January to
March 2023
03/20/2023 | What a weirdly eventful month this continues to be. (Suicide mention in next paragraph!)
The day after I posted last, my partner found out that one of his very closest friends committed suicide. It's not my place to go into the details, but it's been a hard week. His other friends and family have been checking in on each other and offering support and distractions, but I can feel the ache in all of them. =( It's not my first go with this process, but it doesn't necessarily lessen the blow either.
The death of Lance Reddick shortly after hasn't helped. Destiny is one of his favourite passtimes, so his own personal grief and that community grief has been a lot, and I hadn't mentioned it but my father had a health scare at the beginning of the month and his dad currently has covid (thankfully he's vaccinated) so we're doing our best to stay afloat together.
To regain some feeling of control (but mostly because I was two months overdue for it), I bleached my roots and redyed my hair. Even though I've been doing this since 2016, it's always such a relief once it's done. I feel more whole and put together with fresh color in my hair. My Dad every so often tries to gently remind me that I may have to give it up for professional reasons someday, but I don't think I will unless I suddenly pick up expertise in a very white collar or conservative industry, neither of which I have. So teal!Dryad is here to stay for a while longer yet.
03/12/2023 | Happy Sunday, friends. I hope you're nice and cozy and enjoying the slow turn of the season from winter to spring. I started seeing spring birds in February this year, so it's felt very slow in my area, but I'm tarting to see buds forming and early leaves growing and little sprouts bursting from the ground. Winter is a hard season for me, and it's hard for me to shake the cold from my bones some years, so I'm hoping this slower transition will be a little gentler.
I started a new job this past week, and gods am I sore! It's a nice feeling to actually feel physically tired instead of just mentally exhausted, but I forgot about entire muscle groups that could hurt, lmao. I'm cautiously optimistic that this'll be a good fit for me, and the pay's not awful for what it is so we won't be cutting into our savings quite as much and can hopefully start working on some other future goals.
My partner has been asking me what I want to do for my birthday at the end of the month, and I've been at a loss. ^^; We never ended up taking that trip last year with how miserable both of our jobs were at the time, and it probably won't be in the cards this year either with the new job. He suggested taking a day trip to a zoo that I've been wanting to visit since I moved up here, but part of me wants to do something closer to home. I might find a nice hike for us and maybe we can go out for lunch after. There's also a pottery studio close to us that does classes I've been wanting to check out, so maybe I'll suggest that? Idk, I'm so hesitant to make plans after the disappointment of repeatedly having to cancel things due to the pandemic. Don't get me wrong, it was the right thing to do, and I don't regret doing so, but I also don't need any more bad associations with my birthday than I already have.
03/02/2023 | Good evening friends new and old! How have things been? I am plunking away at my goals for the year over here and there's already been some reevaluating about what's keeping me from meeting them. Still working on committing to letting myself be bad at things so that I can improve, even just an inch at a time.
If you haven't seen via my neocities profile, I've been making lots of updates! Most of the website is mobile responsive with the exception of the the house, the aquarium, and the garden. Of those, the garden got a complete overhaul, and I added a host of new graphics to it, though I still have plans to expand it further. I also recently reorganized my blinkies onto racks like a madman, but I'm very pleased with the result. From here, I'm probably going to start updating content on some of my half-finished pages (looking at you, dragon age shrine) and providing content updates to others (animal crossing and pokemon shrines most notably) before I start making new stuff that I'm chomping at the bit to do.
(Only mildly related, but all the spring cleaning around here inspired me to update my tumblr theme as well! I did not personally code that layout as tumblr's code shenanigans are a lot to wrap my brain around, but it's nice to have a fresh coat of paint on it. Shout out to glenthemes.)
Otherwise, things have been pretty quiet around here since we got back from visiting my partner's family which I'm relieved about! The trip was a lot of fun with much good food and celebrating of the superbowl and some thrifting and divine homemade jams from his grandma, but it was very go go go for most of the week, and I was so oversocialized by the time we got home. ^^; I miss getting to travel more, and we have another trip planned to jump down to Portland next month as well as figuring out when we'll be visiting my family, so this won't be the end of trips for the year!
02/08/2023 | Happy early out of touch Thursday, lol. This is your irregularly scheduled, totally-not-procrastinating-before-travel Dryad checking in. Not much new has happened since we got back from Ireland aside from a friend's birthday party, my getting glasses for the first time, and a job interview that I haven't heard back about. The party was fun, the glasses are an adjustment (I've never heard of people having like, dizziness while adjusting but apparently it's a thing, and I'm frustrated no one warned me =((( ), and I guess at this point I'm just resigned to not hear back from potential employers (but I'm still kinda hopeful, the commute would literally be 10 minutes!).
We're heading to visit my partner's family tomorrow and then driving to meet some of his other family. It'll be some intense days of travel! But I'll get to see Oklahoma and Texas for the first time outside of literally just the airport which I'm kinda excited for even though everyone's told me not to expect much. =P I just like roadtrips! And what a treat to neither have to drive nor navigate! So I'll just get to stare out the window until my travel sickness meds kick in or sleep or play on my switch or whatever.
When we get back, I'm hoping to do some big updates to the site, it just may take a bit til they visibly go live. A lot of my code is haphazardly built and not mobile optimized and while certain pages will probably never be optimized, I'd still like to clean up the ones that I can so that future me has less work to do. I think I also wanna make some graphics for myself. I'm not a great artist (traditionally or digitally), but I'll never improve if I never try, right?
01/19/2023 | Have a warm beverage and a treat, friends~ Have you rested today? Celebrated your successes? Make sure you're not focusing on work and the somedays too much to enjoy right now. I'm very guilty of forgetting this like... very often, but I can see the progress! I've gotten better, and we can be here for each other.
My partner and I just got back from visiting my dad in Dublin, which was really lovely. We live in different states to begin with, but he's going to be out there for work for some not-quite-determined amount of time, so I'm really grateful that we were able to go since I don't know when I'll be able to see him next. =C We went to a number of museums though (my partner very lovingly humored my excitement at the archaeology museum) and a few great restaurants and the zoo and did so much walking! It made me really long to live somewhere where walking felt like an option and not a great hurdle of last resort. Otherwise, jetlag is a curse, and I am ready to not be tired, lol.
While we've been recovering, we finished Mass Effect 3 (his first rodeo, but decidedly not mine), and I'm finding myself caught in this feeling of unsatisfaction and wanting more. I was there Gandalf when ME3 came out and the whole debacle-fiasco-whatever you'd like to call the reaction to the end of the game happened, and I'd hoped that distance of a decade would help it land a little better but alskdfj;askdjf;a. =T I think having such an unsatisfying ending for the third installment in the trilogy is made all the worse by how much I like the conclusions to the other two games? Big shrug emoji, it's still one of my favourite video game series and it saw me through some of the worst years of my life, so I have a soft spot for them (much like Dragon Age, which has its own share of issues). Maybe this'll actually get me to make my Mass Effect shrine!
01/04/2023 | Happy belated new year, all! I hope life is treating you kindly, and if not, I hope you can at least find some kindness for yourself.
I'm doing my best! I'm feeling weirdly optimistic about this year, and while my natural inclination is to temper those feelings (especially considering the last time I felt like this was the beginning of 2020...), I'm trying to just let myself enjoy the excitement for now. I put my goals for the year up on my noteboard (except for some personal ones that I don't need to discuss with the void of the internet) and am planning to keep notes on when they get done.
Speaking of noteboards! Grim (Bisuko) made his own and I absolutely love it and you should all go see it. =3