NOTE FROM THE FUTURE (June 16, 2020): Apparently i started writing a year-end blog for 2018? And never finished it? And forgot about it entirely until i came here to post my Star Wars rant two years later? I guess the end of 2018 was pretty insane, as i was gearing up to move to LA, so it makes sense. Anyway i never finished or published this, so i'm going to publish it now because i might as well. Also, i haven't read it.
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Man, 2018 was kind of a big year, wasn't it?
Whereas we're all usually complaining about how quickly time is flying by, like where did the year go, you know? this past year has felt so. long. Like i saw a meme in about November about how long 2018 had been, reminding the reader that the Tide Pod Challenge had happened in January, and everyone was like, no, the Tide Pod thing was clearly five years ago...right?
And it certainly felt that way to me. But where others just felt like the year had dragged, like come on, just let the Trump years be over already type of deal, 2018 felt long to me because i've actually been busy. I've been utilizing my time with an efficiency i've never been able to before. In 2018, i finally decided that i'm so sick of this bullshit life i've been living that i am going to have to actively change it. There's a lot of conventional wisdom, a lot of sayings that we've all been force fed for our entire lives that i always thought i understood, about working hard and being anything you want to be and so on, that this year i finally came to truly understand. I think. I mean, let's be honest, the only thing i know for sure is that the more i learn, the more i know that i don't know.
So that's the feeling for 2018. The rest of this post will be less philosophical and more of a chronicle. I'm going to talk a little about 2017 though, just to set the stage; especially since i haven't written a year-end post since 2013 and apparently haven't used this blog at all since 2014. I'll start in 2016.
November, 2016, i stood on a scale and gazed deeply into the most unhappy number i've ever been given by that device. I was nearly 100 pounds away from the target weight i'd chosen for myself probably ten years earlier, and the gain had been accelerating. I knew i needed to make a serious change if i was ever going to get where i wanted to be. So, i used my birthday money to buy a Fitbit. For the first few months, i made no changes to my behavior, just monitored the data, to get a baseline.
Then Amanda and i rolled out the elliptical her mom had given us a while back and put it in a place where we could use it. Then, we started to actually do that.
April 2017. I bought a bike. This is the first major turning point. I was working on the East Side then, and it was about a four mile ride each way. I think i started out biking to work twice a week, then escalated. Then i started biking other places. For most of the summer, i biked pretty much anywhere i needed to go in Madison. Later in the year, we started doing workouts with a YouTube channel called Fitness Blender.
I lost 25 pounds in 2017.
November 2017, we took a long weekend and flew out to Los Angeles, because we have been considering moving there for a few years now. I'd never been there; Amanda hadn't since she was a child. We fucking loved it. We went to the beach in November. We saw a lot of cool things and had some great experiences. I didn't want to leave. Still don't.
In December of 2017, speaking of YouTube channels, i discovered Casey Neistat. This guy inspired the fuck out of me.
Watch those two videos. Watch them again. Those two videos irrevocably changed my life. I still think that, over a year later. And if i ever meet Casey Neistat, i'm going to tell him so.
So that is basically what i'm carrying with me into 2018 - a Fitbit, a bike, Casey Neistat, and a four month old puppy. Oh yeah, we adopted a puppy, Zuul, in October of 2017, after our old lady Lindsey's tragic passing in July at the age of 16.
I don't like making New Year's Resolutions. The whole concept seems somewhat disingenuous; rare is the person who keeps them, rarer is the person who keeps them longer than through January. But sometimes i do make plans, or set goals. I began 2018 with the explicit mission of hitting the water goal in my Fitbit app every single day. That's 64 ounces of water, or half a gallon, every. single. day.
At the beginning of every year, for the last...decade, at least...i've said to myself that same thing that so many other people say: this will be my year. I certainly said it in 2016 and look what a fiasco that turned out to be. I probably said it again in 2017. So at the beginning of 2018, with a fresh new year laid out in front of me, i said to myself and anyone who would listen, alright. I'm calling it now.
2020 will be my year.
This definitely took some pressure off of 2018, but left enough on that maybe, maybe i would actually get things done, get those building blocks in place to actually be where i wanted to be by 2020. The whole fitness thing, the losing 25 pounds in 2017 thing, really made me start to look at all of my goals in a different light. Start small. Just GET. STARTED.
