So a close friend of mine works at a Bitcoin casino and one day around new years he mentions to me that Bitcoin was on track to hit $1000 USD per BTC.

One long shit and a shower later, I started doing some serious research into bitcoin value and how it all works,

This is what looks like, it was actually around 450 USD mid 2016, and then suddenly it practically explodes and skyrockets.
What caused it I wondered, and then remembered. Trump.

So if the graph looks like this and Trump isn’t even officially in the whitehouse yet… what will happen when he actually starts making changes?
This coupled with similar worries about our own country in regards to brexit and a british pound which could crumble if Theresa May waves her arm too hard, and it got me thinking that I should maybe invest in some bitcoins before it’s too late.

Breaking into the market was terrifying, my friend hooked me up with some reading material https://bitcasino.io/bitcoin-info which was a massive help in finding out where to grab coins from, however without knowing anyone who had actually been down that route, I was somewhat on my own to find out, and finding out in this game means risking some big money.

After reading some reviews I ended up on Kraken.com which is apparently legit, the only problem is that the only way to buy the coins is to transfer money… to luxemborg. Couple this with the fact that it was Sunday before the bank holiday, and the fact it takes 1-5 days for the funds to reach and be registered on the website, and i’m actually sitting here £510 out of pocket, with money in the ether somewhere between international banks and nothing to show for it. I’m hopeful that the money will go through fine and i’ll eventually be able to do something on the Kraken, but sitting and checking the bitcoin value every day was driving me crazy – the value was still skyrocketing and would go up £20 while I slept, I needed something faster if i was to properly capitalise on this opportunity.

I dug around a little bit more and had a peek at Bitstamp and Coinbase, but didn’t end up going too far with either.

Back to work on the Tuesday, and I realised I did know someone who had purchased bitcoin after all…
One of my colleagues had to buy some on behalf of a company who had fallen foul to some nasty ransomware – the cost of the ransom was something like 3 or 5 BTC. I asked him where he got it from and he recommended me to the site i’m now using – Localbitcoins.com

This website was shockingly easy to use compared to Kraken and Bitstamp, both of which required pictures of your ID, proof of address and so on, localbitcoins you trade with other users rather than with the website and so each of the traders will have their own requirements – some of them want you to have X amount of previous trades, a certain amount of reputation or a selfie with ID. I found what appears to be a pretty trustworthy group of traders who work for bitbroker.co.uk who only required a selfie to be able to trade with any of their members. It also allegedly has buyer protection, essentially taking the bitcoin from the seller and giving buyers advantage in terms of safety.

The first transaction was the scariest, though I wouldn’t say any of them were particularly enjoyable to take part in.
Clicking the buy button takes you to a chat screen where they basically send their bank info for you to pay into (direct bank transfer between UK banks) and then you click a button to say you’ve sent the money and then… you wait… and pray…
The first transaction I didn’t know whether to hit the button which says ‘i’ve paid’ – scared that If i hit the button and wasn’t meant to, that it’d flag to the site and close the transaction as complete , turns out the trader had already released the bitcoin by the time I mustered the courage to push the button and so it was no problem though.

I performed multiple transactions with the group, all went off without a hitch, and now I have some bitcoins.It’s a very strange concept knowing you’ve sent off thousands of pounds to another bank account to be awarded with a single digit number.

Here’s hoping my investment pays off,
If things go sour, I won’t be too upset, after all without risk there is no reward.

Of interesting note, During the window which I was buying yesterday, the price fluctuated £10
I woke up today and it had gone up £40
I went to work, came home, and it had gone up another £40

If I had somehow bought 10 BTC on the first day, I would be literally £1000 richer only 4 days later – not far off from a months wage after tax.

Hey guys, remember when I said I was going to try and blog once per week?

ahahahahahaha.

The past month has been a really steady routine of going to work and then coming home to eat and smash out some video games. In rather typical fashion I went from basically nothing to play to all of a sudden just too many things to play. I was already pretty hooked on Battlerite but then last week there was a free weekend for Rainbow Six Siege, I gave that a bit of a go with uni friend Ed and I think both of us were just completely sucked in from the start.

R6 Siege to me just feels like Counter Strike 2, it takes a bunch of the innovations that counter strike made – the ability to shoot through walls and light materials, multiple entry points, a 1 life per round system, no healing, tactical smokes and flashbangs, and an asymetrical map – and just really combines it all together with the modern tropes we’ve come to expect like exp/money, cosmetics, gadgets, perks and so on. The wall breaching stuff really makes it so that there is never a defined expectation and you’ll very rarely find yourself in exactly the same clusterfuck mess twice – as enemies can breach and shoot through most major areas.

