Saturday Doin's

I was beyond excited for today. Boy kitten let me sleep in. I took out the garbage, green waste, recycling and stomped on some beer boxes to get them in the recycling, and scooped the cat boxes. Redid my dry-erase calendar in very tidy handwriting. September and October are now accounted for. I've written down the holidays for November and December.

It feels great. Then I cleaned up the aku room, tidied some plants that were trying to overtake the house, while listening to my current book, This Changes Everything, by Tyler Merritt. He has stopped yelling. I stopped listening to Andre Agassi because the guy's unredeemably angry, only to find that Tyler Merritt gets pretty wound up, too. 

I paused for a little plant shopping at Home Depot, some groceries for the best soup ever made, and now I'm here. I made the mistake of reading all the sad messages from departing employees on the Discord channel, and then I had to write out my sorrow. 

But I'm back, so to speak. I made a tuna sandwich, and now mrguy is eating tuna for the first time in a few months. His appetite has returned. His CEA, which had gone up to 3, stubbornly, has gone down to 2, where it lived since he first started responding to chemo. Yay! His CA 19-9, the important tumor marker which was way up there, is continuing its downward trend and although it is not in the normal, it's coming down by hundreds of points every week. We may be heading for better news. PET scan in two weeks.

Some photos of the wild succulents. They make babies that then fall off of the leaves and root on the ground. I made a large pot of cuttings, and am rooting some leaves, and they're kinda everywhere in the aku room now. I used to not like these plants, but then succumbed to my mantra "like plants that like you".

Let's do that.

PS Can NOOOOOTTTT wait to retire. For real. 

A Final Layoff Post?

This past few weeks has been really sad.

Yesterday was my 26th anniversary at the forklift factory, and it was also the last day that laid off employees had their keycards. People were doing things for the last or first time, like using their newhire free lunch coupon that they had never used, or buying things at the company store, or asking the commissary to make their favorite cookie or dropping things off on the free table or selling a million things that were in their office. On Thursday while I was eating lunch with some friends, there was a young woman openly weeping at the table next to us and being consoled by her tablemates. On Tuesday and Thursday we did oral histories with 5 people. Despite the advance notice that layoffs were coming, so many people were caught unawares. My teammates especially. We are still in a state of shock.

We took our affected teammates to a very fancy lunch on Wednesday, which felt good, when it didn't also feel shitty. We met at the rose garden, and then lunched, and then I went for a walk with my old boss and caught her up on everything. She knew some stuff that I didn't. Anyway, it was while walking with her that I realized that I've outlasted all of my bosses and all of my enemies. Except one.

As I said, yesterday was my 26th anniversary and also the saddest day I have felt at the factory. I've been through the deaths, all but one of the layoffs, metoo, Covid. People have left their goodbye messages on Slack. And because Slack is ASS and doesn't have an archiving function, and since all of our goodbye messages in the past were sent by email, I am cutting and pasting every single goodbye Slack into an individual email message which I send to myself, with the subject line "Employee Name Slack Goodbye" with date sent. Then I move it to my Terminations folder so we can archive all of the contact information, past and present, in the same place. This means that I read every single one of those goodbyes.

One person said that she'd be sitting on the lawn near the front gate playing the theme song from Top Gun until she was disconnected from the company wifi. I will miss her.

After work, clam and I went to a bar to sew. Her husband was part of the layoff and stayed home with the rest of the champagne bottle they were working on when I arrived to pick her up. We quickly had a distracting moment on our way to the bar when we saw a guy in cream colored shorts and a lemon yellow golf shirt, facing the busy street. He was holding his phone pizza box style and talking to someone while simultaneously battering a tree with the force of his tremendous stream of urine. We started pointing at him and yelling, while I flipped him off. I don't need to see that. My people just got laid off!!  Clam and I later agreed that he must have been drinking 40 ouncers because of the volume and light color of his flow.

That really was an interesting way to change the subject from sadness to outrage and observation. Then we sewed and drank beer and caught up on several weeks of news.

