scordatura (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
scordatura) wrote2020-01-11 10:50 pm
scordatura) wrote2020-01-11 10:50 pm
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2019 Life Recap
WELL HELLO, FRIENDS, [surreptitiously brushes dust off of this journal], and welcome to the only reason I ever use this anymore, whoops the first of my annual recap posts: my personal life recap from 2019!
This was a very weird year in that the first half bore ALMOST NO RESEMBLANCE to the second; if I called 2018 my rebuilding year, 2019 was the year in which it aaaaaall came to fruition, in full and fabulous form. Basically the first few months of 2019 were almost exactly the same as 2018... and then I got my very first full-time job, and within two months was moving to an entirely new city and back in with Boyfriend after seven years (!!!) of long-distance. TALK ABOUT YOUR MOOD WHIPLASH, FOLKS. It's been a wild ride, and I still kind of can't believe, some days, that this is my life now?? But it IS, and I'd like to take a look back at the year that helped bring me here, to relive all of the highs and lows and exciting new parts of it!!
January
• Mostly just a lowkey month for me, on the whole-- I spent some time with friends, tried to work on some habits, watched a bunch of Hallmark movies, and tried out some new recipes! Not a super eventual month all around, but a nice one, from what I can recall!
• Honorable mention to seeing Aquaman in theaters with friends TWICE, what an adventure we had :"))) I really loved all of the movie dates I got to have with friends in DC and miss it a lot! (Stupid far-flung movie theaters in my new city!!)
• And I ended this month, and started the next, with...
February
• ...a trip to Colorado (Boulder and Breckenridge, specifically) with friends!! We consumed tons of weed and ridiculous media, engaged in real-life rather than long-distance D&D, toured a meadery, played in snow, and just generally had a really lovely, chill, fun time; it was the perfect way to semi-start off the year and I really hope we get to do something like it again sometime in the future. ♥
• I also had a really lovely Valentine's Day date with Dee -- our new friend Alina provided us with free tickets to a play, so we went to dinner and wandered around the nearby Wharf, an area neither of us had been before, and in exploring the beautifully lit waterfront area we managed to stumble onto a S'MORES CART RIGHT IN FRONT OF A FANCY RESTAURANT, COMPLETE WITH FIRE PIT, which was so exciting for me, a lifelong s'mores lover!! It was such a wonderful night, one that definitely stands out to me as a highlight of the year.
March
• This was the month Wasteland, Baby! came out and I got really into Hozier, whose music I'd always loved before, but this really kickstarted off an even stronger fondness, which culminated with seeing him LIVE IN CONCERT IN NOVEMBER, AAAA.
• More bittersweetly, this was the month my maternal grandmother (my last living grandparent) died; it happened shortly after my mom's visit to Belgrade, so it really wasn't a shocker, especially since she's been in increasingly declining health over the past few years. My relationship with her was complicated, to say the least; even in my warmer memories, she was always kind of in the shadow of my grandfather, whom I adored, and the older she got, the more she started becoming short-tempered and verbally abusive towards all of us, and especially him, which really didn't sit well with me. After he died, things got WAY worse, and for a while she became essentially unbearable, which really eroded any remaining goodwill toward her I might have had. The past couple years, though, she pretty much totally declined, and the last time I saw her, we barely interacted. So by the time this happened, it was... really hard to feel any emotions about it at all? They were all really distant and complicated, and I mostly just tried to be there for my mom, for whom things were of course even MORE complicated. Mostly it just feels very, very weird not to have grandparents anymore, though I'm lucky I had all four for as long as I did.
• WOW WHAT A DOWNER, LET'S TAKE A BIT OF A BREATHER BEFORE WE MOVE ON
• In happier news, this was also the month where I had my first interview for my current job!! (Fun fact: the person I first spoke to was our communications director, who just had his last day on the job with us, BOO.)
April
• And following interview #1 for job were interviews #2 and #3 -- both of which went really well and made me increasingly excited for the prospect of said job!! (Additional fun fact: three out of the four people I interviewed with are people I work very closely with now -- my project manager, my data manager, and my supervisor! I hope I get to work with the fourth person sometime, too, we had a great catch-up chat after I got hired and she seems really delightful.)
• This was also the month of what we affectionately referred to as "Samiracon" -- Samira coming to the US and thus a BUNCH of people attempting to coordinate schedules for a giant friend meetup, spanning one vacation, one visiting-family-for-Passover trip, one visiting-family-for-Easter trip, and a handful of people who already lived in the area. There were nearly a dozen of us in our bigger outings and anywhere between four and eight in the smaller ones, and we had so, so much fun going to museums, eating delicious food, wandering through thrift stores, watching ridiculous movies and Youtube clips, and generally having an amazing time meeting up irl for (many of us!) the first time. WHAT AN ADVENTURE IT ALL WAS, I hope we can recreate it at some point!!
