Tag: on call pm

Back to the answer mines! I wasn’t at work today, but I was on call. The thing for the customer was finished during my shift, so I got to announce it to them, and will take all credit for it.

Also managed to go grocery shopping this morning, which made me hate life and time but otherwise worked fine and I should be able to eat almost every day until Saturday.

Read: Stray Cat Strut ch 1-26 (RavensDagger): Dystopian cyberpunk future in which hungry aliens invade and allegedly benevolent aliens pick people to enroll in the kill-invaders-in-exchange-for-hyper-technology program. Feels a little like a video game in that guns and medical gear and cyberware appear out of nowhere the instant points are spent, but there isn’t any more to the system than that, so I’m not sure it counts as LitRPG.

Read: Butts: A Backstory (Heather Radke): A little bit about butts physically (bipedalisms, endurance hunting, etc) and a lot about butts socially, from the Hottentot Venus to Twerking on Tiktok. Spoiler: the answer is always sexism, and usually misogynoir.

Read: The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses vol 1 (Koume Fujichika): Therefore she has to lean in really close to share the male lead’s textbook, which is hard on an innocent manga boy’s heart. Cute, but very slight, and the female lead seems to mostly exist to be klutzy.

Written: 157 words. Two days in a row!

Got up way too early at a sensible hour for the cleaners, then went back to bed, then got woken up by Ken texting that he is still sick and NYE fondue party is cancelled. Festive food was a 90-minute wait and it was raining out, so I stayed home and ate food from the fridge and did nothing. I was on call in the afternoon, but nothing happened.

Read: Love Crafted ch 45-80 (RavensDagger): The end! Pretty abrupt and the commenters didn’t like it, but whatever. Omnipotent tentacles can only go so long without solving the Inquisition problem for good.

Read: Dreamer’s Ten-Tea-Cle Café ch 1-44 (RavensDagger): Spin-off, mostly for the purpose of crossovers with other web serials, but also to follow the personal development of Dreamer’s pamphlet-distributing clone.

Written: FAIL. No more words for 2022.

Hurray, I’m on vacation! Boo, I’m on call!

The customers were worse than I hoped, but not nearly as bad as I feared, and I wasn’t even on call until after I managed to go grocery shopping and get lunch, so I guess it wasn’t that bad.

Read: The Grand Conspiracy (Terry Mixon, JN Chaney): This volume is all about inter-human conflict because there’s a break in the alien onslaught, and what human would work with other humans to survive when instead they could die with slightly more toys than that other guy?

Read: Holstaurus Magic (Warren Thomas): Extremely raunchy smut. Not really LitRPG even though set in a VRMMORPG. Does cater to certain specific interests, but there is a lot of regular banging too.

Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 22 (Tomohito Oda): Further NYC adventures. Also, only 22 volumes into the series, Komi is communicating almost entirely in speech! Whispers, but definite speech, not writing!

Written: FAIL. No brain.

 

I managed to get up and go grocery shopping at pretty much the time I intended, but then was completely useless. Around midafternoon, I realized I was yawning and yawning, so I took a nap, but when I woke up it was already dark so I was very discombobulated and even more useless.

Fortunately the customers were extremely quiescent. Hopefully that will hold through the holiday season.

Read: The Baby-Sitters Club: Kristy’s Great Idea (Raina Telgemeier. Ann M Martin): I never read the originals, but the graphic novel version is pretty cute and full of period-appropriate landlines.

Read: My Best Friend is Dense Harem Main Character-kun, But Why Am I The Heroine?! (Shintaro Mofujin): I’m usually here for a story about a boy getting turned into a girl, but this one was not great, and I get the feeling she may turn back, so what even is the point?

Written: 839 kitten words.

I meant to get up early and go grocery shopping in plenty of time for going to see Jus’s soccer game, but none of that came to pass. Then I was on call all afternoon, and customers rudely wanted me to fix their problems. It wasn’t intense work, but anything else beyond pad games and light reading wouldn’t have worked well anyway. Bah.

