Where I’m at right now

What are some of the things going on in my life? Ugh, where to start.

First off, I’ve been having a pretty bad fibro flare for the last couple of weeks. This has been intertwined with job stress. And just like… stress in general. This has really gotten in the way of me being productive at work, or being able to work on comics, or music (including the music I was going to do for some folks' game jam games), or any of my IndieWeb things, and I’m just in pain a lot of the time. And as usual it has a feedback loop where things just get worse and worse.

I’ve also been house hunting. I need a calmer environment to be in. My condo has gotten pretty noisy since everyone’s home all the time and always having progressively-louder Zoom meetings, and I’d really like a space to do more physical things in, like woodworking and gardening. None of those are doable when living in an enclosed shoebox in the urban core of Seattle.

But I’m not the only one doing this house hunt, and so the housing market is absolutely ridiculous right now. Things will go on the market and then get snatched up for higher than asking price within days, or sometimes even hours. And the market is flooded with poorly-considered flips, or places which are almost great except for one critical flaw.

For example, I put an offer on a place in Renton, before realizing that the kitchen had only a tiny refrigerator, and nowhere to put a bigger one. Fortunately, I was able to get out of the contract thanks to the inspection contingency. Then someone else bought it half an hour later. Good for the seller.

There was also a fantastic place in Bothell that was seemingly perfect, but my Realtor™ convinced me to go back today and check out how things were during high airplane traffic. Because it is directly under the flight path of both SeaTac and Boeing Field. Yeah, that would have driven me bonkers pretty quickly. (But otherwise, the house was exactly what I was looking for. Such a shame.)

My mom has been trying to convince me to move back to New Mexico but oh my god that is such a terrible idea. Yeah, I can do my work from anywhere (and a big part of why I’m considering the suburbs is because it’s not like I need to commute anymore) but Seattle is where all my friends are, and I still want to be here when the pandemic eases up! Plus, I’m way too used to living near sea level and having at least some amount of humidity.

My other reason for trying to move to the suburbs is to just reduce my monthly living expenses, and get more capital to have stuff to do with in case the worst things happen and I have to go “self-employed” again. Right now most of my money is tied up in my condo. Selling my condo gives me way more breathing room.

As much as I enjoyed my trip to Port Angeles last November I don’t think I’d want to move there. I’d go stir-crazy with isolation, and it’s quite the endeavor to get back to Seattle from there. If I have to expand my housing search out to, say, Federal Way or Tacoma, that still feels doable, and would also make it way easier to access Portland, but that’s starting to feel so far away from everything and everyone I care about.

Anyway. In happier news, at work we’re working on finally hiring a manager for my team, which is something that’s been promised for the past six months while I’ve been here (holy heck has it already been that long?!) and hopefully that’ll help to get things more manageable there.

Also, Werner, who is now around 19 years old, has gotten much more kitten-like and has gotten yet another burst of playfulness. The little old man just isn’t gonna give up, is he. And Fiona’s still got boundless energy too, even though she’s around 10 years old now.

But, holy cow I’m in so much pain. I have so many things I want to do but just… can’t, right now. I feel like I’m being hit by many simultaneous cases of life happening and it’s all I can do to even tread water.

It also really doesn’t help that now that everything’s online, every single platform has doubled down on trying to completely monopolize my entire attention all the time. When gatherings were in person it was easy for me to choose the one to go to and decline everything else. But now I’m constantly inundated with things from Meetup and Discord and Slack and Zoom, and since everything is “just online” it’s so easy for everyone to expect everyone to come to everything. And everything tries to grab my attention constantly through email and a deluge of in-app notifications, which has now made it pretty much impossible for me to keep up with things.

Back when the pandemic first hit I thought, oh hey, great, now people will be more willing to do things in a more accessible way that doesn’t require physical travel. And then the monkey’s paw curled another finger.

Everything’s just so much right now and I have no idea how to cope. I could really use a break from everything.

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