May
• This was the month in which I got my job!!! Aaaaaaa!!!! My first real, actual, official, permanent, 9-to-5 job, a process that's been over two years in the making, and an outcome that has consistently been making me super happy since it was first offered to me. I've talked about it a lot since it's happened, but I still genuinely can't believe a job this great exists (remote, solid salary, meaningful work relevant to my background, amazing coworkers), and that I was able to land it as my very first one-- honestly, it's felt like a dream come true, and even six months in, I seriously kind of can't fathom that this is my life now. It felt surreal to start it and now I get to do it EVERY DAY and it just feels so satisfying and fulfilling and good, and IT ALL STARTED HERE!!
• Boyfriend and I also went to our first of MANY college friend weddings this month, our friend Johnnie's in rural Virginia! It was so much fun to see college friends I hadn't seen in years and to catch up; we fell into our old dynamics so quickly, but we're all clearly so much healthier and happier and more stable, which is so nice to see, ha. And the event itself was so nice -- it was on a farm and mostly outside, so I was MISERABLE with allergies, but it was a really beautiful space, and a really beautiful ceremony and reception (their first dance was to The Book Of Love and READER, I CRIED), and sinus death aside, we had an amazing time. (Also there were THREE Great Pyrenees and I pet ALL OF THEM.) (Yes, this is vital to event enjoyment.)
• Hilariously, Game of Thrones's now memetically terrible finale happened the same night as the wedding, so despite the fact that we haven't watched show in years, Boyfriend and I caught portions of the repeat post-reception. BOY, WAS IT BAD, FRIENDS. SO, SO BAD.
June
• So with the job safely under my belt, the plan to move to Chicago with Boyfriend was on! And, coincidentally, he happened to be defending his dissertation (which he passed, thus making him Dr. Boyfriend now, yay!) the week before my job started... so what better time to hop on a plane one evening, see apartments and travel down to see him the next day, watch him defend the day after that, then travel back up to see more apartments and hop a plane home THAT evening? RIGHT? RIGHT? ... Well, fortunately this several-day adventure worked out for the best, because BOY was it fucking exhausting, ha. I saw a couple places I really loved and we applied for one of them semi-arbitrarily, and it was a BIT of a process trying to get it all sorted, but it worked out, and spoiler alert -- we really, really love it!
• And this, my last month in the DC area, was actually the month my parents took their long-anticipated month-long trip to Australia and New Zealand -- I was SO jealous, but I did have the house to myself for a month, which was amazing! ALL the cooking/baking, ALL the friend shenanigans. We had a movie + wine day, a work-from-home party culminating in us going to see Men In Black International, a weekend of winery adventures, a berry-procuring-and-pie-baking day, and even out of town friends coming to hang out -- it was just the absolute perfect close to that chapter of my life, and I'm so happy I had the chance to go out in style with everybody!
• As mentioned, my job actually started this month-- coinciding with my parents leaving, ha! So I had a nice stretch of time where I was on my own to acclimate to the new routine, which was SO helpful. It was a really slow start, which was also super helpful in terms of adjusting to a 9-5 and the kind of communication required of the remote work, as well as getting to know the environment and my new coworkers -- and it has all been uphill from there!!
July
• THIS WAS THE MONTH OF THE MOVE, AAAAA. So I just had some last chill hangs with friends to celebrate -- I still miss everyone from back in DC so, so much, but I'm so glad we had the time together we did (and that we celebrated me moving in such fun style!), and I'm always so excited to see them whenever I'm back. I'm very grateful to now have people to come back to when I do visit! ♥
• And then... the move itself!! !!! My parents came home and a week and a half later, off I went, packed only in two giant suitcases, one medium suitcase, and one small suitcase!! (It felt like A LOT, but I realized it pretty much just meant I was moving with my own body weight packed, which is KIND of cool, ha.) THE ADVENTURE WAS ONLY BEGINNING as we proceeded to figure out our organization, buy furniture, and have a slow trickle of furnishings, dishes, and other decorative details, but this was the start of setting up our new home, and it's been so, so lovely, and I'm so proud of the outcome.
• Celebrated the move by seeing Les Mis TWO DAYS LATER, HEYO. :") Look, when my favorite musical is playing in the town I just moved to, I have to!! I have no choice!! It was such a fun little outing to have on my own (pun not intended) to celebrate the move, and I had such an amazing time seeing the show (wept buckets, of course, as usual!!).
August
• Capped off my thirtieth birthday (!!!) by seeing Hamilton on it, for the second year in a row! (Does this have the makings of a tradition now? I THINK SO.) I really, really loved the Chicago cast; they, on the whole, had the best voices of the three casts I've now seen, especially Jamilton, and it was great to see a group who's been doing the same thing in the same place for so long. I love seeing musicals again and again with different casts, picking up on the differences and what they choose to keep mostly the same, seeing different takes on performances and different audience reactions -- and it was Boyfriend's first time seeing the show at all, which was extra great to share with him!