I didn’t have anything else I wanted to sign up for, so I forgot, but the final round of signups for Big Bad Con was tonight. I’m up to four people in my Friday session and five in my Saturday session, so I better get this glass mountain filled with [SPOILER] and [SPOILER] and DOOM.

I don’t know whether it was the weird mayo-chicken-salad filling of the arepa I ate tonight or the ranch dressing I put on my chicken nuggets last night, but for a bit it looked like it was going to be a sad night. Fortunately it cleared out quickly and I did not have to spend the night with my forehead on the cool bathroom counter.

Read: Spy x Family vol 8 (Tatsuya Endo): An army of hit men trapped on a cruise ship with Yor. That’s definitely going to end poorly for someone.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 3.4-8: Wait, wasn’t that the end? No, apparently Marco has to be a doofus and also the writers have to ship him with Star for no good reason. Hmph.

Written: 330 kitten words.

Someday this will be Guillotine Day instead, but for now it is just a day when many things are closed. I did manage to do grocery shopping and get lunch tacos, although only one of those has a convenient tipping option.

I once again accomplished nothing, although this time I had the excuse of being on call. It’s not much of an excuse.

Read: “Rodeo Clown” chapter 1, a great new Helluva Boss fic.

Written: 310 kitten words.

I was on call all day, Marith’s car is pretty dodgy at the moment, and Nonny has some illness, so there was no gathering, and I didn’t do anything else useful today. I should have, what with having the whole day to sit in front of my computer, but I was too dumb.

Read: “Clutch Control” (Chosen_undead): Loona/Octavia from Helluva Boss, mostly during the last episode of season 1 while their fathers are having their own drama. No smut, just trying to be friends in their messed-up world. (Is smut even a thing in fanfic any more? I feel like it went out with Harry Potter, which probably just shows that I’m too dumb to read fanfic.)

Written: 638 kitten words.

Bah, getting up. Bah, being on call. But bouillabaisse and shishito peppers are good!

Played: Among Us. I think we might be getting better at this, although I still pay way too much attention to performing my tasks and not enough to establishing an alibi. Also apparently bodies don’t get autoreported?!

Read: “Porgee’s Boar” (Jonathan Carroll): Only arguably spec-fic. Also an example of why psychological attacks don’t necessarily work on truly terrible people.

Written: 518 kitten words, which brings me to 3446 for the week so far.

Instead of being at a baby shower in Roseville, I am at home being on call for twelve hours straight. It’s probably for the best, since although I am still testing negative, I spent most of the past week with humans and their virus-spewing face-holes.

Read: “Grow” (Carrie Vaughn): “Wild Cards” short story, about what the teenage impulse to show off your powers gets you.

Read: “Equoid” (Charles Stross): Reread, still the most horrifying unicorns (although Kij Johnson may beat Stross for most horrifying unicorn story).

Read: “The Silken Swift” (Theodore Sturgeon): What’s horrifying here is not the unicorn, who is actually pretty okay, but the assignment of blame, which is, um, a product of its time.

Rapid Test: Negative.

Written: 848 kitten words, 1714/3000 for the week.

Ayse has a cold, so Marith didn’t want to visit, and I was on call so I couldn’t make long bus trips. It was very sad. Especially for Ayse!

Played: Jus ran a thing! I was a crow spirit, Marith was a disgraced apprentice jeweler, we hunted ghosts! The little kid ghost was very sad, but we did the thing you do with sad ghosts. Jus is probably as good of a GM as I was in college.

Read: Legends & Lattes (Travis Baldree): An orcish adventurer retires to open the coffee shop of her dreams, which is harder than it should be because some people are jerks.

Written: 776 kitten words = 4192/3000. I don’t seem to be writing other things, do I?

Why is there so much temperature? I didn’t order this! At least the customers were mostly quiet.

