I thought about doing Holidailies again this year, but decided I have neither the time nor the stuff to write about. However, I am now kicking myself. I have, for some insane reason, taken on the grand project of scanning, organizing, and preserving my family’s entire photograph collection, so I am digitizing vast quantities of slides and photos every night. At least once a night I find a picture that has me howling with laughter. I could actually have written every day even if I only posted embarrassing childhood photos and told the stories to go with them. Oh, well. I will content myself with being on the readers’ panel instead. I do that every year, and every year I am the grouchy one who only picks about three best-of entries all month, but Jette keeps inviting me back anyway, so I just keep on doing it.

Even though I will not be posting ridiculous family stories all month, I thought I would at least endeavor to do a bit of updating. If nothing else, I should make brief mention of the utterly insane four-states-in-three-days Thanksgiving trip Len and I did this year. Road trip to New Jersey, thence to Baltimore and back in one day, and then New York and back the following day, and then back to PA on the next day. I came back way too exhausted for having just had a week’s vacation. Damn holidays. Though it was lovely to see my family again, meet the utterly charming cat they’ve gotten since I was last home, and see Company on Broadway. I do love my Sondheim, and thoroughly enjoyed myself even though I was unsuccessful at luring Melissa into joining us. I suppose having one of the world’s cutest brand-new babies is one of the few utterly acceptable reasons for missing out on Sondheim.

Work is driving me nuts, as usual. Len’s studio is progressing slowly, as usual. Although it has actual drywall now, which makes it look much more like a real place.

Life’s proceeding both too fast and too slow, as it does, and I am feeling tired and stressed out way too much lately. But at least I have ridiculous pictures of my childhood to keep me amused.

Right now I am sitting on my little green loveseat in my room, snuggled up under a warm fleece blanket. My laptop is propped up against one knee and Pixel is stretched out along my other leg, purring madly and wheezing a little the way she does. She likes our morning cuddle ritual, when no one else in the house is up yet and it’s just us and the couch and the blue blanket. I’ve been here for ages this morning, catching up on web sites, watching the sunrise pour out across the clouded patch of sky I can see from my window.

It was a year ago this week that we first came to look at this house, figuring we wouldn’t buy it (who winds up buying the first place they look at?), but that you have to start somewhere. And then we looked at other places, but just kept coming back here. And now a year later we live here, so I get to watch this sunrise in this room in my house. I love this tiny little house like crazy.

This year has been ridiculously long and short all at once, and certainly one of the more stressful periods of my life, but I feel like I’m ending it in a good place, happy and grateful to the universe for all the good things that have happened, and mostly at peace with the not-so-good ones.

I seem to be having the sort of utterly ridiculous 96 hours that ought to be chronicled, if only so I can keep it all straight in my head since some of these things may be important later. (And some of them, hopefully, will not be.) So, in short, here’s what my last few days have been like:

Friday: Quit my job. Quit with a lot of notice, since I know it’ll take a while to find and train my replacement, and anyway I wanted to stay out my two-year commitment even though at this point the difference between a 2-year commitment and a 1-year-9-month commitment is somewhat negligible. So for various reasons, I’m leaving in the spring. It feels excellent to have the notifying-of-my-boss done with, he took it well, and I’m relieved it’s underway now.

Weekend: Went for a routine eye exam, attempting to spend out my health care account since I over-funded it this year, overestimating how much it would cost to have my wisdom teeth out. Had the doctor hem and haw, look in my eyes a bunch of times, and tell me that I have swollen optical nerves, which are probably a “pseudotumor” caused by a buildup of cerebrospinal fluid. Apparently if that is what I have, it responds well to medication, and I appreciate the pseudo and all, but I don’t want to ever be told I have anything with “tumor” in the name, thank you very much. I just wanted some damn eyeglasses! Instead, I am being shuttled off to a specialist this week for a neurological exam that’s probably going to involve both an MRI and a spinal tap. Ow! And eek. And ow. I am completely petrified about the whole thing, convinced that my brain is going to explode any second, and on a practical note, annoyed that just as I spent out all my remaining health care reimbursement money on glasses, I’m going to be racking up specialist bills this week.

On the plus side, my new glasses are going to be really cute.

So that was the weekend. Then today, a colleague offered me a new job for when I leave the current one in the spring. The timing is right, the pay sounds right, and the job is potentially interesting, although I need to learn more about the research I’d be doing. I’m tentatively intrigued. However, I am too busy dealing with my exploding brain right now to think about it seriously, so I told her we’d talk about it next week.

I am really ready for a nice quiet day where nothing of import happens. I have hopes that tomorrow will be that day. But then Wednesday it’s off for the MRI and spinal tap, so the calm won’t be calm for long.

My parents and sister are now here for several days, so before things get crazy, I figured I should check back in to note that my brain is apparently not exploding. Rather, I have strangely structured optic nerves that mimic the way regular optic nerves look, when they are planning to explode. Odd, but better than the alternatives. I am greatly relieved.

And now for several days of family, which will no doubt be fun but also exhausting. Right now it’s early enough that everyone is asleep but me (and the cats), so I’m enjoying the peace and quiet. I think a bubble bath may be in order.