February always seems to fly by, and not just because it’s the shortest month of the year. There are several birthdays for us and Valentine’s Day, and along with a bunch of appointments this year it just disappeared on me. Here’s how it went!

Last month I talked about my health centre’s infuriating and anxiety-inducing phone system, and dealing with their staff. As a result I was a bit later than usual in booking my depo appointment. I try to book it for the earliest date I’m allowed to get the injection because without the new depo in my system my migraines and pain levels are horrible. Hormones are not fun. It wouldn’t have been a huge issue apart from I missed the appointment due to an epic migraine *facepalm*

When I called back I got the awkward male staff member who I always seem to have issues with. Instead of just booking me an appointment he had to talk to my nurse because my depo was now overdue – honestly, what did he think she would say? Of course, she told them to book me in ASAP! Unfortunately I ended up with a new staff member calling me back who asked if I could do 7:40. I asked if that was evening, because as far as I was aware they didn’t open until after 8am. No… that was morning… I thought that it said on my file somewhere that I can’t do early mornings because of my ME, but apparently not. Usually I make a point of saying late morning or afternoon only, but I wanted to see what was being offered first since I assumed she was going to be trying to squeeze me in. I’m not sure what my nurse said to her, because I ended up with an appointment THREE WEEKS later.

So I spent the whole month of February with a migraine pretty much every day, or the pre- or post-affects of one, and a lot of joint pain. Sleeping has been horrible. I finally got my depo on the 27th and with it some good news; I was able to book my next appointment right there and then! Yes, my GP surgery has at last started allowing patients to book appointments more than one month in advance. How they managed to cope for so many years booking appointments only one month at a time I have no idea.

Dealing with a new illness and not knowing whether it’s going to be permanent or not has had an effect on my mental health. It has prevented me from attending my weekly group for a while, and then for reasons I’m not sure of, the group had to take a break. It’s supposed to start back up next week. While the organisation running it did make sure we all had access to support if we needed it, it was still a loss for me. Especially as I was just feeling well enough to attend again, and suddenly it was gone. I had to deal with a lot of guilt regarding my lack of attendance, and whether me not going was why the group was not on.

Thankfully I had already reached out to them and started to arrange one on one support and that came through just as the group took a break. Perfect timing! It’s a different type of counselling than I’m used to, but it seems to be what I need right now and that’s good. Hopefully my group will be back as planned this month and my mental health will be back on track.

I need to make an appointment with the GP I wanted to discuss my costochondritis (see last month’s post for details) as it’s getting worse not better. I’ve had three attacks over the last few weeks, two in one day and one in the shower, and they are not fun. I need to know if this is something permanent or if it’s going to eventually go away. If that’s the case, what can I do to speed it along.

My plans for getting back on track with blogging were a no-go thanks to the whole depo appointment debacle and the resulting migraines. As much as I want to dive straight back into things, I need to recognise my limitations right now, and so I’m taking things slow. Each month I’m going to try to add something back in and gradually build up my content again. So watch this space!

What I did do last month was update my currently watching page so if you’re interested in seeing what TV shows I’m watching then check that out.

I actually played something other than Final Fantasy XIV! The truth is that I did so in January as well and completely forgot to mention in, so that’s two months in a row that I played something different. I’m quite proud of myself considering how little I’ve done that in recent years.

Let me back track a wee bit to January to fill you in on the game I played last month, and then I’ll get to this month. In January, I completed a huge chunk of a game I’ve been playing on and off for a while; Lust for Darkness. I wasn’t able to play FFXIV due to a twenty four-hour patch day, and so I had to find something else to play. I was stuck on a bit that required reflexes that I just don’t have, and I got Chris to help me get past it. Once I was passed that part I was fine, and flew through most of the game even some challenging bits. I ended up getting to the final boss fight and getting stuck because it is an extremely frustrating fight which doesn’t make much sense. I’ll need to watch some walkthrough videos and see if I can get a proper explanation for it as it’s not clear in the game at all.

