Well...

What a terrible week. Not only has the work trip been quite frustrating, but it's not just work; I'm trying to refinance my house with the lower interest rates now in play, and there's been snags, and my assignment at church has had someone who's really anxious and pressing on something that she thinks is super urgent and needs immediate attention even though I'm out of town, and my dad's health has gone from bad to considerably worse over the last few months, accelerated even more in the last few weeks. I'll probably have to take some time to my folks house and help my mom out with him. And, who knows? At his age, these compounding health issues simply are not a great sign. His younger sister passed away a couple of years ago; it might be his time this year too, unless he can rebound shortly. 

So, my plans to have a semi-relaxing work trip didn't work out. When I wasn't frantically texting or calling people in my off time, I was pretty drained, and just kind of sat and vegged with my phone; either listening to music, blowing through YouTube videos that I was only semi-interested in, or otherwise doing things that required little to no brain power or emotional investment. I did not read anything other than a couple of chapters of Rise of the Seventh Moon. I'm still a little bit shy of halfway. Which is easy to tell, because I'm reading it on my Kindle app on my phone. 46% right now. Maybe I'll finish that with my additional personal travel that I'm doing tonight and this weekend in general. Sigh. I'll take my stuff if I go to my folks house too; I won't be busy literally the entire time, of course.

The image is ChatGPT generated, of course, but it's a reasonably accurate facsimile. Maybe he's a little better looking than me, and maybe just a little bit grayer. (Or maybe not.) But otherwise, that's pretty close. Other than that I don't wear dress shirts like that very often, especially when sitting in a hotel room by myself. 

Anyway, yeah—sometimes life sucks, and sometimes the suckage lingers for a while. Don't get me wrong; things could be worse. But I've mostly just been very busy, very stressed, and very frustrated by things, and haven't had an avenue to "come down" and decompress very well. I think that's part of the reason I've embraced SWTOR so much lately; it's a pretty brainless activity that accomplishes that. Without it, my more aggressive reading plans ended up not being the best—they required more mental horsepower than I had left at the end of the day. 

I do need to mark my completed book in my tracker, but with only one complete, that's not super urgent. I just don't want to forget it. Although maybe I don't need to worry so much about tracking my reading. I've only done that for the last four years, and I was reading just fine before that. I did find that tracking my reading ended up encouraging me to read more, but even that wasn't necessarily consistent. 2024 wasn't a good year for reading, for instance, even though it was a good year for tracking what relatively little I read. 

Anyway, it's nice to make plans, even for something as frivolous as how to spend my free time while out of town on a business trip, but making plans is no guarantee of keeping plans. I don't know if this is literally true, and Google's seach AI seems to suggest "sorta" but I'm feeling it today.