2014

I was going to blog about something else, and I'm worried about this blog entry in case it becomes self-indulgent, so instead of blogging about my stuff, I'm going to talk about what happened around me.

The year started very stressfully and positively with us moving and me having an assessment interview for counselling on the same day.  My brother helped us.  Theintrostealer was fantastic in clearing up the whole living room.  We'd lived on the other side of the city for twenty-one years by that time, but prior to that both Sarada and I had lived around here for several years, so although we miss Westcotes, it's also like coming home.  Being here is good but at first too many changes happened at once and I found it hard to deal with everything shifting.

I'm a bit hazy about what else happened and in what order.  There was hassle with housing benefit which was eventually resolved.  This caused a lot of stress early on.  It would be nice to get into a situation where we don't need to claim any benefits at all.  I don't know how we're going to get there but I don't want to say for sure that we never will.  The situation could arise where we're simply cut off, and I can't envisage what would follow from that, but even there I'm not committing myself to believing it would be disastrous.  We do know that our subjective impression is that we can fling any degree of effort we like at the poverty issue and it has never so far been resolved.

Then there was the house warming, which was good.

After that, Theintrostealer started to get physically ill, and got steadily worse, ending up in intensive care at the Infirmary.  We still don't really know how this happened and although I would like to talk about it, I wouldn't like to say anything he wouldn't want me to, so I won't.

In the middle of all that, another major highlight of my year happened:  I visited my home town and stayed with VanillaRose!  This involved doing something I never imagined I'd ever do, with her help.  I got my ears pierced.  It was strange going back to my home town as myself rather than under the cloud of furtive deception that was my home for the first eighteen years of my life, but it was weirdly both like and unlike going back.  I can't pass over this event without commenting on what an amazing, wonderful and fantastic person VanillaRose is, as are her friends, and meeting her face to face was brilliant.  The weekend was however tinged with guilt because it meant leaving Theintrostealer in hospital for a couple of days, although he was on the mend by then and other family members were around.  Another good thing about the weekend was that my oldest friend gave me a lift there and back.  I pondered what the three of us had in common when we were all together, and I think there is quite a lot, although one of the things we had in common would probably have prevented us from finding out what the others were.

So far, and so ridiculously, I have not succeeded in extricating the sleepers inserted on that day, but I will.

Theintrostealer emerged from hospital to everyone's great relief and Sleepoversweet left home to go to university.  This was a major event for various reasons, which she should probably comment on rather than me.  She's doing so much better than either Sarada or I did at that point that it bodes really well for the rest of her life.  We can soon graduate to being dried up husks.  I can hardly wait.

NaNoWriMo in November - a month in which to write a fifty thousand word first draft of a novella.  Although this had gone awry every time I'd tried before, this time it was a success, although it feels disturbingly abandoned.  It was good to do something like that in a group.  It is actually ludicrously easy to write that many words in a month.  The problem is making it good.

Sarada's had an eventful year too but she can tell you about that over here

So that was the year that was and I've managed to restrain myself from saying too much about myself.