I can’t believe it’s been a year and a half since I’ve posted anything on this blog.

2023 came and went like lightning. I spent most of last year saying, “I can’t believe how crazy this year has been.” There was work stuff that was tough to deal with and very stressful in the way that existing in a capitalist system is stressful, and then there was life stuff that was very stressful in the way that existing in a capitalist system is stressful. All-in-all, last year was a rough year. We lost someone very dear to our family, we had medical scares, and we had all of the things that come with life.

I don’t have a specific topic to write about, so I feel a little weird writing anything at all. But one thing I’m trying to break myself from is that I need to have “anything to say” in order to write a post. This is my space, and I can be as structured or as free form as I want with it. This is not a professional blog, after all. So I’m just going to write whatever comes to mind and post that. Probably just life updates and such to catch up on the last 18 months.

It tickles me that my last post was a picture of our then newly adopted dog Leia, whom we adopted in December of 2022. She’s doing great and is in great health. She’s one of the smartest dogs I’ve ever owned, and she constantly surprises me. Since then we ended up adopting another dog — a dachshund mix named Bernie, whom we adopted in August of 2023. My best guess is that he’s a mix of chihuahua and dachshund — his face is a little shorter than our full dachshund, his ears a just a little bit smaller, and he has that chihuahua forehead. He’s also one of the happiest, friendliest little dogs I’ve owned. He reminds me a lot of my family’s dachshund Jimi Hendrix who passed away a few years ago — very excitable, very licky, very sweet. And, of course, we still have our baby boy Sanford, who will be 18 in September. He’s gotten slower and sleepier in his age, but he still gets up to shenanigans and is still as stubborn as he’s ever been.

As far as why I fell off on blogging, it all goes back to how rough 2023 was. My mental health was in an abyssmal place, even as I pulled back further and further from social media. I finally got so low that I started seeking out a therapist and going to regular therapy. I’m happy to report that unlike the last time I went through this, my current therapist is someone who specializes in ADHD among other things and has been great in helping me figure out ways I can build supports into my life so that I’m not battling my own mind. Who knew that therapists shouldn’t make you feel anxious and like you’re a piece of shit?

The last time I posted very frequently here, I was just starting an online D&D campaign with a bunch strangers, and now that campaign has been going strong for almost 2 years and is on the cusp of wrapping up our first campaign and beginning a second. It’s a very unique set up, and one I’ve truly come to treasure. We are all “forever DMs” who don’t get to play very often, so we formed a gaming group where we all take turns DMing. But beyond that, we collaboratively built the world that we’re playing in, and each arc we’ve run has been part of the same on-going story in the same setting. So it’s not just random games and random systems and random characters. It’s been so cool to see how each person approaches story telling and game running when we all share the same toybox. I actually just finished my turn last month, and I think I ran the best games I’ve ever run. It was wildly creatively rewarding.

Since the last time I posted, we also went to a bunch of concerts. Last year we saw Willie Nelson, Bring Me the Horizon, Fall Out Boy, Babymetal, Dethklok, Tenacious D, Ghost, Ice Nine Kills, and Metallica, and this year, we’ve added Gen and the Degenerates, Amigo the Devil, Flogging Molly, Dragonforce, Dethklok (again), Creeper, Black Veil Brides, and we’ll be seeing Ice Nine Kills and Creeper again, plus Twin Temple and Ludo, whom we used to see basically annually but weren’t able to go the past couple of years.

Since the last time I posted, I also joined the rest of the population by finally catching Covid — caught it at the Metallica show, which was fitting because not only was it the first and largest in-door venue we’d been to all year, but the crowd was very different from the rest of the shows we’d attended. Let’s just say the audience for Pantera and Five Finger Death Punch don’t overlap much with our usual crowds. It was still great to see Metallica, but it was a rough couple of weeks after that. And I do periodically worry what finally catching Covid will mean for me in the future, but I guess I feel some happiness that thanks to masking, limiting social activities, getting vaccinations every time we can, and keeping our hands washed and santized, we were able to avoid catching Covid until September of 2023. Nearly four years from the start of the pandemic is a pretty good run.

Since the last time I posted here, the political state of my country has continued to devolve. The perceived attempted coup by the former president has come nearly full circle, with his bench of judge loyalists passing down some of the worst, most damning decisions in our nation’s history. It’s a scary time to be alive right now. But there is hope — although right wing fascism has been on the rise across the globe, the recent elections in the UK and France are leaving me hopeful that maybe things are turning around a little. Even though my nation continues to fund an active genocide, I can feel hope that there are more and more people waking up to this fact and becoming increasingly louder about it.

Since the last time I posted, my wife and I have been trying to be more mindful of each other and of the way we live. We’ve tried to be generous and give to people in need when we can. We’ve also been trying to find ways to make our day-to-day lives happier by doing things that are for us. In some ways, we’ve doubled down on things we like — we have always been strong proponents of physical media, and as the streaming services look closer and closer to collapse, we continue to buy things on Blu-ray when we can. My wife calls us “librarians of the apocalypse,” which sometimes makes me chuckle and sometimes feels too real. We re-activated our AMC memberships so that we could start seeing movies in the theater more. My wife has started reading a lot more, which I love. I still haven’t found the brain space to read much, even audiobooks, but I’m hoping the more we work on this and the clearer my mind becomes, the more I’ll come around.

We’ve also decided to fix our house up a little. To be clear, we are lucky to have a very nice home, but while we’ve made little steps to make things feel like home here and there — curtains and framed pictures and tablecloths, we’ve never been big home decorators. Part of that is because we’ve always rented, which means we’ve been very limited in what we could do without risking our deposit, but this is our place! So I’ve gotten into a lot of DIY/maintenance stuff lately.

(As an aside, whenever I left a rental place, I always worked my ass to ensure that I cleaned our rental as thoroughly as possible with the resources and time I had. I always tried to leave our rental as close to what it was when we moved in as I could manage. And yet, I think I only got a partial deposit returned once, and that was at the place I left the messiest. I truly shouldn’t have bothered, and looking back I have to laugh at how much time and effort I wasted.)

It started with hating the carpet in our living room and how disgusting 3 dogs could make it over the course of a week or two. So I finally bit the bullet, bought some vinyl flooring, and replacing the flooring over a weekend. Then, we started looking for some thrift furniture — we’ve been hoping for a few pieces that we could use as a small snack pantry, for instance — and from there, I got it in my head that we should just go ahead and paint the living room. We’ve never painted before, so every place I’ve lived has always had white walls and popcorn ceilings. After doing some research, we both loved the “dark academia” decorating style, so the plan to paint the living room eventually morphed into a larger project. But it hasn’t been too overwhelming. We’ve tried to just take things one little step at a time.

Assuming I can get back into the habit of blogging and such, I’ll probably end up writing about some of the home projects I’ve been working on. I’ve been really hyper-focused lately on cleaning, organizing, and DIY YouTube videos lately, so I’ve been finding more and more projects to work on around the house. Nothing crazy, manageable things like “powerwash the fence” and “organize the pantry.” For now, though, I think that’s probably all I have.

I hope your 2024 is going well (or as well as it can given the *gestures widely at everything*). Until next time!