write me well

Tag: life

  • New Year, Old Feels 

    I am usually not a big January fan – I once wrote here that “grim is a rather nice word for January”. But this year I was here for it.

    Fall felt long and hard and exhausting, the way life can be sometimes. When January arrived, I was ready to shove all of the emotions and struggles of the past four months into a box right next to our Christmas decorations and move right along.  

    The Christmas decorations I knocked out in a single morning, a simple task aside from getting so increasingly annoyed at how long it was taking me to remove the lights from our Charlie Brown-sized Christmas tree that I just threw the thing out on our deck to deal with later. (I eventually aggressively stripped the lights by spinning the tree itself like a reverse Fruit Roll Up, pine needles flying and Kevin watching in horrified curiosity from inside.)

    The emotions and struggles? Not so easy. Life has no regard for seasons and will continue to put you through the wringer at its leisure, and the only course of action is to decide what to do with the time that is given us (I see you Gandalf). Sure, The White Wizard was talking more about the impending end of Middle Earth (and Tolkien was talking about the horrors of a world war), but the statement rings no less true in the context of each of our tiny little lives, wherever they may be.  

    Sometimes, life is just real hard. You can be surrounded by people you love, life can seem super simple and settled, there can be no tangible thing to hone in on as the Cause of All This Stress, and stressful it will be. You will still have to wake up each morning, find a thing that will motivate you to get out of your bed, and choose to give the whole racket a go. Add on that the state of the world has been doing THE MOST to destroy the ability to “give it a go” on a daily basis, and fuck, bro, that is just really tough to do. 

    So, despite knowing full well this is the way of the world, what did I decide to do at the beginning of January? I tried to pack away all those autumnal struggles with some New Years Intentions.  

    I called them intentions, because as a deeply grayscale person in a society that’s out here acting like everything is black and white, resolutions are far too resolute for my own comfort. But regardless of what I called them, given my mindset, writing down any long-term optmistic intentions seemed a bold-ass strategy for tackling my emotional exhaustion, new year or no.

    BOLDER STILL, the more I thought about them, and about what to write for my first post of the year, I decided to share them here.  

    Because the truth is this: the stupidest, tiniest little attempt at developing who you are as a person or the things that surround you? For me? That is just one of those things that never ceases to have the capacity to motivate me to get out of my bed. I don’t care if it is THE lamest cliche on the earth. An itemized list of things to aim for? SIGN ME UP.

    So, copied directly from a brand new notebook (because where else would I have written them), I give you my intentions for the hot mess that very well may be the year 2025: 

    1. Write more! So much more. Would love to start a new project. 
    1. Add something new to my life routine. Who knows what this will be. Some ideas: Sewing. Knitting. Skating?? Language learning. DIY-ing. Something…musical? 
        1. Reduce sugar intake. Basically, stop buying a weekly dessert item. 
        1. Paint something (or multiple somethings!!) in this house. 
        1. Find something that makes me appreciate my amazing silly body. Some kind of movement. It has done a fantastic job of getting me this far. I should probably return the favor. 
        1. Be a better communicator. Stop stewing. Share your thoughts. Even when they are scary or feel dumb. 
        1. Narrow career goal. Tough to do with a sort of unknown long-term (i.e. potentially moving to Europe), but at least figure out some over-arching goals. 
        1. Be okay with prioritizing small beauty and finding ways to bring it into every aspect of my life. 

        Will I actually do any of these things? It is entirely possible I will not. Did writing them down in a new notebook achieve anything? Not…not really. But stay with me here. 

        The horrific fires happening in LA have produced some harrowing imagery, and a particular story that came out of them has stuck with me. An artist had posted a video a few days before the fires started, a simple tour of the home she and her husband had created and the studio within it. The original intent of the video was just to record and celebrate the home they had created, and how much they loved it, and within days, it became a record of a place completely and unexpectedly destroyed by a fire. And they re-posted it in the aftermath with the added caption: “I wish I had known this would be the last week we would spend in our home.” 

        Sure, a home (especially a beautiful one) is a pretty universal thing to find joy in and be motivated by. Nobody looking at that video would be surprised that it brought that artist a huge amount of joy. But the tragic one-hundred-eighty-degree twist of that video just really drove home for me that we do not know what is going to be here tomorrow, what we will need to find next week to get us through the tough moments.

