write me well

Tag: life

  • Oh, spring!

    Much in the same way that you cannot beat London in the summer, you cannot beat the PNW once spring has finally sprung. The sun wins a five-month-long battle with ceaseless cloud cover, the temperature creeps a degree or two above fifty, the sun stops setting at 4pm, and I genuinely think you can feel your soul leave your body (in a good way!) when you step out onto your front porch in the early afternoon to a blue sky filled with warm sunlight. I am a true believer in the seasons and I love them each deeply – but the first time every year that I feel sun-warmed skin might just be the best seasonal emotion.

    We went down to San Diego in March for a long overdue visit to friends and America’s finest city and it was a flashforward of the sunshine to come, and I appreciated it in my bones. (For the record, I think when it comes to city monikers, the tourism gods have chosen well when bestowing the title “Finest City”: the English city that boasts that distinction is none other than Norwich.) But after four beautiful days, we left San Diego in March and returned to Auburn in March, where it proceeded to snow. SNOW.

    It took about a month, but now, in the mixed bag of forecasts that is the month of April, spring is doing its damnedest to stay sprung, and I am revelling in it and all of the joy therein.

    What’s been bringing the joy besides the sunshine? So many things! Let’s make a list!

    One: Trips & trips & trips

      There was San Diego last month, then next month I will be going on a cruise to Alaska (a first for me and a very generous gift from a very generous friend), and in August Aaron and I are GOING TO ENGLAND & SPAIN!!!! I am SO VERY THRILLED! We will be there for 12 days, flying in and out of London, where Aaron will get his first United Kingdom experience and see all of the things and people and places I have fallen in love with over and over again. Is there something better than sharing what you love with someone you love? It is one of my most favorite things. Then we will set off for Spain, where we will see one  of my best friends and her amazing family, which will be so very wonderful. And then we will catch the total solar eclipse on the 12th. Jetlag and August heat be damned – it will be SUCH an adventure, I cannot WAIT.

      Two: Progress of many kinds!

      When we bought our house, it was almost entirely because of the potential on the property to host a shop for Aaron. We have just under half an acre, and on it sits a 24’ x 30’ reinforced cement foundation three-walled RV carport, making us one wall and an electrical plan away from a perfect shop. In the past five months, while the sun battled the ceaseless clouds, Aaron and I have battled the equally ceaseless King County permit department, and we are finally gaining ground, culminating in very exciting coming changes and, eventually, a full-permitted working shop for Aaron! This feels like some of the biggest progress we’ve made on the property since moving here, and I am very here for it.

      Then, there is health progress. I don’t think I have ever been a particularly unhealthy person, but the past year has seen the most consistent and least dramatic (which I think is fully the only reason this has been consistent) progress in the department that is Being Healthy. I slowed things down in the winter months, because goddamn the winter is long and dark and cold and hard, but now that we are springing, I can mark nearly a full year of running. I checked my old C25K app a few days ago to see when I first picked it up last year: on April 22, 2025, I did my first thirty minute workout of alternating 90 seconds of walking with 30 seconds of jogging. Last Friday I did a casual 4 mile run after work. I just love it and am excited to see if this next year brings any other fun ways to stay on the move. (And if it doesn’t? That is A-Okay! Running can absolutely be my personality if needs must.) (Jokes.)

      And then, there is driving progress! This will sound like a weird one because I didn’t really plan it and it’s not exactly on everyone’s list of things to learn/know how to do. But last fall, Aaron started teaching me how to drive a manual transmission car. There were many reasons for this: getting extra cache at work, because, well, car museum; feeling cool, because, well, feeling cool; and most practically, being able to jettison Rhonda the Honda, who has been my boon companion since I got back from London in 2021, but why have a car payment when you can…not have a car payment! It wasn’t until late January that I really decided to make the jump, after some months of casual weekend lessons and feeling like a small stretch of Military Road just outside of our neighborhood where I could hit fourth gear for all of two-hundred yards was the most I could handle without having a panic attack. But since about the second week of February, this gal has been daily driving a lovely little manual transmission 1998 Ford Ranger, and Rhonda has gone on to greener pastures (i.e. Carmax). Maybe I’ve just been spending too much time around car people, but I really do think there is something to driving a stick shift. I have been converted and absolutely love it and despite it being completely unplanned, this too feels like progress.

