So, a new year has begun. Twenty twenty six… it really doesn’t feel like it’s been that long since I began studying and becoming anxious about how my abilities weren’t enough. Or when I was obsessing over trying to get someone’s attention on top of my existing anxiety. Time is a strange thing, I’m telling you. In any case, let’s go over some of the things that happened to me this month.

The year began with me barely being able to sleep, as it’s usually the case, people celebrate until very late at night, sometimes even into sunrise. I have gone on and on about how much I hate it when people party at night, and it’s especially annoying when they’re loud about it. What gets me even more is the fact that they hadn’t been loud at all until around 2:30am, and then they continued until at least 5am. Needless to say, I barely got any sleep that night, and the heat only made it worse. These people, whoever they are… you’re all now on my shit list, motherfuckers.

The first week already had a pretty drastic change for me: after nearly 3 years of going at it, I decided to do away with my long hair for good. I had a few reasons for it, the heat being one of them of course, so that I can go around feeling a bit fresher. The second reason, being the upkeep– I was getting pretty fed up having to constantly trim my bangs, and the split hairs were starting to get on my nerves. And my biggest reason was probably the social aspect of it all, I got tired of the constant comments I got about it, and I didn’t feel comfortable getting constantly misgendered by others. Seeing my hair falling off my head was so strange… but I want to start off the year fresh, and I figured this would be a great way to do so.

I had also taken my cat to the vet that week, since she’s still under treatment for dermatitis. She’s been getting better, we applied another one of those parasite meds and she hasn’t scratched herself anywhere near as much. On that same visit, we also got her claws trimmed, and surprisingly, she didn’t make a scene at all. In fact, in every visit, she’s behaved herself, although expectedly she does get pretty stressed out. And she seems to hate me now for all these visits… but I’m doing it for her own good. Here are some pictures of her I took recently.

Halfway through the month, I went out with a friend and we talked a lot, basically catching up with one another and all the things we experienced since we last saw each other. And we also had some drinks, which is always very nice when it’s hot. Although that day wasn’t tremendously hot, surprisingly. She also suggested bringing one of my old phones to take pictures, so I ended up bringing my iPhone 3GS and we took some photos. If you follow me on SpaceHey, you have already seen these, but here they are again if you missed them.

This month I also decided to go biking again, I cleaned up my old bike and I’ve gone out with it during evenings. Not every day mind you, my legs can only handle so much after all. I’m easing myself into it, and eventually I’ll start going more often. I do need to do some maintenance to it, which I plan to do during Feburary. I also invested on a helmet, since it’s a legal requirement where I live and up until now I didn’t have one. I really do need to work out, my body has been out of shape for years by this point.

Finally, near the end of the month, I went to my cousin’s baby shower. I don’t really like going to such parties normally, I get overwhelmed with the amout of people around me, and the loud music really gets on my nerves. At the very least I can say the food was really good, and there was so much of it in this occasion. There’s not much else for me to say about this, other than the fact that seeing people around my age having kids still very much weirds me out. At least I saw some cute kitties.

Last week, I was finally given a start to my adventures with Vue. One of my teammates got in touch with me asking if I wanted to join the team, to which I agreed. The day after, we had a meeting explaining to me how it was all going to work and guiding me through the basics. Then on Friday, we had another meeting where we set things up so I could finally start working. During this week, I was formally given the tasks, which basically consist of polishing up the styles on the platform we’re building, as that’s my area of expertise and they told me they’d focused on functionality way more. So far so good, I’ve fixed quite a few things already, though I have been going a bit slowly. Either way, I hope to upload my changes by the end of the week before going on a week long break.

While I am glad that I’m finally dipping my toes on Vue, I’m also somewhat worried about how well I’ll do once they ask me to do more complex things. I’ll have to rewatch the course I did last year to solve any questions I might have, since there are so many concepts and I struggle to remember them all. What does help is that my teammates are more than happy to help, and as I mentioned above, they have walked me through the basics for getting things set up. And I hope I can get to a more advanced level over time, I’m still light years away from what my teammates can do. Vue isn’t hard to use, I just get tangled up a lot with all its features, something that should become less of an issue the more I work with it.

Next week is my break, and I sure have been looking forward to it. Especially with how December treated me as a whole, I ended getting really stressed with all the situations going on in my life. I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere this year though, sadly. I will use some of my free time for my medical nonsense though, and I expect to get blood work done as well. Anything to make sure I don’t have a nasty illness or whatever, we’ll see. So, yeah. Work has been going alright all things considered, and hopefully things will remain as such the further we venture into 2026.

After one of my friendships ended last year, I did question if I wanted to continue trying to meet people online. After all, for the past couple of years, I’ve been rather unsuccessful when it comes to making friends, less so in the sense of meeting people and more so when it comes to actually maintaining those relationships. A lot of them end up taking the same route, becoming super distant after a few months of talking. While I do understand that adult life gets in the way, it does rub me the wrong way when I then see them online playing games or posting like nothing ever happened.

This year I decided I wanted to try again anyway, despite my previous failures. At the end of November I rejoined SpaceHey so I can give this whole friend making thing another try. I do want to be careful this time round, I should try not to get too attached to other people, but knowing me, I know it’ll be hard. I also need to be able to detect any red flags and decide if they’re a deal breaker for me or not. So far I’ve only interacted with a few folks, maybe I’ll become friends with some of you, but of course only time will tell. But so far I’m enjoying my comeback, I’ve had quite a bit of engagement on my posts.

