Hello again - Giant Update Post of Doom

I fell out of using this blog for a while, but I'm back. Lots to share. The last year has been pretty crazy, but I'm still here, despite everything.

Got a new job last year in late January, and was officially hired on that June, so I've been gainfully employed now for more than a year and a half. Met a lot of great people, learned a lot about Unions and Pensions (which is what I work on), and starting to consider where I will try to move inside the company.

It's meant a lot more reading on the ride to and from work, as well as on breaks, which makes me very happy. I've missed the enjoyment of new books, but between one of my co-workers' suggestions for reading, and Goodreads, I've been finding all sorts of great books, both on Kindle and in paper form.

And because of my reading, I've started a new blog here on blogger. The blog is called A Slash Reader's Diary, and it deals specifically with reviews of stories that have a male/male pairing as the central focus, as that is one of my favorite genres. I've found it's hard to find books that are in the genres I like that also have that focus, so I wanted to provide a place where others could find the great books I've found.

I lost one of my kitties about a year and a few months ago. I still miss Sebastian a lot, but after a few months (right around this time last year), I got another black kitty whom I have named Nicky. He's not sure what to make of everything, but he's having great fun tormenting my poor Morgan, who doesn't know what to do with this kid who keeps getting in her face and doesn't kowtow to her every demand the way Sebastian did. He's more cuddly than Sebastian or even Morgan, as he loves to jump right up into my arms and snuggle for a few minutes. It's been a learning process for both of us, but we're definitely doing well.

Shortly after arriving last year, at the old apartment

Yesterday, settled in his favorite viewing spot at the new apartment

Morgan's having more issues than a new brother, though. Shortly after his arrival last year, I noticed her weight was dropping too much, so I took her to the vet. She has hypothyroid problems. For a time there, I was pretty sure I was going to lose her, but we got her on meds which seem to be helping a lot. So she gets her ears rubbed twice a day, and the kitties get wet food daily, something that was only a once or twice weekly treat before.

And, as you can see from the pictures with Nicky, I have moved. I moved in late July and early August, and it's been stressful and wonderful in turns. Some great things, some bad things, but I'm slowly getting settled. Nicky wasn't too sure about all the strangers coming to visit, but hopefully he'll start to relax around strangers, as I don't plan to stop having people over to my own place, now that I've started the habit. I think it's mostly leftover stress when they were trying to find him a home at the rescue agency. Takes him a little to warm up, but once he does, he loves you.

Had a few successes with connecting to distant family over the past year.

One of the Welsh branches of my tree contacted me, and showed me that they've set up an online version of the family tree. I need to add our family information to it, but it was great to see one of my guesses confirmed (That Gabriel Howel's wife was Gwen Evan), and to discover that they'd found one more generation before them.

The other discovery was an email from a distant relation I'd never heard of before. A few years ago, in a fit of desperation, I posted on GenForum about my great-great grandparent from a small town in Czudek in what is now southern Poland. The family were Jewish, and in the late 1800s through the 1940s, it was a very bad place to be a Jew. Unsurprisingly, I know very little about this family. Originally, only what I got from my grandfather, then from his papers, which gave me a bit more. So I wrote a note on the Forum hoping that someone who knew them or of one of their other descendants (at the time, I knew only two daughters, though I was fairly sure there were more children).

Then a few weeks ago, I got an email from someone who said she was their granddaughter. I know enough to be wary of that sort of claim, but the information she gave worked with what I had in a way that made it pretty clear to me that she was, indeed who she claimed to be. So now my great-grandmother's family is finally intact on my family tree. She had three brothers and two sisters, one of whom disappeared at the end of World War I, and one of whom was taken by the Nazis. All the others escaped to the US or Israel, and lived full lives in their new homes. Given that I'd always assumed that I had several on this branch who likely died because of the Nazis, I was glad to learn our losses were so few. And now I have a few new names to try and track down. Who knows what I might find now.

I think I'll stop there and do the other two things (NaNoWriMo and a new recipe) in a different post, but that's pretty much my life for the past two years.