Hello everyone! It’s been a while since there’s been a Geeking By monthly post and now that I have a blog schedule firmly in place these will actually be a monthly occurrence! January 2023 has raced by so read on to find out how 2023 has begun for me.

This year started extremely stressful. A family member was in hospital on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day was extremely stressful. While everyone was celebrating we were all worrying about what was going on and waiting for news. Not the best way to start a new year, that’s for sure.

I was still recovering from a flu-like virus that you might be familiar with yourself as I’ve heard so many other people say they had something similar. Not quite the flu or covid, but worse than a cold. It hit like a tonne of bricks and stayed with me for a lot longer than it did Chris and anyone else due to my health conditions. I also still had Costochontritis (inflamed rib cartilage), which I discussed in my hiatus post at the start of December, so that didn’t help.

The Costochontritis is still up and down, seeming to ease off for a bit and then returning with a vengeance again. I’m going to have to back to the GP about it which is a whole hassle on its own. Normally I’m not one to avoid going to see a doctor, however, the current situation at my GP surgery is causing me so much anxiety that it is making it difficult for me to handle. I was late booking my depo injection this month for this reason and right now I’m suffering the hormonal consequences of not getting it as early as possible.

The problem is that they are short-staffed, and their staff keep getting ill. The second issue would be helped a lot more by their staff actually wearing masks when they’re supposed to, and I’ve spoken to someone about this who assures me that they’re supposed to wear them. Yet I can guarantee every time I go they won’t be which doesn’t help my anxiety either. And so they remain in this constant cycle of being short-staffed which means it’s very difficult to get through on the phone to make an appointment. It can sometimes take days because the system only lets ten people queue at a time, and while that sounds unhelpful it’s actually much better than it was. There previously was no wait system at all, so the phone would just keep ringing and ringing with no indication that you had even got through!

If you’re able to get into the queue, and you’re tenth, then get comfortable because that’s at least an hour wait. They only seem to ever have one person answering the main line during the day. Then when you do get through you have to hope you get a member of staff that won’t argue with you. I’ve been told “no we don’t do injections any more” when booking my depo appointment (they don’t do diabetes etc. injections) which as you can imagine made me panic. Or I get told I can’t make an appointment and have to call back at 8am, which I can’t do because I have ME/CFS and struggle to do anything that early. I used to be able to email in, but they scraped that system because it put some patients at risk. I’m not sure how other medical practices, including hospital departments, can work by email yet a GP surgery can’t seem to get a system working properly for it.

They sent a letter out saying “stop complaining to us, it’s not our fault, it’s NHS shortages” and that just felt like a copout especially since it was several months late and as I mentioned, a huge issue seems to be staff sickness. I know this because they send out text messages stating the reason for no appointments being available and most of the time that’s the reason given. That letter just made my anxiety flare because essentially all it did was confirm that this is the situation right now and there is no solution in sight.

I remained on hiatus throughout much of January, so I only wrote two blog posts this month. The first was a big one and one I’ve been wanting to do for a few years now. This year I was finally able to find the time and energy to put together a huge master list of Disability and Neurodivergent books out in 2023!

The second was my personal goals and blog updates for the new year. I’ve not done one of these for several years and I explain why I’ve decided to do one again in the post which you can read here.

I continued my adventures in Eorzea throughout last year and into this year, which is to say I’ve been primarily playing Final Fantasy XIV still. As of my update last January, we had finished the Stormblood main story quest (MSQ) and were working our way through the post-Stormblood content. We took a break from that content as it was mostly raids back to back, and we wanted to level up our other classes/jobs, so we took it slowly before heading into Shadowbringers. Now a year later we’ve just finished the final raids for the post-Shadowbringer content, and we’re just about to start Endwalker.

I’ve made a huge amount of progress levelling all my classes, including professions. As you can see from the image above I’ve got most of my classes at level 80+, except for two DPS classes; reaper and ninja, tanks and healers. Level 80 is the current max level I’m aiming for right now as Endwalker is level 80 to 90. Blue Mage is at 70 and that is max level for that class.  I don’t mind levelling my white mage in groups with other players, but I struggle with my astrologian which is why that healing class is lagging behind at 61. 

Unfortunately the duty system, where you play with NPCs instead of other players, doesn’t cover 60 to 70 yet, so I have a gap in levelling for my healers and tanks. There is a slow method using some beast tribe daily reputation quests which is what I used for my other tanks (Gunbreaker and Dark Knight). In FFXIV you can only complete twelve reputation quests a day, and I’ve been using my daily allocation to level my reputations up. There are fourteen that I have access to at the moment, and I’ve completed most of them with only one per expansion left to complete now. Most of them are on the last rank and will be completed soon which opens up a quest line when all the beast tribe reputations of that expansion are maxed.

Now that I’ve levelled up most of my classes up to level 80 it’s given me a much larger range of items to play with for glamours. I have several set up for my level 80s, such as this one for my dark knight, that I’m absolutely in love with.

The year started off with us continuing our catch-up of the Marvel cinematic universe. We’re quite behind and have been playing catch-up for a while now. It began with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and then moved onto Moon Knight and then later in the month we started Ms. Marvel. I had managed to avoid spoilers for all of them so got to enjoy the full experience of them. I found Moon Knight to be a strange experience to watch at first, but as the show went on and things began to make sense I found it hilarious.

I’m not so sure about Ms. Marvel yet, we’re halfway through it and I think the problem is that it’s reminding me way too much of myself at that age – and not in a good way! There was a lot of facepalming and hiding under the bed covers while cringing. I love Kamala, so I’m looking forward to seeing more of her in other Marvel projects.