February saw me returning to another game that I’ve played before and that was Starbound. Starbound is a 2D pixel game created by the same developers that made Terraria, and it’s a very similar style of game with a few big differences. While Terraria was set on one world that the player created, Starbound as the name suggests is set in the stars; players can move about planets. There’s also a main story line with the aim of the player building their ship and finding out what happened to them, whereas Terraria was storyless and about building things, unlocking bosses and beating them.

One of the things I love to do in video games is to explore. I’m that annoying player who has to look at everything and uncover every single corner of the map. So an open sandbox game like Starbound where I literally have an entire universe to explore? I can get lost in it quite happily. Our internet was down, and I’d also had the notion to play this, so I picked it back up for a bit. I got further than I had before and what I like about this one is it’s a game you can just pick up and put down whenever you want to. It’s a nice relaxing game with some challenges at times, and a lot of choice about what you can do.

To be honest, Terraria was an escape for a while because I got burned out with FFXIV. I only got a few more levels on one of my classes, my ninja, going from 75 to 78 before burning out from doing roulettes day in day out got to me. I continued doing my beast tribe dailies and I thought I had completed them all until I realised that I got the reputation levels mixed up. I thought I had completed them when I hadn’t. So I wasted a week or so at the end of the month doing only one set of dailies when I should have been finishing off the other two as well. It does mean that I’ll finish all three reputations from that expansion at the same time at least.

Towards the end of the month we started Endwalker and that has opened up a whole lot of new content of course. The main story quest for Endwalker is going quite fast and as of writing this, I’ve actually finished it but since it’s technically March I’ll be talking about that in next month’s update 😉

It was good to be able to have an active TV schedule back again in February with new seasons for multiple shows I watch. New seasons of all the new NCI shows, S.W.A.T., CSI: Vegas, The Rookie and the first season of The Rookie: Feds.

It does get a bit slow though waiting for one episode each week even if there are a lot of shows in my schedule again. I decided to check out one of Amazon Pride’s paid for channels using a free trial and I have to be honest, I wasn’t that impressed. The channel was Acorn, which is crime and mystery TV shows and has been developing its own shows. Eventually some of those shows turn up on other channels, however, there was one that didn’t seem to be and a few other shows that I could watch on there, so I thought I’d try the trial out.

I first caught up with season three of the wonderful My Life is Murder starring Lucy Lawless as a quirky former police detective who acts as a consultant for the police on their particularly difficult to solve murder cases. Set in New Zealand it’s Lawless at her best with a quirky assistant and fabulous cast.

The show that was only available on Acorn (it’s now on Channel 5!) that I was interested in was Harry Wild, a show starring Jane Seymour as a newly retired chain-smoking, potty mouth literature professor who ends up solving crimes using her knowledge of literature. It gets more interesting when she takes a troubled teenager under her wing, and they both work to solve the crimes, much to the dismay of Harry’s son, a policeman. It was brilliant, with Seymour at the top of her game and a great cast.

I ended up watching another two shows exclusive to Acorn which I wasn’t aware of until I picked up the channel. The first was Signora Volpe starring a favourite actor of mine, Emilia Fox. The premise is an MI6 agent ends up visiting her sister in Italy and deciding to stay, and ends up playing detective. It was a lot more whimsical on the detective part than other shows, with her more helping out here and there rather than actually setting up as a PI. I wasn’t sure if Fox could handle a more physical role but she did so beautifully and it was a very interesting show. The downside was that season one was only three episodes long, and I’m hoping that was just to test the waters.

The other was The Chelsea Detective, a London based police drama which I enjoyed immensely. The two main characters are both interesting as are the cases, and the coroner is played by a Deaf actor which was great to see!

Something that I’d been wanting to watch for a while was available to watch on the channel and that was The ABC Murders an Agatha Christie adaptation starring John Malkovich as an elderly Hercule Poirot, alongside a rich cast including Rupert Grint and Anya Chalotra (The Witcher). It was very good as you would expect from such a stellar cast.

