Is it hypocritical of me to say that I miss when people used to write long-form blog posts when I’ve been really bad at doing so myself?

Probably, but something something do as I say not as I do.

The sporadically (and weirdly) warm weather the past couple weeks seems to have started triggering my spring allergies already, resulting in me waking up at 4 or 5 AM with a running or congested nose, so blame this post on that.

I’ve been reading back through my old journal posts from during and before the pandemic, and I… really miss pre-pandemic life. And it also strikes me that I used to have a much more obvious “life outside of work”, but that mostly disappeared during the pandemic and hasn’t come back since. I don’t think this is the fault of work — my teams and manager and everyone has always been great about work-life balance — but it just feels like something inside me stopped being able to properly destress outside of work (so *all* of my non-work hours are now spent trying to relax) and/or my hobbies now would rely on things I’d consider unacceptably high risk (like going to Origins again and sitting in a convention hall with thousands of people for 4 days).

But it’s striking how much I used to do outside of work, whether it was as simple as “host board games on a weekend” or “go rock climbing once a week” to “dedicate a day every week to doing newspaper things for The Tartan” or “go to things like weddings or group events”. It’s not that I don’t write about them anymore… I don’t do them anymore. It’s probably worth a more serious look at how I can change that.

2024 will probably end up being a year of change (and unexpectedly expected large expenditures of money), in many ways, and not just for myself. It’ll be interesting for me to make a December post and see how many of the currently ongoing pieces of “fun” (both with myself and friends) ended up working out.

Anyway… life goes. There should probably be some photos in this post, but it’s 6:30 AM and I’m not going to boot up my photo computer to satisfy that itch, so wall-of-text it is. (Or was.)