Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2018-01-14 10:43 am
azurelunatic) wrote2018-01-14 10:43 am
Entry tags:
2017 in (the) Re(ar)view (Mirror)
2017 In Review
I didn't keep particularly good notes this year. A lot of things were going on, and I couldn't necessarily talk about them in public at the time.
Politically, the United States has been a shitshow the whole year. That's been hitting a lot of us pretty hard, me included. This is not the entry where I'll be ranting extensively about that one. One of the things I did, however, was get paid a little bit for my internet skills. Communities that are organizing because politics is a dumpster fire need people who can moderate the online side of things. So a friend hauled me off to consult.
I was declared cancer-free over a year ago. That hasn't changed, but I get a higher level of medical monitoring as my body adjusts to its new normal, and to make sure that there isn't a return.
Pinterest is an utter timesuck hole. That said, it's *great* for helping organize the sort of wheatgoogling research holes that I fall down, especially when that thing is primarily aesthetic in nature. If I have a place to put that sort of thing, it relieves the strain on the friends who would ordinarily hear All About It. I started doing more of that, upon developing Feelings about aesthetics for stuff that would have to be far-future if ever.
In January, my beloved partner got to a breaking point with putting up with their ex's denial and bullshit as a roommate. They had been broken up for three months. My partner is the homeowner. I helped them put together a precision strike force to extract themselves and their cat, for the purpose of living separately until the ex could be compelled to leave with the force of law. The operation was a success: it went with the most important things gathered, and no confrontation with the ex. The ex didn't seem to take the breakup seriously until they came back to find my partner, one cat, and my partner's stuff gone.
Also in January and into February, I went through the last of Kaiser Permanente's hoops standing between me and effective treatment for my sleep disorder. In March, I eventually got a prescription for a med that works for me. And it isn't a benzo. I continued exchanging medical advocacy/yelling-at-doctors with a friend.
Around that time was when my partner started a relationship with Leopard Girl. That uncovered some places where our communication and assumptions needed adjusting. On the whole, I was happy that my partner had someone local to snuggle with, and happy that it was Leopard Girl specifically. The relationship ran through most of the year.
I had started to think about what would be needed to move to Washington State. I'd had my eye on the Pacific Northwest, as rent in the San Francisco Bay Area rose and job opportunities were disappointing. And Washington was as good a place as any.
In April, my partner arranged for me to come visit, to see what our relationship was like in person. It was good. It was fantastic to be with them in person, after so long. When I got home, I did some hard, fast thinking. My partner's hosts who they were crashing with, learned that they were getting evicted for some renovations. My partner had to find another couch to crash on until they could get their house back.
In May, I began preparations to move. That was a huge endeavor. I stuffed the majority of my possessions into a storage cube. I realized that it could be a while before I got stuff out of the cube, so I tried to pack sensibly, and leave out the essentials for survival. I also tried to make sure that all the boxes were labeled sensibly. This got much less coherent as the process wore on.
This has been the year when I got a number of pretty gnarly Dental Things tackled. This resulted in a lot of happiness/significant reduction in ambient pain, but also bonus super-pain when some of the stuff Went Very Wrong. (It got fixed.) Unfortunately, that stole a week of possible packing time from me.
In June, I actually completed the move. I stuffed the rest of the things I was keeping into my car, and drove North. I rented a room in the same somewhat dodgy building as my sister, and discovered firsthand what Seattle traffic and parking is like. (It is not good.) I met my sister's man-child partner, and remain committed to loving my sister no matter what. My partner got their house back the Friday before Open Source Bridge. I spent that weekend helping make the house habitable again, along with the rest of the polycule and some friends. Then we went to Open Source Bridge. I spoke there, which was (as always) a delight.
I spent the rest of June and much of July working on the habitability of the house. There was also a temp job in there.
