I hesitate to even summarize the past year, lest I seem like a big downer. Which I may very well be. If you've read my Shelley interview, and my family history page, then you know a big chunk of what happened.

I think I mentioned in the Shelley interview that Dave and I had finally decided (after more than 4 years of "togetherness") to head on up to the next level. At the time I thought it quite unfortunate that he subsequently started freaking out about it when I made some real-life steps in that direction.

So instead of reporting to you that I am now pregnito, as I expected to be doing about now, I am reporting instead that Dave and I are quits!

It was really, really hard, especially on top of everything else that had already happened last year. I pretty much used up all my ability to cope, and ended up even smoking two packs of cigarettes (!!) over the "holiday" "break" (which of course is when this all had to go down). I got really, really, tired of crying by about mid-January.
I had just been starting to catch up on school stuff that had been too hard to accomplish during the summer/autumn, and had planned to use winter break to finally get back on track a little bit, not to mention get some things started with my thesis. Of course, this completely shot the legs out from under me, and I was barely able to do basic class stuff for a while, let alone get on with the catching up/thesis progress.

So now, I am mainly angry because I want the wasted four years of my precious limited fertility back, and I want back the cumulative 6 months of my academic time he wasted by putting me through all this emotional @$#%& not just once, but TWICE! I don't regret that we're no longer together; I just wish it had happened a lot sooner, like several years.

But (except for when rehashing it like right now) it's funny how little I think about it.
A lot of this will have been old news if you know me, and who else reads this thing?

This week, I just handed in the last class paper of my academic career, a day I have imagined in a vague, misty way since I started this whole process eight years ago. (Well--okay, I do have one more class in August, but it's a week-long class in Traverse City, it's almost vacation-like, and is about a topic in which I am already pretty well-versed.)

There is so much I wanted to do academically that I now will never, ever have the time to. It's also hard to go back to the drawing board in the "family" area, since I was already freaking out about fertility a year ago, when I thought I had a committed partner.

I'm still hovering around 120 pounds, instead of my previous 125, but that's still not too bad. I have been trying to get back on the exercise boat since last summer, something that has been intermittently successful.

Oddly, one thing that has been bothering me is that there is a lot of cleaning and filing that I wanted to do a year ago and then was too traumatized to get to, that I then thought I would do over the holiday break--instead spending that crying on my couch, dangit. So I am tentatively looking forward to doing just some basic maintenance kind of stuff in my life again over the summer, between research and clients and so on.

And yes, I am seeing someone else now. I have to say it was pretty strange starting over after four and a half years. (Different than the previous time, because I knew that wasn't going anywhere, whereas this last one supposedly was.)

We've only been going out a couple months, so I am hesitant to write much (and jinx it?)

It's enough to know that he's my age (whew), English, and a programmer. (Although I must brag and say that he's darn cute, too!) :)