Jules and I have been trying to remember how we spent last Christmas and New Year’s and we simply could not remember. The only mention I could find was a post I made here that we had a quiet time at home. Must have been pretty quiet indeed!

I’ve been really good at keeping up with Twitter, but miserable at keeping up with this blog. I keep forgetting about longer-format writing these days. Ah well, I’m not going to be too hard on myself!

We had Thanksgiving over at Nat’s place. Everyone made something delicious and brought it along. We had Christmas over at Rachael & John’s new house with another potluck. Both were utterly successful and we were all majorly stuffed. Yum!

This year we didn’t take any extra time off work for the holidays. Since Jules is so new to his job, he’d already spent all his holidays (and then some) when we went to France and I didn’t want to take time off when I couldn’t spend it with him so we’re back at work today. Ivan has the week off (as do most of our friends, to some degree or another!) so he’s at home today before he heads off to Las Vegas with some of his friends from back in Australia. Today is his birthday so we’re going to do something special for him tonight before he leaves tomorrow.

As time goes by I am realizing more and more that I am just not really into this whole “giving gifts because society expects it of us.” I feel a little ill listening to people talk about their “haul” they got for Christmas. Jules and I are in the fortunate position in which we are able to give each other gifts whenever the occasion arises, not at a prescribed time, and this suits us really well. It is genuine and heartfelt, and often unexpected. This year, since we had spent so much money getting our dishwasher installed, we agreed that would be our “present” to each other. Jules had gotten me a box of Godiva dark chocolates, which he gave me as soon as he got them so I could enjoy them right away (and ohmygod, did I) and I gave him a joke present, but otherwise that was it. We gave his family gifts since we don’t get to see them for years at a time and it’s very important to them, but my own family agreed not to exchange gifts, and we were all happy with that.

It’s hard to explain how I feel without it sounding snobby or elitist, but the fact of the matter is I just don’t like stuff for the sake of stuff. (I don’t personally feel that this sentiment is elitist, but I know that some people think it’s a declaration of superiority. I really wish that weren’t the case, but it is.) I used to think my mother was crazy for feeling this way when I was growing up but as time goes by I am coming to appreciate this more and more. For a time in my “rebellious” youth when I was making my own money I bought tons of “stuff” simply because I could. I didn’t have much as a child, and stuff sounded so cool. When I moved out to Seattle and had to consolidate my belongings into what would fit in my car, it was a chance for a fresh start. A large amount of that “stuff” simply got given away or sold. At that time in my life, I was happy to have next to nothing in terms of material possessions. I often think back to those days with great longing, since I could literally pack up everything I owned and move in one fell swoop. Of course, now that we own a house, that is no longer the case, but the desire for fewer things is still very strong in my life. It is true that we have spent a great deal of money on the house itself and on things for the house, but with few exceptions everything has been thoroughly researched and considered before we bought it. We’d ask ourselves “Does this item contribute something useful to our lives, or make them easier in some way?” We had each other to confer with over things we were unsure of. As a result, our household has many labor-saving or money-saving devices which we use all the time. Even things that seem almost gimmicky on the surface. If it isn’t useful or fulfill some very specific purpose, it doesn’t belong in our house, and we get rid of it. I am so much more interested in experiences, memories, and consumables than yet another item that can clutter up our already hectic lives.

Something that caught me off-guard is that I’ve noticed that other people are also seeming to feel this way now. I went with Jules to his company’s holiday party, which I wasn’t really looking forward to. We got to spend it with Christian and Miyuki, which helped make it fun, and there was beer/wine tasting which also didn’t hurt. The big takeaway from this was the raffle they held. As a result of winnings at the “fake-gambling” casino at the party, we could cash in chips for raffle tickets. I was skeptical about this because I didn’t want to even think of the possibility of winning more “stuff” but I was really impressed by the prizes they had chosen: *experiences.* Most of the winners got things like an overnight stay at the Salish Lodge (the hotel/spa that was “The Great Northern” in “Twin Peaks”) and tickets to Teatro Zinzanni (dinner theatre.) I utterly approve.

I’ve been reading a lot of books lately about organizing and simplifying your life. This has always been something of interest to me, but I feel like lately I’ve been getting a lot more serious about it, especially when I consider the possibility of one day going pro and being able to help other people. The more I read, the less stuff I want. I wonder if minimalism is going to be a lifelong obsession now.

