liv | Entries tagged with anniversary

What can I tell you about this year? I've been a rabbinic student for all of it, the course is going really well, but it's also eating my life.

Significant events

I travelled abroad for the first time since the pandemic began, a school trip to Paris.
I bought a flat in Hendon, and got it set up, and moved into it. And then had to deal with emergency bathroom replacement, and with one thing and another I still haven't had a housewarming.
My partner became Jewish and celebrated his bar mitzvah.
I saw The Merry Widow at Glyndebourne with my family of origin, and Hamilton on tour in Birmingham with cjwatson. I also saw Fiddler on the Roof in Regent's Park, but sadly without ghoti_mhic_uait as she was isolating with Covid when we'd booked to go.
I celebrated my third wedding anniversary (and 12 years of marriage / 16 years together) with jack with a very fine meal at Itadaki-Zen. I celebrated my 10^th anniversary of dating cjwatson and ghoti_mhic_uait with a very exciting trip to Legoland.

( the rest )

Overall I'd say that the year has been academically and career-trajectory successful. My socializing has been limited but my connections with family and friends have been wonderful when I did manage it. I haven't succeeded in building the online presence I want, though, either personally (eg posting properly here and on Mastodon), or professionally (eg setting up my website.) And I haven't made a start at all on learning to drive.

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Moooooood okay

10 years (and one month) ago some friends of ours, themselves a married couple, asked me and

jack out. At the time we had no clear expectations for what 'going out' was going to mean, but we fell in love very intensely and rapidly and were thinking long term thoughts probably sooner than would be standard. Though there isn't really any 'standard' for a couple dating another couple.

A few months later our OSOs went to Legoland for their 10^th wedding anniversary, and we sort of joked that maybe when the quad reached ten years we should follow the same tradition. So this year we have in fact been together for ten years, and we did in fact go to Legoland.

( theme park and soppiness, passing mentions of Covid )

Anyway. The short version is that I had an awesome time with my loves and I feel extremely fortunate.

Moooooood loved
Whereaboooouts Legoland Windsor

Hello DW, it's been a while. This term has had way, way less drama than last, but on the other hand I still don't have stable accommodation in London. My cousin, who is extremely lovely, is very politely intimating that I've already been staying in her spare room quite a lot longer than originally agreed, so I am in the midst of arranging to be a lodger for part of the week with a stranger, in exchange for money rather than relying on goodwill.

Anyway, I want to tell you about this weekend. On Thursday it was mine and

jack's third actual wedding anniversary, but on Friday I had to go to Paris for college reasons. ( soppy and travel )

The thing I wanted to pull out from this experience was that the guide was pretty convinced that the fantasy image of a witch is based on antisemitic stereotypes. The last time I came across this theory was a weird controversy on Tumblr some years ago, where some people were very vocally insistent that you shouldn't write witches in your fantasy settings because that's antisemitic, and others were pointing to this an example of just how ridiculous Tumblr's social justice culture is. At the time I kind of rolled my eyes at the idea that fairytale witches are antisemitic, I mean, sure, they have big noses, but loads of cultures claim that their despised minority or othered group has big noses, that's too generic to be meaningful. But on the other hand, I was strangely comforted because Tumblr in the height of the SJW era was just about the only online community I've been part of where it's actually considered bad to be antisemitic. Anywhere that neglects moderation will be full of far right griefers who are still recycling the same stereotypes from Crusader-era Jew-hate filtered through the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, when not spreading outright neo-Nazi propaganda. Anywhere with a progressive or lefty bent will assume that antisemitism isn't a real issue because Jews are white and middle-class and anyway Israel is evil. (Mastodon, which I like in principle, is particularly annoying for doing both of those at once.)

But the guide made a somewhat convincing case: Jews were forced by Christian anti-Jewish edicts to wear pointed hats. Jews usually had several precious old books in their homes written in foreign script when most of the population weren't literate even in French, and furthermore often kept cats to protect said grimoires from mice. Plus the big noses and the stealing children thing, and arguably allowing more freedom and economic power to women than most of the surrounding culture in some parts of Europe. So I suppose there could be a connection.