• This was also the month in which MY FIRST OFFICIAL WORK TRAVEL KICKED OFF, AAAAA. Part of the reason I'm allowed to be remote for the job is that there's so much travel (three trips in my first six months is no joke!!), and I started it by heading to Boston for both an in-person meeting of my main project team and a mandatory training, at which I met two out of the four coworkers who got hired around the same time I did! (I'd already met two of them in DC, one during a work trip -- her travel got started even earlier! -- and one because she lives there. LOOK AT ME, ALL NETWORKING.) It was a lot of fun to... actually SEE my work's office, ha, and see everyone in person and actually do some in-person work; it made it all feel so much more real and official! (Also I stayed in a REAL cute AirBnB right across the street from a Shake Shack; extremely important.) (Also I got to briefly see my aunt and uncle the day before AND catch up with my two dearest still-in-Boston friends, Ellen and Katharina, which was great!! So, so excited to see the latter again on my current Boston visit, aaaa.)
• And shortly after this trip, on VERY short notice, was a very busy four days in Nashville with my supervisor's project team!! SO much work and hectic scheduling, but also so much fun -- I got to sit in on meetings with state officials and nonprofit stakeholders alike, watch some training of corrections officers (the same exact training we did in Boston, no less, which made it feel extra special to witness!), and see a bunch of my coworkers in action, which was so cool. It was an extremely overwhelming trip, but apparently (as per my three-month evaluation the following month) I made a good impression on everybody, so I'm glad it went so well! (Also I got the chance to see friends for a couple days right after, which was extremely exciting!)
September
• Sadly, this month had a downer note on it that ended up with more repercussions than I realized at the time -- I jammed my thumb against a wall, which, after several days of excruciating pain, was diagnosed as a strained tendon. After a couple weeks of brace-wearing, icing, and ibuprofen-ing, it mostly recovered... though I have, in the months since, realized that WHEN IT GETS COLD OR PRECIPITATES, IT STARTS TO HURT AGAIN. What kind of bullshit I swear!! How did I reach the age where injuries now do this to me?! I'M SO BITTER ABOUT IT EVEN THOUGH IT'S NOT A SUPER SIGNIFICANT THING, SIGH SIGH.
• On a better note, though, this was the month in which I started knitting!! !!! Can y'all even believe there was a time in which I wasn't doing that?? I had gotten inspired over the prior couple months to finally start learning how to knit, and I found a great local class, and it's been the beginning of something truly beautiful! I absolutely love knitting, and I try to visit the store every week because I love it there so much, and I've spent SO much money on yarn, ha, but it's worth it for all the beautiful things I'm making and how much fun I'm having!! I hope I can finish some bigger projects soon and also start distributing some of my work to friends (and possibly doing some charity knitting as well), yay!!
• This was the month in which Boyfriend started his job as a writing tutor at one of the local city colleges; he's since also added adjuncting for another one of them to his plate, which is a little busier but does help the resume-building! He's also had two pretty successful interviews at other institutions, which is great for his morale should he decide to go elsewhere (but he does really like his current work and hopes to move up there!).
• This was also the month of our eleven-year anniversary (!!!) and the first one in a VERY long time we were able to celebrate in cohabitation! Yay!! We were both working both days of it (we technically got together just past midnight, so we tend to view the day on either side as a flex celebration), so we only got to spend the evenings together, but it was great -- for one of them we went out to dinner and to see a local production of Spamalot, and for the other we watched the S4 premiere of The Good Place, so VERY successful celebration all around!
October
• The first half of October was spent either in transit or visiting family -- Boyfriend and I had what I've been affectionately referring to as college friend wedding #2 (our friend Jason) in Brooklyn, and the weekend after was my dad's birthday, so rather than fly into NYC (which is something I've THANKFULLY been able to avoid thus far), I just took an extended visit home and bussed up and back from there! Said NYC trip was really great; in addition to having an amazing time at the wedding and reuniting with EVEN MORE college pals (the makeup was slightly different than college friend wedding #1, a couple more folks there that we hadn't seen in ages), I also stayed with longtime internet buddy HK and hung out with several other local internet friends, which was so, so much fun. (And yet another internet friend got to meet and approve of Boyfriend, yay!)
• Seeing family was also fun, but for the most part not particularly noteworthy! :") We had a really great time, though, and I'm so happy that my remote work lets me schedule longer trips back without interfering with my schedule!
• I also picked Outlander the show back up this month! Not a HUGE event, but definitely one I'd like to note, since it used to mean so much to me and still has a pretty strongly hold on my emotions. :")
• Also I experienced snow on Halloween this year! Again, not a huge event, but kind of a FUCK YOU, CHICAGO WINTER one worth nothing, ha.
