Hello and welcome to my Geeking By in March 2023 update! March has been a bit of a strange month for me. While some things settled down, and I got into a rhythm with them, others just seemed to be set in rollercoaster mode. Keep reading to find out more!
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It feels like all I ever do in these posts is complain about my health centre and if you’re thinking why don’t I just swap, I wish it was that simple. I go to one “wing” of a large health centre and from various accounts the other wings are even worse. And yes, worse does exist. One of them is, or at least last year, was only opening half the week.
Anyway crap hit the fan this month when I tried to make that appointment with a GP that I was talking about in my last update to discuss my costochondritis. I was suddenly being told by the staff that they were no longer able to book appointments in advance. This was a bit of a shock considering my nurse had literally just told me a week before that they had started booking appointments months in advance. The only way to book an appointment I was told was to call up on the day at 8am, which was particularly problematic for me as I can’t function that early in the morning. When I pointed out that this meant that appointments were inaccessible to me to the staff member she stuttered and said she could try putting a note on my file to get the GPto call me – which the GP might see. I asked how I could make a complaint and got the practise manager’s email.
The next day the GP did call me and as predicted, asked me to come in the same day which isn’t easy for me. She did this last time as well and that time I only said yes because I was very ill, and I’d been waiting weeks to speak to a doctor (someone at the health centre screwed up). This time I said no because I wasn’t feeling well and this led to me mentioning not being able to call at 8am to make another appointment with her. She told me that if I called later in the morning, which is doable for me, I could make an appointment.
The next day the practise manager called me in regard to my email, and she was super nice. She apologised for the confusion and explained what was happening. Apparently, they were only doing this system for two weeks to catalogue statistics and improve services. She also said that staff were told all this, and you could literally hear the eye roll down the phone. From the sound of it she knows how bad her staff is. I don’t know whether it was a coincidence or not, but the staff member was the same one who gave me that dodgy depo appointment last month that was supposed to be ASAP and ended up being three weeks later. Both times she seemed to act differently after I mentioned I had chronic fatigue syndrome and couldn’t do something due to it. Either she doesn’t understand what ME/CFS is or she’s one of those people that believes people with chronic illnesses are just making excuses, which is a bad attitude for someone working in a health centre.
I never did end up making that appointment. I had a horrible cycle, probably due to my depo being so late last month. Flare-ups followed it and then this week I’ve had a three-day migraine for no apparent reason. A variety of things trigger my migraines, from stress and anxiety, to hormones and fatigue. I’m lucky that food doesn’t trigger them in that way. The third day was most likely just the after effects period as it wasn’t as bad as the previous two days.
I’m hoping I’ll feel better next week, so I can try to make the appointment and also go to my weekly therapy meeting. Meetings started back up three weeks ago, and I’ve not been able to go back. I felt fine the first week and of course, that was the first time we had proper snow. I struggle in cold weather due to my asthma and mobility, and it’s even worse with the costochondritis at the moment. That plus the anxiety of a new location that I’ve never visited before made me decide to stay home. Part of me wishes I hadn’t since I ended up missing every week since, but it was just too much anxiety all at once and the chance that I could make myself seriously ill.
It was back to Final Fantasy XIV in March as we headed into the Endwalker expansion at last and woah, was it an experience. I don’t want to go into it in too much detail as I know several of my friends have just started playing the game and are far away from this point in the storyline. I knew one spoiler about who we thought at some point and that was it, and that was messing with my head a bit. Thankfully it was what we thought it was but considering how much of a rollercoaster Endwalker was, honestly, anything could have happened. I laughed, I cried, and I fell helplessly in love with the Loporrits.
This expansion main story quest (MSQ) felt like it went a lot quicker for me as I stuck just to that and didn’t let myself get distracted by everything else. I’ve only done the first part of the MSQ; there’s been patches since that have added in more content. I’ve not continued with it yet because my entire game just exploded with new content.
While working through Endwalker I kept up with my daily beast tribe quests and in March I finally completed the remaining ones. I’m now working on two of the Endwalker ones, and doing some of the older ones to level classes. First up was finishing off my ninja which was lagging behind and is now 80. I can’t open the third beast tribe for Endwalker without doing a dungeon, and I’ve not been feeling up to doing any recently so that one’s just going to need to wait a bit.
After completing the MSQ I worked on getting my crafting jobs and fishing up to 90 (my other two gathering jobs were already up). I did this while doing the new profession quest lines, the studium deliveries, which were fun. It took a while, but I now have every one at level 90! Now I need to get a decent set of gear and Chris is doing that so only one of us has to grind everything as it is a massive undertaking. I’ll help out with some stuff, however, he’s so much better at this sort of thing than me, and he’s happy to do it.