And then, at long last, tomorrow we have Planet Coaster coming out, which i’ve been eagerly awaiting for months.The launch trailer looks super awesome and I really cannot wait to sink my teeth into this one. I feel a bit sorry for the girlfriend who is inevitably going to be completely ignored this weekend.

I’ve started trying to do a bit of christmas shopping, but as usual i’m throwing up some blanks already and am not sure what to get for people. I’ve grabbed gifts for my brother and father already, but typically all of the women are going to be harder to shop for.

Perhaps i’ll find something in Austria or Prague when I go? It’s shocking to think that my holiday is only 2 weeks away now, and will technically be my third holiday of the year and 4th consecutive one with the gf. I’m surprised she isn’t fed up of me by now. That said, I’ve only managed to do small cheap european holidays this year, changing jobs mid way through the year didn’t really help as I didn’t have sufficient leave to book anything long. My leave refreshes on new years though, and I think we’ll be looking at maybe Taiwan as a destination? Given that it’s been almost 5 years now, maybe Japan is due a revisit soon as well? Not sure i’d do central tokyo again next time though, as there’s just so much to see in this world, and so little time to see it all!

Oh my god where did June disappear to?

I can’t really think of anything particularly eventful that happened this month.

At work they have made the decision to get us to start working from home, so the office is currently in cleanup mode. I’m a bit torn on the idea of working from home – on the plus side, it’ll be slightly less stressful, I won’t have to commute, I can listen to my own awful music instead of the office radio and things like that. On the other hand, I’m worried it’ll go back to being very lonely like my old job, as I won’t be needing to go into an office (they say they’ll still hold meetings every other week), I obviously also have issues with desk space at home, and my chair is rubbish and i’m not sure they’ll let me buy an office chair to put on expenses…

One of my housemates moved out today, very impartial about their leaving as I’m an unsocial git and rarely say more than a Hi every now and then, that said at least it was a girl – we’re getting a bloke called MIchael moving in so it’s going to be dirty sausagefest 2016.

I celebrated my first year anniversary with Cordelia on Tuesday 28, we went to Thorpe park over the weekend, and then on the day itself we went out for dinner at a japanese place and then saw Xmen Apocalypse – Which was imo very mediocre as a film, and Sansa stark’s stupid face was irritating me throughout.

I’ve been spoilt for choice with games lately, after buying BF4 for £5 earlier in the month, i’ve wanted to play that, but also have had Danganronpa 2 on my plate to finish (I’m up to the 5th case now). Factorio Ver.13 also just came out which has loads of improvements and achievements now, so I would love to dive back into that at some point. And just yesterday, Zero Escape 3 came out, which is the finale to the fantastic 999 / Virtues last reward saga – i’ve taken a quick peek but I really want to finish off some other games before jumping into what will inevitably be a big twisty story game.

I also went to VEGA’s quarterly rhythm game meetup in London last weekend, which was pretty good fun, lovely to see the community as always (or well, most of them at least). They had 2 new games there as well! England finally has Jubeat and a Reflec Beat cabinet, which is an amazing step for our community, we actually now have most of the big rhythm games aside from Sound Voltex (which I have a home setup for anyway).
Corin was nice enough to give me a PS2 memory card with freemcboot on it as well, so i’ll hopefully be able to make use of that next time I go to the girlfriend’s place – though I only found out recently that you need specially burnt/patched disks to be able to run them via FMCB, which is of great annoyance as I have some 200 games at home for my PS2 which are thus incompatible (I think my PS2 was hard-modded with Matrix or infinity or some edgy name like that)

i’ve started trying to get in shape (again), there is no gym round the corner this time, so i’ll likely just be doing some kettlebell/bodyweight routines and then trying the keto diet – which is pretty much minimal carbs and lots of meat/fat, the logic of it being that your body switches from burning carbs to burning fat instead. I’ve actually wanted to try this diet for a while, but living at home or not having enough money was a bit of a struggle, as you wouldn’t get to pick your own meals or I wouldn’t be able to afford the necessary food due to it being so meat dependant.
I’m about a week in so far, and i’m not sure how I feel about it,
– I absolutely adore being able to eat pork scratchings and pass it off as part of my diet
– I love bacon and eggs in the morning
– I love being able to add salt to my food because I need to for my diet
However…
– I miss cake and chocolate, especially because there is ALWAYS something sweet to eat in my office
– I miss crisps and being able to eat whatever I can get my hands on
– Girlfriend is diabetic, which as you can imagine, is a bit of a pain when she comes over and i have fuckall carbs in the house.

