Dinner with Vicki

 

Today's entry is a short one, as I don't have much time to write....

Now that I work 5 days per week, I don't have much time to get things done.  So, I have to take care of my errands at night and on weekends the way the majority of people do in this world.  It is a shock to me, as I haven't had to live according to a "normal" schedule for years. Yet, I plan to adjust to my new normal for a while to earn a few dollars and bulk up my bank account.

When the day began, I took it easy for a while.  I sent a message to Vicki and suggested getting together. And she had the time to do so - today.  Since I didn't expect that she'd be available until later in the week, I adjusted my plans for the day and scheduled dinner at a Mexican joint that I've gone to several times before.

I took care of little things such as laundry during the day, and finally got around to changing the sheets on my bed.  (Don't ask how long they've been on the bed.  Often, there is a pile of stuff on the side of the bed where a partner used to lay, and it gets in the way of me changing the sheets.)  And then, I changed into Marian mode for dinner.

Dinner with Vicki was nice.  But it was more expensive than expected.  It seems as if we're seeing inflation hit the restaurants that are surviving the pandemic.  In suburbia, limiting restaurants to 50% capacity has forced these establishments to raise prices subtly to help them cover their costs.  In today's case, a dinner which we expected could cost us $40-$50 each cost us $70 each.  Assuming that this is part of a trend, I expect that we will see fewer people being able to afford to dine out at the end of the pandemic, as the fewer surviving restaurants will be able to charge higher prices to the fewer people who are able to pay those prices to eat out.

Another trip to the supermarket with FH and her daughter

 

The store in the Brooklyn Navy Yard was the first Wegmans to open in New York City.  It's been around for a while, and it is easier to reach than I first envisioned.  So, when FH asked me to take her and her daughter on a shopping run today, I didn't mind doing so.

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FH's daughter is a pretty young woman, and has a long happy life ahead of her if she can conquer the demons in her life.  No, I won't go into the details here, but she has many of the problems often exhibited by a woman her age. My impression of her mom asking me to include the daughter on our shopping trip was that of a mother trying to keep her daughter occupied in a time of stress.

When I arrived in Forest Hills, FH asked me if we could stop by a doughnut shop so that her daughter could eat and drink something, so that her stomach wouldn't fight a uncivil war.  Throughout the trip to Brooklyn, the daughter was complaining of how ill she felt. And it seemed as if she would rather have been left at home to deal with her problems by herself, instead of accompanying her mother on this shopping trip.

Arriving at Wegmans, I let them off at the front door while I hunted down a hard to get parking space. Entering the store, I looked around and found the daughter on a motorized shopping cart for handicapped people.  She was tooling around on the shopping cart, while her mom was trying to select food for the week.  Surprisingly, FH's daughter seemed to calm down after a few minutes in the store, as the cart distracted her enough from her sick stomach to make this shopping trip almost a pleasure.  $230 later, we exited the store and headed home.  While on local streets, the daughter got sick, and we had to wait for her to be ready for the rest of the trip home.

Eventually, we made it back to Forest Hills.  We were lucky to find a parking spot across the street from her apartment building.  This made it possible for me to join mom and daughter in carrying the afternoon's purchases to the apartment and loading them into the refrigerator. Both FH and her daughter had unsettled stomachs for different reasons, and we hung out at the apartment until FH was ready to go out to eat.

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Dining out in the age of Covid-19 raises many questions.  One of which is: How many people in a restaurant are "too many" people?  There is a legal definition of "too many."  In NYC, a restaurant is limited to 25% of pre-Covid capacity until 2/28/21.  In the suburbs, it is 50% of pre-Covid capacity.  The restaurant I chose was less than 100 feet from the Nassau county line, and was subject to NYC capacity limits.  This, I thought, would keep occupancy low enough for FH to feel comfortable dining at the restaurant.  At first, she was comfortable.  But, people started coming in, and she was ready to leave the place.  As for me, I have not yet had my first vaccination shot, and I'm the person at greater risk.  Yet, she was the person who was uncomfortable as the place approached 25% capacity.

