Right, that general update I promised you

[spindizzy]

Behind the cut: excessive wittering.

• I don't even want to talk about how many words I'm going to have to write this week to reach my Camp Nano target. Let's – let's just put it over there and pretend it's not happening, okay?


• The reason I am so behind is that a) according to the captainraz apparently shark week exacerbates depression and ADHD symptoms, and b) I fell into a hole made of phone games and while I'm thoroughly enjoying myself, this is INCREDIBLY bad for my ability to get things done.


• Oh, and we went to visit one of our old housemates and his partner! (Not the Kevin and his wife, thankfully, although they have spawned recently.) It was good! We ate delicious food, we watched movies, we hung out with friends that we like and see FAR too little of. And while we were in that neck of the woods, we stopped in to visit Lex's mum! We got to go on a ferry and a gin distillery tour, which was pretty cool! Turns out that distilling rooms count as explosive environments, who knew? And there is SO MUCH STUFF that goes into it, which I didn't know! So yes, good trip, very educational, very glad I got to spend some time bothering Lex and breaking through my reading slump.


• So far, being off work has involved a lot of running around sorting things.
  
  • Like, I finally booked someone to come and clear our garden! Mike's been trying to keep on top of it, but someone nicked our garden bin so we had nowhere to put any of the plants we removed, and buddleja has basically taken over the entire yard. Like, full-on, "Gardener asked us if we knew it had grown through the fence panels" levels of taken over. AND he's going to take away the sofas that we put out there months ago and never got round to arranging collection for! I'll be honest, I felt a twinge of class anxiousness over hiring someone to do it (I'm a working class screb, okay, it feels weird), but honestly at this point the cheapest way to solve this problem is with money.
  
  
  • The house is back to being a mess again because I got halfway through tidying up a bunch of things and got distracted. (See also: phone games.) It's no where near as bad as it was, but it's still frustrating. My master plan is to go through the list on Tody and see what I can get done tomorrow or on Wednesday while Mike and Lex are out, try to blitz it again.
  
  
  • Lex has bought (and I have borrowed) a whole bunch of the things we need to actually finish putting stuff away in our room! We're still in the stage where we had to remake a lot of the mess to fix the mess, but sooooooooon the problem will be solved! I'm even planning to foist books off onto other people so that I have more space for the books that I want! And Lex has proper storage for his Magic cards! We just need to like... Sit down and deal with things...
  
  
  • I booked all of the flights and train tickets that I KNOW I need, which means I feel like I've forgotten to order something, whoops. How did I end up with this much travelling booked?! What is going on?!


• madebyjenni and I went to a stationery fair in Manchester at the weekend and had a good time! We were very determined that we were going to look at everything and then swing back around to the stalls that we liked the look of, which lasted MAYBE a stall and a half. Whoops. I think Jenni maybe bought more individual things than I did (SO MANY STICKERS), but the things that I bought were larger (NOTEBOOKS!) so we probably wound up spending about the same.


• I've fallen off the wagon of using my diaries, which is Not Good. I've used the calendar bit to remind me when I have doctors appointments and that's it. NO WONDER I feel like I've low-key forgotten something all the time. I have currently got a running to-do list in a separate notebook with all of the writing tasks I need to do colour-coded and separated by site, and it's twelve pages long so far so I'm trying to only look at it when I pick things off it.


• (I am planning to get back into using my diaries, but it's a "spirit is willing" problem. I want to, I just forget. ... Maybe I need to turn the "Look at your diary you idiot" alarm back on.)


• I have read SO MUCH f/f manga and short stories this month, which is EXCELLENT. It turns out that there ARE f/f manga being licensed that isn't 100% male gaze, it's just all being published by Seven Seas, which surprises me. I'm used to them being the "monster fucking and harem manga" publisher! I'm confused as to how they've ended up with Nagata Kabi's autobiographical stuff and a bunch of f/f stuff NOT set in schools!


• (I've still not hit my goal of finding as much weird genre-spanning bullshit f/f manga as I have m/m manga. The closest I've got is Eve and Eve, which is a weird horny gremlin of an SFF anthology. I refuse to believe that there is less weird f/f stuff out there than m/m, I just need to find out who is licensing it so that I can shake them down for more of it.)


• THERE IS A NEW FATE SPIN-OFF AND IT IS ABOUT MY DEPRESSED TRAUMATISED SON WAVER VELVET! I'm so happy, oh my god, especially because it's a MYSTERY series, with the full manor-house murder "Come into this room and I will explain who the killer is" resolution! A lot of things from other series make more sense now (like Waver's apprentice in Fate/Apocrypha), and I'm so happy. Full-on "raptor noises at the laptop" levels of happy. IT HAS WAVER HAVING THE EXACT AMOUNT OF FEELINGS OVER RIDER THAT I WANTED. WE GOT TO EPISODE FOUR AND I RAPTOR SCREECHED EVEN LOUDER BECAUSE OMG I NEED TO FISTFIGHT EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO SHENANIGANED THEIR WAY INTO THE HOLY GRAIL WAR.


