Tuesday 6 October 2026: Meltdown

I still wasn’t in the right place to do any work on Wednesday, so instead we tackled the office.

The office was a bit of a dumping ground when we first moved here. We had to get rid of so much stuff anyway, but the stuff left over was distributed between the shed, the garage and the office. We carved space out in both the garage and the office so they could at least be functional, and the poet’s been using the dining table for his Teams meetings.

We got rid of my old reading chair because we didn’t have anywhere to put it. Besides, it was old, dirty and tatty, as well as Very Big. But when I started to do the hard copy client edit in the living room, my back complained a lot. Remember, my regular armchair was already causing me night-time gip and the settee already sags at one end, although now it’s starting to sag at the other end too. Neither are any good for reading and copy editing for long periods, even 50-minute Pomodoros.

I can’t do the hard copy edit at my desk because my new varifocal glasses are next to useless for looking down at that angle. It puts extra strain on my neck too. And anyway, my old reading chair (and a previous armchair we had, actually), was really comfortable and didn’t give me any kind of back ache. So much better for my posture too.

So we’re thinking of either getting the new suite for the living room ahead of building built-in cabinetry and decorating it and buying a fireside chair as part of that, or just getting me a new fireside chair I can use for reading and hard copy editing that might go in the office.

But the office is slightly smaller than the office at the last house, and it was still filled with junk.

We have a kitchen dresser and a kitchen island in there doing time for storage. These were both brand-new at the last house and we didn’t have the heart to throw them out. So we utilised them in the office. We also have a tall book case, 2 pedestal chests, and a pop-up table in between, making it like a kneehole desk. But I can’t push my chair under the desk out of the way.

There’s a guitar stand in there too, with 7 full size guitars and 3 miniature guitars. This is likely to stay in the office even when the garage has been converted to include a studio. But the poet doesn’t even have a studio set up anywhere yet. Yes, we’ve only been here for 3 months, but it already feels like we’ve been here for years and he’s being very patient over his studio when I have a sort-of office.

I’ve identified some office furniture we can buy that’s a bit scaled down compared to what we had before, including a much smaller desk each. The poet thinks we can fit a reading chair in too, but I think that might be a bit ambitious and think it be better as part of the living room suite. The room will also need the walls stripping and the walls and ceiling walloping. There’s a hole in the wall too where the gas boiler used to be.

But to give us some idea how much room we might have, we decided to empty the bags and boxes that were still cluttering the room. I got most of it away in either the dresser or the island, and I got books on shelves too, with shelves still to spare for books still in boxes and bags in the garage.

It came to a head because if one of us was working and the other one wasn’t, we’ve always kept each other company. But when the poet came into the office to sit with me and eat a snack while I carried on doing what I was doing, there was nowhere for him to sit.

If we leave it as it is, or with just one desk, then yes, there’s room for a reading chair. In the meantime, while we decide, it feels so roomy we think we can have a disco in there!

After having a couple of wasted faff days, including having to unexpectedly deal with problems that are out of my control, I did hope Thursday would be better. It began with me sleeping in a whole hour, which had a knock-on effect for the rest of the day. Everything was an hour late.

And even then I ran into issues, namely Firefox not retaining any formatting when I copy and paste from Scrivener to WordPress, and even to Patreon, which was a way of stripping out superfluous spaces randomly added in by Apple for no apparent reason and with no discernible pattern.

I ended up going down a rabbit hole only to find out that after years and years of Firefox being advised of this issue, they still haven’t fixed it. So after wasting more hours on something else that’s beyond my control, I learned how to copy the text from Scrivener so it would paste into WordPress without me having to go via Patreon to fix it, and I went straight back to DuckDuckGo.

Now, DuckDuckGo isn’t as good as it would have us all believe either. There are still some sites that don’t work at all or have parts that don’t work. But as this is a (week)daily post, I have to go with whatever is the most time efficient for me.

I’m keeping Thunderbird for now to collect my emails, but it’s still only acting as a client to collect Yahoo emails, and only from my main Yahoo account. I’m still going online to collect the others. Also, it’s leaving suspected spam behind so I still have to go online to collect anything that’s gone into spam that shouldn’t have.

I’ve joined the waiting list for a Thunderbird account, but if it costs money I may as well look at something like Proton, which I’m also trialling, or use the free Proton account and then keep the storage clear as they only give you 1Gb of storage on the free version of Proton. I’ll still have to collect everything from Yahoo before deleting all the Yahoo accounts, and I’ll still have to slowly work my way through changing my email address in various places.

I just wish things would just work, even if they are freeware or subject to donations or whatever. Especially when the developers brag that they’re the best in the field. LibreOffice is also free and open to donations, but if someone reports something that doesn’t work it’s usually fixed in the next update, or there’s a reason given and a forecast date when it will be addressed. It isn’t just ignored.

I wrote up Thursday’s blog post and published it everywhere, including Patreon as it was the September wrap, and I started both today’s post and Friday’s Hello, October. Before I could finalise the Hello, October, though, I had to update the schedule. And with me feeling so despondent about everything, for now I’m blocking all the client work in first, so I can get it out the way and the money in the bank, and then adding in the short story work, the non-fiction work, and the republishing.

And then my TickTick stopped working…All my recurring tasks vanished, on all of my devices. And I pay an annual subscription for this one! It’s like the entire world is conspiring against me at the moment. Is it any wonder I feel like just throwing in the towel?

On Friday I pretty much had a meltdown and I decided to call it a week on the work front. I spent the day doing a lot of thinking and cogitating and moaning and, well, melting down. But I didn’t do any work and I didn’t even fire up the computer. Once he’d finished work himself, the poet decided to drag us all to the seaside for our tea, to cheer me up. It was a lovely surprise and we had fish and chips (or he had fish and chips, the dog and I both had sausage) followed by an ice cream cornet with a flake, juice and bits on mine.

The weekend was pretty much as usual, but we all went shopping on Saturday, and we all went to visit the mother-in-law.

On Sunday the poet suddenly started to reorganise the kitchen cupboards, putting all the baking tins and cookware in one 3-shelf double wall cupboard, consolidating the condiments shelves, and relocating the tinned goods to one of those now vacant. He cut the grass in the back, tried to cut the grass at the front but couldn’t get the lawn mower down the side of the van, and did some fishing pole stuff with his fishing poles. I think I must have still been cogitating…but we did take the dog to our local peatland for a walk.

Monday dawned and he went off to work while I sat and worked through my schedule before writing up and posting a belated Hello, October! post. I hung 2 washloads out and did the start of my ‘activity’, which for now was the exercises the physiotherapist gave me for the spinal stenosis. The only work I did was the client edit, which I took into the living room to do. I also transferred the week’s jobs to the desk diary.

The poet came home from work, manoeuvred the car and the van on the drive, cut the front lawn, and put everything back again.

Today it’s more of the same for me, minus the scheduling. The new calendar looks okay, but my working day now finishes at 5pm instead of 6pm.

This post appears on Words Worth Writing and Medium.