icebluenothing

This was .... a hell of a year, really.

I left a job that was slowly killing me even though I had no fallback plan for it. I was more broke than I've ever been, getting by on ramen and peanut butter sandwiches. I put together a spiffy redesign of webmutant and starting shopping my resume around, and now I'm paid quite well at a job I really enjoy.

They turned on the proton beam in the Large Hadron Collider, and the world didn't end. An exploding star halfway across the visible universe became the farthest known object ever visible to the naked eye. The SpaceX Falcon 1 was the first privately-developed spaceship to make orbit, and India launched Chandrayaan-1 to the moon. A woman in Spain became the first person to have a successful trachea transplant with a lab-grown replacement. We found snow, real snow, falling on Mars.

We lost George Carlin. And Gary Gygax and Edmund Hillary and Heath Ledger, Arthur C. Clarke and Forrest J. Ackerman and Stan Winston. And Boeing Surplus.

I had my first migraine. That's a club I was perfectly happy not being a member of,

The Merchants of Deva had to cancel our annual party at Norwescon, thanks to untenable new rules and regulations at the hotel. I joined the committee for Steamcon, and made it to an Orycon for the first time in years; it was pretty laid-back and uneventful, but it was nice to have a room at a con for just me and Ahna for a change.

I started using the jQuery Javascript library, and it finally made coding Javascript fun and easy.

I finally got to go to Florida for Halloween Horror Nights, and I got to take windbourne with me, and we went to DisneyWorld and Epcot while we were at it. I fell asleep on the plane and woke up to find my fear of flying was suddenly, inexplicably gone.

We saw Avenue Q and Phantom. And I saw English Beat, Death Cab for Cutie, The Killers, Goldfrapp, Cold War Kids, We Wrote the Book on Connectors, Vixy and Tony and Tricky Pixie (about a million times), and probably some other bands I'm forgetting. David Tennant announced he was leaving Doctor Who. Steven Moffat was tapped to be the new head writer, which I couldn't be happier about.

.... I got published. I have a story in a book, from a real publisher, a real book I can take down off the shelf and hold in my hands. And best of all, it's a Doctor Who book -- I'm finally, really genuinely a part of my favorite thing in the world. A small part, a footnote of a footnote, but still.

I bought myself a completely adorable little laptop. Used it to finish revisions on my fan-film script, write a new story for Halloween, enjoy having wireless Internet access practically everywhere I went, and now I've fried it stone dead. A short in either the power supply or the motherboard, most likely.

I put together lots of props for the Mercury's Doctor Who night, and everyone's amazed and delighted expressions made all the work totally worth it. That same weekend, my condo burst a pipe and had a terrible flood, and I've been living with a bare concrete floor in my dining room ever since.

The price of petroleum hit $100 per barrel for the first time, this year. Gas reached $4.00 a gallon. Our economy tanked, taking everyone else with it, but at least that brought oil crashing back down to $40 a barrel. Seattle was crippled by the most massive snowstorm in years.

I wasted hours and days of my life on someone I thought was one of my best friends, who turned out not to really be a friend at all. It's the first time I've ever had to explicitly tell someone I was done with them, and the first relationship of any kind I've looked back on with the sense that it was all just -- pointless. I let a lot of my other friendships fade during this time, and I wish to God I could just have that time back again.

I donated money to a political campaign for the first time in my life. I watched in horror as John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, the most calculated and cynical and anti-intellectual such choice I've ever seen, and even deeper horror as so many voters seemed to take her seriously. And then Barack Obama was elected, the country finally waking up from one long post-9/11 nightmare of hate and fear and choosing love and hope instead. Barack Obama didn't get the country to just believe in him -- he gave us a chance to believe in ourselves again.

I literally danced in the streets that night, with thousands of people, thousands, who could finally believe in their country again, who were laughing and crying and cheering and everyone was a friend, that night. It felt like we'd won a revolution without ever having to fire a single shot. It was, honestly, the most joyful and meaningful and profound night of my life and I will never forget it, not ever.

We reached the deep minimum of a long solar cycle, but after a slow start, it looks like Solar Cycle 24 is finally beginning. Maybe the future will be a little brighter.

You've been -- interesting, 2008, I'll give you that. Still, I won't be sorry to see you go tonight. Even if you do cling to life for one extra second.

Whatever rumors you've heard about the four of us, they're probably true.

(And If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry about it.)

