Return of the Dragons

I’m am mildly ashamed to look at how long it has been since I’ve posted on here, but this blog has not been alone in the neglect. It all started about the time I had to knuckle down and really get into the meat of my dissertation. It took a lot of my time and effort, and there’s been things since then that have just piled up, and I was really bad about picking up all the pieces that I’d left strewn behind me in the wake. I didn’t go to taekwondo for six months, I failed NaNoWriMo for the first time ever, and my eating habits spiralled in a slightly uncontrollable fashion. But that’s the good thing about life – you can always come back and pick things up. So new(ish) year and I’m really making an effort to do things.

First big and good news is that I got a new job. I started that in October and I’m now pretty settled in it. I’m an Information Analyst for the NHS now (a mental health trust) so I get to look at figures and numbers to do with mental health services and provide information to people so that we can show we’re meeting our targets and improve the service. I love it, it’s data and number crunching and SQL and excel all the time. I do miss the library, I like books and information and the people there were great, although weirdly the biggest thing I miss is how much I moved around – I’m very sedentary in this job, and I have to drive to and from work, so no more walking, and I do notice the lack of it (I try to walk during lunch time). But the job is overall more satisfying and much more my pace of working, so it’s a huge step up.

Since started my master’s degree I’ve not done much, if any reading for pleasure, so something I aim to do this year is pick up a book or three again. Not signing up to any challenges or anything, just realising the I enjoy reading and encouraging myself to take it up again. The new job is full time so I find I have less time to do, well, everything else really, so I’m really working on doing what I want to do and cutting out the other stuff that I don’t want to do. It’s sort of like refocusing. Writing comes in here as well – as mentioned above, I failed NaNoWriMo for the first time since I started, oh, what, seven years ago? And you know what? I’m rather okay with it. I decided that with everything that was going on (new job, anxious about results, some mental health stuff, other bits and pieces) I could push to try and get it done, but then I’d probably hate the story at the end of it, and liking what I’m writing was more important to me than completing the challenge. It was a good realisation and I’m still okay with that decision and I look forward to getting back into that story. Again, I’m not going to push this immensely, but I will remind myself to open up a file and put some words on the screen, because I am looking forward to getting back to writing that book I didn’t – Quiet Poison, it’s very fun to write about assassins and underground stuff.

One thing I am looking to do more of is play video games. I’ve had Ori and the Blind Forest sitting on my computer for ages, and I’ve just picked up a recent release called Rime for my switch which looks right up my street. I’ve also got Persona 4 to finish off so I can finally move onto 5 (but nothing will ever match the feels I had for 3 (playing as the girl, it’s much better)). I do like playing video games and I feel that I don’t do enough of it. I get distracted. And as I said above, working full time cuts down on my spare time, as I still have all the house and other chores to do.

Oh! Speaking of house – me and my partner are going to try and buy our first house this year! If we can get the right mortgage lender, we’ve not had the best luck so far finding one, but we will! Eventually!

In more good news last weekend I went to the first LARP player event (smaller than the main events, often run by players rather than the main crew) that I have ever enjoyed, and considering it was my third, I was almost put off them forever. I’m grateful to my friends for pulling me along to it, because I did have a wonderful time, and I’m actually looking forward to trying to go back next year. I got to heal the people from the fighting tournament, enter some contests, coming third in the crafting one, talk to people, and had a delicious nap on a huge pile of bean bags. It was a very fun and relaxed day and just what I needed to get me excited about LARP again.

What have I missed. Life. Writing. Gaming…of course. Dragons.

You know I mentioned that I won third prize in the crafting competition? I did it with this beautiful cuddly thing – my wood dragon. I’m super proud of him, even though he took forever to make (entirely hand sewn. Worth it, but sooooo much time). And guess what? People have already asked me if I take commissions – pretty damn high praise in my opinion ^_^

Time

Time has become a valuable luxury for me as of late. I mean, I love this job and I’m actually shadowing and doing things and putting my name on the end of emails to the clients and things and it’s great. But Jesus my to do list just keeps piling up and I have a very active social life and all sorts of thing to do and arrrrrrrgh!

