Quick Update: Site Stuff! and stuff
Hullo - along with this post, I’m pushing an update to a few parts of the site today, and it’s probably as good a time as any to talk about random life stuff. It’s my blog, after all.
Site Updates
- I toyed around with the idea of a splash page, but really, the home page should just be the blog - so I did that.
- Updated the navigation to be a bit easier to parse (I hope): the main features are pretty much the blog and the page with links to everything else.
- Added an RSS feed to the content hub, so you can see if I’ve been active anywhere at a glance.
- Added some posts! Mostly, overviews and postmortems of the challenges I’ve taken upon myself for art and writing.
Life Updates
The job part
Dementia is whack, and I wish it upon no one. We’ve been here about 8 months, now, and it’s proven to be a challenge in ways that were unexpected (versus, like, the housekeeping and physical care, which were obviously a part of the gig) and add a lot of randomness to daily life. Randomness, as you might guess, is difficult to build a routine around. If you’ve been adjacent to it, you know what I mean.
It creates emotional exhaustion on top of the ambient strain of feeling out the nature and extent of another human being’s cognitive dysfunction, their moods and rituals, their expressed likes and dislikes (and your best guess about the source of them, and the accuracy of the communication), figuring out how to separate out practical problems from grasping, nebulous confusion, troubleshooting needs. Not to mention confronting unavoidable thoughts about what the experience of losing touch with time, language, familiar skills (ex: how to use a remote), and reality must be like, what it must be like to feel the steady degradation of motor control and to live with a constant undercurrent of helplessness but remember what it was like to be independent and authoritative in the scope of your own life, and watching another human being try to come to terms with the death of a loved one (when they remember it) and their own looming mortality.
Heavy shit. Not all the time - at least not front and center - but enough to earn a one-time mention up front.
The practical upshot of the dementia life is that it necessitates figuring out how to be on top of your game all the time. Fortunately, I’d like to do that anyway. It’s been as good a time as any to dive in and try to structure habits and a routine that are consistent, healthy, and resilient, and to really work hard on the discipline muscle.
At the moment, I think I’ve landed in a fairly good spot with it. I have a dedicated post about it in the works.
Unfortunately, this means: Sorry, family and friends, I don’t have much flexibility in my schedule, I know the time zone is inconvenient, and I don’t have the latitude to travel. :c I do like hearing from you, though.
The free time part
Friggin’ trying to figure out how to become a better artist and writer, and develop projects I’ve had kicking around in my brain for years.
Part of this is, like, shaking off rust and resuming a healthy mindset with regards to the craft (the bad ones are surprisingly sneaky), and part of it is solving the problem of exactly how to push the skills forward. In the meantime, showing up to the thing and applying effort in a vaguely correct direction to habitualize the activities has not been a bad start. Art stuff lives on DeviantArt, Artstation, and now apparently Instagram.
I’m pairing my study/practice with art books and writing books.
My order of operations looks tentatively like this:
- Bring the art skill home. (this will take up the majority of my real human hours for some time)
- Develop a story to the stage where I can do real visual development. (this will happen slowly, in parallel with 1)
- Write and storyboard the developed narrative.
- Animate.
Hoping to make up for what feels like lost time.
That aside, I started a hobby: gardening.
Well, sort of. I’ve been playing with it on and off for the last few years, as space and life allowed, but this is the first real plant adventure I’ve gone on by myself and I kind of went all-in. It’s presently demanding: I really can’t get away with less than an hour a day at the moment. It’s my own fault, though - I got overwhelmed with other life things and did not listen to the ancient wisdom of “nuke those pests as soon as you see a single one of them.” xD
It’s a very chill hobby to lose myself in, checking up on the plants and grooming them (now that I’m not so afraid of pruning). The feeling of having fresh herbs on-hand for cooking if you want to get fancy is also rad, would recommend.
My other hobby is this blog.
Health & fitness
These are my support activities. The primary goal here is to facilitate consistent energy and mental clarity.
I’m not good at them, yet, but I’m getting better. This year, I’m trying to rehab my knees and get back into some kinda reasonable shape. For me that mostly translates to ability - being able to show up to sports, heavy lifting around the house, hold myself with good posture - and a bit of vanity because as much as it would be nice to drop a bit of the weight that flops around when I try to do things, I want to want to see myself naked. Why not?
So: exercise and diet. Also, doing actual research to guide my decisions in crafting the exercise routines to get me to my goals and the diet that will help me feel healthy and in control of my body.