Essential

Almost. It’s almost the weekend. Last week, BossRPh asked if I wanted to take some days off because someone from another district wanted more hours. I missed my chance; it turned out that tech’s state license expired and his regular manager never worked on renewing it. For the moment, no vacation.

I spoke with one of our regulars on Tuesday. “How are you guys handling things?” she asked me. “You guys aren’t closing, right?”

“Oh, you know. We’re essential,” I replied. “We are the unsung heroes of this whole situation.”

“God love ya,” she replied, catching my slightly sarcastic undertone and laughing.

Everyone in our building is now carrying documents explaining how we are essential workers and aren’t just dicking around. Corporate released a video, which explained how much the company appreciates us, what types of precautions the company is taking to protect us from the virus, and what we need to be doing to protect our patients. Reading the comments left by other employees, people are seriously pissed that corporate isn’t doing anywhere near as much for its workers as other companies are doing. Most of them believe we’re getting a token “you’re appreciated” pat on the head because it’s the cheapest option. There’s some chatter about what corporate says we should be doing being different than what is actually happening.

Today, it’s another BossRPh shift. Next week, StressedRPh comes back. DayTech and I are pretty apprehensive about her return. Vacations seem to bring out the worst in her, and an extra two weeks might compound the issue. However, maybe she’ll be so happy to be out in the world, she won’t have the energy to be a complete twat.

Purging

I put four bags of clothes outside this morning, and one bag of shoes. There’s only a dresser and one closet upstairs to go through, and I think that’s the end of the clothing portion of The Great Sort. Both of those are pretty empty anyway. I managed to fit most of the clothes I kept for him into his bag. Most of our things aren’t going into the bag. For the time being, I’m not getting rid of all of my clothes. Since I don’t know exactly when I’ll leave, there’s no sense in getting rid of everything just yet. I rarely wore shorts during the summers here, I don’t expect I’ll have much of an opportunity to do it up there, regardless of where we end up.

In addition to continuing to sell off the collections, the next major project is boxing the extra plates and glasses. There’s at least a dozen coffee mugs in the basement, and probably enough plates of various sizes to host a decently sized holiday dinner. Why? Because we can’t just throw out these things, they’re USEFUL. Those plain white dishes might come in handy, even though we haven’t used them in years.

While I plan on taking a quick inventory tonight, I shouldn’t need to go shopping this weekend. I might want to pick up some extra “base food” tomorrow, like my enormous sweet potatoes. With any luck, I may have to bring stuff to the post office if any of my auctions sell. My only other travels should be to the pet store for some cat litter and to exchange Mal‘s harness. I don’t need much.