Friends and family, loved ones near and far, Hannah and I
wanted to take a moment to extend some Holiday warmth and cheer to you and
yours. As most of you know, our 2017 has been wrought with change. As if we
jumped into the Tower card of the nearest Tarot deck, we have been faced with
sudden and life altering situations that have made for one intense 2017. Early
in the year Hannah underwent a surgery that brought with it a slow and painful
recovery. Later in the year, on the first of October, in fact, our apartment
complex gave us 30 days to vacate as they had become a tax credit property and
we no longer qualified to live there. The good news was that they gave us a
rehoming stipend to help; the bad news was that October happened to be the
month of our wedding.
It was only with the help of our amazing friends that we
were able to accomplish a Friday the 13th Wedding, a honeymoon to Seattle, and
a move-out in the span of a month. Sanity aside, we then began the very adult
task of shopping for a house. No more renting for us. We were ready to put down
some real roots. We stayed with friends and my parents while looking for a home
and finally, two months to the day after our wedding, we closed on a house on
Wellesley.
I cannot thank you enough, all of you, for helping Hannah
and I make it through this turbulent time to find peace just in time for Yule,
Christmas, and New Years. Making it through this year wouldn’t have been
possible without your helping hands and encouragement.
Thank you so much to all those who listened to our woes and
helped us ground our emotions, who walked backwards up a ramp hauling a
handcart loaded with hundreds of books, who arrived early, who stayed late, who
donated money to our honeymoon, who stunned us with generosity, who humbled us
with kindness, who kept us going with positive energy and litanies of ‘good
luck’ and ‘hang in there.’ Hannah and I have been so stressed that we may not
have seemed as grateful as we actually felt. So I tell you now: dear friends
and family, know that we love and appreciate you and wish you peace and joy
during this magical time of year.
Happy New Year everyone. And I'm so glad it is a new one. 2016 was made of suck. In true Hannah and Amanda form we have yet to send out cards and letters. These are coming, I promise. They may arrive in July but, much like the ukes in Sensitive Pornograph, they are definitely coming.
2016 took so many people and pets from us all. And it didn't leave without a fight. In the last week I managed to cut myself nice and deep on my thumb (new knife for Christmas doesn't leave one wanting!) and break all my nails. They are my natural nails and I'm used to the longer ones occasionally meeting with a jagged death but not all fucking ten nails at once. I look like... like... someone who cuts their nails. It's horrendous I tell you!
But not all of the end was bad. There was a spontaneous Hobbit extended editions marathon one day. And Yule was made of ash, mead, reindeer fur, and three lone souls bearing witness to the birth of the new sun after the longest night. And what a sun it is! We've had some beautifully sun shiny days. Cold as fuck but sunny at least.
Looking forward to the future: Hannah and I are going to start writing 6 hours a week. That's the minimum that Brander Sanderson, the author of the Mistborn series) prescribes his students in his college writing class. I think 6 is fair and more than doable. I think I shall start with a short story and then return to Death Man. I need to finish that so that I can do two things: send it out and get on my life! Haha. I feel trapped by my desire to make it perfect, but I keep forgetting what my first MFA mentor told me and that is - it will never be perfect. There will always be a sentence you wish you could tweak or a phrase that you want to go back and hash over again and again. In short, you will never be finished writing. You're never finished composing. But there comes a point when the book itself is finished with you. And that's where I need to be. And soon.
There's a wolf moon coming up and I would like to greet the full moon in her splendor with wolf howls in the night. I remember last year's Wolf Moon and want to relive the energy though in a much more contained way. The aspect of wolf I want to explore this year is the cunning and sly aspect, the clever watcher from the shadows. I want to embrace those shadows for all the secrets and knowledge that may lie within.
In other news: the two kitties are getting along remarkably well. They tolerated/cuddled on the same cat bed last night for four hours. However, Narcisa it seems is feeling very under the weather. She's thrown up (very tiny amounts) twice this week and this cat never throws up. I mean she's a rock solid warrior princess, she ain't got time for that shit! Yet she's thrown up twice that we know about and her voice is ragged and scratchy. That may be a result of all the hissing she threw at Thorin when he first came to live here but I think she's caught a cold or something. We're taking her to the vet on Thursday because we're paranoid mommies and don't want to just say "Oh, she'll get over it on her own" because what if she doesn't? What if she suffers for our negligence? So to the vet she goes.
