Review of the Year

[chrisvenus]

Everybody else seems to be doing it so I thought I'd look back and see what I can remember of the last year.

Last years review is http://www.livejournal.com/users/chrisvenus/160354.html?nc=1 and contained a bit on where I wanted to be this time next year which was kind of cool. I then read my last years LJ posts which mainly told me I didn't really keep much track of what I'd been doing.

So, things that stand out from last year...

1) Moving house - in many ways this has dominated my year even though it was technically a brief thing
2) Ex-housemates getting married
3) Enjoying work

So how am I different from last year?

Well, same job as last year though a lot more settled in now and actually knowing what I'm doing that I don't think I did totally this time last year. New place to live for the first time in five or six years which was weird. Same old love life for the same old reasons. To quote: "Now I'm single and have been for some time. Its not a choice, I'd like another relationship but its not happened. I'd like to say its not a problem but I know it does get me down. Still, maybe next year will bring me more luck."

So lets think about detail...

Job

I'm still working for InfoBasis and thoroughly enjoying it. I'm really feeling like I contribute a lot to the product even if I can't always point to a specific part of it and say "that was me". However there have been a few great sites where I've worked on functionality as well as look and feel and had a lot of people say how good they think it is. I have to say that enjoying my job has kept me sane this year. If I didn't enjoy my job I'd be just... I dunno. In a very much worse place than I am right now.

Living place

Well, I spend the first four months of the year in my old place looking for somewhere to live. At the beginning of the year I had no idea what I was going to do or anything because I had nobody lined up to live with and finding somewhere for one was proving to be a nightmare. Luckily things changed and I gained quisalan as a housemate (despite having already told me that she didn't want to live with me) and nearly kissifa (before she made the wise choice of staying in her cheap and nice place). Krys did the majority of the househunting though I think we both looked at the same number of houses. She eventually found the current place and also provided a third housemate. We moved in back in may and then the problems all began.

The moving wasn't too bad. I bought 25 collapsible packing crate things and put everything in them, dismantled my room and moved everything with help from some friends. The problems came with getting stuff sorted at the house. The garden wasn't sorted when we moved in and in fact is only nearly sorted now. It spent most of the year as a wilderness and only got cleaned out this month as the gardener came in.

Lack of third housemate turning up and paying rent caused problems. After the obvious lack of money came the fact he was going to transfer his BT and ADSL over to the new house so I hadn't made moves to sort that out for a month or so. Then when I decided to sort stuff I decided on NTL (I wasn't keen on the idea of a satellite dish for TV) and the fun and games started culminating after two months with them saying that they could in fact not install. Then BT started being crap and telling me it would be 5 weeks before an engineer could come out to get us set up.

Eventually all our services (ADSL, sky and BT) were sorted but after far more phone calls than are really healthy. There was some fun and games with bills not being paid and us nearly getting cut off leading to me taking the executive decision to just sort all the bills myself rather than hoping somebody else might do it. This has worked so far and we've not lost any of our services yet.

The third housemate turned up eventually, five months late. I have a funny feeling that I won't be living with him after May though since after the way this year has gone I'm not sure I could cope with that kind of thing. He's a nice guy and were it not for the money issues I'd be happy to live with him again.

I've tried to summarise this but I feel it worth reiterating, for my own benefit when re-reading if nothing else, that through most of these things there were a hell of a lot of phone calls to various people. Uncountable messages left for Paul, innumerable conversations with the letting agency in which they told me that they didn't know when the garden would be sorted, what the situation with was the curtains they promised, etc. etc. There was a point that I was really hating this place because of the amount of work I was having to put in just to get things going as they should be. Luckily with all the issues with the letting agency sorted (with the exception of the nearly finished garden) and a third housemate who, though still in debt, has started giving me money.

Social Life

I feel in a quite different place socially than I was last year. Last year I was still doing Cam and so seeing people from that a lot. Since April though I've not done any Cam at all and so have fallen out of touch a lot with the people that I used to see from that. Luckily a lot are on LJ so I still get to keep uptodate with them that way. Trouble is that they all live scattered around the country so without something events like Cam to give me an excuse to see them all at the same time its just not practical to see them all lots still.

I've met new people though which has been good. A few are new people through RPGSoc and people from AnimeSoc that I have got to know better. Also though there is ou3fs that the observant among you will have noticed cropping up in my LJ posts over the last few months. There are lots of nice people there and although I don't know them that well they are all very nice people that I am looking forward to getting to know better.

There are still people (apart from the Cam lot) that I don't see as much as I'd like to which is annoying but time and distance constraints will tend to do that.

And its just occurred to me in a weird way that Kim'n'Andy are people that I had never met this time last year and I now consider very good friends. I first met them at TFM and AFM's wedding. Well, Andy at least because Kim was ill so I got to know her later.

Roleplaying

One of the big things that I tend to do is roleplaying so I thought I'd put in a little bit about that in here. As mentioned earlier this time last year I was still playing Cam but that came to an apocalyptic end in March as... err... well, I'm not sure what actually happened apart from that we won in some ways. It was a bit of an end of an era. I'd been playing the same character for six years near enough and the character had totally become real to me. But no more cam. I made the decision long ago that I preferred smaller independent games to things like cam. That was why I was playing firstborn (according to my last year's write up) which came and went and was very cool and had a very entertaining last session that saw me possessed by the (or "a" possibly) big bad.