As of the end of March my class levels look like:
I watched a bunch of new shows this month to get things off my watch list and catch up with shows. This month I watched:
- The Diplomat – Season 1 – A crime drama with a difference set in Barcelona, Spain and focusing on the Barcelona Consul helping British tourists in trouble. The alternate perspective was great, although the main character was messy as hell. I did love the supporting characters though so if there’s a second season I’ll be checking in.
- Unforgotten – Season 5 – This was the first season with a new lead actor and while Nicola Walker was missed I loved Sinéad Keenan. The lives of the police in this show have always been so messy and real, and her character’s was spectacularly so from the first moment she was on screen. It took a moment for her character to fit with the team because she’s so different to her predecessor, which was to be expected, and I liked the way the writers played into that rather than trying to force chemistry between her and Sanjeev Bhaskar who plays Sunny. The plot this time was also much better than the previous season.
- Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger – Season 2 – I finished up this show and I liked how it ended. A season 3 would have been very interesting, but the way it did end sort of fit with the feel of the show.It would be great to see these two pop up in future Marvel projects, however, it feels as though they’ve been forgotten.
- Luther – All seasons – I originally watched the first two episodes of Luther in February 2015 and didn’t like it. With the release of the new movie coming up in March 2023 I kept thinking about it, especially after watching Idris Elba in The Suicide Squad last month. So I decided to give if another chance and this time it seemed that it was more to my taste. I ended up binging it all and the new movie Luther: The Fallen Sun. Personally I enjoyed the movie and thought it was the natural evolution for the character. It seems I’m a minority as I saw many comments from old school Luther fans complaining about Netflix and Hollywood ruining their dear show etc. Having just binged the show from start to finish, I’m not really sure what they expected to happen next? I think it comes down to people not liking change and always needing to complain about something.
- The Midwich Cuckoos – This one-off show is an adaptation of John Wyndham’s 1957 book. If the name sounds familiar you may recognise him as the author of The Day of the Triffids. The Midwich Cuckoos is a science fiction book/show about a village that suffers a strange blackout. The blackout occurs in only one specific part of the village, and anyone who enters that area is knocked unconscious. When everyone wakes up all women of child-bearing age suddenly find themselves pregnant and any attempt to end the pregnancy is prevented – by their unborn child. It is very sinister, creepy (helped by the creepiest child actors you’ll ever see in one British TV show at the same time) and just enough of both to be interesting to me but not scare the crap out of me too much. Keeley Hawes was great as one of the main characters.
- Hustle – All Seasons – I like to check out actors credits when I watch shows and one of the actors in The Midwich Cuckoos was in Hustle. It reminded me that I should probably check it out especially as it’s where one of my favourite actors, Jaime Murray, started. For as long as I can remember I’ve been a bit averse to this show and when I started watching it I realised why; it was advertising when I was in my late teens. Back then this was aimed at people my age now, so my thoughts about it were out of date and entirely wrong. I also thought it had come out after Leverage, so I harboured this ill-conceived notion that it was a bit of a (British) copy-cat. If anything, it’s the other way about as Hustle started in 2004 and Leverage didn’t start for another four years after that (2008). Both are about con artists, but they have very different styles.
- Leverage is very robin-hood style, while the Hustle crew are in it purely for the money and while they do sometimes do robin-hood esque cons, the point is always to make a profit. For the Leverage crew any money they make always goes to the victims. The other big difference is that the Hustle crew changes up often, while Leverage stays the same. One thing I liked about Hustle is that the actors break the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience, and as they’re con artists this has such a fun affect. There are also little cut scenes and fantasy style scenes where they play things out or explain cons, in Leverage they say all the terminology but rarely explain it. Hustle is essentially a long lesson in how to con someone or how not to get conned. I still enjoyed Leverage more, and I think the biggest reason for that was the huge amount of misogyny in Hustle. There’s only ever one female member in the crew, there is always talk about how women look and in the fantasy scenes it was always the women in sexual fantasies rather than the men. A lot of that is to do with the era it was made in, and that it’s a BBC show.
- SEAL Team – Season 1 and 2 – I’ll be honest, this show is a just a bit of a filler for me for when I need something to fill the silence. It’s not that I’m not enjoying it but war based shows aren’t really my thing. Watching them go on missions is fine but when they get deployed to a war zone I’m just there for the character development. I decided to check it out because of David Boreanez who I’ve been a fan of for a long time, and as the show’s been going for seven seasons now I figured it can’t be that bad. There’s a strong chance I might give up on this one at some point, but for now it’s filling a need.
