It's now been a year and a day (entirely by coincidence!) since I wrote anything bordering on news here. Seems like a good time to give my loyal fans (hah, both of them) an update.
My life is actually going quite well. Back in...2012, I think it was, I got back in touch with Red Maple, a druidic grove in Ottawa (and I think I've gone to every one of their High Day rituals since then, to the point where I'd almost write `our' instead of `their'). Back in early February—about ten months ago—someone I'd been peripherally aware of as one of the Red Maple people asked me out. We've been together since then, and it's a bit surprising how it feels to me simultaneously as though it was just yesterday and as though we've been together forever.
She's the only person I've met, since before I started living on my own, that I've been able to get a good night's sleep when in the same bed as. I've never been able to sleep well in the same bed as anyone else, not even with my past partners, but with her I can.
It is SO NICE to not have to explain my religious and magical practices to her. (There was one person who, when I said I considered myself neo-pagan, asked `so, does that mean you're, like, a Satanist?'. Once I got my face out of my palm I told her `I'm not Christian enough to be a Satanist, and yes, I expect that confuse you more'.)
We're already working on moving in together. Of the three possible ways to do that (she moves in with me, I move in with her, or we both move to a third place), we've decided that me moving in with her makes the most sense, so that's what we're aiming for...though, at this point, the next step is the same for each of those possibilities: get rid of a lot of stuff! I already found someone in Albany who drove up and took my VME-based Suns off my hands; I was a little sorry to see them go but I was much more glad to have the space they were occupying back. We'll probably wind up with a storage unit as well, for (if naught else) the computers I want to keep but don't want to have at immediate hand.
But the biggest change is probably that I'm actually feeling happy a lot more of the time. All the things that have historically been depressing me (you can find plenty of examples in other posts on this blah) don't seem to matter as much now. I'm not sure why (indeed, I'm not even sure that's entirely good) but that's the observation.
I've also been playing games a lot more. Tabletop games, I mean. This is something that's been missing from my life for a long time and it's very good to have it back. There are still some games I'd rather play more (go, chess, my family's variants of pinochle and backgammon, those come to mind immediately) but I am learning lots of new games and enjoying most of them. Perhaps principal among them is zendo, but there are lots of others: Cards Against Humanity, Ascension, Quantum, Ticket To Ride, Ghost Blitz, Lost Cities, the list is long and varied. There's a café near here which, once a week, turns into a boardgames café for an evening. I've been going there for a bit over a year and it's great. They bring in a DJ and there's someone who plays MC, looking to match up people looking for games with games to play. It's done in association with a full-time games café, which I don't go to because they are more for preexisting groups to go to to play games and less for individuals looking for other people to play games with.
And, in more computery news, my MicroVAX-II emulator is to the point where I think it may be able to complete a build of the NetBSD world, running diskless. Not that I think another VAX emulator is something the world needs; it's just a fun thing I've been working on and it's nice to see it all starting to really work. I have a build of the world underway and it's most of the way through /usr/src/usr.sbin, probably more than halfway through the world. (Now I want to learn enough about MSCP, and MSCP-on-Qbus, to build an MSCP disk interface into the simulator.)
So, on the whole, my life is definitely in GMH territory these days.