Back to Work; Back to Reality

After three weeks of annual leave, I returned to work this past Monday.  The girls were still off school so it felt weird being the one ‘going back’ to some sort of routine.  Bizarrely, time off didn’t feel like it flew by like it normally does.  Perhaps it’s because we were able to do a lot more this time around – our trip to London, Folly Farm (which I’ll try and post about soon) and other random days out and keeping busy in general.

Interestingly, the last few days of my leave saw my stomach pain return.  During my time off I had very few flare ups and even they were fairly minor.  I felt anxiety wash back over me and a change in my mood on my last few remaining days.  Some would say holiday blues but it’s clearly more than that.  My actual health and well-being began to decline again, reverting back to my pre-holiday liberation.

This week is my long week too, with only today rostered off and working six days this week will be a killer.  I keep hoping we win the lottery but I dunno who I’m trying to kid.  All we seem to win these days are a lucky dip or two (sometimes three).

This new site has ushered in regular post content without me having to focus on it like before.  Posting never really felt like a chore as it had done but my worry was that, with less time at my disposal, I wouldn’t be able to post as much and end up becoming less and less frequent.  In the short space of time this new site has been up, I have achieved more visits and interaction in the three weeks this site has been active than my previous site hit in three months.  I know that that has certainly encouraged me to post more as it feels more like a commitment then with new and returning visitors hitting the site and exploring.  The TopCashback post certainly drove in a ton more traffic which then led to new followers on Twitter and so on.

During my time off, my depression and anxiety had greatly reduced.  I’ll be honest, there’s never a day when they’re not present and there’s never a day where I’m not in pain whether it be my stomach, my back or just general aches and pains.  The sheer volume of content I was publishing/creating was certainly due to the reduced mental strain and I’m hoping I can keep it at bay so I can continue to make this blog successful and interesting.  It’s certainly encouraging that in only three weeks I have amassed 600 subscribers.

A lot of my posts were about activities whether it was days out, jigsaws and whatnot and as I have less time due to my shifts I’m hoping I can still make time for that content and more.  I have a number of drafts ready to go such as our trip to Folly Farm that I mentioned earlier, some little projects on the go as well as TV shows and movies I want to write a little something about.

I was hoping to undertake a project in which I construct a LEGO table for the kids but it’s been nineteen years since I did tech (workshop) in school and, being the very unblokey bloke that I am, I lack the tools and the knowledge that the project requires and deserves so I ended up buying one.  The baseboards aren’t proper LEGO ones but they apparently work with the “leading brands” so I’ll test some proper LEGO on it soon to see.

I’m also looking at buying a lift-top coffee table, such as the one below but forgetting about the mechanism so I can lift the lid off manually.  Inside, I want the base to serve as a game table for dice games/card games by covering the board in felt…I was thinking red felt which would look pretty kick-ass on a black table.  I’m hoping to do that very soon and get some games like ‘Zombie Dice‘ and ‘Get Bit‘ in try the project out proper.

In the meantime, thanks to all my subscribers and regular readers and I hope to have even more content soon as well as a stable amount of interaction with comments and so on.

 


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Craig Stewart

Craig is a father to three daughters and works full time in the telecomms industry. He has a passion for comics, movies, TV shows, tech and games. Craig is a HUGE Batman fan and is a Playstation fanboy. He is also somewhat of a Kevin Smith fanboy too. Latest hyper-focus: Slogging through 2000AD and publishing a daily post as he makes his way through almost 50 years worth of comic books.

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