Things I'm Grateful For

[lunasariel]

'Tis the season, right?

But seriously, I am so goddamn lucky to have such a wonderful life. Every year at Thanksgiving, I used to say "I'm grateful for my problems," since holy shit they could be worse. These days, I think "I'm grateful for my problems" sounds a little smug and facile, so I don't say it anymore, but I'm very aware, and very fortunate, that my problems are along the lines of "I don't get along particularly well with one of my siblings, although we're both trying" or "I have a weird sensory processing disorder that gives me a hard time at work" or "I worry a lot about climate change." I have a roof over my head, a fridge full of food, a meaningful job that pays well, and a life full of wonderful people who love me, and this situation is likely to continue on pretty much the same. Oh, and great wi-fi. What more could I ask for?

R2. Oh my goodness I lucked out on this one. <BEGIN SAP> It'll be ten years next Valentine's Day since he gave me a handmade Vorkosigan-themed valentine and I gave him strep throat, and he's still my absolute #1 favorite person in the world. His is essentially a joyous nature, and even when I'm tired and cranky it's infectious. He makes every day brighter and more fun. He keeps a gratitude diary, and he's challenged himself to put something besides me every day, otherwise it would get repetitive. He just finished The Shepherd's Crown, after promising to read the entire Discworld series when we first started dating. (He's also planning to re-read Swordspoint, which is the book that kinda-sorta got us together, before the end of the year.) His favorite Discworld character is Tiffany Aching, followed closely by Sam Vimes. He loves Mega Man and TTRPGs the way I love LotR and Discworld. (Speaking of which, he loves LotR and Discworld almost as much as I do.) He's always genuinely delighted to listen to me rant ramble discourse at length about, like, the role of hope in LotR or what would happen if you put Locke Lamora, Miles Vorkosigan, and Moist von Lipwig in the same room; I'm equally genuinely delighted to listen to him rant ramble discourse at length about the TTRPG campaigns he pours his heart and soul into. Whatever he does, he does with all his heart. </END SAP> I love him a lot and he makes me happy; super fuckin' glad I married him. Good call, us.

(Yes, his office is always like that. XD)

My cats. I reached the "if anything ever happens to them I will kill everyone in this room and then myself" stage after having them for like a couple of weeks; I've now had them for nine months. They are the softest things I've ever touched. Even when they're kinda jerks (Sammy bites feet, Jasper knows exactly when I'm busy in the kitchen and howls for pets), I love them so incredibly much. They're both very handsome young gentlemen (see below), fierce hunters of wand toys, bugs, and empty toilet paper rolls, and Very Shaped. Jasper is still quite a bit more outgoing than Sammy, whose motto is "CONSTANT VIGILANCE!!!", Mad Eye Moody-style, but they've both become quite sociable. They've come so far from when we first adopted them, when they would hide behind the toilet and stack on top of each other like Legos. Now Jasper is a super-cuddlebug (although he does complain when we pick him up), and Sammy... prefers to be the petter, rather than the pettee, let's say. But they both have the cutest little squeaky meows (although Jasper has also learned to cry "woe!"), and the fluffiest knickerbockers (which I just recently learned is the actual name for their fluffy pants/bloomers). I also love them a lot.

(That's Jasper on the left, wondering why I interrupted his nap, and Sammy on the right, keeping a close eye on me in case I take off my human mask and reveal myself to be a Dread Kitten-Eating Monster, as he's long suspected. We won't lull him into a false sense of security!)

The rest of my family. It's been actually kind of a scary year around here, health-wise. My dad has had two more TIAs (mini-strokes), bringing his total up to two major strokes and NINE TIAs. He said he was taking it easier this year at harvest, and I do believe that he actually tried to do so this year, but still, when you're getting like eight tons of fruit within sixteen hours, there's only so much resting you can do. But it sounds like his assistants/junior colleagues (IDK what their actual titles are) were trying damn hard to give him more space this year, and it sounds like his body also just refuses to cash checks after a certain amount of time, and he takes a nap whether he wants to or not. Which has happened before, but now he'll actually take the damn nap, instead of trying to drive. XD My mom beat breast cancer earlier this year (for good and all, hopefully), and the surgery and chemo were pretty rough on her. But ever since her parents both had debilitating strokes, my mom has been diligent-bordering-on-fanatical about preventative healthcare, exercise, nutrition, etc., so she was actually in a pretty good place to bounce back. And now she has, more or less! Her hair is now properly pixie-length, and she has a lot more energy, but she's still taking it a lot easier than she used to, which I'm grateful for. A has now finally started the process of getting on state disability, now that it's clear that their autism is of a sort that makes getting a job, and many other forms of independent living, difficult-to-the-point-of-impossibility. It's going to be a long slog, of course, with lots of forms and phone calls and minutiae and other things that are super easy for neurodivergent folks (lol), but I'm glad the process is in motion. They're living with me while my mom's house is having some work done, which I don't love - they just Need so much, I constantly feel like I'm on A Duty, and my time isn't really my own. I mean, I love them, but I'm not their parent. But hopefully the construction will be done sometime early in the next year, and then they can go back to our mom's place. And P came up from SLO a couple of weeks early for Thanksgiving, because it turns out they've been having very scary heart trouble-like symptoms. We have a strong family history of strokes, but not so much of heart attacks (aside from our paternal grandmother and one maternal great-grandfather, both of whom were elderly), so it's Concerning that a 31-year-old dude who's otherwise in perfect shape is having them. He's had two ER visits since he came up, and apparently two down in SLO as well. Every time they've said it's not a heart attack, and apparently there's something called costochondritis that exactly mimics a heart attack except it's completely benign. But still, it's pretty rough on him, poor dude.