I also feel weird about the witches thing because of the Burning Times meme, and the debunking of same. Because historically Jews, and Christians with Jewish ancestry or who protected Jews, were in fact burned as an act of religious persecution, and there were mass burnings of Jewish books. So were other people, particularly Christians from minority sects, and some probably mentally ill people as Janega points out. And I definitely don't want to play oppression Olympics here; there absolutely are contexts where Jews have at least conditional legal protection and social acceptance in ways that Pagans do not. But TERFs claiming to be witches and decent people pointing out that mass burning of witches never actually happened, both leave me in a slightly awkward spot.

(PS I am not interested in arguing about whether antisemitism is really just legitimate criticism of Israel, or whether anti-Zionism is antisemitic. Both angles on that just promote misery and not useful conversation at all.)

Moooooood refreshed

2023 was a year of two halves, really. First six months I worked at the best job I've ever had (or probably ever will): decent money, worthwhile work, great working environment with awesome colleagues. But having made the decision to walk away from it, I was somewhat detached. Then at the end of June I dedicated myself seriously to preparing for and then joining my rabbinic training course.

I have surprisingly few regrets about the Best Job Ever. Normally when I do a new thing it takes me a long time to escape from the tangle of regret and nostalgia for my previous existence, even when it's something completely expected like progressing to the next stage of my education. And I still follow Old Job on social media and still really want them to succeed; they're doing amazing things about decolonizing scientific training. But I basically never think about the other leg of the time-trousers, or what if I'd stayed? Like, trying to live in London with no money kind of sucks, and the course is over-timetabled and over-assessed but I fundamentally just love being a student again. I love my cohort more than I can describe, and the more senior students and the faculty are awesome too.

Significant events:

I quit my job, as mentioned above!
I combined family and community work for Pesach and Shavuot.
I led Reform services in Hampshire, Hull, and Milton Keynes, Liberal services in Peterborough and Norwich, and Orthodox services in Stoke-on-Trent. This should possibly be a separate section of my review from now on, come to think of it.
I got very involved in student life (which is pretty necessary when the entire student body is 15 people). I volunteered as deputy chair for the student society and ended up basically running it, because the actual chair had stuff going on and wasn't really available. I joined the team who run college services, including chanting the Torah (rather than just reading) for the first time, which was incredibly emotional.
I put a lot of time and effort into trying to find somewhere to live in London, so far unsuccessfully, but two people, a friend of angelofthenorth and a cousin of my dad's were willing to take me in, so I haven't actually been homeless or living in terrible rentals. Really hoping to find somewhere permanent this spring!

( the rest )

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Moooooood cold
Tuuuuuune Siouxie and the Banshees: Israel

2022 has been dominated by trying to cope with Omicron through sheer force of personal responsibility, with the government having "exited" any public health measures in March. Aside from endless pandemic grind, there have been a few moments, but it's not a year I hugely want to remember.

The biggest thing that has happened this year is something I'm still not really talking about in public, so I'm going to make an accompanying locked post after this rather bland general summary.

Significant events

[Redacted - see locked post]
At work, I managed a team of four and got some recognition for the outstanding achievements of my team. We have done a lot of work on major national and international training projects, including the massive one around Covid, basically training the whole world to use cutting edge scientific techniques to inform their response to Covid and other infectious diseases. The main bit of it I was directly involved in was 4 and a half (fifth launches early 2023) massive online courses which have collectively reached over 10,000 people.
My best friend hatam_soferet moved in just round the corner with her husband and their 5yo. So we have been very much enjoying being neighbours instead of being stuck on different continents like the last couple of decades. The kid absolutely adores me and jack, which has made things extra lovely.
I've done a lot of Jewish community teaching, several different groups of tweens and young adults, several formal adult groups, and some visiting preacher work. I've continued as a member of the synagogue board; a new chair took over in April and we have started working in quite a focused way to improve social connections within the community. Historically this was never a priority and I feel reasonably proud of what we're achieving. However the new board are also quite pro-Covid so the community is no longer taking any meaningful precautions, and this means that community stuff along with in-person work is eating my entire Covid risk budget and then some.
I had a couple of nice holidays and smaller trips with jack. Managed to meet up with my very old friend D while she was in London, and visited angelofthenorth who also came to stay with me.

