Radio Silence

[oraxia]

So I've sort of ended up doing radio silence by virtue of the fact that I'm just completely a mess right now. Wedding planning messed me up pretty good, and then work decided to go into overdrive (graveyard shifts all last weekend, so my sleep schedule is extra wonky) and I'm not actually sure about when that ship is going to right itself.

Hoookay, let's back up. I guess the last post was from December of 2017. Wow. Let's see what I have to update with...

• So I'm married now, to Carmen. He broke his ankle a month before the wedding, so that made for some fun scrambling and the cancellation of the honeymoon, which I'm now trying to re-plan as our one year anniversary thing (and failing... apparently things are more expensive in the UK now and I may not actually have all of the vouchers for canceled stuff from the original honeymoon in writing, which I thought I did, and that is going to suck because that's even more lost money).
  
• Married home life is actually pretty great, with the exception of having very little space for my stuff (meaning I gotta get rid of stuff, and I am not a KonMari kind of gal... but I'll probably watch her Netflix show anyway just in case it can convince me to give up some of my packrat craft hoarding ways).
  
• Almost all of my houseplants died from a bug infestation, and my outdoor plants are languishing from a lack of attention. It's been hard between the schedule, heavy rain and cold keeping me indoors, and just the sheer constant exhaustion. I'm not being a good plant mom right now :/
  
• My manager lacks significantly more social skill than initially anticipated, which is saying a lot. This may be my first legitimately bad manager, and that's including the one that didn't tell me they were planning to let me drop off the plan (I was notified by my PREVIOUS manager, who noticed it and gave me a heads up so I could find a new position before I got dropped into job limbo... and that's how I got here). Current manager constantly undermines our self-confidence and then berates us for not having more confidence. It's great. Except not. He may also be picking on me individually over the other two on my team (because my team has been reduced from like 7-8 to 3).
  
• work!John hates me now. I have only a vague idea of how this happened--I was under a lot of stress while planning the wedding and he got mad when I told him to do whatever he wanted with something we were working on together because I just couldn't deal at the moment (following getting a disappointment talk from aforementioned manager), and apparently he took it really badly and hasn't talked to me since. In February, that'll be a whole year of not talking to me. He's stopped going to lunch with the work lunch crew, too. Kind of a 360 from hanging out with us outside of work to barely talking to us (except Matthew, whom he'll still talk to on occasion, but apparently only if Matthew initiates). I'm worried about him, and I miss having a boba run buddy.
  
• Work group started a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. I decided to break from my usual rogue/DPS character type and go with a tanky barbarian for a change. I have a lute-playing, glaive-wielding, blue/brass dragonborn barbarian called Cupcake now. I drew a picture of her and stuck it on Instagram. She travels with a couple of weird elf boys. One of them is a drow masquerading as a wood elf (he spends a lot of time in the bathroom every morning re-doing his make-up), and the other one is certifiably insane and possibly evil. Can't wait for work crap to die down so we can get into the next session, hopefully before the drow elf player's move to LA takes him out of the game :/
  
• Oh yeah, I'm sort of posting to Instagram now. I've had the account for a while, but I'm attempting to participate in at least a little social media. National Geographic posts a lot of amazing pictures and stories.
  
• I'm into fountain pens now. My aunt found my great grandfather's fountain pen behind some furniture in my grandmother's old house and gave it to me as part of my wedding gift--this is the grandfather I was named after, so the engraved initials are pretty close to mine. In trying to sort out how to get it repaired so I could use it, I stumbled into the fountain pen community (and some free calligraphy classes at Stanford, so that's pretty awesome). It looks like an expensive hobby, but I figure if I find a good everyday carry pen I can change the ink color whenever and I'm not tossing any disposable pens (which always bothered me), so as long as I don't turn into a pen collector, I'll be fine. Fountain pen ink collecting, on the other hand, is already looking like it's going to be a problem... There are some fancy damn bottles and really cool ink properties, let me tell you!
  
• In an attempt to organize something in my life, I'm trying to start a bullet journal. So far, it is a handy system for a constantly updating to-do list, but the procrastination is strong with this one (meaning me). I am hoping the artsy part of it will help me actually stick with it. It's semi-successful so far, I think, but I'm also using the wrong kind of journal (it's actually a planner that I'm jamming some bullet journal stuff into because I figured I would need training wheels and the old 2018 planner was stupid cheap), so I might be sabotaging myself for now. If it looks like the journal is a problem, I have backup blank journals, so it might not be a disaster. Maybe. Anyone else doing the bullet journal thing?
  

I think those are the main update points. If I find a little more time, I will probably elaborate on the ones I want to vent about, because I feel like that would be cathartic for me (and potentially annoying to readers, but I'm not really expecting readers after such a long radio silence). I'm tired.