Once I was done with my dinner, we took a drive to Hicksville, and then I dropped her off at her apartment.  This was a night that I didn't go back upstairs - she was getting tired after a long day.  And I was just as happy to drop her off at her front door, since I was getting a little tired myself after a long week of work.

A year ago, things were so different.....

 

A year ago, things were very different than they are now.  For example, in the back of my mind I still had hope of getting together again with my ex girlfriend.  Today, I'd have to think long, hard, and carefully if that option were to present itself to me.  But that's the least of things I can mention today. My father was still alive, and I had no idea that he'd be one of the over 400,000 (and counting) Americans who'd die of the coronavirus over the next 12 months.

Both as individuals and as a culture, we would have to ask questions posed by a once popular song:

Can it be that it was all so simple then?
Or has time re-written every line?
If we had the chance to do it all again
Tell me, would we?
Could we?

Most of us thought that the good times we experienced prior to 2020 would last forever.  As the virus taught us, they were only fleeting things.  

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I spent most of 2020 employed at the census as Marian.  Recently, I applied for and accepted a job, working as Marian again.  Although this would have been a job better suited for Mario, I figured that I wanted to see how I would do in private industry without the official protections of a government bureaucracy.  Is this the job I really wanted?  No.  But it will have to do when there are 75 people (or more, in many cases) applying for jobs in both public and private sectors.

If things had progressed as most of us had expected, most of us would have gone on our usual vacations, not really noticing what they did for us as people.  Now that we've been largely isolated from others for a year, many of us feel it's time to get out in the world again, even if we are taking big risks in doing so.  I look forward to taking my Hawaiian cruise when cruising opens up again.  But I will not give the cruise lines a penny more than I have to for their products.

Travel and work are not the only things affected by the pandemic. Our nation's political future was affected as well.  Many of us gave our former present better than an even chance of being reelected because of the then "booming" economy.  The pandemic put an end to that, as the then president made light of the virus when people were more concerned about their lives than whether they had jobs or not.  How many of you think that our current president could have won the election if things were as they were in 2019?  I certainly don't think he'd have had much of a chance, as people usually vote with their wallets.  This time, they voted as if their lives depended on their votes - which they did.

 

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2021 looks like it will be a better year for many of us.  Hard-line Evangelical "Christians"  are no longer able to use the federal government as a tool to attack transgender people.  We are on target to see most Americans have access to a Coronavirus vaccine shot by some time this summer. And we will soon be able to resume outdoor socialization when Spring comes.  We will be entering a time where a "New Normal" is evolving, a period where growth starts anew for both individuals and for society as a whole.  I look forward to this future.

 

The Snowman Cometh

 

Again, we have snow falling on the ground in New York.  But I'm not as inconvenienced by the snow as folks are in Texas as evident in the picture below. 

The left hand side of this Texarkana street lies in the state of Texas, while the right hand side of the street is in Arkansas.  Do you notice the difference?  Arkansas thinks ahead, and tries to plan for rare events such as this year's frigid weather.  Texas, on the other hand, takes a Laissez-faire approach and is often unprepared for extreme weather events.  It's hard to take pity on a state's residents when they keep electing scoundrels who have no interest in true public service.

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I woke up today after another sleep deprived night. The roads were clear when I drove into work, the salt spreaders were out trying to keep roads from icing over, and people were driving safer than usual.  No one wanted to get into an accident on a day where the tow trucks would have more than enough business.  Unfortunately, I was delayed on the way to work by one of these salt spreaders, as it blocked two lanes of traffic all the way from Croton to Pleasantville. Even with this delay, I still made it into the office 20 minutes early - enough time for a cup of coffee.

None of the people I usually deal with were in the office due to the weather. Yet, I was able to get some work done while fighting the urge to go to sleep.  However, I made a big mistake which could have been a big problem. Luckily, one coworker who was in the office resolved it for me, and I was able to proceed without incident.  Around noon, I realized that I had to pack it in for the day.  As I was leaving, I took my pocketbook out of the locker and screwed up the combination on the lock.  That'll be something to take care of when people are back in the office.

On the way home, traffic was moving very slowly.  There was good reason for this.  I must have passed by at least 3 accident scenes, with one of them being serviced by police cars, tow trucks, and ambulances. It made me glad that we had some daylight, and that I knew how to drive in bad weather.  