( the rest )

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Moooooood tired
Whereaboooouts Pumbedita House, Cambridge, UK

Well, nothing really happened this year, did it? I made 40 posts to DW, which I think is my lowest total ever by some margin and a lot of those were just administrivia. I have almost no essays I'm sufficiently proud of to want to call attention to them again.

You might have thought that with a full year stuck at home I would have done loads of reading, gaming and other media, but in practice, no, I'm going to end up skipping most of my usual end-of-year media categories.

A year ago I summarized:

I've stayed healthy as have all my close people. I've really enjoyed my job, fortunately with employers who've been entirely supportive of working from home. As part of that I've provided online training to about 70,000 people. I have felt really connected via various unsatisfying forms of technology, but I'm really grateful for my friends and especially my Jewish community. Isolating with jack has been brilliant. He is the most wonderful pandemic partner I could have asked for.

And pretty much all of those things are still true for 2021. Staying home has been a bit easier, because at least since March there have been few if any legal restrictions on social mixing, and we have enough information about transmission mechanisms that I'm happy to deem outdoor socializing safe, as well as take a few calculated risks when case rates are relatively lower. And I'm vaccinated as of summer and boosted as of last week, so that helps at least somewhat, even if not as much of an escape route out of the pandemic as I'd hoped.

So, significant events:

I got vaccinated against Covid and was briefly optimistic.
My OSOs bought a big house in the country and acquired several chickens, ferrets and a most excitingly, a puppy. Also a piano.
I had a week's holiday with jack in Norfolk, including hearing a seal chorus and seeing a crowd of my friends in person.
My work expanded from creating a bunch of massive, but rather specialist, online courses, to include a huge international project about pandemic response training.
I took an actual trip, on an actual train, to an actual place.

( somewhat abbreviated other summary )

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Moooooood blah
Whereaboooouts Pumbedita House, Cambridge, UK

I am generally not feeling sparkly or enthusiastic, for probably obvious reasons. It's my 43^rd birthday in ten days and I haven't even started organizing anything. So I'm going to resort to asking the the internet to make my decisions for me like we're back in the 2000s.

( help me plan )

Anyway, what should I do? Words of encouragement greatly appreciated

Moooooood blah
Whereaboooouts Pumbedita House, Cambridge, UK
Tuuuuuune VNV Nation: Endless skies

As several people have remarked, that was the year that wasn't. I've basically stayed at home since 16 March, 290 Blursdays with very few events. In some ways the hardest thing has been to be apart from my OSOs for most of the year, but in some ways the best thing has been the little snatches of time with them, on video calls, outdoors when we could manage it, and every carefully planned interaction to keep our relationships strong in this weird-as-hell sixth year.

Positives: well, I've stayed healthy as have all my close people. I've really enjoyed my job, fortunately with employers who've been entirely supportive of working from home. As part of that I've provided online training to about 70,000 people. I have felt really connected via various unsatisfying forms of technology, but I'm really grateful for my friends and especially my Jewish community.

Isolating with

jack has been brilliant. He is the most wonderful pandemic partner I could have asked for. When we got together in 2008, and even in the more recent years of our relationship, I could not have begun to imagine spending nine months in each other's constant company. But he's been so good, talking me down when I'm stressed, making sure to give me psychological space even when we're constantly in the same building, and he's stayed interesting and fun to talk to even when we have no separate experiences to talk about. We never meant to be workmates as well as housemates and romantic partners but it's worked astonishingly well.

Also, right at the end of 2020 I turned 42 and had a surprisingly lovely Zoom birthday party, attended by friends from every stage of my life and all over the world. Lots of people I would never have been able to gather together in normal circumstances.

