I spent most of my weekend doing chores. Almost the entire thing, actually, when I really think about it. Woke up nice and refreshed feeling on Saturday and got out of bed, ready to dive into my weekend’s list of Things To Do in preparation for my friends coming to visit (last weekend, as this gets posted), and then got slammed almost immediately by the difference between feeling rested and recovering from burnout. So, rather than push myself to do the chores I’d set aside for that day, I took my time through the morning to relax, play some video games, and let my body be awake but still for a while. All while doing chores in Final Fantasy 14. I’ve started a personal money-making project, something simple but likely still lucrative, and had a bunch of orders and gatherables to deliver for my player guild to keep me busy while I spent my idle time doing research. Once that was done, I moved back and forth between doing bits and pieces of my chores and attending to the various tasks I’d set up in Final Fantasy 14, slowly whiling away my saturday while I collected a ton of stuff, crafted a bunch of stuff, sorted out my retainers in a more beneficial manner, and attended to some of the more laborious of my weekend chores. I did mostly the same thing on Sunday, but with the addition of spending about four hours playing Stardew Valley with one of my D&D group members since I wasn’t up for running a session, so really it was just chores all the way up and down my weekend.

I don’t really mind, though. I made a lot of money in Final Fantasy 14 (I’m finally almost back to where I was before I bought my house, despite spending pretty heavily (for me) in the intervening time) and figured out how some of the retainer systems work a bit better. I mean, there’s explanations for all of it and some of my fellow players have told me things that I probably relearned over the weekend, but there’s no replacement for just getting in there, digging deep, and making it all stick by going through it one venture at a time (ventures are the things you send your retainers, NPCs you’ve hired, on to gather materials for you). I also completed a long-overdue organize of my in-game storage, cleaned the hell out of both of my bathrooms, did a bunch of laundry, created a spreadsheet for the project I’m doing so I can repeat it in the future without needing to do a bunch of math, cleaned the hell out of my kitchen, and finally cracked the method for getting as much out of a gathering node as my peers did back when I first got into this stuff. It was a pretty busy pair of days, all things considered, but it was pretty physically restful at the very least, since I rarely did anything requiring exertion long enough to break a sweat other than cleaning my shower. That I had to do in one go because I was getting all mucked up with cleaner and didn’t want to let that stuff sit too long before I could shower it off. It wasn’t a huge amount of fun, but I got a lot of podcasts listened to and managed to get through all but one of my long list of chores anyway, despite breaking them up and taking so much time to do them.

I was able to have a little fun Sunday evening, once I’d realized I wasn’t going to get more chores done, but it was kind of a frustrating experience, despite how content I felt prior to then. I’d spent an entire weekend doing chore. Sure, I made about six or seven million gil or so in Final Fantasy 14 (It might be more since I didn’t exactly track how much I spent while bringing my net gil number up six million) and that’s nothing to sneeze at, but I didn’t really advance the plot I’ve been invested in lately or work on any of my other goals. Sure, watching the number go up felt great and I got a lot of satisfaction out of that, but I think I probably might have gotten more chores done more quickly if I’d stayed focused on those the whole time, rather than flipflopping back and forth. I’d probably have made less money if I’d focused on my chores, but I’d probably also be more tired today. It’s difficult and kind of frustrating, having the drive to do things and the mental wherewithal to do them, but having my body wear out so much faster than it used to and never quite get up to the level of performance I’d expect from it. This was probably for the best, frustrating as it sometimes feels, but I feel like my in-game character and I both wasted a lot of time that could have been spent better.

That might just be the monday-evening hindsight talking as I contemplate being even more tired than I am while looking at the chores I’ve given myself to do tonight and thinking about what, if anything I’ll be doing in Final Fantasy 14. The chores there never end, but they are a lot more fun and lucrative, most of the time. I still need to get back to leveling my jobs in earnest sometime soon, since I’ve been putting that off a bunch for the last few weeks. Eventually I’ll reach the start of the next expansion and will need to start leveling my highest-leveled jobs again so I can do the expansion’s job quests. I mean, not that I’m trying to have all of my other jobs caught up by then, just that all my leveling time and energy will have to go into my high-level jobs rather than my low-level ones and I’ll wind up back in a gear-based pinch again once I start picking up new stuff. I mean, the whole reason I started leveling them the way I did was to cut down on how much gear I’ve got in my pocket. It’s too much right now and I really need to downsize. Especially because I think a lot of the higher-level gear currently available is a bit more granular in what jobs can use it than my current best-in-slot-based-on-role gear can cover. I’ll need all that pocket space soon! I mean, hopefully soon. Or maybe hopefully not too soon? I don’t know. I’m invested in the plot currently and want to keep that ball rolling, but I’ve got so much other stuff to do that isn’t plot advancement that I might try to dole out the plot advancement a bit more slowly, as a treat for doing my other chores. Well, the in-game ones, anyway. Right now, all my time is going to my real-world chores and preparing for my friends to visit which is all the reward I need to get my apartment cleaner than it has been in maybe eight months.