Cloistered

Today, I've basically been out of the loop. This afternoon, I had to attend the annual eight-hour refresher course that is a prerequisite for the license I need for work. There were only six students in the class, so the instructor was able to get us all to eschew the breaks so we could just call an hour-long 'break' at the end of the class and call it a day. Whew... that was a relief. I had thought that I had a night off, but on a hunch I checked the schedule and realized that one of my subordinates had a schedule conflict and needed time off- my subordinate who worked the early shift covered the first half-hour of my shift, and here I am, trying to get enough caffeine into my gullet. Dinner, I must sheepishly admit, was a couple of handfuls of Cheez-Its. Thankfully, I don't have to start tomorrow night until 9PM... I think I need to force myself to eat a whole mess of vegetables just to start feeling like a human again. I fear that, with October being such a slog, I'll devolve into a trashivore.

In the meantime, I need to catch up with the news, I've been cloistered for most of the day. There's also the matter of some first aid supplies that I had requested ahead of our busy season- the summer stock of first aid supplies has seen quite a bit of use, and we will be busier in the coming month than we've been all summer, so I badgered a bunch of managers until they told me what needed to be replenished. I figure I can put on the all-news radio station while I separate generic-brand bandage strips, adhesive tape, and 'sting relief' swabs into separate packages to send to other sites. We don't have any epi-pens, those are too damn expensive to just hand out to visitors these days.

UPDATE: In the interest of candor, I have to note that I have to take an eight-hour refresher course every calendar year- you can bet your sweet bippie that next year, I will take the course in late March or early April, before the tourist season. Just because I've long taken the course in the Fall doesn't mean I have to keep up the habit.