Destiny Skywalker

I've never done the financial management things like Dave Ramsey because if anything, I'm kind of cheap because my parents were terrible at money management. But have you tried a program like that? Is your spending truly beyond your means with one job or is it just anxiety that something financially bad is about to happen because of how you were raised? Do you have a 401k or savings? I fully admit that I think 6 months savings for most people is a pipe dream, so also don't feel like you have to hold yourself to impossible standards set forth by people speaking from a position of privilege.

I had no idea that was going on in Hollywood. It makes sense as you explain it. Sorry, that is tough, and I can understand why it would make you anxious. I hope the Cymbalta is effective. I have a kid on Zoloft and I'm a little unimpressed. Probably not the right med for her. But do know that working with psychiatrists and med management can be a little bit of whack-a-mole, but when you get it dialed in, it's pretty good.

I didn't blink too much of an eye at your family shenanigans, but I think I just had an aneurysm reading about your boss.

Do you get paternity leave, paid or unpaid? How long?

I never pick up on the lesbian vibes. My gaydar is broken. I think my thing is that I just appreciate Girl Power at face value and don't think much else about it. But I admittedly thought the love triangle was lame and didn't see how any of those 3 would be into each other. I liked the show. I'm not much of a horror fan, though. Not that Addams Family has ever been hardcore horror, more campy. I liked Uncle Fester's characterization much more than I usually do.

Found a giant yellow jacket on a closet door when we got home from dinner. Realized a few hours later it was probably the queen from the colony we had removed from our crawlspace in October. At least I hope it was, because that likely means any colony she re-established won't survive the winter. Keeping an eye out for those ***holes.

It's hard when you're burnt out to find much joy in work. And I think many of are burnt out post-pandemic. Not to undermine what you're saying, just saying that you're not alone and it is hard. I think this is how many people fall into quiet quitting, which I think is actually a tiered process. There is literally I will do the absolute bare minimum not to get fired, but there's also "I'm not putting in work above and beyond what is expected when I know from experience that I won't be rewarded for it and will likely just get more responsibility to pick up the slack from others or allow my company not to hire when they reallt need to." It's simply having good boundaries, which management hates. I feel like many people who go into management don't have good boundaries themselves. There are definitely some who exploit boundaries, but I think most people in low-level management are actually just people who feel like they need to succeed and put too much pressure on themselves, and have their own poor boundaries. It sounds like your coworker who only gives out small bits of information either overextended himself in the past helping others or someone got promoted/recognized over him when he did some heavy mentoring. Or he's just an extreme introvert. Or both. Speaking of tech, I've been trying to get my Boomer father signed up for home internet so that he can watch Netflix. Holy hell. This millennial engineer is pulling out her hair. I should've take care of this when I helped him move but he had no energy to do this at the time.

That one makes me sad. I grew up watching Cheers. And the Look Who's Talking movies.

So is he Jacen234?

Oh no! Did you finally get over to the new job and it's awful? What's wrong? The job? The people? About 8 years ago, I got super pissed at my boss and hit the eject button. I did well in the interview, I knew good people in the organization, but the hiring manager made a red flag comment that I brushed off. (He asked me a diversity question and I gave an anecdote about being a woman in engineering and he said that wasn't diversity but then moved on.) I showed up on day 1 and realized the group was incredibly toxic. I knew immediately I had made a mistake. I managed to get an inter-organizational transfer after 6 months, but not before the hiring manager tried to ding me for poor performance 3 weeks after an "exceeds expectations" performance review to try to prevent me from going elsewhere. He succeeded in blocking a major career opportinity but not the backup plan. I ended up staying for another 2 years before successfully getting transferred back to my old organization through a handshake between higher ups, and only because I had a competing offer in hand. The environment (manufacturing) sucked, the work was boring and yet high pressure. I've been back for 5 years now, and things are finally starting to go the right way. Sometimes you have to wait out shitty, toxic people. You can wait them out if they aren't pigeonholed. My first boss wasn't, but it still took almost the entire 2 years to dislodge him. The even more toxic manager was totally pigeonholed, so getting out of there was the right move. But the work was terrible too. There was a period of about a year in that 2 where I was killing it, actually. I had an awesome executive who empowered me and gave me opportunities. I was bored but she almost made it worth it. Then she got promoted and following her would've meant uprooting my whole family. Within 3 months I was gone. Once she left and it went back to the same old, the boredom wasn't worth it.

