candybox - a semi-open musebox

Having a lot of "good hours, bad hours" lately. Not really sure what's triggering it other than perhaps that we're now heading into the less light months and I feel particularly panicked by things I can't affect and very much caught up in grief of not living a life and struggling to do most things.

I'm just, really tired. Seasonal shift. My PEM hasn't been too bad after groceries but the brain fog has been gruelling, I finally managed to look at words four days on but after about half an hour my head is on fire and it hurts, and I've not been sleeping too well due to pain from however I'm laying so keep waking up every half hour to adjust my arms. The lack of recovery and improvement and just slippery parameters of "basically nothing" is very hard to deal with.

I don't know if I'll do November writes this year. I want to, but I'm still struggling my way through C7-10 rewrites for undercoverfic after six weeks. I haven't touched C10 at all yet, and though I made it through C8, C9 needs more adding to it but I am not smart enough to figure out what that thing is. The other reason is the uncertain number of days I can't write around groceries: I used to be able to get away with one session the day of. Then I had to cut out the day of completely. Now it's anywhere from 2-4 days. I might do something small in Bloodstains' universe just to play with a concept, but I think the bigger Ashe fic that runs concurrent with Dawntrail will have to wait. I really don't want another behemoth to edit.

Still working on alts through ARR. Yorva is at Coerthas; Kaesumi, Faye, and Mélodie are in ARR patches, Faye furthest along. I can tell you playing the gambling game of "please give me the next Crystal Tower raid on alliance roulette" failing for all three of them is three too many lotas in one day lmao. I'm kind of trying to get a job to 80 on each of them before doing patches in earnest, since they all either have picto or viper on their job lists, then I can speed through all the ARR patch trials solo... I'm smart.

Once again in a state with food where I'm just debating not eating for three to four days until the rattling on the left side of my body subsides... ( food is not worth this much aggro )

What else... I took Mélodie and Faye both through ARR within a couple of weeks, debating on if I should push Kaesumi through as well since she's at Titan, and if I should do the same with Yorva and Bitter, who are at sylphs. I did buy the outfit I wanted for Yorva, so perhaps now is the time. I should probably push Mél and Faye to HW so they can pick up machinist and astrologian respectively, but ARR patches are something of a slog, especially when you're doing them in tandem... perhaps I'll level them to 70 first, and see if I can solo trials with it to make it a little bit faster...

( it's time for stadium )

I bought Japan only Ashe merch through Neokyo off Mercari, which is taking forever to get here. There was an over a week delay for my parcel to be assembled after everything arrived at the proxy (thanks US tariffs), and after it did finally ship, EMS has now not updated at all in 8 days after supposedly leaving Japan, which is annoying when I paid extra for it to arrive in the projected widow of 3-6, lol. EMS has been very slow to the UK as Royal Mail and parcelforce are combining their services and it's now like?? Maybe 3 weeks to get here?? Who knows??? I had to cut off a couple of things to avoid going over £135 for VAT/duty, but I might have to start acquiring the second round being sent to the proxy before this one eventually arrives to me. And also just, Rems pay less than £5 more and have it come by DHL next time let's not do this nonsense again.

That said I did source a Pinkie Pie kotobukiya direct from Japan via FedEx, which was supposed to be 2-3 days and is going to take 5-6, so international delivery windows seem to be made-up things.