silliness (dreams, 2012)
Jan. 12th, 2013 07:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanateI had a very complicated dream that involved house hunting bits clearly inspired by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
the_impassive's recent rental and a conversation yesterday evening touching on the first house I remember living in and one of grauwulf's years of elementary school. And then there was a bit where I was finishing up a class that involved playing something that was half computer game and half arcade-style hitting things in a spread-out whack-a-mole sort of format (only with a kind of puppet theater backdrop, and without the unpredictability of whack-a-mole) which I'm pretty sure was inspired by *someone* drumming on my insides off and on all night.
1. What did you do in 2012 that you'd never done before?
Took the Maryland Master Naturalist class, went to cons were I talked to people & did some networking, got pregnant.
2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Last year's goals were birthday-to-birthday, and I seem to have managed some, in a small way. I have a place-holder of the website I want, which does for now; the bedroom is not just painted and carpeted, but book-shelved; and while I didn't track craft projects I did a lot of them, and spent rather large sums on native plants, what with all the new garden space to fill in. Not so much on the writing (see below). And as I think I've already mentioned, now seems like a rather silly time to be making expansive goals. Have a healthy kid and survive early parenthood with as much sanity as possible seems like the most I'm ready to commit to.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Not really? Some friends on the west coast had their second in August, and my cousin's wife had her first in November (but they're in WI, and for various reasons I haven't even actually met her yet.)
4. Did anyone close to you die?
Not yet. Grauwulf lost his grandfather, though.
5. What countries did you visit?
The farthest afield I've been this year was the near end of Ohio and Boston.
6. What would you like to have in 2013 that you lacked in 2012?
Weirdly, I'm sort of looking forward to having the very clear priorities involved with taking care of an infant; I've been doing too much scrambling lately to try to accomplish *all the things* and missing at least half of them.
7. What dates from 2012 will remain etched upon your memory and why?
Um... driving to FL for mothers' day weekend to rescue my father from the hospital, probably. There are a bunch of discrete experiences, but I think that's the only one that's particularly temporally tied down.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Most of the things I did over the year were cumulative towards things that aren't done yet. So, seven and a bit months of gestating, continuing to follow up on networking as a writer, working towards the Master Naturalist cert (ok, I'm done with my requirements, but our class doesn't "graduate" until April), building various bits of wildlife garden/habitat (my pond! a backyard treeline-to-be! Proto-meadow! working on a labyrinth garden in the back!).
9. What was your biggest failure?
In the sense of the thing I particularly wanted to do but didn't manage was most of my novel-writing goals from summer onwards. I wanted to begin querying agents about the first book, to have done a great deal more replotting and cleaning up the three middle novels, and to finish at least a plot-sketch level of rough draft for the 5th/final one. None of this turned out to be as compatible as I would have liked with my brain on pregnancy hormones.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Nothing major.
11. What was the best thing you bought?
Readercon tickets? (though actually those were at the end of 2011) A pond liner? Wood to build bookshelves? Hard to say, really. Nothing stands out as a clear "best." (ask me ten years from now how the trees are doing, though...)
12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
I'm not sure I have any stand-outs on these in my real life; there are a lot of people on the news/politics side of things who could probably stand to be mentioned, particularly for the latter, but that would involve keeping track of political figures.
14. Where did most of your money go?
On a household level, definitely mortgage payments. On a personal level, probably plants, books, & fabric in that order.
15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
I don't really seem to do sustained jump-up-and-down excitement that much. (Susan Cain suggests that may be a potential introvert trait, and protective against things like making impulsive bad decisions.) Things I that thought were excellent & that made me happy on one level or another include the baby house wrens, building bookshelves & a pond, moving into the bedroom that looks out at the oak tree, having a writing loft, building at least a small social network for congoing, and young Miss Radiator. Although "excited" is really not the right word to describe how I feel about impending motherhood. I think I'm saving up my emotional energy for the long haul.
16. What song will always remind you of 2012?
I don think this year had a song. Most of them don't, as such.