Pursuant to that, on January 1, 2018, Amanda and i founded Snakewater Forge, LLC, following the legal dissolution of my previous company, Duckworks Media Forge, LLC, in September of 2017. The plan was basically this: Do whatever we want, all the time. Just as long as we are doing things. We had big ideas for vlogs, short films, regular films, YouTube series, photography projects, music, blogs, and so much more. Meanwhile, we'd also make ourselves available to take on clients and do contract work. I made the first Snakewater vlog that very day, as a mission statement.
Then i started clearing out the lower level of the house, to convert it into a studio space.
Then the car died.
Straight up fucking died.
I couldn't get it to start one morning. It was something like -20°C and after my first shot at it the thing wouldn't even crank. Being a logical, rational person, i decided that the best thing to do, in the first week of January at temperatures well below freezing, was to bike to work. I mean, it was a clear day otherwise; no wind, no precipitation, just a bit cold. Well, i got to work with icicles hanging from my mustache, and my skin bright red and able to freeze water on contact. That afternoon, an ice storm hit. My bike was covered in a thin coating of it, and i had no money for bus fare. By the time i realized my situation, all of my coworkers had left, so i had no remaining choice but to knock the ice off of my bike and ride home. I couldn't shift and was stuck in third gear the whole way, and i think i did permanent damage to the bike on that ride.
The car turned out to not be worth fixing and nearly impossible to sell, and would eventually end up going to the scrap yard. Meanwhile, we couldn't very well operate with only one vehicle, so we started poking around Craigslist. It didn't take us long to decide that we're sick of limping along with shit old vehicles that need constant repair, so we started looking at newer vehicles. We found the deal of a lifetime on a 2016 Toyota Yaris - weirdly identical to the one we had rented in California. Same color, same year, same bizarre combination of accessories. We did what neither of us had ever done, and got a car loan. The car had 6,000 miles on it, and we got it for four thousand under Blue Book value. Damn.
We had wanted to go back to New Zealand in March for the 10th anniversary of our original, life-changing adventure, but unfortunately concerns over scheduling with Amanda's work and Alyssa's school, and financial stuff, caused us to change the plan to Scotland in June. It would cost about half as much and we would be able to slide it neatly into Alyssa's semester break.
Well, i still had a ton of banked vacation time that i needed to use in the first quarter of the year or lose, so even though the trip was canceled, i kept my scheduled time off. I considered heading out to LA to look for work during that time, but ultimately decided to spend it at home working on putting the studio together and doing some short films. In the first weekend of March, i wrote and shot a short film called Just Pizza Things, using pizza as a metaphor for filmmaking and with the underlying moral to JUST GET STARTED. For a weekend project, it turned out reasonably well.
After publishing that one slapdash little short film, i suddenly found myself with three clients. One of which was Procter & Gamble. This was literally the only bit of my work they had seen, and they wanted to hire me to do a video project based on it. I accepted.
Then the dog was diagnosed with cancer.
Our girl Haley, our 14-year-old puppy, had seemed like she was having trouble breathing for a few days, maybe a week, it was hard to say when it had really started or when we had truly noticed. So Amanda brought her in to work. Lung cancer. Spread out across all of the lobes. Best case scenario, three weeks.
All the productivity i thought i was going to have in March suddenly ground to a halt. I found myself just spending hours lying on the couch, cuddling the dog, and listening to her rapid, uncomfortable breathing. I still tried to get work done on the studio, but it was tough to focus. I certainly didn't get that Procter & Gamble job cranked out as quickly as i should have; i was scatterbrained and distant. Looking back on it i wish i had been more hands-on with the script in particular, because there were definitely things i should have asked for rewrites on, or rewritten myself. But the timing was just the worst. Relations with the second client i had picked up became strained. Fortunately the third project was a live event that was still weeks away. All i wanted to do was sit with my dog and make sure she was as comfortable as possible.
Haley passed ten days later. And even though i had bigger plans for my time off in March, plans which may have drastically changed the way the rest of the year played out, all i can think of is that i'm so glad i could be there for Haley at the end, that she didn't have to spend the last few weeks of her life cooped up in her crate all day while her humans were both at work. At least she was able to spend her last days relaxing with one of her humans.