On a similar topic, I’ve been very stressed out the last six months or so. The lifestyle surrounding my job has left me drained and depressed…the long, rollercoaster days of not enough or way too much to do, and the 3-hour bus commute every day. I had been working on a commissioned blanket for someone who saw my work on Etsy, which took up all of my evenings and left my right side in a great deal of physical pain. I pretty much stopped exercising due to lack of free time and energy. Jules has had a lot of bad days physically, too, which were often exacerbated by my mood. I promised him when I finished the blanket I would take a break so we could both recover.

And that’s what I’ve done. I decided I wouldn’t work on anything again until I feel my life has stabilized. And probably not work for commission again, since the self-imposed pressure was too much for me. I finished the blanket last week, on the same day Ivan got his American driver’s license and our dishwasher was finally installed. On that day, it was like I had finished a semester of college. Things were finally in order and I actually had free time again! My mood soared. I have been feeling so much better since then.

One thing that we’ve decided to do in our free time is to start playing World of Warcraft again. I had fought against the idea for the last 6 years since I last played, since to me it represented the worst time of my life. It was something that Jules (and other friends) really, truly wanted, and it was clear that if I didn’t play then no one would, and that made me feel really bad so I decided to suck it up and try to get past my history with the game and my life at that time. I had a few breakdowns over it in the last couple weeks, but I am happy to note that my ill feelings towards it have faded a lot. At first it felt like someone was replaying the worst months of my life in full HD in front of my eyes and it was all I thought about, but luckily I think I’m finally past that. I still can’t say I’m actually really having fun with it yet but at least it no longer brings me to tears. There’s no point letting something fun remain associated with something horrible when there’s actually no logical connection. It feels good to feel like I’m rationally triumphing over irrational emotions. It might seem silly to an outsider, but to me, if I can disassociate my emotions from past experiences from the game, I’ve won. As I mentioned, at first I was hesitant but I finally decided it was worth it to me to work out the trapped feelings that aren’t serving any useful purpose in my psyche. Begone, I say.

1up Mushroom created with Jello shots (and Bailey’s pudding shots)!

Our mega summer birthday bash was a huge success. My ridiculous efforts to create an edible 16×16 sprite entirely out of Jello shots ended up with a hugely positive result, and I’m very happy I saw it through to the end! I had lots of help from Russ (visiting from Chicago) and Ivan (who meticulously stacked them all in the fridge!) About half of them were gone by the end of the night, which is far beyond what I expected.

I also created some crazy decorations for the walls from construction paper, including:

Mega Man

and

Goomba

Much food was consumed, games played, and company enjoyed. It was fantastic to see everyone again, especially hachi who came up from San Francisco just for the weekend, and who forgot his phone so he had his coworkers Fed Ex it overnight to him. Hachi being hachi, he had a tracking app on the whole time which pinged the internets with its precise location so he could track it during transit. No need for a tracking number there!

Thanks everyone for coming to the party and making it one of the more memorable events of recent years! Time for me to collapse now!

More photos here.

Spent 7 hours working outside on Saturday. Potted the herbs in the self-watering containers, planted one of the three raised beds with potatoes and strawberries after treating the wood with linseed oil, finished weeding between the paving bricks, and moved one of the two piles of unused bricks to an unseen location. Then our buddies showed up for a BBQ/Bioshock completion night. It was really wonderful and just a perfect day.

Sunday was spent playing Guild Wars with Jules and lazing around. My brain had shut off at this point and still hasn’t restarted. I think it’s because I took care of all the niggling thoughts by getting things done. It’s a strange sensation to not be constantly bombarded with thoughts.

Less than a week till Ivan’s here!

One of the funniest/most completely random things I can think of, and have been laughing at for years. You will find the explanation here.

I accidentally called my mother last night (I’ll get into this in just a minute) and she mentioned that she still checks this every day to see if maybe I had posted since the previous day, so today I upgraded all my plugins and the WordPress application itself so everything was up-to-date enough to work seamlessly. I’d been meaning to do this for months but have been so busy I haven’t prioritized it until just now. So here’s an update!

