2009.

1st lines from the months. It's kinda funny, in that apparently the first lines of my posts almost never actually reveal what the post is about. How very odd. :)

January: It's snowing again. In that sort of "holy cow is it coming down" sort of way.

February: Today we've been doing a bit of cleaning. I should be working on taxes, but at least I'm getting something done, right? The boys are working on their room bit by bit, and I'm working on mine.

March: 1) Spend today working on freelance work and job hunt.

April: 1) Got a random compliment on my appearance yesterday on the way to class. Given that I had no makeup on, my hair back in a ponytail, and was totally thinking about something else at the time... that was pretty cool.

May: So in conversation, it came up for the first time what David and Shawn are naming their baby.

June: So the final project in my short story class was the story "Brokeback Mountain."

July: So. Went out to Ohio this week.

August: Today I went hiking with my kids for the first time.

September: Had to take off early from work to go deal with a problem I'd realized last night, in which my oldest son is supposed to have a bus to and from school, but because of a number of issues, he wasn't assigned a transportation IEP in the system.

October: So on the way home, my son tells me about how he got chased today at school.

November: So I've been planning for a while to get a tattoo -- got the sketch worked out and everything with Nigel Sade, who has done a fabulous job in working with me on the art.

December: I am supposed to be reading a novel and writing things right now, but the novel is too damn depressing and I can't get the writing done I need to get done and read it, so I'm taking a small brain break.

2009 Retrospective.

I'm sitting here right now, drinking some lime flavored sparkling water with which I took my medication, looking around my cluttered-with-travel-and-luggage living room, and trying to figure out what to say. I found one of my photo albums with pictures from... gosh. '93? '94? Me and all my online friends who came to my house for a New Years Eve party from across the US and beyond, which we dubbed Elycon. It was really the first time most of us had met in person, except for a few small regional groups who knew each other already and decided to road trip together. Crazy, but good times. :)

This year has been... well, unusual. I said somewhere back toward the beginning of the year that this seemed to be my "Romantic Comedy" year -- you know, where the divorcee has everything in her life blow up, so she does completely impractical things and moves somewhere new and meets a man and basically turns her life upside down? Yes, that. I really need to learn to restrain my occasional urge for prediction when it comes to my life, let me tell you -- well, or not, because as low as some of the lows have been, I really wouldn't take this year back for anything.

I've been unemployed for something like seven months of it, which is the longest I've ever been unemployed since I started work in the first place. I started my senior year and became an honors student at UW, which has both elevated my chances of getting into school even as it largely screwed my chances of employment. I took up with this guy who became a boyfriend, and it really changed my life in so many positive ways. I'm applying to grad school and planning to try for my English PhD, which would let me be a professor. My oldest entered middle school, my youngest is a fifth grader. My dad had a bleed in his brain and had to go to a VA care center, but he's doing really well. My ex has a new baby. I made a lot of new friends. I got better acquainted with some others. I got back in touch with still others with whom I hadn't spoken with in ages. I got to do voice work, which was awesome, and I started singing lessons. I had a number of really significant realizations that have shaped my decision making as I move forward, and started me heading in directions I'd never considered, all of which is good.

All of this would have been greatly improved by, you know, income, but we take what we can get. It's still been a pretty damn good year, if entirely too stressful. If I can managed to keep the good and improve on it while reducing the stressful, at least in the latter half of the year, I'll be well and truly pleased.