How I’m doing

I feel like it’s been a little while since my last checkin post so let’s do one now, I guess.

Pain

Lately I’ve been flaring, fibro-wise; it started about two weeks ago (just before GeekGirlCon) and it’s only getting worse.

For whatever reason, wearing my wrist braces to bed hurts a lot and they’re disrupting my sleep, so I’ve been going without them lately. That flies in the face of years of experience with them, so maybe I need to find a new pair or something. It looks like I’ve had this current pair for a year and a half which isn’t that long for a pair to last but these ones also aren’t washable so there might just be an accumulation of grossness that’s hurting my skin or something? I dunno.

ADHD

Only a week until my psychiatrist appointment, finally! In the mean time I’ve been experimenting with self-medicating with caffeine again. Which is to say I’ve once again decided to dive into full-on coffee snobbery, which is something that I always find fun and have missed a lot.

I’m not going so far as to be like James Hoffmann (although I’m very much enjoying his videos!) but I’m definitely experimenting with different brewing and grinding techniques. I found a rather nice stainless steel Moka pot for $20 at TJ Max, and have experimented with that a bunch, and then at the thrift store they had a surprisingly good electric burr grinder for only $10 so of course I picked that up (even though I’d just ordered a hand-cranked grinder for $30) and so it’s been a lot of fun experimenting with different grind sizes, water levels, brew times, etc.

But after a few days of that I decided that my Aeropress (affiliated link) is still the way to go.

Right now I’m doing a 1:2 mix of caffeinated:decaf, and that has me at a comfortable spot where I guess I feel a bit more focused but am not having excessive amounts of panic or anxiety (although I seem to get triggered a lot more easily right now). I’ll definitely have to reevaluate this when I end up on ADHD medication.

Projects

I also have way too many projects I’d like to be doing right now, and I feel like I have no time or energy for them.

Music

Between having a bit of a sinus infection and the pain flare I’ve been kind of phoning it in with Novembeat for the last week, and even missed a few days. I don’t feel like any of it is really, y'know, there for me. I’ve made some really good songs this month but a lot of it is just a minimal effort.

On the plus side, I actually entered Song Fight! with a song that started out as a quick Novembeat experiment, and people are enjoying it. (Feel free to enjoy it and vote for it as well as whatever other songs you like! At least before this Friday.)

I also really want to spend more time on Songs of Substance (my next full album) but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards right now.

I was also thinking about doing a collection of my various covers, but dealing with licensing and stuff makes that more annoying and can be incredibly expensive. Fortunately, the other day I found out about Soundrop which seems to hit a nice price-point for that, so that’s probably what I’ll use for distributing cover songs.

Like, don’t get me wrong, DistroKid is still by far the best deal for distributing original music (well okay amuse.io is cheaper but their overall product isn’t as good IMO), but their cover licensing management is pretty darn expensive. Soundrop is a nice middle ground; they do a one-time $10 fee plus a 15% commission, and take care of all the legal stuff for you. That’s about perfect given my reach/audience and the things I want to cover, and ends up being less expensive and way easier to administer than a Harry Fox license.

I do have a pre-existing licensing agreement with one of the cover songs' original artists so I’ll probably put that one on Songs of Substance, but the rest of them are either major-label things (which are expensive to administer) or the rights are unclear (in one case, specifically because the original artist – an acquaintence of mine – is deceased and I’m unable to find contact information for his estate) so it’s a lot easier to just pay someone else $10 to deal with administration and hope it makes its way to his heirs.

Comics

I want to work on Lewi some more, but even moreso I really want to be working on Unity again; for some reason I keep getting Very Inspired to work on some of the many stories I have drafted for book 3, and the other day I came up with another story idea which fills out more of one of the major arc points for the book as a whole.

I really wish I weren’t in so much pain because comics are fun to do but also probably the biggest pain trigger and need the most concentration (which is something I can’t do when I’m hurting).

Storefront

I have my short-run store up and running on Storenvy, but unfortunately it’s got some aspects which make me want to have a more dedicated shop. Namely, I found out their TOS disallows linking to products on other sites, meaning I still can’t use it as a clearinghouse to cover my music and apparel. In the short term I’ll probably make biz.beesbuzz.biz an entry portal again (only this time built on Publ instead of a bespoke/janky PHP script), and in the longer term I guess I’m gonna have to figure out PayPal’s embedded cart API (which has pretty bad documentation and an accretion of many layers of conflicting mechanisms, especially around shipping rates) or maybe bite the proverbial bullet and go with a self-hosted cart of some sort.

I’m feeling like the least-onerous path forward for that is WordPress + WooCommerce, but gosh do I really dislike WordPress.

Publ

I’ve been doing a bit of feature work on Publ, mostly in response to shortcomings I found while building the storefront. For example, because of the way Publ handles images, there wasn’t a convenient way to put image or asset URLs into arbitrary attributes on HTML elements; now there is.

I also finally corrected a long-standing issue with how Markdown footnotes work. It’s still not perfect but it’s way better than before.

I haven’t yet released these changes, but I should probably do a release fairly soon. The more I build stuff with Publ the more issues I find and thanks to ADHD I just really want to work on all of them right away. This is of course a big part of why I’m such a mess in general.

Really everything on my website is a monument to my ADHD, and this blog entry is a microcosm.

General health/hygiene

My home is a complete mess. Part of that’s because I haven’t gotten around to getting organized after GeekGirlCon, part of that is because with my pending kitchen remodel I don’t feel like spending a lot of time keeping the kitchen tidy, most of it is just me not feeling like dealing with any of it.

This time of year is also hard on me because of the very reduced daylight hours and general gloominess, which is causing a vicious cycle with both ADHD and fibro (which are really two sides of the same coin, anyway).

I’ve not been playing Ring Fit Adventure as much as I should. I need to start that up again because I very much enjoyed it while I was doing it.

Also my IBS has been extra-weird lately. More annoying than anything else, but I hope it resolves itself soon.

Day job stuff

I’m trying to take a more active role in designing and developing the backend services for the startup but for Reasons I’m having difficulty getting started.

Also the non-profit that I mentioned in a few prior entries still wants to hire me but hasn’t yet figured out what to hire me for. It mostly comes down to budget and hopefully there’ll be a suitable job opening in the coming months. (Fortunately I’m not in a huge hurry. Although I’d love to be able to worry less about how much I’m spending on my kitchen.) Unfortunately the original position they interviewed me for turned into an internal promotion, and the next one that seemed to be perfect for me ended up getting down-leveled to a junior role.

Oh well. With all the above, the last thing I need right now is to be taking on a full-time job, right?

Thanksgiving

I’ve been invited to a friend-of-a-friend’s dinner, and it’ll be a nice low-key thing. I’ll probably make farroto again.

Comments

Before commenting, please read the comment policy.

Avatars provided via Libravatar