We euthanized her in the comfort of her own home, surrounded by her pack. Her brother Herman, whom she'd never been apart from for more than a few days at a stretch in their entire lives; her new sibling, our puppy Zuul; Amanda's parents' dog Copper, who had moved in with us toward the end of 2017 for his own safety; Alyssa's other dog Ghost; and Alyssa's mom's dog Gilbert. We made sure they all got to spend some time with Haley and say their goodbyes. Once it was time, Amanda pulled Haley into her lap to hold her as she passed. Zuul curled up by their side and refused to move. As Alyssa injected the solution, though, the other dogs all leaped up and began howling at the sky, like they were warning the dead that Haley was coming, a la the Klingon Death Yell. It was truly surreal. Zuul remained at Amanda's side though, and didn't move for hours.
Zuul was painfully depressed for the next several weeks. I don't know if there is anything in this world sadder than a depressed eight-month-old puppy, i truly don't.
At this point, Copper became our dog. The situation at Amanda's parents' house, which i won't get into here, had not improved and wasn't looking like it would be safe for him any time soon. So, we finally agreed to take him in permanently. He and Zuul get along famously anyway; they spend their days playing and are just great friends. It's been very surprising seeing how much energy old man Copper has around her; we assume his age to be somewhere between 9 and 11.
When i came back to work, we had hired a new person, Sami, who would end up becoming my only friend in my unit. I had transferred from Newborn Screening, my long-term home at WSLH, in October of 2016 and had spent the previous year and a half struggling to fit in at my new post in the Communicable Disease Division; the only friend i'd made at that location was Mikaela in Receiving.
In June, i started a personal Instagram account. I was largely inspired by Casey Niestat to do this; he was at one time a big proponent of the platform, and i took his view of it to heart. Just post one or two or three photos every day, to encapsulate and share what you've been up to that day. So i made that my goal; to post just a couple photos every day, as kind of a photo diary. Also, to practice with framing and shot composition, because that's something every videographer or photographer should be doing every day, regardless of their skill or experience level. In my professional career as a filmmaker i have gone for long stretches, weeks or even months, without touching a camera, and that is BAD. BAAAAD. B. A. D. Bad. So, here's something to keep my brain engaged on that level. I think i only missed six days in 2018, after starting the account.
June 17 was the ceremony for the Madison Area Music Awards. My band, Cats On Leashes, ended up winning two of them: Hard Rock/Punk Album of the Year for our 2017 full length release Give To Get Got, and Hard Rock/Punk Song of the Year for our slow-burn sonic soundscape Fix.
Then, we started to gut the basement. We planned to have our first-ever garage sale, to get rid of some of the shit that's just been sitting around, taking up space, for the eleven years we've lived together. We moved four times in 2009 alone, carting all of this garbage all the way across Madison, believing each time that we'd buckle down and sort through some of it before the next move, but we never did. Some of these boxes have been packed up since we left our parents' houses, or longer. Over the course of the entire summer and part of the fall, i took about half of the boxes out of the basement, and ended up recycling 14 boxes just of random papers, most of it unopened mail. Why are we so bad about dealing with the mail?!? Honestly i feel like our mailbox could almost be replaced by a recycling bin, just have the mailman chuck it in there and call it a day.
On July 1, we had our first boxing class. Amanda convinced me to join a class called Punch and Brunch, run by the wife of one of her former teammates. Punch and Brunch was exactly what it sounded like: on Sunday mornings, we would go have a boxing class, then get food. There was never any doubt about Amanda, but i took to it shockingly fast, and now i look forward to boxing as one of the highlights of my week.
The following day, July 2, my brother Correy rolled into town for his annual summer visit. We immediately had to chase the ambulance to the hospital, as our stepdad Greg was in it. Greg had a series of health events through the early part of the year, and was just getting home from a few weeks in rehab when he fell in the driveway and hit his head on the pavement. He would end up spending several more days in the hospital.
Later that night, Herman passed away, joining his sister in Valhalla. They were separated by death for just over three months, the longest they'd ever been apart. Herman said farewell to his pack and his humans, sitting in the exact same spot that Haley had. And with that, all three of the core members of the pack, counting Lindsey, had passed away within a year.
