Reading

I am sick and tired of traveling. I'm sick and tired period. I rarely get more than 5-6 hours of sleep a night lately. Too much anxiety about work, about my house situation, about retirement and our debt, etc. Life as an adult hurtling towards retirement age and not really being prepared for it, as well as one who was kind of screwed over by one of my own kids who, in retrospect I have to admit probably has some kind of personality disorder like malignant narcissism or something, is really bringing me down. We also spent money we don't have on my son's wedding recently; probably more than my new daughter-in-law's family did, honestly. I told my wife that if we don't get our debt paid off, including our mortgage, which we're not close to paying off, we can't afford to retire, and we'll be lucky to spend retirement in  a trailer park. That's kind of an exaggeration, but also... not really. If, on the other hand, we sail into retirement with all of our debt eliminated, including our mortgage, then we should be OK. Maybe not as well off as I'd like to be, but OK.

Of course, I'm not considering any inheritance from either my mom or my in-laws, who will likely pass away before I retire. I've got a good 15 years left of work in my, unfortunately (unless I get really lucky somehow) and my mom's 80, and my in-laws are in their 70s. They're both pretty stacked, and their own cushy retirement, especially of my in-laws, was certainly facilitated by inheriting money from my MIL's family. She was an only child, and neither I nor my wife are, though. Still, that will probably be the push that gets us out of a tight retirement into a comfortable one. That and having to work longer than I really want to. Ideally, I'd be retiring early now while I'm still young and healthy enough to enjoy a few good, active years of retirement. My original employer really screwed me over when they had their big white collar layoffs of more senior people. I had 22 years with them, but my pension would plateau at 30 years. I'm only going to get half of what I planned, which means my 401(k), which was kind of an afterthought, now has to do much more heavy lifting than I hoped for it to have to do to fund my retirement. 

Still, with my pension, meager though it is, social security for me and my wife, and no house payment, it should be adequate. Worse comes to worst, we're living in with one of my kids in our twilight years.

Anyway, it wasn't really my intention to whine about my financial anxieties. Maybe I'll get lucky and win a lottery or something, and I can retire early to a nice big chalet or timber home in Wyoming with no neighbors for at least a mile in every direction. And a vacation home in Destin for my wife, who hates the cold and loves the beach. What I really wanted to talk about was reading.

I got a "pocket" sized Pathfinder (1e) Core Rulebook, but I found that I didn't want to carry it around in my backpack, because it was starting to beat up the cover a bit. I also didn't want to read it in that format because the text is very small on my elderly eyes. Luckily, I bought a pdf years ago and never read it, so I fired up that pdf and am reading it there, when at home, and moving my bookmark in the book too, just in case I read the physical book occasionally. It's a little bit ridiculous that I've had this since... well, essentially since it was new, and I've never read it. But the entire Pathfinder 1e corpus is on my reading list now, in the form of five separate trawls (core rules, adventure paths, stand-alone modules, chronicles/setting, and companion books) However, that's a monster book, 578 pages or something (although that includes covers, title pages, and an index, etc. It's still big) so I don't want it to consume my Freeport Trawl which I was poised to finish shortly, with only one relatively modest sized campaign book to read. 

I took several physical books with me, Prisoner of the Horned Helmet, the novel that for some reason I'm struggling with even though I've read it twice before; once in the late 80s when it was new, and once in the late 00s or early 10s, so I know what to expect. I also took the 3e Pathfinder Campaign Setting which is the next book in that trawl, Oriental Adventures which I haven't read since it was new, but I figured I better read before I finally and very belatedly read the Rokugan campaign setting, all for 3e. (I've had the latter for probably twenty years and only flipped through it and read a few pages here and there.) I also brought the Pathfinder Core Rules book mentioned above, but didn't crack it open, as well as the early Companion series on Taldor. But I'll probably read pdfs more frequently, and the only book I finished while traveling was the next T. H. Lain ebook in the old 3e iconics ten novel series. I'm now half way through that series, for whatever that's worth. 

I want to finish the Freeport trawl by reading the Return to Freeport module, which was originally published in six parts (although I bought the "omnibus" pdf from DriveThru), read the next adventure path, Second Darkness, also in six parts, as adventure paths are, and read the big Pathfinder Core Rulebook, all on (mostly) pdf.

I added that image just for visual interest. I don't like making a post without an image. But that also reminds me, given that that prompt was something along the lines of D&D party in a dungeon confronts a Lovecraftian horror, that I also need to finish the Yig Snake Granddaddy campaign, which I've read half of. It comes in four books, and I've read two of them. 

The problem with having so many trawls, especially because the Paizo trawls have so much material in them, is that it feels incredibly slow moving to get some of the other trawls moving. I'd like to finish the next two there too, as well as read the next 5e campaign, Princes of the Apocalypse in the relatively short term. It'll feel nice to get the Freeport Trawl done so that I'm not juggling so many balls in the air at once. The Eberron 3e trawl is the next most reasonable to finish, but 3e Forgotten Realms and 5e campaigns aren't crazy, if I just buckle down on them. The 3pp trawl is also manageable, and I can massage somewhat what's on it as well, as some of the products aren't really campaigns in the traditional sense. 

And maybe I can reach hanging points on some of the others, like on the Pathfinder Modules trawl, I can at least finish the D&D 3.5 compatible modules and then feel like I've reached a half-time of sorts for that trawl. Same thing with the 3e Adventure Trawl if I finish the pseudo-Adventure Path modules, and then just have the stand-alones in chronological order left to read. I'm halfway to that half-time already, and those modules are pretty short. Maybe if I focus on them, I can feel like I can "rest" that trawl for a little while, at least.