Tomorrow marks week three after catching the sick and I'm finally feeling better. Still coughing (because goodness knows I wouldn't want to spend a day not doing that!) and still a bit weak and sore in my core but overall I'm feeling much more like my old self. And I can talk again! World beware. So here's a quick update of all things fanged and fragile.
Our friend Chris got us a cat for Christmas/Yule. She knew we were looking and so she paid half of the adoption fee which was the only reason we were able to get a cat and it was damn nice of her. We visited her rescue ccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc yttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttth6777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777x
Okay... so I left the computer for a minute and came back to the above nonsense. Since it was the new cat who inserted said nonsense, I've decided to leave it for your viewing pleasure. Also it ties in nicely with my explanation of this cat's proclivities.
So back to where I was: we visited the rescue and found a four month old little orange tabby. He came from a feral mama but had been fostered pretty much since birth with his brothers and sister. Of the litter he was the smallest as well as the last to be adopted. So we brought him home. Narcisa had things to say. Mostly hissing things to say. But it hasn't even been a week and the cats are already playing and chasing each other. They sniff each other a lot and are not aggressive toward each other at all, however it may still take some time before they cuddle. If they ever do cuddle. But I think eventually Thorin (that is the little one's name) will wear her down.
In the mean time however the Son of Thrain has found his calling in dismantling our computers. He took mine off internet access for two days. It wasn't that he put it into airplane mode... no he somehow erased my computer's connection to our wifi. Hannah had to work her magic and run a whole bunch of cleaners before I was able to get back on the net. No sooner was my compy back up and running did he waltz over to Hannah's and erase all her icons. He's been known to turn off the computers as well as save print-screen images to Hannah's one drive. Yeah, he's pretty good with the technology but that isn't surprising as most kids these days are born with a tablet in their hand.
The cat and his shenanigans aren't the only reason for this post tonight. Earlier today, friend Rachel of kettle korn fame, came over to the house to hang out with us while Hannah made a butt-load of bierocks (German buns) and I made an equally loaded butt of baklava (honey-nut pastry). Apparently it was b-named food night in the Hannamanda kitchen. Anyhow, I made some fun alterations to the baklava. I am trying to think of a dairy and gluten free sort of substitute for a friend but that might not happen. I'm a wee bit discouraged, you see. I made the Krampus-klava (pumpkin spices and whiskey) without too much stress and followed that up with Snow-klava (the addition of sweetened coconut) but then I made my masterpiece: Freya's Delight Baklava. We named it that as I was constructing it. This baklava had everything in it apart from the kitchen sink. And the honey syrup mixture that I put on top was perfection! I set it on the stove to cool and went to work on a special fruit filled batch for my dad that I call Loaded Odin Baklava.
I got one layer of Loaded Odin down when there was a sudden loud pop-crack sound. I looked up to see Freya's delight (and Rachel's very special baking dish that she had let me borrow) scattered all over the kitchen with a decent sized fire roaring over the burner. A burner that I had left on. I feel like a moron for that rookie mistake but I know that I'm not the only one who has done it and I take solace in knowing that while it's embarrassing at least it is common enough to illicit a teensy bit of sympathy from my culinary friends. The best part about this sudden emergency was that none of us panicked. Hannah quickly and efficiently herded the cats to the bedroom and closed them in while Rachel and her boyfriend helped me to extinguish the fire (baking soda is my new best friend) and clean up massive chunks of broken glass and honey. What a fucking mess! But how cool of them to help me.
The kitchen counters are very clean now and I'm nearly 100% certain that there is no glass in the bierocks that Hannah made earlier. I suppose if we find blood in our stool we shall know otherwise. The last thing I have do to now is to mop the kitchen and that will have to wait until morning. I'm exhausted and it wasn't until Rachel and her boyfriend left that I realized how late it was. Today has been an interesting one to be sure. (Or yesterday into today rather, since it is still in the very wee hours of the morning right now.)
