My New Year’s Resolution in 1997 was “to keep better track of what the heck was going on in my life 1) so I could remember myself and 2) so I would have something to tell the jillions of people that ask me what’s been going on lately.” That’s when and why I started this blog. I’ve updated it pretty faithfully for the last ten years. I decided to take a month off in August/September 2001 for the Virgo Month of Leisure, opting instead to blog by postcard. That turned out to be a really weird month.

This blog has seen me get divorced, buy a house, throw a bunch of parties, get by with cheap or free rent, become a librarian, get blogger-famous, date hippies, protest the WTO, land in the hospital, go to Burning Man, fall for a future law student, travel the US, move to Vermont, start new blogs, make new friends, add thousands of photos to Flickr, make the papers, and send and receive hundreds of postcards. It’s finding me now in a big house, on the side of an icy road in Vermont, drinking coffee, wearing a wool hat and a wool sweater wondering what the next ten years will be like.

The last six to nine months have been particularly up and down. While the end of my long-term relationship was a big deal in this sort of “I had a PLAN and now I don’t, wtf?!” way, being in a deteriorating relationship for a few months prior to that was what was more damaging and harder to get over. My Mom’s lung cancer diagnosis, surgery and treatment a few months later (doc says all clear for now, I can almost not type that for fear of jinxing it) was one of the more personally difficult things I’ve gone through as an adult, partly because I didn’t write much about it here or talk to many people about it. I don’t really have a “smiles everyone” approach to adversity, but I find public hand-wringing distasteful personally, so I don’t do it much here. It’s something I need to do a little work on.

My professional life has done nothing but continue to be awesome which has been a nice solid bedrock underneath all the rest of this. Getting shoved into a familiar-yet-new living situation (same house, same place, just me) has been constantly fascinating to me. I feel very lucky to enjoy the inner workings of my own head, because I spend a lot of time in there. This work and travel year brought me new friendships and closer friendships with a lot of my existing friends. My travel schedule helped that to happen. Out of the 50+ places I stayed last year about a third of them were with people who I’d never stayed with before, a third were hotels and a third were family and existing friends. I feel like I have the plane/hotel thing down now, I did not feel that way at the beginning of the year. I’ve enjoyed having the last month or so to just be home and reconnect with my routine.

This was also the first year I had any sort of a fitness routine, which I mentioned in the last post. Feeling in control of my health and weight has been a huge deal, I hadn’t realized how much it would be when I started. Keeping track of it has also been useful, since the organization part comes naturally and the results are obvious: I swam a ton, I lost some weight, I have been happier, I am musclier. A side effect of this has been an increase in general confidence which is a mixed blessing. I’ve always felt pretty confident but now, in my own me-driven, me-centered universe, that can border on arrogance and/or aggression. I get competitive with myself and need to keep it in check to not be competitive with other people when it’s not appropriate. On the “to do” list.

Another weird side-effect of making new plans is that since I’m not planning to move, leave my job and buy a house (G’s and my nominal post-law school plan) I find myself suddenly sort of … rich, relatively speaking. I had been saving money for a possible down payment which is now mine to do something with. Kate and I are travelling to Australia in early March which will suck up some of this, but not terribly much. I’m now in a situation where I’ve met all my short term financial goals and need to start thinking more sensibly about long-term ones. I’m going to start using Wesabe in 2007 to track my pennies, but I need to put in place a larger plan to deal with my dollars.

Other than that, my ongoing resolutions to stay well-fed, well-slept, and around things that smell good seem well within my reach. I hope this new year brings you peace and joy. I’m optimistic that mine might.

jessamyn, abada abada

I apologize in advance for the extreme wonkiness of this post.

I swam a little over eighty miles in 2006. I don’t have much of an idea of whether this is excellent or somewhat paltry. I do know that it’s the first year since college that I’ve had a regular exercise regimen all year, and I liked it. This is an annotated chart of my Excel spreadsheet of my routine. Eighteen laps is about a half mile, thirty-six is a mile. I did a mile at one time twice in 2006. My goal for 2007 is to swim the “length of Lake Champlain” which is about 110 miles. If I get super ambitious, I’ll make some sort of progressive graphical lake chart. Probably I’ll just do this at the end of 2007.

jessamyn, abada abada, swim, swimming

I can not tell a lie, when I did my last year in cities I thought “Eh, I can top that.” I don’t think I’d like to recreate the frenetic craziness that seemed to buzz around a lot of these trips, but they sure were fun. 2006 saw me get to my last US state and flesh out my list of states I’ve given library talks in. I slept away from home on 52 occasions, sometimes for a few days in a row. I have pictures of all the beds but one. Here is the list. Stars indicate multiple visits to the same place. Numbers indicate number of distinct guestrooms at each location. Idea from Matt, who got it from Jason who apparently has visited the town next to mine, recently. I expect to see him at the Sugar House one of these days.