So social life, there’s a game on Monday, which this week was replaced with a birthday party of all you cane at sushi which was really quite brilliant. I ate sooooooo much. But it was good, although I didn’t have any other time because after we got back home I went straight to bed. yesterday I had to, well, not had to, but you know, really really should have so did, all the stuff on WoW that I hadn’t done in the previous week from the new patch stuff. So the new raid finder, and some of the daily quests, and the new world boss (boy was that a chore). Tonight is more WoW stuff since it’s raid night and there are new parts of raid finder. Tomorrow there is probably Tea and Typing, although I am checking that, but if there isn’t then that does give me a free evening, and I think Friday evening is free, and Saturday during the day is free, and during those times I need to work on my Empire armour, because that’s rapidly coming up and I need my costume to be made by then and hopefully all the things I’m getting from ebay will have come by then as well! Although it turns out that finding rabbit fur, fake or real, is actually quite hard. I want some to edge my hood in. But it’s not absolutely necessary. It would just be a nice touch.

But that’s the main thing that I need to do soon, my armour. After Empire I can start to make another list of to do things, which I am sure will get quite long, but there we go. Having no time at all is just making me appreciate the little free time that I do have, and my freaking amazing social life. I can  being doing activities every night of the week and have basically no free time and I still love it! I regret nothing. Having a job is great. Although my lunch breaks are something I do look forward to.

Job!

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. I got preoccupied with getting a job!

I have a job now! It’s fantastic. It’s with a IT company that produces some software (yes I am being deliberately vague here, there are rules and stuff about posting stuff about the company and I don’t want to get in trouble so I’m erring on the side of caution) and I am working for the Customer Support team, of the Client Experience Team is you want to use the actual term. This means that when the people who buy the software have a problem, they phone/email/bring it to us and we fix it. It’s great! Well, I haven’t actually started doing any of the fixing stuff yet, I’m still just working through the training manuals about using SQL and their own problems and the server thingys. Technical term, thingys.

But my team is very nice (all blokes, but that’s kind of expected) and I like the environment and it all seems really good. I’m actually really happy. Although tired. I am not used to going to bed at 11pm/midnight and getting up 7:45am yet. It’s a big adjustment from 3am til midday.

Also I have a car now! It’s kind of required since the office is out of Norwich itself, although the location is quite pretty, it is in the middle of nowhere. The car is great. It’s a little ford KA and it is so nippy!

Pictures!

My Car:

 

 

And my Desk!

 

It is very clean. Although that is because I have only been here for a week. I am sure it’ll get more lived in as time passes.

So that’s the big update. Other smaller updates: A new wow patch came out but I haven’t managed to play much of it yet because of job, raid tonight should get some play time in. Empire is coming up and I am very interested in it, although I am probably not going to the first one, because tickets on the door will be expensive and I haven’t gotten my first paycheck yet, but I do have my eye on the second one. Navaar is the way to go. Does also mean that I have time to get costume. Used my car to road trip up to Leicester to a LARP fair to help friends get some costume. Got some good ideas for my own costume as well. Car! (I am very happy at having a car, although petrol prices are enormous ) Diet kind of slacked off whilst I adjust to my job, but I need to stop having take-away. Otherwise things are good. I shall try and update more. Well, I always promise that. Luckily I have a topic I want to update on, so I can do that tomorrow.

This Week

Had a little bit of disappointing news this week, I didn’t get the job that I interviewed for back in January. But they said that I interviewed really well, and the only reason they didn’t hire me was because one other guy had basically done the job in another company, so had very relevant experience. But they will keep my CV on their files so if something similar comes up, I might be in there. Silver lining.

I then got contacted by another lady from an agency, who has a job that she thought I was suitable for, so she sent my CV off, the company like the look of me, so they’ll give me an online test and if I pass that then I go for interview. So there’s hope for me yet. Also my jobseekers went through a lot smoother this time round.