The ex left the house pretty thoroughly trashed. It wasn't like there were snack wrappers, abandoned dishes, and food spills on the floor. However, not all of the belongings had been taken away, there was a lot of rubbish cardboard, and pretty much everything was covered in a layer of clay dust that smelled strongly of old dog. I have some sympathy about the abandoned belongings. From various clues, I suspect the ex has some form of mental dysfunction that makes scheduling, sticking to schedules, and generally getting shit done, really hard. I've got some of the same. But -- an illustrative example of the sheer pettiness involved in some of the decisions. The ex declared they were taking the basement refrigerator. Okay. But the ex did not have to take the contents of the refrigerator and leave them sitting out unrefrigerated on the top of the bar. The ex also wasn't very good at pantry management.katarik and I must have filled an entire garbage bag with expired food. That's without counting the very gross science projects... And the burned-out lightbulbs left mixed in with the working ones. And the ...
The dishwasher was broken. The vacuum cleaner smelled of old dog. My partner's futon had been unnecessarily disassembled, with a crucial screw (on a piece that doesn't get unscrewed when the thing gets disassembled) loosened such that the futon cracked and broke apart within a few days of re-assembly. The bed frame was broken. Some of the random items remaining were woo-related, and were not innocuous.
My partner has a cat. She's a blue ghost tabby American Shorthair (with a nice fluffy thick coat), about 9 pounds. Despite being about 8, she still acts young enough that we call her "Kitten" more often than her actual name. She's not the loudest cat I've known, but she's very, very yelly. She drools when she purrs, and will rub her face damply against your fingers for a face-scritch. She likes to sleep on top of my partner, but will curl up on or against me sometimes. She's food-insecure, and cannot be left to free-feed. It took some experimentation before we found an automatic feeder that could withstand her. She earned the name "Hacker-Kitty". One of her unsavory habits is not remaining seated for the entire performance in the litter box. She likes to spray the walls a bit, possibly to mark territory. That's okay when you aim at a wall. It's less okay when you aim at the entrance. The main litterbox is now a top-loader.
My partner also has a whole set of siblings. There are three others besides my partner, plus one is married and another is in a serious relationship. A distinct chunk of the sibling crew sometimes gathers via video chat to play silly games with my partner. I've joined the game crew as well. This is something that the ex never condescended to do.
In August, I formally moved in with my partner, as the parking situation in Seattle had gone beyond what I could actually deal with, and my partner was okay with the idea. (In the weeks between when my partner got the house back and when I actually moved in, I'd spent perhaps three of those nights at my own place.) The plan remains that once my job situation stabilizes, I'll get a bachelor pad for a year.
Once the house was habitable, we started having more time for social life. There's now a small local community we're hooked into, which is great fun. I haven't been posting much about that, either. There's a regular karaoke night, but we can't always make it due to various schedule issues.
We've been cooking together some. My partner is entirely competent to follow instructions on a can or something frozen, or follow a detailed recipe quite strictly. They haven't really had the opportunity to get the level of experience in the kitchen that lets you take random ingredients on hand and improvise something and have it come out to your taste. I've got a little more experience. So my partner takes notes when I throw things together, and is gaining confidence in techniques and basic principles. (I say "take notes". Generally, what happens when I throw something together is that they watch with slight bemusement; when it's particularly good I repeat it and *then* they observe closely.) Sometimes I walk them through one of my tried-and-true simple recipes, like the wedge fries or the garlic-encrusted chicken. (Skin-on chicken; we use thighs. Preheat oven to 350F. Place in whatever pan or tray you use to bake meats; ours is a well-seasoned half-sheet tray with a silicone mat. Sprinkle bottom side with granulated garlic powder, about 1mm thick. Bake. After about half an hour, turn meat over. Sprinkle top (skin) side. Bake some more, at least until the meat thermometer says it's safe, and until the skin is crispy and easy to separate from the meat.)
September started the less eventful portion of the year.
My babyfish completed a much better internship this summer, with excellent work to be done, and excellent people around her. She then entered her senior year at Vassar. I am so fucking proud. (My opinion of her boyfriend-person remains dubious.)
By three months in or so to the spending a lot of time under the same roof, my partner and I had mostly stopped having tense and fraught differences on things like scheduling and chores, and were able to argue about things like cooking without tension. It's great.
I started baking and cooking more, now that there was reliable access to a real kitchen with more than a square foot of counter space.
October was the month where a whole crapton of powerful men behaving badly broke wide open where it couldn't be ignored. This was both vindicating and terrible.