Perhaps the most important part of making friends for me is well, working through my flaws. For the longest time, I’ve been super picky with who I decide to interact with, partly because I want to protect myself, but also because admittedly because I’m very judgemental at times. I have straight up refused to interact with people because of things I deem wrong, even if they’re not always objectively wrong. I do want to give myself the goal to tone down the prejudice going forward, and while I will still be pretty selective with who I want to befriend, I’ll try my best to look past things that aren’t too important in a person.

By far a more severe problem for me has to do with communication, to this day I still struggle with this, especially when it comes to bringing up problems or just stating there’s something I don’t like or disagree with. Considering one of my latest friendship failures stemmed in big part due to poor communication, it’s essential that I start working on this with the new folks I meet. I was always taught to stay quiet in those situations, but now as an adult, I realize it’s more harmful than anything. So this is a pretty big goal for me this year, so I don’t have any situations like what I described last month happen again.

So… yeah, those are my plans for friends this year. I do still want to try meeting people in person as well, but so far I don’t know how I’ll approach that. We’ll see as we go along through 2026.

I got more phones this month, but nowhere near as many as last month. I even got a tablet too, why not. Once again, a whole lot of Sony Ericsson. Can you tell I like their phones?

• Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 (2013): Did you know that Samsung also made Galaxy Note tablets? And like the phones, this one also has an S Pen stylus that can be used for note taking or drawing. This one is in reasonable shape, the middle frame has a few cracks though. I ended up installing Android 9 on it, and I’m surprised at how well it runs given the age of the hardware, it’s very usable. Made in China.
• Sony Ericsson Cedar/J108 (2010): Here’s a phone I’ve been wanting to get for quite a while, as I wanted a newer SE phone that I could use for Java apps and games. It’s in pretty decent shape all around and it works fine. I’m also surprised at how fluid the UI is, normally these phones are pretty sluggish. Made in China.
• Nokia C3-00 (2010): A basic and kinda boring keyboard phone. It works perfectly, although I had to replace the keyboard as it was pretty worn down in spots. Made in Brazil.
• Sony Ericsson Vivaz (2010): This one I had to order online as I wasn’t sure if it was ever sold here. This is a touchscreen smartphone that runs Symbian, and quite a good looking one at that. This and its keyboard-equipped sibling, the Vivaz Pro, were the last Sony Ericsson phones to run Symbian, as they made the switch to Android that same year. Made in China.
• Nokia 5130 XpressMusic (2009): A rather unremarkable music phone. I had to repair this one by getting another one, the screen was completely smashed up. That seemed to be the only problem it had, it now works perfectly fine. Made in Mexico.
• Sony Ericsson Naite/J105 (2009): This is the direct predecessor to the Cedar, and it’s a “GreenHeart” phone, meaning it uses recycled materials for the packaging and the device itself. This one though… it’s seen better days, that’s for sure. And the SIM card slot originally didn’t work at all, so I had to do a very janky repair to get it working again. Now all it needs is a new shell, it appears to work fine otherwise. Made in China.
• Sony Ericsson W205 (2008): A basic Walkman phone. This is actually the successor to the W200 I had as a kid, but honestly this phone is way inferior. It just doesn’t have the same level of fluidity or polish. It’s in alright shape, a bit scratched up and it was missing the back cover, I have to use a black one I had in the meantime. Made in Brazil.
• Nokia 2600 (2004): This little guy is notable for being one of the best selling phones of all time, it was designed as a basic and easy to use phone for first time owners. This one is in decent condition, but it had some issues. Namely a spicy pillow and the battery contacts not making good contact with the battery. I managed to fix both issues and now it’s all good. Made in Mexico.

Here are the toy cars. The Chevy Astro I ended up buying online and it cost me around 35 bucks.

Two Mario related items, a Yoshi plush from 1997 and a Pink Gold Peach toy from McDonald’s.

Speaking of Mario, I got this for Christmas last month. It’s a figure based on his design for the movie, and it’s pretty nice and detailed.

Here’s a curious one, a toy miniature recorder from Japan. It can record up to 20 seconds of audio per cassette.

And this is the strangest find of the month: an IBM SurePOS 300 from 2009. This is what’s known as a point of sale system, and it would’ve been used for things like cash registers or ATMs, basically any enviroments that required a low powered computer for such tasks. It works fine, runs Windows XP, and it was seemingly used at a restaurant at some point.

So, that was January. As much as I like to complain about how much it sucks ass, I will say that this year it wasn’t so bad. Well, it hasn’t ended yet, but I can at least say I had an easier time in January than I did in December. On Friday I’ll go to the doctor so I can get myself checked out, and then I can rest for the first week of February. Gosh, I’m so tired and this heat isn’t helping matters one bit. I need to go take more walks during the evening to keep myself active, on top of the biking trips I’ll take during the month as well.

I don’t have a lot of hope for the next month, but maybe it’ll surprise me. I have my doubts, though. Either way, I hope you guys enjoyed reading my blog post. I swear I pour my entire soul into writing these, or that’s what I want you to believe anyway.

See you all in the next post.