Marsden is Here

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].

( snip )

Some months ago we were given notice of my brother (B) and his fiancé's (R) wedding, to be held beach-side in the the Coromandel. After looking at the costs and logistics of flights, rental cars etc just for a weekend trip versus the cost of the ferry, and discovering that there was a quilt show on that we could feasibly visit en-route, the decision was made that we could afford for me to take a week and a half off work, E would be taken out of school (which she could mostly keep up with remotely) and we would make an overdue family holiday of it, visiting places that D hadn't been in years and completely new territory for the other two of us.

( long post is long )

With E away visiting for this school holidays and D in Wellington for part of school holidays / all of quilting symposium, my expectation was that I would be able to take the energy I normally spend on them and redirect it to a) easier work hours b) downtime c) catching up with people I haven't seen in ages and d) the long list of things wanting to be done around the house.

Narrator: this did not happen.

( mental health dump )

The last two weeks have been school holidays, which was intended to mean instead of losing ~2 hours a day to getting E to and from school I would be spending that time at work. Unfortunately for the first week a mild-but-enough-to-mean-stay-home head cold struck the human members of the household (I was still able to work from home, but at decreased efficiency) and this week even with the boys visiting mornings have been really hard. Back to not being able to get myself out of bed hard, compounded by what I have come to realise is a bad case of revenge procrastination keeping me awake on my phone until well after I should be asleep.

So this post is about control, or the lack thereof which I have been wrestling with (and losing). Arguably despite /feeling/ in control of my life for much of it I have very rarely actually tried to exert any, being mostly comfortable with where the flow of things took me. I may have regrets...
( snip )

Well, what a year. One might have thought that getting married in January would mean the rest of the year would seem relatively uneventful, but Covid was already on the horizon.

Lockdown itself didn't affect us much, as I was able to work from home and otherwise we don't get out much anyway. Deciding that it was time to sell the house and move on came as a surprise, and the subsequent accommodation-related and money stresses have probably defined or at least outlined my life since. We were supposed to have foundations by this point, instead the consents have only just gone to council.

Work remains stable although I have been struggling more and more to make my targeted hours. We did take on a new programmer (after years of needing one) just after lockdown which has redistributed the load in a good way. I'm now primarily stressed only by not getting whatever my current project is out in a timely fashion and not also by the queue of waiting projects and have managed to find time to spend on future-time-saving improvements to our CMS and experimenting with better/alternate workflows.

Other things which have been chewing up my time included aforementioned property matters and looking after D who has sprained her "on" shoulder twice this year, once at the beginning of lockdown and again a few weeks ago (same shoulder, different muscle). If the inset sewing table I brought her for Xmas prevents a future occurrence it will have paid for itself in saved medical costs. The latter has also meant I have no choice but to shoulder more of the housework.

Time to myself has become more and more rare and is probably partly to blame for my current addiction to the Star Realms game on my phone. I resisted putting any games on this phone for a long time, but I also own the hard-copy version (a prize from Buckets of Dice some years back) and it provides excellent semi-mindless replayability with just enough luck involved that I don't feel bad on the occasions I lose to the AI. The free version is ad-free, but I will at some stage when I don't feel money is so tight drop the $10 to unlock the hard AI and more cards.

Related to this although I am technically on holiday I have been spending 2-5 hours in the office most days working on a project which needs to be done, but can't or won't be afforded by the (non-profit) client and will only continue to be a headache for me (and others) long term if it is not. It's nice and quiet in there with everyone else away and although progress hasn't been as fast as I would like it is still progress and I at least feel that I am achieving something and will eventually have one fewer concern weighing me down. (Also I've been able to quickly jump on the couple of live issues which have come up, so a bit of paid time on top of the annual leave burnt during shutdown.)

Contact with other people has also become more rare and in a lot of ways 2020 has seen further weakening of connections which were already on the way out. I had already been sacrificing attended SAGA for work for a couple of years and I now probably wouldn't recognise anyone on the committee. Gaming with friends has been rare and intermittent, I am enjoying being in the ongoing game Z started late this year.

Lockdown stopped KAOS parties and sheer exhaustion has stopped me/us attending many of the smaller KAOS-adjacent or friends events which I/we have been invited to or for as long as I would have liked. We always planned to start having small groups of friends over for dinner/board games at Gladson but actually organised it maybe twice, and our current flat has been decreed too small to entertain. We did make it to he New Years party which was relatively small and quiet and although I didn't interact much I did enjoy myself.

