every day. I believe that due to cancellations and increased availability, lots of people were able to move up their appointments.

My first rescheduled appointment was supposed to be for tomorrow at the Vancouver Convention Centre. After refreshing the list of available appointments this morning, I was able to find a new appointment for today at a Shoppers Drug Mart that is much closer than downtown Vancouver. I have been told that lineups at the convention centre can be lengthy, with some people needing to wait an hour or more for their shot, even when they arrive on time.

My appointment was for 3pm and I only needed to wait about fifteen minutes for my shot. The shot was administered in a small room next to the pharmacy. While I believe a large clinic like the convention centre has both Moderna and Pfizer available, the pharmacy I went to today only had Pfizer. That was ok with me. Any shot is better than no shot.

I now have had three different brands of vaccines in my body. I started off with AstraZeneca, got Moderna in the summer, and now Pfizer for my booster. As with the Moderna shot, I have not felt any significant side effects at all. My arm is a tiny bit sore but other than that, it would be hard to tell that I even had a shot today.

I apologize for my extended absence here on the blog. I normally give the staff at this site a break over the holidays so they can relax and spend time with their loved ones. My absence was longer than normal for a few reasons.

Let me try to sum up what my holidays were like. I spent the majority of the remaining days of 2021 trying to do accomplish two things: staying warm and not catching COVID-19. The last two weeks or so of December were extremely cold ones for the greater Vancouver. It was unseasonably cold, with temperatures going down to around -13 in some cases. I was forced to turn the heat on almost on a 24-hour cycle, which rarely happens. It was bitterly cold, a deep freeze that Vancouver doesn’t see very often all. The air also got very dry which caused me to run my humidifier on a 24-hour cycle as well. I had my humidifier on full blast in my bedroom and it was competing against my baseboard heater. The heat would dry the air out and my humidifier would try to add back in some moisture. I could never get it above 30% humidity in my bedroom. I’d have to dial down the heat to get more moisture in the room but then it would be too cold. So it was either be warm and have itchy dry skin or cold and less itchy skin.

The cold also made for some interesting driving conditions. Before the heat would kick in, my steering wheel would be like an ice cube, so it felt like gripping a block of ice while steering. I don’t like driving with gloves, so this sucked. It of course snowed while it was this cold and invariably I would track snow into my car. I park my car exposed to the outside, so the snow would stay solid in my car sometimes. I also had a bottle of water in my car which froze solid for almost two weeks.

Of course, the holidays and freezing cold all is still occurring during a pandemic. Normally holidays are a time for seeing friends and family but those activities remained curtailed for a second straight year. I kept my social circle small and didn’t take many unnecessary risks. I managed to finish one game, The Outer Worlds, before the year ended.

I used vacation days to extend my holiday until the 13th of January, but I have to say, I haven’t felt very relaxed since the 2022 started. That’s because I had a painter come in to paint my place starting on January 3. That meant that I had to clean up and move my furniture and belongings before that. So while some people had a relaxing New Year’s Day and January 2, I was moving furniture and boxing stuff up and cleaning. The first week of the new year was basically me having my entire apartment unavailable other than sleeping. While the painter was painting in the apartment, I was either relegated to a small spot or I was hanging out somewhere locally. I also couldn’t sleep in during the week since the painter would start early in the morning. The painter finished on Friday and he left a mess despite saying he’d protect my floors, furniture and belongings from paint dust and paint splotches. It’s Sunday, and I my apartment is still not back to where it was before. I still have to do a ton of cleaning before I can move my furniture back. I basically put my bed back so I could sleep and just today I put my desk and computer back together. My living room is still a disaster, with everything piled into the center of it, all covered in a layer of paint dust.

I don’t go back to work until Thursday but I feel like I’ll be using all those days to just clean and move all my crap back into place. As far as I’m concerned, my last restful day where I was completely relaxed was well before the new year.

Today was my last day of work for the year before I go on the holiday break. I will return to work on January 13 as I’ve taken some extra time on the back end of the break. My employer, from the very top of the executive level, down to the middle-managers have encouraged everyone to take extra time off if they desire so. I have lots of vacation time in the bank, so I decided to take the time off.

I am looking forward to resting and relaxing over the next few weeks.

Zach returns for holiday 2021.

My niece is officially one year old today and we celebrated her birthday on the weekend. Because of the pandemic, I’ve only started seeing in person for only half her life, at the six month mark. She is a very cute baby and well on her way to becoming a precocious toddler. Her most recent development is crawling extremely fast. She can also pull herself up on furniture, especially baby gates. I think walking might come next but she’s still unsure of that herself.

Sometimes she’ll let me hold her for up to five minutes and sometimes she’ll wait about sixty seconds before reaching out for my sister. I’m going to see her more often because before long, she’ll be too big to hold and I don’t want to miss out on that.

I ran out of toilet paper this morning. I just forgot to get some yesterday when I was out and about. This led to a situation in the early afternoon where I could feel a poop coming on. It wasn’t a dire feeling of needing to poop immediately though. I also had to get some Christmas cards at a drug store, where just incidentally, they also sell toilet paper. Could I delay the poop long enough to drive to the drug store, shop for the cards, get the toilet paper, and then drive back home?

The urgency to poo can change in a second and the urgency rarely, if ever, decreases. It almost always increases. So, I made the decision to poop at home before going to the store. I wasn’t going to go without wiping though, so I used the next best thing to toilet paper, which in my opinion is tissue paper (or Kleenex in some parts of the world). There’s some debate if that stuff is flushable but I took a risk and flushed it.

I was able to get to the store without having to worry about a poop. I got my Christmas cards and a dozen rolls of toilet paper. Thanks for reading.

I was hoping to get my apartment painted before the holidays started but it’s been pushed to the new year. Everything will start on January 3rd and it will take three days. I can wait that long. It also means I move all my crap away from the walls during the holidays and not worry about taking time off to do that.

I started playing the new Battlefield game tonight and it automatically determined my computer was capable of playing it on the recommended graphical setting of “low”. That’s a bit of a bummer. It’s mostly my old-ass video card that’s dragging my experience down. It’s four years old now. I’d love to replace it but as you may know, along with everything else in the world, new video cards are difficult to come by now if you don’t want to spend 2-3x MSRP.

I guess I will play with blocky graphics until things get better.