On the New Year
Happy New Year! Welcome to 2025 - a year that I’m sure will be one for the record books. This year has unwritten potential, and now that we’re a week in, I’d like to look back on 2024 while also looking ahead. The past year was a bittersweet one. With every first of our marriage (first Christmas as a married couple in 2023) also came every first without my dad. The past year was hard in a lot of ways I didn’t anticipate. Trying to hold it together for my own sake, while also holding it together for everyone else’s sake, is one of my fatal flaws and I really saw that come to fruition in 2024. I kept pushing myself when I shouldn’t have, invested into friendships and work obligations way more than I should have, and insisted on putting others ahead of myself for far too much of the year. Brian reminded me that I needed to take time for myself in 2024, and I started focusing more on self-care in addition to my regular duties. I saw the past year as a time of self-discovery and growth. The good came with the bad though, as Brian and I continued to plan and prepare for our wedding ceremony, I fully committed to preparing for the ATP (Assistive Technology Professional) exam, we met new people, visited new places, and saw things I never thought I’d see before. I learned that I actually do like spicy foods, we really like building Lego sets, and our kitchen stove is partially run on AA batteries (true story - that’s a blog post for another time).
As I look forward, I’d like to set up some hopes for the year and see how many of them I accomplish. I’m not big into resolutions, mostly because I’m not too “resolute” with them. Everything on my list will happen eventually, whether it’s in ten minutes or ten years. So, here’s some things I’d like to do this year in no particular order:
Read 25 books
Visit one new NHP (bonus points if it’s in a new state)
Re-start learning a language, preferably Spanish
Finish a Legacy game (we have two ongoing right now!)
Get the website to 1000 views
Do something for Dad (plant a tree? dedicate a tree? go fishing? This one is very to-be-determined)
To close this, I’d like to remind myself of something my high school principal would say daily over the loudspeaker. It’s something that was really corny at the time, but it’s stuck and now it resonates: “Make it a great day or not, the choice is yours”
-G
On Winter Break
When you hear the phrase “two weeks off” it sounds like infinite possibilities, endless time, and opportunity galore. Will I finally re-organize the closet? Can I get those donations out of the bedroom? How many friends can I see and how many boardgames can we play? I can guarantee that next to none of that gets accomplished, largely because a holiday is smack dab in the middle of everything and societal norms dictate that some of that time is spent differently. There’s family to see, gifts to give, cookies to bake, books to read, blog posts to make… None of these are bad things, but they do take time. Meaning all of a sudden those two weeks breeze by in a blink. I’ve only barely started a book, I haven’t organized a damn thing, and our home is continually not as clean as I’d prefer (but it is clean enough - I’m just a perfectionist). Now there’s four days left in the break, with two of them partially occupied by socializing, making our wedding album, and gearing up for the week ahead. At this point, I’m feeling somewhat refreshed and ready to go back, though I’ll always say that it wasn’t enough time off.
P.S. We did manage to finish another show: Fallout (the series) on Amazon Prime. I rather liked it. The show accomplished a lot in a little amount of time, especially if a viewer is going into it blind or with minimal knowledge of the game series. There are great easter eggs and world-related hints that savvy game-players may pick up on, but it’s just extra flavor to the world if you don’t. Without saying too much, it does differ in one key way from the video game cannon, but I see this as a necessary change in today’s climate and makes some factions even more sinister. It’s a weird dinner-watch considering it’s so gory, but we’ve watched ickier while eating. I’d give it a 4/5 and recommend to anyone who likes action/adventure, gore, or post-apocalyptic stories.
-G
On Gearing Up for Launch
We’re trying to get things set for launch prior to the holidays, and it’s slow going it’s so much fun! It’s not exhausting at all. Having a lack of clear direction is definitely wearing on Brian’s brain because I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be setting up at a given time, and I’m slipping in updates between clients at work when I have some down time. A list of things to come:
Wedding photos (Engagement photos are live)
Park photos (Only some are live, and we have many more parks to scope out!)
A new landing page (With actual content or useful navigation links)
A sense of direction.
A personal working knowledge of how to make Squarespace do the things I want it to do.
-B
Well I think it’s fun… Getting to combine my art and technology backgrounds into a new creative outlet is a welcome challenge for me. I’m mostly fueled by the fact that we have over a thousand wedding photos to share and I want them to start trickling out before Christmas. Really, that was the inspiration for this whole endeavor. I wanted a place for the photos that was easily accessible and shareable, something that we were in charge of, and something that wasn’t held hostage by the whims of social media. I still plan on sharing a link to the site on socials whenever I add new pictures, but I’d much prefer to forward foot traffic our way instead of giving my Facebook profile a ton of views. Using Squarespace is getting more intuitive the more I play with it, so once B and I figure out what to actually post (book club? Movie reviews? Thoughts on current events? Life updates?) and get our media uploaded, it’ll look like a real thing. So pardon our pixie dust while we put up some “go-away-green” walls (any Disney fans know what I mean?) and get some things figured out. We’re learning!