Played: Zoomwarts. The lizards and their mammalian sidekicks made it back into the land of the dead, to rescue everyone!

Eaten: Coq au vin and kale salad.

Watched: The Slayers 4-5: Attack of the fish-creature! Also joke which caused Jus to die of mortification, which fortunately will never be brought up again.

Written: 286 kitten words, for a total of 4119/3000 so far this week.

I don’t actually need to shop for groceries until Monday, but I ended up buying some less-perishable stuff because I had to go to the bank to get quarters anyway, and then the bookstore is right down the street, and I didn’t have to be on call until the afternoon…

A few weeks ago, Nonny wanted a “My books are calling and I must go read” shirt like mine, which was I was finally able to deliver. Now we’re Book Buddies.

Played: Zoomwarts, although not very energetically. Jus had a sleepover last night so of course very little actual sleep occurred, and Marith is always oppressed by work.

Eaten: Japanese food, but it wasn’t great. Or maybe I was just wrong about that being what I wanted. I’m not sure about this whole “eating” thing, TBH.

Read: The Gulp (Alan Baxter): Five linked stories about an extremely creepy town on the Australian coast and the horrible things that happen there: fungus, mutation, ancient dreams, inbreeding, eyeball eating, murder, the usual fun stuff.

Read: Babalon’s Hangover 2 (various): 100+ pages of horrible things, places, people, and happenings for the doomed, decaying world of Mörk Borg.

Written: FAIL.

Instead of sleeping in, I got up at the usual work time and walked to grocery shopping. The sun supported me in this by mostly not coming out until I was done, so thanks! More walking to get lunch and finish off the parts of my shopping list that could be done on the way. Then I was on call, so I did a little work stuff until I realized I had started off completely wrong and gave up to go to Ayse and Ken’s for pizza and hugs. Marith was flat, so that was more walking, and then a lot of playing foursquare in addition to socialization. A surprisingly full day, even if we didn’t get any anime or gaming.

Read: Nettle & Bone (T Kingfisher): A little grimmer than many T Kingfisher books, maybe, but full of possessed chickens, fairy godmothers, sturdy practical women, muscular men with tragic pasts, terrifying underground labyrinths, and all the other paraphernalia of fairytales.

Written: FAIL.

I was on call all day, which annoyingly prevented me from going grocery shopping, but the customers remained quiescent.

We did go over to dye eggs with Ayse and Ken and fam, and also eat delicious Thai food and exercise Nonny. No gaming or anime, though.

Words: I think I figured out how to upload and link the thing I’m not currently revising. Also, 303 kitten words.

I didn’t really get up earlier than usual for grocery shopping, but I did it with less whining, so that’s good, right?

On-call in the afternoon, but the customers were blessedly quiet.

Read: Rackham Vale (Brian Saliba, Craig Schaffer): An OSR sandbox based on (and including many examples of) the art of Arthur Rackham, featuring many faeries of various scales, mutant alligators, curses, ambitious witches, and party trees, among other fey goings-on.

Played: Zoomwarts. Surprisingly, trying the same plan again worked better. Everybody got killed, but some of them got over it, so that’s good, right? Possibly we’re going to start alternating Zoomwarts with D&D run by Ken, so that Nonny can fight monsters.

Watched: Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions 1.7-8: Beach episode! But more importantly, we find out what Rikka’s deal is. Also, both positive and negative examples of romantic behavior which may be of use to Jus now that she is a middle-schooler and practically a teenager.

Eaten: Ribs! (Also brisket, burnt ends, collard greens, etc.) Apparently Jus took a break from wanting sushi 24/7 to demand ribs, and nobody was going to object.

Played: Laser tag.

Watched: RWBY 1.1 for Jus. She liked it, and we aren’t even to the trauma part yet!

Words: FAIL. I did a little revising because I figured out what one of the slang terms should be, but not very much.