The middle of the emotional spectrum? I thought that was a myth!

I am feeling... Weirdly okay! I think I might be hitting the point where all of the boring stupid things I was doing to get my brain back to functional have kicked in and now I have enough action points to do the slightly more complicated tasks! Or I've freed up more action points because everything is taking a little less effort than it did, one of those two. The level of progress we're talking about here is "Able to interact with people again" and "Making myself beans on toast for lunch instead of cereal" and "able to send/answer emails about freelance stuff" and "most of the way through a craft project" and "started doing freelance stuff," and honestly: I WILL TAKE THIS. I am living the dream right now, because I feel okay!

(I am trying to be responsible about how quickly I start picking things up again, because I don't want to Hyperbole and a Half myself! LOOK AT ME LEARNING FROM MY MISTAKES.)

Things that have happened since I last posted:

• The UK has come out of lockdown! My coworkers are very excited about going shopping and getting haircuts again, and I'm happy for them! Went for a walk around the park with Lex, and had a socially distanced picnic with friends last weekend. I do want to go to bookshops and craft shops so I can touch everything! But I'm gonna wait a bit longer, both for safety's sake and because I get a bit jangly when my bollocks o'clock tram to work has all of seats filled, so let's not risk it!


• LexGarrett is excited about maybe getting to go back to his office, because it has aircon and our house does not! I am doing my best not to get in my feelings about this, because if he's not working from home then I get my desk back and there's a chance I might remember to clean the house! But my four hours of being able to exist in Lex's space while we do our own things!


• WHO HAS TWO THUMBS AND MOVED AN ENTIRE BOOKCASE! This is very exciting to me, because now we've got all of the furniture in our bedroom in the places they're supposed to be! Now I just ("just") need to declutter and tidy up, and we should have something that approaches a liveable bedroom! ... Also I've applied card and duct tape to the door latch to see if that solves the problem of the door sticking and trapping me inside, so I think that's all of my good house karma for the month.


• MATES I WROTE THAT LAST BULLET POINT, AND THEN OUR BEDFRAME BROKE. WHAT DID I TELL YOU ABOUT THAT HOUSE KARMA.


• I finished my first playthrough of Fire Emblem: Three Houses! It was a Black Eagles run, and I have DEFINITELY missed a huge chunk of plot somewhere, but that's fine! I have unlocked the New Game+ mode, so I'm gonna do it again but better.


• THERE IS GOING TO BE AN OXENFREE SEQUEL!!! Thank you for telling me about this bookishDi! My reaction to the trailer is very ALEX NO DON'T DO THIS but I'm going to buy it and wig myself out, because Oxenfree was SO GOOD. ... In related news, Oxenfree's on the switch, so I guess I know what I'm doing when I finish Fire Emblem again.


• New series of Great British Sewing Bee, AND a competition show about making jewellery? Why thank you, BBC, I think I shall.


• On the work front: I'm getting trained for a NEW mindless data entry task, I am SO HYPE! Apparently one of the people who made the library management software we switched to in 2019 just forgot that the cataloguing team might need updating when our e-journal access changed, and forgot to turn that on for six months. Which somehow spiralled to the point where there's now a year's worth of updates that need checking and it's being passed on to library advisers! ... For context, a year's worth appears to be 64 thousand updates, because academic publishing. This is going to take forever to check and I! Am! Ready!


• Oh, and I'm doing stuff that I can totally wrangle as "developing new procedures" when it gets to performance review time, because I've convinced my manager that we need an actual system for tracking all of the chasing we've done about lost items, and now I'm bodging that together.


• Man, I forgot how much I love trashy romance manga. Like, I know every March/April I rock up like "'Sup, I read twenty volumes of BL manga in a week, ask me anything," but also: I keep forgetting how much better my life feels when I can actually read! Next trick: gonna try reading new-to-me fanfic instead of reading the exact same twelve fic I've been reading for the last four months!


• The sticker release notebook I bought have arrived and I'm slightly in love, because now I have a tiny little book that I can just plaster my stickers in! I'm a little in love, this is so convenient.


• The last Heaven's Feel OVA came out, and my overwhelming reaction is RIDER YES. Like. I appreciate there was other stuff going on apart from Rider cutting loose, but RIDER YES.

So... Yeah, I'm okay. Not sure how it happened, but I'm glad it did!