Marsden is Here

Reading my state-of-me from the beginning of last year I am in an amazing different place. Now a great deal of this is down to the presence of one particular lady (D) in my life, but the overall trajectory was upwards. Mind you I was in a pretty bad space to start with and through at least the first half of the year if my writing is to be believed.

Stream of consciousness as reading through 2017 journal entries.

Standing desk - still going. Cat has mostly ignored her box in favour of perching between me and the rightmost monitor and demanding attention; cause of quite an amount of frustration over the year. Later in the year I upgraded the leftmost monitor to an actual monitor donated by my neighbours during a garage sale and this has made quite a difference.

I have not opted to (attempt to) switch to a standing desk at work.

Speaking of work although my hours have improved dramatically at least over the latter months of the year my ability to accurately estimate and complete work to-time has if anything been worse. Partly this may be that
- I am dealing with more complex projects, or
- that I am no longer making /simple/ mistakes or that our in-house code base has been rewritten multiple time with ever more abstraction by one of the other programmers so when something isn't working it is taking me longer to find out /why/
- I am taking more time to write up provide our clients with clear instructions for the use of their systems

I am investing more time in planning out projects at the request-for-quote stage in hopes of solving this next year. It feels awkward; I'm still locked into an out-of-whack mental model somehow but I have at least come closer to identifying the exact mental block.

Finances: During the first half of the year I made good progress at putting aside the money for the next stage* of house renovations. About July I took a calculated gamble to help bail out some young acquaintances who had run into difficulty; this did end up costing me significantly more than originally expected (and continues to) but they are mostly in more stable positions and self-supporting now. (After some unrelated expenses this month I expect to be able to start rebuilding my week-to-week base and saving again in February.)

* I say "stage" but it's become apparent that this will have to be practically a complete internal refurbishment; from wall insulation through redecoration ceiling-to-floor and redoing the kitchen. Savings will not suffice; I expect the mortgage to be painfully large again at the end of it.

Managed a little reading through the year but not as much as I would have liked. There are still columns of RPG books and a couple of novels sitting on my bedroom desk waiting. There are also still tasks on my to-do list from January last year which are still outstanding. But D has been visiting from Wellington over the Xmas/NY period and although this has meant a lot of time in companionable activities we are now getting into a pattern which reinforces time and motivation to be productive for both of us.

Social: there were quite a few social events throughout the year as represented by the many photo galleries published. However the distribution was a bit different; while there were many of the same people attending the context was less KAOS-specific and more KAOS-adjacent. I found myself categorising many which I would once have automatically put in the KAOS folder as events either hosted by friends who happen to have been KAOS and are now more-or-less out in the real world, or by friends who I met through their attendance at some KAOS parties but whose lives and primary social circles are elsewhere.

Hosted the 48 hour party for a second year; event was again a success.

Gaming: My Broken Kingdoms game continues, we had a little player turnover during the year and have changed day. I think there is about a year of play time left in it but a great deal depends on the directions the party choose to take at this point.

The other group I play in regularly went through a couple of mini-campaigns and is currently on an indefinite hiatus although I hold out hope for a restart in the new year.

I /finally/ managed to write up the final chapter of the Anthony saga from a few years ago.

Board games were regular; I did sacrifice a lot of SAGA nights in favour of working late and there were a lot more which really didn't do anything for me. The couple of events I hosted were poorly attended. I did sign up for Board game arena so D and I can play online (especially in the evenings as we wind down from the day in our respective beds).

Hall: my commitments weighed heavily particularly through the middle of the year but have eased; particularly with one of the other team members freeing up to supervise bookings again. Significant progress was made on several working bee projects; the credit primarily goes to A and friends but it has been good to see.

National events: the big one of 2017 was the general election. I wrote a couple of other things after the event.