- The Lazarus Project – Season 1 – I left this one ’til last as I’m going to have to break out the spoiler code because I have some major issues with this show. The Lazarus Project is about a guy, George, who starts reliving the same period of time over and over. He’s informed by a secret agent that he’s a mutant, someone who can naturally sense when time has been moved backwards, and it’s been moved backwards a lot. The agent belongs to a secret organisation called The Lazarus Project that uses a temporal wormhole to go back in time to prevent world ending events until they can prevent it. Mutants like George are very rare, so he automatically gets recruited despite being a complete idiot… and this is where the ridiculousness kicks in.
View Spoiler » - The thing is, The Lazarus Project is a good show. It has a sound science fiction premise, and George might have been better if the actor that played him wasn’t as bad as the character he was playing. I felt bad for the rest of the cast because they were brilliant and clearly giving if their all. It’s as if the writers created a fantastic science fiction show, then someone came along said “people aren’t going to get it, we need to make it easier to understand!” so they made the main character a hapless idiot and got a comedian-style actor to play him. While George was terrible, I can’t pin all the bad writing to that one character. Illogical decisions such as one team member going off without telling anyone what was happening, and a horrifically traumatising birth storyline that felt as though the writers used pregnancy to create drama and horror for the sake of it. The problem is that the first and last episodes are great, and the cliffhanger of the last episode means I’m invested enough that I will check out season two to see what happens next. Whether I stick with it depends on how much it continues on the same path as season one or not.
Other than the Luther movie the only other movie I watched in March was Everything, Everywhere All at Once. I’ve been interested in this since I saw the trailer, long before it started to get hyped up and award nominations etc. I enjoyed it; it’s a decent science fiction movie that is heart-warming, clever and tackles some serious topics that usually get ignored. It was definitely worthy of the awards it won, it’s a masterpiece, but I wouldn’t say it’s one of my favourite movies.
My partner and I were discussing movies that have won Oscars and we both agree that we don’t rate many Oscar winning films. That’s not a surprise to me because my taste in movies has always been the total opposite of what’s considered popular. If a movie has been panned by the critics or has a low rating on Rotten Tomato, chances are I loved it. That doesn’t bother me, never has. Just out of interest for this post I checked the list of movies that won the Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Picture to see how many movies that won I liked – or even seen.
Starting from 1990, out of thirty-three winners I’ve seen ten of them and I would say I only really liked two of them, with another five being enjoyable. Another was ok, and the final two I thought were terrible. Looking at the winners I’ve not seen, there’s very few that I’m interested in and honestly, other than the “this is an award-winning movie, that means I should probably watch it” guilt I don’t feel any reason to watch them. Life’s too short for that.
In March 2023 I read:
- Bitter Medicine by Mia Tsai
- Shadow Service Vol. 3: Death To Spies by Scott Cavan
- The London Particular: A Newbury & Hobbes Investigation by George Mann
- Where You See Yourself by Claire Forrest
- The Dark and Dangerous Gifts of Delores McKenzie by Yvonne Banham
- And Put Away Childish Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- The Bone Master (The Sands of Achten Tan #2) by Debbie Iancu-Haddad
- The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fisher by E.M. Anderson
The one thing that did settle down this month was my book reviews and I managed to get back into a routine again. I was able to update my book review schedule and stick to it!
Here are March’s book reviews:
[rcno-book-listing ids=”30211, 29153, 29961, 30071, 30379, 30466, 30479″ wc=250 readmore=”Read my review”]
I ended up setting myself a small challenge in March, and I was partly successful due to my health. I have a lot of new makeup I want to test, however, when you have as many chronic health conditions as I do it’s quite difficult to find the motivation to get glammed up. Especially when you don’t go out much and struggle with fatigue. I’ve been trying to talk myself into it and failing miserably, so one night I posted this tweet:
I had a great response which was varied and so far I’ve managed to test two lipsticks (row 4, lipstick 4 and row 3, lipstick 5):
If you’re interested in seeing how some more tests go then give me a follow-on Twitter! Feel free to add some requests to the original post too 🙂
Something else I’ve been doing recently that I can now talk about is my first time being a sensitivity reader for a book! It’s something I’ve always wanted to do as a disabled person so when an author friend was looking for someone I decided to take the jump into the unknown. I figured it was better to do it for someone I knew first rather than a stranger and T. A. Hernandez was such a great person to work with! She’s such a sweetheart and made it such a lovely and fulfilling experience.
Her book Revenant Prince is now out, so I can reveal all this 🙂 It’s the second book of a trilogy, the first being Tethered Spirits which I previously reviewed here. I highly recommend it if you’re looking for an interesting, fun and diverse fantasy read. Both books are available on Kindle Unlimited and Tethered Spirits is currently on sale for a few days to promote the new book.
Thanks for reading my Geeking By update for March 2023! As we head into my least favourite month of the year here’s hoping I can hold onto some of the stability I’ve managed to create this month.
How was your March?
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