Life and family update

[marsden_online]

D and I have now been a couple for six years. Our relationship has ups and downs but an abundance of mutual respect and a commitment to talking things through as they arise has seen us through without approaching any breaking points. We don't get as much "us" time as either of us would like, as I try and time together alongside as much work time as I can manage[1], house and garden duties[2] and time just for me[3].

[1] My pay rise at the beginning of the year came with the loss of the last of D's disability support and a drop in our WFF payments for E; which still left us a little ahead but since then the cost of our insurances in particular has jumped sharply. D's car insurance went up over 50%, complicated by the loss of part of her no-claims bonus, but house, contents, and most of the health insurances have also had steep increases. Add in the general cost of living increases and every dollar I can push myself to earn - without triggering burn out - counts.

We've had to not bring the boys down for the next holidays, we simply can't afford the flights.

However we're now past the worst of the winter power bills so hopefully we can start building up the reserve again to afford the next round of known expenses coming in November/December.

My body clock has also stabilised, it's not what I want it to be but at least most days I reach the office about the same time (half an hour either side of midday). Still going in for ~half-a-day most weekends.

[2] In addition to my regular indoor house-care duties, and picking up whatever the other occupants haven't managed recently, I have in the past ~month managed to de-stone about another square metre of the front wasteland, de-swamp the gutters (last weekend) which weren't completely as bad as I had feared, and dig over / plant potatoes in another section of the bank (yesterday).

[3] See also: not triggering burn out. I made it an intention of this year to take more time for myself instead of constantly putting other people's requests first, which has seen only mixed success. In practice this has been more-or-less deactivating my brain and playing computer games - previously Mass Effect: Andromeda as mentioned in an earlier post but currently I have traded Path of Exile (E was monopolising the main computer for Genshin Impact for a while) for Hero Wars after seeing ads for it for years.

There's another whole post in that, but I've found that as a "casual" player who is aware of the gamification and has the self control to ignore the incentives to spend real money, it provides a lot of gameplay for no actual expense. It is well done enough that when finances are better I will probably spend a little money on it, just as I did with POE and have yet to do but its still on my list with Star Realms.

D, bless her heart, has joined me in playing it so that we can spend time together doing the same sort of thing and helping each other out in the few co-operative modes that the game has.

What hasn't been happening very much - because work is taking the vast bulk of my mental and emotional energy/brain/spoons, is any progress on personal actual projects :( I haven't really added to this list, but I also haven't significantly reduced it at all.

There have been a number of in-person social events I would have liked to attend recently but scheduling conflicts / lack of energy have meant missing most of them. There was a KAOS not-the-48-hour-party over two evenings this weekend which I did manage to attend, although neither night attracted above drinkies numbers (so I didn't bother breaking out my camera) I was able to enjoy catching up with some people. On the flip side some of the negative feelings I used to experience back when KAOS parties were a 50/50 "will I enjoy myself or will I leave utterly depressed" also decided to remerge :/

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Other news

Ellie and Gytha are still not friends, but they mostly tolerate each other's proximity. At some point Ellie got tired of Gytha's attitude and started standing up for herself.

Gytha (void cat on the left) and Ellie (tabby cat on the right) sitting upright in close proximity but carefuully not looking directly at each other

E has officially been diagnosed with "high functioning" autism, which opens up pathways for dealing with some of the challenges they have been encountering with school. We got really lucky, one of D's quilting contacts turned out to be in private practice diagnosing autism and other learning disorders, and needed a case study to progress on a qualification they they are working on. In exchange for E being said case study we got to jump the queue and a substantial discount on the usual ~$1500 assessment fee.

D's quilting continues to progress although there are no new items that I can show off here until after the next round of exhibitions. This has been greatly helped by a quilting friend donating access to their quilting space and long-arm sewing machine. This has enabled D to work on larger quilts without sending them out for (expensive) 3rd-party quilting, and proven to be much better for her back and shoulders than working at her little machine. Unfortunately - cost of the actual machine aside - it is not feasible for us to add one to the limited space in our little house, so once the estate is sorted out (more issues which I am not going to go into here) we will definitely be looking to upsize.

The Star Trek game we were playing in has petered out - two players where taken out by their work lives and the remaining four of us proved too intermittently available to get regular critical mass.