General Update

[hils]

This has been a particularly difficult month. I don't know if it's just the time of year, the fact that we're approaching the one year mark of working from home, or all of the above. I'm just feeling drained, apathetic and generally fed up. I don't think it's just me either. Tempers seem to be short in our group chats with people falling out over nothing or silly little misunderstandings. Everyone just seems to be particularly unhappy at the moment and it's not a fun time.

Boss was off work last week so I had to cover for here which is always stressful. It calmed down towards the end of the week but the first few days were awful.

I'm trying to keep going with my daily routine, though. Because I remember what a mess I was when my days didn't have structure.

I'm in week 6 of learning Mandarin and it's ticking along. The hardest part is learning to recognise all the characters. The grammar rules are actually pretty straightforward compared to other languages I've learned and I can understand more than I can read, I think. It's still very basic stuff like counting and saying my name and where I'm from but progress is being made. It's nice to be learning something new and I get excited when I hear a word I recognise that I didn't know before in one of my dramas. That was the main reason I wanted to learn :D

I can't remember if I mentioned we were reading the Heaven Official's Blessing novel for our online book club. The book club has kind of dissolved (see above about people getting upset over stupid things - that one was me) but I'm still reading. It's kind of a slog but I think I'm starting to get back into it now. I'm only about a third of the way through. It is a LONG book.

Fic writing is going well too, mostly. I'm sticking to my goal of writing a minimum of 500 words per day. I've completed two treats for sundial_exchange which just need editing, and I've started a third and have an idea for a fourth. I really need to get my most recently completed one to a beta because I don't think it's good, and I need someone to either tell me that I'm being overly critical or to help me identify what's wrong with it.

We finished Tomb of the Sea/Sha Hai last weekend and have made a start on Ultimate Note. I loved Tomb of the Sea a lot. The actor playing Wu Xie was amazing and it was kind of darker than the other tomb shows which I found strangely appealing. Ultimate Note is almost at the other end of the spectrum. It's bright and colourful and full of nonsense. It's by far the most shippy of any of the tomb shows and I'm loving it.

Nirvana in Fire continues to be excellent although I haven't had time to watch any this past week. Hoping to get back to it again on Monday.

Our lockdown is getting reviewed next week and I can't see anything changing because as far as I can tell our number of cases hasn't changed. They might go back to the tier system but that really didn't help last time. We seem to be doing okay with vaccine rollout although from what I'm hearing the north seems to be doing better than the south in terms of how much vaccine is available. No idea why that is.

We're certainly nowhere near ready to go back to anything approaching 'normal' yet so it'll be interesting to see what happens.