Hi, I'm back. Ok, I wasn't really gone. I've still been reading LJ, when I can get on it (although even when I can get on it, it keeps logging me out, so my reading of friendslocked posts has been somewhat hit or miss), as well as FB and G+, not so much because I have so much time as I have lots of things to procrastinate on. But writing for me seems to require so much more *intention* than reading or even commenting. But I think I may have unpacked my todo list enough that writing LJ posts can be back in the occasional circuit. That, and I synced all the photos off my phone and my camera yesterday and organized them all and realized, well, just how much I haven't been talking about here, and maybe I can use them as a guideline. Photos and travelogs have been at the core of a lot of my LJ use, and while FB is really good for sharing the in-the-moment shot, it's not so good for combining a series with an extended retrospective. I never have a sense for how many people actually read that stuff, but it's good for future-me if nothing else.

I feel like I should also do a catchup general where-am-I-now sort of life survey post, since I haven't been posting in awhile, but, well, not sure there's really all that much to say there. I've been successfully self-employed for over a year now. It has its ups and downs, pros and cons. Feel free to ask questions if there's things about my state of being that you're curious about.

But anyway, the real reason I called you all here today... I'm undecided about what to do with my upcoming Saturday. This is a matter which seems far too serious for Facebook and yet too frivolous for G+, so here we are.

You see, I had plans. They were ok plans. I was going to go to WordCamp which is a WordPress mini-conference thing, which seemed like a really good idea, since a lot of the work (self-employed, remember) I've been doing lately has been WordPress related, so it seemed like a good chance to make connections and beef up my skills and learn some useful things I didn't know I didn't know. But then I went to go get a ticket and I'd left it too long and they were sold out. There's still a chance I could get a walk-in ticket, but I looked at the schedule, and, well, I'm not too enthralled. So now I no longer have a locked in plan for Saturday, and meanwhile there's all this other stuff going on.

One of those things is an Oakland community service day. It's really important to me to give back to my community where I can, especially since Oakland really needs it, and there's lots of fun projects going on, and I know blue_estro was planning on doing this. But I'm also cognizant that on the one hand I blew off the tree-planting day last weekend that my own neighborhood group was involved in, and on the other hand I've actually been doing a lot of community-involved stuff recently, so maybe I'm not feeling like this is a thing that's all that important for me to do right now.

Finally, some friends in the South Bay are having a party, which, yay party. Would be good to see them and some of the other people I know are going. And I could maybe stop in and see my aunt and uncle, who I had to flake on a couple weekends ago due to car issues. On the other hand, South Bay is annoyingly far. And I am doing that social anxiety thing where I worry that I will go and just stand around and feel awkward. Technically I could also do the service day and then the party - the timing would work ok for that.

So anyway. That's where I am right now. What do y'all think? I know this is one of those too much of a good thing problems, and I'm not actually complaining. I'm just massively undecided, and it was ask you guys or roll a die.

Sunday is pretty clear - I'm going on a heritage tour of the neighborhood and then to help friends with their yard. Oh, and tomorrow night (Friday) I have a wedding to attend. Busy busy busy, but awesome busy, however you slice it.

I'm still here. I skim often, comment sometimes, and have been posting never. The problem is that I keep wanting to post big deep things. But the big deep things are often still percolating in my mind and changing underneath me as I try to write the posts, and so they don't happen, and I retreat to the comforting shallowness of facebook. Seriously, I have like 20 half written LJ posts, and the more of those I have, the more difficult actually posting anything seems.

Just thought you should know.

Can somebody comment on this post? Testing to see if adding lj to my spam whitelist actually fixes the notifications problem or not.

Edit: Thanks guys, you can stop commenting - it didn't work.

Has anyone else been having any trouble receiving LJ comments in email?

2010 was pretty good to me. The quitting my job and going freelance thing was huge, and has made me much happier and less stressed. I also learned I have an allergy to sesame, and eliminating that from my diet solved a lot of the low level 'feeling like crap all the time' I'd been having. So I've been feeling pretty damn awesome lately, at least comparatively.