Apart from that it’s been a fairly boring week. Still jet-lagged and attempts to get my sleeping cycle back on track have failed miserably, but at least I am keeping to my diet that I proposed for myself back at the start of the year. After coming back from America at least. You cannot keep to a diet on holiday, no matter how hard you try.

This weekend has been fun though. Weekend of roleplaying. There was Lost on Saturday afternoon which was quite nice, I got to have some nice little scene with some people, and my new costume turned out really well for that. Then there was Shades in the evening at which I got to be as fabulous as I usually am. And then today I got to come to Cambridge mage for the first time, which was nice. Got to do a little bit here and there. And earn some Arcane XP. It was good overall. Now I am sitting in the bar whilst Requiem goes on upstairs. I have no enthusiasm to play in Cambridge requiem. But I do still like requiem, and there may be some other things I might be considering. Including running my own tabletop game very soon.

Day 29 — Hopes, dreams and plans for the next 365 days

Well, most immediately I am going to America. I’m going home tomorrow and then getting on a plane early on Saturday morning. Going over to Florida for a week, so lots of roller-coasters and theme parks and then visiting my grandparents who live out there for half the year and celebrating my mum’s birthday.

It’ll be February when I come back and I’ll be planning to take my first foray into being a GM and then if it goes well, then I might be considering doing something else that I’ve been mulling over.

The really big thing that I hope and dream for in the next year is a job. That’s the main thing and everything else will work itself around that. I’ve recently had an interview that I went to and haven’t heard back from, so I’ll give them a quick email saying, hello, I still exist, how are things, have you made a decision yet before I pop off to America.

Frankly apart from the job most everything else isn’t something that I’ve really contemplated. My social life will adapt itself around work, and then I’ll do what I always do which is make things up as I go along. There are some vague plans that I have, but they are so vague that I don’t want to mention them since I’m not sure they’ll really come to fruition.

Oh, I do want to finish writing my novel by the time that November rolls around, so that’s….9 months. Hmm, I should get on that.

Day 28 — This year, in great detail

Well. This is not going to be in great detail at all. I keep telling you I have a bad memory, don’t I.

January onwards I was still at university, doing third year things like my dissertation and modules and things, although I only had one module plus other work, it was pretty sweet. I was still doing my blog back in January so there might be some things on there and…oh! Hey, I just remembered. Finally, a use for facebook timeline! Right, so looking back, I was blogging, eating sushi, and getting drunk at something. IoD was still really new at that point as well, so we were setting up things in that. Not much else.

February: There was snow, a friend was moving to another university and was horrified to discover they have no games society, so we suggested she start one. I was doing ref things for LARP, doing my dissertation in the library, went to Nandos at some point, bought plant vs zombies in a steam sale and went to Animus soc which was it’s usual fun self.

March: Lots more IoD and shopping for IoD. I really should stop shopping for characters. More essay writing, because 5000-6000 words is a hell of  lot for a scientist! The shipping wall was born and thus started a run of angst since I wasn’t allowed to see it. Went to Great Yarmouth with my dad, had the 24 hours roleplay and stayed up for 39 hours to enjoy it. Dyed my hair red, again. More dissertation (screw references!) which I actually finished this month and then even more IoD. I have an obsession with it.

April: More IoD, that’s just standard. Though there was that awesome comic Irina drew about us. We managed to kill deathwing in world of warcraft. Bad weather in england – shocker.  I finished university work and started preparing for exams and for some reason which isn’t explained my boyfriend was awesome.

May: Revision was the first thing this month! Followed by IoD of course, although there was that utterly annoying national plot in changeling. More classic british weather. Then i did my exams and was free of the education system. Then there was a birthday party.

June:  I was a bit ill, and I think there may have been some sort of national that happened, either tha or leading up to it. there was talk of requiem at least. Oh yeah, this was the month where there was that mouse in my toaster. I got rid of the toaster and refused to open the new one until we moved house. Moved house and everything was good, even though I hate packing and stuff.

