I remember when I had time. It was so incredibly great to have this week, and we got everything done. Cookies, coffee cake from which I fed my family for breakfast for the week, and just time to relax, get to sleep before 10pm on a regular basis, and reconnect with the world.

I have to build this into my schedule more often. Once every three years is normal for investment banking, but I'm older now, and the toll it takes is far more than when I was 25. I don't do New Years resolutions, but I think this might be one I have to take.

I finally get a week off. Let me repeat that again: I FINALLY GET A WEEK OFF!!! I'm coming up on three years at this job, and while I've taken a few consecutive days to visit Florida, when moving, or to use up my days, I haven't had a full week off yet. At LIB we could always cover multiple people out with India and Argentina picking up the slack, but considering that for all intents and purposes I work alone at night for SIB, it's...not encouraged since we don't outsource 95% of what we do.

If you count in the weekends it will actually be 9 days off in a row, so I'll be tidying my apartment, going down to my parents for cookie baking and Christmas, laundry, etc, as well as celebrating a belated birthday for my Dad and my parents' anniversary. Those were on Tuesday and Thursday of this past week so I texted and have cards for them, but couldn't be there on those days. 

On the plus side, I've been sleeping better and recovering from my rough day in NYC, and while I have to call in the super to unclog my drains again I'm waiting until the new year for anything that is fairly major. For now I'll enjoy the time off, and enjoy spending time with family, imperfect as they are. All my gifts are bought and I dropped them off last weekend along with my stand mixer and cookie sheets so I'm set and ready to go for a marathon baking session. 

I miss baking, since I've been trying to lose weight for the past year and a half, and while I've been successful substituting fruit cups for dessert and popcorn for chips, I still have more to go so this will be a pleasant splurge. Baking is very meditative, and never in a hurry like cooking. But I'm 75 pounds down from my max weight. 15 more to go, then I can start making muffins and coffee cakes again :).

Yesterday was our department's biannual meeting to go out for dinner for the holidays and I was really looking forward to it since last year I had Covid so obviously couldn't go. Two years ago I still had the stamina from not working for the past three years so a 21-24 hour day was doable. On the train at 6:08, work all day in the office, then dinner at 6pm. Catch the 11:18 train out and get home around 1:30-2am. It was a long day, but I didn't suffer too much.

This year, well, was certainly different. I've intermittently gone back to drinking, developed vertigo, then jaundice from the meclazine to treat the vertigo so I can't take that any more, and also have had frequent insomnia since the election. I still committed to it though and was on the 6:08 train.

All was well minus a slight vertigo spell when I arrived at the office. I know that dehydration and exertion exacerbate the changes of having an attack, so I made sure to hydrate, went out to lunch with the group and a vendor, and finished work.

I was booking it cross-town with my coworker who wanted to take a detour past the Rockefeller tree, and started heating up and getting out of breath. Ok, I'm not in the shape I once was when I lived in NYC, but no biggie. By the time we crossed Times Square and passed the Gershwin Theatre though, I knew I was in trouble since my brain started feeling like it was sloshing side to side and I had a weird visual delay. Oh shit, this felt like a major attack.

I breathlessly had to ask her to wait at 51th and 8th, where there were two concrete NYPD blocks I could lean on and it was bad. I didn't fall since I'd braced myself on the block, but I could tell this was as bad as the one I had in July. Sure enough, 5 minutes later I had to drop to my knees and throw up for 5 minutes in public. Good thing I'd lived in NYC for so long or I'd be mortified, but I've seen worse in my days there. My colleague stayed with me the whole time protecting me and my belongings, which I am SO appreciative of.

At this point my whole body was shaking from the reaction and I was weak, so I capitulated and asked to go to the ER. My colleague got a cab, and we went to the nearest hospital; she stayed with me until they wheeled me into the back and I told her to go to dinner and have a great time. I'll be fine.

So now I've thrown up twice on the sidewalk in NYC. The first time I took a zinc on an empty stomach before going to work and had to get off the bus and puke it up. This time it's sad that I have this damn vertigo, but also pretty funny that I ended up puking only a block from Times Square so HELLO MANY PEOPLE!!! You've just gotta laugh at stuff like that, and try not to do it again.

What in the everlasting fuck is happening? I have been bitter and angry towards the higher ups at LIB and still am. But literally killing someone? The CEO of UnitedHealthcare (an admittedly terrible company) was shot and killed in Manhattan today.

They don't know who did it yet, but I assume it was someone, or the relative of someone that was royally screwed over by the company. I'm saddened that he died, but I also cannot totally condemn the shooter if that was the scenario where they lost their loved one because UNH decided that they didn't deserve to live, or at least not at a "reasonable price."

I'm somewhat scared since it does seem that the fabric of society is ripping apart. Things that were once unthinkable are happening more and more and we're all just hanging on trying to make sense of it all. I just don't know where we go from here.

Yay! Gifts arrived the second time, so now I've got almost everything set & ready to go. Cards - mailed. Gifts - received and wrapped. Stamps - came late, but I'm set for next year's cards. I can work with this.

*sigh* I'm back to checking outside every few hours to make sure that the new package is delivered. Not that I think anyone is porch pirating my packages, but it's not the first time it's happened, and I am in a complex with 150 apartments with no Ring doorbell. Perhaps I should invest in one of those, considering it's a couple of times where things were missing that were listed as delivered.

I wrapped gifts today and mailed the bulk of my Christmas cards minus one for a pending address, so at least I'm caught up on that. My apartment is clean, I just have to wash the dishes and I will be set on the basics. I wish I had a job that allowed me to take an hour off here and there. I wish that something that came back with an iteration on a previous request wasn't still hanging in the queue since Thanksgiving which no one has picked up in Hong Kong or London. Yes, I logged on just to get an idea of what the queue looks like for when I come back to work on Monday, but I won't touch it until then.

I'm done in terms of bending over backwards trying to fix problems. I'm not the supervisor. If they have a problem, then talk to me directly; if there's no insistence, well, they will deal. Put the burden on someone else, just not me, and I do not want to cut into my personal time considering I work 50 hrs per week as it is.