• I started watching The Untamed and then got horribly side-tracked by the novel being 114 chapters of slowburn candy because of who I am as a person. I want to go back to it! I know they're going to cut all of the romance subplot out and it's probably going to end in MORE TEARS, but also I don't care because this is slowburn where one of the participants was literally dead for sixteen years gimme gimme gimme.


• captainraz and I have been trying to get back into the swing of writing now that we're on ADHD meds, and it's certainly... Gone. Both of us have managed to clean our houses! Our general adulting is very good! The writing has been kinda left by the wayside. It kinda works better when we both manage to get into gear and keep each other on task? (This is called having a body double and is a recommended technique for people with ADHD, WHO'DA FUCKING THUNK.) But our getting words together haven't been syncing up quite right lately.


• I went swimming for the first time in like SEVEN WEEKS, and HOLY SHIT I felt energised afterwards? Are these endorphins?! Is that what everyone else gets after exercise?! Is this what I've been missing all these years!


• SUMMER DRESSES! I've been living my "wear cute dresses" dreams, and it's been SO GOOD. ... I am maybe the only person in the UK over the age of eighteen who's happy about the weather, to be honest, which is completely fair.


• I've also gotten back into baking, because it turns out that when I don't need to leave the house every day, it's a lot easier to find the time and motivation to bake? It also helps that I bought myself an electric mixer a few months back, because it means that I can wallop a cake batter together in maybe five minutes, which is SO GOOD. I can finally use the all in one method! This is amazing! After like twenty-five years of baking, I still have to look up the ratio of ingredients to egg in a victoria sponge!


• I've gone up to 30mg of the Equasym XL, but I can't figure out if it's having a noticeable effect, because hi, sharks. I can tell you that the jump between nothing to 10mg was way more dramatic than the jump from 10mg to 20mg was, but that's about it? It's fine, the doctor was just like "Do you want to see what would happen?" and I figured it sounded like a laugh so why not? I can always drop back down to the 20mg if I don't like it.


• I've also gone back to therapy temporarily, because the doctor recommended combining meds with talking therapy, and compliance with medical recommendations means you don't have to fight with your NEXT doctor. It's fine? It was very strange to have a guy with a heavy Russian(?) accent make soothing noises and tell me that I've done quite well, but it was fine? I gave him the laundry list of "Things that I have trouble with because of the ADHD" and "Things that I am trying to use to mitigate the ADHD" and he reckons that we won't need many sessions? Which, honestly: FANTASTIC. I am busy and therapy is difficult.


• SPEAKING of ADHD mitigation, captainraz got a bunch of Tile fobs, which are basically keyrings that you can find with your phone/use your phone to make them play a tune at you so you can find them. I put one on my keys and so far the system is working! My keys keep turning up in places like my backpack, where my keys don't go because I will never find them again, so can confirm that it's useful for that!


• Oh! Lex bought me (... us...?) a disk drive! Optical drive? I don't know what they're called anymore, a thing that I can plug into my laptop and play DVDs through, because I love Svetlana dearly but she's the first laptop I've had that hasn't come with a CD drive. Now I need to find my copies of The Meg and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and then I can capslock about them whenever I want!


• We haven't played Pathfinder in about six weeks, so I haven't had ANY closure on the whole "My Disaster Lesbian's ex admitted that she was still in love with the Disaster Lesbian while under a zone of truth -> Disaster Lesbian ran away to bury herself in the literal deepest hole she could find out of guilt -> the party tried to save an NPC that tried to kill them -> Now we must recklessly fight monsters and NEVER SPEAK OF FEELINGS AGAIN" issue. ... Yes this game is 40% soap opera, 40% SHENANIGANS, 10% actually playing the pre-written adventure (AND 100% REASON TO REMEMBER THE – no, wait, that's something else.). Yes I'm responsible for a good 60% of those problems. But IN MY DEFENCE, we warned hardlyaverage that things were going to get silly and dramatic if he let splend and I be in the same party! We warned him!

So yeah, HI EVERYONE, JULY WAS SOMEWHAT BUSY. I'm only slightly in a hole of "things that I haven't gotten done yet" though! I believe in myself and my ability to get out of the hole! And August is going to have more travelling than initially planned, but that's fine!

Comments

[umadoshi]

I'm used to them being the "monster fucking and harem manga" publisher!

They publish some really fantastic stuff! ^_^

I'm glad to see so many good things in this post. *hugs*