Ruth Sadelle Alderson

Hello Dreamwidth friends. I was very excited to write that post about Bridgerton last week because it was the first thing I'd written in a very long time, so I thought I would write a miscellaneous recent things entry as a way to practice writing something, anything.

I am now the only unvaccinated member of my family! I am very much looking forward to it being my turn for the vaccine. I would like to hug my family again. (Or anyone really; the closest I've come to touching another human being in the last year was getting a flu shot.) My family has been having Zoom lunches every other week for most of the last year, and we're all ready to transition to close, in-person meals. We did have one distanced outside lunch, but outside is hard here - most of the year it's too hot, too cold, or so full of allergens I can't breathe. On the upside to this whole pandemic thing, I had the easiest allergy year I can remember last spring and it was really nice to stay inside in the air conditioning all day all summer.

I have baked a lot over the last year. I have always said I would bake even more than I did if I had someone else to wash the dishes for me, and it turns out that not feeling like I have to give up some of a limited amount of free time to wash dishes is a second best. I've decided that at this point, I am very much an experienced baker, and I can trust my instincts about recipes. I've had the experience more than once now where I've read a recipe, followed it exactly despite my doubts about the proportions, and then found that the final result would have been better if I'd followed my instinct about how to adjust it. I did, however, realize that I needed to start taking notes about recipe variations because I won't actually remember what I did from time to time. They also need to be useful notes; there's a bread recipe that has water amounts in two different places that might be different things I tried or amounts that need to be combined, and my cobbler recipe has the word "less!" with an arrow pointing at the sugar but no notes about how much less.

Also in pandemic-related news, I got very sick of dealing with my hair so I bought clippers and cut it all off. I'm not sure exactly how much I like it as a look, but I'm so relieved to have it off my neck and out of my way. I keep joking that it's basically lesbian haircut #17, and I was highly amused that while there were some straight people who left positive comments on my Facebook post about it, most of the early comments were from other queer people. I also had a very interesting sense when I first did it of feeling very intensely queer (in a "not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you" sense), probably because this is the most visibly queer my look has ever been.

Speaking of queer people, I have now read all of Cat Sebastian's Regency romances. The Regency Impostors series was fine. I loved The Turners and the Seducing the Sedgwicks series! I actually want to go back and reread A Gentleman Never Keeps Score even though I read it within the last month. I got all of them through libraries (if your library system has access to books on Hoopla, they have a lot of hers), so if you like Regency romances about queer people, I recommend her stuff. I will also take any and all recommendations for other good similarly historical romance novels about queer people.

In terms of fic reading, I am very much between fandoms, and so I've spent a significant portion of the pandemic reading MCU fic, because it's one of those fandoms where I know just enough for it to make sense but don't care about that much. Somehow the pairing I have decided is the one I want to read a lot of fic about is Clint/Bucky. Bonus points to anything with (a) falling in love/competing/flirting while shooting, (b) therapy for one or both of them, and/or (c) d/s-y dynamics. If you have favorite Clint/Bucky or other MCU fic, I would take recs.

This was a weird year for me. Between whatever physical trauma there was from breathing in the smoke from the fire, the emotional trauma of the fire, and my worrying about what it was going to mean for me, I caught two back-to-back colds and was sick from the middle of January until the middle of February. I had gum graft surgery on one side of my mouth in the middle of July, and spent four solid days zoning out on the couch and another three weeks or so until I started feeling more normal. At the end of September, I went on two back-to-back vacations, then went right back to work, which was clearly not okay with my body because I caught a third cold at the beginning of October. October is our busiest month of the year at work. Then at the end of October, I had gum graft surgery on the other side of my mouth. I feel like that one took a lot longer to recover from, probably because I was already a little run down and then the first anniversary of the fire was just a week after I had the surgery. Between all of that, I estimate I had about three months total out of this year that I was in some sort of illness and recovery mode, and maybe a few more weeks that I felt like I was still recovering mentally. I also had an interesting year in that I realized while 38 was arguably the uppermost limit of mid-30s, 39 was definitely almost 40, so I spent a lot of time thinking about what I want my life to be like in my 40s and making changes toward that end.

Write. I'm not sure how much I really achieved what I wanted with this this year. I did have some times when I really felt my way into the experience of writing. I also spent a lot of this year feeling somewhat fuzzy and unfocused. I am leaning into the idea that some times are like that, and that's just what I needed to do this year. It was a fallow year; next year will be different.