I was (voluntarily) called upon to make a statement about the character of that terrible ex. Which I did, at some length. It was painful to revisit and put it all on the line in one place. Despite the way it warped those years of my life with its insidious gravitational pull, mostly I'd survived by only experiencing part of it at any given time.
We got a gel pad, which wound up on the master bedroom mattress. This has made quite the difference to my poor angry hips.
There was a little to-do about Halloween and its costumes, but in the end I was a loon, my partner was a Slenderman (Slenderperson?), Leopard Girl was a Pokémon Go glitch, and Stray Puppy Girl wore a Pikachu hat ... inside her GIANT INFLATABLE DINOSAUR COSTUME. We were spooks on a haunted hayride for Halloween weekend. It was great.
On actual Halloween, my partner and I handed out candy. We got around 75 kids. I had to make a re-supply run in the middle.
The job search has been tedious. I have been getting myself out there, applying for things, getting recruiter calls, getting submitted to things, and there was even an interview or two. The rate of recruiter contacts ramped up around the end of October/beginning of November.
Partner got into Gems of War on Steam. I asked if I could play a treasure map or two. Then I started doing battles in Explore with the treasure hunters team (Hero, Marid, Tyri, Johnny Bronze) to build the stock of treasure maps back up. Oops.
The year's been busy enough that it seems longer than a year had gone by between this November and the end of my radiation treatments, but that's what the timeline looks like.
After spending a busy day with an old friend from my childhood who was in town for some knee surgery, my little car broke down for the final time. This has made transportation arrangements ... interesting. I got the car sold for parts and out of my hair, which was terrible but less terrible than it could have been. It costs less to get an affidavit of lost title for the purposes of selling the car, than it does to get an instant replacement title. I threw myself upon the mercy of the clerk, who knew such things.
Miss Kitten is a yellcat, and I have mentioned the food insecurity. At some point, I hit upon the idea of doing classical conditioning with her. I set an alarm with a dedicated alarm tone for her feeding. I steadfastly ignored her demands until the alarm went off, at which point I immediately commenced the feeding, no matter what I was doing. This did reduce the amount of yelliness before the alarm, and made her into Instant Yellcat the moment the alarm went off. Reducing the yelliness is an excellent thing. My partner got another model of feeder for her to try, so we'd be able to leave for the Michigan trip in December. After we established that the feeder worked, I hit upon putting her wet food into the timed feeder if I was leaving before it was feline food time, so she would not get the reward of having a human feed her early even once if she was yellcatting around.
My partner's basement likes to flood, when more water seeps in than the sump pump takes. This has been interesting. They know what to do about it, and now so do I. Usually, I can deal with it. Sometimes ... less so.
My babyfish learned to drive (properly). She accepted a job offer from the place she did the internship.
Manual labor is hard in general, and harder if you have any physical disabilities.
This was a year of three US Thanksgivings: one with Leopard Girl and family on Thursday, one with my partner's May-June hosts on Friday, and one at home on Saturday. All of that took a lot of coordination. A very good time was had by all, I believe. I got to meet the May-June hosts, and some other friends, properly. I had a good amount of introvert time in the corner with crocheting. I do like having crocheting projects with me, as it's something to keep my hands busy, and a good and easy topic of conversation with strangers.
I met a few Internet People in person for the first time this year. That was good. I didn't meet as many as I might have wanted to, with a full amount of energy and sleep, but energy and sleep are always an issue.
