Thursday, January 22, 2015

Re-entry

Wow, it's been a long time since I last wrote, here. The fall was mostly about grief, in one way or another. The first month was just grief, and rawness, and rediscovering how to be in the world with part of my foundation missing. And then there were weeks of slowly getting back on track, trying to catch up on all the things that fell by the wayside during that first month. And then it was Thanksgiving, all wrong, because so many things were different. And then it was Christmas, all wrong, because so many things were different, and we did hardly any caroling at all (normally the center of our Christmas visit) because 3/4 of the songs had landmines in them.

And then January was going to be about crawling out into a new year, and focusing on new things. But on January 3rd the CO detector went off, which led to needing to replace the boiler, and needing to remove some asbestos we didn't know we had, and having no heat for a week while the overnight lows were in the 6-15 degree range, all of which led to burst pipes and holing up in the bedroom with an electric heater for a week, putting on our jackets to come downstairs and make food twice a day. And spending $3000 in repairs, ignoring the $8K boiler which we financed with PSE&G. So we're spending the rest of the month eating beans and rice and hoping no one suddenly needs new shoes or a dentist visit.

And so 4 months go by (I know I was sort of here 3 months ago, but not really. I wasn't really anywhere, that first month).

I've been doing a terrible job of keeping up with my friends' journals, although I did finally unsubscribe from most of the communities that were clogging up my feed.

I'm thinking about what I want this journal to be, and whether it makes sense to pick it back up.

I'm also looking to find out where more fannish conversation is going on, these days, as my old online community seems to have dried up/moved. I know there's some on tumblr, but the site doesn't much appeal to me (although I'll adjust if I need to). I often read fanfic while drinking my tea in the morning (because bite sized, lighthearted stories are exactly what I'm looking for in the morning) and I came to the end of every available story on AO3 in a particular fandom, this week, and found myself having no idea where fans might gather to say things like "okay, I've been immersing myself in this fandom for the last two years. This is what I love about it. Sell me on a different fandom, and some of your favorite stories in it". I've started writing again, and I have an AO3 account for when I start posting, but I'd also like to be connecting conversationally.

I'm also looking to connect with more pagany folks, locally, because I'm missing the community I'd been part of, but they're centered in MA and between the cost of attending their events and the resources involved in having to travel that far, it's not gonna happen. I could start back up with the various gatherings I'd been hosting but most of my friends are more pagan-friendly than actually pagan, and that's not really what I'm looking for right now.