Social Butterfly – The Climb #298

Wednesday 15^th November 2017

Friends have been moaning me about our annual board games meetup. Every year for the last few years since I got my own house I have my friends come over for the day and we play boardgames. Each year there’s a different game. The first year it was Shadows of Brimstone, last year it was Zombicide Black Plague and this year it will be Massive Darkness.
It’s always a good day, even if you can guarantee someone will argue over the rules within the first hour. But this year setting a date has been really tough. A combination of day job and a social obligation means I can’t do the day we all thought. And as a result of this my friends are moaning about me now having a social life.
I hope to get it sorted tomorrow as we have a meeting in the day job about holiday cover.
I wasn’t either in the office or at training tonight due to the problems with the car. I took it into the garage today. I dread to think how expensive it’s going to be. It feels like the last few months have been super-expensive what with travel and physio and the like. I guess, given how many miles I do each year due to training, I can’t really moan at things going wrong with the car.
On the plus side, I had an excuse to tidy the house today as I had a friend come round for a cup of tea. We played Cards Against Humanity and chatted until late. Tidying up was a bit stressful. The house isn’t dirty but it was untidy. Given all the hard work on edits and tournaments it’s meant I don’t get a lot of free time to do a lot of housework. And why should I bother when no-one comes round. My boardgaming friends live so far away that they visit just once a year. The swordfighting lot don’t like to travel beyond Reading. So it means I’m often here on my own.
In recent weeks I’ve been doing a lot to be a bit more social. I’ve kept a lot of people at arm’s length for various reasons but making new local friends and having them just pop round for a cuppa is ace and I love it. It’s motivated me to do more housework (Because the house is still a tip, it’s just that the sofa is no longer covered in weaponry) and that’s good.
Being social eats into my time a little but I’m really enjoying it and I think it’s doing me a lot of good. I am acutely aware, however, that edits on book 2 have stalled somewhat. I need to carve a time for them outside of evenings.
Of course, if I could afford to work full-time on the writing then that might save my evenings, However, that feels an impossibly long way off right now such that I’m starting to feel a bit desperate for news on that front.
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