There were a few gift exchanges. One at partner's work, to which they brought a pair of Cards Against Humanity expansion packs. One at the club, to which we brought a novelty book with cute pictures of animals captioned with frankly not all that interesting profanity, plus a comedy sized bar of Trader Joe's chocolate. One with the karaoke/dinner crew, to which we brought another chocolate bar and more CAH gear, plus the Christmas crackers that I realized we could not take on the plane. (It's a family tradition of theirs, and I approve.) A good time was had by all. (There's one guy who has a grudge against penguins. We have the sort of connection with him where teasing is acceptable. I wrapped both our gifts for that exchange with the penguin paper. By the time it was his turn, there was the thing he'd brought, and the two penguin boxes. Hee. ((His actual girlfriend does the equivalent of putting penguin temporary tattoos on obscure parts of his body. He finds this inexplicable but hilarious.)) )
My partner hadn't seen their family for any great amount of time for about a decade, thanks to the insecurity, neediness, and demands of their partner and the inflexible pet chores routine. This December, they scheduled a visit to see the family for Christmas. They asked if I would like to come along. I said yes. I got to meet both parents, all siblings and siblings' partners/spouses, the surviving set of grandparents, and so many auncles and cousins. Most of the family lives in rural Michigan farm country. There was a Scotch Exchange party, which is like a White Elephant except gifts don't get locked after two steals. They get locked if they've been stolen once in that particular round, but they unlock for the next round. It had something in the neighborhood of 20 participants, so it went on for a while and got very silly. That was with the maternal side of the family, on the 23rd. Then there was the paternal side gathering, which was Midnight Mass and then lunch-and-gifts on the day (going late into the evening, with Lego assembly). We saw the new Star Wars movie, and I only cried a few times. I got to see pictures of my partner at grade school age, and confirmed that we probably would have been dedicated enemies if we'd met then. (They had a very particular type of impish grin.)
The plane trip out was interesting. We were going through Portland. Unfortunately, due to conditions on the ground at Portland, our flight there was canceled. The airline rebooked us through another carrier with a direct flight to Detroit. (So, a long line followed by a scurry through the airport to get to the other airline's help desk, and a wait at the other gate. I try to pack our bags for speed and ease through screening, then re-pack in case they need people to volunteer for gate checking. Sure enough, they asked for volunteers to gate check. We offered up our bags. I'd made the last of the bread into sandwiches, one for me for dinner and one for either my partner or later. "Later" turned into sharing with my partner, since it was getting quite late. The flight back was less fraught, but it was running late and we still missed the original connection. The airline rebooked us on another flight, but we still had to scurry to make it.
We had a quiet New Year at home. I was still jet-lagged enough to need a nap before midnight. Partner found various countdown live feeds online. We toasted the new year sparkling pomegranate-apple cider at midnight, and kissed.
I didn't keep particularly good notes this year. A lot of things were going on, and I couldn't necessarily talk about them in public at the time.
Politically, the United States has been a shitshow the whole year. That's been hitting a lot of us pretty hard, me included. This is not the entry where I'll be ranting extensively about that one. One of the things I did, however, was get paid a little bit for my internet skills. Communities that are organizing because politics is a dumpster fire need people who can moderate the online side of things. So a friend hauled me off to consult.
I was declared cancer-free over a year ago. That hasn't changed, but I get a higher level of medical monitoring as my body adjusts to its new normal, and to make sure that there isn't a return.
Pinterest is an utter timesuck hole. That said, it's *great* for helping organize the sort of wheatgoogling research holes that I fall down, especially when that thing is primarily aesthetic in nature. If I have a place to put that sort of thing, it relieves the strain on the friends who would ordinarily hear All About It. I started doing more of that, upon developing Feelings about aesthetics for stuff that would have to be far-future if ever.
In January, my beloved partner got to a breaking point with putting up with their ex's denial and bullshit as a roommate. They had been broken up for three months. My partner is the homeowner. I helped them put together a precision strike force to extract themselves and their cat, for the purpose of living separately until the ex could be compelled to leave with the force of law. The operation was a success: it went with the most important things gathered, and no confrontation with the ex. The ex didn't seem to take the breakup seriously until they came back to find my partner, one cat, and my partner's stuff gone.
Also in January and into February, I went through the last of Kaiser Permanente's hoops standing between me and effective treatment for my sleep disorder. In March, I eventually got a prescription for a med that works for me. And it isn't a benzo. I continued exchanging medical advocacy/yelling-at-doctors with a friend.
Around that time was when my partner started a relationship with Leopard Girl. That uncovered some places where our communication and assumptions needed adjusting. On the whole, I was happy that my partner had someone local to snuggle with, and happy that it was Leopard Girl specifically. The relationship ran through most of the year.
I had started to think about what would be needed to move to Washington State. I'd had my eye on the Pacific Northwest, as rent in the San Francisco Bay Area rose and job opportunities were disappointing. And Washington was as good a place as any.
