Still Life, With Cats

So. 2012. Nearly over. Yay, or something.

Okay, I kid. 2012 was actually a pretty decent year for us. We both have the same jobs we started with – something I suspect I may never be completely confident will happen for a very long time (thank you Dot Bomb of the early 2000’s). We both still enjoy doing what we get paid to do, and we both have found avenues here and there to also get paid for doing the things we love to do (outside of work, that is).

We did a little bit of traveling this year.  We took our yearly trip up to Seattle to visit my younger sister and brother-in-law and niece, and my sisters and I did our annual Sisters Only weekend this summer, to Bodie, California, where we did things like wander around a ghost town and wade in Mono Lake with brine shrimp, and drive white-knuckled through Yosemite in the pitch dark on windy twisty roads where the wrong turn would send you over a cliff. Okay, possibly that last part was not necessarily a highlight, but hey, we made it through alive, and Yosemite is really pretty during the day when you can see where you are going.

The highlight of the year though, in terms of travel, was when we went to Nerd Camp At Sea, otherwise known as the JoCoCrazy Cruise II. It is kind of hard to explain if you aren’t into this sort of thing, or have never heard of performers like Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm and Wil Wheaton, and Marian Call, but just imagine roughly 550 of the sort of people who are passionate about computers and science and gaming in all its myriad forms, all traveling on a giant cruise ship somewhere in the middle of the Caribbean, and you might be about 10% of the way to understanding what it was. There were a lot of other people on the ship as well, and since it was a Holland America boat, that means that most of the rest of the passengers were…um…how do I put this delicately….the sort who are at an advanced age where they are still a little befuddled by that whole crazy internets thing, and then there were the JoCoCrazy folks who were all three or four decades younger than the rest of the passengers (and as we are in our early 40’s and are roughly right smack in the middle of the general JoCoCrazy Cruise demographic, that’s saying something), wearing snarky message tees and often sporting fezzes (because fezzes are cool) or other hats or crazy colored hair, or randomly breaking out into song in the elevator. Before we left, everyone kept asking us where we were going on the cruise and seriously, we really had no idea, because it wasn’t important. We were on a boat, with several hundred of Our Kind Of People, meeting awesome new friends and hanging out with a crowd where if you sat down and started talking about databases or Dr Who or Red Dwarf, they were right there with you, and not giving you weird looks. Also there were performances nightly (and sometimes also during the day) from awesome people like the aforementioned Coulton, Paul and Storm, and Wheaton, and a talent show where I sang in a human beat box, and the Mustache Formal (where everyone wore fancy duds and a mustache and a fez, yes really), and at one point I got to go swim with some dolphins, and there were islands and it was really freaking humid, and we had NO INTERNET FOR AN ENTIRE WEEK OMG and it was quite possibly the best  thing ever, the end.

Phew. Anyway. 2012. I am still doing the Master Food Preserver thing, which is awesome because occasionally I get to demo canning techniques like making jam (the gateway drug to canning) to newbies and get them all excited about it too. Also this year I decided to try making hard cheese, and so far I have made two wheels. The first one was kind of a flop,but the second one turned out okay. I have been making noises about digging a cheese cave somewhere in the back yard, but so far Richard has been pretending he can’t hear me (possibly because there really isn’t anywhere to actually *dig* a cheese cave, but details, details). I did a lot of knitting- socks and lace and hey, even a sweater – although most of it is the sort I can’t show pictures of, or talk about, because a lot of it was test knitting or sample knitting.

We did not put in a garden this year because we were kind of overwhelmed from last year and are also still working our way through all the sauce and dried veggies that I put up in 2011 (although I am happy to report that we *finally* used up all the tomato sauce from 2010, phew). We did, however, get the front yard all ripped out, so that there is no more grass – just a bunch of drought-tolerant plants (don’t ask me what kind – we hired a nice man who showed us pictures and we did a lot of nodding and saying things like ‘ooh, pretty’) and also a tangelo tree and a mandarin orange tree because the red grapefruit and the Meyer lemon tree do not overload us with enough citrus as it is.

Let’s see. What else. We adopted Sherman in May. I failed to escape the zombies in October. We both did Nanowrimo again in November. And now it is the end of December, and hey, would you look at that – I have blogged more this month than probably all of last year. Way to end things on a high note.

And there you have it. 2012.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.