Marsden is Here

So, 2024. We've kept our heads above water but little more. Ever in hope of the bulk of D's inheritance actually arriving which has seen delay after delay. It means we've periodically shifted into house-hunting mode as with D's youngest, R, coming to live with us ... in less than a week now ... and D desperately needing more studio space we have outgrown this little house. We're poised to put the property the market (contract signed etc) as soon as we have somewhere else we can offer on. We've seen a good number of places that would work excellently for us, or be they mostly at the very upper end of what we expect to be able to afford, and sales in that space have been slow so I'm confident we will be able to find somewhere.

The landscaping on this property has been done, just lawn, gravel and a little wall along the back bank, thanks to a loan from parental unit which will be paid back when house is sold.

Work this year has been solid, no dramas. The NDRI prescribed by my new doctor seems to be working, I've been able to keep focus a lot better although this hasn't actually increased the number of hours I can manage :( But I'll take writing better code that I'm more confident in / happier with as a win. I've also had more energy for chores around the house in the mornings, though not a lot more mental/emotional spoons outside of work.

Gaming - not much, in person anyway. A short campaign at the beginning of the year while A was in the country. A couple of visits to J & T's. Mostly it's just D and I on BGA, Terraforming Mars mostly with Wingspan, Seven Wonders Duel, or Race for the Galaxy when we don't have enough time/spoons for TM. D gave me Masters of Orion 3 for Xmas so we had an actual computer game that we could play together, the MOO games are exactly one of my cups of digital tea so I may lose more time to that on single player than I should.

Family-wise - D & I had our big trip to Sydney, and we'll have been married 5 years in two short weeks. On one of the boys' visits down R discovered that D keeps all his cards and drawings and stuff and had a bit of an epiphany about how much his Mum loves him (and a consequential emotional overload episode). That's contributed to him expressing his desire to try living/schooling down here for at least a year. E has had a bit of a roller-coaster year including more diagnoses, but has really blossomed in/from their drama group and grown in confidence overall.

We lost Gytha of course, which was a big blow to all of us. It was a bad year for pets - I lost count of how many friends and acquaintances also had to send fur-children over the rainbow bridge.