        It doesn’t matter what you need to focus on to get you through the day, what motivates you to get out of your bed. Do what works for you, take the video of your house, appreciate your silly little body, write more. In whatever way makes the most sense, decide what to do with the time that is given you.  

      • “November!”

        About a week ahead of my birthday this year, I had a sudden, urgent need to hear my dad’s voice.  

        The twenty-seventh of last July marked five years since I’ve heard it in real time – technically, five years and ten days, because our last phone call was a little under two weeks before he died. I talked to my dad fairly regularly, took pictures with him less so, and to my eternal regret, took even fewer videos of him. So few, in fact, that I have none. Not one video with or of my dad from the last fifteen years.  

        Most people have a slew of home movies to consult in moments like these, but in that moment this past February, I had no such luck. Not only did I live about a thousand miles away from the pile of our family’s home movies, but the home movies themselves had for several years presented their own challenge. Sometime in the early 2000’s, my sister had the forethought to transfer the aging VHS tapes they were recorded on to DVDs. She spent meticulous weeks one summer watching every single home movie, since you had to play them to transfer them, pressing all the right buttons to get them safely burned onto this significantly more resilient format. Birthdays, backyard play sessions, a random recording of my dad’s then-commute home through Newport Beach…she watched and recorded them all.  

        Thinking the home movies were now safe in their fancy new format, none of us really clocked what happened to the original VHS tapes. The last time I can remember seeing them, they were in neat rows inside of one of those faux wood, stackable, slide-open tape holders that everyone had in the nineties. During the disbursement of my family’s shared possessions in 2011 when we lost our house (shout out to the economic crisis of 2008), who knows where they went. Their unknown location was no big deal right up until the next time we tried to watch the DVDs, and every single one of them failed to work.  

        Our first thought was that the movies had been recorded incorrectly. My sister took one of the discs to a specialist, who told her, very matter of fact and with absolutely no awareness that he was crushing our collective family history, that none of the DVDs would work in any DVD player outside of the one that had created them, and there was nothing we could do about it. Since we couldn’t even figure out where the originals had ended up, I will let you guess whether we had any remote idea of where that DVD player had ended up either. (We did not.)  

        Despite all the DVDs being deemed to be in a useless vegetative state, when I moved to Washington last year, my sister gave me the disc containing my first birthday, and I promised I would do my best to find a way to make it work. Life happened, and I promptly forgot about it until that moment last February when, more than anything, I wanted to hear my dad’s voice again. 

        So, with the sense of urgency of someone that knows there is only one way to make something happen, and you are that way, I decided to get my first birthday DVD out of its prolonged coma.  

        I did a fair bit of Google searching for a data retrieval specialist to assist. I found a few, but none that sounded remotely confident that they’d be able to solve my issue. The last one I spoke to admitted he could try, thought it was unlikely it would work, and would then feel bad charging me for the failed attempt. Because the experts didn’t seem to have any faith in their own ability to solve my problem, I thought I would try and solve it myself.  

        The first and foremost mystery to solve was exactly what was wrong with the DVD, and therein was my biggest challenge. If you simply Google “my DVD won’t play”, that problem is simply too vague, and you’ll get nowhere fast. Most forums will assume your disc has physical damage, but I was absolutely sure that wasn’t the case here because they were all pristine. Others would suggest that your disc actually never had any data recorded on it in the first place, but I knew that wasn’t true either: you could see the varying degrees to which data had been physically stored on each disc by flipping them over and taking a careful look at where the iridescent digital surface started and stopped.  

        In my many, many searches, the most promising website I found was Pacific Video Repair, an amazing company conveniently located in Washington state, that specialized in data recovery from damaged VHS tapes. On their FAQ page, a somewhat vague answer about problematic DVD files made it sound like they might be familiar with my conundrum. Hopeful for the first time in months, I sent them an email asking if they’d be able to help me even though what I needed was outside the regular scope of their work.  

        Pacific Video Repair got back to me within 24 hours and the answer, unfortunately, was a hard no. But they did say in their response that they were, in fact, very familiar with the issue I was describing, and that it sounded like what had happened was that the video files had not been successfully finalized when they were originally recorded on the disc, leaving them only playable on the DVD player they were recorded on.  

        Now that is a level of specificity a girl can Google! 