...All that being said, I do love my family, and the older I get the more I realize how lucky I am to have them. I can really be myself around them; I love and respect them as well as like them. It's been very eye-opening watching R2's family, where they clearly love each other but don't actually like each other all that much. His parents are always trying to make him "better" in ways that he's clearly stated he doesn't want, but they don't seem to respect him at all. But they clearly love him to the moon and back, and always want to see him and talk to him, even if it's just to tell him that his shirt isn't nice enough, he needs a haircut, and he doesn't take good enough care of his car. XD So this year, I'm extra-grateful for my parents, who told me The Hobbit as a bedtime story, listen when I speak, are always down to listen to me yell about books (a habit I picked up from them), and are silly and weird the exact same way I'm silly and weird.

(Ryan and me at our wedding, with P and A suddenly realizing they had a golden opportunity for mugging.)

(My dad in his natural element, complete with kilt, sporran, and Akubra, also at our wedding. It turns out I don't take pictures of my family all that often. XD)

(My mom at yesterday's Thanksgiving Feast #1, very proud of her Platter o' Meats and accompaniments.)

Bestchat. The ones I can take the brakes off with, to steal an Ada Palmer phrase. <3 I have very few regrets in life, but one of them was dipping out of Bestchat Original in like 2018; it robbed me of a good two years of some of the coolest, smartest people I know.

hamsterwoman

,

cyanmnemosyne

 ,

cafemassolit

 ,

tabacoychanel

 , and I started texting, and then having weekend-ly zoom calls, sometime during the pandemic, and that's just...kind of continued. Recently they've been graciously allowing me to yell at them more or less nonstop as I fall headlong into TI obsession (and, even better, yelling back :D), but they've also been here for "hey, look at this funny thing I found" and "aurgh, I must vent about petty grievances," on top of actual Big Life Shit. I've always had kind of a problem making and keeping friends, mainly due to a weird niggling feeling that when people hang out with me, they only do it to be nice/out of pity, and I appreciate it more than words can say that these guys, each of whom definitely knows her/their own mind and has no trouble speaking it, have chosen to hang out with me and thus presumably likes me! Take that, brain weasels.

(A screenshot of all of us, including the elusive K/

cafemassolit

  with her camera off!)

My health. Especially with all of the scary family health stuff above, I'm SUPER glad that my health is usually pretty good, and usually pretty stable. I rarely get sick (the occasional migraine aside), I could still run a ten-minute mile the last I checked (which, OK, was last year, but still), and I can pretty much digest rocks if I need to. I am so glad, and so fortunate, that my body does pretty much what I need it to, when I need it to, and doesn't do random scary and/or painful shit all on its own. Good job, body. <3

(Me on a hike for my mom's birthday in September. Yes, it was hot. XD)

