Today, Patty left a comment on a post, commenting specifically on not hearing from me for a while, hoping all is well and that married life is treating me okay. So, I suppose I should quickly update people on the state of Jules.
Things are well, overall. Married life is great. I’m just extremely busy as of late. Plus, this year has been full of many ups and downs, which started with the sudden death of my father-in-law.
Some highlights, both good and bad, since April, include:
- My wedding was all kinds of amazing. I’m still overwhelmed by everything that happened during that weekend of celebration. If you are so inclined, you can read about the entire wedding process here. There is still one more post to come in that series. Hopefully, it will be done by the end of this month.
- Over the last few months, I’ve been the target of a series of attacks. I’ve been the target of online attacks for nearly four years now. But, recently, they have become a daily event, resulting in loss of income, another server migration, increased security on my server, and R.C.M.P. involvement. Dealing with this has been very taxing. To be quite honest, I am getting extremely weary, and it’s taking a great amount of will-power to maintain my online presence. Thankfully, every now and then, someone either leaves a comment, like Patty, or sends me a very heartfelt e-mail about how I’ve impacted their life, and I get an added boost to continue. Even if it is limited at the moment.
- I started writing for one of my favourite publishers, Quirk Books. I’m really excited about that.
- I was writing for Nerdy With Children. On a break for a bit. I wrote a chapter for the Nerdy With Children book, which, hopefully, will be published in the next few month.
- I’m back as Special Events Manager for GottaCon 2014. So, until that is over, I have a lot of extra stuff on my plate. (Ignore the bit about panel submissions. The deadline has passed, and now I’m busy juggling the schedule.)
- I’m starting a Star Trek book club over at United Federation of Planets. We are currently voting for January’s book. You are welcome to join, if this is something you’d be into.
- Geeky Pleasures is getting somewhat regular updates again.
- Andrew is now living in Canada, which is good.
- We are currently searching for a bigger house to rent. We were hoping to buy. We even found what would have been our perfect home and was about to make an offer. But, those hopes were dashed when we learned that, without a co-signer, or rent-to-own type deal, we’d have to put a 35% down payment because of Andrew’s current immigration status. Now, without the co-signer or finding a suitable rent-to-own, we will have to wait at least two years before we can purchase a house. Finding a suitable house to rent, in an area that would allow Kid2 easy transportation to his school, is proving very difficult.
- My lupus has been a bit of a bugger as of late. Lots and lots of brain fog, resulting in really terrible aphasia. Some days, it takes up to 20 tries just typing out a tweet so that it is somewhat coherent. And even then… let’s just say there has been way too many tweets with really bizarre errors in them, thanks to lupus. So, when one’s job involves a lot of writing, it makes working extremely difficult, to say the least. Also, this past week, I’ve been running a higher than usual fever.
- Reverse quarantine came early for me this year when whooping cough made its way into Kid2’s school.
- I’ve been doing a lot of cross-stitching recently. For way too long, I was working ridiculous hours and not taking any time for self-care. Obviously, that isn’t a smart thing to do. So, even though I feel really guilty for doing so, I’ve been taking at least 2 hours a day just to focus on a craft that I’ve loved for over three decades. I’ve been shutting off social media, shutting down my e-mail program, putting something on to watch, and just stitching. Work be damned. If I don’t take the mental health break everyday, I’m not going to make it through the next few really crazy months, thanks to stress and how it will only make my existing lupus issues worse.
I know there are things that I’ve neglected to mention. But, I only intended for this to be a short update, and I’m now at over 750 words.
TL;DR: Everything is fine. Busy. But, fine. Thanks for wondering, Patty 🙂
I enjoy your tweets, and I for one, failed to notice any bizarre ones; perhaps the aphasia isn’t as bad as it feels from the inside?
In any case, I strongly applaud your emphasis on self-care. As a mental health advocate, I know the importance of self-care over all else: you can’t be helpful to others, or of much use at all, if your own mental health is failing. So, good on you!
Also, sorry so much that your personal attacks have been increasing. It’s possibly the biggest problem in the internet today, and I wish to heck there was some easy solution to it. So many valuable contributors to our civilisation like yourself have dropped out because of this sort of bullying. May I add that I would miss you terribly should you decide to pull back into a shell? But I would not blame you if it became necessary, either.
Good luck!
Thanks, Paul 🙂
As for the tweets, some of them I delete and fix. Some of them I add a fix after.
One of my biggest problems is that I’ll think one word, but what ends up getting typed is a word that kinda sounds similar, or begins and ends with the same letters, but it isn’t at all the word that I’m thinking. So, it’s gibberish, but not really. It’s one of the permanent after effects from my stroke 7.5 years ago. And when my lupus is acting up, it just gets worse. It takes so much effort to do the necessary thinking required for communication, leaving me so exhausted.
Posts that would normally take me 30 minutes to type are taking up to 6 hours.
Also, it’s affecting my speech, forgetting common nouns, etc. Thankfully, I have a safe word for when it happens when in speech, cueing the other person to fill in the blanks.
It takes a lot of effort to mask this struggle. So, if you aren’t noticing it, that means I’m doing a brilliant job covering it up.
Jules, I’ve just discovered your website and blog. As a pretty mainstream (conservative actually) suburban mom, I find your work to be excellent and relatable, despite the fact that I don’t have the same struggles that you have faced. We all have struggles with ourselves, family and the larger world in general of one kind or another. I look forward to more of your work here and on geekmom.com. Chin up, you have more support than you may know.