        With this added descriptor to my problem, it was not long before I found this incredibly random six-year-old video on YouTube, made by someone who doesn’t even seem to specialize in this kind of content, with over 1,600 likes and 340 comments from highly emotional people JUST LIKE ME, desperately looking for a way to rescue their old DVDs. And those comments, my friends, were euphoric and filled with profuse thanks – because the method described in this guy’s sixteen-minute video fucking worked.  

        It took two excruciating days for me to find this out for myself, because I had to locate a working computer with both a DVD drive and access to the internet, and holy shit is that harder to do in 2024 than I would’ve thought. But I ordered a new power cord for the Sony Vaio my parents had bought me back in college, spent over an hour getting it turned on and updated to 2024 standards, and then followed TheMaxAcceleration’s step-by-step directions.  

        Like the hundreds of commentors on that video, within twenty minutes, I was absolutely bawling, my nearly-thirty-five-year-old self watching my one-year-old self seated in the middle of our old condo, both of us listening to my dad chat aimlessly with my grandpa and great uncle. Hearing my dad call me “sweetie pie”, something he had not done for years and I had long forgotten he ever did, was worth every minute of the struggle.  

        When my sister visited in July she brought the rest of the DVDs to be rescued, and although life happened again and it’s taken me ages to do so, I’ve now successfully recovered all but three of them. While what I had been most excited about at the onset of this adventure was to unlock the home videos I remembered most – ones with my sisters and I being in turns obnoxious and adorable towards one another, or ones with my extended family ceremoniously gathered in folding chairs as one of us opens presents on a birthday – my favorite, by far, is one of my parents before any of us were born.  

        My mom is heavily pregnant with my oldest sister, and my dad, in anticipation of her arrival, has just purchased the video camera that would come to film every one of our home movies. The entire video is just clips of the two of them hanging out with their cat in their messy 1985 apartment. They are so relaxed, so happy, and so silly. My dad sounds just like I remember, and my mom’s voice is equally unchanged. In a moment of quiet she suggests making a cheeseburger casserole for dinner, to which my dad says “that sounds like a great idea”, and then it cuts to my mom holding the camera, filming first my dad and then herself in the mirrored sliding door of a nearby closet. Shortly after that, it cuts again, the camera now back in my dad’s hands, and for no more than five seconds, there’s my mom, age thirty, hanging out on the sofa, smiling up at my dad. Another cut and a shot of her walking through the hallway towards the kitchen; another and she’s picked up a freshly baked layer of cake and taking a whiff, then holding up a jar of frosting and saying “frosting”, pointing at the calendar and saying “November!”…because I guess with the novelty of a brand-new video camera, what else is there to say?  

        My oldest sister’s birthday was yesterday, which means that footage was being filmed just over thirty-nine years ago today. I don’t really have anything more profound to share than all of that; to put to paper this new memory of unlocking old memories, only to find ones that don’t even really belong to me, but matter that much more because of it.  

      • So Much Blue

        Things I love: sunshine, tacos, the ocean, and great driving.

        Things we experienced on our four day vacation across the California coast: all of the above.

        This trip was originally planned so that we could visit Aaron’s family for Father’s Day, which we did and had a fantastic time doing. But after we booked the flights and reserved that Sunday for family, we decided that we were deserving of a bit of a treat vacation on either end of it. So one by one, we booked extra plans to really make it an escape: one night beachside in Cambria, two nights in Aptos within walking distance of the Cement Boat (or, at least, what’s left of it), and a bright red mustang to get us both of those places in between visiting friends and family in a very fun way.

        May was a pretty garbage weather month here in Washington, so we were very much in need of sunshine. California, ever faithful, delivered. Aside from an atrocious hour spent in airport security last Saturday morning, we had four near-perfect days of road-tripping, hangouts, and laughter. We ate tacos and burritos and chips and salsa, we played mini-golf on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, we watched surfers catching overhead waves off of West Cliff. We saw elephant seals and moo cows and horses, all living their best lives, and countless rolling golden hillsides up and down the coast. After our night in Cambria, which I had never visited before, I left with a much fuller appreciation of why Aaron is so eager to return there – if I had spent my last year of college getting to do a daily run along Moonstone Beach, I too would measure every other place I lived against that almost unreachable standard.

