stephbg | A rough guide to 2013 (Reply)

I haven't blogged much this year, and indeed have failed to blog many non-trivial things at all (part 2 of our Dunsborough anniversary trip being but one case in point). This is actually informative, because it reflects a year of poor health, even by my standards. Actually my poor health is one of the few things I did document even remotely properly, because of the amount of information I needed to track. This does not please me.

January 2013 brought sadness – the death of my fluffy little man Pumpkin not long before his 14th birthday, and the very next day the first anniversary of the death of my beloved Daddy. It goes without saying that I've been missing Dad a great deal this year, but even I've been surprised that he turns up in my dreams with such great frequency. It used to be every single night, but now it's only a few times a week.

February 2013 brightened up with a trip to Adelaide to witness the wedding of another niece. While the occasion was lovely and the people a joy to be with, the conditions were harsh and I wilted. After the wedding we flew to Tasmania to take in MONA, which was fun and fascinating and I can't wait to return. The next day we rode a tour bus up Mt Wellington to take in some lovely solid granite geology. Then it was back to Melbourne for a few days of Melbourneness, this time with bonus human contact.

On our return from that trip we collected Buffy, a blue tricolour Ragdoll kitten. A few days later we went to the Cat Haven and adopted leggy black Boris Giles, who was about two months older. All this was to plan as we carefully constructed a new cat society chiefly designed to reduce the stress on the two elder cats Cally (now nearly 21) and Princess (now nearly 17). After a bit of a shakedown period, and some health and psychological issues, everyone has settled in. After an astonishingly energetic first few months the kittens have fortunately slowed down a little and will no longer chase each other at top speed for an hour at a time. There's still plenty of scamperage, and the kittens are good friends.

Bugger, I've just discovered that my "smart" phone calendar clears all entries older than 3 months! Reportage will be necessarily vague as a result.

March 2013 brought Swancon and I'm afraid it wasn't a good year for me, with few highlights and many low points. Couldn't have survived it without wonderful Husband running errands for me at no benefit to himself, but it was true that it needed surviving this time around. I have plans to make 2014 better, including plonking myself in a comfortable spot in the front lounge area and hoping to attract civilised chats.

April 2013 was probably when I embarked on the year's core health investigation, kicked off with a diagnosis of Pyroluria and seeing a somewhat left-of-centre GP I refer to as Dr NF. The investigations and treatments that followed in the rest of the year have been pretty well documented here, so I'll just summarise by saying it was expensive, made me even more ill, and solved nothing. I did feel a bit better after I stopped most of the treatment, but I can't say it was worth the damage to my liver or the feeling that I've lost a big chunk of time to much worse health than I would have had otherwise. This year I'd like to throw up a whole lot less.

I'm not sure I can put any sort of dates to the rest, so it'll be one big blur.

I can't say I feel a great deal of achievement re Pretty Rock Designs. Yes I took more pictures, and I think I'm better at composition now. I think it was during 2013 that I got stacking software so I could make sharper pictures. I sold some stuff, but not very much. I've got a bit of a following on redbubble and get group features on a regular basis, although I've yet to crack a challenge.

I had hoped to focus on Pretty Rocks On Frocks (fabrics) in 2013 and made a certain amount of progress there, but only on a casual hobby level, rather than the business footing I'd hoped to establish. I was just too sick for it. The Spoonflower site is very limited in many ways, but I've not had the energy to do the necessary work on prettyrockdesigns.com to make up for the lack. That website haunts me – I feel deep professional shame for its limitations, but there's never the spoons for it. Ultimately it doesn't really matter, after all, and the laundry needs doing right now. *sigh*

I wasted a lot of time and money trying to get better photographic equipment on the cheap. Only at the very end of December did I take delivery of some new rigging, lights, and a higher res microscope that might do the job. But again, I've been too ill to really take advantage of them, although I'm slowly frankensteining the sundry bits together. In my happier moments I'm brimming with ideas. In my mostly unwell moments all those unexplored ideas just make me sad.

I've been reading a bit more lately than in recent years, getting a lot of the kind of space adventure stuff that I really like. My TBR pile has too many books in it that I don't want, and I finally gave myself permission to jump the queue. I can't read like I used to, but I'm more forgiving of my fuzzy brain these days and now accept that maybe a couple of chapters is all I can cope with in a sitting.

December 2013 brought with it the highlight of the year – our 20th wedding anniversary and a short trip to Dunsborough in SW WA. We bonded and shared a nasty cold virus, from which I'm only now emerging, shakily.

So in summary I spent far too much of the year too ill to achieve much of anything, but the kittens came into our lives so that's what I'll choose to concentrate on:

2013 – The Year of the Kittens