This is the time of the year when people get all nostalgic and stuff about what happened in the last year. A bunch of people I know have posted "what I thought of this year" posts, and it seemed like a good idea, so I jumped on the bandwagon.
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FIrst of all, I had a pretty good year. I changed from community college to a professional architecture program, and I love my school and my classes, and I feel like I'm really learning and retaining (which is more important than learning, I think). I didn't get a perfect 4.0 this quarter (a mere B+ in engineering), but I'm feeling very good about my performance and my abilities. Next quarter I begin my construction management courses, and probably next year I will be allowed to begin taking graduate level classes.
I have a great life, with a dear sweet lovely husband who is supportive of everything I'm doing, and who helps me when I need it, both by giving me a hand and by letting me work it out on my own. When I had a paper route as a kid, one of my customers once told me that the first year of marriage sets the tone for the whole thing. I was like 12 or something, so it wasn't as if that meant anything at the time, but now I can only hope. Being married per se has not made much of a difference, but my relationship with Noel has completely changed my life, for the better.
Noel's college friend John moved in with us this summer, and having him around has been great. While there have been the natural adjustments to living with another person (John eats more than any human being I have ever met, so our food storage needs have increased quite a bit), the animals love him and he takes good care of them. He often covers for us when animal care is needed, which makes my being away at school much easier on Noel.
I have a dangerous, ruinously expensive hobby in the house, but I have a great time with it in between painful and frustrating reconstruction experiences. Half the time I'm only guessing what I need to do, but it seems to turn out OK in the end. In the next few days I'll finish the end of the year wrap-up on Casa Decrepit and you can see how much work we've done in the first year of the Ten Year Plan.
I have other, also expensive hobbies in ceramics (which I have not been doing much work on) and photography. I enjoy them, and fortunately they are the sort of thing you can set down and not do much with for a while and all that happens is that you forget what that mysterious, unmarked button on the camera does (answer: eject film).
I have returned to knitting after several years of not doing it because of my allergy to sheep, and it is loads of fun, especially now that I can sit around and make fun of newbie knitters behind their backs. All the cool new yarns make for some very interesting options, and I'm excited about some of my planned projects. I may even knit myself another sweater.
Despite all the goodness of this year, I feel sometimes as if this were the beginning of the Apocalypse, with the end of democracy and the checks and balances system in America, uncontrolled religious war in the Middle East, the Sox taking the pennant (not that I'm complaining about that), the tsunami with unbelievable death tolls. I don't know. It all seems so awful and painful that most of the time I shut it out. I thought the World Trade Center collapse was bad, but this last year has taught me that that was nothing, a blip. Things can get much worse.
Some people close to me have had a hideous year. It really tempers my joy when those close to me are going through divorce, miscarriage, the death of a baby, the death of a parent (or two), the loss of jobs or other major monetary setbacks, or the aftermath of a house fire. Here's to a better 2005. Here's to finding the joy in a bad time. Happy New Year.