While we’re talking about food, I was invited to a BBQ the other day, it was pretty close by and I thought it would fit in well with my diet so we went, the host was vegetarian (why even host a BBQ) so we had to pick up our own meat to cook.
We turned up to a lovely roaring fire pit and grill so that was nice, she put on some tofu, potato and veg skewers and promptly burnt them all to a crisp… Whatever, I aint judge.
So we basically put on all of our food afterwards, I practically ended up taking over the BBQ. There were about 10 people, I had brought 13 chicken legs, 8 sausages, 4 burgers and 8 mini corn-cobs, expecting other people to bring stuff too. Nobody brought anything! Okay then, whatever, we have enough to share anyway.
Throughout the night we cooked off all the chicken, corn and sausages… The other 8 people at the BBQ/party ate a total of about 5 chicken legs and 1 sausage.
Literally ate about 4 or 5 chicken legs, 2 sausages, and 5 Corn-cobs, along with whatever cake, crisps and chocolate that happened to appear in my hands.

I can say with 100% certainty that this was the first BBQ i’ve attended that was bring your own food, bring your own mixers (she only had spirits), cook the food yourself, and eat it all yourself because nobody is hungry. Why have these other people even turned up? Was it even a BBQ or was the fire just there for a centrepiece? Did other people just get told it’s a birthday gathering? I’ve never been so confused…. The corn was hella fuckin good though.

So my contract with the last landlord ran out, so I had to relocate, i’ve moved to Tolworth – near Kingston, and only really like 10 minutes down the road from New Malden where I was living before.
The new house is a little nicer, it isn’t a live in landlord so at the very least the boiler can at leats be left on, and I have a bit more kitchen space this time round. Unfortunately it’s a double edged sword, and now there is nobody to take out the rubbish. You never really realise how much of a grown up you are when you constantly find yourself complaining about the childish attitudes of the people you live with, even if they are in their twenties as well – like for fucks sake is it so hard to take out the bin? Maybe if you don’t fill it til it’s literally overflowing… Fuckin kids.

New room is nicer, bit bigger and with a double bed and some windows, I took the opportunity to buy myself a TV that I saw on sale, as I thought it would be nice to be able to sit on the bed and watch TV with the GF, or otherwise just sit back and be able to play games on a big TV – It’s set up to the PC so I can mirror display whenever for some tasty 43″ Dark Souls action, the refresh rate and response time is actually really good as well, I can even play beatmania on it without changing my offset from my monitor.

This also means i’ve hit 3 months at my Job, wasn’t able to negotiate a raise sadly, our company has been having some changes and lately and the boss claims he doesn’t have enough money to do so… hmm. Well, if it hits a year plus with no change, then at least i’ll have significantly more experience.

In other news, we’ve booked another Holiday, just a short one for 6 days in Malaga, in the south of spain, Cordelia’s best friend apparently has access to a villa timeshare which would otherwise be going unused, so we’re going to piggyback off it and go with them, meaning the price of the holiday is more or less just going to be flights/travel and food/booze, that’ll all be happening in the last week of May, which as of time of typing, is about 3 weeks away.

On the gaming front i’ve been enjoying Dark Souls 3, and more or less only that – though I did briefly play the DOOM mp beta a week or two ago, and i’ve played a bit of the new Hitman level too (Ep2: Sapienza), I guess i played some of the devolver humble pack as well, but I havent really had enough time to go through and play them all.
Dark Souls 3 is pretty good so far, though certainly after 2 games, a lot of the magic is gone, with the only surprises really being the bosses. the environments are very uninspired and generic, the enemies are fairly tame so far, and the difficulty is less than previous games (though I guess experience plays a big part). I’m only up to ice land so far (about 11 hrs i), so god knows how much further I have to go,

Few other bits and pieces, but if I type any more on this post it’ll just be a wall of text :)

I’m going to try and make a bit more of an effort to blog again, or at the very least take some more pictures, I ordered a bluetooth keyboard and a phone stand today so I’ll be able to easily blog from Malaga.

Legitimately feels like I slept a couple of times and a month just passed me by.

I’m now almost at the end of 3 months at my new job, and by extension, my new life.

