Tolerable weekend with the parents, would have been better if Mum hadn't dragged us back to the same fucking town we'd spent back in October when it was all five of us. Their bickering on the second day started to get unbearable, my father's new hearing aid has just exacerbated his lifelong ambition to ignore everything we say, to the point where, while I think my mom's being a short-tempered bitch about it and could handle it differently, I haven't been living with this and still hadn't my patience blown more than a few times (now that his volume is a choice, it feels more deliberately assholery on his part). And then as we said our goodbyes, Mum was all ominous with "we still need to talk", and I'm assuming it's about my ditching them in October. And explains why she is so insistent on me taking a train or bus up to visit them. Sorry, even if I didn't feel the need to have my escape route handy, there's still presents and winter luggage there and back to consider.

Today was an irritating day, where my boss again forgot what time I usually leave, so scheduled a meeting half an hour past that time, which then ran 15 minutes past that, which meant I hit terrible traffic driving home. And my coworker seems to be conspiring to make me come in for a 50-minute training on my telework day, even though we've all agreed I don't actually need to take that training. And tomorrow, when I normally come in late because I stay late and go straight to rehearsal, there is more training, so I can't sleep late.

Fucking Monday.

Jessica, you have my complete sympathy about your work situation. The boss I fled from a few years ago was doing the same sort of nonsense.

I'm eating a meal in a diner attached to a gas station convenience store

Those are pretty common in Louisiana and Mississippi.

I'm taking the darkness of my kitchen (I ordered replacement tubes online because I am afraid if I went to a store i might not get the right wattage and I'v already dealt with that once) as an opportunity to eat takeout without regard to my diet. Panera's this morning for breakfast and lunch, Round Table tonight for however many meals this pizza and a salad last me. Yum.

Ate the Drive-ins Diners and Dives rec of rice balls at Marie's in Green Village, NJ, but the ones at Amores in Armonk, NY were better, if only because they were cheesier. Marie's had better Vodka sauce, though. I also didn't feel the need to shout "health code violation!" at Amores. Maybe because there I couldn't see the staff lounging their armpits all over the display cases, but jesus, save that shit for behind closed kitchen doors when you have them. I'm impressed you put out good food with a kitchen that small, but train your staff better habits, even if you are dead on a Monday.

The panic that the job will fall through is all encompassing. Looking for opiates on the pee test? I'm all full up. And they can't find proof I graduated from McGill, when all they have to do is ask them.

But I did get lunch with John Rogers and CFerg, and despite not having a word to put in edgewise (Tim and migraines and drug tests and Supernatural was about all I had in the face of relentless business talk). He did point out that one of the reasons there's not much driving in Librarians is because XFiles did it boringly and Supernatural still does it so well.

I think I'm going to run a slideshow of Pallas cats during my morning status meeting. If I have time, of course. I'm supposedly getting a redelivery tonight that I will be testing at breakneck speed but with exacting thoroughness starting early tomorrow morning. Meeting is at 9:30.

...yeah, maybe I should skip straight to the slideshow....

This is just this whole fucking year of unreasonable schedules and team member departures coming home to roost. I actually feel for the developers because this was one of those refactorings put off for higher priority stuff (a lot of which crashed and burned for other reasons) and then suddenly it became high priority for Reasons and they'd lost some of the previous coders and it's just a fucking nightmare.

And they only have me for another 7 days.

Oh, yes, "We've got time so do something else. We've got time so do something else. What do you mean it's not done! Mandatory OT till it's done!"

One of my companies decided to push for some big end-of-the-year productivity bonus by running us through all the work that had been scheduled for the first quarter of the next year. We got the bonus and special sweatshirts and a party, then we shut down the company for three weeks in the first quarter because there was no work.

Upside? After a disastrous swim last night, all today's agita boosted my times back to prevacation range. And got rid of all of the aches from the disastrous swim.

So there's that. I guess.