The long overdue second update

[Lot of talk about depression, also possibly unpleasant living situation]

I'm going to break this into sections, for ease of reading.  If anyone cares, they were written in the order of "Living Situation", "Living Situation Part 2", "Money", "Mental Health", "Writing", "Computer"

~ Computer ~

Obviously my computer is pretty critical to Stealing Commas since without a computer I can't post anything here.

Right now my primary computer is borked.  It had various smaller problems, then the hinges broke (it's a laptop) and now it's in two pieces.

It's under warranty, and hinges are easy to replace, so it shouldn't cost anything to fix it.  If it needs to be replaced, though, I'll need to pay for a new warranty for the replacement.  Possibly more, since I don't remember if it was on any kind of sale when I got it.  (The warranty gives the money to buy a new computer of the same price, not the same capabilities.)

Still, as far as I know the only major problem is the hinges, and those are simple enough to fix.  It should be relatively quick and fairly easy to get primary computer fixed.

It's been sitting in my living room for over a month doing nothing.

I want to back it up myself.  That means locating the external hard drive with enough storage space to pull it off.  As tasks go, that's not a difficult one.  The problem is that right now I'm having great difficulty with all tasks, regardless of whether or not they're intrinsically difficult.

That brings us to the next thing:

~ Mental Health ~

I'm not doing well.  I haven't been doing well.  I never fully recovered from breaking my ankle back in mid February of last year.  That's more than a year and nine months now.  Around six months ago or so, things got worse.

My hormones are still out of whack.  There's no evidence that that's what's screwing up my brain in depression-y ways, but we're working on getting them back into whack.  Checked my thyroid.  It's not the problem.  Working with my psychiatrist to adjust medications, but antidepressants tend to be of the form "tweak, wait a month, see results if any, repeat" so it's a very slow process.

Anyway, being in this bad place makes it hard to stay on top of other things.  Notably, Eat-Drink-Sleep is a huge thing that has repercussions in every aspect of life and I've been doing a crap job of keeping on top of it.

Screwing up any one of those can give depression-like symptoms, screwing up all three when you're already suffering from depression is not good.

~ Writing ~

My creativity has abandoned me.  That's incredibly unpleasant.  I cannot describe how much I want to be telling stories, and how much it hurts that I can't.

I'm going to keep trying, of course, and I certainly hope that there will be stuff to share here in the near future.

~ Money ~

Money should be great.  Actually, I need to update the thing in the sidebar.

*does that*

As one can see, while my debt is still as massive as it has ever been, most of it isn't accruing interest.  This is a very good thing and a huge thing, and I'm very grateful for it.

If my camera hadn't passed the point of dead and dived right into the murky depths of "no longer capable of being zombie-level animated" I'd have zero high-interest debt.  (That's camera, plus warranty, plus needing to buy a different type of memory card for the new camera.)

That said, things aren't great.  I have been so absurdly out of it for the past six months, and I wasn't particularly with it for the year and three months before that.

Sometimes the only way out is to spend money on the things I'm not capable of doing myself.  That adds up, though it doesn't add up quite enough to explain why I'm over $900 behind on certain things.  I'm probably going to have to look up what constitutes the remainder of the shortfall.

Anyway, that' the quarterly and . . . thirdly(?) bills hitting at the same time.  I need to scrape up that $900+, and soon, but I have no idea how I'll do that.

I also should put oil in the tank.  $427.35 right now, but the price of oil changes constantly.

So: yay.

~ Living Situation ~

I was planning to write up a post saying that things weren't as bad as they were, then I got news that, while long anticipated, was still very much "Oh God, oh God!  The sky is falling."

You know how every time it's looked like I wouldn't be able to afford to keep my house I said that the only other options would be bad for my mental health?

(The other options being moving in with my dad or my sister.)

My dad is going to be moving in with me.

As I said, this was long anticipated.  My dad was renting the upstairs apartment from his dad.  His dad's attempts to make an updated will didn't go well.  The result was that when my grandfather died his property passed to his girlfriend, which was not a good thing.

Before he died, my grandfather had my dad pay rent way into the future so that, when he was gone, it wouldn't be possible to suddenly evict my father.  That, however, didn't change the fact that my grandfather's girlfriend now owned the building.  She got a reverse mortgage.

The way those typically end in cases like hers (and her inheritors aren't likely to shell out the money needed to make things atypical) is that when the person dies, the house becomes the property of the lender.

Now comes the stupid part: Apparently a house changing hands via reverse mortgage does not result in the new owner becoming landlord to any tenants (in the legal sense of that word).  Some sort of loophole somewhere.  As such, tenants (here: my dad) are not protected by tenants' rights.

As near as we can tell, once all of the paperwork for the transfer of ownership of the property goes through, he can be evicted with zero notice.

At which point he'll move in with me.

On the plus side, he'd be a great resource when it comes to keeping up with the bills.

~ Living Situation, Part 2 ~

This may not be as bad as moving in with him would have been.  There's a difference between me being a guest in his house, and him being a guest in my house.

I have my doubts about it being that much better, but apparently when he was looking after my grandmother (not his mother, my moms) and therefore lived with her, he kept to himself except when necessary for the "looking after" part of the equation.

So maybe he'll just sleep in a room I don't use anyway, we'll occasionally cross paths in the kitchen, and he'll pay for TV to actually be on TV in the living room.

Of course the use of entertainment systems is a problem in itself.

Not the mental health problem that living with my family represents, mind you, that comes from frequent direct interactions especially if they involve a shared living space.  The problem entertainment represents is more of a frustration.

I can't block things out.  Well, I can't _intentionally_ block things out.  There have been times when I was engrossed in reading and the world around me basically ceased to exist (as far as my senses were concerned) for hours.  I cannot summon this power, however, and I don't think I've used it in over a decade.

What normally happens is that my attention fixates on anything around me with a strong preference towards things I don't want to see or hear.  (I have a lot of home improvement projects I want to do, one of them is instituting some form of soundproofing.)  My childhood was full of times when I searched the house for the ever elusive spot where the TV in the living room couldn't be heard.

Attempts to distract myself all fail as the thing my attention is fixating on takes precedence.  It's very annoying.