Good Morning, Taylor.

It’s the darkest day of the year for us here. I know it’s the longest for you, but here, it’s getting very dark and very cold. I like the cold. I don’t like the dark.

We’re on week two of a three week vacation. It’s been mostly spent puttering around the house, doing cleaning and birding and fixing things up. Everything was good until Friday.

Ragdoll is refreshing all her computers and she started the last one on Friday. She spent the first half of the day trying to get some networking thing to work, and when she couldn’t went back to her old version of Linux to get it working. Then she started her media server, and both our days went sideways.

Ragdoll and I share time. We agree on times we can and can’t come out, make do for work stuff and emergencies, and we try to give each other an equal amount of time (although she usually gives me a little more). She was supposed to have Friday Morning, and I was supposed to have Friday Night. I had a lot planned for Friday Night including a grocery trip.

But her rebuild of the server went bad. And the first sign things were going to go real bad? She bought pizza. We had food in the fridge, and if she wanted pizza I could have gotten some that night at the grocery, but she just was so fixed on fixing her system, she ignored me.

And then my time to come out came and went. She was still fixated on fixing her system, over and over again, rebuilding copying reinstalling. And she wasn’t letting go until it was fixed – she locked me out of my day, I held on hope that maybe I’d get some later night time, but by the time she was done, and really she wasn’t done – she reached a point where she couldn’t do anything more – it was nearly midnight. My day had come and gone away.

I was upset. I had a lot of plans to do stuff. And now they were all out the window.

Saturday Morning, she woke up, and handed me control. I was hoping maybe to hike today while it was light, but I had errands to run I didn’t do on Friday Night. But I decided to take some time for me. It’s my vacation, too. After a pizza breakfast (leftovers) and some cleaning up of me and the house, I ran off to do the errands.

I ran off to a local bird-watcher store and stocked up on food for the birds. We have so many birds now. Not just crows, but jays, flickers, juncos, finches, all sorts of birds visiting now. They get a good deal of food…seed, suet bits, suet block, tree nuts and peanuts. I don’t spend time with my crows as much as I like, but really because sunrise is SO SO SO late right now.

If Ragdoll can have pizza, I can get some food too. I went to a little Japanese place and ate some grilled eel and rice, which was so good. Just me, my food, and a rainy day outside watching the people go by. I don’t go out as much as I like these days. It’s just too dark and rainy and cold. But this was nice.

I did a grocery run after that, and bought a ton of groceries for the next two weeks. It really hit out budget hard and things will be super tight, but hopefully things won’t need to be too spendy now that we’re all stocked up again.

Sunday I cooked again. I’m graduated from the kid recipes to beginner’s recipes from a book she had. I’ve made some good French Onion Soup, and today some curried sausage stir fry. The onion soup took FOREVER to get going, but it was really really good. The Curried Ssausges were kind of “throw them in a pan, and get them warm.” But they’re tasty.

Ragdoll put me in charge of the budget! I do numbers better than her, and we’re already making a dent in our credit card debt. We haven’t touched the cards in two weeks and won’t be touching them again if I have my way! Maybe I should put her on an allowance, instead of her putting me on one.

It’s going to be my one-year birthday soon. Out for a whole year. I have some plans for it…Ragdoll and I will go see the ocean finally. She promised me that a few months after I came out. It’ll be a short trip, because there’s not a lot of light right now. But she said we’ll try again in the summer, too, when there will be a lot more light.

I hope I get a chance to go out a little more now that a lot of the chores are done. I miss going out a lot but the weather and the sun just aren’t there as much as they used to be.

Thank you for the invite to the wedding! It was really lovely and I’m glad you wanted me there to be part of it. I know you both will be very happy together.

–Andrea