Thinking

I've been meaning to update for the past week, but I've found it a bit hard to. I've said before that I didn't want to turn this into a diary and share every last detail of my life, but over the last week my thoughts have been a bit dominated by something personal that I didn't really think was appropriate to broadcast on here. I'm alright and there's nothing that anyone needs to worry about, I've just had an awful lot to get my head around and think about that's making it a bit hard to idly chat about anything else.

It's still been a 'positive' progressive week regardless though, another OT session, another outing, all went well and I continue to move forwards, whether I can fully comprehend it or not. Next week I start my new magic wonder pills, so if they work then I might just be able to measure my progress by more normal standards than my current skewed scale.

And I remain very thankful for my background noise, I don't know how I would have got through this week if I didn't have something I could sink my hours into while I try to process things.

Time passes

It's often given as a measure of 'how far I've come' whenever something goes wrong and I manage to get through it. Back at the start of the year, one of the real turning points for me was after so much else had gone wrong, we got snowed in with no power for a few days, and it even surprised myself just how much I rose to the challenge. I always say whenever things are hard to get through that time just goes by regardless – whether you're happy and looking forward to it or dreading every last second, the time will just tick by and the world will keep turning around you, so long as you just keep breathing in and out all things will eventually pass.

It was the release of Civilization V on Friday, one of the games that I mentioned in my pre-order post a while back; it was the one that I had the free map for via Game. The disc came on Thursday, but since this is the digital age of bonus exclusive, digital and encrypted content, the game wouldn't even let me install it until midnight on launch day. Midnight GMT, that is. Why they felt the need to display that when we're not actually in GMT for British Summer Time, I don't know, but either way, it was only an extra hour to wait.

An hour later and we had stage 2 of the problem, with the game refusing to run. Eventually after several reinstalls and driver updates, I gave up at 3am, and got up just 5 hours later when my mind refused to switch off of the problem solving mode it had drifted into in my semi-sleep. Fortunately though I had managed to stumble across the solution, so at long last I've got the background noise back that I've been bemoaning the lack of over the past few weeks. Really, its been a lifesaver.

The problems rapidly shifted to the foreground though, since an outing was needed to get a parcel posted, only already a week late. In a nice bit of synchronicity, I was only actually able to get it posted at last because I could use the padded envelope the game came in, so one thing rolled nicely into another on that count.

Things were... bad, though. Hopefully for the last time, since this week I should be starting some new pills to help eliminate that, but still. The outing itself went perfectly and I got my achievement, will hopefully make a friend's day tomorrow with post and I've made another one of the baby steps towards normality that everyone seems to think is so valuable. What's stuck with me though, instead of the 'good' parts, is the way that I felt before it, the sense of impending doom that took so much to conquer that was attached to something so utterly mundane as driving for 2 minutes to post a letter.

I've laid all the foundations so that hopefully, just by getting by and breathing in and out, the wheels have been set in motion to drag me along forward to the place I want to eventually go. It's all I can do to just keep at it, knowing that the time will be there regardless of whether I am. Sometimes, when it comes to posting parcels or solving computer errors, things work out. And sometimes, for reasons that we can't influence as time marches on regardless, they don't.

Onwards and upwards

I received a very... helpful email this morning. It was from play.com, responding to my third complaint (submitted 6 days ago) and finally passing on my code for my free horse. If you had been paying attention, you may have noticed that my last entry said a similar thing. It would appear that that one was in fact the ORIGINAL email, promised to be sent within 72 hours, finally arriving after 23 days, and this one was just them finally getting back to me after complaining about it repeatedly. Needless to say, I'm not exactly impressed by my first time shopping experience with them, and I don't think I'll be going back. But then... Gran Turismo 5... they DO have a nice pair of very shiny black cars...

I got another package in the mail today, one of my games arriving a day early! And unlike my experience with other retailers, I've got a nice email sitting in my inbox already promising my lovely map of the Americas, all ready to install the second I've got the game set up. But then, that leads me to my next problem, and my next reason for grumping – the bloody game won't even install itself until midnight and the official launch date. I'd accepted that I wouldn't get to play it until then due to the fancy high-tech copy protection, but not even able to INSTALL it? Meaning that at midnight, I can finally put the disc in the drive... and spend the next 2 hours getting it configured and patched, and faced with the choice of leaving it til morning or pulling an all nighter. Considering that the last couple of nights my mind's seen fit to keep me awake til after 5 anyway, the latter option might just be more appealing...