I still as frequently find myself thinking "I should reach out to [names here] and find out what is really going on in their life" on Facebook or via email/text to catch up, and either not having the energy or not knowing what to open with and not doing it :(

~~~

Society wise

- lockdown(s) affected the country in ways which we probably won't fully understand for decades. I am more grateful than ever to be living where I am in the world, and that we had a government prepared to move fast and "risk the economy", rather than the plentiful counter-examples elsewhere in the western world.

- We had an election which returned that government in the unprecedented position to govern alone under MMP, and we are still waiting to see what they do with that. Significant structural changes to both the education and health systems are happening, it remains to be seen if the latter will be what is needed or any more than shuffling some chairs to the upper deck.
I can understand why they are moving slower on many issues than many people would like, both for long term political reasons and because it takes time to line up major structural change properly. Social welfare benefits should absolutely have been increased by more already though, there better be some damn good announcements coming.

- The same election contained referendums on assisted dying, which brought in a not perfect but also not "poor law is worse than no law" legal support for the option despite outright scaremongering and falsehoods from opposition groups, and narrowly rejected much better law for the legalisation and control of cannabis. Perhaps the next left-wing government will act on this since our current PM has a tendency to say "not on my watch" in response to even middling public opinion against significant law change (see also capital gains tax). (I maintain this is a long term strategy so she can step down and let her successor bring them back to the table).

I generally feel that as a snapshot these events indicate that we are becoming a more progressive society on several fronts, and there is hope on others. Not however on the housing market front :( Any money the government puts into the economy seems to end up there somehow, either landlords putting up rents to match benefit increases or investors taking advantage of ever lower interest rates to buy up even more properties.

~~~

Going forward: basically I feel that I am surviving, little more. One more day, one more closer to house. Everything is an effort, often including spending time with my wife :( There is still time for something disasterous to come out of the White House or the stacked administration which it is leaving behind.

Still standing, but staggering.

( 3000+words later ... )

So that's where I'm at. Me having time to achieve things for me and my sanity, let alone spend the time doing things with D which she deserves looks to be mortgage-paid-off-and-retirement time away, which at this rate means I will be about 85. It's not a sustainable situation, but I have very few ideas of how to remedy it that I have not already tried and failed over the years.

pushed myself past my limits
physically, mentally, emotionally
broken

Depressed over not being able to help fix the world's problems when I cant even get my own house (literal and metaphorical) sorted cleaned and in order. I am managing /something/ almost every day but just don't seem to be getting to the big tasks which are staring me in the face every day.

~~~
Thursday was a public holiday and I exhausted myself physically doing overdue cleaning - the shower, the toilet, the fridge - even without doing a complete job of any of them. I find myself exhausted myself today just from trimming a green-bin full of branches off the hedge.

(I was glad to see that at least one of the pansies I transplanted from the middle of the back wasteland to a garden bed appears to have survived and is putting up new growth. In my experience they are tough little plants.)

I have exhausted myself mentally at work. It looks like the pay rise I asked for isn't coming so I feel I have little choice but to to work more/better hours. But right now the extra time I am pushing myself to do is going on preparations for the final stage (going live) of a project I am no longer billing for because it went so far over estimate. It is one I am very emotionally involved in doing properly (and could cost the company a very valuable client if the final stage gets cocked up).

I have further exhausted myself mentally and emotionally dealing with the things which require these types of energy at home.

~~~
I am still receiving the alarms and updates of both what has most recently been looted from the Hall and the owner's continued inactivity to even meet their commitments to make the site safe after the fire. All I can say to questions about when we might go back - whether from members of our team or from our contact still there - is "not until it is safe". It is not going to be safe in the foreseeable future.

I had reason to go back to the photos from our first few visits looking for references for some of the stolen fittings, it's heartbreaking seeing even how beautiful the interior - and overgrowth free the exterior - it was then before 8ish years of dirt, damp and deliberate damage and neglect against our best attempts.

An overhaul of the website is one of the many things which need doing that I just haven't managed to get to. I will keep that history there as long as possible.

Meanwhile grief and anger pains rise in my chest with no outlet. While the Hall may be the obvious current source it's not like I'm unused to this state, it seems to have been part of me for most of my life. Keeping pain within so I don't lash out with it and hurt anyone else.

At our ceremony D. talked about how "nothing seems to rattle [me]"; it's just that I am very practiced at putting aside being pain as not being a productive thing right now and this skill is equally applicable to many other things which might get in the way of viewing a situation ... if not clearly at least practically.

But I also know that sometimes to deal with a pain or frustration and move on you have to take it off the shelf, feel it and accept it for what it is. Many, even most are trivial and easily discarded in retrospect. Some, not so much.

~~~
This story moved me greatly this morning,

https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/09-02-2020/a-magic-like-no-other/

Sometimes death comes for the old, and sometimes for the young. And sadly, like life, it rarely makes much sense when it does come.

Not because of any recent deaths; actually I think I am quite lucky to have reached my age without losing too many of my peers. (But Alex, Kirsty, Kaye+Martyn, Geoff immediately come to mind ...) but because I am constantly failing to keep in touch beyond the occasional FB connection even with people I dearly want to. We don't get to sit down - over a meal or board game perhaps - and have conversations about each others lives - not that I ever feel there is much to say about my own which (at least at the moment) doesn't devolve into self pity but I still want to know what is going on with you, the good and the bad.

~~~
D. just opened the door and passed in a plate of hot quiche full of goodness, and I am so grateful to have her in my life even with all the complications and responsibilities that entails.

April, December, September - only managing these big updates every 8 months is suboptimal.

( long )

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.