July: Has a visit from a friend, there was summer time fun in the garden, found a hedgehog in the garage. graduated. That was a big thing. British summer hit and I started to melt. I went with ym boyfriend to meet his nephew for the first time, and got some incredible cute pictures.

August: I rediscovered scrambled egg on toast. Hmm, might have to go make now as that sounds delicious. Kept leaving my facebook logged in around my friends. Lost my purse, found ym purse, but then that started off the whole chain of having to replace my debit card. More IoD.  Had a birthday at which I got very drunk and passed the rule that I am never allowed to drink wine. Ever. Walking dead game started up. I started applying for jobs and job seekers, those little bundles of joy. Moved again in my current house which is full of lovely people.

September: Applied for a job tht was door to door sales in disguise and was not impressed, but at lest I got to play with kittens. Debit card arrived. Went to my first adult event when two of my friends got married. It was an amazing wedding. Also went to her hen party before the wedding. Cineman doughnuts are delicious. There was a new expansion of WoW and I played the crap out of it, still am. And then there was the best shades downtime forever.

October: More job searching, job seekers and IoD in general. A good day happened as well, which was a surprise at the time. Apparently a rather boring month other than that, so I have to suppose that I was playing a lot of WoW.

November: Fireworks and NaNoWriMo started November. There was a lot of shades thing going on around the game.  More IoD and a day out in London with my mother which was awesome and amazing and I discovered tapas. Had my first job interview, which I didn’t get, but the interview was good experience. Broke my laptop and then got a netbook from a friend which I fixed up with help from my housemate. Well, he did most of it actually. NaNoWriMo was great as well, I won this year.

December: Christmas thinking, I learnt to knit to knit my presents for this year and broke reality by knitting a Möbius strip. Yeah, I’m not sure how that happened either. Did a christmas spring clean and realised that my housemates manage  to shove a lot of crap under the sofa’s, although I too m guilty of that. Went home for christmas, decorated the christmas tree, bent a spoon with my mind (and a mixer). Had about four roast over the period of a week, watched Dr Who, and cleaned out my room at home.

So actually, with the help of facebook, I can tell you about my year in detail. 🙂

Day 27 — This month, in great detail

Hmm, well I can summarise a little I guess.

Early December I was doing much the same as I have been with looking for a job and then playing a lot of WoW. There was the tail end of term, so a requiem game, and other tabletop games happened.

I went home for Christmas, met up with the family and new family (my mum has a new partner and I was meeting my potential brother in law for the first time) and had some fun times. Met up with my friends on christmas eve and we did our secret santa thing. Then christmas, with presents and everything eaty. Boxing day was pretty relaxing. Day after we did Dad’s side of the family, then there was some cleaning of the room, then a spa day before I headed back home for a new year’s christmas party.

Back in Norwich there was an awesome new years party, then some more job searching since I had my meeting on the 2nd, and then there has been some tabletop gaming, some socializing, more jobsearching, and the usual faf that fills my life these days.

That’s my last month of so. Christmas was awesome though.

April

Well, exactly a month since I last used this blog. Oops. In my defence, I discovered tumblr and created an IC tumblr account for my changeling character and it’s freaking awesome. And then I had work, and life stuff, and I am just a little bit lazy as well.

Easter is going alright, I didn’t go back home since I got distracted and I only had three weeks to do everything and I still haven’t done everything because everything is a lot. Stupid work. Found out that the presentation I have to give is on Monday, which is a lot sooner than I thought it would be, which is annoying. And I can’t seem to get into the groove of working today. Don’t know what it is because I’ve been doing awesome at revising all week, but today it’s just not coming to me. I have the weekend as well, but I know that I’m just wasting away today and it’s irritating, but I can’t focus and grrrrrrr.