In April, my partner arranged for me to come visit, to see what our relationship was like in person. It was good. It was fantastic to be with them in person, after so long. When I got home, I did some hard, fast thinking. My partner's hosts who they were crashing with, learned that they were getting evicted for some renovations. My partner had to find another couch to crash on until they could get their house back.
In May, I began preparations to move. That was a huge endeavor. I stuffed the majority of my possessions into a storage cube. I realized that it could be a while before I got stuff out of the cube, so I tried to pack sensibly, and leave out the essentials for survival. I also tried to make sure that all the boxes were labeled sensibly. This got much less coherent as the process wore on.
This has been the year when I got a number of pretty gnarly Dental Things tackled. This resulted in a lot of happiness/significant reduction in ambient pain, but also bonus super-pain when some of the stuff Went Very Wrong. (It got fixed.) Unfortunately, that stole a week of possible packing time from me.
In June, I actually completed the move. I stuffed the rest of the things I was keeping into my car, and drove North. I rented a room in the same somewhat dodgy building as my sister, and discovered firsthand what Seattle traffic and parking is like. (It is not good.) I met my sister's man-child partner, and remain committed to loving my sister no matter what. My partner got their house back the Friday before Open Source Bridge. I spent that weekend helping make the house habitable again, along with the rest of the polycule and some friends. Then we went to Open Source Bridge. I spoke there, which was (as always) a delight.
I spent the rest of June and much of July working on the habitability of the house. There was also a temp job in there.
The ex left the house pretty thoroughly trashed. It wasn't like there were snack wrappers, abandoned dishes, and food spills on the floor. However, not all of the belongings had been taken away, there was a lot of rubbish cardboard, and pretty much everything was covered in a layer of clay dust that smelled strongly of old dog. I have some sympathy about the abandoned belongings. From various clues, I suspect the ex has some form of mental dysfunction that makes scheduling, sticking to schedules, and generally getting shit done, really hard. I've got some of the same. But -- an illustrative example of the sheer pettiness involved in some of the decisions. The ex declared they were taking the basement refrigerator. Okay. But the ex did not have to take the contents of the refrigerator and leave them sitting out unrefrigerated on the top of the bar. The ex also wasn't very good at pantry management.
katarik and I must have filled an entire garbage bag with expired food. That's without counting the very gross science projects... And the burned-out lightbulbs left mixed in with the working ones. And the ... The dishwasher was broken. The vacuum cleaner smelled of old dog. My partner's futon had been unnecessarily disassembled, with a crucial screw (on a piece that doesn't get unscrewed when the thing gets disassembled) loosened such that the futon cracked and broke apart within a few days of re-assembly. The bed frame was broken. Some of the random items remaining were woo-related, and were not innocuous.
My partner has a cat. She's a blue ghost tabby American Shorthair (with a nice fluffy thick coat), about 9 pounds. Despite being about 8, she still acts young enough that we call her "Kitten" more often than her actual name. She's not the loudest cat I've known, but she's very, very yelly. She drools when she purrs, and will rub her face damply against your fingers for a face-scritch. She likes to sleep on top of my partner, but will curl up on or against me sometimes. She's food-insecure, and cannot be left to free-feed. It took some experimentation before we found an automatic feeder that could withstand her. She earned the name "Hacker-Kitty". One of her unsavory habits is not remaining seated for the entire performance in the litter box. She likes to spray the walls a bit, possibly to mark territory. That's okay when you aim at a wall. It's less okay when you aim at the entrance. The main litterbox is now a top-loader.
My partner also has a whole set of siblings. There are three others besides my partner, plus one is married and another is in a serious relationship. A distinct chunk of the sibling crew sometimes gathers via video chat to play silly games with my partner. I've joined the game crew as well. This is something that the ex never condescended to do.
In August, I formally moved in with my partner, as the parking situation in Seattle had gone beyond what I could actually deal with, and my partner was okay with the idea. (In the weeks between when my partner got the house back and when I actually moved in, I'd spent perhaps three of those nights at my own place.) The plan remains that once my job situation stabilizes, I'll get a bachelor pad for a year.
Once the house was habitable, we started having more time for social life. There's now a small local community we're hooked into, which is great fun. I haven't been posting much about that, either. There's a regular karaoke night, but we can't always make it due to various schedule issues.
