waiting....On the Sunday before Further Confusion, I took a step off a two-step ladder and injured my left knee. Not a complete dislocation, thankfully, but it is still very painful and rather unstable, and so folks at the con saw me using crutches and wearing a brace.
The convention was a lot of fun, sitting next to Momma Mel White and helping her sell stuff and draw and chat with friends. The injury prevented me from doing a lot of moving, so I didn't get out to visit as many folks as I would've liked, but overall it was a good time.
The Tuesday after the con was the first day of my new job. I have returned to doing technical work, which has many advantages for me over being in the culinary field:
1) The pay is steady. I was so underemployed in the previous 3 months as to be essentially unemployed -- catering is feast or famine.
2) As a telecommuter, I stay at home - especially useful in this current gas crunch as I don't need to deal with traffic or gas as much.
3) It is less hazardous, as I have fallen too many times now to feel secure being in an industrial kitchen under time constraints that may cause more accident.
This doesn't mean I've stopped cooking entirely, just that working in the culinary field is less than optimum for my situation. With my continuing medical problems (not including the injury), I need income to handle the bills and I need to be in a situation where I can work without further injury risk.
Now, the one downside to the new job is that I'm essentially working on Texas time. This isn't so bad, since most of my corporate-catering gigs required me to be on site at 6am -- including prep and commute would usually take up 90 minutes prior to that, instead of the 15 I have now. And while I am technical support (with all that the job title implies), I don't deal directly with the customers 100% of the time and can be very personable those times when I do.
So, I'm adapting to a new schedule that requires me to go to sleep a lot earlier (when I was unemployed, my sleep was between 6-18 hours long and waking up before noon was a good day), working with computers, and getting a small but steady income. Slow improvement is better than no improvement, and that includes getting back into having a creative schedule as well.
This does mean, though, that some things have been lost along the way.... I ran into Brian Reynolds at the con and was reminded that a friend of his tried to contact me through LJ some *years* ago, and while my ferret-brain thought I replied immediately to the interesting letter, apparently that motion never translated to actual activity.... I hope you still lurk, and perhaps send me another note so we can chat.
No, Nicolai, I haven't forgotten your commission... but it's been buried under 3 feet of stuff on what's supposed to be my art table. With the new job came the requirement of having an actual office space to work in, so there's been a massive furniture arrangement in the smallest room of this house. I am only now removing cruft and clearing the area that's not my computer desk so I can once again draw and sew.
The Other Suns project is in one of those buried boxes, patiently waiting for this foster parent to get enough spare cash to clothe it. I still want to do it properly, and that requires money I cannot spare at this time. Perhaps in the future I can create some content for a website that would be worthy of a "Donate" button and generate the needed money and interest for that game once again.
I have 35 years of a world living in my head that I need to get out into the physical plane. I have high hopes that stability will allow me the freedom to delve back into that creative space and pull something out for the outside world to enjoy -- or at least ponder at. As with most ADHD people, I have to reconcile the warped sense of timespace that exists both inside and outside my head. As I finally build structure to deal with the outside world, I'll be able to work on the inside as well.