Strengthen connections. I did so much of this! It still makes me really happy to put all these things down in my tracking spreadsheets. I sent a lot of emails, texted, started sending mail to my niece, hung out with people from my yoga class, went on vacations and to local cultural events with my mom, went to the movies with friends, enjoyed both my book clubs, and got to see some of my best friends who live far away. One of the real highlights is that I have a better relationship with my brother now, which I think is mostly because he's changed, but my getting a cell phone so we can text each other now probably helped. I also met a potential new friend right at the end of the year (the joke I've been telling myself is that the post-work holiday party mood is: I'm in ur Facebook befriending ur partner), so I'll see if she wants to hang out earlyish this year.

Connect to God/the divine. It turns out I wrote down a lot more things on my tracking spreadsheet than I thought I did. I have the sense that I'm still really struggling with how to do this in an ongoing way. I think part of what I need to start doing is noticing the divine element of times when I'm not specifically trying to make that connection. For example, the day after we did Thanksgiving Friday at my house, I was singing along to Kesha's Rainbow while washing dishes from having hosted my family, and I thought, "This is a devotional practice."

Get more sleep. I think I did much better on this one. I still wrote down that I was tired more weeks than is ideal on my check-ins, but I have the sense that I wasn't as exhausted this year due to not getting enough sleep reasons.

Cut out the mindless internetting. Hoo boy. I did okay with this. I definitely spent less time doing mindless internetting and more time reading books this year. However, I also spent a lot of time doing mindless internetting during all of the rest and recovery from illness and dental surgeries time. I think this is something I need to keep being mindful of.

Take a vacation. I did a lot of vacationing this year! In fact, this week is my only staycation all year. My mom and I went to San Francisco in February to go to the ballet and in May to see Hamilton and go to the SFMOMA. In August we went to Ashland to see five plays in three days. In September, I went to Wisconsin to visit lakeeffectgirl and we went to see the JoBros with one of our other best friends. Right after that, I went with my mom and a handful of other women from my yoga class to Asilomar for a weekend yoga retreat with our yoga teacher. This does not need to be on my list for next year because I already have two out of town cultural events with my mom and a two Louis Tomlinson concert dates trip planned with lakeeffectgirl.

Prepare to move. I didn't have to move! I did clean out some things from my cabinets and have a few things fixed by the apartment people.

Volunteer/get involved in a cause. This did not happen at all. I think partially it turns out it's not really a high priority for me and partially being sick so much put me off doing anything that took more work.

Address problems earlier. I did okay on this. I have a lot of things on the fixed problems row of my tracking spreadsheet for the beginning of the year. I'm not sure if I slacked on this or if there just weren't a huge number of problems left in the later part of the year.

Share my interests/enthusiasm/excitement. I sent a lot of emails to friends, and talked about some of the things I was interested in at family dinner, plus there were my two book clubs. I also talked more about my interests on Facebook this year.

Be more weird. It's really hard to be weird when you're out of the habit! I did some singing and dancing in my car at stoplights, had post-lunch one-song kitchen dance parties for a few months in the summer, and was much more willing to be weird in terms of what I posted on Facebook. I'm still not sure how to be more weird.

Today I'm thankful for the really good relationship I have with my mom. I called her this morning, and it was nice to catch up and chat.

Today I'm thankful for my dad, who brought me pomegranates. I don't have the dedication to eat very many of them, but I like eating some of the seeds in the fall.

Today I'm thankful for my family. We had a very nice Thanksgiving dinner, and my brother and his girlfriend both came - and stayed even longer than my cousins.

My mom and I went down to Sacramento last month to see Wicked. She saw the San Francisco production a few years ago; I knew almost nothing about it except that it's different from the book (which I haven't read anyway) and that it's femslashy.

( Spoilers, ranting, and a recs request. )

Today I'm thankful for all the things that haven't made it into a post yet:

I'm thankful for friends: siryn99, who has become one of my closest friends over the last couple of years. inlovewithnight, with whom I've had a lot of internet and plot bunny based fun. icanbreakthesky, who I feel like I know so well from her Twitter. Twitter's whtesde, whose replies always make me laugh. Sarah, who I finally managed to spend time with a year after she moved back to the area. J, who is one of the coolest people I know and who I got to hang out with for the first time in years this summer. All the people I'm forgetting: I'm thankful for you too.

I'm thankful that I saw my brother more this year than any year since he went to college. (Context: we've lived in the same town for most of that time.)

I'm thankful that I have a job, and that said job comes with health and dental insurance.

I'm thankful that my health is generally good. I'm thankful for the Babycakes cookbooks and the general availability of foods that make eating vegan and gluten free easier and easier.