D has continued to go from strength to strength in her quilting with more exhibitions, more prizes (including a viewers choice), and of course Epilepsy's acceptance into the Houston International Quilt Show. We did manage to raise enough funds to send her there, I'm very proud of her receiving 3 out of 3 funding applications as well as very grateful to everyone who contributed to the GiveALittle. Once she actually gets the write up posted on her website I'll come back and link to it. She had an intense and inspiring time.

~~~

I have taken the work shutdown as holidays again this year, and intended to take it easy. In actuality my time has been mostly taken up with end-of-year administration, reinstalling 2 PCs and 2 laptops (so far) with slimmed down versions of Windows 10/11 in anticipation of increased household computing needs, and "spring" / pre-sale cleaning and clean-out, and I don't feel rested /at all/.

E is at their father's for Xmas/NY so D & I have theoretically had a quiet couple of weeks together. In actuality between our body clocks running almost completely opposite hours at the moment and a mutual lack of spoons we haven't seen as much of each other as we would have liked, nor to get out and visit friends. D has spoiled me with dinners and baking though <3

I don't know if I have fallen through the void and out the bottom, or pulled back a little, but by the end of yesterday I was left feeling a great nothingness. It has receded a little this evening to leave just exhaustion and general grumpiness.

I know I have been struggling the past week. Pushing things and giving too much to others. There just doesn't seem to have been very much time/opportunity for me to take for myself.

My body clock has shifted two more hours in the wrong direction, now apparently on a 2am to midday sleep cycle. (My own fault for staying up to 2am playing FreeCiv one night last weekend). This has knock on effects to the hours I am working.

Work/life hours have /not/ fallen out as expected. Although I am mostly sticking to the plan of a couple of hours work, some downtime/chores, repeat, I am not finishing work by early evening to then relax / spend time with D. as the maths would suggest. One evening I finished work at midnight. Other activities I have been called on to continue into the evening even though I think I am pretty clearly, explicitly sometimes, operating past the limits of my exhaustion have finished later.

I have not managed any time on my own projects at all unless you count the gardening, where I have managed to keep pruning the hedge at one green-bin per week, and a little computer gaming.

Then last night (in addition to the nothingness) I got trapped listening to an audiobook and didn't get to any kind of sleep until after 5am, eventually emerging after 2pm. Heaven knows what effect that will have. Until a few minutes ago I was not sure if I would go to bed at a reasonable time tonight because I feel exhausted or if I will try and stay up all night and tomorrow, but now I think it will be bed. I am just not sure if I will get to sleep.

This article from Rands seems appropriate

The experience was the same on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Wake-up, get ready, sit down for the 9am meeting and BAM it’s 6pm, I haven’t really eaten, the sun is going down, and I have a slight headache. Part of this focus is certainly a coping mechanism. I seek normality because everything else appears broken. The absence of calm that comes with standing up, walking across the building, being out of the meeting mindset, letting my mind wander, and unwinding is startling.
Rands in Repose: The Housekeeping of the Intangible

Except it's not BAM, because time drags, my focus is not great and while I am making probably adequate process on my work projects it doesn't feel like I am making /enough/ given current urgency. But there are no breaks of the sort that I suppose having to pop out an move the car to a new parking space, or the 20 minute commute to/from work enforced. I switch from work mode to home (chores/relationship) mode and back again.

Even my hoped for downtime today has been mostly hijacked. I'm not complaining too much because the outcome of this will be a gaming group starting back up, but it was a serious effort for me to participate.

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.

Lying in bed this morning I managed to identify the thing mostly keeping me in bed was a mental rejection of tackling anything that resembled "work". Going to work, or picking any of the things on my to do list to spend some time on or even ultimately going to gaming tonight. So I decided to call in sick and spend most of the day napping or in front of the fire.

Ironically once that decision was made my brain then immediately switched mode to firing all available cylinders on a quote-request for a major project which has been sitting in my mailbox since Friday. So I just spent two hours working from home on that, and am currently taking a break before finalising the email.

I suspect this will be followed by a variety of other productive activities around the house, possibly interspersed with naps followed by cheerfully going to gaming.

So it seems that a big part of not getting going in the morning is something to do with being /expected/ to get up and do things. As soon as I am no longer "expected" to do anything it's full steam ahead :/

Need to figure out how to leverage this.

Jotted in my Fb this morning:

Feels stuck in a holding pattern destination unknown.
This is not doing any for the areas of my life which require me to be self-motivating. Which is having flow-on effects for others ...

The area in particular is work where I am managing closer to minimum hours than maximum; which means that projects I am working on are not being delivered as quickly as they might (should) be; which must flow on to the client's perception of the company.
I am managing good periods of focus - the hours I am at work are being well spent and the work I am doing at present is challenging and a learning experience. But I might describe it like a favoured food - it's still not something you want to eat every day. This is in comparison to a staple food, which you can have for e.g. breakfast every day. As my source of income I really need to be able to chew through work every day.