      Three: The Little, Beautiful Things

      I’m not going to go fact-check this statement, but if I had to hazard a guess, I would say that tucked into the first or last paragraph of every post I’ve written since November 2024 there is something along the lines of “ignoring the fact that the world is on fire”. That’s because it feels inherently bad to write a whole lot about what is going well when everything on a macro level is, legitimately, the worst – even by millennial, unprecedented times terms. But the truth is I don’t think that you can really keep on keeping on if you don’t have some good to focus on, and I feel that no less now than I did in November 2024. And so much of that good is the little, beautiful things. (Baseball caps & also, kindness. That sort of thing.)

      Back in my Tumblr era, there was a trend of listing Very Good Things. It might just be because I’m listening to the They Were All Making BANGERS playlist that captures the moustache-laden hipster whimsy optimism of the early 2010’s, but I think we could all benefit from bringing Very Good Things back. We all desperately need Very Good Things, and the most wonderful part of Very Good Things was that sometimes, it was something as simple as really good plate of spaghetti. Or a fan-fucking-tastic playlist. The stakes were low: if it brought you joy, even in the tiniest amount, it was a Very Good Thing.

      Whether it’s in the form of a pair of yellow speckled plates, of laughing at something incredibly stupid, or of realizing people are capable of changing feelings at any giving moment, this sentiment seems to be all around my life right now. And like the sunshine on my front porch, I am revelling in it. May everyone, world on fire or no, have more Very Good Things meet them left, right, and center, wherever they are.

    1. Baseball caps but also, kindness

      Half a post a month is not my finest average. Don’t take it personally, 2025. I’ve had worse statistics, and this is most certainly a case of it’s not you, it’s me. In fact, if it makes you feel any better, there’s a notebook sitting somewhere in my house that has, at most, been visited three times this year. (Future Kathy: stop trying to make stone paper notebooks happen. The advertisements are slick but the paper is not. You will always hate writing in them.) 

      Even though it is impossible from a mathematical perspective for there to be fewer days of December before Christmas from one year to the next, this year the impossible feels possible. We’re as many days into the month as we are away from Christmas, and most of me feels like it’s still September.  

      This is for several reasons: aside from the atmospheric river we had this week, it has been a very mild fall/winter, so more than a few of our neighborhood trees still boast a thick mix of orange and red leaves. I’m also spending more time outside in our neighborhood, so it feels like a bigger deal than it probably is. Then we got our Christmas tree pretty early (in November!), but it’s a potted tree that we belatedly realized was dead dry, and we ended up needing to undecorate it and leave it outside in the rain for a few days. It’s been back inside since Tuesday, I think? But I haven’t really felt the Christmas spirit inspire me to redress it, so it is still naked, just two feet of very off-putting pokey needles, sitting by its lonesome in the window.  

      I guess that’s not exactly several things, but it’s enough. That and the universe being all universe-y have conspired to make it feel like Christmas is anything but a week from this Thursday.  

      Ignoring the fact that technically, it is not the season of winter, I have to say that winter as it feels right now is the most ridiculous thing. This is my third winter in the PNW, and my (pauses to count) ninth (NINTH!) one on this latitude, if you count all of the time I spent in the UK. When we moved here, I didn’t think that the short days would be all that much of an issue because I’d done it before, for years at a time, and been just fine. 

      What I did not reckon with was the longitude. In this particular part of the world: 1. The sun is not a £50 flight away. 2. Even if it was, you don’t get enough paid time off to buy the flight, take the flight, and go enjoy it. In short, it makes handling the dark days and the lack of sun a helluva lot more challenging.  

      The goal this winter is to be nicer to myself about being annoyed by that. It’s okay to do less and achieve less when all your body wants to do is…nothing. The progress gained over the past eight months of running is not undone by the fact that I’m only squeezing in two-ish runs a week right now. Because really: two-ish runs? In this lighting?? That is something to be celebrated! (Plus, brief flex, those runs are now up to a cool four miles each. Still feeling very Who Is She but I love it.)  

      In other silly and shouldn’t matter news but feels, well, very big? Is that for the first time in almost twenty years, I am growing out my hair. This is primarily an exercise to see just how white my gray hair will get, and it is going the best it has ever gone. I have made it through the most painful phases, the ones that do not bear describing, but I’m now stuck in the endless un-pony-tail-able bob phase that requires no fewer than eight bobby pins to be on hand at any given time (unless a hat is present). Because my hair is curly, it feels like all it has done for the past two months is grow outward and upward – every direction but the one desired. I have discovered in myself a love of baseball caps that I never thought possible (we’re all about the impossible in this post, I guess) and it makes me feel absurdly glam, the source of which I’m choosing to trace back to Princess Diana.  

