Life-Altering Adventures and other stories

With the fall of Google Reader now in the distant past, technologically speaking, I'm not sure if anyone will see this auld blog's resurrection post. But the blog and its readers have come to my mind often in the two years and some since my last post. Some updates seem merited.

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Bella joined our family at New Year's, 2016.

She's a loyal, sensitive, somewhat crotchety little papillon, now about six years old. All she wants out of life is lap time, a woolly squeaking toy, a stranger-free household, and to be served her own plate of meat and cheese and potatoes at every meal. It hardly seems too much to ask.

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We lost Maia to feline leukemia virus this summer, at age seven.

Rest well, kitty.

My houseplants are healthier, but I miss her regularly. It feels strange to be able to leave rubber bands out on the counter and have a vase of flowers on the dining table without expecting a mess.

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The best surprise of my life came into the world this past spring.

Learning each other's faces.

I spent two weeks in the hospital, and then she spent four in the NICU after an early delivery, but we have long been home and healthy. She is now ten months old and on the point of crawling--active, alive, curious, precious.

Long-term, I'm not comfortable posting pictures of her; it's a question of consent for me, and also of safety. I'm also not posting her name on my public accounts. But baby pictures are such wonderful things....

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And one more big change: this coming spring, we're moving nearly all the way across the country. Our destination is a little Ohio town not far from Pittsburgh, further east and further south than I've lived since I was seven years old.

I love the Pacific Northwest. I never thought I'd leave. But it's good to know that at forty, I'm still up for choosing life-altering adventures.

Yep, I just turned forty.
And I'm so not giving up my pigtails.

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In various news:

• I'm halfway through college, now, and to my liberal arts major I've added minors in anthropology and ASL.
• I participated in and won NaNoWriMo again, just this past year, and immediately had to trash basically everything I'd written. But it was still a thoroughly happy and sometimes cathartic experience.
• Bullet journaling and mindfulness practice are making beautiful alterations in my life.
• I've gotten into sustainability and minimalism and am cheerfully bungling my way through mending knit shirts with cloth flowers cut from old pajama pants at the moment. #nailedit
• As was broadly hinted in previous posts, I have some different perspectives from what I had when I blogged here regularly. Having been smashed in the face by how much I don't know, however, I've become a bit less mouthy with my opinions. At least, I think I have. You all can be the judges. The necessary honesty of blogging means that changes will naturally make themselves known, over time, of course.

I hope to post more. Blogging has fallen out of favor with the rise of the social media giants, but mindfulness is pushing me away from the Twittery kind of thing and back toward long-form writing and more personal communities. Also, Masha blogs all the time, which makes me jealous! But in between times, I can also be found in the following places:

• Scratch Paper Book Reviews, my book-review Instagram account, where I write reviews on scraps of paper otherwise destined for the recycle bin
• My personal Instagram, where I sort of mini-blog and will continue to post baby pics till baby is about a year old
• Twitter, where I let my new perspectives stretch their legs and run around a little

Maybe someday I'll even manage to get my Goodreads up and running again....

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Redesign coming! Apologies for the messy sidebar in the meantime.

If you're out there reading this... How are you?