No, I wasn’t in a coma for the last year. That would have been way too restful.

I’ll just sum up the last 12 months by saying it’s been fraking exhausting, with no end in sight. (Not a complaint, mind you — I absolutely LOVE most parts of my life, and I fully expect it to just keep on getting better! But it is tiring.)

Okay, alright, to hit just the highlights –

bought an awesome 2005 Dodge pickup truck (too bad the damned thing is red, but they were all out of purple), moved a rather large household’s (3 humans & 9 pets) worth of stuff into a rather small condo that already had (1 human & 2 feline) inhabitants, got sucked into Facebook despite years of resistance (because of some stupid farming game, on which I’m currently level 75), cut nearly all of Geoffrey’s waist-length hair off (at his request, so he could get used to having short hair for the first time in 20 years, before he went to Boot Camp), performed my elder spawn’s wedding ceremony on her 21st birthday (oy and vey), had a Yule season frought with tension, helped elder spawn move house when she decided her marriage was A Big Mistake, had to deal with the most gawd-awful high school in the state until I finally told younger spawn that she didn’t have to go back (she’s now enrolled in an awesome “alternative” school & will probably graduate ahead of her year-mates), got to go shooting with my beloved Geoffrey and our friend The Bastidge a few more (awesome) times, managed not to bawl like a stoopid girl when Geoffrey left for US Navy Basic Training (miss him miserably, constantly, fiercely), was only able to visit hubby for 3 days in the last almost-four months and won’t get to see him again for another month yet, have done about 8 times more work on a garden this year than the cumulative total of my prior gardening, got a kick-ass purple netbook for natal anniversary number forty-one and named it Tinhead (shout out to F.M. Busby), have done about 4 times more crocheting this past year than the cumulative total of the previous 21 years since I learned how (and invented the term “yarn porn” to describe my fast-growing crocheting magazine & book collection), discovered my eldest cat has hyperthyroidism and has to be given pills twice daily to keep her alive (gee, that’s fun), and am still adapting to living with FIVE cats (not *quite* as much fun as I’d once thought it might be) and very little sex.

Yeah, I’m at the theoretical best years of a woman’s sexual lifetime, and my husband — light of my life, joy of my heart, fire in my loins — is over 2,100 miles away. (That’s something in the neighborhood of 3,400 km, for the rest of the world.) My new motto? “Navy Wife: Sexually Deprived For Your Freedom”

Hey, but I’m crocheting a lot. (A. LOT.)

I’m vaguely amused at the fact that I’m writing this on what would have been my 23rd wedding anniversary to my first husband, if he hadn’t been such a completely abusive dick who — among many other horrible things — stole & destroyed my most treasured childhood things, tried to take a breastfed newborn permanently away from her mother, lied in court documents & forced me all the way to divorce court, all just to hurt/punish me. (Guess what, Mick? My life is AWESOME now, and yours probably sucks. Karma is a stone bitch, babe.)

Here’s the scariest — nay, the most terrifying — part: if anyone had told me 10 years ago that I would be 1) married, 2) married without being traumatized by it, 3) married to a US Navy Sailor, 4) happy about owning a pickup truck, 5) excited about gardening instead of disliking it, 6) rabidly excited about crochet instead of just liking it, 7) a rather enthusiastic gun owner, and/or 8 ) a registered Republican, I would have said to them with complete and absolute seriousness, “Just how high are you, dude?”

And they say people don’t change. Well, one little thing hasn’t changed one little bit…

I am still a snarky bitch.