17-DEC-20 Cleanup Day

[DiveMilw]

I miss our old snow blower.  It is huge, powerful, and is self-propelling.  The electric snow blower I bought this week was fine but not the same.  I had to snow blow in three stages because the batteries ran down.  And there are a couple of spots I didn't do because a) it was starting to get cold, b) I was getting tired, and c) the electric snow blower was going to require a lot of effort by me to get that much snow taken care of.  We had, I'm guess, 10-12 inches of snow on the ground.  Despite my whining, I am extremely happy to have the electric snow blower.  There is no way I would have gotten all that shoveled by hand.  

Winter has arrived in the Northeast!

[scenicdesign71]

Has it ever!  I'm proud of myself for dragging my ass to work today, one of only four of us (out of a fourteen-person crew, I think? I've lost count these days) who braved the storm and made it to the studio, plus two others out on location in Yonkers.

We got our regular Thursday PCR test and then puttered around stretching not-all-that-much work to last ten hours, so it's just as well there weren't more of us -- indeed, it probably would have been fine if I'd opted to stay home as was my instinct.  But the pay will be nice, anyway.

And having fewer people around made things a little more relaxed, not least because it made social distancing easier -- thereby helping to ease, for a day, the main Covid-era source of workplace anxiety.  (I haven't talked a lot about this, but it's probably my biggest stressor these days: it's all but impossible for me to ever feel really safe at my job because the sheer nature of what we do is physical, messy, collaborative, and often involves a lot of people working in closer quarters than one would like; and even though the shooting schedule for the whole season has been extended to allow extra time for getting things done in a safer fashion, it still seems as though we're always under the gun, fighting impossible deadlines, and juggling twenty things other than safety most of the time.  Today was a rare exception, probably the lightest day we've had since returning to the job in October).

Tomorrow (Friday) is our last shooting day before a three-week holiday hiatus.  There will be work for a few of us on Saturday restoring that Yonkers location, but not me; I turned it down when offered.  That pay would actually have been especially nice, time-and-a-half all day, but I'm just too exhausted and impatient for the break to begin.  (To be honest, I'm a little proud of myself for making it to work this entire week, when what I've really wanted is to be at home hibernating properly self-quarantining for a full fourteen days so I could visit my mom uptown on Christmas).

Yesterday (Wednesday) we had all knocked off an hour early to beat the oncoming blizzard, but today, even staying for a full day, the ride home was the fastest it's ever been -- rush hour traffic was nonexistent.  (The morning commute, by contrast, at 6am with the roads equally empty but still a snowy-slushy-icy mess, had ended up taking twice as long as usual).