Significant events

Last couple of months of the Before Times:

Thoroughly excellent production of Cyrano de Bergerac in Martin Crimp's new translation at the London Playhouse, with cjwatson
I celebrated my second anniversary and 8 years of marriage to jack with an extremely fancy fine dining meal at Midsummer House. I'm particularly glad that we chose to spend a month's food budget on a tasting menu when it turned out that the world ended just a couple of weeks later and we haven't set foot in any restaurant since.
I sent 19 of a planned 40 postcards, and really enjoyed the opportunity to wander around looking for interesting stuff to photograph and send to my friends. In principle I could have carried on through the lockdown but I lost heart for taking pictures of just the few streets around my house. So my apologies to the second half of the group who asked for postcards but never received them.
I went to the Troy exhibition at the British Museum with jack.
The very last weekend before we went into voluntary lockdown, (a week before it was nationally mandated) I attended a pop-up painting event followed by a very nice meal at Baltic as a last hurrah with ghoti_mhic_uait. Even at the time I almost thought it was too risky, it was a lot of time in enclosed spaces with lots of other people, but we got away with it.

( 300 days of solitude )
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Moooooood sad
Whereaboooouts Pumbedita House, Cambridge, UK

8 years ago, I married my most wonderful

jack, on Leap Day exactly four years after we started dating. So Saturday was our second anniversary. Since our anniversary happens rarely, we felt justified in treating ourselves: we went out for the veggie tasting menu at Midsummer House. Which with two Michelin stars is the fanciest restaurant in Cambridge, and we'd never been.

( food )

Anyway, my happiness about being married to

jack is still here just like at our first anniversary. The main thing that's got better since then is living together full time since late 2017. We still have our wonderful polycule; they've been part of our lives for more than half our marriage and nearly half our entire relationship. Basically life is good.

Also our anniversary present to each other was a bread machine. So HMU with good bread machine recipes, and particularly recommendations of good flour. We can both eat gluten so normal wheat flour is fine, but I'm never sure what's good for bread machines as opposed to hand made bread.

Moooooood satisfied
Whereaboooouts Midsummer House, Cambridge, UK
Tuuuuuune Audible conversation, yay

As many of my friends are reporting, 2019 has been an excellent year personally against a background of terrifyingly awful politics. I've spent far too much of it in a mindset of, we might or might not leave the EU in a few weeks, and nobody has any idea how that will work. And, surprise, I still feel like that as the year closes. I started the year hoping to emigrate to escape from the politics, but that didn't work out.

At the same time, I've completed a successful and very positive short term project at work, taken a couple of months (not entirely intentional) break, and started a new job I'm really excited about. I've remained in stable, happy, long-term relationships of 12 years, 10 years and 5 years. And I never see enough of my friends but there have been some great moments of connection. There has been some tension over our different reactions to terrible politics, but an amazing solidity underneath that. I've done enough learning new stuff to keep me really happy. I like where I am Jewishly, just the right level of community commitment, connected and active but not overwhelmed.

Significant events

The first half of the year was dominated by my partner's amazing road trip. Being apart for so long was difficult, but it was really brilliant to be able to support her in visiting every country in the EU and several more besides.
I successfully completed a major educational research and innovation project in February, and then had a glorious half year extension when I got to pursue and develop my academic interests and build on the skills and institutional knowledge from the main phase of the project.
There was a period around July-August when it felt like everything was in crisis, and I just felt really lucky that this fell towards the end of my job contract. In particular, my father-in-law died suddenly. I was there with jack and his mother for the last days, and a few weeks later helped to run the funeral. I found I have a lot of what's referred to as "resilience" but is actually a sufficiently comfortable and secure life that there is spare capacity to deal with this sort of bolt from the blue.
I lead a seminar on the Hagaddah. I took two excellent online courses with the Leo Baeck college, one on Exodus with R's Kahn-Harris and Ashworth-Stein, and one on Maimonides with R' Solomon. I sort of half completed a more in depth online course with the Woolf Institute about Jewish, Christian and Muslim relations in Europe. I really want to go back and at least learn the material even if I've got somewhat behind the group discussions. I also went into my third year teaching cheder, and started an online pre-bar mitzvah Hebrew class which Judith has been joining in with.
In October, I started the best job ever, and I'm really loving it.

