Multiply 365 Day 212 - Addle minded

 

So what time is it anyway? Well I guess that clock in the bottom right hand corner should be able to answer that question, perhaps a more appropriate question would be what day is it? I'll admit it took me a good 5 minutes of solid brain work before I figured out the answer to that little question, and I am still not completely sure I got the answer correct. And how did I get so stupid, well read on.

I mentioned something I wanted to do for the blog page yesterday (at least I think it was yesterday), but that I overslept and ended up missing my opportunity. Well as I was here in the apartment last night/early this morning I got to thinking, maybe I will just do it Monday morning instead. So I made the needed trip over to The Weather Channel's website, found out that the skies looked like they would be cooperating and checked the time for sunrise, which was to be a 5:41 am, plenty of time for me to get my photo before starting work at 7am.

So now I have a plan, but I realize that for this plan to work I will probably have to stay up all night. That is okay though, by the looks of the schedule at work it is panning out to be an easy day. We have two deliveries coming in but I have an extra person on my crew and neither of the deliveries is looking to be all that big. With all of my paperwork caught up in advance, it is looking to be a pretty easy day, at least on paper, so I convince myself that I can just pull an all niter and make it up to Mt Washington for some picture taking before work this morning.

Around 2:30am I go and climb into the shower, and then get everything I will need to get ready for a day at work (laptop, MP3 player, digital camera) and am out the door around 3:15am. I strat the walk in when I realize this would be a lot easier if I go to work first, drop off all of the things I don't need to take a picture and then just scoot across the Smithfield Street Bridge and go to Mt Washington from work, since it is just across the river and up from where I work anyway. I get into work a little after 4am (downtown is about an hour walk from where I live), so I go into the office, set up my laptop and drop off my bag, keeping only MP3 player and camera. I check online to see what the bus schedule is like for Mt Washington, but I don't see anything that is running early enough for me to take before sunrise, so I figure I am going to have to hoof that portion of the journey as well.

The trip involves a climb up Sycamore Street. This is not what one would consider an average climb. Not impossible, unless you are completely out of shape, but isn't your normal everyday jaunt either. Sycamore Street is one of the ways to get to the top of Mt Washington, it is road that has a climb of roughly 350 feet in a little over a half mile of actual distance, so the street has a grade of somewhere in the ballpark of 15% and I am sure it didn't help that prior to this I had already walked about 3 miles just to get into work, so by the time I had left work and made the climb up Sycamore Street, my foot was pretty much killing me. But I was geeked, I was up there with my camera, the sky in the distances was just starting to get a little reddish, so I just had to scope out the perfect spot, or at least a good enough spot and fire off a couple of pics and I would be on my way. Except this is where I learned just how old my camera is. My digital camera is at least 4 years old, probably older. In the land of digital cameras, while it was a good model in its day and still manages to take a good picture when needed, it isn't very well suited for taking a picture where it is sort of nighttime, yet starting to become daylight and getting all of the city lights in the distance without things getting all blurred out or being to dark to take a viewable picture. Basically it sucked. I will review the pics at a later time and see if something is usable, but I am not holding my breath on that one.

Rather than walk back into town, I took an incline off of the mountain and made it back into work about 6:30am. Things looked like they would be off to a flying start too when out first delivery arrived by 7:15am. We had it checked in and put away in about 20 minutes, I went into the office and broke down the invoice, as well as a dairy invoice that came in earlier in the morning. And all of a sudden my eyes didn't want to function. The lack of sleep was catching up with me, and I was doing that thing where, when you are reading, you find yourself rereading the same paragraph time and time again because no matter how much you try to focus you just can't get through it without your mind drifting off some place else. That was me and a list of numbers, I would start adding them up, my mind would drift and I would forget where I was in the invoice. What should have been a 5 minute task tops was turning into a journey, one that was thankfully broken up when I was told I needed to ,og someone into one of the registers with my account upstairs. Seems we had a call off and one of my crew was being asked to work behind the counter instead. So much for an extra guy, but it still wasn't that big a deal, with all we had left to do Sammy and I could certainly handle it. Except then a second person didn't show up, and the grocery order arrives, so now I am bouncing between trying to check in and put away an order, and also spending a decent portion of time on register.

It is at this point that I have to ask myself why we even employ some of the stupid motherfuckers we do. I mean sure, I helped create my situation by being up all night before coming in, but as I look around the room, my crew is there. As bad or as mean as I can sometimes be, at least my crew shows up for work. The people upstairs that get coddled by Ed, well if it fits into their schedule then maybe they will come in. Don't ever let me be in charge, I would have a field day firing people.

Somehow I managed to get through today, though by the end of the day my foot was absolutely killing me, and because I was on register a good portion of the day, I still had a bunch of paperwork to catch up on after I got done balancing my drawer and what not. I end up missing my first bus home, and instead catching the second one about 20 minutes later and end up falling asleep on the bus and missing my stop again, so it was off that bus and onto another one headed in the opposite direction to get back home. I ended up getting home somewhere close to 5pm, roughly a hour or so later than a typical day. I manage to get my laptop all set up and get online but it wasn't long before I was back into the land of the deep, dark sleep.

It was the waking up that brought about the first paragraph to this story. Usually I can benchmark what day of the week it is by what I did the day before, so figuring out it was Monday night wouldn't have been hard, I would have remembered that I didn't work the day before, except I did work the day before and being up the entire night Sunday night/Monday morning only further added to the confusion. My brain doesn't work that well when I first get up to begin with, it is one of the reasons my alarm, clock is set three hour ahead, I try to trick my head into doing math when I first get up, just to get the synapses firing, but with the way my schedule has been the last week, it literally took a good five minutes before I was able to figure out the date and time and realize that it was Monday night, I hadn't missed any days of work and that I had a blog entry yet to do before the day was complete. But I would like to think this qualifies as said blog entry, maybe tomorrow when I am on a more regularly scheduled programming kind of day I will take a couple of moments and see if anything from my attempt at pictures is even remotely salvageable, but for now I am just going to see if I can forage for food at call it a night.