17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder? Neither really. Stressed about different things, and the high & low points are more dramatic, but it kind of balances out.
b) thinner or fatter? Same me, + roughly 20lbs baby & support system
c) richer or poorer? About the same. But with less mortgage, and only a few more grad school classes to go, so this should improve. (In theory, healthy babies cost much less than a year of grad school. We'll see.)
18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Writing. Talking to/getting together with people I like. Finishing things, possibly going interesting places on a day/weekend trip scale.
19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Probably staring at the computer; sitting on the couch being overheated all summer. The usual "I should have done [this, that, the other] instead of staring at the walls" except that there's also a point at which my brain does seem to require some amount of staring at the walls time. Just probably not as much as it thinks it does.
20. How did you spend Christmas?
Here (and I finally got into the swing of wrapping presents so that grauwulf couldn't guess what was in them) and then down to VA for dinner with my parents. Very laid back, but not in a bad way.
21. Did you fall in love in 2012?
Not that way. There are some naturalist & historic concepts that made nice colorful splashes being to the soup that is my brain (Doggerland, Homo erectus, milkweed diversity, house wrens, babywearing with a big strip of linen, stuff like that)
22. What was your favourite TV programme?
Uh... probably that PBS bit on the wolves in Chernobyl. I don't think I watched anything actually on the TV besides snippets of football games when I didn't go somewhere else fast enough.
23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
No. The only candidates for that would be politicians, and hating people I don't even know is completely a waste of my time.
24. What was the best book you read?
"Book" singular? Some stand-outs: Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (Bjuold), The Serpent Sea/The Siren Depths (Martha Wells), The Poisoner's Handbook Deborah Blum), Breadcrumbs (Anne Ursu). And a lot of re-reads, which I already knew were good & that was why I reread them...
25. What was your greatest musical discovery?
This sounds like something I found under my bed. According to iTunes, the only song I added to my music library in 2012 was Owl City's "Fireflies." Though there was a lot of new stuff from a few months before that, so I was still working through that earlier in the year.
26. What did you want and get?
Uh, pregnant?
27. What did you want and not get?
Better health & less stress for my family.
28. What was your favorite film of this year?
Brave. Wish it had come out when I was twelve.
29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
Watched it snow, went out for dinner, and bought picture frames for a few things I've been meaning to put up on the walls for ages. Turned thirty-four.
30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Having more writing-brain. I think I just said that...
31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2012?
Oh, goodness. The whole changing size thing does weird stuff to one's brain. I've been moving towards wanting a bunch of tunic & leggings options for a while, and did some indulging in that for maternity wear. By the end of the year, I'd pretty much moved on to "ok, what will work to nurse in?" and um... Somewhere I went from "ok, how can I do steampunk while pregnant" to "hey, this could totally be a nursing garment if you did the front zippers in plastic..." Interesting clothing has always kind of been one of my points of madness, though, so I guess that's nothing new. (and no, I'm not actually making myself a gothy zippery nursing jacket. Really.)
32. What kept you sane?
To the extent that I am? Grauwulf (we trade off on this one), the cat, backyard wildlife watching, baking things, books, other people talking about writing process and other making-of-art.
33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Er, what?
34. What political issue stirred you the most?
Stupid election politics getting stupider. And the world in which it's apparently ok not to believe in well-researched reality if you don't want to.
35. Who did you miss?
None of my friends live close enough. So most of the cool people I know, a little bit each.
The other thing I feel like I've been missing out on is not a who so much as a what-- there's this expectation, being pregnant, that you'll be treated to everyone and sundry's weird anecdotes about pregnancy and how it went for them, or what horrible thing their aunt went through. Normally, all I get is people's anecdotes about their hair (which I really don't care about) but I was looking forward to getting my dose of pregnancy folklore and horror stories. And then nearly all the time I've been visibly pregnant has been spent either in limited social situations, or around childless people; grauwulf got far more "this is what to expect/what we experienced" stuff from his co-workers than I have from anybody.
36. Who was the best new person you met?
Uh... I'd say Phiala, only I didn't actually manage to track her down at pennsic, so we haven't actually met. The master naturalist crew was pretty cool en masse, but I don't know that I'd highlight any of them specifically.
37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned
Nothing new as such; just more of the "some things are good & some things are bad, and you just keep going either way." Because, I mean, what else are you going to do?