Today is another day.

Friend Stuff

I reconnected with an old friend last week. Neither of us is quite sure why we haven't been in touch.

I do better with scheduled togetherness. Otherwise I'm sure I'm bothering someone or it would be an intrusion. Setting our zoom schedule today.

In other news, on Sunday I went out to lunch with one of our bandmates. I had Chuchitos, in honor of our friend's Uncle Chooch, who I have never met but whose name I adore. Friend had fried chicken.

Then I went to a friend's house and took a walk with her 88 year old dad, who is recovering from a fall. Afterward he told her I was a "force of nature". I was on my best behavior! She said that he meant more like I'm a good egg. Whew. 

Then, back to the house where the man's son-in-law was having a beer with mrguy. I cooked pasta shells with beef marinara while the guys talked, and we ate together. It felt like a weekend.

This week's viewing:

• Renovation Aloha, Home Town, Sweet Magnolias (these are things we can watch while chewing). Then How To Get To Heaven From Belfast. Man, that's a great show.

Post SBD

The whole layoff thing has been super depressing, and I'm trying to make sense of it -- to find a narrative that works for me. I don't understand the layoff methodology. I don't understand getting rid of all of the managers in some departments, including the managers of the forklift operators, when forklift operating is what a forklift company does. It's in the company's name, for crying out loud. 

We're doing handoffs with people who were affected, including an archivist who is of the "making things globally better in the company" persuasion. Her projects are heady, important and involve people across departments. I am not motivated to continue her work, because the desire for making things better by means of large projects that I might also leave mid-stream just doesn't seem like the right thing to do. That said, I will need to continue to participate in handoff discussions in order to honor the departing.

I gave up on my own larger projects a long time ago. And in the months before the layoff I realized that even if I stayed at the forklift company for another two decades I would not get the opportunity to take care of some stuff that I think needs to be done. 

Case in point: there is a database that I've been looking at since 1999, when I was a contractor. It was a combination of data from several different databases pulled under one hood. I would love to do data cleanup, because there are project titles that nobody will know about without the brain of a longterm employee. I bring assets back by knowing what the records mean, but when I'm gone some of that access will be gone with me.

Someone once told me that I shouldn't care more than the company does. I never agreed with that, because I can't do my job if I'm not aiming higher and thinking about all of the ways that the things I collect will be used. On one hand maybe I was wrong all of those years, but on the other I helped make something remarkable. I'm going to concentrate on the latter, and try to tidy up before I leave.

Oh one more thing. This whole situation makes retirement so much more desirable. 

The Man Report

Things are good. The road has been rough.

Earlier in the week, after weeks of chemo and radiation, mrguy looked unbelievably frail. He was awake for a few hours of the day. He could only rally for his Monday dj session. He was living on yogurt, and I felt like I needed to intervene. He'd get up to drink three 530 calorie Boosts a day. I would make food and eat it myself. Both of us were super depressed. I had my work life, which was incredibly intense, and then I'd step out of a meeting about crazy work stuff to get advice on what I should do for mrguy, or what to expect.

When I talk to our oncology nurse navigator, who is provided by our insurance plan, I realize why it's so hard to retire. We can't continue to work with her unless I stay at the forklift factory, because Cigna doesn't work with individuals. And she is the most calming influence I have. For two and a half years, she has guided us through cancer, and we wish she was our mom. Anyhoo, she suggested that mrguy take his nausea meds a different way. Then I suggested to him that he go back to his old plan that worked so well. He kinda gave me a "Hell no" on that, saying that the original plan required him to get up at 3am to take one of the meds. He said he'd just stop Compazine entirely.

Unlike most stories in which a person goes cold turkey and then has something awful happen, he woke up the next day and was a completely different person. The spark of life had returned, Lazarus-like. He stopped sleeping 6 hours in the middle of the day, and occasionally cruising like a toddler who steadies himself on the furniture while walking. He's super thin, but last night all he could think about (insomnia hasn't changed) was driving to the town where he went to college, visiting a particular bagel shop, burrito shop and donut store. His description of the chile relleno burrito has my stomach rumbling. And we are SO going to do this.

