December 12, 2001: every heartbeat like falling in time
First, housekeeping things:
One—a pair of my old journals has just gone public, if you hadn't noticed from the front page. Following Smoke covers 1997 to 1998, and Stone Versus Skin covers from 1998 to the first part of 1999.
Rereading these, it strikes me how much I've grown since then, and how much I *didn't* say in those journals. There was all sorts of stuff going on that never hit those pages, and now I'm glad for it.
Two—For those of you who may not have noticed, I do have a notify list. If you're not on it, you miss all sorts of tidbits of information. I babble a lot in email. (I note this only because I occasionally have people email me (or come up to me in real life) and say, "Dude. WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME YOU HAD A NOTIFY LIST." So this is me. Telling you. The, um, three people who don't already know. heh.)
Three—I updated my reads page. Got rid of dead links, added a few new people. Like this one. And that one. And, mmm, her.
Four—I added the link to my Livejournal. I know you're all so excited.
Five—Here's what I was doing four years around this time, three, two, and one. Exciting, huh?
I feel cool today, because I have conquered the HTML Help thing that was driving me eversoslightly nuts.
Yay, and stuff.
Exploding Bill Sushi, my elderly betta, died the other day. (Here's where I first talked about him, i think.) He was named as a collaborative project, where I asked for name suggestions.
I'd had him a bit over three years. It was a good long time for a betta to be alive.
RIP, Exploding Bill Sushi. You will be missed, especially by Juniper, who loved to stare at you for hours on end.
And so we skate down to the solstice.
The month surrounding the solstice--from about December 7th to January 4th or so--is the hardest month of the year for me, when the light dwindles to almost nothing. I'm handling it better than I have in years past; keeping busy, keeping happy, filling my days with things to do and just enough downtime so I don't go insane. There is an art to this, one that I am slowly becoming better at. The potential for depression is there, I can see it, but I'm avoiding the things that might trigger it.
Things keep moving along. It still looks like i'm going to be able to take some time off (maybe not the whole week, but some) between Christmas and New Year's, so i'm looking forward to that. i'm getting a Christmas tree this weekend, hopefully, and I'll be baking gifts for people, and life keeps moving and i'm glad of it.
I'm looking forward to spring, though, with a feverish appetite.