Hey, quick heads-up: my phone is dead. So, if you were planning on calling me, umm, don't.

I dropped the damn thing about a week ago, and it seemed just fine, but it died last night. The guy at the store tells me that's not unheard of.

I'll have to replace it when I can, but it's going to be a couple of weeks, probably. I'll let you know. But the important thing here is -- if I had your phone number, I don't any more. You should let me know what it is. Comments are screened, so you can just post it here, and no one will see it 'cept you + me. Cheers.

Things have been pretty decent lately -- everything from finally setting up my home office for telecommuting, to having a lovely Valentine's Day with Ahna at the Bodies Exhibit. But today especially has been all kinds of awesome.

I met with a client this afternoon and closed the contract to do the site redesign for Richard Hugo House, the literary arts center here in Seattle. They're the perfect clients -- they know exactly what they want, they have a pretty good understanding of the difficulty involved, and they're offering me considerably more money than I was initially asking for. So now I can stop worrying about how I'm going to pay my taxes this year, which is nice.

I had "lunch" (some plums and a can of Rockstar) at the little park at the corner of Pine and Broadway, where I found a single perfect little rose just lying unwanted on the ground. I brought it with me to Golden Age Collectables and gave it to Ahna, and scoped out their clearance section while I waited for her to get off work. She let me know that the tickets she bought us as an anniversary present for the upcoming Placebo concert arrived. I picked up a couple of supercheap graphic novels and gave her a ride to Lush.

Then I met up with Riff, who was putting the finishing touches on my new -- desperately-needed -- computer. It's soooo cute, with it's sleek black and silver case and spiffy little backlit gauges. Pictures will be forthcoming at some point. More to the point, it's not dying horribly like the machine I'm typing this on now is, and it actually has the chops to run Vista, so I get to join the twenty-first century. He'll be coming over shortly to set it up for me.

Oh, and I kept having really decent luck finding parking spaces all day, too. And the weather was gorgeous.

Life might just be okay.

My poor dead truck is finally gone.

It had been sitting in my parking space at my condo since it died, over a year ago. I tried researching how to donate a vehicle to charity, but it all seemed terribly complicated -- I'm deeply phobic about incorrectly filed paperwork, and the one place I found that said they took care of all the paperwork never called me back.

I was going to drive the truck down to Olympia to give it to my sister, hoping that I could avoid having to go in reverse at any point the whole way down, but it turns out that if you let a truck just sit there for a year, it won't start the next time you try to use it. Who knew?

The management of my condo had been gently asking me all this time when I was going to get rid of it, and when I was going to stop parking my car in visitor spaces. Not too long after I failed to get the truck moving again, they finally put a note on my car saying they'd tow it if I parked it in a visitor space again. Fair enough, I figured.

In the end, I went to Pull-A-Part, a wrecking yard in Lynnwood, and found out they would indeed tow it away for free and take it off my hands for spare parts if I signed the title over to them. I wouldn't even need to be there for them to pick it up. So that's what I did, and one night I came home and it was just gone.

-----

Why a whole year?

Part of it's just the inertia and procrastination that plagues so many parts of my life. But it was also just frankly hard to do.

My dad told me, after he bought me the truck, not to fall in love with it. He told me too late. It was my first car, something that brought me my first real taste of freedom and independence and responsibility. I didn't get rid of it for so long because I didn't really want to.

. . . . Why is it so hard for me to let go of things when it's so easy for me to let go of people?

"1. Must demonstrate a Customer First perspective and fully participate in the Boundless Selling culture." -- OfficeMax Print & Document Services Associate Job Description

Here we go -- back down the rabbit hole of modern corporate life. Barring anything going horribly wrong with my drug screen¹ or my background check, I've got the job, and should start sometime next week.

_________________
1. I always swore I'd never pee in a cup to get a job. *shrug* Food first, ethics later.

Another Halloween come and gone. The one day I wait for all year, the day when the world makes sense to me and looks like somewhere I'd feel at home, over and done with, and in its place, suddenly winter. It feels that way, at least. This is when my year ends, spring forward and fall back and you can't catch yourself to keep from falling, one hour sooner into darker nights. Pull down the strings of orange lights, put the skeletons back in your closet; the world is winding clockwork down.

Near my work, the little convenience store and its strange tiny food court where I've had so many lunches the past few months is gone now. The coffee stand in it had closed the week before, and today I found the rest of it shut and fenced off.