Fortunately the rest of Correy's visit was more enjoyable. His (almost) nine year old daughter Zia got to ride horses and play a real guitar for the first time. We had a decent-sized game night and got to play his favorite game, Telestrations, as well as a newer one that works best with large groups, Captain Sonar. And then there was the obligatory big get together at the clubhouse in our mom'strailer park mobile home community, followed by a whole day of just the two of us sitting around playing Halo.
By mid-July, it became apparent that the Scotland trip was not happening either. I, at least, was still hell-bent on taking some kind of a vacation, so we began making plans for a second season of American Nomads In The Recent Future, which is what we had called our great American road trip in 2011 that i made webisodes out of. Planning began on July 13. I started to work with my drone more, which i'd purchased in December but not really found much use for, in anticipation of doing some cool shit with it out in the Rocky Mountains.
So the vacation was broken down kind of weirdly, for...reasons. On July 27, we headed for Indianapolis, to chill with our friends Shayne & Christi for a few days before GenCon, that giant annual gaming convention we always go to. However, i had a job interview on August 1, which the prospective employer absolutely could not move for, again, reasons. Alyssa was only able to come down and spend the weekend with us, due to her school schedule, so on the 30th, her and i drove back from Indianapolis, leaving Amanda behind. I had my interview, it was...strange, but i made sure to leave an impression on them at the end by responding to the old "Do you have any questions for us" question with "Who's your favorite Batman?" (Their answers: Ben Affleck, Michael Keaton, Ben Affleck, no answer, Adam West). As soon as that was done, i drove straight back to Indianapolis by myself.
GenCon was fun, but it pretty much always is. We played some great games, we played some not so great games. Overall i think we did more roleplaying than usual. Amanda proudly played creepy characters in both of our longer sessions; one kept mindmelding with corrupted creatures in the blightland, and the other used weird Cthulhu powers to do gross shit, like exploding the bad guy's head with worms. We bought far less than we typically do. That last bit was sort of a mission this year, because i'd like to move to LA with as few things as possible. Also, we already have shitloads of games. Amanda got to meet her favorite author, Anne Bishop, and have her sign a bunch of books. Probably our best find was the game The Reckoners, a game where you play a standard human out to kill supervillains in a world where superheroes don't exist, because everyone that gets powers becomes corrupted by them. It's based on a series of novels by Brandon Sanderson. We enjoyed the game so much that we decided to read the books. Amanda really liked them. I...did not.
-----
Man, 2018 was kind of a big year, wasn't it?
Whereas we're all usually complaining about how quickly time is flying by, like where did the year go, you know? this past year has felt so. long. Like i saw a meme in about November about how long 2018 had been, reminding the reader that the Tide Pod Challenge had happened in January, and everyone was like, no, the Tide Pod thing was clearly five years ago...right?
And it certainly felt that way to me. But where others just felt like the year had dragged, like come on, just let the Trump years be over already type of deal, 2018 felt long to me because i've actually been busy. I've been utilizing my time with an efficiency i've never been able to before. In 2018, i finally decided that i'm so sick of this bullshit life i've been living that i am going to have to actively change it. There's a lot of conventional wisdom, a lot of sayings that we've all been force fed for our entire lives that i always thought i understood, about working hard and being anything you want to be and so on, that this year i finally came to truly understand. I think. I mean, let's be honest, the only thing i know for sure is that the more i learn, the more i know that i don't know.
So that's the feeling for 2018. The rest of this post will be less philosophical and more of a chronicle. I'm going to talk a little about 2017 though, just to set the stage; especially since i haven't written a year-end post since 2013 and apparently haven't used this blog at all since 2014. I'll start in 2016.
November, 2016, i stood on a scale and gazed deeply into the most unhappy number i've ever been given by that device. I was nearly 100 pounds away from the target weight i'd chosen for myself probably ten years earlier, and the gain had been accelerating. I knew i needed to make a serious change if i was ever going to get where i wanted to be. So, i used my birthday money to buy a Fitbit. For the first few months, i made no changes to my behavior, just monitored the data, to get a baseline.
Then Amanda and i rolled out the elliptical her mom had given us a while back and put it in a place where we could use it. Then, we started to actually do that.