November
• This was my fifteenth (!!) year participating in NaNo, and my thirteenth (!!!) year winning, as well as my third (!!!!) year in a row of interconnected projects; the first of those is the first NaNo I've actually completely finished (not counting the ones that were series of interconnected short stories), and I'm now working on finishing the second and third! This year was... super busy for so many people, which is so understandable, but it means that way fewer friends were doing NaNo, which means the community aspect I usually so love was greatly diminished. Which is a downer, but I still had so much fun, and it made me think of how much I want to one day schedule a friend NaNo month to get that community feeling back!!
• This was also the month of my first live music show in well over a year -- we went to see Hozier, and he was AMAZING. Seriously, I very nearly tried to buy scalper tickets for his second show the next day because it was so transcendent; I'd been looking forward to it for so long and it MORE THAN lived up to my expectations. Can't wait for him to put out new music and tour again so I can relive the experience!!
• Our D&D campaign also wrapped up this month, which was very bittersweet; on the one hand, it's hard to say goodbye to characters we've lived with and loved for so long, but on the other hand, I now have Saturday nights free again! :") But in all seriousness, the ending was really beautiful and felt very satisfying, and I AM glad we got to give everyone a proper ending (and potentially revisit them in the future!) rather than letting things peter out in a far less conclusive way. I'm so grateful to our awesome DMs for making such an incredible world and giving me such an amazing time in my first D&D campaign ever, and so glad I got to spend so much time fiddling around fictional worlds with friends! ♥
• Did another trip back home to see family for Thanksgiving -- less for the holiday, which we definitely don't really celebrate, and more for just togetherness during which we all have time off, ha. Again, not a hugely noteworthy visit, but a really nice one!
December
• And after a couple months' break from work travel, HERE IT CAME AGAIN, this time in the form of several days in [Bruno Mars voice] Jackson, Mississippi! (Seriously, that song has gotten stuck in my head EVERY TIME.) The work trip itself was very productive -- very BUSY, with four back-to-back meetings, but retaining a lot of helpful information for us to move forward and really setting the scene (often in very depressing ways, ha) for our work in the state. I really like the team I traveled with, and it was fun to do a shorter, less intense trip with a much smaller group (there were eight of us in Nashville and only four here!). It made me extra excited for my upcoming Colorado trip in less than two weeks (!!!), I hope that goes just as well overall!!
• In addition to the work stuff in Jackson, I also did a bit of tourism! ... and I say "a bit" because seriously, y'all, there is fucking NOTHING in Jackson. Nothing to do, no people on the streets, only maybe a block or two of the downtown area with interesting stopping points built up. (People will literally just PARK THEIR CARS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE MAIN ROADS there. IN THE CAPITAL CITY!!) (Our hotel was literally RIGHT NEXT TO A HALF-DEMOLISHED BUILDING. It's so, so depressing, I'm so glad they're funneling some funds into revitalization because boy do they DESPERATELY need it.) So I took a few hours to take a look around, and honestly, it was all I needed -- I did the state art museum (which was small but extremely lovely!) and the state's oldest distillery (which was AWESOME, I'm seriously going to have to check a bag next time so I can bring some booze back with me). Next time, I'll try to hit up the Civil Rights Museum, the Eudora Welty House, and the Museum of Muslim Cultures (the former two are further out from downtown, the latter is close by but was $$ so I skipped it this time around). And I'll keep eating delicious food, because the food was admittedly REAL delicious everywhere we went.
• This was also my seventh (!!!) year doing Yuletide -- I had way more going on this month than usual, so I didn't quite manage to dive in with my usual intense fervor, but I still got the assignment I most wanted (that I had actually ALREADY STARTED WRITING as a treat, the first time that's ever happened!!) and I still had a lot of fun. And maybe next year will be a little less hectic and let me push forward with my usual gusto!!
• And, of course, wrapped up the year with our big Belgrade trip, Boyfriend's first time in Europe, meeting my extended family, and seeing Belgrade!! !!! NO PRESSURE, RIGHT? Jetlag did kind of kill him, unfortunately, which made the trip less enjoyable than it could have been, but I think that's pretty unavoidable, and otherwise we had a really amazing time!! Wandering around Munich for an evening was really lovely (even though all the Christmas markets were already closed, boo!!), and I got to show Boyfriend so much in Belgrade that I love and grew up with, and he got to eat so much good food and meet a lot of my favorite people, and spending time with him in the apartment that feels like a second home was just indescribably lovely. I know it was a lot for him, so I very much appreciate his bearing with us for all of it, but he seems to have had a great time and is so enthusiastic about the possibility of returning, which makes me so happy! I hope we get to go when it's better weather and for a little longer sometime soon -- five days is definitely not enough! -- but as is, a VERY successful first trip, and one I'm so glad we got to take. ♥
So... that's 2019, wow! SUCH a big year for me, and I still kind of can't believe it's over, and I'm glad to take the chance to reflect back on it while still planning for the future!! !!! Stay tuned for the rest of my usual recap posts, as well as a Goal Post for things I'm planning in 2020!
