Oh hey there, 2012
One minute, I’m doing a little NaNoWriMo victory dance, and the next it’s the middle of January and I haven’t posted a single post. Man, how time flies!
Anyway, hope everyone’s holidays were awesome (though, I guess to be fair, even if they sucked enough time has passed now for you to be over them…so really, we’re good either way and my slackerdom has payed off). Ultimately, mine were as well, though they were preceded by a pretty weird winter, which I guess could explain the lack of posts if I were a smoother liar. As it stands, I am a terrible liar who, in the process of making up a good cover story, will probably just get flustered and tell you the true but embarrassing fact that I have gotten into the habit of plopping down in front of old Law and Order episodes with my knitting and a beer when I run in to some free time. In fact, I will probably go do exactly that as soon as I crank out the writing that I’ve been kicking myself for not being more consistent with over the last few months. So there we are. But I digress.
So! Since we last checked in, many things have happened which, in retrospect, I SHOULD have written about, but at the time I got a little preoccupied with just getting through them:
-Recovering from my immigrations-based ulcer, and getting used to having a full time Dan in the house. I guess there was a bit of an adjustment period (probably mostly when we were both trying to figure out job situations whilst crammed into a tiny studio apartment), but honestly it’s just been awesome being in the same place. I guess the novelty of not having to fly cross-continent just to have breakfast with my husband will wear off eventually, but for now, hello honeymoon period!
-Trying not to get a new ulcer while navigating MommaPasq’s epic health saga. First that one cancer spot was gone. But now it’s back. No, wait wait. THAT one’s gone, but there’s another seven in a spot where we didn’t even think you could grow cancer. Okay, now take this pill. No no, the other pill. And I’m sorry, but yes, this shot will have to go there. Survival rate? Well, if you had this uber specific disease track record it would be 14% percent, but turns out you have a strain normally only found in East Andean Yak wrestlers…yeah. Short version, Mom’s still in treatment. We still don’t know what comes next. It’s still scary. But she’s still very much Mom, very much going about her daily business while everyone else tries to figure that craziness out. Which is not a terrible state of affairs, if you ask me.
-Transferring my Seattle life to my Los Angeles life. I finally got back up to Seattle for a visit, under the sad pretense of having to move the contents of my storage unit down to LA. We’ve got a big place. We needed the furniture. I missed my books. It all made sense. But still, aside from the taxes I pay, that unit was my big tangible link to the place I called home for a lot of years, and that I never really expected to move away from permanently. I don’t know which was sadder; handing over the unit keys or the realization that I was sending my stuff home, not taking it away from home. Don’t get me wrong. I miss Seattle a lot and it kills me that I’m so far away from all my amazing friends up there, but when I visited it definitely felt like I was visiting. It took driving back into LA before I regained full comfy vibes. If you had told me three years ago that this is the city that would suck me in, I never would have believed you.
-Saying goodbye way before I thought I’d have to. Right around the time MommaPasq’s cancer flared up big time, my foster grandma Pat passed away from heart failure. I’m sure everybody says this, but she wasn’t that old and I really thought I would have more time with her. Pat and her husband George feel as much like grandparents to me as my actual grandparents–we were all military folk, so they’d take me out and spoil me whenever it wasn’t easy for my parent’s parents to come visit. Even though I lucked out and was able to be at the funeral, it still doesn’t really feel like she’s gone. Funny how the good ones find ways of sticking around.
-Switching gears at work. HR and I are still working out exact details, but it looks like I’ll be sticking around my BMT unit permanently once my travel contract runs out. Not gonna lie; while I’ll certainly miss the scheduling and location freedoms of being a contract worker, the idea of really invested in one place (a place, I might add, where I’ll have decent insurance and paid sick leave for a change) is pretty exciting. It’s time.
Hol-y Mol-y. Think somebody had a couple of pent up words? I’ve really got to make this a more frequent thing again. It’s really just cruel to subject people to this degree of ramblings. My sincerest apologies.
Until next time.