I suppose it doesn't matter:

I won't have a job after this Friday anyway.

I can't be too surprised, or even that upset -- the political campaign my employer was building a site for doesn't want to keep paying for development after election day, which makes sense. It's been fun, the money's been good (although I haven't saved enough of it), and I finally have more recent webdev experience, so it shouldn't be that hard to get another job. I hope not, at least.

Tomorrow, I hope -- and I hope this so fervently my stomach is in knots -- something else will be ending: four years of terrifying misrule. I wish I were sure how this would turn out. Every time I let myself hope for something better, I can't help but feel that rush of dread. Spring forward, fall back.

The world is ending around me. But the world ends all the time, and there will be another one in a minute.

I know this. Sitting out in the cold the other night, conspiratorially close, watching the shadow of the world steal the moon from the sky with my windbourne, I knew the moon would come back.

And it did, brighter than anything, its midnight light filling the courtyard outside with white like a blanket of snow on the ground as we made our way to bed.

You'd think I know how stairs work by now, but last Monday, I thought I'd reached the ground floor at my workplace when I actually had one step left to go, and as a result, pitched forward, ran into an innocent bystander and an innocent vending machine, and most importantly, caught my right foot wrong and bent it back. Hurt like mad, but I didn't figure it was anything too awful until hours later, when I noticed it was really swollen.

A phone call to hetaera15 and a little research on the 'Net led me to believe it was sprained, so I figured I'd wrap it in a bandage, start elevating and icing it, and take Ibuprofen. But, what the hell, I'd probably better be a responsible grown-up and see what a doctor had to say about it, in case I'd misdiagnosed myself. I hauled my sorry crippled butt to the doctor the next day -- taking advantage of my insurance while I still have some -- and had him look at it, prod it a little, and take some X-rays. He told me to, basically, wrap it in a bandage, start elevating and icing it, and take Ibuprofen. So, yeah.

I've been walking with a cane some days, and driving with my left foot on the pedals. A little adjustment, but no big deal.

The amusing part to me is how superstitious I am. I've had such a string of good luck lately -- getting my book published, getting to date windbourne, getting a decent job in my chosen field -- I've been dreading the backlash, wondering what bad thing was going to happen to balance it all. As soon as I injured myself, I could feel myself relax. Hell, I thought, was that it? That was nothin'.

I can mention this now -- I've known for a couple-few weeks, but now they've sent out postcards announcing the fact, so I don't have to stay quiet about it anymore.

The Lake Forest Park Jo-Ann Fabrics I work at is closing down. It, and the Lynnwood store, are combining into a new super-store up in Lynnwood. I haven't decided if I'm going to be going to the new store or not. Probably not. I've been really tired of this job anyway, frankly, so I think I should take this as a sign it's time to move on. If anyone has any decent job leads, let me know.

It's been kind of stressful and depressing the past couple of days, what with all these people coming in asking, "Are you really leaving?" A couple of customers seem happy about the new store, but the overwhelming majority are sad and frustrated at the move. (Mainly because of the location. To hear these people talk, you'd think Lynnwood was in Canada.)

On the bright side, no-one's mentioned training me on the cutting counter again, so maybe that idea's been dropped in the shuffle. *fingers crossed*

Oh, yeah, we're hiring a bunch of people to get us through the transition period/liquidation sales. They're desperate for people, so if you're looking for temporary work, come on by and apply. Tell 'em you know Six.

Didn't mention yesterday, but I was posting from the Library here at Lake Forest Park, in the same building as JoAnn Fabrics.

This is, in fact, a Big Freakin' Deal. See, using their computers requires a library card, and, ummm, I haven't had a library card in well over a decade.

.... See, there was this book I checked out once. A book about Attention Deficit Disorder. I returned overdue. About a year overdue. I kept meaning to bring it back, but I just kept getting distracted .... Yeah, so anyway, I returned it in the middle of the night and came home and cut up my library card like a bad credit card.

But I've been reading more books lately, and more importantly, I've really wanted to use their free 'Net access, so here I am.

It's a little strange, using these terminals. I can't telnet out, so I can't use my command-line LJ client .... I can't even use Notepad or the like to compose my posts first, so I'm a little worried about typing all this stuff into the web browser and hoping nothing goes wrong when I submit.

I imagine I'll get using to working without a safety net, though, so I might back to posting a little more regularly. We shall see.