I'm thankful to live in an apartment I love. I'm thankful to be in walking distance of the library, and short distances from everywhere else I go on a daily basis. I'm thankful to live in Chico, which is a lovely town full of trees and whose traffic is really not that bad, even though we keep growing.

I'm thankful to have had so many fun travel and concertgoing adventures this year, and that so many of them were with wonderful fangirls.

I'm thankful that my mood this holiday season is so much more relaxed than last.

Today I'm thankful that my grandparents live in Sacramento. It means instead of planning infrequent full weekends with a lot of driving to visit them, we can just head down for dinner whenever. (Like today.)

So far thirty doesn't feel all that different, although I do like the number thirty better than the number twenty-nine.

The biggest thing I'm doing to celebrate this year is taking charge of my birthday. I had one really good birthday a few years ago when allegram and dedalvs were up visiting, but my birthdays have been not the best for years and years. Not for any real tragedy of a reason; they've just been minorly annoying. I've said for a while that if I could get away with it, I would do away with my birthday celebration all together. See, I don't really want to spend the evening of my birthday spending a lot of time with a lot of people, especially when I've had the repeated experience that people don't want to do what I want to do. A quiet night at home where I can read, write, or watch a movie is my idea of a good time. (I'm not wholly antisocial, just a bit of an introvert.) Last year or the year before I tried doing lunch instead of dinner, but that didn't work out particularly well: one set of cousins was hungover and couldn't make it, and my brother goes to San Francisco to party for New Year's Eve and wasn't back yet. So this year we're doing dinner tomorrow night instead. (Although the cousins who are usually hungover are recovering from the flu and not yet ready to get off the couch and won't be there anyway. My mom says my brother initially said he would be there, but he also said that of her birthday which he then couldn't make, so we'll see.) That means I'm enjoying a quiet day at home today.

Specific things I've done/plan to do today:

Following on lakeeffectgirl's New Year's Eve plans, I watched The Bourne Supremacy earlier, and I think I'm going to watch The Bourne Ultimatum later. Jason/Nicky forever! I also bought the newest Michelle Sagara book last week, so I might go read for a while.

While watching the movie, I also wrote thank-you notes and organized some of the stuff that's been lying around on my dining room table for months. That might not seem like a fun birthday activity, but I like organizing and I like the idea of starting out a new year with at least some of that taken care of.

My mom's asked me if I had anything new to go on my wish list about ten times since I got a job. I keep telling her no. (As of about one-thirty yesterday, she said I was so far getting a cake. We'll see if she did something creative or just went for things off the list.) The reality is that my life is pretty pared down to essentials, and eating really good food actually is a treat for me, and something I'd rather have than anything else I could think of as vague wants. (The snack foods I put on my wish list are things I'm slightly less likely to buy for myself because they're either expensive [nuts] or impossible to find [Sunkist Fruit Gems], and gift certificates make me feel like I can splurge a tiny bit.) So now I'm going to talk about food.

I decided I wanted pizza for dinner on my birthday and that I could spend the money on the ingredients for it since I got gift certificates for Hanukkah and Christmas, and then I discovered that S&S no longer carries the vegan, gluten-free pizza crust I was buying. They do carry another kind, so I'll be trying that out for dinner with Passionate Mango coconut milk yogurt (something else I love but is hideously expensive) for dessert. Yum! Tomorrow night is Thai food with raw "cheese"cake for dessert.

I wasn't going to cook for lunch, but then the thing I really wanted was something that had to be cooked: rice, black beans, and sauteed bell pepper and onion. For the black beans, I've been heating them in a pan with a little bit of water, some garlic (I stopped cutting up my own and started just buying jars of chopped garlic), salt, and whatever spices seem good to me at the moment (today it was a little bit of cayenne; I think I liked it with red pepper flakes and a dash of sage better). For the bell pepper and onion, I just sauteed them on medium or so with some salt, pepper, and garlic. I also had some chips, some of which I ate with the main lunch stuff and some of which I ate with what I've been laughingly calling lazy salsa (cut up tomato). I managed to burn the rice on my first try. This is the third or fourth thing I've burned in that particular pan, so maybe I've just ruined it.

The bottom line of all of this is that I'm so far having a very nice, quiet birthday. Thank you to everyone who's been a part of it! I've gotten all kinds of lovely emails, tweets, Facebook comments, and even a v-gift. Some wonderful, anonymous person also gifted me with six months of paid time, which I'm excited about. I was thinking about letting my paid account lapse, but now I don't have to. Thank you so much, wonderful, anonymous person!

Today I'm thankful to have spent the day with family I don't see very often - including two cousins and an aunt who I think I last saw at C's bat mitzvah. C turned 18 in September.