the mellow tigger's musings

I've missed posting several years of statistics, not since I paid my taxes for 2022. Since starting this job, I haven't had the mental bandwidth to spare. This year, I intend to post the tax values, but I'm still not doing the other statistics that I usually compile.

Those are the numbers anyway. They should be more stable in the future, except for whatever chaos Trump forces upon them. Trump was my motivation for making this list in the first place, long ago. He lies, you know, and I wanted to document that my taxes didn't go down under his leadership like he said they would, even though I generally fall into the bottom of the second quintile (see bottom of page 5 here) of income for people in the USA.

Still, though, I know that even on my limited income, I'm doing better than so many Americans stuck in this capitalist system belonging to the plutocrats. Richest country on the planet, we're told repeatedly. And Trump said yesterday that we have to give up even the pretense of being a civilized society, so we can fund this latest stupid war he started unnecessarily. *sigh*

Minneapolis seems to be in the lull before a storm. Our weather prediction includes, "WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM NOON TODAY TO 9 AM CST MONDAY" (emphasis in the original, scroll down to bottom). I see snow falling outside my bedroom window right now. That's good. The forecast was rain first, followed by snow, which would cause terrible ice conditions on sidewalks and roads for everyone. Only-snow is much better for everyone. It's still 2.5 hours until that noon arrival time.

I'm currently in between shifts of work today. Most people at the university have 1.5 weeks away from work. I, however, work on an "essential" team, so we have a skeleton crew during that time. We were actually and truly closed only on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year's Day. I volunteered for shifts on Friday, Saturday, and today. If nobody volunteers, then somebody gets told to work, which is unpleasant stuff for the holidays, so... I volunteered on several shifts that were still empty.

I'm supposed to do an annual review of my Bingo 2025 card. I planned on it. I'm not sure that's going to happen. The thing about this job, where I'm constantly asked questions for which I don't know answers but have to find them on short notice, is that I don't have mental bandwidth to spare for other stuff after the work day has ended. I haven't done my annual tax review in a few years, for instance. It requires more thinking that my tired brain wants to avoid in favor of not-thinking to recover stamina.

I'll still do a Bingo 2026 card, though. I find it very useful to avoid stressful topics for a year. I'll continue that practice. Maybe I'll write more on that idea tomorrow.

Normally, my team working on 40-50 tickets per hour is a respectable pace. About 2.5 years ago, during the semester start of the worst semester of workload at my job, we crossed 100 tickets per hour a few times. That experience was awful.

Today, I saw 85 tickets per hour once, and 70+ tickets per hour at 2 other times. That, plus we had about 1/3 of our full-time staff out for vacation or sick leave, so the workload was higher for those of us who remained. It was a very busy day.

I had other topics planned for Moody Monday discussion, but I don't have the mental bandwidth for it now. If I had any booze in the house, I'd be drinking it. I may still dress warm and walk to the store to buy some. Despite marijuana being legal in Minnesota for 3 years already, there's still no widespread deployment yet. Too bad, since if I had any edibles in the house, I'd be eating that too. This article talks about the slow rollout here, and it even mentions firefighters as another group of workers needing edibles to make their brains stop rehearsing the stressors of the day.