Monthly Roundup: The rest of December and the start of the New Year

Hey guys, here's an update on how things went down for the rest of December and how they've been so far these past couple of days.

The rest of December was rather exhausting. I kept having to do a lot of chores during that time and at one point I ended up having to wash an entire laundry basket full of nothing but my brother's for 3 days in a row... Our stepdad finally bothered to clean up outside, though my brother and I were obviously stuck doing most of the taxing work (yet again; I lost count of how many times we went up and down the stairs carrying a wagon full of garbage). There's obviously still work to be done and to no one's surprise, he's painfully slow as ever about it. I had trouble falling asleep or even sleeping well last month because of all the noise people were making around the neighborhood. People had been lighting fireworks pretty often throughout the nights of December and making noise with their cars as they obnoxiously zoomed by (either with their tires or playing terrible reggaeton music loudly past midnight).

Our internet has been ridiculously slow for quite some time now and my brother had called the net provider the first time a couple of weeks ago, iirc. At the time, they told him to call them back if we were still having issues after 3 days and he never really did (because he thought it had already been fixed/that it fixed itself). The internet speed never really got any better and we kept waiting because he thought it would be back to its usual self once they were done with whatever maintenance they were doing in other areas of PR. Since then, he would always restart the internet modem and router whenever he got dcd from it (or was just too slow). It never solved a thing and he'd always barge in to ask whether I was having internet issues as well before he did all that, despite me telling him that simply disconnecting it wasn't going to solve anything because this had been going on for far too long at this point. I also mentioned at the start that one of the possible reasons was simply because our modem was finally starting to break down and damage itself, but he quickly discarded that thought. He finally got sick of it and ended up calling them again tonight. The internet provider ran some tests on their side and found out that the reason our internet connection was bad was all because our modem was broken/damaged (my hunch was right). We'll have to wait until Monday to go get a replacement (they're not open on Sundays and even if they were, tomorrow's a holiday over here, so they would be closed anyway).

The power went out for a couple of hours on Friday, but thankfully came back during the evening. I haven't been able to upload any of the current WIPs on here because whenever either of us attempts to upload or download any kind of content, the internet gets worse than it is and quickly disconnects everything from it. I'll still try to upload what I have so far, but it might not get through (or take longer than usual if it does).

Regardless, I hope you've all had a good time during the holidays and I wish a happy new year! Here's hoping this one is better than the last.