News: some good, some bad

Hello, readers!

If you've given up on me, I wouldn't be surprised. Here are the last few month's highlights. I'll start with the good.

• Jess and I moved in together, to a wonderful place that's the top two floors of a house. After many false starts, it looks like we also have a roommate to occupy the third bedroom!
  
  
• I spent thankstaking with Jess's family in Harrisburg, PA and stayed up until 11:30 making tofu onion quiche, from-scratch pumpkin pie and stuffing for a veritable vegan army. It was a wonderful break, I curled up with a book in front of their fireplace. I can't remember when I had that many contiguous hours to be reading. Perhaps the last time I posted to this blog, eh?
  
  
• DC Trans Coalition won our campaign about handling procedures for trans people with the DC Police. Yay! It's a great document. Now we're working on enforcing it. First stop: a big ol' fashioned Know Your Rights training with the community;
  
  
• Jess and I took a Spanish class together;
  
  
• Our new place has seen a whole slew of fabulous visitors already, a pumpkin-carving party, a housewarming, a bevy of guests. Yay!
  
  
• Halloween, my favorite holiday, was particularly delightful this year: friends of mine through various USAS connections had put together a zombie-laden haunted scavenger hunt/bicycle race all across DC. It was truly amazing. I was a devil and Jess was a witch, complete with pointy hat affixed to her bicycle helmet. Can't beat that.
  
  

And the bad...

• This November 24th was marked not only by the birthdays of Elly and Juliana, but the untimely death of my cat Miles. Miles had been in the care of my parents since 1996, so my claim to him was shaky, but my love for him was not. There are really unfortunate parallels to my dad's death as well, and Miles also had a chronic kidney condition, but his only lasted a year or so. I will miss him terribly. He was 13, which was old, but in my family we've had cats live to be 21.
  

So much has happened over the last few months there's no way I can get it all down here. Needless to say, living with Jess is a joy. The moving process was...eventful, and for about a month I spent every spare moment assembling some piece of Ikea or Ikea-via-craigslist furniture or unpacking boxes.

Also, I'm coming out to California for a big chunk of the winter, and I'm really excited about it. It's going to be a rough time no matter what, and I'm already pretty down about the events of last winter. It blows my mind that it's already been almost a year.

With that, though, it was much more joy than sorrow when an dear friend of my parents, Jim Heid, discovered and sent me a clip from the last episode of Jeopardy that my dad was on. I was two when he was on the show, and I've never seen the show as an adult because this was long before we had a VCR. I don't even know if you could get them in 1979. Nonetheless, here's the link. My dad's the swaggering ham who had won the previous four days...he lost the fifth, but it was enough money to build the house I grew up in.