        What always strikes me about time spent in the sun is how blue it is. Sunshine, in my mind, is a bright and blazing yellow. When I try to illustrate it with words I reach for butter colors, bursts of citrusy lemon, maybe something akin to mustard if we’re talking sunshine in the fall. But in photographs, and in life, I really feel like sunshine turns out to be very blue. Sunshine is a cloudless azure sky, a rolling turqouise wave, cold clear splashes in a cobalt snowmelt river. And after the soggiest of Mays, we spent four days savoring an almost intoxicating amount of it, whether exploring Morro Bay at sunset, killing time and grabbing iced coffee in Morgan Hill, or driving up Highway 1 near Ragged Point with the windows down.

        We are making a concerted effort to be better at things like taking vacation because, in a truly American turn, it is not something we excel at prioritizing. But a mere four days spent on the road together, surrounded by so much blue, was a wonderful reminder that even simple escapes can go a long way.

      • Home Things

        We’re not going to talk about how potentially far-distant home ownership is. Nope. This is, instead, a post about home things in the context of the house where we’re renting.

        Some background:

        I’m in Portland right now, writing this from the lobby of my hotel while on an evening break from attending my first ever APGA conference. (That’s APGA as in American Public Garden Association, not Advocates Professional Golf Association. There can be a lot of grass in both, but it’s an important distinction nonetheless.) Today is day two of conferencing, day three of Portlanding, and whoof, I am already exhausted.

        Traveling for work is one of those life tasks that seemed glamorous and fashionably professional when I was a kid. Thirteen year old Kathy, my favorite lens through which to measure my adult achievements in life, would not believe that I am seated on a creamy leather banquette, a fluted pint of beer next to my laptop, typing away with an array of brass lights and murals and cocktails for company. She’d probably think it was freaking sweet.

        Alas, thirteen year old Kathy is not thirty-three, and she doesn’t understand that your own bed is the best bed, and home is home. (And that conferences, educational and inspirational and well-meaning as they are, are by nature, conferences. And are thus deeply exhausting exercises in note-taking, coffee-consumption-regulating, and in 2022, N95 masking.)

        So last night, when one of the coolest people I work with (honestly, she is so cool) invited me to her local best friend’s birthday dinner at her home, I was quick to accept. Yesterday happened to be the first full day of summer weather that Portland has seen, so while I’m sure the evening would have been exceptional regardless, it was blessed with the extra magic that is a Summer Solstice full of golden, mid-seventies sunshine and sitting on the grass with olives and soft cheese and chilled white wine with a group of people that haven’t seen the sun for six months. In London this was always the best experience and I am happy to report that it was the same here in Portland.

        The entire evening gave me a really interesting combination of feelings that I haven’t fully processed yet. That’s part of why I’m sitting here, writing about it. First, I was surrounded by such clearly amazing people. One of the women I met had a very similar recent experience to me – she had been living in Brooklyn for 12 years, working in corporate retail, and got laid off in the pandemic. Between that, the sudden distance created by an inability to visit home and her nieces, and the realization that retail is some ruthless-hustle-based bullshit, she decided to move back home and change careers. She felt an even stronger version of the bittersweet longing for Brooklyn that I feel for London, given how long she had lived there. But she knew she made the right decision and she is in the right place now, and she was happy with her imperfect decision because really, all decisions are imperfect.

        The amazing woman whose home we visited, who has the fortune to call the longest day of the year her birthday, had not only the most impeccable taste in all things design, but shares with me some fairly random passions. A jeweller by trade, she specializes in English antique pieces, and has her own collection of enamel Victorian mourning rings (one of my favorite types of antique jewelry), which she pulled out and shared with me on the grass in the backyard while the sun set. She even, as one of her pieces of daily jewelry, wears a Tudor-era memento mori ring – something I have aspired to have of my own for years.

        And then there was her home. An early 1900’s craftsman, with its small porch, original hardwood floors, chartreuse kitchen cabinets, and Persian stairwell runner of salmons-and-oranges-and-browns, was an absolute dream. White brick fireplace. MCM built-ins but a lived in, cream linen sofa. Palette-knifed original artworks and lamps with stained glass shades handmade by her father. An oversized, oil pastel Picasso gallery print the sole work living above the fireplace. Cupboards full of vintage plates and hand-thrown ceramics. And above all, an open, easy grace reflected in her hosting and her own personal energy, that permeated every part of the place. As I told her when I thanked her for her hospitality before catching an Uber home, “Not to sound completely creepy, but I love everything about the home you’ve created. It is wonderful.”