Xposty from dreamwidth.
the_impassive's recent rental and a conversation yesterday evening touching on the first house I remember living in and one of grauwulf's years of elementary school. And then there was a bit where I was finishing up a class that involved playing something that was half computer game and half arcade-style hitting things in a spread-out whack-a-mole sort of format (only with a kind of puppet theater backdrop, and without the unpredictability of whack-a-mole) which I'm pretty sure was inspired by *someone* drumming on my insides off and on all night. 1. What did you do in 2012 that you'd never done before?
Took the Maryland Master Naturalist class, went to cons were I talked to people & did some networking, got pregnant.
2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Last year's goals were birthday-to-birthday, and I seem to have managed some, in a small way. I have a place-holder of the website I want, which does for now; the bedroom is not just painted and carpeted, but book-shelved; and while I didn't track craft projects I did a lot of them, and spent rather large sums on native plants, what with all the new garden space to fill in. Not so much on the writing (see below). And as I think I've already mentioned, now seems like a rather silly time to be making expansive goals. Have a healthy kid and survive early parenthood with as much sanity as possible seems like the most I'm ready to commit to.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Not really? Some friends on the west coast had their second in August, and my cousin's wife had her first in November (but they're in WI, and for various reasons I haven't even actually met her yet.)
4. Did anyone close to you die?
Not yet. Grauwulf lost his grandfather, though.
5. What countries did you visit?
The farthest afield I've been this year was the near end of Ohio and Boston.
6. What would you like to have in 2013 that you lacked in 2012?
Weirdly, I'm sort of looking forward to having the very clear priorities involved with taking care of an infant; I've been doing too much scrambling lately to try to accomplish *all the things* and missing at least half of them.
7. What dates from 2012 will remain etched upon your memory and why?
Um... driving to FL for mothers' day weekend to rescue my father from the hospital, probably. There are a bunch of discrete experiences, but I think that's the only one that's particularly temporally tied down.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Most of the things I did over the year were cumulative towards things that aren't done yet. So, seven and a bit months of gestating, continuing to follow up on networking as a writer, working towards the Master Naturalist cert (ok, I'm done with my requirements, but our class doesn't "graduate" until April), building various bits of wildlife garden/habitat (my pond! a backyard treeline-to-be! Proto-meadow! working on a labyrinth garden in the back!).
9. What was your biggest failure?
In the sense of the thing I particularly wanted to do but didn't manage was most of my novel-writing goals from summer onwards. I wanted to begin querying agents about the first book, to have done a great deal more replotting and cleaning up the three middle novels, and to finish at least a plot-sketch level of rough draft for the 5th/final one. None of this turned out to be as compatible as I would have liked with my brain on pregnancy hormones.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Nothing major.
11. What was the best thing you bought?
Readercon tickets? (though actually those were at the end of 2011) A pond liner? Wood to build bookshelves? Hard to say, really. Nothing stands out as a clear "best." (ask me ten years from now how the trees are doing, though...)
12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
I'm not sure I have any stand-outs on these in my real life; there are a lot of people on the news/politics side of things who could probably stand to be mentioned, particularly for the latter, but that would involve keeping track of political figures.
14. Where did most of your money go?
On a household level, definitely mortgage payments. On a personal level, probably plants, books, & fabric in that order.
15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
I don't really seem to do sustained jump-up-and-down excitement that much. (Susan Cain suggests that may be a potential introvert trait, and protective against things like making impulsive bad decisions.) Things I that thought were excellent & that made me happy on one level or another include the baby house wrens, building bookshelves & a pond, moving into the bedroom that looks out at the oak tree, having a writing loft, building at least a small social network for congoing, and young Miss Radiator. Although "excited" is really not the right word to describe how I feel about impending motherhood. I think I'm saving up my emotional energy for the long haul.
16. What song will always remind you of 2012?
I don think this year had a song. Most of them don't, as such.
17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder? Neither really. Stressed about different things, and the high & low points are more dramatic, but it kind of balances out.
b) thinner or fatter? Same me, + roughly 20lbs baby & support system
c) richer or poorer? About the same. But with less mortgage, and only a few more grad school classes to go, so this should improve. (In theory, healthy babies cost much less than a year of grad school. We'll see.)
