looking back.

I'm not near the end of any more books, so it looks like I'll be finishing out 2017 at 90 books read. I read quite a lot of comics this year, but decided to leave those out of the counting. That still leaves me finishing 1.73 books every week; by habit (more about this in another post) I would tend to minimize it by pointing out it was a handful re-reads and a whole lot of Terry Pratchett, but that's a lot of books, even if I didn't finish The Iliad.

(Gonna go ahead and spoil you for that one: Gandalf isn't actually dead, and Gollum dies at the end.)

How was 2017, really?

I still love my job managing software engineers. Faltered a few times as my anxiety got in the way, but by and large I did the job and I'm good at it.

The dog has settled down quite a bit--inasfar as anything with Jack Russell Terrier heritage can be said to settle down--and she learned some new behaviors, some intentional, others not. My favorite, far and away, is that she inadvertently learned that "Rat check!" means she should run outside and check the back patio for rodents. (It started because I would open the door and summon her for a walk, and then I was in the bathroom and saw a squirrel, said "Leela! Rat check!" and from somewhere inside the house she bolted out her door, to chase the offender with the special joy of any animal fulfilling its purpose.) She's also extremely soft. Even J pets her now.

I suddenly had the unstoppable urge to learn to play the violin. Go figure. It's fun: "play" in the most kid-like sense. My ambition extends as far as playing for dance nights at bars; that will carry me for at least a couple of years. It's the least forgiving instrument I've ever encountered.

Related: there's a whole world of Scandinavian fiddle music! Kismet being what it is, of course there's an active fiddle jam close to home, playing at the monthly dance party.

I finally learned the difference between a fiddle and a violin:

Nobody cares if you spill beer on a fiddle.

J is taller than me. If his shoulders are not yet wider than mine, they will be in 2018. In theory, this is not his "major" growth spurt. He has hit the choppy adolescent cross-currents from "child" to "adult," and it's tossing him, and us, every which way. We all suffer an extra bit because his other household is...less amenable to angry disagreement, let's say. We knew it was coming, but the map is not the territory.

Anna has been hard at work with Garage Project (tearing down our horrible decaying garage and replacing it with an Accessory Dwelling Unit). Besides not having a horrible decaying garage, we want to scaffold J's entry into adult life with a place he can pay an achievable rent on without technically living with his parents.

It's been a year of heavy-duty therapy work, which I summarize for people as "My childhood was not nearly as healthy as I thought it was." My life has never made sense, in a way that lives should make sense: I could see the problems I had, but never found a theory to understand where they came from, and I just assumed I was born with a package that included striking emotional issues along with the freakish intelligence. Now I have a theory that fits all the facts! I am excited. My family-of-origin does not share the excitement.

(Fun fact: I am the only one of my siblings to make it out of my teens without injuring a hand by punching a fire door in anger. That's normal, though. Right?)

Tentatively, I'm feeling better in the past couple weeks. I've been sleeping more or less like a normal person, feeling pretty awake during the day. Anna and I even overlap for an hour or two in the evenings, which restores some important time that we haven't had in a few years. We're remarkable people to talk to, it turns out.

My 2017 was better than most recent years. I hope 2018 goes better still.