“And after all this, woncha give me a smile?” What a difference a day makes. Yes, yesterday I was crestfallen. All I saw was bleak. It was ot good and it was mainly financial. Something I don’t want to talk about much less write about. You don’t want to know mine, I don’t want to know yours.

Things improved greatly overnight. Assistance was asked for and given and a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Not totally, but enough to relax a bit. I didn’t want to tell Bill who is on the road, lest he would worry, and being away, he would be unable to offer a hug.

We talked on the phone and I was reluctant to tell him what was going on, but I needed to talk to someone. And he found out mostly. I didn’t show all my tarot cards.

Work was easier today. My supervisor was able to explain a few things that I did not know about. Apparently, it was in an email but obviously, I didn’t read the whole thing. If there is another employee evaluation, that would likely be brought up. Even though I knock it out of the box 99% of the time, it’s the cracks that they go after, sticking their noses into wherever they’d like.

I think people were more or less helpful and friendly today. There is one woman though who I respected and last week asked her if she was afraid of me. She hesitated which showed me that yes, she was afraid of me. That is her problem and not mine and like Bill says, I freeze her out.

It may be an Irish thing. This isn’t like The Banshees of Inisherin where she is Colin Farrell and I’m Brendan Gleeson. And I can’t say it’s permanent, perhaps there will be a thawing out. And she’s not exactly coming forward to chat anyway.

I slept nicely last night though at 5:20 AM the carbon monoxide detector went off, not due to carbon monoxide in the air but because the battery needs to be changed. There’s a mechanical voice in the detector announcing ‘Warning! The battery in the carbon monoxide detector needs to be replaced!’.

You can’t ignore it and it just repeats. It’s not a calm voice like HAL 9000 either. So I got out of bed at 5:20 AM and got the stepladder and started to climb in the dark with no glasses on. Even in my groggy state, I knew that it was not a good idea.

I turned on the light and removed the detector and removed the battery which silenced the mechanical voice. I did go back to sleep but not to the depths of slumber where I had been earlier. I knew I’d be getting up roughly ninety minutes later so that thought was doing it’s jumping jacks in my head.

I got up earlier than usual, not by much, and proceeded to start my day again, only not so forlorn.