      So really, I have achieved lots of things this year. Two very specific things that have plagued me as impossible for many years, and a handful of other things. What I’m trying to tell myself in this glummy winter vibe is that resolutions in the plural are rather insane things. It is absolutely okay, and to be expected, to really only achieve a thing or two. I have many years ahead of me in which to achieve more things. Who’s to say I don’t continue this habit, and each year tackle 1-2 new resolutions? Multiply that out across a lifetime and that is SO MANY THINGS! We should all be nicer to ourselves. We should not take it personally when we don’t make everything happen on the timeline we envisioned, en masse and concurrently and as if just getting through to Friday is not, some weeks, a big-ass achievement. 

      Bringing this full circle, much of this is coming from my sensitivity to the fact that I have not, indeed, written very much at all this year. I truly thought I’d found a project earlier in the spring but it has since died a death, and no other writing projects have come to take its place. And if I am being honest, I really wanted that to be one of my Achievements this year. Whereas growing out my hair or starting to run are exciting new things that I can add to my identity roster, writing has been so long a front-row feature of that list that it’s becoming really hard to not take my lack of writing personally.  

      But there is so much time to fix that. It’ll come back around. It’s not you, writing, it’s me. I’ll figure it out. I’m being kinder to myself and celebrating the small wins, like right now: when I dropped by the library to return a few books, and instead of walking right back out, I sat down at a computer, tabled my purse and my plans to grocery shop, and for the first time since university spent time writing at a library, writing this post.  

    2. Moody Moods

      Almost exactly a year ago, I rediscovered The Moody Blues. I randomly remembered their rather delightful song Lovely To See You, decided to use it for a tiny reel I made for the journey downtown to get my last tattoo, then promptly forgot about them again.

      Something in the late summer of this year brought them back from my periphery, and unsatisfied with the various Best of The Moody Blues collections I could find online, I created a nearly two-hour-long playlist titled The Moody Blues Per My Childhood. It has been my constant soundtrack these past several months and, the way often only music (and particularly, music with uniquely nostalgic ties) can, it has brought me a disproportionate amount of joy.

      As with many things in my life, this stems from an obsession of my mom’s (shout out to Karen King). The Moody Blues were a deeply seeded staple of my early childhood, linked inexorably with memories of the condo featured in our home movies and my mom’s Laura Ashley dresses and Princess Diana haircut. When I asked her how she got into the band in the early 90’s, which was hardly their heyday, she said it was through my Aunt Joan (shout out to Aunt Joan).

      So on my next call to my aunt, I asked her what caused the sudden love for Justin Hayward, John Lodge, Graeme Edge, and Ray Thomas. She shared that at the time of the onset, she was living in Vancouver and studying for a masters. She was also, as it happens, incurably homesick. Home for my aunt wasn’t California – having left for Denver before I was born, she was missing the Rocky Mountain State. So when, in 1992, The Moody Blues issued a recording of their live performance at Red Rocks, it was for her like a postcard from home. A fantastic live album in its own right, it cemented The Moody Blues as one of her, and eventually my mom’s, favorites.

      (Prior to this, she hilariously shared with me, her only knowledge of them had been Nights in White Satin, which she hated, because for a group of friends she spent time with in her early 20’s, it was the song the boys in the group would play on repeat whenever they had a girl in their room. A musical sock on the door, if you will, played ad nauseum. I die.)

      If nothing else, I am a total sucker for nostalgia, the weepy whims of missing something, the feeling of needing a person or, better yet, a place or a time. Finding out that my own family’s ties to this underrated progressive rock band were rooted in exactly that – UGH, the full circle swell of joy it brought me! They are my favorite brand of feelings: the emotional equivalent of the French word souvenir – meaning memory – being adopted into the English language. Give it to me ALL. DAY.

      This all felt very appropriate for September, which was a month of family things. After an unintentional two-year hiatus from Sacramento, I spent the last week of September staying with my family and having the best time. Sushi, vintage shopping, and laughter with my sister and her girlfriend, ice cream sundaes with one niece, an afternoon of coloring and make-believe with the other, visiting the renaissance faire for the first time in a decade with my other sister, and many mornings of tea and chats with my mom. A perfect moment for The Moody Blues Per My Childhood, if I do say so myself.