Media
I am keeping my habit of seeing about one movie in a theatre a year. This year it was 'Get Him to The Greek' for strangebint's birthday. It was pretty funny. Also caught the restored Metropolis showing at the Castro theater, and more recently the Christmas Noir thing they did, both with xthread, both of which were excellent and fun. (I also made it to the theatre theater a couple times, which was lovely, and went to my first Cirque du Soleil show, Ka, while I was in Vegas, which was totally stunning.) It looks like I watched less movies on DVD this year, although there's been several TV series worked through from beginning to end (Veronica Mars, Wire in the Blood, and Eureka). There's nothing that really stands out as 'best movie of the year', or even as 'worst movie of the year'. I enjoyed new-but-shortlived tv show Terriers, and the very short first season of The Walking Dead, in addition to starting to watch Eureka. And there was that whole Lost finale thing. Otherwise, it's been the usual rotation tv-wise.

My reading habits have gone completely down the drain. I'm pretty certain that the only books I read this year, I read on an airplane. :( I think that was a total of a very depressing three - 'Mona Lisa Overdrive' (William Gibson), 'Across the Wall' (short stories, Garth Nix), and 'The Brothers Lionheart' (Astrid Lindgren).


Consumption
The biggest thing in this category is my shiny new Epic phone (Sprint Galaxy S Android). It's pretty sweet having the internet in my pocket all the time, and it takes pretty decent photos to boot. I also got an iron, an external CD/DVD drive, and a new external hard drive. Oh, and some awesome cowboy boots I need to wear more often. I also got some dental work done, including a crown, which is not as shiny (since I didn't go with the gold), but definitely pricey, even with insurance. A lot of friends did charity events this year - runs, walks, bike rides, etc. - and I tried to give something to all of them, as well as giving to Doctors Without Borders in the wake of the Haiti earthquake. Between it all, my donations this year added up to a decent sized chunk of change, and I'm happy about that. I expanded my stock portfolio slightly with some smaller, more risky companies, with more good results than bad ones.

Events
It was a hard year for the planet, with earthquakes, volcanoes, oil spills, floods, and killer beesclimate change, but very little of it directly affected me. And despite the Republican wins at the mid-terms, I'm actually more optimistic these days about the state of the nation - I think Obama has been doing some great things, and I feel a lot of people are *trying*, even if sometimes misguidedly. I also feel there's been an increase in name-calling and partisanship among individuals, and that makes me sad, but I'm not alone in noticing it and calling attention to it - from Obama calling on the parties to work together to Jon Stewart asking to restore sanity.

I know a lot of currently preggers people, so I expect there will be a tidal wave of babies this year. Welcome to the world in 2010 to deirdremoon and tronpublic's little one, and to River and Trin's baby boy, who I got to meet today! (If any of the rest of you had a baby this past year, let me know...I may have miscalculated some as being in 09.) I am relieved to report that no one close to me passed away this year. There's been a few marriages, although it seems a number of people have been doing it 'on paper' rather than 'with wedding' (some 'with wedding to come later'). I did get to go to the_siobhan and the_axel's double Elvis wedding in Vegas, which was as fantastic as it sounds, and I am glad to have gotten to be a part of it. Congrats to all of you, and I hope your happiness is the lasting kind.

I took a couple of good trips, one in January to Seattle/Olympia, one in the summer to Vegas and Utah, for the Elvis wedding, C16, and bonus roadtrip between the two, and one in the fall to DC/Delaware/Philadelphia, for the Stewart/Colbert rally, with bonus sightseeing and seeing of SO MANY fabulous folk. Also went down to my parents in SoCal for Thanksgiving and got some good socialization in there as well. Sadly, did not make it to the UK this time around. Had some good visitors throughout the year, although less of them on my air mattress - ratontheroad's Limo of Epic Debauchery was pretty epic, my friend Hannah and her family visited in March, there was easter egg dying with cincinnatus_c_, my friend Sam came to town from Chicago, kat1031 and satorisearching were in town *twice*, with excellent brunches and sightseeing both times, ramonarjona was here in May and in October.

Went to a number of good parties and social occasions, and ended the year by hosting a fun New Year's party. Had a great time at the Faith and the Muse show at the DNA in April...I think that's the only concert I made it to. Took a trip to the Winchester Mystery House in honor of my birthday, with Thai food after. Enjoyed watching onceupon in her TV appearances, and attending gordonzolas book launch.

