March 10th, 2011 by Chris Eng

It’s been nearly a year and a half since I last updated this blog. A year and a half since I last checked in and talked about what was going on in my life. A fair amount has happened, too. Here’s a brief checklist:

- I actually wrote the book I talked about here. No, I did. I wrote a damn novel. I’m in the final stages of editing it and have enlisted a friend who will be providing literally dozens of illustrations for it in anticipation of it getting serialized online this year. I even have a website for that where I’ve published a bunch of loosely-connected short stories in the same community: www.hoodieripper.com. It’s exciting; check it out.
- I kept working at Sophia Books through to the beginning of Summer 2010, at which point the ailing book industry and the SKY-HIGH Vancouver rent rates killed Terminal City’s only language/culture bookstore once and for all. After that I did (and in a sense I suppose am still doing) a bunch of freelance editing for a company in the States. The pay is certainly all right, but the work is sporadic. There are essentially two busy periods a year and when you’re not in the middle of them, you don’t work. They sent out an email this January that said that they’d be sending out some work again in June. So, y’know, sporadic.
- Carla and I moved from East Van (East East Van) to smack-dab in the heart of Vancouver’s West End. We actually scored big. We ended up a block and a half from the beach in English Bay and are now living in a 1950s three-story walk-up with hardwood floors. It’s smaller than our last place, but if you scroll back through those entries, it was a constant battle between us and our crap that was filling up the available space. Less room now equals less room to store crap that we don’t need. It’s been good for the paring down and purging of possessions. I have also (as of this month) become the building manager of my apartment. It’s pretty cool. The pay is decent and it’s a smaller complex (only 21 units, including ours), so I’m not constantly in damage control mode.
- I fell into one of the worst depressions I’ve ever been in. Or maybe a better way to phrase it is that I fell out of anxiety and into a deep depression. This one might take a bit of explaining. In fact, I know it will, because it ties in with the reason this blog got abandoned for as long as it did and has one or two things to say about the environmental movement in recent years. I’ll save that for the next post. Don’t worry—I’m not going to make you wait until 2012 for the next entry. I believe in suspense, but not that much.

So, what does this all mean? I’m back. I can’t promise that I will be updating this blog non-stop, but I think I’ve reached a point where I’m mentally prepared to update GeekUnplugged regularly, if not constantly. So, if you’re still following this on your RSS reader, thanks for not deleting the feed and I’ll talk to you all very soon.