Autumn is here. It’s raining and the temperature is going down. The days are shortening. It’s my favorite time of year.

I suppose I should be happier that it’s autumn, but I’m not. I’ve been under a lot of stress lately. It’s all I can do to get these posts done each day. I’m not looking for sympathy or anything, though. There is light at the end of the tunnel. I think this blog will be better off when I’m not updating it every day. Posts will be less frequent but hopefully better researched and more thorough.

There are other things I plan to do, as well. I want to write fiction again–short stories, novels. Maybe some poetry. Maybe I’ll write essays for other sites and then link them here. I’ve gotten a lot of practice in the past year, after all. I also have a video game to work on. I could go back to making music, too. Maybe put some more things in my Soundcloud, finally. There are a lot of possibilities.

Or I’ll do nothing. I could just take a break for a while. That would be nice. My workload at my job along with events in my personal life have left me mentally and physically exhausted lately. I’ve been withdrawing from friends. These are things that I know are happening but I don’t know what to do about them. I am just unhappy in a lot of ways, although I can’t say this blog is a major contributor. In some ways, the habit of working on it every day has given me a comforting consistency in my life. There are just days when it’s a struggle to get through–I need to make my brain work overtime when it’s already so tired from the day’s events.

I suppose that’s enough complaining. There were a couple outages on the server this week–never for more than a few minutes, but still annoying. On Thursday, there was some kind of network outage. Very strange. Everything was very sluggish or nonresponsive for a couple hours. Seemed to sort itself out, though.

I still haven’t done the maintenance tasks I keep saying I’ll do. I still need to recategorize, I need to go put alt text on all my images (I feel particularly bad about that one, there’s no excuse on my part but laziness or being a scatterbrain), and possibly put a new theme in place. I never did get a permanent logo. I stopped pursuing it after I continued to have a difficult time getting anyone to do it for me. And I’m certainly no graphic designer.

This political season has been disappointing and depressing. It’s astonishing that an unabashed scumbag like Donald Trump is the nominee of a major party. Jill Stein and Gary Johnson both come off like clueless morons, fighting for relevance. At least Johnson is likely to get some votes! And while I’ve come around to liking Hillary Clinton more, every so often she reminds me that she’s this era’s Henry Kissinger. I worry about what death and destruction she might sow around the globe, regardless of her domestic accomplishments. Of course, it’s not even a context next to somebody like Trump. I see Clinton keeping our problems about the same, or making them somewhat better or worse. With Trump, there’s a real worry that the world would end in fire under his leadership.

I’m also unhappy with my job but trying to stick it out a while longer. I keep getting more and more work dumped on me. I am now doing what 6 people used to be responsible for, and my work duties are only growing. I got a raise, which was nice, but certainly not enough to deal with everything that’s now on my plate. I wonder if this is what drove so many others out the door. Can’t say I blame them. And I don’t know what the future will be like at this company, given recent acquisitions and changes. But at least I have a job, right?

I’m just doing a lot of whining here. I am not having a good time. Good thing I only do these once a week, eh? I hope your week goes better than mine!