On the plus side the gaming in my life is going very very well. The second sight mortals game has started up again and we has two sessions last week and a session tomorrow and I have my innocents game tonight. Might have to skip LARP on sunday though if I don’t progress on the presentation enough. Or just take it with me, or something. I am as obsessed as ever with changeling, and determined to lose at least a little bit of weight before the next game. If I cut out all the bad stuff I keep eating and then do some exercise then that should be a good start, and save me money as well. Sweets add up after all.

Finding a job is annoying. Need to go into Employability when term starts up again next week. Graduating. I keep thinking about it. It’s a funny thing. I don’t want the uni life to stop, but I’ve realised that my life would hugely benefit from more structure than it has now. And I do want a job after I graduate, it’s just a case of what I can find. Opened a fortune cookie the other day. It said “Your next interview will result in a job” which made me laugh. Now I just need to get an interview.

What else has been going on in April. Oh yeah, the guild has managed to kill normal-mode Deathwing and heroic mode Morchok in Dragon Soul which is sweet as (yes I am on about World of Warcraft for those of you that care).

Hmm, graduating. Still find it weird. Should probably book my robes sometime soon. Luckily my exams (the two that I do have) are spread out, one on the 4th, the other on the 22nd. So no rush, but it’ll come sooner than I would like it to I bet.

So that’s a summary of my month. Or the bits I remember. I am not good at remembering stuff after all. Well, some stuff.

Getting there

Dissertation is 98% done! That means I get to finish and tweak it tomorrow, and then actually hand it in on Thursday, which is its due date. So yay! Things have gone according to schedule! Thankfully. Then I have another essay and a week to do it in, but there we go. The work won’t stop til I graduate and then I have to get an actual job. The horror.

Need to apply for more jobs. I just has responses back from the last of the people I applied to over christmas, and it’s another no. Which is needless to say, annoying. Something to do over easter, as well as revising and working on a presentation I have to do in week 12. I’m glad it’s in week 12, if I didn’t have easter to do it then it would be very very bad indeed.

Still obsessed by changeling. Can’t wait for the next game, it’s going to be amazing. Been doing downtime roleplay with my motley mate, and she’s been drawing different things and they’re all really really good and this is only fueling my obsession, but I now have one of the pictures as my background and then I’m trying to do my own pictures, although I suck at drawing humans which makes it tricky.

But yes. Obsessions are pleasing. And then I will have easter, although it’s not going to be much of a break and more of a do everything, since I need to find a house, jobs, and do some work, and go home, and revise for my two exams. Hooray for only having two. Easter Break is not going to be much of a break.

February

Okay, I’m sorry! It’s only just turned February and I know that I have already broken my promises to update regularly. I know it’s not much of an excuse, but I have been really really apathetic lately, not wanting to do anything but sit at my computer and waste my time.

Well now I am on campus and attempting to work, and it is working. Slightly. I should have gotten up earlier. And had a smaller lunch. But there we go. Tomorrow I shall endeavour to get up at a reasonable time, go onto campus, spend the day working, go to my practical, then go home and do nothing all evening, instead of doing nothing all freaking day.

Yesterday wasn’t a total bust. Well, it was work wise, but on WoW I got the drop from the boss that we managed to kill that I wanted, which was awesome, and then I got another piece of gear with my valour points, which means that I only need two more pieces from valour points and then I am done with them!

Oops. Just went onto the uni website and found that I have an overdue library books. On the plus side I have renewed it, and this means that I have a deadline of sorts. So I shall try to have the majority (majority defined as 90% written and not edited) of my final year project done by the 16th Feb. This is a little over two weeks, so I shall be in the library most days from now until then I would think. Yay for force motivation!

I shall try to write some more creative stuff as well, as I did promise more of that. But it is a little difficult with so much work to do. As well as the dissertation (which is 6000 words. Not long for a dissertation, but I am a scientist) I will have another essay to write for the module that I am doing this term, which is going to be 3000 words. Need to motivate self harder so that I can get a decent job. Also I need to apply for more jobs, which involves writing more covering letters, which I have never done before in my life. Why is it so hard to find a decent job?