It feels like I was just writing last month’s wrap-up, and here we are at the next one. Keep reading to discover how I was getting by and geeking by in my February 2024 wrap-up!

Content warning: I’m going to be discussing trauma, grief and the loss of a relative (not recent) and their battle with cancer in the first paragraph of the ‘Feeling’ section. If you don’t want to read this, skip to below the first image <3

February is always a difficult month for me as it comes with a lot of memories, trauma and grief. Twenty-one years ago, my grandad died suddenly when I was seventeen. I was very close to him, and it came as a shock as he had been very ill with cancer twice, and a heart attack. He survived both and then died suddenly from a blood clot in his lung. Grief is a strange thing. Some years I don’t feel it, and others it hits like a brick. I expected it to be like that last year. I mean twenty years, that should have meant something right? And it did, but my grief wasn’t overwhelming.

This year I’m feeling it more as it’s twenty years since other events in my life, of a time when I was extremely vulnerable – not that I knew that at the time. It has taken me the last decade to piece all that together and to recognise where I was emotionally when I made ill-informed decisions. I was in a vulnerable place, not just struggling with grief but a newly diagnosed chronic health condition (migraines) and several undiagnosed conditions (mental and physical) – some of which took years to get diagnosed, and some I’m still trying to get diagnosed today. Recognising all these things in therapy has allowed me to stop blaming myself and start to heal.

On top of all those feelings, my hormones were completely messed up. After talking with my nurse, I decided to come off the Depo injections. I’ve been struggling with side effects and while on the Depo I get no cycle, which is a problem as women in my family get the menopause early. The symptoms of menopause are all symptoms I get from my various health conditions, and since the NHS doesn’t offer blood tests for it any more, the only way I can know if mine has started is to have an actual cycle again.

I didn’t expect going off the Depo to be easy, I’m not an idiot, I know that medically adjusting my hormones for years and then stopping it would have an effect. But I did not expect the first month off it to be so intense. Every health condition I have flared up, and my moods were swinging like a rollercoaster. I didn’t know whether I was coming or going for a week, and nothing got done, making me feel worse mentally.

It’s probably a bit too soon to tell whether what I experienced is perimenopause symptoms or just a reaction to coming off the Depo. My nurse is keeping track of things and I have another appointment to check in with her in a few weeks.

Due to my health being all over the place, my blogging schedule was also all over the place. January’s monthly wrap-up was posted partway through February, and the February edition of Disabled and Neurodivergent Books ended up being much later than I had planned. I hope to get those out within the first week of the month.

I also took part in a cover reveal this month! It was for Cursed Under London by Gabby Hutchinson Crouch an urban fantasy novel about a hidden world, unsurprisingly under London. The cover is one of those that the more you look at the more things you see and the story sounds so interesting. Read the full synopsis for Cursed Under London and see the cover in the reveal post here. Just a reminder to any authors reading this, I am always available for cover reveals!

A small bit of housekeeping; monthly updates have been renamed, as you can see from this one.

I also updated my Links In and Out page to tidy up links and took the time to make new link back buttons as my old ones were terrible and woefully out of date. The new ones are shown below and if you would like to use them to link back to Just Geeking By you can grab them from the Links In and Out page here!

The event I spoke about in my last update was still taking place throughout February 2024, and by the end of the month, I had collected most of the items I wanted from the event. I prioritise mounts, pets and then Triple Triad Cards. There are two orchestral rolls I would like to get before the event finishes, however, if I don’t manage it they’re easy enough to obtain elsewhere.

One of the challenges for the event was to achieve a certain amount of points while ocean fishing. I wasn’t sure if I could manage it, and I got even higher, completely an achievement while I was at it. The achievement awarded a mount so in February 2024 I collected five mounts altogether!

I completed the Omicron beast tribe reputation this month and that meant I was able to do the allied beast tribe quest straight away. It was a very fun quest line and exactly the sort of thing I would expect with Loporrits involved!

Other Final Fantasy XIV activities included working on my flower collection. Out of twenty-one flowers, I have four and a half left to finish. The items have filled up a chunk of my storage, but they look so pretty and as I play a Viera (a bunny girl) a lot of headpieces aren’t designed to fit over my character’s ears. Some of the flowers can be made into really cute headpieces that look great with my bunny ears!

In February, I levelled up my:

• Scholar and Summoner up to level 90.
• Dancer from 82 to 86.
• Dragoon from 80 to 85.
• Monk from 80 to 88.
• Gunbreaker from 81 to 82.
• White Mage from 73 to 80.
• Sage from 79 to 80.

I’ve still not found a movie to catch my attention, so this part of my February 2024 wrap-up is all about TV shows again. At the start of February, I finished off my Father Brown binge-watch with the last two seasons (10 and 11). After that, I jumped straight into the spin-off series Sister Boniface Mysteries for two series and a Christmas special. I loved the character when she appeared in Father Brown, and it was great to have a full spin-off series dedicated to her.