My job. Oh my goodness I am the luckiest person in the entire world when it comes to jobs! The progression went something like this: was a Library Kid -> I hung around all the time -> I wanted to help organize the books -> they figured they might as well put me to work and made me a (pre)teen volunteer -> one of the librarians mentioned that they had a position for college students coming up -> I got the job -> the job had a set end date and thus ended -> I went to library school -> my mom (also a grown-up Library Kid) started working for the library part-time when she retired from the pharmacy -> I graduated from library school, having focused mostly on special collections and tech services -> my mom mentioned that they were hiring for a cataloging position, which I'd done some coursework on (although it deeply intimidated me) -> I applied for the job -> the interviewer/my prospective one-level-up manager turned out to be my old manager from the college job! -> I somehow managed to dredge up a snappy answer (if I do say so myself) to several tricky interview questions -> I got to nerd out about the connections between cataloging and special collections -> it turns out my actual manager is also split in his library loves between cataloging (rules! taxonomies!) and special collections (really cool old photos! "hey, I know that place!", stabilizing carbon paper that was incorrectly stapled 75 years ago!) -> I get the job (again) -> here I am! :D But srsly, this job is anything I could ever possibly want - I don't have to interact with patrons, I get to play with taxonomies and MARC records all day, my team is the chillest group of human beings on the planet, the library is very generous with time off, and I have killer health insurance for myself and R2. It's the perfect balance between technical skills (the aforementioned taxonomies, mucking about with regular expressions, wrangling our labyrinthine set of internal procedures) and cool humanities stuff (the current push towards more equitable/decolonialized subject headings, identifying a bunch of Native American religious materials and moving it to the correct Dewey number, etc.). And finally, it brings me into contact with a wealth of information that I never would have found on my own. I'm now decently up-to-date on national publishing trends, can speak confidently about the harm of censorship and book bans (beyond "it's bad, obviously, so don't fuckin' do it"), and I keep stumbling across all sorts of cool books on, like, how mushrooms communicate or the OSS or how nutrition and diets actually work. The only downside is that I have misophonia, and one of my coworkers really triggers it. 10-15 small-to-medium panic attacks per day is No Fun, and I still haven't found a perfect solution, but this job is worth trying for.

(This is what I spend most of my day looking at, with variations.)

(...But [heh] also there's this.)

My home. I have a ten-minute commute and a fireplace, and we have enough space for R2's office (really a walk-in closet, but for such a big dude, he seems to really like small spaces), an office-with-a-bed for me, and a spare room for siblings. Now both beds are occupied by siblings and I've been ousted from my office, which is not ideal, but it's only temporary. I also wish we had more light in the backyard, so my garden could really take off. There are so many things I want to grow - berries of all kinds, tomatoes (yes I know they're botanically berries, but we're talking in the culinary sense here), herbs, greens, flowers, fruit trees, you name it - but pretty much the entire yard is shaded, so the best I've been able to do is some tomatoes, berries, and one rosemary bush that hasn't quite taken off yet. But hey, we have a back yard! And we're the middle unit of a triplex, which is awesome in summer, when our house actually stays relatively cool. It's less awesome in winter, but I like being cold much more than being hot, so I'll chalk this up to bug-that's-become-a-feature.

(My garden, including flourishing strawberries and blueberries, a raspberry plant that used to be flourishing but now I'm a little concerned about, surprisingly-vigorous tomatoes, extremely sad and buggy kale, and the remnants of what once was spinach before the leaf borers and summer got at it.)

 

Comments

[hamsterwoman]

Aww, what a lovely post! I know you've had a really rough year, family-health-wise, so it's especially good to see you have still found so many things to be grateful for <333 (continued good health vibes to your parents and P, of course, and also good luck to A with the disability paperwork)

The ones I can take the brakes off with, to steal an Ada Palmer phrase. <3

<333

We make a nice little geo-distributed bash', don't we :)

It's been really cool to watch you progress through at least the later stages of the library job pipeline as you evolved into the rich and powerful librarian you always said you would become :*

And on a totally random note: I've seen and admired your wedding dress from the front, but this was the first time I saw it from the back, I think, and it is so cool from the back too!!

[lunasariel]

Thank you! It has indeed been a pretty rough year, family-health, wise, but we're definitely not alone in that. <3

And thank you for the good health vibes/wishes! At least for my parents, the trend does seem to be a positive one - I'm SO grateful that my mom has taken such good care of herself; it's made her recovery go a lot smoother (and faster!) than expected. And when I got to see my dad on Thanksgiving, he was actually looking pretty good; some days you can definitely tell that he's had a stroke or two, but now he's much more "standard slightly creaky old guy."

We make a nice little geo-distributed bash', don't we :)
We do! Curse our ancient enemy Poseidon/Distance, etc. ;)

as you evolved into the rich and powerful librarian you always said you would become :*
<333

Thank you for sticking around for the whole journey! <3

I've seen and admired your wedding dress from the front, but this was the first time I saw it from the back, I think, and it is so cool from the back too!!
Thank you! This is probably a good reminder that I should actually post my wedding pics one of these days or something. XD I was especially pleased with/proud of the dress, because I DREAD dress shopping, and I would have been cranky at the tradition of white wedding dresses in particular, so I was *so* happy that I found one (and quickly!) that a) didn't cost an arm and a leg, b) looks cool, and c) is comfy!

[hamsterwoman]

Curse our ancient enemy Poseidon/Distance, etc. ;)

Hahaha, indeed! <333