To put my money where my mouth was I am playing in two big independent live action/freeform games at the moment, both based in London. One is a Star Wars game (how could I resist?) and the other is an Amber game. Its a lot of effort at times getting down into London so I have sucked and missed a couple of games but given that starwars is monthly and amber is every two months I am hoping to get to them more often.

In oxford the Society Game, Conspiracy, finished with an impressively good result for me having managed to take over everything from behind the scenes. All went scarily to plan in that (in the long run - the short term was beset with problems of course). Horizon came next and has proved excellent fun too and is taking us into next year. I seem to have accidentally become involved in running the next game after Horizon which is in its planning stage and lots of ideas are being bounced around by the prospective GM team. Despite having promised myself after my Cam burnout that I wouldn't run big games like that again I seem to be doing so and am really looking forward to it.

And in comparison?

So how did that match up to last years section on what I wanted to be saying next year.

I think I can say I contributed well at work and there are things that I have done and I can point to and say "that's mine" and it not be lost. I think my work goals were a success. :)

Love has been non-existent this year really. No girlfriend still but as I said, that's just keeping the status quo so not on target with this one but not going in the opposite direction at least (mainly due to their being nowhere to go in that direction).

Housing I think I hit the mark though beset by many issues that were unforeseen so I'm not going to count that as a complete success.

Social Life - got to see snow_leopard, even if it was only a couple of times. And made new friends in oxford outside of my RP friends. I say this is an unqualified success.

Holidays - I said I wanted to go on holiday and although I was meaning abroad which I failed I did at least manage a holiday. A nice week in Cornwall organised by mentalfirewall was a proper holiday and included many of the elements holidays should have including lots of good friends and going to the beach.

I think I'm getting about half marks on that which isn't too bad.

Anything else?

The year has also seen me go to far more national trust properties than in a long time. I've actually found I really enjoy wandering around houses and learning about their history. I'm much more into houses and their history than gardens though. I like to see the history of the people and how the way things were done has changed and how they lived in the past. My partner in crime for this has been David who has a national trust life membership which means that he can get me into these places for free. :)

On a more down note the end of the year has been beset by my depression rearing its ugly head again. Its hard to say when it started but in mid-November I wrote myself a fairly lengthy private post in which I commented that I wasn't sure when it started but it had been going on several weeks at least. Its probably around the last two and a half months or so maybe more. The trouble is it comes on very subtly and I think at first that I'm just stressed or tired and its only when you realise that you've been feeling down for some time that you realise that it might not be just a passing phase.

Its under control to the extent that I don't feel I need to go see the doctor about it or get medicated (the day I say that I think I need happy pills again is the day you know its *really* serious given my attitude towards those things). Its not under control though to the extent that I can't seem to dislodge it again. I suspect it will go in time as it always does though so I'll just give it a bit more time. And I'm not a big fan of new year these days so I don't expect to be cheery around now.

The main thing that my depression seems to be doing this time round is making me feel very socialphobic. I am getting really nervous whenever I go out places and do things with people (not always but often). Best example being I've spent half the afternoon trying to persuade myself that I should go to at least one of the four new years parties happening in oxford that I've been invited to. My original plan was to make it to two of them (which were a 20 minute walk from each other) but I suspect that if I get to any I won't bother moving on. I'm not sure what it is I'm afraid of though. In a certain ironic way I think I'm scared that I won't enjoy myself and that I'll feel awkward and crap and get depressed. I have fears of conversations that involve me not being able to think of a single interesting thing to say and people to think I'm a knob and all that kind of thing. I can logically tell myself that this won't happen but the emotional part of me doesn't accept that.

My lack of emotional stability is amusingly obvious to me in some ways. I can find myself crying for very little reason, either for happiness or sadness. I think the recent thing that got me most was that at the beginning of the new Narnia film there is a scene of the bombing of London. I got ridiculously emotional as I thought about the blitz and kept thinking about my dad having lived through it all and it all just got a bit much in my head. Its all really silly and as I try to explain it just sounds like I should stop whining and being silly but its just not that simple.

And next year?

I think my hope for next year will be that I'll get rid of this depression quickly, I'll have less housing issues than this year and that I'll get a nice pay rise from work that will demonstrate how valuable my work is. I'm not going to do resolutions because in my current low on the depression rollercoaster failing to keep resolutions might not be the best plan.

Comments

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

It sounds to me like there are tons of positives there - however, the black dog rears its head without rhyme or reason. You don't need to have things going badly in order to be having far less fun, all round, than you should.

If I lived near you, I'd be dropping around to see you and share daft stories and jokes all the frickin' time. :-) (Mostly just to watch you play Quake, like in the good old Keble 2 days.)

I hope you have a good night tonight and that you find things that work for you so that next year can have even more of the good things and far fewer of the bad ones.

[snow-leopard.livejournal.com]

huge *HUGS*
and best wishes for 2006

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I think the recent thing that got me most was that at the beginning of the new Narnia film there is a scene of the bombing of London. I got ridiculously emotional

Hey, that wasn't just you. I almost cried during that bit and my family weren't even in England at the time.

[lathany.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear the house is now sorted (more or less).

Been meaning to ask you - any computer game recommendations from 2005?