( other lists )

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Moooooood sore
Whereaboooouts Pumbedita House, Cambridge, UK

So my lovely husband had a birthday, and we had a tasting menu at Navadhanya. I'm really pleased

ghoti_mhic_uait discovered a restaurant which is so well suited to our tastes. We had a bottle of Indian white wine, and I should probably be less surprised that Indian wine exists, but it was merely pleasant rather than exciting. I think in future I will go back to drinking their extremely exciting passion-fruit and chilli lassi.

Then at the weekend we had a birthday party; we seem to be reliably hitting really good house parties these days. Lots of people from different bits of our social group, lots of really good interactions and conversations.

The third part of celebrating

jack is that he asked for a spa treat for his birthday. Does anyone have any recommendations at least vaguely local to Cambridge?

I've never really found the idea of a spa appealing so I don't know anything about it. Ideally we want to avoid anything too far in the "woo" direction; we're looking for someone who is going to do nice things to muscles, not chakras or auras or chi or that sort of thing. I don't really want to join in with the massage because I have some mild but annoying trauma around massage, but if it's possible to pay for a couple of hours of hanging out in a nice relaxing environment then I could keep

jack company.

The most plausible option I've found so far is The Glassworks. They don't seem to offer the option of just paying for spa time, though. I would be glad to hear if anyone's been there and can tell us personally if it's any good.

Moooooood hopeful
Whereaboooouts Pumbedita House, Cambridge, UK
Tuuuuuune Girls in Trouble: DNA

2018 was the year of living stably in Cambridge and staying in a job where, and I keep coming back to this with amazement, there's a concrete set of expectations of me which I generally live up to. And spending lots of time with my husband and our OSOs and their children. And doing Jewish community stuff to a level that's fulfilling without having to carry a whole community single-handed. And I had a few really exciting trips, too.

Significant events:

I published articles! For the first time since 2009, and for the first time at all in education journals rather than science ones.
I went to Legoland.
hatam_soferet spent time in the same country as me and I met her baby daughter.
I returned to my community in Stockholm to help out with their siddur launch, and got to show ghoti_mhic_uait and the children a little bit of one of my places.
I turned 40 – my birthday is right at the end of the year and often feels like part of the following year, or gets drowned out by Christmas, but this year it was really special.

( various lists )
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Moooooood loved
Whereaboooouts Pumbedita House, Cambridge, UK

I will post a review of the year at some point but it might be a bit into January. I'm also about to turn 40, so it seems a good time to look back over my 30s. It's quite nice that all of it is documented on DW (apart from the first few months of 2009 when I was still on LJ), but I'm not going to get too much sucked into re-reading old posts.

( reminiscences )

It's a real luxury to have Christmas Eve completely free like this. My work and Jack's both didn't feel it was worth opening for half a day between the weekend and the holiday, so we are at home with no particular responsibilities.

Moooooood relaxed
Whereaboooouts Pumbedita House, Cambridge, UK

I ended up skipping an end of year retrospective in 2016 and 2015, which I regret, as I knew I would. Those two years were very full of exciting new relationship on the one hand, and the long, drawn-out train wreck of my academic career on the other. And I didn't quite want to write about them.

Up to summer 2016, my little research group was gradually unravelling and I was constantly scared about whether I would be able to salvage any career at all, and increasingly convinced that the only positive outcome would be to get out without any glaringly obvious black mark on my CV. I was spending a good chunk of my week commuting between Keele where I was struggling with job, and Cambridge where I was trying to cram as much relationship stuff as possible into about 40 hours of weekend plus a couple of weeks at Christmas.

Summer 2016, the ongoing bad situation at work came to a head and my second PhD student was removed from my supervision, against her wishes as well as mine. Also in summer 2016 the UK voted to leave the European Union, and I... haven't been sleeping well since, even though so far not much has changed materially for a British citizen who reads (passes?) as white. In spite of the political awfulness, in many ways the academic year of 2016 - 17 was easier than the previous several years; I knew, instead of fearing, that I couldn't progress much further on the traditional academic track. And having half my job, the research part, effectively snatched away from under me was upsetting, but it meant I was giving my whole time and energy to half a job and was able to excel rather than struggling to catch up.

