Month: June 2017

Restless & Undirected

It’s difficult, sometimes, remembering that right now, waiting is the right thing to do. It certainly doesn’t feel like the right thing to do. But it is what it is. We’ve closed on my parents’ house in Concord, so I’ve got work to do getting that prepped – the two things we need are accessibility ramps & A/C + new furnace + ductwork. It looks like I’ve got the latter taken care of, and the former is a fairly straightforward process.

We’ve got a trip coming up in a few days, going back to London, then to visit good friends in Dublin. After that, we’ve got a week here, and then I’m off to NY to actually help my parents with their move, which is both something that’s taken forever, and feels much too fast. Still, it’s a step that needs taking, might as well get it over with, and better to do it now, while unemployed, than later, when I’ve gotta juggle all this and a job, which would be a challenge.

The kids are bananas. They draw all the time. Huge fans of Dav Pilkey’s work –  Captain Underpants and Dog Man, primarily. They’ve both been drawing the characters, making their own comics, flipbooks, and all kinds of stuff. It’s been a huge leap in Jin’s enthusiasm for writing, which is great, and Kuno’s getting to a point where he knows most of his letters, and he’s great at copying stuff out of the books. So he’s gotten to the first step of writing, which is really fantastic.

I’ve been spending a reasonable amount of time swimming & learning to kiteboard. Wind’s been useless this week, unfortunately, but before that, I’ve had a couple solid efforts at it, and I think I’m super close to it being fairly comfortable. One or two more stints. It’s really just a time issue. Getting the kids in the evening means cutting out pretty early, just as the wind is picking up – so I’m never there at the optimal time. Ah, well. It’s getting there, slowly, and there’s a lot of the season left.

I’ve spent a lot of the time at home cleaning – not really “cleaning”, I guess, so much as “decluttering corners of the house that have been building up for years.” All that random stuff that we don’t really have a place for – getting rid of it where that makes sense, reorganizing and putting into some sort of organized storage where that makes sense. It’s interesting, also, trying to figure out what to keep & what to hang on to re: the kids’ stuff. There are some toys that are clearly “aged out”, but then there are others that are more cyclical. So I’ve taken to putting some of those in the closet, and hopefully when they come out again, they’ll be interesting & fresh. Then for the other things, they’re in the process of getting donated.

So. Organization. Feels like one of those things that’s satisfying because progress is almost inevitable given an investment of time, whereas much of the rest of my life feels like it’s out of my hands.

Been starting to look at potential jobs, and it’s … daunting. Finding a job outside of games will be a challenge, I think, in large part because my skill set is difficult to categorize for someone who’s not really experienced with game development. I’d like to do something that makes a tangible, positive difference for people other than “fun”, and something that helps people become better people. There are some nibbles on that front for something that looks a lot more like contract work, but it’s still a bit nebulous.

Part of the problem is that we’ve just got a high burn rate. Between my parents’ house, daycare, medical insurance, etc. – our burn rate is something I would have never even though possible, particularly because our lifestyle hasn’t blown up in ways that seem obvious to me. Hopefully once we get jobs, and once we get my parents moved out here & their other house sold, that burn will come down significantly. But it’s still bananas, and it’s been on fire for nearly three years. So… yeah. Ah, opportunity cost. We paid a lot for the ability to try to follow our dream of independence. Sad it didn’t work, but it was worth giving a solid shot. Now, it’s time to find something new.

So off on vacation for a few weeks, dive into moving craziness, and once I resurface in mid-July… we’ll see where we go from there.