        All of which is the background to the first sentence I wrote here. We’re not going to talk about home ownership and how distant that feels. We’re going to celebrate the progress in what my home is now, an imperfect place that I share with a human whose imperfections complement my own, which all works together to create a place that I would very much rather be than in a swank boutique hotel lobby. So while my intent with this post was actually to talk about the specific pieces of interior design progress I’ve made in our own (albeit rented) craftsman bungalow, it turns out the bit I really wanted to talk about was how it’s all come together to feel like a home worth missing.

      • Snapshots

        Long gone are the days I save every file in one place; RIP my 2003 Sony Vaio laptop named Konsuke, which held that distinction for almost a decade. Because of this (actually mostly because of the Cloud), my personal OneDrive has become this bizarre bastion of rando documents saved ignominiously as “Document8” or “Hills” or “Happy Sunday afternoon”. Many are blog posts that made it all the way to my blog. Many are little written blips, a few hundred words that I clearly never felt came full circle enough to post but now serve as very specific snapshots of moments I had since forgotten.

        I found three today that I think deserve to be dusted off and shared with the world. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did. (The interjections I couldn’t help adding are in italics.)

        Titled “2020 / I’m not an adult, YOU ARE”, written on January 2, 2020

        Twenty-four hours into 2020 and I’m off to a roaring start. [HA] Yesterday, I watched a season and a half of Nashville and ran the dishwasher. Today, I started my day like a champ – with a cinnamon Danish and white coffee from Pret – and followed it like one too, with a burger for lunch, blistered padrón peppers for an evening snack, and popcorn and Terry’s chocolate orange slices for dinner.  

        I’ll be thirty-one in a month and if this manages to be the year I start eating like you’re, well, supposed to, I’ll be as shocked as the rest of you. I blame my professional upbringing in retail for these dietary habits, but honestly for the most part I’ve just got a small appetite, boundless energy, and zero patience for cooking. This’ll be me until somebody shows up and makes me do otherwise. We all have our categories: what we care about, what we really care about, and what we aggressively ignore because why prioritize responsible life habits and consistency? That’s some impossible nonsense.  

        I’ve used retail and its utter lack of consistency as an immaculate crutch, a spotless excuse to never have a routine or habit of any kind. The being at work part of my job is genuinely the only part that feels routine. The when of it varies, constantly. And the way I’ve handled it, from age twenty-two onwards, has done anything but.  

        Don’t misunderstand me – I do feel like I’ve changed in the past ten years. I have for SURE changed. But mostly at work. At home, outside of work, I’m the same girl that spent her days off at Peet’s, working on a novel, feeling fulfilled by the very act of sipping an iced coffee and typing on my laptop. I’ve spent many a moment being grateful for what I’ve come to realize is the ease of my satisfaction. I am almost always one day off, one stunning playlist, and a blank word document away from a good mood. It’s just something I was born with. I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that this ease of happiness has some pretty fatal drawbacks. Well, not fatal. But not thrilling, either. For example, because it’s so easy for me to be happy on my own, when I’m not really accomplishing anything, it staves off any true will power to, y’know, accomplish ANYthing. And this is where the annual hoo-ha around resolutions rears its black and white, bullet-pointed face. 

        See, I’ve always been more of a May girl when it comes to the winds of change. Spring is my time when I feel the world is fresh and my spirit is lifted by the mere promise of potential…whatevers. It happens to me every May without fail. New Years? Eh. January is the least magical month out there. It’s a grim, Christmas-less winter month, filled with short days and shit weather. It carries its own sense of promise in my realm of retail, where there is genuinely nothing more satisfying than consolidating every remaining speck of holiday product onto three grimy shelves and gutting your gifting displays in favour of spring product. But then even the spring product feels like a lie. Because as clean and fresh and new as it is, you take two steps outside – in Sacramento or London – and you wonder why you’d even bother. Grim is a rather nice word for January. 

        So I’m envious of people that can engage with the concept of a fresh start this time of year. I’m always biding my time until May, looking down my nose at the stacks of other people’s goals around me, and think ha! What a farce. Because I know that May is when shit gets real. It’s when I decide that anything can happen and I, me, empowered and fiercely independent and badass, am the one that’s going to do it. creative [Not sure why the word creative is here, alone and uncapitalized, attached to no larger thought or sentence. Sounds about right, actually.]

