Recent Updates
5/18/2025 | Happy spring! It feels like the season just suddenly appeared overnight despite me watching the changes closely this year, but it's given me lots of time to get outside. I finally walked the whole loop around the lake nearby with the warm weather, and it's been such a treat. There are a couple of bald eagles, some cormorants, red eared sliders, and a whole host of plants that I'm still learning to identify, and it's been a fun time getting to observe them on my runs.
I took up running again! And have started going to the gym a couple times a week. I briefly ran cross country in middle school, and then took up running again in college, but then I never got back to it when I moved up to Washington even though it's always been a space of calm for me. I'm trying to focus on doing it for fun, doing what feels good, trying to build strength and stability in my body to make it feel like a home again. I feel like my body's had so much happen to it in the last year that it's still trying to heal from that I'm having to start my relationship with it over from scratch in this area and in other areas.
My mom was a bit of a catalyst for this as she bought me some new running shoes when I visited my family for my birthday at the end of March (the ticket was a gift from my partner for said birthday). It was a much needed trip, and I really need to watch ticket prices more closely so I can go down more often. Two days to visit my parents and my brother and my QPP and my best friend was not enough, and organizing everything was so stressful, but the time with everyone did so much good for my heart. It was also nice to see the desert in spring. I love Washington, but I miss the familiarity of desert seasons sometimes.
Other than that (and a too short lived love affair with Kingdom Two Crowns), hobby time has mostly fallen by the wayside. Work has been.... not great. I'm feeling stagnant and a little burnt out. We had some really big changes happen after I got back from my trip, and while I think they will be really good for the long term health of the business, it feels like absolute garbage right now, and we are hella understaffed for it. I've been so brain dead that most of my hobbies (which include a fair bit of brain power and decision making), I have not had the capacity for. But the stagnation, I'm still trying to address. I'm bored in my current role, but with our side of the business as busy as it's been since I was hired two years ago, my manager hasn't been able to train me on the more advanced stuff that I need to know to take things off her plate. It's not even her fault or for lack of her own desire, but we're in this terrible catch-22 of time and mental capacity. I talked to our owner at my annual review that I'd like to find some other professional development opportunities outside of what my manager can teach me, but I think our owner's also so burnt out from the current going ons that she didn't really have any concrete suggestions.
I feel like my fun to do list just keeps getting longer as the days pass, and while my unemployed spells had a lot of anxiety that accompanied them, I am missing the freedom to direct my own days and focus on my passion projects. Definitely some rose colored glasses, but I've always been at my best when I can direct myself and find a flow with my work, but working in a reception environment (now with double the patients) is more for the part of me devoted to service than it is the part of me that likes the gradual progression of working my way through things. This is a good job. Both the business owner and my manager are wonderful, and they have been nothing but supportive through my medical things over the last year, and I would be crazy to consider throwing it away, so I'm really, really hoping when we hire some extra folks that things get better.
2/12/2025 | Life keeps on being busy, but I'm still trying to make more time for my fun stuff including Dryad Glen. =3 Slovene learning is going slowly (as all language learning does at the beginning), and my QPR and I are playing our first session of D&D later today~ My writing for GYWO is behind, but it's still encouraging me to write more, and it feels good to be shaking off the creative dust!
WE ALSO FINALLY BEAT VEILGUARD! owo I'm still mulling over my thoughts on the game, but overall I had a good time playing it. I enjoyed the characters and the environments and lots of little lore details. I do have a fair few criticisms, but they come from a place of love, and I'll have a more in-depth write up on my Dragon Age shrine once the dust has settled. (And I'll probably have some fanfiction to write as I get into the nitty gritty of it lol.)
I don't think I've mentioned here, but my partner's gaming PC has been having issues since Christmas, and I've literally been losing sleep over it. ^^; I finally caved and took it to a repair shop a week ago, and turns out the CPU is shot because there was a bug with some of Intel's 13th/14th gen processors (which I didn't realize when we bought it last year). There is a fix out, you just have to update your BIOS, which I did in the process of troubleshooting, but the damage had already been done. Unfortunately, the company we bought his PC from is unwilling to extend the warranty and has shoddy turn around times. I'm still going to try getting a replacement from that company, but I'm just having the repair shop replace it. Best case senario though, I'll have an extra CPU so I can start piecing together parts to build a PC of my own! (I mostly game on my laptop who is a champ, but gets very hot even with a cooling pad. >.>;;) Worst case, my partner's PC will be fixed in a couple weeks, and I'll be pulling out my call center knowlege to make formal complaints to the original company.
Otherwise, trying to make more plans so we have things to look forward to. Want to talk to my partner about going home to see my folks in the spring for my birthday. We were able to get tickets to see Nine Inch Nails on their tour this summer which I'm so pumped about! There's a balloon festival east of us at the end of the month that I'd like to go to, but it'll depend on the snow/ice driving conditions. (I grew up hot air ballooning, so they hold a special place in my heart!) Just... trying not to drown in the winter sads and overwhelm with the state of the world a little bit at a time. I hope you're all doing as well as you can be and that you're staying warm!
1/29/2025 | Happy belated new years all! I can't believe it's already the end of January. US politics are also in chaos, but I've been trying to focus really hard on what is within my control so that I can keep the anxiety spiralling to a minimum. (Idk if it's working, but anything is worth a shot right now.) I've also been journalling a little more and trying to reach out to friends so that I'm not just endlessly ruminating on things.
Stress aside, it's been a busy start to the year! My mom, who reconnected with our extended family in Slovenia two years ago, and decided to start learning Slovene this year and she asked me if I wanted to join her. I'm really out of practice with language learning (despite still knowing a little Spanish, Italian, and Japanese), but I thought it would be a fun thing to do with her. =3 There aren't a lot of resources for Slovene out there, but I'll probably start a page here when I have a little collection of links to share. (If on the slim chance you're also learning Slovene, I'd be happy to have some other folks to practice with!)
I'm also still moving along on my crochet sweater. I just have to finish the last cuff, sew up the seams, and block her, and then she will be wearable! I've been a little unfocused for crochet, but I think it's because I'm out of "do the same thing with tiny modifications" territory and into "read the directions closely". But hopefully!!! This weekend!!!
On a whim I also joined Get Your Words Out for 2025 with their tiniest wordcount pledge (75,000). I used to be a fairly prolific writer of fanfic (that I never shared, lol) and original fiction (mostly short stories and poetry), but I realized at the end of fall that I was really missing it! I'd wanted something to encourage me to write again (self-motivation is hard), but 200ish words a day didn't seem like such an insane task. I'm still figuring out where to make time in my day to write, especially when I can't be at my laptop, and I'm already behind, but just keeping track of what I have been doing has been strangely encouraging in contrast to other tracking options I've tried.
Slightly related in that I'll be needing to do a little more writing for it, my QPP asked if we could play D&D together! >=) He's only played once, and I've been playing since I was 10 but have never gotten to DM, so we're gonna play around with a smol campaign just the two of us. I'm also jazzed because I sold him on my favourite campaign setting, Eberron, which I've only gotten to play in a little bit, and this is a great excuse to recycle some of my old D&D characters who I never got to play with long term but invested so much love into. I guess it might be time to really commit to making some OC pages here too!