Only purpose of this post is pretty much purely to rant and get it off my chest, so forgive me if this just comes across as a whine. Going to give the full background on each piece, and apologies for any accidental swearies which I'll remove as soon as spotted!
These last twelve months have been a royal pain in the backside. My other half (together 8 years, married in 2013) suffers from a severe anxiety disorder which has been getting progressively worse these last couple of years (since the tail end of 2012).
She's had CBT, and is now on medication which seems to be helping, but largely seems to be down to her profession as a primary teacher and the stress she's been under because of it. So much so that as of September she cut down to part time work, and with me getting a fairly significant promotion and pay rise, I decided it would be even better if she quit altogether and went back to uni to retrain in something more towards what she actually wants to do (child bereavement counselling). As an infrastructure engineer myself, and a teacher, we're not exactly badly off but we both work hard, but it's the best thing to do for her quality of life.
Which leads me nicely on to work. Now, don't get me wrong, my employer is on the whole actually pretty good, and understanding with work/life balance. The job I do is quite flexible in terms of working from home, but with a major contract change with our main customer the Level 1 24/7 position I was in changed to having Level 2 technicians as the first port of call. So, we were all made redundant, but with the experience I have the offer came in to stay on with a small pay bump, progressing in to a larger pay bump after completing a couple of Microsoft certificates.
All well and good, but with the job as mentally busy and short on staffing resources as we were, I never got the chance to do the certificates. Fast forward 3 months later and I get pulled aside by my manager with an offer to promote to Level 3 to fill the shoes of someone else leaving. Brilliant, thought I, accepted without a second thought... and four months later here I am essentially doing Level 3 work with not much higher than Level 1 wages. Conversations are going on at senior management level to get this resolved, outcome of which I find out tomorrow. Suffice to say, the difference in wages is pretty major, and the back pay for the last 4 months (officially started as L3 at the beginning of November) equates to quite a chunk of change.
In the background to all of this, at the beginning of 2015 my mother started getting sufficiently ill that she was in and out of hospital a lot. Fast forward 12 months and 9 or 10 hospital visits later, and it turns out she's down to 30% liver function (never having drunk a drop in her life), has a large terminal colon cancer which has spread to her lymph nodes, has ascites compressing her lungs and heart, and has large varices which could pop any moment and take her out. She's currently as I type in hospital on what is possibly her deathbed, having developed a perforation in her stomach which is leaking bile into her body cavity. Hospital are doing all they can in terms of draining her stomach of fluid to give the perforation a chance to heal up and give her another few months, but things don't exactly look great for her.
Christmas 2015 was reasonably good for family stuff, especially as I picked up a nice annual bonus. I thought, you know what, it's been a naff year, I've got this pay rise coming, I'm going to treat myself - so I picked up an LG 34UC97-C, 34 inches of curved gorgeousness. Curve being utterly not worth the price point aside, loving the resolution and clarity of the screen.
35 days after buying it, I look down from what I'm doing, look up again, and see... http://i.imgur.com/f6Ymitr.jpg. They're present regardless of whether the card is plugged in or not (backlight on but no connection - still present). After talking to OCUK I get sent to LG for warranty repair. Two weeks later I'm still waiting for the monitor to be picked up.
A week ago, quite happily working away on my living room server/HTPC (playing with Cookie Clicker, of all things), and all of a sudden I start getting really bad explorer process instability. Has been a while since a reboot, so off it goes... and doesn't come back up. 3 hours of swearing and pulling cables I find that 1 3 TB storage drive out of 5 is totally hosed, and all content on it totally inaccessible. Array was built using Drivepool, which is a nice piece of drive management software - so the content on the rest of the drives was fine, but I then spent about a week replacing the missing stuff where I could.
And now I've got up this morning to work from home (as I'm basically on alert to get to the hospital ASAP), take a quick glance at my side window and notice the water level on my Raijintek AIO cooler is quite a bit lower than it was last night. Look down and... oh, really?
http://i.imgur.com/0YQh78Z.jpg
Looks like it's leaked and dried out overnight, card is still working more or less fine - it's a GTX 780 so ideally needs swapping out fairly soon, but really could have done without this too right now!
tl;dr: Host of 'minor' issues compounded by a couple of major issue hammering me hard right now. Needed to vent.
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