At first we thought the breaking dish might have been a sign that we'd angered the gods or that we were somehow undergoing a sort of curse. Earlier in the evening my Yule tree fell over on the table for no seemingly no reason. So the tree falling and dish breaking all seemed a bit spooky at first but we realized in the end that the tree fell because I had neglected to ever balance it properly (something I have since rectified) and the dish broke because I'm a moron. In all actuality we can count this as a blessing because no one was hurt. We could have easily been in the kitchen and been cut, burned, or otherwise harmed when the dish exploded but everyone was off doing their own things. A cat could have been in there, or been in the tree. But no kitties were harmed either. Aside from adding a lot of cleaning to the evening and wasting a batch of baklava (and the loss of Rachel's dish which I'm still very sad about as the dish had belonged to her mother who is no longer with us) the evening was a fairly decent one.
Which means 'it's been a while, yeah?' And it has been a while since I've posted. The only reason I'm settling down enough to post a blog at the moment is because my head is about to explode if I don't stop moving so here I am. Things have been busy. With it so very close to Christmas and Yule I'm really feeling the brunt of not having much money. People are going to be getting home made gifts this year (not that home made is anything to sneer at) but typically I like being able to spoil friends when I can. However, the gifts Hannah is making are truly wonderful and will spoil our friends nicely I think. Also this year I've decided for my friends who live far away (beyond a few hours drive to reach) that I'm going to do a fun and interactive Christmas/Yule gift this year. And I have a weekend off coming up during which I hope to get most of this done and then as soon as I'm paid again, get it all mailed out.
At the moment I'm 'resting.' On Tuesday, whatever it is that Hannah's got (presumably the seasonal bronchitis that seems to be ringing in many peoples' December) hit me like a ton of bricks! I felt perfectly fine all day and then suddenly it just attacked me. I ended staying home from work for a while the next day but had to go in as most of our staff also is sick. Today I stayed home again and I'm really pissed about it. I wanted to be there to help and I know they really needed the assistance what with being so short staffed, but today I fell victim to laryngitis the likes of which I have never known. If I were being pursued by a murderer right now, I wouldn't even be able to call for help. Even during my worst vocal node episodes in the past, I've never felt quite this without voice. It's infuriating and a little scary. I've been sucking down warm beverages and soft foods today and come hell or high water I'm going in to work tomorrow. I may only be able to do non verbal work which sucks for my compatriots on the phones but at the same time it would free them up from having to worry about emails and other such business. I hope I have at least a little voice though.
Aside from all of that, I've been trying to rest my body, voice, and chest... but am a restless creature when I'm laid down. So I've been cleaning a little. I cleaned the bathroom and the hallway and mopped both. I've been doing laundry too. These things have happened in quick bouts of energy that later result in pathetic, voiceless whimpering curled up on the couch. We've been watching old movies like "An Affair to Remember," and "How to Catch a Thief." We started "Sunset Boulevard" this morning and had to keep going back as we would either fall asleep or had other things going on. Somehow I managed to whine enough (via Hannah who acted as my voice) to my parents that they actually came over for a little bit to tend their sick daughters. They brought the makings for hot toddies and some soups. In exchange for that I made them pancakes with blueberries and coffee. And every time I opened my mouth to try a hoarse whisper of conversation they shut that shit right down. It was frustrating. But at the same time I was really missing the 'mom' and 'dad' voice.
In other news, Christmas/Yule is on its way! We've been decorating the house and apart from the fact that it looks disheveled as hell in the aftermath of our sickness, the winter theme is coming through quite nicely. Which brings me full circle. Christmas and Yule this year... I am very sad at my lack of finances. Next year may be even worse but for now I'm going to do my best to try and embrace the 'thought' and 'intentions' that make gift giving more important than any gift.
Recently watched the full series of Death Parade and really enjoyed it.
I wanted to share the ending theme for those who might be interested.
Such a sad and psychological anime. I loved every minute of it!
