No News Is Good News?

Just one entry in July. It's the 5th and we're at one for August, so at least that's parity.

Work has been steady, and because of... things*, my days off during the week are separated by several days full of fairly rigorous manual labor in high temperature, high humidity environments. I'm physically tired most of the time. Right now, I'm pretty generally exhausted.

Okay. But.

For a little more than a month, I've kind of put my life into an intentional neutral where I was still doing stuff, but not really thinking too much about it. House work, yard work, being really bad at Civ 5... basically nothing important. I'd finished everything I really could on my end of the grad student admissions process, and was really working at not thinking too much about it. Meanwhile, upper management at the place I've been working at for the past year-point-five decided that all tolerable things eventually come to an end and started dicking around with department structures and our immediate manager and supervisor configuration in our department.

I mean, we're warehouse workers, so unless you have a particular reason to start dicking around with management and your logistical infrastructure, you should probably leave it alone. They don't, though, and they aren't, so things have taken a dramatic turn for the shit pile. My job is as straight forward as it's ever been, but it's a little more stressful now. There are a lot of my co-workers that have suddenly hit the end-stage of the retail job life cycle simultaneously, culminating in a lot of us having cemented plans to leave or be forced to cut our hours dramatically including, but not limited to: new jobs, full time schooling, part-time schooling, and looking for better paying, full time, or otherwise alternate work. There haven't been any new hires since November 2013 (turnover is surprisingly low in our department), but that's biting our management in the ass now, since there's nobody who can replace the more experienced team members and our new manager doesn't actually know anything about operations department processes or management.

I'm getting out at the right time. I'll do part time work for a while, but I'm not hitching my star to this low-rent trash gig.

So, I'm officially unofficially approved for graduate studies at SIU Edwardsville. There's not much time between now and classes starting, which is really more the fault of how long it took admissions to process me, but there's nothing I can do about that. It's not optimal, but I'll take it.

I won't really say that it's good news or bad news. It's what I'm doing. I've said in the past that I have a limited number of options, but I do know that if I'm thinking outside the normal parameters, there really are a lot of different things I could be doing - a lot of directions I could be taking things in. A lot of people are really positive about this, but others are less so for good reasons. This is a major life goal of mine, though, so I'm still excited as well as pretty nervous.

So that's my break in radio silence.

* Basically boring workplace logistics, not something ominous. Even if I could make it interesting, it's not really worth my time or yours.