So this year's significant events:

I applied for and was offered a new job []. This entailed moving properly to Cambridge, and generally reorganizing my life.
The move meant that I used up my annual leave so I didn't have time for many major trips, or for giving as much attention as I'd have liked to other major events, like my parents' ruby anniversary and Forestofglory's visit and Lethargic_man's wedding.
Talking of simchas, my excellent student celebrated his bar mitzvah towards the start of the year. And illusive_shelle celebrated a magnificent wedding, and fluffymark married bella_luugosi and it was much talked about, though I wasn't able to attend. Congrats also to monanotlisa on her marriage, and to hatam_soferet on the birth of a daughter.
In fact, it was a really good year religiously! I went to a really great interfaith event in March. I hosted my partners at some Seders in April. I led some successful Shabbat services including the one where I bid farewell to the community where I've been organizing religious things for the past 8 years. And I returned to them for the High Holy Days. I started teaching at the same Sunday school where I worked as a teenager, and was invited to take over as headmistress (!) from next year, but said no as my plans are too uncertain to commit to that. And right at the end of December I read Torah in the synagogue where I spent my teens, where they have incredibly high standards of who's allowed to read and apparently I now meet them.
There was a mass exodus from LJ due to draconian changes in the Terms of Service and concerns about the legal and moral situation in Russia.

( rest of the summary )

Anyway, happy New Year to those of you for whom changing the calendar is important. As every year, my resolution is to be better at keeping in touch, and hopefully this year will have few upheavals (she says, optimistically) and I will actually have time and energy to do something about it.

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I note in passing that it's 14 years to the day since I started this blog, 6 years on LJ and 8 years on DW. That's a lot of writing and a lot of conversations. I've made just over 2000 posts in 14 years, and I think the average length is only a little under a thousand words, so somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million words and that's not even counting comments. I was really not expecting either the site or my interest in blogging to last as long as 14 years, but I'm really glad you're all still here.

I still don't have a good way of making an offline archive of DW; the program LJArchive is timing out because, I think, my DW is just too huge, and it doesn't have a way of downloading one bit at a time. Does anyone have any recs?

It's also coming up to the end of my 7th year of working at Keele – I've finished teaching and only have exams to go through before this academic year is over. It's a pretty awesome job in lots of ways. Our senior people like to point out that there have been over a million consultations when patients have been treated by Keele-trained doctors in the ten year history of the medical school, and I've contributed to the education of quite a high proportion of those doctors.

And it's the 20^th anniversary, give or take, of my leaving school. I have signed up to attend the reunion next month; I'm not entirely sure that was a good idea, but I am at least somewhat curious to see if I can pick up some gossip from anyone who isn't on Facebook. I don't think anyone is going to be surprised that I'm an academic, that's what everybody was predicting when I was going around convinced I was going into school teaching. But they might well be surprised that I'm married and poly.

Anyway, now I'm going to catch a train from the new exciting local to my house station.

Moooooood nostalgic
Whereaboooouts Dreamwidth
Tuuuuuune The New Pornographers: Avalanche Alley

Recently read:

forestofglory is brilliant at recommending short SFF; via her post I found A good home by Karin Lowachee. I've had Lowachee on my radar for a while but haven't been able to find Warchild in a reasonable format, so I'm excited to read this short. It didn't perfectly work for me but I'm an easy sell on humans forming emotional bonds with androids (after all that Asimov and Star Trek in my childhood.)

Currently reading: Sisterhood by Penelope Friday. I am happy to enjoy the sex scenes, the miscommunication, and the external conflict that fit the genre, but with lesbian and wlw characters. I like that the miscommunication is realistic and doesn't rely on characters being gratuitously stupid, and that the conflict comes not from the fact that the relationships are between women, but that the heroine's gf is an abolitionist and her brother-in-law on whom she's financially dependent is involved in the slave trade.