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Now that I am home, I'm going to wait for an alert from the office.  Sometime in the next 16 hours, I'll find out whether I'm going in to work in the morning and at what time I'll be expected to start work.  Until then, I'm going to relax and hope that my Texas friends will be available for our Thursday night Zoom meeting.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I finally got some work to do.

 

This was the third day in a row that I haven't slept well.  So if I didn't have my caffeine in the morning, I'd have fallen asleep while shadowing a more senior worker.  Luckily, I can have as much coffee as I want while on break or during lunch.  This means I can get as wired as I need to be to get through the day.

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It's nice to go into the office and be referred to as a "She".  Yes, there may be some people who shun me, but I haven't noticed that yet.  Instead, I showed a friendly appearance to my coworkers, and they have responded back in kind.  I still haven't decided if this is a place I want to stay at for the better part of a year.  But that's OK for now.   

My goal is to sock away enough money to pay for a Hawaiian cruise-tour on NCL sometime next winter.  Whether I go alone, or travel with a partner is not yet a material consideration for me.  YGM showed an interest in this cruise last year, and others may yet want to be a travel partner for this bucket list trip.  In the old days, my former travel partner would suggest a cruise to go on, and we'd plan things around that date.  Since we are no longer friends, the onus is on me to find a new travel partner for the bucket list trips.

Ideally, bucket list trips should be taken with a close friend or family member, as these are the trips one will want to talk about often.  When my wife died, I lost the one person who understood how I felt about San Francisco, as she was with me when I first visited the city.  Most of the trips I took with other women have been forgettable, as nothing much stood out about the places we traveled.  Yet, I can still remember a couple of the trips I took with my ex girlfriend from Rochester, simply because of the problems we encountered on our trips.  I'm glad that she's building memories with her partner of 22+ years, as they are doing the "until death do us part" routine without benefit of legal acknowledgement.

But I digress....

Today, I finally got some work to do after lunch.  And I was grateful to finally be doing some QA on scanned documents.  No, I can't tell you the names of the organizations we do business with. But I can say that they run the gamut of governmental entities, for profit businesses, and not for profit organizations.  Having meaningful work to do is a good thing, as it keeps my mind busy and awake.  (Now, if only I can stay asleep through the night....)

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Since tomorrow will be bringing a 6"-12" snowfall, I'm going to sign off for now and try to get some sleep.  More later....

Sleep - Something we all need, and never get enough of.

 

 

It's the second time I've used this picture in a while, and it makes perfect sense.  I felt like this model looked this morning when I woke up, and I could barely stay awake at work today.  AARGH!

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One of the problems with shadowing someone as she does her job is that without doing any activity other than observation things can bet boring enough to put one to sleep.  And I was in danger of this happening today, as I only had 4 hours of sleep the night before.  Thank god for caffeine!

I'm glad that I chose to report to work as Marian, as I feel much more comfortable in my female presentation.  However, after a full day at work and being tired, I noticed that I was not projecting as feminine a voice as I'd like to project.  This is something I'll have to work on again.  I'm not used to being tired at work anymore, nor am I used to the routine of this new office.  It will come with time, but it's not something I was really ready for when I started work.

When I got home, I chatted with a friend.  I realized that I'd rather be in a position where I can socialize more with people.  A receptionist position would have suited me nicely - but would it have paid what I get now?  If I were to get an offer to do this kind of job, I might jump for it. Until then, I'll sit at my computer screen and digitize paper documents. 

The start of a new job

 

Today's post is going to be quick.  I decided to start at the new job, and people are accepting me as Marian.  Whether or not my boss knows that I am legally Mario is not going to be an issue, given some of the paperwork that they had me sign.  This will be the second job that I've had working as Marian, and this is a good start.  However, I'm not sure that I want to stay there for long, as it is forcing me to again get up at 6 am, so that I can be at work for an 8 hour day.

Am I up to working an 8 hour day?  I still think so.  But "do I want the headaches and boredom?" is another question for another day.   Right now, I think I'll go back to bed and try to catch some winks before I am rudely awakened by the alarm om my phone.

More news on this soon....