This after­noon, I opened the blinds on the win­dows behind my chair, think­ing it would draw Kioshi off the mon­i­tor (his tail kept obscur­ing the screen) to look out the win­dows. Nope. He turned around, so at least his tail was­n’t in the way, but he was inor­di­nate­ly pleased with him­self because he could then sur­vey his world from his nice, warm perch.

I down­load a ridicu­lous num­ber of pod­casts, then for­get to lis­ten to them. I can’t find my MP3 play­er, and it’s tiny any­way (512k), so it does­n’t hold much. Sam has the same kind, and he gets by, but he’s more moti­vat­ed: it keeps him sane while he’s “out there” every day. I nor­mal­ly take the lazy way out and lis­ten to Pan­do­ra or Last.FM.

I got through NaBloPo­Mo, as ridicu­lous as it was to com­mit to post­ing at least once a day for a month. So of course that small suc­cess has led me, in a moment of more-than-usu­al-luna­cy, to sign up for Blog365 (oth­er­wise known as “Out of the Fry­ing Pan, Into the Fire”).

The pur­pose is fair­ly clear: to post at least once every day of 2008. Feb­ru­ary 29 is a “rest day.” Posts may be writ­ten on any site, rather than stick­ing to just one blog, so I’ll try to spread them around on mine/ours. If I can’t get some­thing on the actu­al site on a par­tic­u­lar day due to net con­nec­tion issues or what­ev­er, I have to write (yes, write! like, cuneiform or some­thing!) a jour­nal entry and trans­fer it to a blog as that day’s entry.

It would be far sim­pler to have a sys­tem of some sort. Maybe I’ll cre­ate a rota­tion:

• Fibrant Liv­ing — health, liv­ing with a dis­abil­i­ty, pod­casts
• Acad­e­my Car­i­tas — home­school­ing, edu­ca­tion, col­lege
• House Fire­heart — polyamory, par­tic­u­lar­ly my and Sam’s approach to it
• Heart­song Hand­i­crafts — home of my orig­i­nal needle­work pat­terns, and soon to be home for the rest of my stitch­ing infor­ma­tion
• Cyber­stalked! — inter­net safe­ty and pri­va­cy issues
• Cyn­thia Armis­tead — my pro­fes­sion­al port­fo­lio, where I put the geeky stuff
• Ene­my of Entropy — here, of course, where I put gen­er­al stuff, book reviews, and the like.

Hope­ful­ly there will be new pod­casts up soon. There will def­i­nite­ly be more music, as we have that love­ly con­cert piano we received via freecy­cle all repaired and put togeth­er. It’s beau­ti­ful and sounds great! Not at all bad for one dri­ve to pick it up and less than $200 in repair fees! (Sam want­ed to just take it to the near­est autho­rized repair cen­ter rather than doing it our­selves.)

2007 was­n’t a stel­lar year, but nei­ther was it ter­ri­ble. Sam has a steady, secure job that he enjoys, in an orga­ni­za­tion that’s allow­ing him to advance. , Katie had a lot of health prob­lems, but I’m hop­ing that we’re on the right path to resolv­ing them. Shel­ley passed away a lit­tle shy of her 18th birth­day, but since we’d been told in 1999 that she only had a year (at most) left, we felt that we’d got­ten an “extra” 8 years with her any­way. Kioshi has grown into a nice com­pan­ion, too.

We real­ly kept to our­selves a lot through the past two years. When you’ve been betrayed and hurt as deeply as we were by our for­mer house­mate’s sud­den crazi­ness in 2006, there’s a lot of heal­ing to be done. I don’t know if I’ll ever approach Thanks­giv­ing with­out trep­i­da­tion again, but we had a good one any­way. The stress did con­tribute to the dete­ri­o­ra­tion of my health, and that does make it hard­er to get out. We’re work­ing on it, though. We cer­tain­ly learned who our true friends were, and we’ll nev­er for­get that.

So on to 2008, which we hope to be full of more time with friends, bet­ter health, much more music, Katie spent last night and almost all day today with friends from the school she was attend­ing as well as her new beau. Sam and I spent the day gam­ing, upgrad­ing some web sites, eat­ing good food and watch­ing movies. If it’s true that what­ev­er you do on Jan­u­ary 1 indi­cates how your year will go, we should be just fine.

Sam has start­ed anoth­er pod­cast in cahoots with Bill Wal­ton. This one, Square One, is for com­plete­ly new gamers. Check it out — they’ve done a good job. I’m in one episode, though I don’t think that one’s up yet.

Sam and I are part of a group play­ing Out in the Black, a Seren­i­ty RPG mod­ule, that’s being record­ed for the After Seren­i­ty pod­cast. The first episode has already been put out on the feed, and the sec­ond episode should be out soon (we’ve already record­ed it).

At home we’re still play­ing Raven­flight togeth­er. Silken Moon­light is on hold ’til Son­ji can join us again. She’s always too busy to play from about Sep­tem­ber to Jan­u­ary each year. Sam recon­nect­ed with some­one we gamed with in the past recent­ly, and we have hopes of gam­ing with a group he’s part of before too long.

We (Sam and Katie and I) have been watch­ing the first sea­son of Veron­i­ca Mars on DVD. It’s a good show, with a bit of a non-super­nat­ur­al Buffy feel. We’re also watch­ing the last episodes of Alias. The con­trast is inter­est­ing, to say the least. Since we get around to watch­ing maybe one episode of one or the oth­er a week, it’s slow going.

I final­ly fin­ished watch­ing Rent, too. Sam and I have both found that movie to be a dread­ful ear­worm gen­er­a­tor. I picked up the sound­track CD at the library this week­end, and will try lis­ten­ing to it ’til I’m sick of it. Maybe that will help.

Sam has a small TV in the kitchen, and he always has some oth­er series going in the DVD play­er there to keep him com­pa­ny while cook­ing if some­one isn’t in the kitchen with him. The cur­rent one is Penn & Teller — Bullsh*t! The Com­plete Sec­ond Sea­son. I thought I’d watched that, but appar­ent­ly I mis­re­mem­bered. Penn is awful­ly atten­tion-get­ting, even with­out a visu­al.