We've been cooking together some. My partner is entirely competent to follow instructions on a can or something frozen, or follow a detailed recipe quite strictly. They haven't really had the opportunity to get the level of experience in the kitchen that lets you take random ingredients on hand and improvise something and have it come out to your taste. I've got a little more experience. So my partner takes notes when I throw things together, and is gaining confidence in techniques and basic principles. (I say "take notes". Generally, what happens when I throw something together is that they watch with slight bemusement; when it's particularly good I repeat it and *then* they observe closely.) Sometimes I walk them through one of my tried-and-true simple recipes, like the wedge fries or the garlic-encrusted chicken. (Skin-on chicken; we use thighs. Preheat oven to 350F. Place in whatever pan or tray you use to bake meats; ours is a well-seasoned half-sheet tray with a silicone mat. Sprinkle bottom side with granulated garlic powder, about 1mm thick. Bake. After about half an hour, turn meat over. Sprinkle top (skin) side. Bake some more, at least until the meat thermometer says it's safe, and until the skin is crispy and easy to separate from the meat.)
September started the less eventful portion of the year.
My babyfish completed a much better internship this summer, with excellent work to be done, and excellent people around her. She then entered her senior year at Vassar. I am so fucking proud. (My opinion of her boyfriend-person remains dubious.)
By three months in or so to the spending a lot of time under the same roof, my partner and I had mostly stopped having tense and fraught differences on things like scheduling and chores, and were able to argue about things like cooking without tension. It's great.
I started baking and cooking more, now that there was reliable access to a real kitchen with more than a square foot of counter space.
October was the month where a whole crapton of powerful men behaving badly broke wide open where it couldn't be ignored. This was both vindicating and terrible.
I was (voluntarily) called upon to make a statement about the character of that terrible ex. Which I did, at some length. It was painful to revisit and put it all on the line in one place. Despite the way it warped those years of my life with its insidious gravitational pull, mostly I'd survived by only experiencing part of it at any given time.
We got a gel pad, which wound up on the master bedroom mattress. This has made quite the difference to my poor angry hips.
There was a little to-do about Halloween and its costumes, but in the end I was a loon, my partner was a Slenderman (Slenderperson?), Leopard Girl was a Pokémon Go glitch, and Stray Puppy Girl wore a Pikachu hat ... inside her GIANT INFLATABLE DINOSAUR COSTUME. We were spooks on a haunted hayride for Halloween weekend. It was great.
On actual Halloween, my partner and I handed out candy. We got around 75 kids. I had to make a re-supply run in the middle.
The job search has been tedious. I have been getting myself out there, applying for things, getting recruiter calls, getting submitted to things, and there was even an interview or two. The rate of recruiter contacts ramped up around the end of October/beginning of November.
Partner got into Gems of War on Steam. I asked if I could play a treasure map or two. Then I started doing battles in Explore with the treasure hunters team (Hero, Marid, Tyri, Johnny Bronze) to build the stock of treasure maps back up. Oops.
The year's been busy enough that it seems longer than a year had gone by between this November and the end of my radiation treatments, but that's what the timeline looks like.
After spending a busy day with an old friend from my childhood who was in town for some knee surgery, my little car broke down for the final time. This has made transportation arrangements ... interesting. I got the car sold for parts and out of my hair, which was terrible but less terrible than it could have been. It costs less to get an affidavit of lost title for the purposes of selling the car, than it does to get an instant replacement title. I threw myself upon the mercy of the clerk, who knew such things.
Miss Kitten is a yellcat, and I have mentioned the food insecurity. At some point, I hit upon the idea of doing classical conditioning with her. I set an alarm with a dedicated alarm tone for her feeding. I steadfastly ignored her demands until the alarm went off, at which point I immediately commenced the feeding, no matter what I was doing. This did reduce the amount of yelliness before the alarm, and made her into Instant Yellcat the moment the alarm went off. Reducing the yelliness is an excellent thing. My partner got another model of feeder for her to try, so we'd be able to leave for the Michigan trip in December. After we established that the feeder worked, I hit upon putting her wet food into the timed feeder if I was leaving before it was feline food time, so she would not get the reward of having a human feed her early even once if she was yellcatting around.