I decided to give Mr & Mrs Smith a try since I enjoyed the original Mr & Mrs Smith movie a lot. The show version is very different; in the movie, the married couple are spies who work for different companies and do not know they are married to a spy. In the show, the two spies sign up to be spies (how this came about is never really explained) and are put together as a married couple to go on missions.

There were some ok moments, however, as the show went on it started to go places I found offensive, using humour as an excuse for prejudice. There’s a random conversation about whether an ex-girlfriend of Glover’s character is an amputee and whether he just didn’t notice she was missing a limb while dating her. Like, what the actual hell?!

In another episode, there were a load of racist comments about Asian women, aimed at the female lead’s character played by Maya Erskine. It’s brought up in character during a counselling session when she pulls her husband up on it, and Glover’s character argues that it’s just part of his culture. It felt like the show was trying to look like they were apologising for the comments, but they did it in such a way that they didn’t apologise at all. There were other issues with it as well, and generally, it was a disappointment. It doesn’t surprise me that the show was cancelled.

The next show I watched was Ransom, a show that had been on my to-watch list for a while, and I wasn’t sure about it. It’s about a former FBI agent who opens up his own crisis negotiation company after a case goes wrong and becomes an expert in his field. It was a good show and one of those that was quite fascinating to watch. Ransom lasted for three seasons before being cancelled.

I tried Reacher and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan next, watching all the available seasons for Reacher (three) and finishing Jack Ryan (four). I was attracted to Reacher due to the leading actor, Alan Ritchson, who I’ve seen in various shows and liked as an actor. I enjoyed the absolute chaos of Reacher, and it reminded me of old-school action movies where the hero would just go in, blow stuff up and screw the consequences.

Jack Ryan was a lot darker and more complex, and until I started watching it, I didn’t realise how many films set in the Ryanverse franchise I have previously watched (most of them!). I ended up hooked on it, and quite enjoyed it, even though it was a bit different for me. It helped that it had a great cast, and until I watched it, I didn’t understand why people loved John Krasinski so much. When he was cast as Reed Richards, I was like, him? Why? After watching him play Jack Ryan, I completely get it. And before someone says go watch A Quiet Place, please don’t. I don’t want to watch it.

Keeping with the spy theme and also feeling nostalgic, I decided to watch FUBAR with Arnold Schwarzenegger, which if you’ve seen it advertised on Netflix is indeed a TV show, not a movie. It’s about a CIA agent who is all set to retire when he gets sent on a mission to save another agent whose cover has been blown… surprise, the agent is his daughter! Neither of them knew the other was an agent and the rest of the family remains clueless. If you’re expecting an authentic spy show where all the details are spot on then this isn’t for you.

However, if you’re looking for cheesy action movie-style fun then you’ll enjoy this as much as I did. The one thing that irritated me was the stereotypical “butch lesbian” who constantly made phallic comments and jokes. Do writers not realise what being a lesbian means? /sigh

I had only previously watched one episode of season four of True Detective, Night Country, and I finished up the season in February. I liked this season more than the previous three for several reasons. First, I liked the way it toyed with supernatural ideas and kept viewers questioning whether the writers had gone completely off-script, jumping into full horror mode instead of sticking to a detective show. The second was Jodie Foster who was brilliant to watch. The setting of Alaska was also very interesting, and I liked the way the show included the indigenous community, Iñupiat, and their culture.

The next few TV shows for me were more detective shows; Grace seasons 1 -3, and then the new season (three) of a favourite of mine, The Madame Blanc Mysteries. I was stuck on what to watch next and decided to give American Rust season 1 a try, and it wasn’t for me. It’s based on a book and is essentially one of those shows that is all about human misery and people screwing up (and each other). I only watched as much of it as I did because I was feeling too ill to find something else to watch.

The next day I decided to return to Deadloch season 1, an Australian comedy crime show that I had watched the first episode of way back sometime last year and wasn’t sure if it was for me. Someone on Twitter had told me it got better and after putting it off I finally decided to find out if that was true – it was! I’m really glad I followed their advice as once it stopped trying to be loud and brash it turned out to be a great show. There’s one character that I can’t stand and want to slap, but otherwise, I’ll be checking out season 2.

Bosch is a show I’ve seen advertised for a while and I’ve been making my way through shows on Amazon Prime, if you hadn’t guessed from February’s watched shows. I was pleasantly surprised at how easily I became hooked on this show and its characters. The adverts I had seen made it look a lot darker and more disturbing than it is, and I easily binged seasons 1 – 4 in February.

Welcome to the reading section of my February 2024 wrap-up, here are the books I read this month:

• The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan, #1) by Robert Jackson Bennett
• The Absinthe Underground by Jamie Pacton (Did not finish)
• The Briar Book of the Dead by A.G. Slatter
• The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown
• The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed

I reviewed the following books in February 2024:

[rcno-book-listing ids=” 33716, 33761, 33926, 33995, 34028″ wc=250 readmore=”Read my review”]

Thank you for reading my February 2024 wrap-up!

How was your February?

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