This was a very weird year in that the first half bore ALMOST NO RESEMBLANCE to the second; if I called 2018 my rebuilding year, 2019 was the year in which it aaaaaall came to fruition, in full and fabulous form. Basically the first few months of 2019 were almost exactly the same as 2018... and then I got my very first full-time job, and within two months was moving to an entirely new city and back in with Boyfriend after seven years (!!!) of long-distance. TALK ABOUT YOUR MOOD WHIPLASH, FOLKS. It's been a wild ride, and I still kind of can't believe, some days, that this is my life now?? But it IS, and I'd like to take a look back at the year that helped bring me here, to relive all of the highs and lows and exciting new parts of it!!
January
• Mostly just a lowkey month for me, on the whole-- I spent some time with friends, tried to work on some habits, watched a bunch of Hallmark movies, and tried out some new recipes! Not a super eventual month all around, but a nice one, from what I can recall!
• Honorable mention to seeing Aquaman in theaters with friends TWICE, what an adventure we had :"))) I really loved all of the movie dates I got to have with friends in DC and miss it a lot! (Stupid far-flung movie theaters in my new city!!)
• And I ended this month, and started the next, with...
February
• ...a trip to Colorado (Boulder and Breckenridge, specifically) with friends!! We consumed tons of weed and ridiculous media, engaged in real-life rather than long-distance D&D, toured a meadery, played in snow, and just generally had a really lovely, chill, fun time; it was the perfect way to semi-start off the year and I really hope we get to do something like it again sometime in the future. ♥
• I also had a really lovely Valentine's Day date with Dee -- our new friend Alina provided us with free tickets to a play, so we went to dinner and wandered around the nearby Wharf, an area neither of us had been before, and in exploring the beautifully lit waterfront area we managed to stumble onto a S'MORES CART RIGHT IN FRONT OF A FANCY RESTAURANT, COMPLETE WITH FIRE PIT, which was so exciting for me, a lifelong s'mores lover!! It was such a wonderful night, one that definitely stands out to me as a highlight of the year.
March
• This was the month Wasteland, Baby! came out and I got really into Hozier, whose music I'd always loved before, but this really kickstarted off an even stronger fondness, which culminated with seeing him LIVE IN CONCERT IN NOVEMBER, AAAA.
• More bittersweetly, this was the month my maternal grandmother (my last living grandparent) died; it happened shortly after my mom's visit to Belgrade, so it really wasn't a shocker, especially since she's been in increasingly declining health over the past few years. My relationship with her was complicated, to say the least; even in my warmer memories, she was always kind of in the shadow of my grandfather, whom I adored, and the older she got, the more she started becoming short-tempered and verbally abusive towards all of us, and especially him, which really didn't sit well with me. After he died, things got WAY worse, and for a while she became essentially unbearable, which really eroded any remaining goodwill toward her I might have had. The past couple years, though, she pretty much totally declined, and the last time I saw her, we barely interacted. So by the time this happened, it was... really hard to feel any emotions about it at all? They were all really distant and complicated, and I mostly just tried to be there for my mom, for whom things were of course even MORE complicated. Mostly it just feels very, very weird not to have grandparents anymore, though I'm lucky I had all four for as long as I did.
• WOW WHAT A DOWNER, LET'S TAKE A BIT OF A BREATHER BEFORE WE MOVE ON
• In happier news, this was also the month where I had my first interview for my current job!! (Fun fact: the person I first spoke to was our communications director, who just had his last day on the job with us, BOO.)
April
• And following interview #1 for job were interviews #2 and #3 -- both of which went really well and made me increasingly excited for the prospect of said job!! (Additional fun fact: three out of the four people I interviewed with are people I work very closely with now -- my project manager, my data manager, and my supervisor! I hope I get to work with the fourth person sometime, too, we had a great catch-up chat after I got hired and she seems really delightful.)
• This was also the month of what we affectionately referred to as "Samiracon" -- Samira coming to the US and thus a BUNCH of people attempting to coordinate schedules for a giant friend meetup, spanning one vacation, one visiting-family-for-Passover trip, one visiting-family-for-Easter trip, and a handful of people who already lived in the area. There were nearly a dozen of us in our bigger outings and anywhere between four and eight in the smaller ones, and we had so, so much fun going to museums, eating delicious food, wandering through thrift stores, watching ridiculous movies and Youtube clips, and generally having an amazing time meeting up irl for (many of us!) the first time. WHAT AN ADVENTURE IT ALL WAS, I hope we can recreate it at some point!!