      Prior to September, the entire summer had been spent fully entrenched in car things: Aaron started teaching me how to drive a stick shift, I went to more car shows than I can count, I planned scenic drives for my work. Cars on cars on cars. Then there was my trip home, and now, it’s fall! Lovely, leafy, tea-filled fall. Yesterday was a crisp autumn day and we had shepherd’s pie for dinner. This morning was cozy and spent on the sofa before heading off for coffee and errands. I have every plan to bake homemade ginger nut biscuits this afternoon, and tomorrow – currently looking to be all blue skies and chilly sunshine – we’re going to head out to Snoqualmie Falls. In a world that is feeling increasingly insane, it’s the little things. And sometimes, those things are listening to a silly little playlist while the leaves turn.  

    3. Gerunds

      Well, if February felt quick, the four months that followed lasted all of five minutes. Which is how you find me, in the near-exact middle of July, deciding it’s time to check back in and think some thoughts online.

      Completely ignoring the raging dumpster fire that is this nation, the first half of 2025 has been rather dreamy – particularly in comparison to the six months that preceded it. Instead of walking through the last however-long sequentially and all of the delightful things that did happen, I’m just going to round-robin my way through some of the sources of joy because this is my slice of the internet and that’s how I want to do it.

      Kevin-ing

      Let’s lead with Kevin.

      Last I wrote, I thought I hadn’t mentioned him here, but turns out I had one time in passing. If you’ve talked to me at any point since August 30, 2024, you know this tabby ball of meows deserves far more than a mention in passing that was so short I didn’t even realize I did it. Here is that more.

      Full disclosure, cat people of the world: it wasn’t until I met Chevy that I really understood why people loved cats. I was born a dog person and knew no other way to exist. What can I say – I like my affection obvious, so visceral that it knocks you over when you come home from work because the affection is a dog that is jumping on you. Chevy changed that. I loved Chevy and Chevy loved me. But Aaron was always her Person, and she loved no one quite as much as she loved her Person.

      Kevin is not perfect. He is needy (we call him special needy) and really doesn’t like it when you play bongos on him. He is a LIAR about having been fed, has a propensity to CONSUME SILICON that had never before been seen by our vet, and for a nearly 15 lb cat he has the meow of a thirteen year old girl from the Valley. But Kevin has decided I am his Person, and dear reader, let me tell you, this is a first time experience for me and I cannot.

      He waits for me to wake up in the morning. He meows at me when I get home. He comes and lays on my chest, getting so close to my face it’s like he’s an infant trying to get that newborn skin-to-skin contact. At night, he sleeps tucked into the crook of my elbow with his chin resting on my forearm. He is The Worst in many ways (usually when he is lying about the fact that he hasn’t been fed), but PAPA I LOVE HIM. He has been no small source of silliness and laughter (and annoyance) and joy since he waltzed, shouting and underfed, into our lives last August. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

      Goal-ing

      Of all of the goals I hoped to achieve when I set up my beloved intentions last January, the one I had the least faith in being able to achieve was, obviously, finding movement.

      PEOPLE, SHE HAS FOUND MOVEMENT.

      For the first time in twenty years, I am enjoying RUNNING. I have been running three times a week for eight weeks and it has been…delightful? I won’t be that person that instantly makes their chosen form of exercise their personality (even though here I am, blogging about it at the first opportunity) but what I will say is this: regularly moving around really is the best way to appreciate my silly little body. You simply cannot go wrong with movement. So, find your movement!!

      And if you think it could be running – or even if you don’t think it could be running – highly recommend investing $5.99 in the Couch to 5k app. Grab a pair of headphones and pretend you’re on The Island with Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, listening to the dulcet tones of an apparently omnipotent woman telling you “Great job deciding to move your body today!” or “Begin your workout now!!”. It also tracks your runs/steps/distance, and genuinely starts from a place of no experience. It may feel silly running for sixty second then walking for ninety seconds eight times in a row, but it truly is effective.  

      Not Work-ing

      Sadly, no, this does not mean I have been off work for four months. Rather, not work-ing refers to an intentional, personal switch in focus from on work to on not work.