Planning to do other things before work isn't helping; do things (housework, writing) before work and I am afraid I will be out of spoons before I get there. The result is I cannot be bothered getting out of bed until not only is it to late to do whatever I had planned but too late to get to work at the time I would like to (not that I am achieving that with any regularity anyway).
Scheduling things after work is a little better; but the usual pattern is I am a little less late than usual and work harder down to the wire where I have to leave.

Before work also usually means someone at the Hall (because for it to be something I have to keep to there have to be other people involved). And for all that many people are enjoying their association with that place and I still feel it is where I can make the most difference right now - as a project it's not returning/achieving what I'm looking for and I feel hamstrung by others lack of commitment and follow through.

And for all it feels like a holding pattern objectively most areas of my life are progressing nicely.
- Gaming continues to be excellent, with the recent, possibly temporary; addition of non-junk-food/meals to my mid-week game making it feel less like a group of over-aged teens and more like a group of actual grown-up friends socialising (this is a new experience).
- A deposit is down for solar panels to be added to the house, measurements taken and it is currently at the design stage; I don't mind if it's stalled there as I wasn't originally budgeting to initiate the project until next spring/summer.
- by my maths I will finish paying off my student loan this month and be properly debt-free - plus an effective pay rise of some tens of dollars a week.
- even the recent plumbing issues may have a silver lining in that I may discover that the next major project *needs* to be the kitchen; which would simplify certain decision trees.
- I have built a small reserve of money and investments - a long way away from closing off the mortgage aka emergency fund or living off the interest, but it feels those might one day be possible.
... if I can keep myself working and earning. Back to the start.

There's a little ... verse I found running around in my head in the car on Monday -
"Want to make a difference;
need the resources to make a difference;
back to working in an attempt accumulate the resources;
will I ever have enough to to make that difference?"

Last night (well this morning) I had dreams of epic length even by my standards. The sort where your bladder drags you out of bed midway for a toilet break, but that is only a temporary escape. The content was not pleasant either.

( long post is long )

A month or so ago I jotted in my tumblr

Questions of myself
What are you trying to do?
Prove Worthy
Worthy of what?
Not of what, of whom.

( once upon a time )

One of the things on my to-do list for this holiday was to step back and assess my life from the new vantage provided by higher mood. To see what looks different from up here and what new options may be visible; to see if there is anything old or new I now feel it is within my power to change for the better.

This post pulls together some of those thoughts.

( insecurity )

( procrastination )

( fear/pain )

This post has felt like forcing myself open from the inside and I've procrastinated more than a little while writing it, but I think I have reached some insights. Still more yet to come, later.

Expectations. Often I exceed them - especially work-related stuff. Sometimes I'm oblivious to them - especially relationship-oriented stuff. Almost invariably the fact that I do not meet them leads to at best surprise, at least confusion and at worst anger.
( long ramble needs to be got out of brain )

Cracked.com has a post on some of the cultural programming that men encounter about women. (And let's not forget that women are exposed to the same messages.)

I'm still turning over how much some of these memes might have had an influence on me (that they have is undeniable) but I actually want to spin off one line of the article to go into something more personal.

So, from about age 13 on, around 90 percent of our energy and discipline is devoted to overcoming this, to behave like civilized human beings ...

The rest of the sentence isn't really relevant. This sums up where an awful lot of my spoons go when I'm out in public, and even when I'm communicating (or deciding whether or not to communicate) online.

Maybe other people internalise it better, maybe my routines just run closer to the conscious mind such that I can observe them. They include
- don't stare
- give everyone due attention/acknowledgement
- think before you speak. Then think again.
- don't marginalise
- avoid anything likely to give offence
- try to avoid preconceptions about people
- recognise and counter internalised biases stemming from culture/privilege
- avoid anything likely to give offence (yes I know I put it twice)

These are habits that have formed over decades. They override my basic mode of interaction which is pretty arrogant and abrasive. Mostly they're OK because courtesy is the grease which keeps the wheels of society turning, and the cycles spent on these sort of things are just one of the prices we pay for the benefits. That I may have to spend relatively more of my resources (that's what it often feels like) in the process is just one of those things.

Being the type of person I am these habits are very firmly ingrained. So far that it becomes a problem in situations where for not-so-random example flirting would be appropriate, maybe even invited*. In any more intimate situation where communication requires doing or saying things which would not be acceptable in a wider social situation, or in a formal situation where a likely hurtful opinion/criticism needs to be expressed - the habits don't differentiate. "Acceptable" and "non-upsetting" override "desired" and sometimes even "necessary".

So in these situations I stall. Why? Because just the other side of those habits - which are safety catches - lies a pool of anger and violence that I can only see unlocking as a valid response in extreme cases. And - here's the real problem - that I don't want to risk opening accidentally on anyone I care about. Or, anyone I might be having a good time with who hasn't signed up to deal with my baggage.

~~~
*I'm probably doing myself no favours admitting as a 30mumble guy that I don't know how to progress when a woman is interested in me, even if I happen to have picked up the signals.