May
• This was the month in which I got my job!!! Aaaaaaa!!!! My first real, actual, official, permanent, 9-to-5 job, a process that's been over two years in the making, and an outcome that has consistently been making me super happy since it was first offered to me. I've talked about it a lot since it's happened, but I still genuinely can't believe a job this great exists (remote, solid salary, meaningful work relevant to my background, amazing coworkers), and that I was able to land it as my very first one-- honestly, it's felt like a dream come true, and even six months in, I seriously kind of can't fathom that this is my life now. It felt surreal to start it and now I get to do it EVERY DAY and it just feels so satisfying and fulfilling and good, and IT ALL STARTED HERE!!
• Boyfriend and I also went to our first of MANY college friend weddings this month, our friend Johnnie's in rural Virginia! It was so much fun to see college friends I hadn't seen in years and to catch up; we fell into our old dynamics so quickly, but we're all clearly so much healthier and happier and more stable, which is so nice to see, ha. And the event itself was so nice -- it was on a farm and mostly outside, so I was MISERABLE with allergies, but it was a really beautiful space, and a really beautiful ceremony and reception (their first dance was to The Book Of Love and READER, I CRIED), and sinus death aside, we had an amazing time. (Also there were THREE Great Pyrenees and I pet ALL OF THEM.) (Yes, this is vital to event enjoyment.)
• Hilariously, Game of Thrones's now memetically terrible finale happened the same night as the wedding, so despite the fact that we haven't watched show in years, Boyfriend and I caught portions of the repeat post-reception. BOY, WAS IT BAD, FRIENDS. SO, SO BAD.
June
• So with the job safely under my belt, the plan to move to Chicago with Boyfriend was on! And, coincidentally, he happened to be defending his dissertation (which he passed, thus making him Dr. Boyfriend now, yay!) the week before my job started... so what better time to hop on a plane one evening, see apartments and travel down to see him the next day, watch him defend the day after that, then travel back up to see more apartments and hop a plane home THAT evening? RIGHT? RIGHT? ... Well, fortunately this several-day adventure worked out for the best, because BOY was it fucking exhausting, ha. I saw a couple places I really loved and we applied for one of them semi-arbitrarily, and it was a BIT of a process trying to get it all sorted, but it worked out, and spoiler alert -- we really, really love it!
• And this, my last month in the DC area, was actually the month my parents took their long-anticipated month-long trip to Australia and New Zealand -- I was SO jealous, but I did have the house to myself for a month, which was amazing! ALL the cooking/baking, ALL the friend shenanigans. We had a movie + wine day, a work-from-home party culminating in us going to see Men In Black International, a weekend of winery adventures, a berry-procuring-and-pie-baking day, and even out of town friends coming to hang out -- it was just the absolute perfect close to that chapter of my life, and I'm so happy I had the chance to go out in style with everybody!
• As mentioned, my job actually started this month-- coinciding with my parents leaving, ha! So I had a nice stretch of time where I was on my own to acclimate to the new routine, which was SO helpful. It was a really slow start, which was also super helpful in terms of adjusting to a 9-5 and the kind of communication required of the remote work, as well as getting to know the environment and my new coworkers -- and it has all been uphill from there!!
July
• THIS WAS THE MONTH OF THE MOVE, AAAAA. So I just had some last chill hangs with friends to celebrate -- I still miss everyone from back in DC so, so much, but I'm so glad we had the time together we did (and that we celebrated me moving in such fun style!), and I'm always so excited to see them whenever I'm back. I'm very grateful to now have people to come back to when I do visit! ♥
• And then... the move itself!! !!! My parents came home and a week and a half later, off I went, packed only in two giant suitcases, one medium suitcase, and one small suitcase!! (It felt like A LOT, but I realized it pretty much just meant I was moving with my own body weight packed, which is KIND of cool, ha.) THE ADVENTURE WAS ONLY BEGINNING as we proceeded to figure out our organization, buy furniture, and have a slow trickle of furnishings, dishes, and other decorative details, but this was the start of setting up our new home, and it's been so, so lovely, and I'm so proud of the outcome.
• Celebrated the move by seeing Les Mis TWO DAYS LATER, HEYO. :") Look, when my favorite musical is playing in the town I just moved to, I have to!! I have no choice!! It was such a fun little outing to have on my own (pun not intended) to celebrate the move, and I had such an amazing time seeing the show (wept buckets, of course, as usual!!).
August
• Capped off my thirtieth birthday (!!!) by seeing Hamilton on it, for the second year in a row! (Does this have the makings of a tradition now? I THINK SO.) I really, really loved the Chicago cast; they, on the whole, had the best voices of the three casts I've now seen, especially Jamilton, and it was great to see a group who's been doing the same thing in the same place for so long. I love seeing musicals again and again with different casts, picking up on the differences and what they choose to keep mostly the same, seeing different takes on performances and different audience reactions -- and it was Boyfriend's first time seeing the show at all, which was extra great to share with him!