Past month or so has been a little more relaxed? Work has calmed down a little bit, with only the occasional crisis, our workload has gone down a lot as well and I feel like i’ve had more chance to bond with my colleagues so we can have more of a laugh now – I’ve always been the type to take a while to open up to new people, so it’s not surprise my new workmates were no different.

The car has come in very useful, both for work and personal life, I can now actually go shopping, visit family, go on day trips and so on without needing to think about the logistics too much, it averages around 12p a mile, so it’s more or less ‘how many miles is it?’ and then divide by 10 to get rough cost of petrol in pounds.
It’s also made travel to work and to the girlfriend’s much faster and easier, I can get to work in about 10 minutes and gf’s in 30 (used to take 1 hour), so I feel like i’ve regained a little bit of extra time in my day thanks to the car.

Not having to worry about jobhunting and stuff has given me a chance to game after work as well, finished a bunch of games that I’ve had on backlog for a while (rise of the tomb raider, grim fandango, some others). Have also been playing some new games, most recently Hitman 2016 and Helldivers, both of which are pretty damn good. On the mobile games front i’ve gotten into King of Thieves lately, which is kind of half supercell style base defence and half super meat boy platformer – the idea being that you make a dungeon for other players to challenge, and then invade other peoples dungeons to steal their gold and gems.

We’ve booked another holiday! I’ll be going to Malaga in spain for around a week towards the end of May, Cordelia’s best friend apparently had a rented villa in a resort there for free so we’ve taken her up on the offer. Price wise not too bad, around £90 for return flights, and then we’d only need to pay for transport to the airport, and food/activities

As a final note, I’m going to be moving out again soon. my contract on this current room runs out in 10 days, i’ve found another place to live in Tolworth, the room is slightly larger and has a double bed and more amenities nearby – ‘so much room for activities!’ as they say. I’m going to be awfully tempted to put a TV or something in there when I move in. The contract for this one is 6 months, so I guess i’ll be more inclined to get comfortable so to speak. The rent is more expensive at £600 a month but hopefully the room quality and such will make up for it.

Not even a week into March and i’ve already almost the whole of my paycheck, and then some.

Where did the money go?

Well, it may have been this delicious pile of german sausages

Or it may have been this car

I never really realised the hidden costs of purchasing a car, this thing was second hand and cost me five thousand something, and then the insurance was obscene on top of that (way way closer to a grand that I would have liked because I dont have no-claims bonus)
Then to top it off they don’t even give you the fucking thing with a full tank of petrol so that cost another £20 >_>

Foolishly I also decided to buy a handheld vacuum, some board games, and a speed rubix cube (which still hasn’t arrived yet).

So i guess you could say i’m basically broke AF right now. Time to sit indoors and play video games until payday.

As an aside, i’d like to mention that this has been an amazing weekend spent picking up new car, eating good food, playing shitloads of Factorio, and watching Netflix’s Chef’s Table series.

Still alive!

My bad y’all, blog has been practically shelved since I started my ‘new life’ away from home.

Life:

Not a massive amount to report? My routine for the past month or so is working weekdays, coming home and watching some anime and maybe playing games for an hour or so, rinse repeat. And then on the friday after work I head over to the GF’s house to hang out, play games and watch TV. I’ve been starting to look into buying a car, i’m maybe looking at something small like a toyota aygo, hyundai i10, or kia picanto but i’ve not had much actual time to shop around.

Games:

I bought a bunch of small games at some point recently, as I still don’t actually have my proper gaming PC in this new house, so I’ve been limited to what my laptop will run. Half of them were ‘couple’ games in hope that I can slowly brainwash the gf with them and get her to play games with me – We already played through the brilliant Life is Strange and The Witness, both of which we really liked, though the endings of both were a little bit weak. This new batch included more active stuff – ibb & Obb, Never Alone, and Grim Fandango, the latter of which we ended up playing for a good few hours the other night, ol’ Manny Calavera is quite the charmer. I also bought Factorio today, and have been playing a bit of Danganronpa thanks to ol’ steam family sharing and a very generous friend. Oh, I’ve been playing Paint is back too, which is basically a PC version of Picross.

We’ve also been getting into board games a little bit as well, we’ve been playing card game Sushi Go! and co-op adventure Forbidden Island which are both pretty good, I ordered 2 more recently as well from america (because it was way cheaper to get it shipped across the ocean than to buy it here), these were Iota – similar to Gyul Hap from korean gameshow The Genius, where you need to play cards that confine to a particular ruleset that is already present, and the other one was some sort of tetris block style game versus game.

