2014
My cat survived the year. Not that there's any reason she shouldn't have - she has FIV but she's an indoor-only cat so mostly safe from getting sick, and she's probably only around 10 years old. But so many other cats I knew died this year, that it feels salient that she did not.
My year was ambivalent, and on balance good. Not because it was so-so, but because the really awesome things were a little better then the badness of the really awful. Maybe I'll write more about that in another post, which would be friendslocked, if I write it. It's why I answered "mixed" a lot of times when people asked how I was.
Aside from that extreme of simultaneous up & down, though, my life stayed very stable. Well, there were some shifts in what I do at work, and that big project I put so much time into in 2011 & 2012 got shut down, which I find very sad. But I'm at the same job, living in the same house, with Valerie and Molly since 2008. In 2012 a house near ours that a bunch of our friends lived in burned down. 2013 the cancellation of that project at work got announced, the large majority of our department transferred to other projects, and we moved to a new office. Nothing like either of those happened in 2014.
I did travel a lot!
From 2003-2009 I travelled around the continental US an awful lot, and got to 46 of the lower 48 states more than once each. Part of it was political campaigns. When you volunteer on a campaign, you can almost always get crash space ("supporter housing") in exchange for spending time canvassing, so I'd hope around between stings of volunteering and visiting friends. In between campaigns, plenty of free time. I did tech contracts to avoid running down my savings completely, but they were all hourly pay with flexible schedules, and could often be done from wherever I had Internet, so I could interleave roadtripping with work.
In 2008 I bought my house and that required normal full time jobs, because they weren't giving out mortgages to people who didn't have those. My last really long roadtrip was between jobs at the end of 2008 & beginning of 2009. Then I spent the next couple of years rebuilding my savings, and then the next couple of years after that on a big somewhat intense project at work. But by the end of 2012 I had money and vacation time. Not enough time for the kind of roadtripping around the country I used to do, but enough money to make lots of shorter trips by air instead, from long weekends to about 2 weeks long.
In the past two years, I went to... (places 100+ miles from home)
- NYC, Vermont, the Berkshires, a few times
- Atlanta, the Everglades & Key Largo, twice each
- Also the SF Bay Area, Philly, and DC, twice each
- Asheville, Raleigh-Durham, and several places in Florida
- Portland, Seattle, and Mount St Helens
- Colorado (Vail, Denver, Boulder)
- Israel
- Paris
- Hawaii and Oahu islands on two different trips each, and Maui on one trip
- Korea (Seoul, Gwangju, Mokpo, Jeju) and Kyoto
- Dublin, Netherlands, Berlin, Italy, Cannes, Barcelona, and Mallorca
My cat stayed home. Here she is:
My year was ambivalent, and on balance good. Not because it was so-so, but because the really awesome things were a little better then the badness of the really awful. Maybe I'll write more about that in another post, which would be friendslocked, if I write it. It's why I answered "mixed" a lot of times when people asked how I was.
Aside from that extreme of simultaneous up & down, though, my life stayed very stable. Well, there were some shifts in what I do at work, and that big project I put so much time into in 2011 & 2012 got shut down, which I find very sad. But I'm at the same job, living in the same house, with Valerie and Molly since 2008. In 2012 a house near ours that a bunch of our friends lived in burned down. 2013 the cancellation of that project at work got announced, the large majority of our department transferred to other projects, and we moved to a new office. Nothing like either of those happened in 2014.
I did travel a lot!
From 2003-2009 I travelled around the continental US an awful lot, and got to 46 of the lower 48 states more than once each. Part of it was political campaigns. When you volunteer on a campaign, you can almost always get crash space ("supporter housing") in exchange for spending time canvassing, so I'd hope around between stings of volunteering and visiting friends. In between campaigns, plenty of free time. I did tech contracts to avoid running down my savings completely, but they were all hourly pay with flexible schedules, and could often be done from wherever I had Internet, so I could interleave roadtripping with work.
In 2008 I bought my house and that required normal full time jobs, because they weren't giving out mortgages to people who didn't have those. My last really long roadtrip was between jobs at the end of 2008 & beginning of 2009. Then I spent the next couple of years rebuilding my savings, and then the next couple of years after that on a big somewhat intense project at work. But by the end of 2012 I had money and vacation time. Not enough time for the kind of roadtripping around the country I used to do, but enough money to make lots of shorter trips by air instead, from long weekends to about 2 weeks long.
In the past two years, I went to... (places 100+ miles from home)
- NYC, Vermont, the Berkshires, a few times
- Atlanta, the Everglades & Key Largo, twice each
- Also the SF Bay Area, Philly, and DC, twice each
- Asheville, Raleigh-Durham, and several places in Florida
- Portland, Seattle, and Mount St Helens
- Colorado (Vail, Denver, Boulder)
- Israel
- Paris
- Hawaii and Oahu islands on two different trips each, and Maui on one trip
- Korea (Seoul, Gwangju, Mokpo, Jeju) and Kyoto
- Dublin, Netherlands, Berlin, Italy, Cannes, Barcelona, and Mallorca
My cat stayed home. Here she is:
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
You could, I suppose, view the fact that I've stuck to jobs I don't have to commute to by car for a long time to be a sort of offset (despite all the long roadtrips, I've done fewer miles than the average American commuter over the same period of years), but I don't view it that way much. And I think trying to track one's personal contribution to the emissions of air travel is a complete fiction, and there's no way at all to figure out how much I actually contribute to the supply of air travel based on the marginal demand I add.
My theory of change holds that systemic change through public policy is more important than most of what one buys if one pays for most of what I've seen as "carbon offset". But that end of things would be even more difficult to track. How much carbon, exactly, do my particular efforts to affect public policy offset in a given year? It's such a weird question to try to answer. So, that's another part of why I'm personally not drawn to the offset framing of contributing to climate issues.
Like I said, I can see why it's appealing to many people, and I'm glad it's out there and motivating people in the ways that it does. But it doesn't work for me.
no subject
ALSO when you look for white noise videos on Youtube there are 8 hour videos of just the sound of cats purring. It's the best white noise ever.
no subject
no subject
(Anonymous) 2015-01-03 05:13 am (UTC)(link)Volcano Girl
no subject
no subject
no subject