A New Year

 I realized this has been the least I've posted on the socials in a very long while. Many thoughts about why this is, including the eternal refrain "it will never be Livejournal", but the preponderance of ads and "growth content" (aka getting you even further addicted), and getting sucked into video after video is part of the problem. FB itself will ignore you when you say "hide this type of content" for the intrusive Reels box, so, today, I used uBlock Origin Lite to create a filter. Reels no longer load, THANK DOG.

Maybe this will help? I don't know.

It has been a very strange year, starting in January with trying to finish the back room, February starting a new job, the horrorshow that is politics right now, and the tripled, interweaving stresses, deadlines, and projects of each. The job feels like it's going well...ish? It's hard to tell with startups, but this feels like incremental progress, while riding another rocketship. Politics has, for better or worse, barely affected me personally. Mostly I see people moving _back_ to California, secretly pleased to be returning not just to office, but to a semblance of human rights.

And while it doesn't feel like it many days, the house stuff is... going. We're like four inspections away from being able to close the curséd foundation permit of 2022, take a breath, and finish the nice downstairs bathroom. Then figure out how to best group and phase the remaining work, and decide how and if we want to the next few projects. (The kitchen needs work, the upstairs bathroom too.) But then I count off the many things we've done since the start of this madness - new roof, the solar, all the knob and tube replaced, a second bathroom, sooo much new plumbing, the seismic upgrade, the new basement space, the more secure garage, and so on and so on. The garden has been cooking along too - although it was barely hot enough all year to set any tomatoes, my passiflora edulis flowered through the entire season and so while everyone else is getting bumper crops of Meyer lemons, we are drowning in purple passionfruit. Oh darn. Oh darn.

It feels like I barely did any travel at all, but I traveled to Santa Cruz and San Diego for work, did my normal Write the Docs Portland trip, visited Booneville (wine! CHEESE!), and then after a really-too-long slog of a summer and skipping Burning Man, visiting the Caribbean on a cruise. (Basically the polar opposite of Burning Man, where someone else cooks, cleans, and drives for you, and you just have to wander around enjoying the stuff and not making yourself sick on too much of anything.)

There's been a lot of grief and loss: Nighty, Tonda, but also my own grandmother, suddenly and unexpectedly Frederick Lighting Leist of Odd Salon, Bryan Chiwito of Rumbustion, Will Wood from Faire (and a number of the Faire folks I remember from the old Tribe.net days), the list goes on.

And then Odd Salon itself; after the grief at Annetta's passing last year, we strode into the new season with hope and determination, planning that this would not be an end to the event that'd become so much a community. We were all ah, misled, shall we say. A furious Signal chat developed into several community meetings which developed into a New Thing. And as the New Thing takes shape and picks up steam, it appears we might... might?? be okay. We might have managed to jump the gap and bridge the transition. Or at least we're selling a good number of tickets, which is a relief. (We, the producers, have committed to taking the financial hit if we're unable to make our ticket minimums. So getting like, a third of the way to that minimum in a few days feels, well, I'm not going to count my chickens etc etc but I think we're all breathing a bit of a sigh of relief.)

This draft has now been sitting for four days, so, off it goes.