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.

( Lots of travel! )

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. )