After a few days of sitting on this realisation, I had to admit that the winter blues had claimed me, as they had already done several of my friends. I'm still working on picking up the connections I dropped then, though, including some quite important ones. To some degree, "working on" here means "in denial about". Lalala.
Work has been stressful, partly because every system in the infrastructure of our client keeps-fucking-breaking, and partly because working 80% means I have fewer days in the office without meetings and context-switching. I need to find a way around this, though all I can think of at the moment is to stop going to lunchtime yoga on Thursdays.
We went to David's gran's early in the month and met his cousin Camilo, me for the first time and David for the first time in about a decade, since Camilo grew up in Chile. I liked him a lot.
I didn't exactly have a New Year's plan to get healthier, but a few appointments piled up in the first week or so of the year and I embraced the coincidence. Fix all the body parts! Unfortunately, this quest is becoming a sisyphean one. I started grass-pollen allergy desensitisation in good time for the start of the season, but thanks to disorganisation on the part of the clinic, have missed this year's window for birch-pollen, which is starting to appear right now. Atchoo. I got my thyroid checkup and am going through the predictable round of fights with my doctors to stay on my current thyroxine dose. Trying to put paid to the mysterious toothache that appeared last August, I got two old fillings replaced last week, but one of them was left too high and precipitated the worst TMJ pain I've had in my life. I write this post, in fact, mostly as a distraction on my second day off work with that pain: the filling has been fixed, but the jaw needs more time to heal up, preferably without any talking or eating or stimulants. (Really, I know I should go to my GP about this and ask them to do something about the TMJ and the night-time clenching that's probably at the root of all these problems, but ughhh, I don't want to.)
The end of January is always busy, with [Ludicious] game festival followed by [Global Game Jam]. Since I currently have Fridays off work, I got to attend nearly all of Ludicious, as well as helping David to run the Unconference on the Saturday evening and then coming back on the Sunday for a workshop on Twine led by Dragica. It was all a lot of fun, with Marioke on Saturday night and great discussions at the Unconference. The Zürich location for Global Game Jam (which David also helped to organise) has always been at the Rote Fabrik, but this year we were in a different space there because of a recent fire in the Clubraum. Working in the middle of an art exhibition in the Shedhalle certainly gave the jam a different atmosphere than in previous years! We ran a bar for the participants and dished up two breakfasts, spaghetti and toasties for lunch, and even homemade pizzas on Saturday night. In the midst of all this, I made my first full Twine game, Numbers. David made two: The Transmission and Captain to the Bridge, which is hilarious.
It's now February. I'm hoping for a good month, with a bit more capacity for human interaction.