Congratulations! Hope you two are doing well adjusting to parenthood. That newborn stage can be rough but also a good time to just take it day by day.

I'm told that a lot of companies don't want union employees moving to states where there is no union because it supposedly opens up the non-union employees to be represented by the union. We had a guy move to Idaho for family reasons and he initially had to leave the union and it was a big hit to his paycheck for health care. He was able to rejoin the union and got the good Healthcare back. But if you are working from your home for the Seattle market and not going into the studio, no one would know that you're union.

Hypoglycemia is low blood sugar. I've never ever seen high blood sugar readings otherwise I would be worried it's diabetes. Maybe my pancreas just works overtime? Dr Google just told me heavy cream won't break my fast. I usually drink half and half, which is half cream and half milk. Hmmm. I could probably take the calorie hit. I'm trying to to stay low carb today because we have a wine club party tomorrow. I do like a lot of the recipes I've discovered, admittedly. And I've used my instant pot a lot. But I'm not sure I've lost any weight this first week. I'm admittedly weird and do better on diets if I hit the gym really hard, which is not what they recommend (can't outrun a bad diet, etc). I'm not there yet, I haven't quite gotten into the gym swing because my husband has been sick and the kids had a bunch of snow days.

I think the biggest obstacle to IF for me is my kid's sports/activity schedule and my need for morning coffee. Some nights we don't eat dinner until 7 or 7:30 when Q gets home from practice, because we have to leave the house at 5 and its impossible to get us all fed before then. Then I wake up and eat a quick breakfast and have coffee. Since I often eat dinner so late, I would have to wait until 11 AM or so to have coffee (because I can't drink it black) and caffeine works like a charm for lifting my morning brain fog. I probably need to figure out my IF type. But I don't think I can jam it in to 8 hours. I'm starting to suspect I'm hypoglycemic or will be eventually. My fasting diabetes testing is always ridiculous. My non-fasting looks like someone who was fasting. Maybe I just have an overactive pancreas.

Last night I started feeling nauseous. I knew I didn't eat enough calories but I was sick of protein. So I had a tiny slice of pumpkin pie and felt better. I can't seem to avoid carbs. I'm hovering around 86g a day and somehow with this carb cycling I'm supposed to have some days as low as 50g. At this point I would even take a salad BUT CARBS. I hate this shit. This can't be healthy. One thing I did learn is that I need to do HIIT workouts again. Orangetheory totally worked for me but the schedule stopped working. I've been doing the slow running that keeps your HR down because that's what all the running coaches say to do, but I've gained 10 lbs instead of losing anything. So eff that, I was faster and skinnier doing intervals 3x a week.

I worked overtime today despite having 2 kids at home and a sick spouse. Q got out to play in the snow a little bit with the neighbor. E said heck no (he hates the cold). I have also managed to not have a drop of alcohol despite this insanity because I have no room for carbs ever, it feels like. FML. I have been really good on my diet, too. I didn't say I'm staying sane, though.

We bought a car seat using Google shopping and it turned out to be a scam. They delivered a letter to a neighbor or something (it was less than 1 lbs so clearly not a car seat) so that a UPS tracking number was generated and delivered. When I called UPS they said your address is not listed and we can't tell you whose is. Moral of the story is Google shopping is full of scams. Report them ASAP. Contact the fraud department at your credit card company as well. You probably won't have to pay, but start documenting.

Yesterday I said if its snowing I'm not going into the office. Leave the house this morning, starts snowing 2 minutes later. It ended up being alright and we got home in time to get the kids, but all the schools started to freak out a bit after 12 and were like yo come get your kids, no after school care. Luckily traffic wasn't bad because the roads were still too warm for it to stick.

