So winter is definitely making itself known around here. The days are getting colder, the nights colder still. There's a violent, gusting wind today making it feel even colder. Definitely a day to stay inside and relax with a cup of your hot beverage of choice.

My mental health has been better as of late. I still have to take medication to go out to my doctor's office, but it completely stops any panic from setting in and I just feel normal. My doctor also increased the dose of my other meds, one of which treats both depression and anxiety. The issue for me has been medication "compliance" as they call it. Not that I refuse my meds, far from it -- I just am so absent-minded, and so task-focused when I'm working on stuff, that I just completely forget to take them. It's a bit of a problem, and I've tried various solutions, including alarms on my phone. The issue is my phone is often either on do not disturb or the volume is off, or I think it's a phone call and just ignore it. I was thinking about building a small microcontroller-based device with a real-time clock, LEDs and some kind of buzzer that could go off to remind me.

Anyway, despite that, I've been on a roll the past week, taking my meds every day. The big thing with antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication is maintaining a certain level in the blood as consistently as possible. So missing days causes it to dip, and then it takes a few days (up to a week) of taking it every day to get the levels back to where they should be. But once I get there I definitely notice a difference.

Nothing else too major to report. I designed a little christmas ornament PCB thing with LEDs but for some reason my MPLAB Snap can't talk to the microcontroller. I might have to reflow the whole board using hot air, as I did the original soldering by hand and despite me not being able to see any solder bridges, it's defintely far from perfect. I need to actually get that finished before Christmas...

Thanks for reading if you did. Though this is mostly for myself, heh.