April 2017. I bought a bike. This is the first major turning point. I was working on the East Side then, and it was about a four mile ride each way. I think i started out biking to work twice a week, then escalated. Then i started biking other places. For most of the summer, i biked pretty much anywhere i needed to go in Madison. Later in the year, we started doing workouts with a YouTube channel called Fitness Blender.
I lost 25 pounds in 2017.
November 2017, we took a long weekend and flew out to Los Angeles, because we have been considering moving there for a few years now. I'd never been there; Amanda hadn't since she was a child. We fucking loved it. We went to the beach in November. We saw a lot of cool things and had some great experiences. I didn't want to leave. Still don't.
In December of 2017, speaking of YouTube channels, i discovered Casey Neistat. This guy inspired the fuck out of me.
Watch those two videos. Watch them again. Those two videos irrevocably changed my life. I still think that, over a year later. And if i ever meet Casey Neistat, i'm going to tell him so.
So that is basically what i'm carrying with me into 2018 - a Fitbit, a bike, Casey Neistat, and a four month old puppy. Oh yeah, we adopted a puppy, Zuul, in October of 2017, after our old lady Lindsey's tragic passing in July at the age of 16.
I don't like making New Year's Resolutions. The whole concept seems somewhat disingenuous; rare is the person who keeps them, rarer is the person who keeps them longer than through January. But sometimes i do make plans, or set goals. I began 2018 with the explicit mission of hitting the water goal in my Fitbit app every single day. That's 64 ounces of water, or half a gallon, every. single. day.
At the beginning of every year, for the last...decade, at least...i've said to myself that same thing that so many other people say: this will be my year. I certainly said it in 2016 and look what a fiasco that turned out to be. I probably said it again in 2017. So at the beginning of 2018, with a fresh new year laid out in front of me, i said to myself and anyone who would listen, alright. I'm calling it now.
2020 will be my year.
This definitely took some pressure off of 2018, but left enough on that maybe, maybe i would actually get things done, get those building blocks in place to actually be where i wanted to be by 2020. The whole fitness thing, the losing 25 pounds in 2017 thing, really made me start to look at all of my goals in a different light. Start small. Just GET. STARTED.
Pursuant to that, on January 1, 2018, Amanda and i founded Snakewater Forge, LLC, following the legal dissolution of my previous company, Duckworks Media Forge, LLC, in September of 2017. The plan was basically this: Do whatever we want, all the time. Just as long as we are doing things. We had big ideas for vlogs, short films, regular films, YouTube series, photography projects, music, blogs, and so much more. Meanwhile, we'd also make ourselves available to take on clients and do contract work. I made the first Snakewater vlog that very day, as a mission statement.
Then i started clearing out the lower level of the house, to convert it into a studio space.
Then the car died.
Straight up fucking died.
I couldn't get it to start one morning. It was something like -20°C and after my first shot at it the thing wouldn't even crank. Being a logical, rational person, i decided that the best thing to do, in the first week of January at temperatures well below freezing, was to bike to work. I mean, it was a clear day otherwise; no wind, no precipitation, just a bit cold. Well, i got to work with icicles hanging from my mustache, and my skin bright red and able to freeze water on contact. That afternoon, an ice storm hit. My bike was covered in a thin coating of it, and i had no money for bus fare. By the time i realized my situation, all of my coworkers had left, so i had no remaining choice but to knock the ice off of my bike and ride home. I couldn't shift and was stuck in third gear the whole way, and i think i did permanent damage to the bike on that ride.
The car turned out to not be worth fixing and nearly impossible to sell, and would eventually end up going to the scrap yard. Meanwhile, we couldn't very well operate with only one vehicle, so we started poking around Craigslist. It didn't take us long to decide that we're sick of limping along with shit old vehicles that need constant repair, so we started looking at newer vehicles. We found the deal of a lifetime on a 2016 Toyota Yaris - weirdly identical to the one we had rented in California. Same color, same year, same bizarre combination of accessories. We did what neither of us had ever done, and got a car loan. The car had 6,000 miles on it, and we got it for four thousand under Blue Book value. Damn.
We had wanted to go back to New Zealand in March for the 10th anniversary of our original, life-changing adventure, but unfortunately concerns over scheduling with Amanda's work and Alyssa's school, and financial stuff, caused us to change the plan to Scotland in June. It would cost about half as much and we would be able to slide it neatly into Alyssa's semester break.
