Rambling update

[marsden_online]

First up, work and finances. You may recall that at the end of last year things had become unstable. At the beginning of this year I was actively following up on another opportunity, but eventually committed to staying with the company for another 12 months with enough of a pay rise that as long as I can keep up 25-30 hours a week we are keeping half a step ahead of expected and unexpected expenses.

There is plenty for me to do at work, as we are still practically speaking down at least one FTE developer at present, and the projects I am currently up to my elbows in are interesting but they are not leaving time free to do the documentation and knowledge transfer which was part of the objectives for the year.

Keeping up 25-30 hours a week has meant often going in for a few hours at the weekend, usually on Sunday. Fortunately my brain is not interpreting this as a 6-day week. Today I have instead taken that time to blog. Saturdays are my "day off", or rather my day to try and get things done around the house, at a gentle pace, or sleep. The past few weeks have included a lot of weekend sleeping.

One of the reasons for this is that my body clock seems to have decided to follow D's example and keep movng my "go-to-sleep" and "wake up" times later and later. (A longer-than-24-hour cycle.) Currently it seems to be prefering to make the former between 1am and 3am, and the latter between 11am and 1pm. This is not conducive to good work hours. Failing to arrest this cycle, I am instead regularly getting to the office after midday and working into the evening. I am practically good-for-nothing when I get home, so this has also wiped out a lot of chores and family time :(

I have found myself looking back at at the amount which I have managed while pottering on a Saturday and thinking "actually that's quite a reasonable number of things done, perhaps this is closer to the amount of productivity which we should expect of everyone in general".

For downtime I have recently been playing a lot of Mass Effect: Andromeda on D's computer. Shooters aren't my genre so it's on a fairly easy mode (more interested in the story). I am enjoying it quite a lot, despite encountering a few bugs (often related to accidentally completing missions before that have actually been given to me) and as it is my first playthrough diligently completing all the missions in one place before moving on. My current (first) Ryder is a young POC who tends to lead with her heart and is halfway through romancing everyone she can. I still don't know who I will settle on (if I don't just stop); Jarl, Suvi and Vetra are the front runners. Cora would actually be my pick, by apparently she is only an option for male Ryder. (Aside, I refuse to believe that whoever settled on the name "Ryder" for the character did not know /exactly/ what they were doing).

D has generously (or possibly in self defence) been letting me have all the time I need. Speaking (typing) of D, her "Experiencing Epilepsy" quilt has racked up another award, getting "best art quilt" at The Great New Zealand Quilt Show and images of her newer pieces (works in progress or small quilts for fundraising auctions) are being very well received online. #proud

There have continued to be issues with the estate / house sale, which I am not going to go into here.

Circling back, I've also not been keeping up social contacts beyond reading social media. At least twice recently I've been surprised to learn of developments in peoples lives that I feel I should have been proactively keeping up enough contact in some form to be aware of. It's also been really hard for me to see some friends and acquaintances going through hard times and not have the financial/time/energy resources to just reach out and help the way I used to. I accept that the problem is systemic, but...

On a related note while the recently released government budget included some low hanging fruit which was well overdue to be plucked, there was nothing there to do the heavy lifting of raising the base line, which is what is needed. My vote will stay where it is in the upcoming election (Greens) and I urge everyone else to vote Labour or leftwards, it would be nice to see TOP get a seat but I'm not going to chance my vote on it.

~~~

A bit over a month ago we adopted a second cat. Ellie (Eleanor) Kat is a pale tabby, about 7 years old according by her teeth according to the vet, bigger and more playful than Gytha and also much firmer about enforcing her boundaries on people with teeth and claws.

Her owner had died and she had been living outside with one-a-day human contact since. D & E fell in love with her from the photo in the FB post, and so did I a little bit so the vote was 2 1/2 to 1/2 in favour. Gytha was very not-impressed with the new addition to the household (Ellie was completely unconcerned about the presence of another cat, beyond self defence) but we have progressed from hissing/growling matches and stand offs to them being somewhere between wary and comfortable in each other's presence as long at the half-metre distance isn't pressed. Gytha has also become much more peopley, but interestingly also more interested in play.

Ellie is also used to a much larger territory (Gytha has always stuck pretty close to property boundaries) leading to several evenings spent herding her home from a block away when we first started letting her out.

I also think the household dynamic has improved with D having a cat she can call "hers" :)