As I mentioned, my call to my mom was unintentional. I had called her for Mother’s Day on Sunday so her number was the last dialed on my phone. I recently bought a Sony Bluetooth headset to use with my iPhone for my bus journeys to and from work. Since it’s wireless, it has a power switch to turn it off, and since it’s meant to be synced to a phone, it also has a “answer phone” button. The two are roughly the same size and shape, but on opposite sides of the right ear piece. As you might guess by now, I hit the wrong button and it redialed the last called number. So we had a nice chat and at the same time I learned the merits of paying attention to which button I’m pushing. On a related note, the headphones are not that great, the sound quality is pretty terrible, and I get interference from what I believe is the fire station next to our house. I will probably invest in some better ones eventually, but they are okay for the time being. (I can never seem to find just the right pair of headphones, and this fact drives me absolutely insane.)

Speaking of family, Ivan will be here in a matter of days now (11 to be exact, and his room is finally fully-furnished!) and shortly after that my family will be visiting us in Seattle for the first time. We are very excited about both events and this will be a great way to kick off summer. We will certainly be getting a great deal of use of our brand new, serious-for-reals propane grill. We assembled it last night and gave it a try with some hot dogs, and were very happy with the results. I’m delighted to note we were able to get $100 off the thing by using our Amazon certificates we got for charging a considerable expense to that card, which was…

Plane tickets to France!

Sadly for the EU, the Euro has been tanking recently, but it was good for us as we got a fantastic deal. We will be in Villefranche-sur-Mer with Jules’ parents towards the end of October for about 2 weeks. I’m very excited and nervous about this trip, as I have never been to a non-English-speaking country before. Although I took French in high school, it’s been a long time and of course the regional dialect is different in the south of France, not to mention high school French is nothing like conversational French. At least for the most part I can read basic French, so I should be able to decipher signs and the like. Jules says his mum will likely make us go to the grocery store on our own just to stretch our lingual abilities. She is lovely and mean like that. :3 It should be fantastic!

Things have been a lot better at work recently. I finally am beginning to feel comfortable here, as if I am a real member of the team rather than someone on the fringes, as I have from the start. We had one major project which recently wrapped up that I was in charge of redesigning the entire user experience for, including all of the look and feel of the application as well as the placement of the page elements. I was given free reign to offer suggestions, which were taken to heart, and the client was very pleased. I feel like I’ve finally had a chance to prove what I am capable of and because of that will be given greater responsibility in the future. Additionally, we’ve recently hired on a new staff member who I have begun working closely with to develop a SharePoint practice in the company. Our personalities and working styles seem to mesh fairly well, so I no longer feel as isolated as I once did. I’ve also been going in an hour later and leaving an hour later, which has improved my alertness dramatically but has no negative impact on what I can get done during the day (no one shows up until after I do now, still!) I’d been worried about a crappy commute, but that hasn’t been as bad either, since more buses are running during rush hour. I’m glad I made that change.

On the home front, Jules has been working hard on his arcade cabinet front end. He has it mostly working for over 80 games, and now just has to record some gameplay videos for the previews. It’s looking great! I am almost finished with my Companion Cube blanket. I literally have half a round to do on the border and it will be completely done. I expect to have that up on Etsy by the end of the weekend! This has been a long time coming, as I expected to have it done in 3 months and now it’s been 5. Oh well, this always seems to happen, doesn’t it? I will probably take some time off from crocheting after this (I’ll try to anyway…I know myself and how I get when I have an idea I want to execute) so my wrist can heal. I’ve been wearing a wrist brace to bed every night, which has alleviated the majority of the pain I feel during the day, but I still have virtually no strength in the wrist, so I want to try to give myself a chance to recover before I go and ruin it again.

Recently I’ve been spending some of my weekends cleaning up the yard around the house. I got most of the dandelions out of the parking strip in the front yard but our 96-gallon yard waste container only had enough room for half of the weeds so it has remained half-done since then! I’ve been preparing the backyard for gardening and entertaining by cleaning out all the detritus and the weeds between the bricks (this year I left the moss though!) I cannot believe how many miniature pine trees are growing in the yard and it frightens me a bit to think about what would happen if we left them unchecked. I uprooted literally hundreds of them already, and there’s still more to go. I really want to spend a lot of time outdoors this summer since I feel absolutely robbed of last year’s summer due to unemployment and depression. I am determined to have a lush, successful garden and a beautiful yard all summer long.

