Digest 20250825

Right, so somehow again it’s been a month since my last update and I am again shocked by the passage of time.

What have I been doing? It’s August, which is family birthday month, including Husbands. So some busy weekends with that, and also honestly I’ve just been feeling a little creep up of burnout with work. I’ve been basically working on this huge project since October, and I’m loving it but it’s fucking intense and I’ve ended up having to do 99% of the data migration myself, against a too tight deadline, because the team is short. It’s catching up with me, plus I’ve just started mentoring our new starter, which I enjoy but that’s also very intense!

Fucking relax

Husband and I had 2 nights away in a posh treehouse with a hot tub earlier this month. Usually, a mini break like that is an opportunity to lay about reading and relaxing, and it sorts me out, by not this time. It coincided with my ongoing struggle to arrange a private dinner with friends for next month (as a post-wedding celebration) and trying to get family to agree to a plan for the upcoming weekend… Which ended up being a BBQ at our house because nobody was enthusiastic about any day out ideas.

So instead of letting all my anxieties melt away in the hot tub I was exchanging messages, negotiating menus and emailing restaurants. And let’s not get started on hotel rooms. I hate arranging group social things, I overthink it and my anxiety goes insane trying to please everyone.

And then.. we come home and have to host the family BBQ, which is the direct opposite of relaxing!

I have been able to take a couple of days off this week, hoping to get on top of the mental pile of stuff I’ve been carrying around for a while.

But…  Things have got somewhat derailed by Obsidian releasing the Bases update, which became an immediate obsession! I fucking love a database… And I’ve spent the last few days working out I can make the new Bases function to work for tracking comic books I’ve read as well as regular books. This has involved several rabbit holes, and I’ve got very little else done!

It’s been nice to just let my brain focus on the thing it wanted to, though.

I’ve still got two days, so maybe I can check some other items of my list, and maybe catch back up on some blogging things I am very behind on!

This is something of the list of things that I want to do, I doubt I’ll do even half!

• Tidy my office and finally properly arrange our bookshelves.
• Finish the embroidery kit I’ve been working on for ages, so I can start a more fun new project because I suspect my lack of embroidery recently has not been helping my mental health!
• Organise the old scraps of material and clothes I keep keeping because one day I want to do an applique collage.
• Tidy garden. Mostly weeding! Today I already managed to hack back the neighbour’s willow where it overhangs our washing line and shed!
• List some old clothes on Vinted.
• Take old books and clothes to the charity shop.
• Finally get a haircut! I got a short notice appointment for Wednesday morning with the new apprentice, my hair isn’t complicated, so I’m sure it’ll be fine! (Maybe not let them do my fringe though!)
• Hang our large framed wedding photo, and order some cheap prints for a scrapbook album.
• Organise all the old photos I have to make it easier to fill them into scrapbooks as I planned 2 years ago, and then got distracted by other projects
• Clean the fridge!

Blog-wise I have 2 book reviews (False Value and Sweetpea) and I’m behind on Top Ten Tuesday (I missed last week!). I’d also like to write up some stuff about what I’ve been doing with Obsidian!

I’m going to need to book a couple more days off work at the earliest opportunity!

Tiny Bookshop

I’ll cop to another reason I’ve been slacking on the blog, and everything else in my life: I downloaded Tiny Bookshop on Steam last Sunday and got immediately obsessed with it. Like I played 6 hours of it that day, which speaks to how addictive it is and also how broken my brain has been lately! All I wanted to do was run my little travelling bookshop in this fictional seaside town.

It is a very quite a relaxing game, but I’ll say after a while it does get repetitive and it doesn’t take long until you’ve seen every book in the game and you have to repeat the same recommendations to customers (also a disappointing amount of Colleen Hoover – I don’t think this was made me people who actually read!). Thankfully, my obsession with it has waned, possibly by being replaced by Obisian’s new Bases!

Movement

In the walk to Modor challenge, I’m at 895 miles at the bridge of Khazad-dum. I’ve managed to raise my average daily steps now to 7,973, slowly getting closer to 8,000!

I signed up for the Conqueror Space Race challenge because the medals are so cool-looking. I’m using that only to track runs! I’m doing ok with Coach Greg’s plan on Garmin, which has been doing more solid running times.. I managed to almost run for 15 mins straight the other week! It does make running a bit more miserable, but I can tell I’m getting better at it!

What else?

• Since finishing Andor we’ve not really found another good TV show to hook us, but we did finish Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and are now into season one of Voyager! Otherwise, we just rewatch our old (new) favourite Corner Gas (it’s honestly the perfect show when you’re mentally and emotionally exhausted).
• For the eagle eyes who follow me on Goodreads or pay attention to my sidebar… yes, I have started to read A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas despite declaring I never would (what a shit book title, I had to look it up because I cannot remember it!). The reason for this is Husband recently embarked on a project to read so-called “smutty books” and this was the first one he read… because he has read it, I feel like I need to read it so we can discuss! However, I am 3 chapters in and I hate the writing and all the characters, so I don’t know if I will actually make it through! I am amassing a lot of “why did she phrase it this way?!” notes and highlights. He also has Fourth Wing… which I’m hoping he won’t actually read, so I won’t have to subject myself to that too.

• I went to China Town in Birmingham the other weekend with my friend who is of Chinese descent. He took me to an authentic noodle place, in part to see if they’d automatically give me a fork! They didn’t and – with his tutelage – I successfully ate a whole (extremely delicious, omg) bowl of noodles south with chopsticks and only got some of it on my glasses. It has been a long time since I last used chopsticks (maybe 2019 in Penang!) so this was a personal achievement!
• Also, went to Stratford-upon-Avon recently. Wanted to go for years, and it was not as nice and quaint as I expected! It’s hard to feel the historic immersion at Shakespeare’s Birthplace when on the other side of the wall a busker is belting out Fleetwood Mac on the high street! Anne Hathaway’s cottage is lovely though.

You know what, now I’ve got this out my head and I’m relaxing in a (too hot because I never get it right, I’m literally sweating!) bath in our lovely bathroom, with a glass of pinot, I’m feeling better! I was getting very tense for too much much computer time (I will try to share what I’ve been doing!) and fretting about not “making the most” of this precious time off but I have two more days to go and I can definitely know some stuff of my list before it’s back to work on Thursday!

Also, didn’t mention it up top but I’ve also had my period for this weekend so my mental health and energy are always a wreck, and my focus is always a roulette and this time it chose procrastination in Obsidian! Hormones are fun. I need to give myself a break!