Tuesday 26 November 2013

Landan Town

Its been a buys few weeks for me. Ive been trying to burn through the excess leave ive got to take before the end of the year otherwise I will lose it. On one hand this is great since it means I am getting loads of time off work, but on the other hand it means that when I am back in work I am having almost twice the amount of work to do since I have to catch up from the time I have taken off. This has not been easy, during my last stint in work at least 2 of the 4 days I was in I worked over 13 hours each day, and anything over 10 of that was free (the joys of being on a salary).
On the plus side, this has meant ive had loads of time off, and I have spent this catching up with making music. I recently got the latest version of Ableton and I have been putting it through its paces. Ive been finding it difficult to get back into production since being off work last year, but now I seem to have caught the bug again. In this week alone ive almost got a track finished.

Our cat has found a new hiding spot which is a bit of a nightmare for me. My laptop is setup on a stand on my desk in the spare room, and she has recently started hiding underneath it. This in itself isnt such a bad thing and is actually quite cute to see her squeezed in, but randomly she will start swiping away at my hands with her claws as I try to type away, and that gets annoying.

Over the weekend me and the other half went to London for the weekend to see a friend of ours. Over the course of out visit we did an awful lot of shopping, I forget the names of all of the places we went to but I can remember Oxford Street, Borough Market (where I had a Venison hot dog), Southbank Christmas Market, and Covent Garden. We were in one shop with our friend and I started looking through the girls clothes absent mindedly, my gf had to push me away saying: "theres boys clothes in here, why dont you look at the boys clothes". Oops, there were some nice things in there and ive kind of got used to shopping with my gf I forget our friend was there!

We were randomly wandering through Covent Garden looking for somewhere to eat and he happened to come across the Playstation Lounge, this is basically a pop up shop which Sony have set up where they have PS4s setup for people to come in and play for free ahead of its release on Friday. Of course I had to go in and have a look! Ive now seen all of the launch titles running for myself, and I also got to play the new Killzone game too which is brilliant. The new controller is fantastic too, its so much more responsive and accurate than the old one, its really made me look forward to the PS4s release. Ive got one on pre-order and since ive got such an excess of leave, I also booked the day off for that too!

I still havent dressed up, with everything thats been going on ive just been a bit lazy with it all. Theres a lot of man to trim back and im just finding it difficult to push myself past that first hurdle when it seems like a wasted effort to get all dressed up with nowhere to go. I know I need to get back into it before going out again, I need to rebuild the confidence I seem to have lost, and seeing myself all dolled up would be a good start. Plus, I picked up a cute polka dot skirt from H&M the other week, I really want to wear it! I do have a thing for spots.....

And finally, on the website side of things I really dont know what to do. I have an idea and ive found a website-in-a-box that will do most of what I want to do (and I can pay someone to customise the rest), but im just really unsure about putting the money down for it. A lot of how the website will work will rely on users updating it, so initially it might not have that much on there since it will take time to build up the database, and if I cant attract the users then its dead in the water. Im just really unsure of spending the money I need to to make it the resource I want it to be because if it fails it will just be a waste of money. I just dont know where to go from here.

Wednesday 13 November 2013

Some Changes

Getting Life Back on Track

Ive actually been feeling pretty good for the past few weeks now, im feeling more or less back to my old self. I still think about my female side a lot but nowhere near to the degree or intensity that I have up until recently. I never bothered to make a new appointment for a review with my GP, but will definitely do so tomorrow. I dont think this is a permanent state of mind, and the counselling sessions might still be useful if the GD rears its ugly head again. 

Ive still got a lot of leave left to use before the end of the year so I took the week off up until Saturday which is a good thing because I think ive also caught a cold. Great timing. Yesterday I spent just wasting a day playing Grand Theft Auto V and making music but today was when I decided to start getting my life back into order and spend this week doing some things ive been putting off for ages. So today I got started:

  • Gutted my laptops hard drive to free up more memory, its been running on critical for ages
  • Finally got around to installing Ableton 9
  • Went through my old man clothes and binned loads of it
  • Went through my girl clothes, binned some of it and tidied up the rest. Its been piling up in the bottom of the wardrobe for months, which irritated my gf
  • Reorganised all my bedroom storage so its all tidy
  • Finally ordered the lockable storage unit for the spare room to keep my obvious t-girl stuff in (wig, boobs, etc) which ive been meaning to buy since August 2012

Ive also got things I plan to do during the rest of the week too:

  • Tidy up my sample library and filter through the junk I took off my laptop HD
  • Tidy up the spare room/office/studio, bin all the junk, tidy the cables, and reorganise whats left
  • Go through all my old music magazines and bin ones that arent useful anymore
  • Get back into a grooming routine (shave regularly, pluck eyebrows, etc)
  • Dress up for the first time since Sparkle
  • Buy some new clothes for both man and girl me, my man wardrobe especially needs casual and work stuff since it hasnt been properly updated in a long time and I look like a scruff all the time
  • Setup my website idea (buy software and hosting package, then try and figure out what to do)

Ive also planned to make a few changes to my digital life too. Its difficult to keep up with everything at the best of times but now im feeling a lot more upbeat I do plan to be more regular in a lot of ways. I plan to update this blog weekly whether I have any gender related issues to talk about or not, lets say I make a post every Monday night at a minimum and see how it goes. I imagine this isnt going to be easy since my life can be pretty mundane at the best of times, but we will see. I think its important (especially if I do have a relapse) to show the normality I have as well as the bad times, I know this blog can come across as just me moaning for post after post and I want to change that.

On the digital side of things I also realise it can take me a long time to reply to comments, emails and messages (sorry again Laura!). It can be difficult to keep on top of these since a lot of them can require quite lengthy replies and I often dont have the time to properly consider a response to all of them. I will try to be more prompt from now on and reply on a more reasonable timeframe.

I think ive realised that I need to get myself tidy and organised in order to keep myself in a happy and productive state of mind. Whether its the piles of magazines and clutter in my studio and on my computer, or the piles of clothes in the bedroom, or taking pride in my appearance as both male and female, it all adds up. I just hope I can maintain it.

Setting up a Website

So ive got an idea for a unique (I think) trans* website which I want to set up and plan to do so by the end of the week. I dont want to say too much at this point about what it is but at the same time I think I really need some help with it. I can buy a pre-made template/theme but the prices vary dramatically and have varying degrees of customisation, although Wordpress based sites look like the cheaper options but even they can go up to $150. I dont mind putting the money down but want to make sure itll do what I want it to, it actually works like it should, and that ill be able to set it up ok. I could do with someone to bounce some ideas off, and also some tech support too but its difficult when I only know me, I suppose the other difficulty will be spreading the word as well. If I can get it off the ground though I think itll be a very useful tool.