18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Writing. Talking to/getting together with people I like. Finishing things, possibly going interesting places on a day/weekend trip scale.
19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Probably staring at the computer; sitting on the couch being overheated all summer. The usual "I should have done [this, that, the other] instead of staring at the walls" except that there's also a point at which my brain does seem to require some amount of staring at the walls time. Just probably not as much as it thinks it does.
20. How did you spend Christmas?
Here (and I finally got into the swing of wrapping presents so that grauwulf couldn't guess what was in them) and then down to VA for dinner with my parents. Very laid back, but not in a bad way.
21. Did you fall in love in 2012?
Not that way. There are some naturalist & historic concepts that made nice colorful splashes being to the soup that is my brain (Doggerland, Homo erectus, milkweed diversity, house wrens, babywearing with a big strip of linen, stuff like that)
22. What was your favourite TV programme?
Uh... probably that PBS bit on the wolves in Chernobyl. I don't think I watched anything actually on the TV besides snippets of football games when I didn't go somewhere else fast enough.
23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
No. The only candidates for that would be politicians, and hating people I don't even know is completely a waste of my time.
24. What was the best book you read?
"Book" singular? Some stand-outs: Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (Bjuold), The Serpent Sea/The Siren Depths (Martha Wells), The Poisoner's Handbook Deborah Blum), Breadcrumbs (Anne Ursu). And a lot of re-reads, which I already knew were good & that was why I reread them...
25. What was your greatest musical discovery?
This sounds like something I found under my bed. According to iTunes, the only song I added to my music library in 2012 was Owl City's "Fireflies." Though there was a lot of new stuff from a few months before that, so I was still working through that earlier in the year.
26. What did you want and get?
Uh, pregnant?
27. What did you want and not get?
Better health & less stress for my family.
28. What was your favorite film of this year?
Brave. Wish it had come out when I was twelve.
29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
Watched it snow, went out for dinner, and bought picture frames for a few things I've been meaning to put up on the walls for ages. Turned thirty-four.
30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Having more writing-brain. I think I just said that...
31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2012?
Oh, goodness. The whole changing size thing does weird stuff to one's brain. I've been moving towards wanting a bunch of tunic & leggings options for a while, and did some indulging in that for maternity wear. By the end of the year, I'd pretty much moved on to "ok, what will work to nurse in?" and um... Somewhere I went from "ok, how can I do steampunk while pregnant" to "hey, this could totally be a nursing garment if you did the front zippers in plastic..." Interesting clothing has always kind of been one of my points of madness, though, so I guess that's nothing new. (and no, I'm not actually making myself a gothy zippery nursing jacket. Really.)
32. What kept you sane?
To the extent that I am? Grauwulf (we trade off on this one), the cat, backyard wildlife watching, baking things, books, other people talking about writing process and other making-of-art.
33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Er, what?
34. What political issue stirred you the most?
Stupid election politics getting stupider. And the world in which it's apparently ok not to believe in well-researched reality if you don't want to.
35. Who did you miss?
None of my friends live close enough. So most of the cool people I know, a little bit each.
The other thing I feel like I've been missing out on is not a who so much as a what-- there's this expectation, being pregnant, that you'll be treated to everyone and sundry's weird anecdotes about pregnancy and how it went for them, or what horrible thing their aunt went through. Normally, all I get is people's anecdotes about their hair (which I really don't care about) but I was looking forward to getting my dose of pregnancy folklore and horror stories. And then nearly all the time I've been visibly pregnant has been spent either in limited social situations, or around childless people; grauwulf got far more "this is what to expect/what we experienced" stuff from his co-workers than I have from anybody.
36. Who was the best new person you met?
Uh... I'd say Phiala, only I didn't actually manage to track her down at pennsic, so we haven't actually met. The master naturalist crew was pretty cool en masse, but I don't know that I'd highlight any of them specifically.
37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned
Nothing new as such; just more of the "some things are good & some things are bad, and you just keep going either way." Because, I mean, what else are you going to do?
Xposty from dreamwidth.