Mar 4:
It's been a wild, dusty mess here.
Let me try to give a quick rundown since you all last heard from us:
(this is gonna be a lot of boring personal life stuff, so if you're not interested, just know we're still around!):
Most pressing: remodeling continues, and continues to be the main holdup. Current end date is now suspected around mid-25, which is killing me inside, but it's not like I can back down now. Dust is pretty bad in the house overall, with constant construction every weekday and sometimes jackhammering, as a treat. We've got roughly half of the house sealed off and folks milling in at all business hours with little to no warning, so any sense of privacy is also zero.
Anything we want to keep as clean as possible gets shoved into the studio for protection, which has turned that space into a different kind of mess.
In pet news: We did end up getting a new kitten for the good of the cat household late last year. Unfortunately it was the hardest cat introductions I've ever dealt with, and it nearly didn't work out, and only for the past couple weeks or so have things been settling to a point that they can be trusted alone together.
Also, a wild amount of child fencing has been kluged together with tons of zipties to keep this tiny idiot from running into the construction zone and getting lost in the walls forever. Imagine a zombie apocalypse barrier in the big middle of your home, and you have a pretty good idea of what it looks like.
Also late last month, we dealt with a horrible situation where some of the snake food we ordered was contaminated, which resulted in the sudden death of several of our snakes all at once.
In DTE News: To top it all off, our work printer has all but kicked the bucket. I'm debating new models to buy, but the one I wanted the most keeps getting delayed! Gonna have to make some hard choices in a couple weeks if that doesn't resolve real soon.
We've got quite a few models in various stages of fresh art, or resculpting, or something entirely new! I'm so damn excited to share everything we've been working on, along with other awesome artists out there.
Also, a small reminder since I've seen mutterings about if we're gone or not, we're definitely still shipping stock out. Don't worry about us ghosting anyone, if this somehow all went up in smoke tomorrow I'd still let you all know.
In the meantime: Obviously between the state of the world and our home, it's been hard to avoid falling into a creative slump while we both literally wait for the dust to settle. I won't lie, for the most part we've been trying to find things to do outside of the house in our spare time, or otherwise keeping our heads down posting fanfic to AO3.
(and videogames, but not even the TV is sacred with construction a couple feet away)
Anyway. The Empire will definitely pick back up, we're not done yet by a longshot. This is just taking longer than expected, which I really should have predicted because this is how construction always goes.
Hope you're all doing well, out there. Stay safe, and I always appreciate y'all for checking in on us.
-Abyss