Other things of note, our friend Whitney has gotten a sweet job with Double Fine so she is moving to San Francisco this week. We dropped by her place to get a Litter Robot which she was donating to our cause. The cats seem scared of it so far, but hopefully they will embrace its robotic charms and poop all over it. Which reminds me…a few weeks ago we discovered a secret stash of Emily pee in the closet under the stairs. When we opened it up, we unleashed an ungodly stench which we have been desperately trying to get rid of. Nothing so far has taken care of it fully, but I sincerely hope the combination of methods will yield some positive result eventually. She’s been pretty bad with that lately, which may be because Leela has been showing major dominance over her (and the rest of the cats.) There are a lot more fights than there used to be, in any case. Leelz has lost a lot of weight as well, so she can clean herself better, so maybe her self-esteem and confidence has gone up?

Our financial situation is stable now. This comes as a great relief to my sanity. I was finally able to open a Roth IRA with Vanguard, which was one of my goals for the year! We have all our credit cards paid off in full, and I’ve stopped taking every contract job that comes my way just to keep current. It feels really fantastic to be back into this position. It also feels nice knowing that we already have our France plane tickets paid for so we don’t have to save for that anymore either. Now we’re just free to pay back what we owe family members, keep current with bills, sock away some savings, and save for some major purchases in the near future. Jules and I keep a spreadsheet of “Wants for FABS” in conjunction with an Amazon wish list so we can plan things out in a reasonable way, rather than just telling ourselves, “sure, we can afford this, why not?” This has helped us stay on track.

One really worthwhile purchase we made awhile back was a NAS (network-attached storage) from Synology which has so many features I could barely describe them all to you! We store all our media files on there now (music, movies, tv shows, data) and use the Playstation 3 to play them across the network (gigabit), which essentially eliminates the need for a media PC (which is great, since Jules usurped that for use as his arcade PC for the time being!) The NAS is essentially its own computer, really! I thought the purchase was a good idea at the time, but now that I’ve lived with it for awhile I have changed my mind. It was an abso-freaking-lutely brilliant idea. I love being able to buy music at work and upload it directly to the NAS. It makes everything so much easier. This is really the solution we’ve been after from the start, but we just didn’t realize it.

Life has just been great lately! I am really happy, and have been making lots of positive changes to my life which improves its quality at each turn. I am feeling more fit, thanks to much pedaling away at the exercise bike and lots of outdoor work, so I am more confident in general. The house is still improving bit by bit as we fix up little things here and there (I love that part.) I am enjoying saving for large purchases before we buy them as it makes the acquisition of said items that much more special. I hope the summer continues to be as awesome as it appears to be headed towards!

Also sold this week–our Wii Fit. Neither of us have used it in over a year, mostly because it wasn’t doing anything for either of us besides making us sore without any benefit, and they’re fetching pretty decent prices on eBay right now as they are not in stock very many places. Glad to be rid of that, and that it is going to someone else who seems very excited about it.

We ordered Ivan’s couch last week. They had an awesome grey herringbone pattern available so that’s what it’s going to be in 6-8 weeks when it arrives. It was $100 cheaper than expected and we only had to pay half the money upfront, so we were more than prepared for that. Woo!

The Sasquatch lineup came out last week and we’ve been trying to convince Ivan to change his flight to the previous week so we can all go, but it’s yet to be seen whether that will happen. Sunday’s lineup in particular looks AMAZING. I’ll be sad if we can’t go but at least we’ll have an Ivan, which is exponentially better than any music festival.

Having to rest my arm a lot lately as the RSI is pretty painful from crocheting. Very frustrating because I really, really want to create. I bought a wrist support which I plan to wear to bed which will hopefully help some.

Today I reconnected with one of the most influential people in my life as a teenager and I am so happy I did. I certainly wouldn’t be who I am or where I am without her.

I mention this because I seriously believe I’m feeling awful because of stress. As soon as our credit card payment cleared on Saturday I felt this incredible weight gone from my body. I felt less moody and sarcastic, and was content to engage in pleasant, light conversation. I really felt different. As I write this today, on Tuesday, I am finally feeling like my body is the correct temperature (I did take my temp on the weekend only to discover I was colder than “normal” when I thought I was feverish) and much less fragile than I have been feeling. I do not constantly feel like I’m on edge, ready to snap at the next person who does or says something stupid or to silently curse someone who walks too close to me on the sidewalk. I feel more like me than the anxiety-ridden ghost that’s been haunting my frame for the last year. I took all of this stuff really hard; I am a very sensitive soul and have a tough time dealing with setbacks. It seems like this is my body’s way of purging itself of all this negative energy that’s been clinging to me.

I really look forward to the next few months for our lives to reach an equilibrium again.