My partner's basement likes to flood, when more water seeps in than the sump pump takes. This has been interesting. They know what to do about it, and now so do I. Usually, I can deal with it. Sometimes ... less so.
My babyfish learned to drive (properly). She accepted a job offer from the place she did the internship.
Manual labor is hard in general, and harder if you have any physical disabilities.
This was a year of three US Thanksgivings: one with Leopard Girl and family on Thursday, one with my partner's May-June hosts on Friday, and one at home on Saturday. All of that took a lot of coordination. A very good time was had by all, I believe. I got to meet the May-June hosts, and some other friends, properly. I had a good amount of introvert time in the corner with crocheting. I do like having crocheting projects with me, as it's something to keep my hands busy, and a good and easy topic of conversation with strangers.
I met a few Internet People in person for the first time this year. That was good. I didn't meet as many as I might have wanted to, with a full amount of energy and sleep, but energy and sleep are always an issue.
There were a few gift exchanges. One at partner's work, to which they brought a pair of Cards Against Humanity expansion packs. One at the club, to which we brought a novelty book with cute pictures of animals captioned with frankly not all that interesting profanity, plus a comedy sized bar of Trader Joe's chocolate. One with the karaoke/dinner crew, to which we brought another chocolate bar and more CAH gear, plus the Christmas crackers that I realized we could not take on the plane. (It's a family tradition of theirs, and I approve.) A good time was had by all. (There's one guy who has a grudge against penguins. We have the sort of connection with him where teasing is acceptable. I wrapped both our gifts for that exchange with the penguin paper. By the time it was his turn, there was the thing he'd brought, and the two penguin boxes. Hee. ((His actual girlfriend does the equivalent of putting penguin temporary tattoos on obscure parts of his body. He finds this inexplicable but hilarious.)) )
My partner hadn't seen their family for any great amount of time for about a decade, thanks to the insecurity, neediness, and demands of their partner and the inflexible pet chores routine. This December, they scheduled a visit to see the family for Christmas. They asked if I would like to come along. I said yes. I got to meet both parents, all siblings and siblings' partners/spouses, the surviving set of grandparents, and so many auncles and cousins. Most of the family lives in rural Michigan farm country. There was a Scotch Exchange party, which is like a White Elephant except gifts don't get locked after two steals. They get locked if they've been stolen once in that particular round, but they unlock for the next round. It had something in the neighborhood of 20 participants, so it went on for a while and got very silly. That was with the maternal side of the family, on the 23rd. Then there was the paternal side gathering, which was Midnight Mass and then lunch-and-gifts on the day (going late into the evening, with Lego assembly). We saw the new Star Wars movie, and I only cried a few times. I got to see pictures of my partner at grade school age, and confirmed that we probably would have been dedicated enemies if we'd met then. (They had a very particular type of impish grin.)
The plane trip out was interesting. We were going through Portland. Unfortunately, due to conditions on the ground at Portland, our flight there was canceled. The airline rebooked us through another carrier with a direct flight to Detroit. (So, a long line followed by a scurry through the airport to get to the other airline's help desk, and a wait at the other gate. I try to pack our bags for speed and ease through screening, then re-pack in case they need people to volunteer for gate checking. Sure enough, they asked for volunteers to gate check. We offered up our bags. I'd made the last of the bread into sandwiches, one for me for dinner and one for either my partner or later. "Later" turned into sharing with my partner, since it was getting quite late. The flight back was less fraught, but it was running late and we still missed the original connection. The airline rebooked us on another flight, but we still had to scurry to make it.
We had a quiet New Year at home. I was still jet-lagged enough to need a nap before midnight. Partner found various countdown live feeds online. We toasted the new year sparkling pomegranate-apple cider at midnight, and kissed.
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I'd love to know what you use for auto feeders - Storm is also food-insecure, and while not much of a hacker, the one auto feeder we tried stopped working properly after a couple months, and in two weeks it's just going to be me and her, and I want to make sure I can still feed her regularly.
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Partner wants to be able to daisy chain them so a second pair will only start their countdown when the first fires off, but that's not the way the timers work. Alas.
Thanks for this --
I'm thrilled to hear all the good things.
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If you feel like checking out Electronic Rights Rainier as a part of the community, I hear good things.