In a bid to get the most out of my Acorn trial I tried a few other shows and watched seasons 1 to 5 of Suspects, a London based police show which wasn’t great for the first season, but I got hooked on. It had some strange camera work, shooting from some odd angles, and thankfully it got better as the shows went on. The final season was very good. I mostly had it on for some background noise while I was playing Starbound.

The other show I tried was a much more successful choice, although I have to admit I wasn’t sure about it before watching it. I was sold by the fact that it starred Sally Lindsay who I loved in Shakespeare & Hathaway. It’s called The Madame Blanc Mysteries, and Lindsay is on fire as an antiques dealer who moves to a small town in the South of France following the death suspicious death of her husband. She uses her knowledge of historical items to help solve crimes. It sounds so cliché, but it’s been done very well and uses such a wealth of accurate knowledge that I appreciated as a History of Art grad.

Once I finished those shows on Acorn I cancelled the subscription quite a while before it ran out because there wasn’t that much else of interest. It was quite disappointing as most of the shows are outdated and poor quality, which for a channel you’re expected to pay for is a waste of money in my opinion.

After watching so much crime, I decided to pick up a few different things, so I started a show called From that I saw on NOW TV. It’s a science fiction horror thriller about a town that people mysteriously arrive at and can never leave, with things going bump in the night. It has a very interesting story and a second series coming later this year.

I watched three movies this month. After watching The ABC Murders I chose See How They Run a mystery comedy movie about a murder related to plans for the first movie adaptation of Agatha Christie’s plays. I’d seen the trailer previously, and it looked like a great fun movie. It is a very tongue in cheek satire which from some of the comments I saw went over the head of so many people, but I loved it. It’s the type of wicked humour that I adore, and the movie laughs at itself at every turn. Saorise Ronan and Sam Rockwell are brilliant as the lead characters.

My second movie was another that I had seen a trailer for, and also caught glimpses of an interview between the two main co-stars; Jungle Cruise. It was high on my to watch list because of the chemistry between Emily Blunt and Dwanye Johnson in the interview; they were teasing each other like old friends. If they were that fun on screen then the movie was going to be hilarious and it was! I was happy to find out a sequel is on the way.

The final movie on the month was The Suicide Squad, and I was quite impressed with this second outing for Task Force X. I think this one got a lot of criticism, just like the first one, and I’m not sure why as this was really good, much better than the first. Viola Davis and Idris Elba were so good together in one particular scene. Davis steals the show as Amanda Waller fullstop and despite her character being one of the most awful characters in the DC universe, I’m looking forward to the upcoming show just to see her in action.

The main reason I watched this movie was, so I could watch the Peacemaker TV show as it was the only DC show I’ve not watched yet. I have mixed feelings about it. The plot was great as was the overall cast, however, I just don’t understand why James Gunn had to make so much of it so unnecessarily crass. I wasn’t familiar with the character, so I did a bit of research and the character of Peacemaker isn’t a misogynist in the comics from what I can see. A lot of the way he is in the show, including the completely unneeded tiny whities, are Gunn’s impersonation of the character. While there were plenty of times when other characters pointed out how wrong Peacemaker’s attitudes and actions were, I still feel that many people watching the show it as confirmation that their own behaviour was acceptable (comments suggested as such).

What Gunn does seem to do well though is creating TV shows and movies with epic soundtracks, and Peacemaker is no exception. It also has the most epic opening credits that I have ever seen for a TV show. If you don’t plan to watch the show then at least watch the opening credits:

I read the following books in February 2023:

• The Thorns Remain by J.J.A. Harwood
• The Stranger Times (Stranger Times #1) by C. K. McDonnell
• This Charming Man (Stranger Times #2) by C. K. McDonnell
• City of Nightmares (City of Nightmares #1) by Rebecca Schaeffer
• The Great Big Demon Hunting Agency by Peter Oxley
• The Foxglove King (The Nightshade Crown #1) by Hannah Whitten

With all the migraines I only managed to complete two reviews in February 2023:

[rcno-book-listing ids=”29668, 29874″ wc=250 readmore=”Read my review”]

Thanks for joining me for February 2023’s monthly update! How did your February go?

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