Black Friday retail ranting

 I sleep in the day after Thanksgiving and do not do any shopping, either online or in person.  That doesn't stop me from complaining, though.  In no particular order, here are my hot takes on retail.

I'm all for reducing the plastic waste problem and decreasing my carbon footprint.  In fact, I work on that for a living.   Nevertheless I'm sick of new on-line brands whose main selling point is reduced packaging for a relatively low volume item.  Yeah, your lotion bar that you will send me in a cardboard box with a bunch of possibly non-recyclable padding is so much greener than the bottle I buy at the grocery store when I do all my other shopping.  Get it in a grocery store or drugstore and I'll reconsider.

On-line retailers of cool gadgets, can we please agree that no one is going to be buying your widget more than once or twice a year so please STFU with the daily emails.  No I do not need another carpet lint remover just yet, please leave me alone.

Sorry, marketer of imperfect produce, I'm not going to order a box of it delivered from who knows where and convince myself I'm doing great things for the environment.  I'll let it be used for juice and frozen foods like it's always been. 

 

 

 

November procrastination

 I'm procrastinating.  Oh how I'm procrastinating.....

Adderall is helping with my ADHD for most levels of everyday tasks and work stuff, but I still am the procrastination queen for making slides. (she writes, as she procrastinates...)  Job and life changes, perimenopause and the stress of the COVID pandemic completely wrecked havoc with all of my workarounds. 

I'm procrastinating because I have to give a presentation on Monday, and then on Tuesday and Wednesday I'm helping to run a workshop on automated and accelerated chemistry.  I get to try to keep a well-known ChemTwitter shitposter from dominating the conversation in a panel that I'm moderating, and also run a breakout session where said shitposter may also be present.  Calgon take me away!

It's been an annoying autumn.  Joe hurt his back and can't stand for very long, so for a while I was doing almost everything.  Then I hurt my knee so now I can't stand for very long and stairs or walking more than short distances really hurts. I'm doing all that I can to help it but it's slow and there are the usual delays with getting appointments for physical therapy, etc. Supply chain issues are causing headaches and lots of lab equipment has been breaking. Getting the new labs set up has taken a lot more mental bandwidth than anticipated for a variety of reasons relating to the fact that "Configure the new labs exactly like the existing labs" was less obvious than my boss or I realized.  Apart from the health issues, none of this is really serious but it adds up into 1000 papercuts of stress. Sometimes I wish I could time travel to a time in my life when I had to do a lot less adulting.

It helps to get that all out.  In this time of mutual collective trauma, I'm trying not to complain too much since we're all going through some shit right now.