        Unsurprisingly, the best part is that every year, when I get there and beautiful May arrives with its fluttery feels, glorious sunshine, and deeply moving vibes, literally nothing will have changed. I’ll get weepy and motivated and “COME AT ME, BRO” about my new fierce goals, when the truth is I’m useless at resolutions no matter how much my spirit thrums in protest, no matter the calendar month.  [Still and likely forever a true statement.] 

        Titled “Happy Sunday afternoon”, written on October 11, 2020

        Happy Sunday afternoon, where I, Kathy, go out of my way to plan a beautiful few hours of studying by the Tower of London, only to forget the stylus for my Surface, with which I highlight all the things.  [This made me laugh out loud and was what first tempted me to share these posts.]

        The year I moved back to California from Norwich was the year I became obsessed with the album Sigh No More. That was nearly ten years ago, but no matter how much time passes, those songs instantly transport me. For me, music has a nostalgic pull to rival scent.  

        I would put on that album when I started commuting to the World Market in Natomas, and it kept me company every shift until two months later, when on Christmas Eve, the car radio was stolen from my dad’s gold Ford F150, leaving my home-burned copy of Sigh No More stuck in the player for all time. But those two months were enough to sear it delightfully into my memory, triggering visions of the otherwise unremarkable drive down Madison towards 80, when I would wonder how long it would be until I was back in the UK. So when Winter Winds came on shuffle this morning, and its first line carried me through a cider-crisp fall day on my way to the Tower of London for a day of studying, it felt like a nine-year circle coming to a close.  

        I like to think I excel when it comes to finding the good in a bad situation. My natural rampant enthusiasm has run gleefully unchecked for most of my life. It’s not quite toxic in its positivity, but it does have a rather dangerous [This one fades off, the sentence incomplete, before ending with the following ominous statement three lines later.]

        It’s a very strange feeling, when you’ve actively identified as an extrovert your entire life, to realize you deeply enjoy spending time alone.  

        Titled “28March21”, written (unsurprisingly) on March 28, 2021

        For the last week I was in London, I spent my most anxious moments looking forward to one thing: the feeling, fresh from a scalding hot shower, of falling asleep in a hotel bed at the end of my eighteen-hour journey. Normally I’d just go straight to someone’s home upon arrival back in California, with the biggest concern being a potential flight delay or the fifteen-second panic when I put my passport in the wrong pocket of my coat. But this time around, there was far more to be worried about. COVID results. Flight cancellations. Shipping issues. So it was with an immense sense of relief that I went through the very bizarre process that is traveling internationally during a global pandemic with no issues at all, arriving safely in San Francisco to be picked up by my mom and deposited at a local hotel in Sacramento for quarantine. I took my scalding hot shower and slid into the sheets and was out within five minutes, blissfully fighting off jetlag for an impressive eight hours before waking up the next day at seven in the morning. It was a weird experience to herald in a weirdly not-weird period of my life – I doubt I will ever get to be on a London-to-San-Francisco flight with only 36 other passengers on board. I also doubt I’ll have to coordinate a similar large-scale international life move, but if ya girl has learned anything, it’s to never say never. [Facts.]

        It feels like the most natural thing in the world to be writing this in Sacramento, from the patio of my best friend of twenty years, despite the fact that as recently as two months ago I was entrenched in a UK-based job hunt. I’m almost a professional when it comes to convincing myself I’m sure of the future, even when it turns out I have no idea what I’m talking about. (Or sometimes I do know, and just don’t know it yet. Like when I write a post called “Roots” detailing all of the reasons I was conflicted and felt like I belonged in California, and then still managed to be shocked when I came to that conclusion out loud less than a month later.) But as difficult as a decision as it was, things continue to happen to validate it. Almost cramping my shoulders from hugging my sisters too hard. My niece telling me I’m annoying because I “keep leaving”, then me explaining that this time I was just going to a different house twenty minutes away. Drinking a bottle of wine and getting to have a conversation in person with my best friend. The taste of an excellent breakfast burrito. And above all, a lack of panic at suddenly up-ending my life for something I never thought I’d particularly envy: good, old-fashioned, stability and support.  

        So there you have it – a few moments in time, unintentionally bookmarked, now intentionally posted.

        In closing, I am very happy to report that I ended up being right all along.

        (I’ll let you decide about what.)