This month felt quite chaotic, like two different months awkwardly shoved together. I had a few days where my brain just would not switch off and I was still up at 4am. While I’m used to experiencing that occasionally, I had it a few times during the month, which threw me off enough that I then couldn’t respond to other annoyances sensibly. I returned to mostly normal by the end of the month, however,

Fun

Music/Podcasts

My friend Josh recommended that I listen to Fever Dream Radio by Sbassbear, not because he’d thought I’d love it, but because he thought I would find its aim and backstory interesting. Josh was correct, and I did also enjoy the album more than I expected to. Knowing the backstory of how this album came to be – that it was borne of the writer’s frustrations with how their ADHD affects their ability to create songs and that it was an attempt to “turn a weakness onto a strength” – almost certainly influenced my view, as the concept held my interest long enough to let the music, which would normally not be my style, grow on me.

I also upgraded my CD player to a D-191 Discman, which plays every CD I’ve tested without any surprise skipping. It has the bonus aesthetic advantage of being the same navy blue colour as my speakers.

Data

My MusicBrainz time this month was spent correcting the recording titles, artist credits, and release group names of the Lateral episodes before no.65. This means I’ve now corrected and re-linked everything from the incorrect release, so I can safely request for that release to be removed. While the MB community generally doesn’t like any information being removed, as it would break any outside links, I think this removal request will get some “Yes” votes as my original release was genuinely incorrect.

Games

I wasn’t able to game with friends much, as our other responsibilities (for some) and different work schedules (for others) got in the way.

The game I played most this month was again Disney Dreamlight Valley, which was sometimes annoying when I got stuck in a resource gathering loop. I only realised this month that the game intends for you to always have a companion with you to take advantage of their passive resource-collecting buffs, so I’ve been making quests take longer by not being sociable enough.

I bought Powerwash Simulator 2 and have so far enjoyed it. The actual powerwashing gameplay is much the same but with some appreciated tweaks such as soap being more useful and levels containing extra traversal equipment like a cherry picker and a harness. The only gameplay elements that I’ve disliked so far are the finicky controls for the harness and the annoying “clean this bit now” marker that appears at around 90% level completion. However, the marker can be switched off entirely.

Finally, I returned to Tiny Bookshop to continue the story quests. After unlocking new storage options for the shop, I discovered that stocking over 100 books applies a sale-chance-decreasing “analysis paralysis” debuff, which was initially unexpected but entirely logical.

Work

I had annual leave during the first full week of Nov, which I mostly spent on life-admin, errands, and gaming. When I returned on the 10th, I had spent enough time in solitude that an office volume I would normally be fine with still felt too loud. I had readjusted by the afternoon, at least. However, I then fell straight into two interesting situations at the same time, so got a little overwhelmed by the end of the week and dealt with that in an irrational way.

For the first situation, I was in the right place at the right time to spot an issue. I wasn’t supposed to be working that day, but I had asked to work for a couple of hours to catch up on a specific meeting. (Given that I had accidentally been awake until 4:30am, I was glad that I hadn’t requested to do a whole day). While I was typing up my notes from that meeting, a colleague asked for help in our group chat as our team’s EMIS Tasks had vanished. I assumed that someone else was probably just sorting out the Tasks from home, but I checked the audit trail of some Tasks completed that day in case something odd was going on. This was the right call, as I found that a name we didn’t recognise had been completing our Tasks for a couple of days. After I alerted my manager, she was able to find out where that person was working and contact their manager to unravel the situation, which turned out to only partly be the fault of the (very new) person and mostly the fault of the IT team giving that person incorrect EMIS access so they were being wrongly classed as part of our admin team instead of their own.

I then tunnel-visioned so hard on restoring the wrongly-completed Tasks, getting all of the information, and checking for anything that could have delayed care for a patient, that I forgot how to be a human for a couple of hours. At some point my Nan left a cup of coffee and a cereal bar at the base of the stairs for me, having realised that I probably wouldn’t think of stopping for lunch myself!

The result was that the admin team were collectively thanked for dealing with the >40 restored Tasks as a team and freely helping each other, I was specifically thanked for thinking of checking the completed Task history (and for having common sense, which… is not something I’m credited with often), and the IT team are hopefully being reminded that Tasks are requests for patients and so should be treated more carefully!

The second situation resulted in a member of staff not being allowed to book further shifts for the company, perhaps permanently, so that was much more complex to process.

Later in the month, I unlocked a sort of achievement by managing to partly call in sick for the first time ever. I say “partly” because I was feeling bad enough that a full day in the office didn’t seem feasible, but I knew I could still do something and that it would be very unlikely that anyone would be able to do the evening part of my shift in my place. My question/statement to my manager was essentially  “I don’t want to fully call in sick, but how much of tomorrow can I not work without screwing anyone else over?” – which is not how that’s supposed to work. We agreed that I would just do the 4pm-8pm part of my shift, from a quiet room instead of the main office, which was basically the compromise-option I was hoping for.

By the 30th, I had recovered enough from being ill that I was able to attend my work Christmas party. The first part of the afternoon – electronic darts plus cocktails –  was great fun, and everyone seemed to prefer it to the previous year’s party. The second part started well, but I (expectedly) ran out of social battery by the end of our pizza. At least I had remembered my earplugs, as I knew from previous experience that the restaurant would probably get uncomfortably loud.

Miscellaneous

After thinking for years that I would like to build my own PC, but always being too nervous about breaking things to commit to trying, I have started buying the parts for a build. While I unfortunately decided to start buying parts about 3 days before the global RAM shortage kicked in, I had enough eBay luck that my RAM cost £90 rather than ~£150. I managed to order two incorrect parts, which was quite annoying, and I’ll need to wait a few weeks for other components, so this will be a very slow-moving build.