Well, it’s 2019.

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So I can’t say that I’m entering 2019 full of hope. I’m hoping that it’s less miserable than 2018 was. I normally do a year in review; but the beginning of 2018 I think I more or less skipped it, 2017 having been so much of a car-crash.

2018 hasn’t been a lot better. I mean, it has in that by changing job I managed to pull myself out of the pit of burn-out and depression that I’d spent so much of 2017 in. I’m not going to rehash the awful political situation, and I’ve spoken enough about how unsafe I feel outside Olympia thanks to the rampant white supremacism, bigotry, and the insane availability of guns. I don’t feel we really need to rehash that. Politically? Socially? 2018 – in a nutshell – sucked.

But 2018 has also run by in a blur of missed deadlines and frustration over the house. A frustration which has, unsurprisingly, spilled over into 2019 as we wonder when the house might, just possibly, be finished. And how we’re going to get to that finish line. The list of jobs is both much more managable and simultaneously, so massive as to be terrifying. Partly because while I can start work on the floor in some areas, much of the work that’s left to do requires two people. And that is kinda restrictive.

There’s still the exterior work to finish, which is at least partially single-person-doable, except that… we have no on-site storage except the house. And for the exterior stuff we need wood; lots of it. So that puts somewhat of a crimp in that. And the move-in readiness stuff? That’s mostly two people for the forseeable. Which is fine. Which we’d talked about. But right now it feels kind of overwhelming.

Part of this is, no doubt, that I’ve just got back from CES. And that was an all encompassing, all consuming event. We filmed, we talked about filming, we planned filming, and then we (well, Nikki) edited late into the night. We ate, drank and slept CES. And coming back to the real world after that kind of event is actually kind of strange. I’d not really thought about the house – or the mortage+rent situation. I’d not really thought about the complexities of the things that need to happen.

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CES, incidentally, was a blast this year. Last year it was a hard slog. This year it was hard, but we actually properly had fun, we knew a bit more what we were doing, and some of my stuff in front of the camera felt more – well, I felt better about it. I still need to get better at interjecting when I have something today. But that’s on me.

And the road-trip turned out to be exhausting but awe inspiring. We crossed the high desert, we went up and down mountains, we drove through cities and towns and near deserted villages. We saw tumble-down houses and massive skyscrapers.

TBH, it was really cool.

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Granted, I could have done without the 3am arrival at Las Vegas, and the 2am arrival back in Portland. But – all of that was done in an EV, fully laden, with essentially an entire studio.

And that whole thing really cements the functionality of EVs. More charging stations would have made life a ton easier. But it’s doable now.

But having arrived at home? Suddenly, all that real world stuff is back.

Bills – distressingly large ones – have arrived. And the phone call this morning – in the middle of my yoga routine (and I rarely give myself time for yoga, so: Really world? Really?) – from the garage that has my minor – saying that they have not really managed to come up with a solution to the missing / mismatched parts and they’d like to look at shipping her off to a different garage… and I’m left suggesting that I’ll call JLH back in England and beg them to send as many bits as they can think of that might fit and I’ll pay for shipping them back…

Well, it’s disrupted a fragile equilibrium.

Or, to put it another way, has left me feeling quite shit.

KateWE

Kate's a human mostly built out of spite and overcoming transphobia-racism-and-other-bullshit. Although increasingly right-wing bigots would say otherwise. So she's either a human or a lizard in disguise sent to destroy all of humanity. Either way, it's all good.