I can't tell you what a relief this is. He's been suffering for weeks and weeks and now we see a bit of a light in the distance. Maybe, just maybe, we've made it through this tough stretch.

I'll take it.

FedEx v Locust Tree

From over on the fb:


Late-breaking neighborhood excitement: FedEx guy backed into one of my trees (twice), while doing a terrible 3-point turn. I went outside, took photos, smacked his truck with one of my lady hands as he drove away, and made him stop. He was literally dragging a small tree branch on his bumper. Despite his adorable face melting my heart I pointed at him and yelled “I want you to APOLOGIZE for hurting my tree”. He did, and was very nice and I was appeased.


I did not use any bad words.

PS Sorry about the formatting. I do not consistently hit preview before I post to see if it looks like dooky.

Ingrediments for Sumo

Miss clam had a double bunionectomy. The viewing of last day of the basho was over at her house. I made mackerel mousse and risotto. It was delightful.

By the way, I am so in love with this lady. An admin in one of the sumo fb groups threatened to expel me for asking who she was. Reddit is a little / lot more promiscuous on the matter. Someone says that she's the head of one of the fan groups. For which rikishi or for which beya I do not know. She reminds me of my mom -- judging me through the screen.

Bonus sumotori armpit for y'all!

My Sweet Boy

That face just kills me.

Spinning Blades of Death

From Last Wednesday:

The term "Spinning Blades of Death" was coined by a guy named Ed Ho, who worked at a startup with mrguy. "SBD" would be the subject line of an email containing a list of laid-off employees.

Today was the day. I wasn't laid off, but not for lack of trying. I have asked the head of the company to reconsider. In a huge shocker they laid off our manager, and our infrastructure archivist. This is one third of our department. Those two make the department run. And we were told that we are now going to be managed by a senior publicist (very nice person) who knows nothing about archives and already has a job.

My initial thought was to whiteboard and fix and do the things that you do if you stick around. But as the decisions above us have sunk in, the pure thoughtlessness of it, the apparent assumption that we'll band together and make things work? It seems pointless.

I built this department up from the contents of a double office and have seen it grow into a well oiled machine. Our team has had a great run. It seems weird to want to walk out the door without knowing that someone will run the thing, but I'm just so depressed that I can't imagine sticking around. I went to the car wash, and was so disappointed there, as well. I paid for three color foam and there was no pink. It looked like the sink in my hotel in Singapore when the neti pot broke through my sinus infection.

From Today:

It's been over a week now, and I feel better-ish. The day after the layoff the team (I call us the square, cause there are only 4 of us) whiteboarded the departing employees' roles and tried to come to a decision about what we won't do. I came clean with the team that I'm retiring. This was a huge relief. The week has been about coming to terms with this seismic shift in our department. Meeting with the GM. Hearing that they really do want us to do less, and won't fire us if we do. Figuring that they had to lay off the people they did, because if they got rid of me it wouldn't be enough.

I am not going to dwell on this too much, but we were doing outreach to forklift designers who didn't have time for what we were offering. We were hearing and responding to the things that the company was telling us. Then brainstorming and executing things that we could do to align with that vision. I am reminded of mrpeterpotamous, my old diner boss, who said "I don't pay you to think. I pay you to serve". So what if? 

In some ways nothing is wrong. Other than being heartbroken that our teammates are leaving. And feeling guilty that I feel bad for my own situation.

One of the square suggested that I hand off my presentation for the fan fest to another member of the square who is attending. I finished the presentation and did just that. Mrguy has been so sick, and this week I realized it's just too much. Thankfully my sweet colleague is going to step up.

I am going to try to get into this new world in the short term. Mrguy isn't ready for me to retire yet, it turns out. And now that I've delivered a first draft of my presentation, my goal is to power through as much of my processing backlog as I can before I go. It's feeling a little better.