I've still been technically 'continuing my progress' towards my grand dreams and schemes, and even today I could say that I've made another big step towards making it all real. But I don't know, maybe its just the winter drawing in and depression taking a bit more of a hold on me, but it all feels just that extra bit further away. In the early stages its all about the purity of the dream and focus on the changes that achieving it would bring, but the longer I have to dwell on it the more holes get picked in the practicalities and the further away it all seems to be. I'm pretty sure I've done everything right in setting it all in motion, now just like everything else I have to wait for that little seed to take hold and grow before I can get to the eating the metaphorical fruit. When you're dreaming of home-grown apple pie though, you don't tend to consider how much dirt you need to get under your fingernails to get there.

Untouched... unhinged.

Don't you just hate it when you wake up feeling like P. Diddy? Oh wait... no. Because that's not even a thing!

For the last couple of days I've been using up all my writingness and creativity on real-life, pen and paper stuff instead of this. If I had a few more followers it might be a bad trade off, but seeing as a third of my audience will see the benefit, its probably worth it!

This is such a boring lull just now, with all my last wave of projects taken care of but their replacements to work towards still a couple of weeks away. I had hoped that one of my game deliveries might help fill some of the gaps, but most annoyingly I've had to use some of my writing allocation to send them angry emails for not sending me my free in-game horsey! It may be minor, but I bought from that shop solely on the basis that they'd give me free stuff, so I want it fulfilled damn it!

Did you know?: That Tatu's All About Us was in fact written by The Veronicas, before the record company reassigned it to the Russian pair? Isn't there something a bit off about that that it was originally written by and about sisters, and then co-opted to be about lesbianism?

Talking of the Veronicas (neither of whom is called Veronica, but still), one of them had a nudey picture scandal. Oh heavens! In this puritanical day and age, no less. Someone must inform the elders! However, it was made somewhat worse by one of their fan forums organising a “post your own nude pics in support of Jess” thread, requiring the poptart herself to intervene begging them to call it off. I think that might possibly be the most misguided show of support I've ever seen. But still, full marks for the execution.

Two's Company

I've said it before, that when things go well and are nice (and normal!) for me, it's a lot harder to write a blog entry about it. It feels a bit like I'm degenerating into a “wot I did on my summur holidayz” style entry to just list a bunch of nice things and to say that all of them made me feel nice and happy. But the fact of the matter is... it did. I had a lovely week where I could just be myself and have some very basic fun and company with the things I do, complete with lots of laughs and hugs and pokes.

I'm always overly focused on being able to cross things that I feel I've missed off of some imaginary life list, so I'm happy to be able to have a couple of them as well as my nice memories. In my ongoing task to actually see all the films whose cultural impact I'm aware of, I can put a tick beside Alien, and it was a lot of fun to put on I Know What You Did Last Summer after midnight, with all the lights out in the dark. And I'm probably a little late on this bandwagon, but man... back in the day, Jennifer Love Hewitt was HOT.

Its always hard though afterwards to get back into the regular boring old pattern of resting and boredom, so I've been amusing myself by combing the depths of the internet (alright, I've clicked links off of maybe 5 sites, but still) to try and find bonus digital deals and pre-order in-game content for my current and upcoming games. It makes for quite an eclectic list, across 4 games of varying genres:

• three sets of armour

• two stealth black cars

• a 10mm pistol

• a water flask

• an ipod dock

• a psychic fire-mouse

• 10 doses of poison

• a horse (neigh)

• a decorative rock

• an XL broad machete

• a set of golden guns

• and a map of Central and South America.

I've not even played The Sims 3 for about 3 months, but it at least keeps me amused surfing around trying to find free stuff for it. I'll no doubt go back to it in a couple of months when the next expansion comes out, so I'll appreciate all the more then that I used 10 minutes of my boredom in July to get that limited time offer in-game Ford Fiesta. Plus, one of the games (that I got most of the militaristic bonuses for) was rated today – Fallout: New Vegas. As per usual, I've preordered my brother and my copies from different sites so that we could collect all the different bonuses between us, it just worked out quite well that I was into shooting and he was keener on stabbing. Next we just have to work on making sure that he doesn't play it in front of my parents, considering the aforementioned classification granted it an 18 rating, for strong violence, gore, drug use, language, and the best of the lot... implied sexual conduct between the human player character and robots.

Hopefully being the best big brother ever grants more perks than will be taken away, (along with the right to judge suitability) by angry parents.