Other new shows I picked up in January were:

• Person of Interest – This had been recommended to me a while ago, and I finally picked it up. I’m glad I did because I thoroughly enjoyed it!
• National Treasure – I was very excited about this when I heard it and so far it’s been good. The cast is great, super quirky and geeky, and I’m loving seeing Catherine Zeta Jones back on my screen in so many shows I’m watching.
• The Last of Us – Not sure where I stand with this one yet because I tend to get bored with apocalyptic TV shows about humanity surviving. There’s only so many times that I can handle watching the same old plots of backstabbing, cheating and lying because the world has ended/is ending and life is hard. And even though there it’s a post-apocalyptic world there’s never any disabled main characters and hardly any (usually none) secondary ones. I’m hoping that this one will be different since it’s about two characters mainly and the girl has caught my attention so far with her sassy attitude.
• Around the World in 80 Days – I’ve had my eye on this BBC show for a while for two reasons; David Tennant and I loved the Around the World with Willy Fogg cartoon as a child. I’ve not read the book and this looked great, plus; David Tennant. It was superb. The main cast is hugely talented and had such great chemistry together, and I thought it was just a limited series, but it actually has a second season coming so yey!

I’ve also been working on one of my goals for 2023 to finish off some of the TV shows that I’d started and not finished. I started by finishing off season three of Preacher and then starting season four but stopped after a few episodes as it’s a show that I need to watch in small doses. Next up was The Gifted; Chris was playing Midnight Suns and that got me in the mood for the X-Men show again. I followed it up with Wynonna Earp and found myself wondering why I had left it so long to finish such a fantastic show.

I picked up Van Helsing again afterwards and finished the first season, but abandoned it after just one episode of the second season. What looked like a great vampire show seemed to be rapidly heading for the humanity survival show route that I was just talking about. Not my thing, and keeping with my other goals of not wasting my time on stuff that doesn’t work for me, I moved on. I finally caught up with Unforgotten season four, and while the main cast was great as always I could have done without the horrible ableism throughout the season.

I’ve been watching so little movies recently that I actually forgot that I even watched any this month! Another of my goals for 2023 was to watch more movies, so I made an effort this month to get a few in. As mentioned there was Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness right at the start of the month and then towards the end I watched Glass Onion: A Knives out Mystery and Hidden Figures. While I enjoyed Knives Out, I watched it after it had been hyped up quite a bit and found it a little disappointing. I found Glass Onion much more enjoyable, although I have to agree with a friend’s observation that there was a character with major red flags. To be honest, there were many characters that raised red flags for me and I think that was the entire point of them. They were written that way on purpose rather than being written out of ignorance, if that makes sense. They were heavily satirised versions of real life figures.

After watching that I wanted something a lot more grounding and decided to watch Hidden Figures, a movie that has been on my watch list for a while and I noticed it was on Disney+ recently. It’s about the unseen black women behind the first NASA space flight. It was a fantastic film with fantastic actors playing the three women.

I always catch up with comics at the end of the year for a few reasons; 1) they’re great for finishing off my Good Reads challenge, 2) by that time in the year the volumes have actually been added to the site and I can tick them off and 3) around the holiday season I just want to read something easy. I also tend to have fallen behind quite a bit during the year, and I’m usually on hiatus from reviews, so this is my comic catch-up time. Last year I had fallen quite a bit behind with the DC Comics storylines and the most recent event, Dark Crisis, took me absolutely ages to complete. It was organised so badly and was such a mess. Every time I thought I was getting close to the end I’d realise I needed to read an issue from another series and then have to read ten to fifteen issues to get to the one issue that was part of the event.

I eventually got there and started on my reading for my reviews. The plan was to start reviews up again ASAP, but I haven’t quite got there, so there’s only been one in January. It was for The Severed Thread by Leslie Vedder, the second book of The Bone Spindle trilogy and part of a blog tour. The book was absolutely brilliant, and you can read my full review here.

Other books and comics I read this month which I’ll be reviewing next month are:

• Rivers of London: Ever After by Ben Aaronovitch
• A Venom Dark and Sweet by Judy I. Lim
• Shield Maiden by Sharon Emmerichs
• Godkiller by Hannah Kaner

There are a few books that won’t be making it to reviews as I didn’t finish them. I have a very full TBR review list, so I don’t have time to waste of books that aren’t working for me. The first that I DNFed was a surprise to me as I’m a big fan of the author’s other series. It was The Luminaries by Susan Dennard and while I love her Witchlands series, this one just felt like it was written by a completely different author.

The other one was The Spice Road by Maiya Ibrahim and if I had less on my plate I might have stuck with it, but I think I would have still been disappointed with it. The main character just wasn’t clicking with me, and she was already doing things that made no sense to me. I don’t need a character’s motives to be completely understandable to me, but I do need the author to write realistic scenes and this one just wasn’t going that way.

To be honest, absolutely bugger all. I’ve not even been going out to my weekly group therapy meetings because I’ve been recovering, had flare-ups or rough nights. The weather has been all over the place, and we’ve hit storm season. It keeps getting very cold and windy with temperatures diving, and we get frost and ice but no snow. I wish it would just bloody snow and get it out of its system!

I’d planned on coming fully off hiatus by the end of the month and that ended up not happening. So it’ll be semi-hiatus for February with the plan to return in full force in March.

Thank you for joining me for my monthly update for January 2023! How did your January go? If you’ve got a monthly update post on your blog pop a link in the comments so I can check it out too 🙂

---

Support Just Geeking By

I hope you enjoyed this post! If you did, please consider sharing it on social media using the nifty buttons at the end of this post <3

If you enjoyed this content, please consider supporting my blog. You can do this in multiple ways (click here to find out how!) or by donating via Ko-Fi to help me reach my current goal.