I missed this place and what I've been up to

SillyOctpuss

SillyOctpuss

Well-known member
This was a hard post to write. It involves me opening up a bit on the internet and discussing some feelings. So if that's not for you then you've had fair warning and can move along but if you stick with it I promise it does have a happy ending.

Well it's been a hell of a year. This is a long post so grab a beverage.

I've not really opened up much about my private life on the forum but feel like it's time to say a few words, just in case there's anyone out there who may be in a similar situation.
Up until last August I was working full time for a rather large company whilst also acting as carer for my wife and trying to be a dad to an awesome three year old little dude.

When he was younger we managed this dynamic but once he hit three he got to the stage where my wife was struggling to cope while I was at work. Thankfully I was able to do a lot of work remotely so I was available to help during the day when he decided he didn't want to listen to his mum. Part of my wife's condition affects her mobility and energy levels so basically she struggles trying to keep up with a three year old.

So working 50-60hrs a week (I was contactable 24/7 = phone calls at 3am), doing all of the cooking, cleaning, laundry, helping my wife AND trying to look after my son things became difficult and eventually something had to give.

Can you guess what it was? Yup it was me.

I basically fell apart, my physical and mental health took a major nose dive. So my Doctor signed me off work and my company put me on sick leave for five weeks to recuperate. During this time it became obvious that the workload I had on my plate was unsustainable and I had two choices.

1 - Drop some things off my plate to focus on family and myself
2 - Keep going as I had been and end right back where I was in another 6-10 months.

Well family obviously won out and when I was due to go back I asked my company for redeployment into a part time role. Rather annoyingly despite all the things I’ve done for them over the years they decided to be quite unhelpful and tried to keep me in my full time role. One of the perks of being the guy who deals with a lot of problems means you know where a lot of the bodies are buried. Once I dug a few of these up and passed on some relevant details my company suddenly became much more interested in helping me move into a part time role and were now very concerned with my mental wellbeing and physical health.

So fast forward to November 2021 and I was now working 16hrs a week with literally zero fucks to give. I’d turn up to work twice a week, work damn hard when I was there, clock off and then not think about them a second more until I was next back on site. Things were pretty good. Our house was tidier than it had ever been, I was looking better, feeling better, my wife's health was a little better due to her being generally less stressed. We were financially tighter than before but damn me things were good... then boom. the universe fucked me and fucked me hard.

We got a call from the estate agent who managed our house to inform us the landlord had decided to sell and we had 2 months to move. Well shit. This honestly becomes a serious problem when you

A - live in a bungalow because your wife can't manage stairs
B - Your son has recently been diagnosed with autism. He had delayed speech and has started a new pre-school where he's both been really happy AND we’d seen definite improvement in his speech and language
C - You have both a cat and a dog
D - You now work part time and have to show that you can afford the place you want to live in.

So we looked and looked and looked and found literally zero bungalows or ground floor properties for rent anywhere near either my place of employment or my son's preschool. Finally after we were getting close to our two months time limit to move, we found a place which was both more expensive and not as nice as our last place! Yup it was not even close to as nice as our last place but we had absolutely no other options and had to go for it.

So queue a bunch of money to some movers to get us into the new place and everything's fine now right? Hell no. Basically the house had issues which were not disclosed and we didn't find out until after we had moved in. There were problems with the water, the power and the central heating system. After much arguing with the landlord we managed to get out of our tenancy agreement but had to start looking for a new place all over again.

So we spent weeks looking and the best we could come up with was far enough away that we’d have to move our son into a new school and I’d have to move jobs so after talking it out for a while we decided to move back to N Ireland to be closer to my family.
 
We originally moved to England for my career but since I no longer had a career then fuck it why the hell not. So an absolute shit ton of money to movers this time. God damn moving countries is expensive. When we moved from N Ireland my company paid to move us but this time we had to fund it. Annoyingly as this was our second move this year and I was starting to run low on savings I had to make a tough choice and decided to sell a lot of my gear to fund it. My Princeton, Hot rod delville, Mesa Tremoverb, JCM900, my R7 Les Paul 335 and my taylor acoustic were all sold to fund both moving to N Ireland and also paying deposits etc when we found a place.

