{"id":526,"date":"2024-01-01T23:13:04","date_gmt":"2024-01-01T22:13:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.squage.com\/site\/?p=526"},"modified":"2024-01-02T10:28:32","modified_gmt":"2024-01-02T09:28:32","slug":"one-year-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.squage.com\/site\/2024\/01\/01\/one-year-on\/","title":{"rendered":"One Year On&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;and no blog posts.<\/p>\n<p>Oops.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s fair to say that 2023 was&#8230; a busy year. Despite this, I felt like I was treading water through much of it&#8230; and it&#8217;s how I ended the year.<\/p>\n<p>Now we&#8217;ve started 2024, I thought I&#8217;d take a moment to reflect on 2023 and see whether it was as &#8220;meh&#8221; as I&#8217;ve come to tell myself it was, or whether, actually, it was a little better than that.<\/p>\n<p>And you know what? It was a mixed bag.<\/p>\n<p>To simplify the previously-written load of rambling, here&#8217;s a list of &#8220;things I&#8217;m happy with&#8221; and &#8220;things I&#8217;m not happy with&#8221; :D<\/p>\n<p><b>Things I&#8217;m Happy With<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Work &#8211; going well, clients happy, no worries there. Plus, websites for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.studioscully.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Studio Scully<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patscullion.co.uk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my personal site<\/a> have been updated at last!<\/li>\n<li>Savings &#8211; growing a bit &#8211; cheers clients!<\/li>\n<li>Home life &#8211; good, chilled (in general) :)<\/li>\n<li>Learning piano &#8211; I know enough to be able to read basic sheet music, play both-handed, understand a bit more theory, and play (after some trial and error) and am making my own melodies up<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.squage.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Squage Party<\/a> &#8211; restarted it and moved to 1 hour each Friday &#8211; it&#8217;s fun, and we&#8217;ve got a great little community<\/li>\n<li>Keeping in touch with Friends &#8211; keeping in touch with various friends back in the UK\/Ireland via Slack and Discord has been great. plus had friends come visit Maastricht and it was lovely to hang out!<\/li>\n<li>MegaGame Help &#8211; I helped my friend Chris from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.verylargehugegames.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Very Large Huge Games<\/a> with graphics (posters for Aftermath and the upcoming First Contact: Rain of Terror, in-game turn timer styling and on-screen &#8216;news bulletin&#8217; intros), and tech-opping of a couple of Mega Games in London.<\/li>\n<li>Christmas Quiz &#8211; we did an online quiz this year on video, 15 teams of friends and family played and it went really well, with a custom web app for answers\/marking. Very happy with that<\/li>\n<li>Computer games &#8211; decided on a cool idea for a game, and started doing game documentation \/ research \/ doodles<\/li>\n<li>Sunday Internet Radio &#8211; It&#8217;s been fun, and although I was a bit burned out during the latter part of the year, listening back to a &#8220;best of&#8221; this evening made me realise we&#8217;ve been having a LOT of fun doing our silly little hobby in 2023<\/li>\n<li>Album mastering &#8211; helped my friend Andy Drysdale by mastering his album <a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/album\/1ALvtQfQ7VdCeWdyKq0BqW?si=s4fCndllQCGnq3xydONRGA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Old Morris Dancer<\/a>.\n <\/li>\n<li>Rest &#8211; We&#8217;ve started going to a local spa once a week and it&#8217;s&#8230; ah, so lovely mentally and physically<\/li>\n<li>Mental health &#8211; Started working on that, so hopefully that&#8217;ll keep getting better in 2024!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Things I&#8217;m Not Happy With<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Weight &#8211; ho boy. Too much food. Not enough exercise.<\/li>\n<li>Tiredness &#8211; need to get more sleep so I can be more motivated!<\/li>\n<li>Procrastination &#8211; see: not having blogged since Jan 2023<\/li>\n<li>Computer Games &#8211; need to actually make something &#8211; see: Procrastination<\/li>\n<li>Piano &#8211; I stopped lessons after the summer break, as I had a bad concert performance (which hit my confidence) and I felt the pieces in the last few lessons were getting too far beyond me, plus work started getting very busy so I didn&#8217;t find the time to practice things like sight reading.<\/li>\n<li>Keeping in touch with friends &#8211; there are some dear friends I&#8217;ve been terrible at keeping in touch with. Need to sort that out!<\/li>\n<li>Keeping in touch with family &#8211; ditto!<\/li>\n<li>Feeling Settled &#8211; several years here and we&#8217;re still not settled, really. Don&#8217;t feel part of the community, and don&#8217;t feel motivated to learn the language. Plus fireworks. JFC. Just&#8230; don&#8217;t. I&#8217;m very tired right now through us being in a car with our dog from 9:30pm to 2:30am last night to get away from the war zone.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Looking to the future&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><b>Here&#8217;s what I&#8217;m hoping for in 2024:<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>More fun here &#8211; Doing more together here outside of work<\/li>\n<li>Pastures new &#8211; Moving to Ireland or the UK or&#8230; who knows!<\/li>\n<li>Computer games &#8211; Make a load of progress and start SHARING the progress too, via methods such as&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>Blogging &#8211; Doing more blogging to share with you what I&#8217;m doing! Also improve this terrible old blog theme :D <\/li>\n<li>Piano &#8211; Restart lessons but slow it down to focus on filling gaps in my knowledge and improving my confidence<\/li>\n<li>Weight &#8211; Lose weight through exercise and better eating &#8211; and more sleep<\/li>\n<li>Staying in touch &#8211; Keep in more regular contact with family and those friends who aren&#8217;t in Slack\/Discord<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Speaking of sleep, I&#8217;ve been writing this for over an hour now and it&#8217;s late. Work tomorrow!<\/p>\n<p>See you soon &#8211; I hope &#8211; and HAPPY NEW YEAR!<\/p>\n<p>Pat<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;and no blog posts. Oops. It&#8217;s fair to say that 2023 was&#8230; a busy year. Despite this, I felt like I was treading water through much of it&#8230; and it&#8217;s how I ended the year. Now we&#8217;ve started 2024, I thought I&#8217;d take a moment to reflect on 2023 and see whether it was as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catchup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squage.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squage.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squage.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squage.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squage.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=526"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.squage.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":541,"href":"https:\/\/www.squage.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526\/revisions\/541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squage.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squage.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squage.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}