My home and love lives have been relatively stable. Got a new roommate around Dec/Jan last year, and another one in May, and they have both been fantastic additions to the household. Quit my job, as I mentioned, in July, and have been making progress establishing myself as an independent successful professional. Discovered allergy to sesame and eliminated it from my diet. Between those things, kept a damper on the number of bouts of sickness this year. Started working out regularly towards the end of the year, and intend to keep it up. Still not king, but getting pretty damn close.

Resolutions
My resolution for 2010 was to deepen my relationships with my current friends. I didn't do this in quite the methodical, organized way I originally had in mind, but I *do* feel like I definitely got in some really good quality social interactions and grew my relationships with more than a few of you, so I'm counting it as a success. I think it was also beneficial overall to shift my attention from 'meeting new people' to 'appreciating the people already in my life'. More about resolutions in the next entry....

People
I enjoyed meeting, among others, megagram, inulro, oletheros, spinneymoon, and soong this year, and getting to know spaghettisquash, cardboard_dream, crossbonesdj, whippingboy, and la_nausicaa better. (It's getting harder to do this here, with the decline of LJ and the increasing rise of FB, as it is based on who I added on LJ, and I added a lot more people on FB this year than I did on LJ, so I feel like I'm leaving people out, not least of which are my stellar current set of roommates. Suffice to say, if I met you this year, I'm glad I did, and if we grew closer, I am thankful for that.)

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you'll join me in having a great 2011. :)

(A Thursday/Friday in Late October, 2010)
After dinner, I headed off with leensterama. Her parents and mine are old college buddies. I met her roommate and her roommate's dog and then we stayed up late chatting. The next morning she made us peanut butter pancakes, and then she needed to head off for work and a seminar, so I hit up the local shopping district for sign-making supplies for the rally. After wandering through several shops I eventually I had pretty much everything I needed, and there was still a fair amount of the afternoon left before I was scheduled to meet cija when she got off work. So I did what I'd figured out the previous evening and took the Metro to Union Station, where they have a bag check, checked my bags, and then went down to the Lincoln Memorial, then went back, picked up my bag, and went to go meet cija. This turned out to be an awful lot of running around, and by this time, with all the walking I'd been doing, my feet were really killing me, but it all worked out.




It's smaller than I always think it is.

cija works nearish the White House, so we went by there. (She took some picks with me in them, but I don't really like how any of them came out.)



Then we went back to her place, and, hm, got dinner at an Indian place, I think. And then I made signs! (Signs and rally photos will be in the next entry.)

I'm not sending out cards this year (I try to do every other year, and I went kind of all out last year with homemade ones) but I may indulge in a little bit of completely random present buying, so if you have a wishlist you want me to know about, feel free to link below, or even just say something like 'I posted it in my LJ like a week ago!' or whatever. No guarantees of anything of course, but...*santa grin* And my own is here but please don't feel you are obliged to get me anything, of course!

Also, if you have moved in the last year, I would love your current address. All comments are screened. My own address is here - if you are sending out cards, I would love to have one!

Terriers. This awesome show with a ridiculously catchy theme song just finished it's first season on FX. Sadly, this will be it's only season, as it's been canceled. It's dark, it's funny, it doesn't give any easy answers, I love it.

Skullcandy. They make my headphones. My first pair of headphones from them, the left ear stopped working awhile back. Luckily, they have the world's best warranty. Here is how it is written on the original paperwork: "If this product should fail in your lifetime, we will replace it at no charge. If the product is damaged by aggressive music listeners sliding a rail, sliding down the emergency ramp of your aircraft, slammed in your locker, slammed in your car door, run over by a car, running into a wall, getting run out of town, mountain biking, road biking, sky diving, beating your boyfriend unmercifully, getting beaten down by the man, blown up in an accidental experimentation with flammable substances, or damaged in any other every day experience, it means you are living your life the way we want our product used! In these, or any other damaging events, we will replace the product for a 50% discount from retail.
Love Skullcandy." So now I have a shiny *new* pair of skullcandy headphones, completely free, and these ones are shiny *blue* and I am a happy camper.

So we went through the gem and mineral hall kind of fast, because we had limited time before our parking ran out. So I just took photos of whatever caught my fancy, but have now researched them on the internet for your educational pleasure.

( from the smithsonian natural history museum )