-G
On Finishing Two Books and a TV Series on the Same Day
That title makes it sound so much more impressive than it truly was - both Grace and I happened to finish books that we’d both been reading on the same day and then followed that up with finishing off all that’s currently available for a TV show we’d been watching with dinner. I am completely blanking on what Grace was reading, I was reading Congo by Michael Crichton, and we finished off season three of Vox Machina. Having managed to coincidentally time it so we did all that on a single day, Grace said it deserved a post. Thus here I sit, contemplating what to write. The show is fun. Think Grace was trying to struggle through her book for a month, so I don’t think it was very good, and I read Congo a few pages a night while going to sleep for the better part of two weeks. Crichton was a master of thrilling books….right up until the end. No matter that I’ve read from him, be it the posthumously released Eruption or his greatest hit Jurassic Park it’s always the same - the book is pretty good, better, phenomenal, shit. The endings are always so dissatisfying. Oh god, oh god, we’re all gonna die. Just kidding, we’re all fine, everything’s fine here now. It always felt like Crichton wanted to end his books on a down note, to kill everyone, and his publisher and editor would sit him down and tell him no and he’d rewrite the last three pages to save everyone who was still alive at that point. Having seen the movie Congo multiple times and just buying it last week while in the middle of the book to watch again, it makes the book even worse. All I want is a good ending. I can’t have it. Neither can you.
-B
It’s more incredible happenstance than anything that we managed to complete a TV show and each complete a book within the same 24 hour timeframe. With work and life and a wedding and work and life, I’ve been reading books at a snail’s pace lately. I used to average a solid 100 books a year while I was in college - particularly undergrad - with the final week in the year becoming a read-a-thon for me to get to that sweet, sweet triple number. My goal bumped down to fifty-ish in grad school, and since graduating I’ve barely been able to clock 25 books a year. The good news is I’m reading more research and non-fiction for work, but that’s really cutting in on my quota of sci-fi, fantasy, romance, and comics.
Anyway, Brian was at work so he couldn’t reference my book journal. I was reading Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne. It was a sweet almost-romance fantasy that I bought on impulse solely because the edges were sprayed with a pretty color and the sequel had a witty dedication. It’s the first in a series (two are out now and two are planned for release next year) and seems like the author’s first foray into the genre. It wasn’t a bad read, but it did take a while to “get good” and lacked what I typically look for in a romance. It’s marked as “cozy fantasy” online and maybe that’s why the romance was very PG and the themes didn’t get too dark. The ending was semi-satisfying, but I felt that it came a little too quickly and easily, almost as if the author had more to tell but decided to save it for the sequel instead or the editor cut a few chapters to save on publishing costs. It was a 3-star read and I have the sequel sitting in my TBR, but I’m deciding to bop back to a different series for now.
On the note of The Legend of Vox Machina, it’s a great watch for anyone who likes fantasy, violence, romance or D&D, especially if you’ve played D&D. We spent a good bit of time asking each other “what level is that character” or “what spell is that” or “how are they making that spell work in that context” among other things. You don’t have to have a whole lot of context when it comes to D&D or Critical Role’s first campaign to enjoy the story and characters, plus there’s a 4th season on the way with teases of overarching plots that harken back to the first season. The writing seems solid and the animation really got kicked up a notch in season 3. We’re undecided on what to make our new “dinner show” but we have an excel spreadsheet of ideas. I just have to get B to pick one…
-G
On Designing a Website
So we’ve been toying around with the idea of building a website for a few months now. We have too many cool things to share, and if we post them on one of our social media accounts, we’re running the risk of people not seeing them, not being able to see them, or losing the post entirely if the site goes the way of the dinosaurs. The way to combat that: make your own website. Brian set everything up and started building some pages from scratch. Then he went to a conference and after talking to some other professionals, was told “building a website is just like using Canva!” and thought ‘that sounds like a project for the wife’. After digging into the back of my mind for information from gen-ed courses from a decade ago, leaning on art and design knowledge from fifteen years worth of learning, and thinking ‘well that just doesn’t look right…’ I can confidently say that I think I’m learning what to do. I think. So apologies if this is a little too work-in-progress for your liking, but that’s just what it is! I hope you continue to check the site out and get some enjoyment out of it along the way.
- G