Well, i still had a ton of banked vacation time that i needed to use in the first quarter of the year or lose, so even though the trip was canceled, i kept my scheduled time off. I considered heading out to LA to look for work during that time, but ultimately decided to spend it at home working on putting the studio together and doing some short films. In the first weekend of March, i wrote and shot a short film called Just Pizza Things, using pizza as a metaphor for filmmaking and with the underlying moral to JUST GET STARTED. For a weekend project, it turned out reasonably well.
After publishing that one slapdash little short film, i suddenly found myself with three clients. One of which was Procter & Gamble. This was literally the only bit of my work they had seen, and they wanted to hire me to do a video project based on it. I accepted.
Then the dog was diagnosed with cancer.
Our girl Haley, our 14-year-old puppy, had seemed like she was having trouble breathing for a few days, maybe a week, it was hard to say when it had really started or when we had truly noticed. So Amanda brought her in to work. Lung cancer. Spread out across all of the lobes. Best case scenario, three weeks.
All the productivity i thought i was going to have in March suddenly ground to a halt. I found myself just spending hours lying on the couch, cuddling the dog, and listening to her rapid, uncomfortable breathing. I still tried to get work done on the studio, but it was tough to focus. I certainly didn't get that Procter & Gamble job cranked out as quickly as i should have; i was scatterbrained and distant. Looking back on it i wish i had been more hands-on with the script in particular, because there were definitely things i should have asked for rewrites on, or rewritten myself. But the timing was just the worst. Relations with the second client i had picked up became strained. Fortunately the third project was a live event that was still weeks away. All i wanted to do was sit with my dog and make sure she was as comfortable as possible.
Haley passed ten days later. And even though i had bigger plans for my time off in March, plans which may have drastically changed the way the rest of the year played out, all i can think of is that i'm so glad i could be there for Haley at the end, that she didn't have to spend the last few weeks of her life cooped up in her crate all day while her humans were both at work. At least she was able to spend her last days relaxing with one of her humans.
We euthanized her in the comfort of her own home, surrounded by her pack. Her brother Herman, whom she'd never been apart from for more than a few days at a stretch in their entire lives; her new sibling, our puppy Zuul; Amanda's parents' dog Copper, who had moved in with us toward the end of 2017 for his own safety; Alyssa's other dog Ghost; and Alyssa's mom's dog Gilbert. We made sure they all got to spend some time with Haley and say their goodbyes. Once it was time, Amanda pulled Haley into her lap to hold her as she passed. Zuul curled up by their side and refused to move. As Alyssa injected the solution, though, the other dogs all leaped up and began howling at the sky, like they were warning the dead that Haley was coming, a la the Klingon Death Yell. It was truly surreal. Zuul remained at Amanda's side though, and didn't move for hours.
Zuul was painfully depressed for the next several weeks. I don't know if there is anything in this world sadder than a depressed eight-month-old puppy, i truly don't.
At this point, Copper became our dog. The situation at Amanda's parents' house, which i won't get into here, had not improved and wasn't looking like it would be safe for him any time soon. So, we finally agreed to take him in permanently. He and Zuul get along famously anyway; they spend their days playing and are just great friends. It's been very surprising seeing how much energy old man Copper has around her; we assume his age to be somewhere between 9 and 11.
When i came back to work, we had hired a new person, Sami, who would end up becoming my only friend in my unit. I had transferred from Newborn Screening, my long-term home at WSLH, in October of 2016 and had spent the previous year and a half struggling to fit in at my new post in the Communicable Disease Division; the only friend i'd made at that location was Mikaela in Receiving.
In June, i started a personal Instagram account. I was largely inspired by Casey Niestat to do this; he was at one time a big proponent of the platform, and i took his view of it to heart. Just post one or two or three photos every day, to encapsulate and share what you've been up to that day. So i made that my goal; to post just a couple photos every day, as kind of a photo diary. Also, to practice with framing and shot composition, because that's something every videographer or photographer should be doing every day, regardless of their skill or experience level. In my professional career as a filmmaker i have gone for long stretches, weeks or even months, without touching a camera, and that is BAD. BAAAAD. B. A. D. Bad. So, here's something to keep my brain engaged on that level. I think i only missed six days in 2018, after starting the account.