Bethel, VT (aka home)
Pelham, AL
Montgomery, AL
San Antonio, TX (3)
Somerville, MA *
Houston, TX (2)
Tunbridge, VT
Chappaqua, NY
Columbus, OH
Westport, MA *
San Francisco, CA * (2)
Warren, NH
New Orleans, LA (3)
Amherst, MA
Brooklyn, NY
Ferrisburg, VT
Washington DC
Baltimore, MD
Jamaica Plain, MA
Chicago, IL
Kittery, ME
Fargo, ND
Boxborough, MA *
Bridgeport, CT
Braintree, VT *
Burlington, VT * (2)
Barre, VT
Portland, OR
Corbett, OR
McMinnville, OR
The Dells, WI
Madison, WI
Los Angeles, CA
Waikiki, HI
South Lansing, MI

jessamyn, abada abada

I just got out of the tub. I’m heading to dinner at friends’ in a few hours. I packed my sister off towards home a few hours ago. We had a great time helping each other out with dopey projects and also just hanging out, eating good food and constantly remarking on the weather (“weirdly warm out isn’t it?” “yes.”)

For my part, I helped her get her snow tires on, buy and wrap a few presents, get a new ringtone for her phone and inspect her weird toe problem for signs of danger (there were none). For her part, she helped me have a dinner party for 13 people (a success!), get flannel sheets on my bed (warm!), move some furniture around, and pay my health insurance bill. We went for a few walks, a few drives and drank a ton of coffee. We swapped a lot of music so I’m currently listening to the Grand Theft Auto Vice City soundtrack and I bet she’s listing to some woodley woo guy-and-guitar music.

She has to work on Tuesday so she’s heading back home today. I’ve got plans for today and tomorrow, very low key, involving very little driving and NO AIRPORTS. Airport avoidance seems to be one key to enjoying the holidays this year. Television avoidance is another. I’m pretty sure I can put the brakes on the “Christmas every day” scorekeeping once Christmas is, in fact, over though I must admit that it hasn’t been much of a hassle.

Happy holidays, however you’re celebrating them. I’ll spend the next week wrapping up the year and also the DECADE since this week marks ten years I’ve been keeping this journallish bloggy thing.

jessamyn, abada abada

So I’ve been experimenting with long shutter exposures on my camera and going out at night and trying to take some pictures, just me and my trusty flashlight freaking out the neighbors. Well it might be freaking them out if everyone didn’t go to sleep around ten, so unless I wake the dog up, I’m good. The weather has been creepily mild but even so I’ll stay up working, then take a bath, then go outside with the steam flying off of me and take a few pictures. There’s room for improvement, but it’s a fun new project.

So this evening, I worked until 8 pm, teaching my last Microsoft Word for Beginners class. I got home and done with dinner by 9. At about 9:05 the power went out, just as I was IMing with a friend asking me how slutty she should dress for her client’s holiday party. All the lights went off leaving me staring into the face of my glowing laptop, IMing to nowhere.

Luckily, I knew where the flashlight was thanks to my recent late night forays. Luckily, Ola is a nutty candle hoarder. Luckily she was also a decorater meaning that there was a fully functional kerosene lantern in the kitchen, just sitting there looking pretty. There was also a “you plug it into the phone jack and it works” phone in the house. So I copied down some numbers from my laptop and settled in among lantern light an a ton of candles to make a few phone calls. I like to pretend when there’s a power failure that it affects everyone else in the whole world, but apparently my friends in Randolph weren’t even affected.

When I was a kid power failures meant 1) eat all the ice cream, STAT and 2) each toilet has one more flush, use it wisely. It took a few power failures out here, before I got that it was okay to use the plumbing whenever you wanted, and there’s not much in the way of ice cream in the freezer anymore.

Before I got too cold and decided to light a fire, the power came back on. I would have taken a picture or two of all the flickery candles but the batteries in my camera were dead from too many late nights with the long shutter.

jessamyn, abada abada, powerfailure, candles

I just installed wireless in the Tunbridge Public Library today and am quite pleased with myself.

For readers of this who are friends with Greg, he had a bad bike accident last week (just him, no cars involved) and cracked his hip/femur. I found out through a pretty roundabout way involving someone from work posting something to a VLS mailing list that a friend of Greg’s read and emailed me. I called parents, called the hospital where he was having surgery, and raced up there just to make sure he wouldn’t be alone. The good news was, he wasn’t. We’ve been keeping in pretty cordial but not super-close touch and he has a great network of friends up in Montpelier who were already there and on top of things. I’ve stepped back into the background again, but people should contact him directly to send well-wishes, offers of support or whatever. His family was up this weekend but he’s going to be hobbling around for a while now. There’s an “end of an era” feeling to this whole incident, but not really in a bad way.

Ask Metafilter has been getting some more press especially in the wake of Google Answers folding. If you’re somewhat curious or you don’t understand why I talk about the place so much, you might want to read what NPR, the Chicago Tribune or Anil Dash (the evangelist at Six Apart) has to say about the place. I know they’re all “Blah blah blah Matt Haughey” but I help run the place. Another media mention is me talking about Wikipedia in our local paper Seven Days.

I’ve really felt like being able to hang out at home and focus has been great these last few weeks. Even the ramping up of the holiday season has been pretty much a non-event for me. Kate’s coming up for the weekend before Christmas and I think I’ll be making some soup. I can’t say I’ve terribly missed the bazillion santas that are usually around here, and the creche didn’t make an appearance on the town common this year. I swam 3.5 miles in the past seven days that ended yesterday which is a new high for me. I’m hoping to end the year on an up note and it’s looking good so far.

jessamyn, abada abada