Saturday 16 July 2016

Mid life crisis

    Seasoned readers may have noticed a slowdown hereabouts in the last couple of months. This isn't the usual progression of bloggers in this sphere going hell-for-leather at a transition goal and then dropping everything like a hot potato when they consider themselves "done", instead it's a mark of how much I have going on at the moment. I'm holding down three jobs at once, a full-time electronic design contract, writing technical articles, and servicing my own electronic business. The good news is that this means I have some money coming in and I should achieve my immediate aim of having a year's reserve in hand should everything dry up, but the bad news is that it's left precious little time for anything else. This isn't the only thing that's suffered, there are several other projects that have gone on hiatus as a result. No doubt when the contract is over things will return to normal.
    In a few months I'll have another birthday. Not a particularly special one, but a point at which the feeling of an inexorable slope towards 50 becomes palpable. This isn't something that I find welcome, I have no need to hang onto some wild and crazy youth but I can't escape a disappointment that there is so much I have not managed to do. I've written of my need for a family in the past, now that is hanging over me in an ever more pressing way. Ten years ago when I was married to someone who turned out in the end never to have wanted a family in the first place there was always a sense that it might have happened tomorrow, now I can't escape the feeling that tomorrow is here and nothing has been done. Where the last twenty years have gone and what I have to show for them is a mystery.

    Staying alive I guess, an achievement in itself.