June 17 was the ceremony for the Madison Area Music Awards. My band, Cats On Leashes, ended up winning two of them: Hard Rock/Punk Album of the Year for our 2017 full length release Give To Get Got, and Hard Rock/Punk Song of the Year for our slow-burn sonic soundscape Fix.
Then, we started to gut the basement. We planned to have our first-ever garage sale, to get rid of some of the shit that's just been sitting around, taking up space, for the eleven years we've lived together. We moved four times in 2009 alone, carting all of this garbage all the way across Madison, believing each time that we'd buckle down and sort through some of it before the next move, but we never did. Some of these boxes have been packed up since we left our parents' houses, or longer. Over the course of the entire summer and part of the fall, i took about half of the boxes out of the basement, and ended up recycling 14 boxes just of random papers, most of it unopened mail. Why are we so bad about dealing with the mail?!? Honestly i feel like our mailbox could almost be replaced by a recycling bin, just have the mailman chuck it in there and call it a day.
On July 1, we had our first boxing class. Amanda convinced me to join a class called Punch and Brunch, run by the wife of one of her former teammates. Punch and Brunch was exactly what it sounded like: on Sunday mornings, we would go have a boxing class, then get food. There was never any doubt about Amanda, but i took to it shockingly fast, and now i look forward to boxing as one of the highlights of my week.
The following day, July 2, my brother Correy rolled into town for his annual summer visit. We immediately had to chase the ambulance to the hospital, as our stepdad Greg was in it. Greg had a series of health events through the early part of the year, and was just getting home from a few weeks in rehab when he fell in the driveway and hit his head on the pavement. He would end up spending several more days in the hospital.
Later that night, Herman passed away, joining his sister in Valhalla. They were separated by death for just over three months, the longest they'd ever been apart. Herman said farewell to his pack and his humans, sitting in the exact same spot that Haley had. And with that, all three of the core members of the pack, counting Lindsey, had passed away within a year.
Fortunately the rest of Correy's visit was more enjoyable. His (almost) nine year old daughter Zia got to ride horses and play a real guitar for the first time. We had a decent-sized game night and got to play his favorite game, Telestrations, as well as a newer one that works best with large groups, Captain Sonar. And then there was the obligatory big get together at the clubhouse in our mom's
By mid-July, it became apparent that the Scotland trip was not happening either. I, at least, was still hell-bent on taking some kind of a vacation, so we began making plans for a second season of American Nomads In The Recent Future, which is what we had called our great American road trip in 2011 that i made webisodes out of. Planning began on July 13. I started to work with my drone more, which i'd purchased in December but not really found much use for, in anticipation of doing some cool shit with it out in the Rocky Mountains.
So the vacation was broken down kind of weirdly, for...reasons. On July 27, we headed for Indianapolis, to chill with our friends Shayne & Christi for a few days before GenCon, that giant annual gaming convention we always go to. However, i had a job interview on August 1, which the prospective employer absolutely could not move for, again, reasons. Alyssa was only able to come down and spend the weekend with us, due to her school schedule, so on the 30th, her and i drove back from Indianapolis, leaving Amanda behind. I had my interview, it was...strange, but i made sure to leave an impression on them at the end by responding to the old "Do you have any questions for us" question with "Who's your favorite Batman?" (Their answers: Ben Affleck, Michael Keaton, Ben Affleck, no answer, Adam West). As soon as that was done, i drove straight back to Indianapolis by myself.
GenCon was fun, but it pretty much always is. We played some great games, we played some not so great games. Overall i think we did more roleplaying than usual. Amanda proudly played creepy characters in both of our longer sessions; one kept mindmelding with corrupted creatures in the blightland, and the other used weird Cthulhu powers to do gross shit, like exploding the bad guy's head with worms. We bought far less than we typically do. That last bit was sort of a mission this year, because i'd like to move to LA with as few things as possible. Also, we already have shitloads of games. Amanda got to meet her favorite author, Anne Bishop, and have her sign a bunch of books. Probably our best find was the game The Reckoners, a game where you play a standard human out to kill supervillains in a world where superheroes don't exist, because everyone that gets powers becomes corrupted by them. It's based on a series of novels by Brandon Sanderson. We enjoyed the game so much that we decided to read the books. Amanda really liked them. I...did not.
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