• This was also the month in which MY FIRST OFFICIAL WORK TRAVEL KICKED OFF, AAAAA. Part of the reason I'm allowed to be remote for the job is that there's so much travel (three trips in my first six months is no joke!!), and I started it by heading to Boston for both an in-person meeting of my main project team and a mandatory training, at which I met two out of the four coworkers who got hired around the same time I did! (I'd already met two of them in DC, one during a work trip -- her travel got started even earlier! -- and one because she lives there. LOOK AT ME, ALL NETWORKING.) It was a lot of fun to... actually SEE my work's office, ha, and see everyone in person and actually do some in-person work; it made it all feel so much more real and official! (Also I stayed in a REAL cute AirBnB right across the street from a Shake Shack; extremely important.) (Also I got to briefly see my aunt and uncle the day before AND catch up with my two dearest still-in-Boston friends, Ellen and Katharina, which was great!! So, so excited to see the latter again on my current Boston visit, aaaa.)
• And shortly after this trip, on VERY short notice, was a very busy four days in Nashville with my supervisor's project team!! SO much work and hectic scheduling, but also so much fun -- I got to sit in on meetings with state officials and nonprofit stakeholders alike, watch some training of corrections officers (the same exact training we did in Boston, no less, which made it feel extra special to witness!), and see a bunch of my coworkers in action, which was so cool. It was an extremely overwhelming trip, but apparently (as per my three-month evaluation the following month) I made a good impression on everybody, so I'm glad it went so well! (Also I got the chance to see friends for a couple days right after, which was extremely exciting!)
September
• Sadly, this month had a downer note on it that ended up with more repercussions than I realized at the time -- I jammed my thumb against a wall, which, after several days of excruciating pain, was diagnosed as a strained tendon. After a couple weeks of brace-wearing, icing, and ibuprofen-ing, it mostly recovered... though I have, in the months since, realized that WHEN IT GETS COLD OR PRECIPITATES, IT STARTS TO HURT AGAIN. What kind of bullshit I swear!! How did I reach the age where injuries now do this to me?! I'M SO BITTER ABOUT IT EVEN THOUGH IT'S NOT A SUPER SIGNIFICANT THING, SIGH SIGH.
• On a better note, though, this was the month in which I started knitting!! !!! Can y'all even believe there was a time in which I wasn't doing that?? I had gotten inspired over the prior couple months to finally start learning how to knit, and I found a great local class, and it's been the beginning of something truly beautiful! I absolutely love knitting, and I try to visit the store every week because I love it there so much, and I've spent SO much money on yarn, ha, but it's worth it for all the beautiful things I'm making and how much fun I'm having!! I hope I can finish some bigger projects soon and also start distributing some of my work to friends (and possibly doing some charity knitting as well), yay!!
• This was the month in which Boyfriend started his job as a writing tutor at one of the local city colleges; he's since also added adjuncting for another one of them to his plate, which is a little busier but does help the resume-building! He's also had two pretty successful interviews at other institutions, which is great for his morale should he decide to go elsewhere (but he does really like his current work and hopes to move up there!).
• This was also the month of our eleven-year anniversary (!!!) and the first one in a VERY long time we were able to celebrate in cohabitation! Yay!! We were both working both days of it (we technically got together just past midnight, so we tend to view the day on either side as a flex celebration), so we only got to spend the evenings together, but it was great -- for one of them we went out to dinner and to see a local production of Spamalot, and for the other we watched the S4 premiere of The Good Place, so VERY successful celebration all around!
October
• The first half of October was spent either in transit or visiting family -- Boyfriend and I had what I've been affectionately referring to as college friend wedding #2 (our friend Jason) in Brooklyn, and the weekend after was my dad's birthday, so rather than fly into NYC (which is something I've THANKFULLY been able to avoid thus far), I just took an extended visit home and bussed up and back from there! Said NYC trip was really great; in addition to having an amazing time at the wedding and reuniting with EVEN MORE college pals (the makeup was slightly different than college friend wedding #1, a couple more folks there that we hadn't seen in ages), I also stayed with longtime internet buddy HK and hung out with several other local internet friends, which was so, so much fun. (And yet another internet friend got to meet and approve of Boyfriend, yay!)
• Seeing family was also fun, but for the most part not particularly noteworthy! :") We had a really great time, though, and I'm so happy that my remote work lets me schedule longer trips back without interfering with my schedule!
• I also picked Outlander the show back up this month! Not a HUGE event, but definitely one I'd like to note, since it used to mean so much to me and still has a pretty strongly hold on my emotions. :")
• Also I experienced snow on Halloween this year! Again, not a huge event, but kind of a FUCK YOU, CHICAGO WINTER one worth nothing, ha.