Up next: I think I might ask to borrow back the copy of The secrets of enduring love by Meg-John Barker, which I gave to my partners collectively for Valentine's Day. Since today is two years since I got together with

cjwatson and tomorrow will be two years with

ghoti. I'm still head-over-heels in love and far too excited for two years in, but we are definitely starting to have more of the sort of conversations that people in long term relationships have. And I'm hoping this will be a long term relationship, so it feels the right time to read up on how to have strong long-lasting relationships from a guide that doesn't assume monogamous and heteronormative.

I've always said that my general happiness isn't about whether I have a partner or not, but these two years I've felt... I think the word is fulfilled, a sort of deeply contented that isn't exactly the emotion of happiness. I feel really rooted in this little network of relationships.

Moooooood happy
Whereaboooouts 19th century London
Tuuuuuune Sia: Academia
Crossposts: http://livredor.livejournal.com/348199.html

So eight years ago, on 29^th February, I asked Jack out and he said yes. And then some years elapsed where we decided the relationship was in fact serious and long-term, and I moved back to England and we had lots of detailed discussions and eventually got engaged. Four years ago, on 29^th February, we did not exactly celebrate the anniversary of getting together, because we were too busy getting married. So today is a day that I couldn't have begun to imagine in 2008, and seemed impossibly far away even in 2012: our first ever wedding anniversary.

( contains soppy )

We had hoped to do something really exciting for our first! ever! anniversary! but when it came to it, we're both just over-stretched and tired, so we opted for just a weekend in a little self-catering cottage (with, amazingly, its own semi-working water mill!) in the countryside not far from me. And we mostly spent the weekend staying in and cuddling and playing board games and watching a low-effort film. We managed a couple of meals out in indifferent pubs, and a half-hour stroll in what is a very pretty but not too touristy area. And we had a few relationship conversations of the kind that you often don't get time for in daily life. But basically we were just tired, and needed a weekend to recharge. It was extremely lovely to be able to do that together, I must say.

Moooooood loved
Whereaboooouts Moddershall, Stone, Staffordshire
Tuuuuuune Imogen Heap: Glittering clouds
Crossposts: http://livredor.livejournal.com/332741.html

I almost don't feel like looking back over 2014, it's been a bit of a blah year. Nothing bad, but little that really stands out. But I've been doing this for ten years now so I might as well carry on the tradition!

( that was the year that was )

Moooooood optimistic
Whereaboooouts Keele University, Staffordshire, UK
Tuuuuuune Dave Carter & Tracey Grammer: Disappearing man

My excellent father is 70 today. P'tite Soeur organized a very fun birthday party for him, by means of contacting all his extended family by any means she could and inviting them all to show up at the weekend. Ended up about 60 people, the descendants of about half of the 10 siblings of my grandparents' generation.

It was a little bit like a reprise of my wedding reception, with a marquee in the garden of my parents' place, and the same caterers, the ever-wonderful Shelford Deli, provided a selection of really tasty salads, an excellent cheese board, and strawberries and cream. Much better weather, though, it was gloriously sunny all day.

My sister who has only improved her baking skill since the wedding made a birthday cake, many different kinds of biscuits, profiteroles, macarons, absolutely amazing. (By the way, she's doing a pop-up restaurant event with a dinner purely made out of desserts, which I am shamelessly plugging because more people should taste my sister's amazing cakes.)

In general it was an absolutely brilliant family reunion, cousins I'm fond of but see too rarely, cousins I've never met before, eating and chatting and catching up on decades worth of family gossip. Lots of people commented that it's really nice to get the family together when it's not a funeral, and I am almost thinking I want to tell you how great my Dad is while he's still here. But he's also really modest and would probably be embarrassed at lots of public praise.

Anyway, many happy returns of the day to Dad, here's to many more decades of happiness and compassion and good food and family.

Moooooood happy
Whereaboooouts Great Shelford, Cambs, England

Happy birthday to

darcydodo!

Happy blogaversary to me - I joined LJ this date in 2003, and moved to DW around this time in 2009.

Happy election day to fellow Europeans, (apart from people in civilized countries where they've moved the European elections to the nearest weekend to improve turnout). ( obligatory election opinions )

Moooooood anxious
Whereaboooouts West Midlands, England, Europe
Tuuuuuune Hazel O'Connor: I'll see you again

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