The state of Me

The last few months have been really up and down. This follows several years of things that have also been very up and down. The hardest has been the death of my mother. I have been trying to spend at least one day a weekend up at my parents place to spend time with my mom since we realized the chemotherapy was not working. My mom was a really stubborn woman, and stated flat out that she was not going to die during the holidays. She made it to the second week of January on willpower alone. The funeral was a much better experience than I had expected, and far better than my brother's funeral. 'Nuf said about that. Maybe more later.

What else has been going on? Work has been tense, tiring and taking far too many hours from the rest of my life. I have done a lot at Stanford giving the broken environment I walked into. I just finished the first phase of a major virtualization project, which has been...instructive. Just about everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong, and I still managed to get it done and keep the downtime to an absolute minimum. I am glad I will be moving on though.

I am really looking forward to working at Playfirst. My last post about that doesn't really do the subject justice. I really want, or perhaps need, a stable environment with medical benefits and some vacation time. I need to start doing better self care, and I find it really difficult with my schedule bouncing around and working 12+ hours per day and having no insurance to make a doctor appointment, or get to a gym, or anything else for myself.

Add on top of all that, caring for purplerabbit and redhatmary has been a lot of work; in some ways, more than I had ever expected. With uncledark taking more time to be at home and help with this, I feel better about this. But it does leave me as the sole income for the household, which has its own set of issues for me. While uncledark is also working on putting together his therapy practice, the income is pretty much non-existent right now. In the long run, this is the right thing for him to do though, and I am proud of his efforts.

Finally, there are some bills I need to catch-up on or find some kind of resolution on. Mostly just student loans and some insurance stuff that has gotten screwed up due to bureaucracy nightmares that trouble my sleep. Hopefully with job stability and some help, this can be dealt with too.

So, if I haven't been very social or talkative, it really isn't about you. I don't hate anyone, I just don't have the bandwidth to handle much more than I am dealing with now. I am using my spoons as fast as I get them and someday I hope to have a surplus again. Until then, feel free to invite me to things, but please don't be disappointed if I don't show.