happy 4th. I woke up to yet more dog vomit and spent 5 hours at the emergency vet, where they charged me a month's mortgage to attempt to figure out why J cannot keep anything down.

I don't think there's much chance they'll keep her through the night, so I will have a doped-up sick nauseated dog to get through the BOOM times tonight.

Oh Suela that sucks hard. I’m so sorry. Poor puppy.

Oh no, 'suela! I'm sorry.

I went grocery shopping and I think that's about all I'm going to accomplish today. I have been confused about what day it is all weekend - the observed holiday on Monday going my head and made me think yesterday was the 2nd and I've just been off balance about when I can do anything ever since. But now that I have it straight n my head I feel good about trying to do some stuff tomorrow. Hopefully it will feel like the bonus day it is.

I think there are fireworks at the waterfront tonight but staying up past sunset to see them and then come home sounds like something that would throw off my sleeping patterns for the next week. I am a delicate flower when it comes to regular sleep. Just listening to the fireworks and going to sleep once they are over shouldn't be too disruptive, judging by past years.

Oh no, consuela. Good luck!

House luck, Laura!

But so weird tat 20 years later, my podcasts are authored by the old TWOP crew…. Including NPR and Slate.

Yeah, that is a trip, honestly.

Looks like J might have eaten something she shouldn't have. She has a lump in her intestine, and pending tomorrow's ultrasound, she will have surgery tomorrow.

... I should probably ask them to take out some of her mammary glands while they do it.

ooh I'm sorry she has to have surgery, I hope it all goes well.

So there's been a lot of changes at work and I realized that one of the leads got promoted to team manager and I realized that while I don't want to be a team manager (they are salaried and lately have been working mulitple 12 hour days in a row) I would like more responsibility and maybe to be a team lead. I talked to the one manager who was at the store today about that and some other things and tomorrow I'll try to find whoever is here and talk to them. I think there's someone they have in mind for the vacant lead position and I'm not sure I want to jump straight into that, but I do want to do more and figure out more of a place.

I've been caught for awhile wanting more responsibility but also feeling like I'm not good enough or wouldn't be good enough to do it. But I'm realizing that is just my insecurities and self esteem issues talking and while there are some things I definitely could work on it's all stuff I can work on.

I also found out that our regional manager had asked if the store could run on our current staffing or if we really needed more people (the assistant manager had told me this while we were talking about store morale and how burned out some people are feeling) and I was partly shocked and partly not. I figured that they would try to go with as few bodies as possible. I know that prior to the pandemic we were probably over staffed, especially in some areas. But we need more people just to keep up with getting clothes out of the fitting rooms and making the store look nice, but if they want real customer service and not just cashiers to check people out then we need way more people.

Do retail stores ever have after hours shifts for clean-up, merchandise return, and restock? I think that would be an ideal job and that you’d be great as a team lead. Smallish team, multiple tasks, covering the whole store.

I was so happy Thursday-Saturday & then sometime Saturday night I was & continue to be attacked by my sinuses. I am doing the hot shower, hot tea, hot broth & have had some relief but still the right side if my face feels overly warm & puffy & my teeth hurt & I am thinking this is the other shoe that I was expecting to drop after my good news Thursday.

I have hit the "but I COULD be doing things!" stage of re-entering life. When it was all quaran-times, OK, fine I'll sit at home doing nothing. But now I'm looking at my empty calendar going "but...surely SOMETHING is happening I could go to?? Do I need to reach out to friends I'm forgetting about and PLAN something? (probably)"

(your continuing adventures in "the perils of being a single extrovert in a pandemic")