So where are we now? Well we’re now up to June and we’re starting to see the light. We finally moved into a nice bungalow in the countryside in N Ireland. W00t. Move on a few more months of working on the house, school hunting, getting medical referrals for my wife and son etc until today.

So where are we now? Well, we love our house, my son has just started a new preschool which has experience working with kids with autism, my mental health is pretty good, my wife’s physical health is better due to much less stress and me being here 24/7 to look after both her and my son. We see my family every week and we’ve even reconnected with friends we lost when we moved to England.

I hadn’t turned on a soldering iron since August 2021 but I now have my own space setup (mostly) and I’ve been working away on a few builds. Despite the gear purge to fund the move I managed to hold onto my favourite prs, a tele, a strat and an old epi les paul I have sentimental attachments to I’m still ampless but at least I held onto my helix so can still play through studio monitors and an amp will follow in time. Oh and I’ve got a gig in a few weeks playing with some old friends in a homecoming they organised for me. I’m gonna try the hx stomp direct into the PA so we’ll see how that goes.

So what did I learn?
1 - Don’t ignore your own health while looking after someone else. You can’t look after them if you’re ill dummy.
2 - Family first. Your job is important but not as important as your health or family. They also won't remember all the hard work, missed sleep and times you pulled their ass out of the fire when you need them to do something outside of the norm.
3 - Always keep receipts and emails of anything remotely questionable/dodgy/incriminating your employer does. That way if/when they try to screw you over you actually have something to bargain with
4 - Gear is nice but a peaceful existence in a lovely little bungalow knowing your family is comfortable, happy and safe is much nicer
5 - I missed my friends. When you’re concerned about career and don’t look after yourself things slide and to my shame I left a lot of good people who cared about me in the dark.
6 - I missed this place. I’ve not been active much at all between Nov 2021 up until a few weeks ago. The last few weeks have been nice catching up on all the things you guys have been building. It’s nice to be back. It also took a lot of effort to sit down and write all this crap out. Hopefully it helps someone else but ultimately even if no one else reads it, it has helped me
7 - Damn I missed playing the guitar.


Oh and @Paradox916 thankyou for the shirt dude. My in laws sent it over earlier in the year but I was in no place to log on here to thankyou for it. I do, however, wear it all the time -)
 
I'm glad that you and your family made it through all of that, what a series of events that was.

My wife's job is as a health coach and she talks to people all over the country (USA). Her specialty is stress management and it just amazes me how much of themselves people give to a company that cares absolutely zero about their own health and wellbeing. People in departments that have been cut in half but they're expected to still get everything done. People who work themselves in to mental health crises or who destroy their personal and family lives because they're trying so hard to hold it together at work. It's absolute madness that she talks to people in that situation pretty much day-in and day-out, and I am really glad that you were able to fix your situation before it became something serious for you and your family. That is very inspiring.
 
peccary said:
I'm glad that you and your family made it through all of that, what a series of events that was.

My wife's job is as a health coach and she talks to people all over the country (USA). Her specialty is stress management and it just amazes me how much of themselves people give to a company that cares absolutely zero about their own health and wellbeing. People in departments that have been cut in half but they're expected to still get everything done. People who work themselves in to mental health crises or who destroy their personal and family lives because they're trying so hard to hold it together at work. It's absolute madness that she talks to people in that situation pretty much day-in and day-out, and I am really glad that you were able to fix your situation before it became something serious for you and your family. That is very inspiring.
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You're completely right. People end up giving so much of themselves it just becomes the norm and is expected. Don't get me wrong I enjoyed a lot of things about my job and worked with some great people. The problem comes when you're dealing with HR and you become a number as opposed to individuals in the business you work with day in day out.
 
Man, I’m glad you were aware I’m enough to take care of your mental health, better late than never. Family first really says it all. I won’t throw in my me too story out of respect, I will just saw I know where you’re coming from and how that feels. Your family must be proud of you too sir, good on you.
 
