This was a tough week and I don’t feel like I made much progress. I did stay off social media, but not through any great show of willpower, but because of work. I didn’t have a moment free during the whole week.

I can’t go in details but we were pulling 12+ hour shifts Tuesday – Thursday this week, while at the same time our future at the company is very much up in the air; a 3rd party bought the company I work for as well as another company in the same marketspace, merging the two into one bigger company. They picked the CEO of the other company to run the new, combined company (good choice as our CEO wasn’t great). So now there are two web teams (as well as 2 IT teams, 2 HR teams, 2 everything teams) and these need to be combined into one, with the assumption (by me at least) that there’s going to be redundancies. Having Something Bad happen on our team this week was about the worst possible timing. So far it seems like most of the redundancies have been from our company, not the other one. Understandable, I guess, that the CEO prefers to keep people he’s been working with. But having this problem happen with our sites will not make him more apt to choose to keep us. So who knows what will happen. Anxiety fuel for sure, though.

Friday afternoon/evening Partpurple had a craft show. I was supposed to have the afternoon off to help her out but due to the Bad Things I had to negotiate with my manager to get a break to help Purple transport and unload her gear, then I came back home to finish working. When that was finally done I went back over to her show. She did OK as these things go and I actually sat at the bar (the craft show was held at a local microbrewery) and had a couple beers while chatting with folks. I have not sat at a bar in probably a decade at this point and I quite enjoyed it. By the time we got home we were pretty much spent and I’d logged 12K+ steps when my average is about 5K.

Saturday it was pouring rain in the morning. We decided that was a sign it was time for a rest day. I spent the morning doing the things I’ve been trying to give up: earning MS Rewards points. Haven’t been able to shake that habit yet. When we had a break in the rain we unloaded her car (we’d left most of her stuff in it Friday night since it was raining when we got home) and packed everything away until the next show. Saturday after lunch I jumped into the new story content for Neverness to Everness version 1.3. Spent a solid few hours getting through that. Maybe I’ll do a post on it. I also took rather a long nap which felt pretty well-deserved after the week I’d had.

Saturday evening we watched a bad movie on Netflix (The Last House… it was super stupid and not even in a very fun way) and soon after I was ready for more sleep. Kind of a non-day.

Sunday I got up and headed over to a ‘riverwalk’ park that I hadn’t visited yet. I saw an alligator. PartPurple and I have had a running joke where I swear alligators are mythical creatures because we’ve lived down here for, I dunno, 12 or 13 years and I’d never spotted one, only constant warning signs about them. Now I know they are real. 🙂

It was an OK walk. Not very long; I had to do two laps to get to 5K steps. And it’s kind of a serpentine path in what is actually a fairly small area so, overall it was mid, as the kids say. (Do the kids still say that?) Still searching for the best walking spot for when I want something other than to go around an asphalt loop.

After lunch I started writing this post, then played more Neverness To Everness. Sadly I think I might be done with NTE. This patch brought the story content I got through yesterday (and didn’t enjoy that much). Today I tried some of the other activites. Did all the personal-vehicle (can’t say Jet Ski cuz copyright) races which were super easy. I tried the volleyball but found it hard to get the hang of. I enjoy the world of NTE but these days it’s mostly grinding out boss fights and I honestly don’t find the combat that interesting. Anyway this isn’t an NTE review post.

I did sit down in a cozy corner away from screens and read a magazine of short stories for about an hour. I keep telling myself I’m going to read more then never get around to it. So that was one of the few wins of this week.

Then it back to the comforting electronic glow of screens. I saw what looked like an interesting video series on YouTube: Joanna Lumley, who to me is just Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous, has a documentary series about traveling up the Nile. That sounded so odd to me, but it was almost an hour long (pretty sure it aired on BBC or something originally, back in 2010) which is generally way too long for a YouTube video. But I caught myself and decided to devote the time to watching it, and it was pretty good. As good as any other show like this anyway. There’s actually 4 episodes and I’ve book marked the others for watching some time in the future.

Now it’s Sunday evening, back to the Hellmouth tomorrow morning, but for the last couple hours of the weekend I’m going to go play a video game, I guess. Ideally just one, for a couple of hours. All in all I’m a bit disappointed in my progress, or lack thereof, this past week but I will give myself a bit of a pass due to the extenuating circumstances of work turning into such a sh*t show. Ideally I’d like to get to where I’m really sinking my teeth into SOMETHING that feels more substantial than just grazing on social media, video games and YouTube vids. I just don’t yet know what that something is going to be, let alone how to get myself to focus on it. Guess this all takes time.