November
• This was my fifteenth (!!) year participating in NaNo, and my thirteenth (!!!) year winning, as well as my third (!!!!) year in a row of interconnected projects; the first of those is the first NaNo I've actually completely finished (not counting the ones that were series of interconnected short stories), and I'm now working on finishing the second and third! This year was... super busy for so many people, which is so understandable, but it means that way fewer friends were doing NaNo, which means the community aspect I usually so love was greatly diminished. Which is a downer, but I still had so much fun, and it made me think of how much I want to one day schedule a friend NaNo month to get that community feeling back!!
• This was also the month of my first live music show in well over a year -- we went to see Hozier, and he was AMAZING. Seriously, I very nearly tried to buy scalper tickets for his second show the next day because it was so transcendent; I'd been looking forward to it for so long and it MORE THAN lived up to my expectations. Can't wait for him to put out new music and tour again so I can relive the experience!!
• Our D&D campaign also wrapped up this month, which was very bittersweet; on the one hand, it's hard to say goodbye to characters we've lived with and loved for so long, but on the other hand, I now have Saturday nights free again! :") But in all seriousness, the ending was really beautiful and felt very satisfying, and I AM glad we got to give everyone a proper ending (and potentially revisit them in the future!) rather than letting things peter out in a far less conclusive way. I'm so grateful to our awesome DMs for making such an incredible world and giving me such an amazing time in my first D&D campaign ever, and so glad I got to spend so much time fiddling around fictional worlds with friends! ♥
• Did another trip back home to see family for Thanksgiving -- less for the holiday, which we definitely don't really celebrate, and more for just togetherness during which we all have time off, ha. Again, not a hugely noteworthy visit, but a really nice one!
December
• And after a couple months' break from work travel, HERE IT CAME AGAIN, this time in the form of several days in [Bruno Mars voice] Jackson, Mississippi! (Seriously, that song has gotten stuck in my head EVERY TIME.) The work trip itself was very productive -- very BUSY, with four back-to-back meetings, but retaining a lot of helpful information for us to move forward and really setting the scene (often in very depressing ways, ha) for our work in the state. I really like the team I traveled with, and it was fun to do a shorter, less intense trip with a much smaller group (there were eight of us in Nashville and only four here!). It made me extra excited for my upcoming Colorado trip in less than two weeks (!!!), I hope that goes just as well overall!!
• In addition to the work stuff in Jackson, I also did a bit of tourism! ... and I say "a bit" because seriously, y'all, there is fucking NOTHING in Jackson. Nothing to do, no people on the streets, only maybe a block or two of the downtown area with interesting stopping points built up. (People will literally just PARK THEIR CARS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE MAIN ROADS there. IN THE CAPITAL CITY!!) (Our hotel was literally RIGHT NEXT TO A HALF-DEMOLISHED BUILDING. It's so, so depressing, I'm so glad they're funneling some funds into revitalization because boy do they DESPERATELY need it.) So I took a few hours to take a look around, and honestly, it was all I needed -- I did the state art museum (which was small but extremely lovely!) and the state's oldest distillery (which was AWESOME, I'm seriously going to have to check a bag next time so I can bring some booze back with me). Next time, I'll try to hit up the Civil Rights Museum, the Eudora Welty House, and the Museum of Muslim Cultures (the former two are further out from downtown, the latter is close by but was $$ so I skipped it this time around). And I'll keep eating delicious food, because the food was admittedly REAL delicious everywhere we went.
• This was also my seventh (!!!) year doing Yuletide -- I had way more going on this month than usual, so I didn't quite manage to dive in with my usual intense fervor, but I still got the assignment I most wanted (that I had actually ALREADY STARTED WRITING as a treat, the first time that's ever happened!!) and I still had a lot of fun. And maybe next year will be a little less hectic and let me push forward with my usual gusto!!
• And, of course, wrapped up the year with our big Belgrade trip, Boyfriend's first time in Europe, meeting my extended family, and seeing Belgrade!! !!! NO PRESSURE, RIGHT? Jetlag did kind of kill him, unfortunately, which made the trip less enjoyable than it could have been, but I think that's pretty unavoidable, and otherwise we had a really amazing time!! Wandering around Munich for an evening was really lovely (even though all the Christmas markets were already closed, boo!!), and I got to show Boyfriend so much in Belgrade that I love and grew up with, and he got to eat so much good food and meet a lot of my favorite people, and spending time with him in the apartment that feels like a second home was just indescribably lovely. I know it was a lot for him, so I very much appreciate his bearing with us for all of it, but he seems to have had a great time and is so enthusiastic about the possibility of returning, which makes me so happy! I hope we get to go when it's better weather and for a little longer sometime soon -- five days is definitely not enough! -- but as is, a VERY successful first trip, and one I'm so glad we got to take. ♥
So... that's 2019, wow! SUCH a big year for me, and I still kind of can't believe it's over, and I'm glad to take the chance to reflect back on it while still planning for the future!! !!! Stay tuned for the rest of my usual recap posts, as well as a Goal Post for things I'm planning in 2020!