I'm just over the wire. Hullo. I hardly lurk at all, but when I do, it's usually in one of the tv threads. I check Beep Me and Press at least every few weeks.

I'm still incredibly grateful to be able to early retire last year, and be comfortable financially, own my own home, even go on vacations. I backpacked from Arcata to the Oregon border along the Calif. coast this past summer, followed by three weeks of car camping in Oregon. The most fun was the Kinetic Sculpture Event in Corvallis. (Check it out!)

My mother will be 96 in 3 weeks. She's hanging in there and has most of her marbles. Her hearing and eyesight have gotten much worse and everything is just harder to do when you are that old.

One of my sisters is a really awful person and that doesn't seem to change, sadly. The other can be terrible but we work it out. The brother is doing well.

I love taking college science classes. I'm enjoying and doing well in Environmental Geology this semester.

I'm having a minor surgery tomorrow and am up having my last cranberry juice. G'night Buffistas!

UNCONTROLLABLE URGE TO SPAM THE DELURKING THREAD. Both it and I are up past our bedtimes!

Lurkers, don't wait til next year, post randomly in all the threads!

OH HAI DELURKERS!!!

umm, you can come out. I won't asscap and exclamation point at you anymore. I'll try to only do it about actual subjects.

I feel like I should make at least a token presence in the delurking thread, especially because I'm mostly only found these days in Natter and Boxed Set, so it might be easy to miss me.

Howdy again, Buffistae. I got to see a few of you at this year's F2F, for which I'm grateful.

I'm still in exile in LA. Looking for Bay Area housing I can afford on my gubmint disability check, i.e. about $400 for rent. The right thing hasn't turned up yet so I'm still renting from relatives. I'm trying to take free and cheap courses to brush up old skills and learn new ones in the hope of vocational rehabilitation.

In the meantime I keep gardening, cycling, reading and self-analyzing just as much as I ever did.

Hi delurkers! All is well in New Orleans, need more Buffistas to visit, though.

Mom and I are Treme fans...it makes us want to visit. (Not that I'm delurking.)

Hi you Buffistas! I'm not around so much but hello hello I love you!

I have recently fallen in lust with Supernatural, which has brought me back to the board, but mostly just in that thread. I check Minearverse, Firefly, Beep Me, Press, and COMM regularly, and did pretty well on that even when I had just given up on keeping up with other threads. I adore Buffistas and still consider myself to be one. I know my time zone difference isn't really all that bad, but I've decided to blame it.

It's been a pretty good year for me. I work with the best people ever and have the best job. I've started cantoring at church (solos...meep), and seem to be doing relatively ok. I just signed up to be in the pit choir for a local musical production, which seems like the best of all worlds (sing show tunes in street clothes with fewer rehearsals and no makeup or stage fright!)

I helped a dear friend pass on, staying vigil with him and other friends for his last 4 days, which was exhausting and turned out to be depressing. But, it was also life affirming and I think I was pretty good at it, so I'm looking into volunteering with hospice now. I was raised fundamentalist and left that faith not because I didn't believe, but because I couldn't follow God as I understood Him. My fear of God, and by extension of death, was still there in a big way, though. I became Episcopalian about 12 years ago, and that was the beginning of my acceptance of a different world view, of myself, and of the future. Being with my friend in his last year and at his passing was a tremendous gift, and instilled both a desire to make that time for comfortable for others and a sense of peace about it for myself.

I've spent time with family, including some really great people that I hadn't seen for 25 years or so. My parents are getting older, and while they're both doing pretty well, their age is starting to show, and it's kind of scary. I know it's the natural order of things, but my parents aren't supposed to age, dammit. On re-read, that perspective seems a bit odd, given the previous paragraph, but it all makes sense to me.

Hmm. I really didn't mean this to be a post about death and religion. The topics have clearly been much on my mind lately, but I think in a healthy way.

Oh, and I started weight watchers, lost 10% of my bodyweight, gained some of it back, but think I'm back on the forward part of two steps forward, one step back. It all comes back to exercise for me. I exercise a lot, get injured, don't at all. Blah. Now, I'm shooting for moderate but continuous.

Hi, Kiba! Hi, libkitty! Good to see your fonts!