Thanks for sharing. There were a few times I thought "hmm where's @SillyOctpuss been?" So I'm glad to hear things are looking up. Sorry about your amps, but they're just stuff. Family is way more important in my opinion.

I too was in a work situation like that for over 10 years. I convinced my employer to furlough me 2 months into the pandemic. After 3 months, it was super clear for me that I was never going back. I managed to ride out that furlough for about a year and a half. My boss started asking me about coming back and I told her my wife and I had had a baby, which I never mentioned, and that I wasn't returning. They decided to dissolve my whole department rather than try to replace me since I was the director. Now I'm a stay at home dad, I'm broke, and I don't really have free time. Like you, I am the primary domestic laborer, but I'm doing better than I have in almost 10 years.
 
Harry Klippton said:
Thanks for sharing. There were a few times I thought "hmm where's @SillyOctpuss been?" So I'm glad to hear things are looking up. Sorry about your amps, but they're just stuff. Family is way more important in my opinion.

I too was in a work situation like that for over 10 years. I convinced my employer to furlough me 2 months into the pandemic. After 3 months, it was super clear for me that I was never going back. I managed to ride out that furlough for about a year and a half. My boss started asking me about coming back and I told her my wife and I had had a baby, which I never mentioned, and that I wasn't returning. They decided to dissolve my whole department rather than try to replace me since I was the director. Now I'm a stay at home dad, I'm broke, and I don't really have free time. Like you, I am the primary domestic laborer, but I'm doing better than I have in almost 10 years.
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Completely agree they're just things and now I know my family are safe and my kid gets to see his aunt and two of his grandparents every week.

Like you I'm also now a broke stay at home dad but I'm much happier than when I was running around putting out fires and fixing problems for my previous employer.
 
Hey, I can relate to this! My son is autistic and is now 13 years old. I had to give up my day job a few years ago because he was becoming too much for my wife to handle on her own.... Hell he's too much for either one of us to handle on our own.

Maaan your new place looks amazing, looks like that worked out!

If you need some PCBs or something to keep you going just say the word.
 
Robert said:
Hey, I can relate to this! My son is autistic and is now 13 years old. I had to give up my day job a few years ago because he was becoming too much for my wife to handle on her own.... Hell he's too much for either one of us to handle on our own.

Maaan your new place looks amazing, looks like that worked out!

If you need some PCBs or something to keep you going just say the word.
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Wow I can't imagine what Thomas will be like at 13. He's almost too much to handle now at 4. I love it when we go outside in the mornings and he runs over to the fence saying "good morning sheeps. how are you today sheeps" :love:

We're really loving the new house and once he's in proper school I will be playing LOUD. You can barely see any of our neighbours so they definitely won't be able to hear me.

Thank you for the offer re Pcbs I'll be putting in an order soon once I get some of the projects I was working on before this all kicked off put to bed.
 
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Robert said:
My son is back to his old schedule this week.... staying up 24 hours straight, sleeping about 4 - 5 hours, then doing it all over again.

We'll be outside on the trampoline around 10pm tonight, in the rain, with the water hose.... :oops: :ROFLMAO:
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OMFG are you serious? My kid is exactly the same. We were just saying tonight that we're due for a week of hell. Thomas will go to sleep at half 8, wake at exactly 01:44 then will run around the house like his bum is on fire, unable to stay still while he chases the dog, cat, pulls books off shelves and tries to get us to turn on any tap he can. He'll usually pass out at 7am then sleep until 9 before the doing the same thing the next night.

When we take the dog out in the morning the first thing he does is say good morning to the sheeps and then climbs into his trampoline for a quick session with his wellies on while we try and get him to come and eat breakfast. Doesn't matter if its rain or sun :ROFLMAO:

Oh and don't get me started on the hose
 
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My son was doing the water faucet thing a few weeks ago, turning it on, then putting his head under the water.

This week he's flushing toilets... if he gets irritated for any reason he runs to the bathroom and flushes the toilet, then runs away yelling. :ROFLMAO:

He doesn't knock things off shelves but he likes knocking over chairs.
 
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