ch-ch-ch-changes

I guess if you only update your blog once a month, you should have something to say.

Briefly, it’s like this…

this weekend is the anniversary of my mom’s death. Since my dad died so quickly after her, it is hard to separate out one set of grief from the other. Oddly, I have been thinking a lot about the town where they lived. I never lived there and really didn’t like that town one bit. But I have been having lots of little flashbacks to places there. It feels related to autumn, for some inexplicable reason.
Anyway… my mom died during Day of the Dead.
Given that we all, apparently, gotta die, I think that’s a pretty good time to leave the planet.

In other news, after nine years of slogging it out in the trenches, it appears I am moving into a new job. Same organization, different position.
It’s been a long time coming. I don’t know if anyone else would have hung around for 9 years waiting for the long promised job to materialize, but I did, and it did, and it just goes to prove that I am loyal and determined rather than stubborn and unreasonable.
Well, I am likely a tasteful blend of all those qualities.

And the last tidbit is I am now a certified Open Water Scuba Diver. And while the course may be relatively straightforward for some, I had to work at it. And I had an underwater mishap that shook me up, and I had to go back and get back on the seahorse and do it again. I’m not sure if you have ever been unable to breathe while 30 feet underwater in the chilly old ocean, but it does activate something primal. I’d call that something – terror.
But I went back and did it again, and I was scared but I did it anyway.
And then I did it one more time because I wanted it solid.
It took up a lot of my mental energy, just getting ready to do this, well, actually overcoming the fear, talking to myself about how it is clearly possible to do this and I just had one thing that went sideways and it was all gonna be okay.

So, I conquered that seadragon on the anniversary of my mom’s death. I didn’t set it up that way; it’s just the way the cookie crumbled. But it was good.
And having succeeded at the skill, I realized that it is complicated to express elation underwater. But that’s okay. I think everyone knew.

Life has been such a shitstorm over the last few years, I am cautious about saying I think it’s getting better, but I am now willing to consider whispering that it may just be beginning to show signs of turning the corner and around that corner, there is a more generous light supply that what I have had for the last few years.