Reclaimed

Okay, so it has been two months now and I am slowly getting my house back in order.  Not in the literal sense, my apartment is still a mess, but at least in the figurative one.  Things are starting to fall back into more of a pre-relationship routine for me, though I am not sure whether that is any of my doing personally or if I have just went above and beyond the call when it comes to avoiding things.

Since the relationship ended work has been both a blessing and a curse, a blessing because I can always get myself lost in things that need to be done there, but a curse because the more I focus on work, the more I start to realize just how dysfunctional things can be there.  In the span of two months we have fired two people, another one quit and my hours have stacked up accordingly, 123 hours last pay period and 110 hours for the current one.  Plus tomorrow begins the process of replacing the existing register system with a brand new one.  Hopefully this one will work better than the last one did.  On the plus side the people who are providing the new system are also going to train us on it and stick around long enough to make sure everything is running properly, which in and of itself is more than what the last company did.

Socially my life is starting to get back on track as well.  I haven't started dating, not that I am against the idea just really haven't pursued it all that much, but I managed to get back into a routine of going out to breakfast on weekends with family and friends, I reconnected with two other friends whom I have not spoken to in years, Hope and Debbie.  Hope I have written about in the blog before, Debbie I may have written about, though if I did it would have been eons ago so I can't recall when I would have done so.  Debbie used to date one of my friends in high school, so at first we were probably more just acquaintances than anything else, but as time passed we developed a friendship independent of that.  We even shared rented a house for a while (along with two other people) but time and interests saw us drift apart, she would get married and move to Virginia, as for me, well most of you can read back and get an inkling as to what I have been up to for the last decade or so.   Anyway as luck and my curiosity would have it, I did manage to locate her on Facebook the other day and lo and behold, she again lives back in this area and on Thursday we are going to lunch to catch up.

As I am writing I am sitting at the Squirrel Cage again, I got here even before they opened the kitchen so I have had plenty of uninterrupted blogging time to this point.  Sitting here is also part of getting my life back on track, as much of what I have done here in Pittsburgh over the last two years had been touched by my previous relationship.  Just the other day I was at work and we needed some office supplies so I volunteered to go to Office Depot after work and pick up a few things.  Everything was fine until I got to the Waterfront to go shopping when I realized the last time I was there was with Ruth.  So each venture out is in some measure a reclamation project, taking back what is rightfully my home and once again making new memories for myself here.  Each day it gets a little easier, the proverbial one step at a time approach to life.

I have even started to venture back into my pontificating ways as it were.  While I haven't gotten to the point where I want to blog about anything political, I do find myself comment more on other people's posts in other forums, offering my own brand of insight that hopefully soon will go from just a couple of sentences elsewhere and blossom into full fledged arguments on this page.

Well it looks like they have opened the kitchen, which is good because I am starting to get hungry here.  I usually do not like to come to the Cage on Mondays, my regular bartender isn't here and while I am sure the guy behind the bar is more than capable, he never makes fresh brewed iced tea, so I am relegated to the raspberry iced tea syrupy concoction that they have on the soda gun behind the bar.  It's okay, but just not what I want when I am in the mood for iced tea.

I know that there are a few things that the blog is still missing, I haven't added to the change meter in quite some time.  I have been maintaining it, even if I haven't updated the total on the page in quite some time.  Rest assured that problem will be fixed in the very near future.  Nor have I done much as far as updating what my fantasy sports teams have been doing this year.  Like most years I have a fantasy football and a fantasy hockey team this year.  The fantasy football team has been doing okay, I am 6-4 so far and in second place with a shot tonight of taking over first place (via a tiebreaker) and a game next weekend with the guy currently residing in first place.  Fantasy hockey hasn't been as good, I fell asleep after work and missed the online draft to kick off the new season.  Then after a torrid start, my team has settled into a run of mediocrity that has me in fourth place out of five teams.  Yes, I know, that ain't so good.

Well lookie there, I just learned something.  As I was going to type in the last sentence of the previous paragraph, I was thinking about the word "ain't", knowing full well that on my iPad spell check has a was of screwing with me, so I was expecting to get some indication that I was using an improper word, instead the iPad was more than content with my using of "ain't", so perhaps it is proper English after all.

I am really not ready for this winter.  As I am sitting here eating it is just 5:10pm and already it is getting dark outside.  I want my warm and sunny days back, not these abbreviated days where I no more than get done with work and I am asking myself where all of the daylight went.  Nor am I all that ready for the coming holidays, in past years I would take time off so I could be with my family, I was far enough up the seniority ladder in what I was doing that I would have first dibs on getting time off, but now that I am, dare I say it, management, I have the least seniority.  While I am sure I could get holidays off if I demanded them, part of me feels that I still need to prove myself in this new role and that the store(s) should not be left completely unattended by management on holidays.  If we can ask our employees to be there then the least we can do is have a presence there also.  Since I am the manager with the least tenure, then that obligation falls to me.  I know that isn't how things were done in the past, on most holidays you would be lucky to see a manager there but I guess I just view things a little differently then past management regimes.  I will not ask anyone to do something that they don't see me doing myself, including working holidays if needed.

Well, I have just about finished my dinner and I really do not want to stick around for more of this raspberry tea so it is probably time for me to pack up the iPad, pay my check and drag myself back to work, I still have two lottery machines that need loaded at our Oakland store, as well as check in with the people working there.  Another of my bad management habits, I do make it a point to check in with all of our shift leaders as much as possible, sometimes to see how things are running, sometimes to get input from them in things that might make us run better and sometimes just to be a sounding board so they can vent if they need to.  Anyway, I better get moving, the lottery machines do not fill themselves.  Oh how I wish they did.