My head is spinning

I guess I should take you all to last weekend.  My schedule was such that again I was working the fulltime gig from 10pm until 6am Sunday followed by the part time gig from 10:30am Sunday until 6:30pm.  That leaves 4 1/2 hours between jobs, even less if I decide to go home and Sunday buses are less frequent on weekends than their weekday counterparts.  There is a bus that sort of runs between both jobs however, so I opted for that one instead of going home.  I used part of the 4.5 hours doing some grocery shopping as well, picking up some snacks for work.

The second gig was uneventful enough, much like the overnight gig before it, and so I got home, made some dinner and before you know it I was out like a light.  Quite a bit actually.  I slept all the way through Monday, until my alarm went off to go in Monday night.  Another uneventful 10pm-6am later and I am back home trying to sleep again.  With a little bit of food and some YouTube for entertainment I nodded off somewhere around noon.

Then the Tuesday night alarm goes off around 7pm.  I continue to sleep until about 8pm, which I am sure annoyed my neighbors (an alarm going off for an hour from 7pm-8pm, please) and when I got up I was dizzy.  It wasn’t a dizziness I could shake off either, I needed the wall to keep me erect (enter flaccid boner jokes here).  But for whatever reason I couldn’t stand up without help.   I thought maybe I slept wrong or something and opted to try napping it off.  So I thought I reset my alarm for another half hour but apparently I didn’t because it never went off again.  Instead I woke up around 2am, still wobbly and way late for work even if I could have made it in.

So I took a hard pass on work Tuesday night, hoping that I would feel better by Wednesday morning, as I had the first of my two COVID shots scheduled.  I went back to sleep until about 7am, then 8am and finally got up at 8:30, threw some clothes on and hurried out the door as my shot was scheduled for 9:15.  Thankfully I didn’t have to wait long for the bus,it was there within minutes of my arrival at the bus stop, which was good as I was walking I was leaning to my right a lot, I fell  off the sidewalk like 3 times.

Part of me was wondering if this was a COVID symptom, but I figured if that was the case I would find out soon enough, like right before my shot.  But nothing in my pre shot testing (if you consider having your temperature taken testing) presented as pro COVID, so I got shot #1 (of 2), was told to wait 15 minutes and then go about my day.  Since I had no side effects I waited like 5 minutes, then walked to Getgo on the South Side and got me a cherry coffee.

I then walked over to Aldi, bought a few things and went home where I made lunch and went back to bed.  I woke up and my dizziness was pretty much gone so not really sure what it was, a COVID thing, a high blood pressure thing, a working too many hours thing, or even a thing which defies description, it just was a thing,.

With a rubber hose

 So, Saturday morning I again opted to take myself to breakfast simply because work is closer to my favorite breakfast places than my apartment and if I don’t work Saturday night, then I am off until Sunday morning at 10:30 or so.  Besides, the bus that goes from work closest to my apartment doesn’t start running until 8am or so and I get off at 6am so if I go straight home I am going to probably have to take two buses and transfer in either Downtown  or Squirrel Hill, whereas there is a bus that runs from the Strip District (where I go for breakfast) to Oakland (where my apartment is).

So I opt for Kelly O’s in the morning (they have been on that Guy Fieri show on the food network) and I opt for the Pittsburgh benedict.  It is an eggs Benedict but under the eggs and Hollandaise sauce is onion, kielbasa and a pierogi.  Of course there was a wait for a seat, being they open at 6am (which is when I get off of work) and being under COVID protocols, restaurants are at 75% seating capacity these days, but it wasn’t along wait and soon enough I was noshing on some really good breakfast food.

I finish my breakfast and head off to the bus stop when I see one of my buses go by (54C for those familiar with Port Authority vernacular) but it runs like every half hour or so and I have a book to read and my phone so 30 minutes isn’t all that bad.  So I get to the bus stop and like less than 5 minutes later a plethora of police cars come zooming by with lights flashing.  They seem to be stopping a few blocks away, mind you my bus stop is at 21st street and I know the bus I am waiting on comes off of 16th street.  So if the police are stopped at 16th street my bus is probably going to be detoured, so I grab ye olde trusty phone to see if there is a detour and if so, where it is.  Of course none of the tv news stations have anything on their traffic maps or their web pages about what is happening, I check the Port Authority website about bus detours which is equally useless.  I figure my next way to find anything out is to listen to the police scanner, so I hop on the Broadcastify website, and am getting some updates mixed in with first responder speak, which I do not know.  Turns out it is a traffic accident, there are 3 victims, to in stable condition, one in critical.  Those are details to round out the story but there is no mention of where the accident is in relation to 16th street.  I am seeing cars headed into town being detoured it can’t tell from where I am if they are being detoured onto 17th or 16th streets.

So I wait around for a while, probably well past the half hour I should have waited and once all of the ambulances cleared out and the only thing left was police cars directing traffic away from the scene,I decide I might as well walk towards town and take a look.  Sure enough the accident was at the intersection with 16th street, god only knows when traffic (including my bus) will resume there and given the web was not offering information about where to catch my bus, I am probably best off walking into town and catching a bus there.

It is around 9am and I start heading in a downtown direction.  I leave the headphones on, tuned to the police scanner, more as background noise than to learn anything about my bus’s arrival, which I have given up on.

And I start hearing what is going on in my metropolis, there is a car accident and the end of a bridge (a different accident mind you), there is a domestic disturbance where no weapons are involved, a COVID positive male is having trouble breathing and then lastly, a man has a Lego stuck in his nose.  Far be it from me to ascertain when someone has a problem, but when you wake up in the morning and need your Lego fix to deal with the day, you might have a problem.  But rather than spend the day contemplating someone’s Lego addiction, I opted to go home and sleep instead.

Raise the roof?

 So rumor has it we are getting a raise at work.  I would like to think I earned it, but truth be told it is more like an incentive to get people to apply.  Not that we need a boatload of people, but there are 4 of us, plus a manager we share with another store to operate a business that is open 24/7/365.  As it is, I am the only one trained to work overnights, which means for me to get a night off, someone has to come in from another store location.  As a result I have been doing 6 overnights a week since late December.

The raise is somewhat significant, $1.50 an hour and while I am not one to spend time spreading gossip, news of the raise came from the shared manager and I can’t think of a reason he would lie to me.

Digging out of my COVID debt, the extra money is coming at a pretty good time for yours truly.  I had a ‘“Robbing Peter to pay Paul” thing going on for a while, so it is nice to be able to pay both Peter and Paul these days.  It is not enough for me to give up the second job, besides it helps to have something to fall back on should things go all shitty at the full time gig.

On another plus, some money I thought was last may not be lost after all.  I had booked my vacation last year prior to my last store closing due to the property being sold.  Given vacation was a trip back to Vancouver I figured my airfare was lost money due to COVID.  But I read the other day that the government of Canada was forcing AirCanada to refund all monies spent on cancelled flights due to COVID.  From what I have read, the Canadian government owns a percentage of Air Canada, so I went to check my booking the other day, but turns out I was booked on WestJet, who were kind enough to extend my airline credit another 365 days.  Now if we can just get the border open.