Couple of years catching up
Jun. 25th, 2021 09:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hafocIt's been a couple of years since I wrote here. There are many reasons for that. The biggest are laziness and futility. Laziness explains itself. Futility? I don't know if anyone reads this. It seems vanity to put it out there assuming somebody will.
But some of my friends have, or had, journals here, and might be keeping up with me. So here is a bit of a catch-up.
I have finished up my career in Environmental Protection and survived a heart attack. Since, unfortunately, this journal is enough linked with my meatspace identity to track me down, to track down anyone I name here, I have to be a bit careful about details. So I'm not going to give too many.
I guess I'll go out on a limb and tell my hypothetical readers a bit about it, though. Confession is good for the soul, right?
I ended up working for a government air quality agency for a little over 31 years. I hope I did some good, but I don't know. Some days I'd be out driving to a field site far from the office, wondering if the good I was doing with an air quality inspection balanced the pollution I was adding to the air by going out to perform it.
Working in environmental quality is frustrating. You're trying to save the world, to be dramatic, but you pretty quickly find out that the world doesn't want to be saved. It's like trying to prevent any other disaster; the best you can hope for is that nothing happens. And if nothing happens, there are those who will insist that nothing would have happened anyway. Maybe they are right.
Our basic means of trying to save the world was to enforce a set of Federal regulations that were notorious for their poor writing. Everything is spelled out in tedious detail, so tedious that they would regularly include entire sections of other regulations "herein adopted by reference." So you encounter the dreaded Octopus Effect: You go to the first reference, find it adopts a second regulation by reference, go to that, to to a third, and ultimately discover that natural gas fired RICE (Reciprocating Internal Combustion Engine) under 500 horsepower are exempt from the regulation. I suspect most of the regs were drafted by some summer intern in a subbasement somewhere in Research Triangle Park, NC, back in the 80s and haven't been revised since. But then I hated the things, so I'm not the best person to ask about them.
I often felt that the ocean liner had hit the iceberg and I had been given a teacup and told to bail. Only there was a formal dance up on the promenade deck. I was under strict instructions not to slop any of that nasty seawater on the rich peoples' shoes.
What with all that I was more than ready to get out. Then COVID hit. I was assigned to work from home anyway. I moved up to my planned retirement home, a condominium overlooking one of the big lakes. Working from there, I didn't think I had any reason to retire. I figured I'd stick it out and retire when they wanted me to go back to the office.
Work was still wearing, though. And the isolation of COVID, nothing much to do, started to get to me. I started drinking. If I had any alcohol, I'd drink it; that old impulse control problem still.
Sometimes I think I was trying to drink myself to death out of sheer boredom. I nearly succeeded.
On Ground Hog's Day-- that's good, because I can always remember the date- I woke up at 4:23 AM with a mild case of indigestion that felt a bit strange and started to wander around my insides. It was smart that I decided to go to the Emergency Room and let them tell me I was an idiot. It was stupid that I drove myself there, 'cause when I got there and they started investigating, they determined that yes, it was in fact a heart attack. I could have passed out at the wheel and killed myself that way, or worse, someone else.
But... water under the bridge. Too many needles, too many tests. I bought the nurses flowers, because they never get any. I got to burn off a month of that vast backlog of sick leave I'd saved up, mostly waiting for them to get around to telling me I was clear to go back to work.
This did decide me that it was time to get out, so I got out. It also convinced me to stop buying booze. That's been good for the budget. I presume it has been good for my health also.
I would guess I wasn't the classic addict, because I had no withdrawl symptoms. I'm the kind of alkie who is going to drink it if I have it but if I don't have it, I don't miss it. Thank the Unknown, that's a fairly easy problem to handle.
We're coming out of the covid. Maybe I'll be able to get out and do some things. Maybe I'll keep this journal now, 'tho knowing me I'll get out of the habit and drift away again. But things are going OK.
But some of my friends have, or had, journals here, and might be keeping up with me. So here is a bit of a catch-up.
I have finished up my career in Environmental Protection and survived a heart attack. Since, unfortunately, this journal is enough linked with my meatspace identity to track me down, to track down anyone I name here, I have to be a bit careful about details. So I'm not going to give too many.
I guess I'll go out on a limb and tell my hypothetical readers a bit about it, though. Confession is good for the soul, right?
I ended up working for a government air quality agency for a little over 31 years. I hope I did some good, but I don't know. Some days I'd be out driving to a field site far from the office, wondering if the good I was doing with an air quality inspection balanced the pollution I was adding to the air by going out to perform it.
Working in environmental quality is frustrating. You're trying to save the world, to be dramatic, but you pretty quickly find out that the world doesn't want to be saved. It's like trying to prevent any other disaster; the best you can hope for is that nothing happens. And if nothing happens, there are those who will insist that nothing would have happened anyway. Maybe they are right.
Our basic means of trying to save the world was to enforce a set of Federal regulations that were notorious for their poor writing. Everything is spelled out in tedious detail, so tedious that they would regularly include entire sections of other regulations "herein adopted by reference." So you encounter the dreaded Octopus Effect: You go to the first reference, find it adopts a second regulation by reference, go to that, to to a third, and ultimately discover that natural gas fired RICE (Reciprocating Internal Combustion Engine) under 500 horsepower are exempt from the regulation. I suspect most of the regs were drafted by some summer intern in a subbasement somewhere in Research Triangle Park, NC, back in the 80s and haven't been revised since. But then I hated the things, so I'm not the best person to ask about them.
I often felt that the ocean liner had hit the iceberg and I had been given a teacup and told to bail. Only there was a formal dance up on the promenade deck. I was under strict instructions not to slop any of that nasty seawater on the rich peoples' shoes.
What with all that I was more than ready to get out. Then COVID hit. I was assigned to work from home anyway. I moved up to my planned retirement home, a condominium overlooking one of the big lakes. Working from there, I didn't think I had any reason to retire. I figured I'd stick it out and retire when they wanted me to go back to the office.
Work was still wearing, though. And the isolation of COVID, nothing much to do, started to get to me. I started drinking. If I had any alcohol, I'd drink it; that old impulse control problem still.
Sometimes I think I was trying to drink myself to death out of sheer boredom. I nearly succeeded.
On Ground Hog's Day-- that's good, because I can always remember the date- I woke up at 4:23 AM with a mild case of indigestion that felt a bit strange and started to wander around my insides. It was smart that I decided to go to the Emergency Room and let them tell me I was an idiot. It was stupid that I drove myself there, 'cause when I got there and they started investigating, they determined that yes, it was in fact a heart attack. I could have passed out at the wheel and killed myself that way, or worse, someone else.
But... water under the bridge. Too many needles, too many tests. I bought the nurses flowers, because they never get any. I got to burn off a month of that vast backlog of sick leave I'd saved up, mostly waiting for them to get around to telling me I was clear to go back to work.
This did decide me that it was time to get out, so I got out. It also convinced me to stop buying booze. That's been good for the budget. I presume it has been good for my health also.
I would guess I wasn't the classic addict, because I had no withdrawl symptoms. I'm the kind of alkie who is going to drink it if I have it but if I don't have it, I don't miss it. Thank the Unknown, that's a fairly easy problem to handle.
We're coming out of the covid. Maybe I'll be able to get out and do some things. Maybe I'll keep this journal now, 'tho knowing me I'll get out of the habit and drift away again. But things are going OK.