      Not work-ing is caring far more about not-work things in your life than the work ones. Reading more. Planning trips. The aforementioned movement. Kevbo. Motorcycle rides. Family, friends, relationships in general. I don’t dwell on my work stress anymore. She is the secular version of letting go and letting god and it is golden.

      Highlights of not work-ing: annual trip to the Bay Area to see friends and Aaron’s family in June, having friends come to stay this past week, hosting floovies (the act of watching a movie while eating food that matches said movie), getting my Italian paperwork up-to-date, making future long-term plans.

      Inspo-ing

      Last weekend Aaron and I saw F1: The Movie and no, it was not the best movie I’ve ever seen. But it WAS the best movie theatre movie I’ve seen in years, and I had truly forgotten just how good a good movie theatre movie experience can be. I am actually debating going to see it again while it’s in theatres because guys, it was just so PRETTY AND FUN. A++ soundtrack, score, cinematography, Kerry Condon, unexpected shots of England. Brad Pitt is the worst but Javier Bardem is not. These days, I take what I can get. I’m okay with a really good movie experience being inspiring.

      Writing???

      HECK YEAH I WROTE WRITING.

      Last but not least, I have started a new something which may or may not go anywhere other than an amorphous Word doc of indeterminate size and shape.

      And that, my friends, is wonderful.  

      So there you have it! Some absolutely made-up gerunds to sum up the last four months. Sorry guys, as they say: you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.

    4. Short & Sweet

      It never serves me well to sit down for a writing session with absolutely no idea of what I want to write, but this afternoon has been particularly aimless. I have completely finished my coffee, sorted through all of the random writing files in my OneDrive whose mysterious titles are some form of “Document [insert numbers 1 – 21 here]”, jumped around my blog to see if I feel like changing the layout, and made my way through 90% of a playlist I have called Vauxhall 2019 that means nothing to anyone but me, for whom it is a time machine that transports me instantly to my commute from Mortlake to Central London from January 2019 through August of that same year. Truly, nothing has been achieved.  

      After spending a final ten minutes on formerglory.ie, my latest favorite website for daydreaming (it specializes in posting period properties in Ireland, the focus of most of my daydreams since its the EU country that remains to us without having to learn another language), I figured I might as well just open a blank Word document and see where it takes me. 

      Last time I wrote I decided I should find a new writing project, and while I am nowhere near finding such a project, I still think this a good idea. I was vaguely hoping to be inspired by one of those Document Number Whatever files, only to be disappointed by many of them (SO MANY OF THEM) not being short-lived creative projects, but rather derelict cover letters. Does anyone else ever pause to think how many cover letters they have written in their life? How many minutes they have surrendered to this most mundane, useless, and modern exercise in time-wasting? A chronic career-jumper, fluent in the professional pivot, this is a life statistic I don’t know that I’d actually ever want to see. It goes without saying that the files did not provide even the slightest bit of encouragement in the writing department.  

      I think I will keep today short and sweet, much like the entire month of February was. February was so fast that it didn’t even make it to the whiteboard calendar we keep on our fridge – just this morning I wiped off January and replaced it with March. February has my birthday and our wedding anniversary, and this year, it also included a trip to South Carolina, just over ten days of a brutal cold, and as it always does, four fewer days than most other months. So, sorry February. You passed in such a blur that according to our Frigidaire, you never happened. Don’t take it personally. 

      What I will say is that it was a February full of wins, despite its brevity. That trip to South Carolina at the beginning of the month was not for fun reasons. In fact, it was for a memorial of a close life friend of Aaron’s. But it was in many ways, exactly what we needed after the tumultuous six months we have had. One of those four-day spreads where you are somehow able to step completely away from your day-to-day, to literally leave the clouds behind you and experience sun and the warmth of genuine people, the reality of grief but the joy of a life that was very much worth celebrating.  

      The world remains very much on fire. I won’t lie about that. But I have been lucky enough in my immediate surroundings to see and touch and experience some real joy these past few weeks. Also, did you know we have a cat named Kevin? His existence has somehow escaped posting since his arrival back in late August, so you will have to just trust when I say he is a meow-based goober that while troublesome at times, has become the Bobby Boucher to my Kathy Bates. He is no small part of the laughter that has been experienced this month. 

      Okay, folks. That will have to do. Thanks for sticking around for the long posts, the short posts, and the meandering, vaguely useless ones. Life is a funny little thing, but we do what we can.