I'm glad they are enjoying the snow! Supposedly it's going to turn to rain tonight but we will see. I'm pretty sure my kids will be on a 2 hour delay for school tomorrow. They better pace themselves on snow days, though. I think we are supposed to get snow again Thursday. And Sunday, and Monday...

Can they transfer you to the local office, at least? All along, the issue sounds like it has been they don't want to pay you a "Seattle salary" to live in Florida. Also I think I've changed my mind about moving back to Florida until I retire... that place is a hot mess.

This is totally my own fault for going in a diet in the first place, but I am on day 2 and already dying (as usual). I want to try carb cycling because I know something like keto is completely unsustainable for me. However, I'm struggling to find an app that does this properly, not to mention the amount of protein this pushes has me worried that I will never poop again. I've already had 102g of protein for the day and I'm starving. I'm supposed to have 100g of carbs and I'm 50g short, but there's 50g more of protein planned for today, but only 600 more calories. Right now there is a metric shit ton of Mac and cheese and pumpkin pie in my fridge. I know what I would rather have than a half pound of freaking salmon.

No way in shit is Santa 194 lbs, unless he has chicken legs and chicken arms.

You know how we talk about giftedness? Kids can be gifted in more areas than just academics, music being one of them. In this case I am pretty sure Q is gifted athletically, and my husband is too. He was ridiculous in college intramurals. Something about his fine motor control is just off the charts. He's just not a big guy, though. She's pretty small, too, and that's really the only thing that holds her back. But her 3rd day of school they suggested she try tetherball, and she beat everyone 1v1, so she offered to play 3v1 and still beat everyone, so everyone was mad. Like what the hell am I supposed to do about that? I'm not going to tell her to hide her gifts. I was a good all around athlete but nowhere near their level.

Q had a bit of a rough start but I think she's finally settling in. She misses the kids at her old school, and she needs to make friends, but I think she's on her way with a few girls. She does like that there's no homework, though, which is a big change compared to nightly homework for the last few years (I was over it already). She also doesn't have to wear a uniform, and I am glad they have decided not to enforce some of the dumber dress code policies regarding leggings (sorry, my kid is skinny and athletic, it's hard to find pants that fit well). Speaking of athletic, what caused problems initially is that we had to learn the lesson again that boys really do not like losing to girls, especially 5th grade girls beating 6th grade boys at recess games. My husband was super pissed and I had to talk him down from going off on everyone. Honestly, this stuff pisses us off because if she was a boy this would be a non-issue. I hate this crap, and I'm pretty sure it will become a non-issue when there are actual school sports in middle and high school. Soccer unfortunately continues to be a hot mess because of mean girl antics, but fortunately we have 2 weeks left and we can walk away from this team. I took her to a tryout for a pro team academy tonight. She did decent, she might get a call for their second team but I doubt they would take her for the first team. Realistically she won't admit that she is a defender or defensive midfielder and keeps trying to play forward because that's where the glory is, but her skill set/mind set is wrong, so she would need to be on more of a development team with a coach who is going to work on putting her in the right role. (She is currently playing some sort of weird withdrawn forward that is really an attacking center mid, but she doesnt score because she's so busy trying to take the ball away from the other team the moment they try to counter attack. Hilariously, this has translated into a weird statistic that only we've noticed: the opposing team has only scored one goal the entire season when she is on the field. All the other goals against them have happened when she is on the bench.) Unfortunately it is not in a great location in terms of traffic, but I wanted to take her mostly for fun and a confidence boost. We ultimately probably cannot make it happen, but I really wish we could. I need a teleportation device to get her to practice. We did a medication change for E and it was a game changer. Super happy with how well he is doing now. The rewards plan helps, too, but getting the teacher and paraeducators to keep with it is like pulling teeth.

We are doing Friendsgiving this year with our friends who are from Australia. I'm making some side dishes and bringing wine, and she is making the turducken. I volunteered to make Mac n cheese and a potato dish, and bring a pumpkin pie. She is making stuffing and Cranberry sauce, I hope she send me some leftovers lol.