Other:

Man I really want to play rocksmith! I don’t know where this urge came from, but I’ve been so tempted on multiple occasions to just spent the £100 or whatever it would cost to just buy the game and an electric guitar to play it but I’m not sure I can justify the buy-in right now… Maybe when I move to a bigger place?

Recently i’ve also had weird urges to play chess? I have no idea why.
I also ordered a speed rubix cube after seeing it mentioned on a reddit thread of hobbies for under $50 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/46v4y5/whats_a_fun_hobby_you_can_get_into_under_50/, I’ve never really known how to solve a rubix cube, but seeing people saying that beginners can solve them in 5 minutes, and eventually drop to times of under a minute… just sounds really badass and impressive, I want to be able to do that, I bet it’s already really fun when you get good at it.

Work:

Going strong? The work is varied and really challenging, and every day brings its own ridiculous cases and stories – especially for someone like me who is punching way above his weight in terms of knowledge. It’s kind of crazy change from my previous job where we would rarely be required to take action on anything without running it through someone higher up the command chain, or we could always call someone if we needed technical advice or assistance. Now however? There’s basically no escalation point, I am the final line of IT support, aside from escalating to suppliers, which is honestly kind of terrifying, but nothing at the same time, it means I can’t run away from anything, and have to eventually face it head on, which is great for learning.

I’ll try and update more often If anything interesting happens!
ps. Go play the Witness! it’s amazing!

Bit of a whirlwind week for me, they say everything happens for a reason and perhaps my departure at FJ really was for the better.

I’ve moved to New Malden and am living with an old korean lady along with a few other people who i’ve honestly still not seen in a week of living there. The room itself is of reasonable size, but the desk is too small for my gaming PC and the room in general is in a range around that of which liquid mercury freezes, the bed is firm at least, and it’s only a 40 minute bus and walk to work.

The job is a second line IT support role, the team is super small and so, for better or worse i’m a key part of the machine here. We have a manager, 2 apprentices, a senior engineer who is leaving soon, and then me – So as you can imagine things get a bit nutty from time to time as I’m still fairly new to the remote support game.

The work itself is interesting though, and i’m learning way more about computers than I was at FJ – even if they aren’t going out of their way to train me, just being thrown in at the deep end and getting paid to resolve stuff is a great learning opportunity, even if it is stressful.

So, brief life update.

I went from unemployed and sort of enjoying life, doing a bit of studying to get some computer qualifications…

Then on monday I get a phonecall at 5:30pm, it’s an interview offer, okay, cool, “when can I come in? Uh, I guess i’m free whenever…”

1:45pm Tuesday, I am in their office having an interview

2:10pm Tuesday, I get offered a job.

I start on Monday.

Well. That escalated quickly.

The catch however? The office is around Chessington, approximately 2 hours 30 minutes commute away. Meaning that essentially, I have 5 days to find a place to live, and then likely in the next month or two, i’m going to need to buy a car as well.

Oh my god the stress.

It’s also weird, I’ve only been out of a job for less than a month at this point, and suddenly i’m employed again after one interview/phonecall, with a job which sounds fantastic (emphasis on sounds) and has great career progression and training and in the field I want to be in…
Yet I can’t seem to feel happy, perhaps the fake/dodgy job offers I’ve had in the past have made me incredibly skeptical but my brain just can’t process why this man would want to hire me so quickly, are they just super desperate? Is this all a scam? I’m so scared and confused, all I can really do is find a temporary place to live and hope for the best.

I am viewing some potential places to live on Saturday, in house shares (as that’s the cheapest option), so wish me luck.

Rest assured there will be blog posts when I move and start work.

Jeez, that time of year again?

Got some nice things this year, parents got me a nice warm hoodie and the phone i’ve been using the last 4 months or so (Samsung Galaxy S6). Shirt from aunt, shirt and hat from little brother, and some tetris lights, guiness book of gaming records and… a jar of mustard? from the girlfriend.
Oh, I also got shovel knight from Sean, as well as downwell and Jackbox 2 from Henrik, the latter was particularly nice as it’s that time of year where we go visit family and friends.

Also got teased a bit by the national lottery, who sent me an email on the xmas eve morning like ‘YOU’VE WON… a lotto lucky dip’. Aww.

