A few months back, it became very clear to me I was the best employee at my small, local job. I had a decision to make. Go all in on work and focus on it, try to get a raise, and distance myself from co-workers. Or, keep living a life where YouTube and the blog are just kinda durdling about as well as work. I chose to really hone in on work. What a journey it has been. I ended up getting a $2 raise, thus becoming the highest paid employee there. Mission accomplished. But it was a real grinding task. It compromised a lot of my mental and physical health. That’s because there was stuff going on in the background.

Namely, the company is doing poorly financially. As an employee and not an owner, it’s tough to say how rough. It’s a ma and pa store that never figured out all the financial parts of the business. And the economy is all over the place right now (more on this later). But this has made me go “All this hard work, just to get to here?”. It’s got me questioning a lot.

Next, my Brother-in-Law passed away essentially two months ago. He was battling poor health, but we still didn’t expect it when it finally did happen. Jessica took that week off to recover. When the following Monday came around, she was informed that the company she worked for was going out of business. She was out of a job 2 days later. A business in the same industry swooped up and let Jessica apply for one of their positions. We thought, “Oh, what a blessing.” Well, two months later, and she still has not started. I’ll leave the personal shots out of it, but let’s just say it isn’t Jessica’s fault she hasn’t started working yet.

Losing a family member, losing a source of income, and losing a creative outlet have taken its toll on us. Yet, it has certainly given me prospective.

For those of you who don’t know. I work 12-9pm and part of my job is actually live streaming online sales. I go live and interact with our audience for 3 hours (6pm-9pm), making sells to our viewers. Now, with a daughter who is a year and half old, it was getting hard to get home around 10pm and say “Yeah, I want to go live for a few more hours” when I’d rather see my family. These are more factors that have led me to not being active on here.

I want to come back. I want to hone in on my skills outside of work, such as editing and writing. So, I want to start incorporating these hobbies back into my life in a healthy way. Where I don’t get burned out or feel like it is dragging me away from my family.

So just know I’m working on several blog post such as: a new Manga Monday, The Games I’ve Played Recently, Ranking My Favorite Alolan forms (that’ll probably become a series of sorts), and Ranking the next Super Mario 64 course.

So those are what I have in mind. Please follow the blog and stay tuned for more content!

Thank you for reading! Have a great day!