The short version: I moved!

Unfortunately, that means no progress on any other projects recently. No time to work on Porydex, or Shifty Squares, or any fiction writing. Nearly every free day for the last month and a half has been devoted to some aspect of The Move, whether by way of the physical labor of moving everything from point A to point B, or communications with our lawyer who was handling all the direct interaction with the people we were trying to leave behind.

The long version:

Well. These last few months have been a surreal kind of nightmare. From the search for a new place to live (which finished only hours before the deadline to be able to renew my previous lease), to the fact that the people our lawyer was interacting with continually used the most absurd delay tactics, it sometimes seemed like everything about this move was always happening at the worst time possible.

Some of that was just luck and bad planning on my part. (Did I really need to wait so long to start the search for a new place to live, and thus run into the lease renewal deadline as a major stressor? Obviously not.) But a lot of it—in particular, any interaction at all with the people we left behind—was either intentionally timed on their part to our detriment… or just coincidentally, consistently looked that way, literally any time they did or said anything.

(I apologize for being so vague on the details here. I don’t want to unintentionally reveal whom I’m talking about, and invoke any further ire from them. Remember, kids, doxxing is bad!) (That said, I still want to blog about this shit, because it’s the only damn thing I’ve been doing with my life lately.)

But after a certain point, intentions don’t matter. If there’s someone in your life who consistently hurts you every time they interact with you, does it really matter whether it’s because they’re just a tactless oblivious fool or if it’s because they actively want to hurt you? No, I don’t think it does.

(But honestly, they were probably being intentionally malicious. When even your lawyer tells you he thinks they’re an asshole, what more validation do you need?)

***

And so, here I am after moving, with a collection of boxes and bags that will take ages to go through and unpack, but at least there’s no more deadlines or time limits involved, so that can happen naturally over time. This past weekend was the last of the “moving weekends,” so now I can finally turn my attentions back to my many creative hobby projects.

It might take me a little while to get back into a good groove, though. At this point I’ve completely broken any productivity streaks I built up last year, and I mostly skipped planning any of my weekly sprints for the last month, because so many major events were in flux literally every day.

Really, today marks the first day that I can finally do non-moving stuff again, so the fact that I’m using it to do my self-mandated monthly blogly update is a good sign, I guess.

***

Currently reading: Academ’s Fury (Codex of Alera #2) by Jim Butcher

I’m about two thirds through it, and I’m enjoying this one a lot more than I enjoyed the first book in the series. I really like how the main character is developing.