Since MBA has been a thing, i created the file uploader and folder as a personal dumping ground for shit, sometimes if I can’t find my USB stick or if I need to store a program or file for use later, I just upload it and download it again later.
Something I didn’t think of however, are search engine spiders, which has recently managed to land me in some hot water.

I’m not entirely sure why, but for some reason, years ago I needed to move a document from X to Y for work so I threw it on my hoster, I actually even changed the file extension so it wouldn’t be obviously accessible. Then stupidly, I forgot to delete it – anyone who has looked in that folder knows there is literal years worth of garbage on there that has never been cleaned out.

Roll round to christmas this year, and apparently someone googled something that was in that document (a laptop serial number, why anyone would google this, is beyond me). Now heres the interesting part, a google bot analyzed this .txt file, realised that it’s actually an xls file, and then put the search results online.

For reference, this is what you would see if you opened the file up – http://meng.s-ul.eu/NZk9rxXh

So yeah, escalated up the chain somehow, and now i’m in some shit for saying bad things about work.
Let that be a lesson to y’all. Internet and google are watching.

I’ve hopefully fixed the problem since, after reading up on robots.txt and how the google bots work, so at least I learned something valuable today.

This is where it gets more entertaining however.

They have obviously been collecting evidence against me, and all of the presented evidence so far is from my /uploads/ folder…
Aforementioned evidence has random number filenames generated by my phone, and yet they have been found and presented, which leads me to believe that some poor soul has manually trawled through at least a few years of content in that folder.

That folder is where jpgs go to die, and honestly I feel sort of sorry for anyone who would go through and actually look at everything uploaded in there, because there was definitely a phase where people would upload big black dicks with odd filenames and try to get people to click on it (thanks boyce).

So to end this post on a lighter note, heres a small selection of stuff that’s in the folder, and probably things that someone at HR got to enjoy while on the job.

http://www.mengsbizarreadventure.com/uploads/hulka911ia.jpg
http://www.mengsbizarreadventure.com/uploads/psu20080207_073731_016.png
http://www.mengsbizarreadventure.com/uploads/2015-01-29%2013.57.31.png
http://www.mengsbizarreadventure.com/uploads/wataportal.jpg
http://www.mengsbizarreadventure.com/uploads/singit.png
http://www.mengsbizarreadventure.com/uploads/heavyflow.jpg
http://www.mengsbizarreadventure.com/uploads/DP%202013-06-26%2015-33-01-95.jpg
http://www.mengsbizarreadventure.com/uploads/mayaobviously.png
http://www.mengsbizarreadventure.com/uploads/ohlawd.jpg
http://www.mengsbizarreadventure.com/uploads/amazing1.JPG
http://www.mengsbizarreadventure.com/uploads/conqueredworldoffantasyae6.jpg
http://www.mengsbizarreadventure.com/uploads/cthulu.jpg

I dont even know who uploaded a lot of this stuff. As an aside, i’m pretty sad I couldn’t find our minecraft rendition of the twin towers exploding, I’m sure it’s on there somewhere though.

Only two weeks into December and jesus christ what a ride it’s been.

The first few days of the month I was still in Germany enjoying the beautiful christmas markets with the gf, since then it’s been a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs.

Work had been hectic, with long shifts forced by all of the businesses trying to desperately get their shit fixed before Christmas, had to do some overtime to get stuff done, which absolutely sucked since we essentially don’t get overtime.

Had some days off somewhere inbetween, and went to see Winter Wonderland in hyde park, which seems awfully big this year round, though at the same time it looks much more…commercialized? generic? I’m not sure how to describe it, but it just kind of screams ‘give us your money’ rather than ‘festive cheer’

This was shortly followed by a few days meeting gf’s friends and hilariously large extended family, we ventured into the middle of nowhere in kent (around canterbury maybe?), to a family house with like 2 kitchens, 2 lounges, and a small hall for a dining room – where approximately 30 people would sit for lunch, followed by 5 desserts, shortly followed by tea consisting of 4 or 5 different birthday cakes and crackers and cheese. yikes.

Then more recently (read: yesterday) I got into trouble at work for some files I uploaded years ago and forgot about, more on that later.
hopefully I don’t get sacked, as that’ll put quite the damper on Christmas and wouldn’t be particularly festive on my companies part, but they probably hate me anyway so who knows. I don’t really know what an anxiety attack feels like, but I can’t be too far off right now.

The rest of the month will likely be something along the lines of: Party at friend’s place, then dinner at dad’s side of family for boxing day, followed by dinner at mom’s side of family for Christmas day.