It's been more than a year now since Chris and I split, and I'm not going to go into detail at all, but it's getting to a point where I think we might be able to be friends one of these days. This has turned out to be important to me, which was surprising because I really thought I wouldn't be able to be his friend, and now I really want to. He still has the qualities that made me like him in the beginning, and it's not like he ever really did anything awful aside from the fact that we just didn't make one another happy. We should have only ever been friends, from day one. The stupid thing was thinking it should be more than that, but it was a mistake we both participated in, and you live and you learn. Point is, when the dust settles, I hope we can be friends or at least not growl when we think of one another. We don't talk much, but from when I *have* talked to him, it seems like he's moving on with his life, just as I've been moving on with mine, and he says that he's happy, which I wholeheartedly hope to be true.

And as for me, I'm in a relationship with a wonderful man who makes me very happy and is suited to me so well that I would scarcely have thought to imagine him. He loves doing crafty things together, going to debates together, discussing science together, all the nerd-tacular things that I love to do. We are great friends, but also ridiculously excited about one another. I am enjoying myself immensely, but I am mindful of the tendencies I have that tend to hurt others, and I am trying to master them (though I know this will be a life-long effort.) We've been together 9 months now, and I am happy.

In short, things are well with me. There are loads of things I could post about right now, but one post is enough at the moment.

So this last week, my mom and I flew back to NY, rented a U-Haul, filled it with my stuff, and drove back to CA in it.  I am tired, and it turns out I have way too much shit, go figure.  But still, it's good to have my guitar and my cello back, my spinning wheel, and just generally to feel like this thing is one step closer to done with.  Sometimes you think you want something to be a certain way, and then when it turns out to be that way you find that it wasn't what you wanted at all.

We got to stop and visit with Phug, which was awesome because I haven't seen him in months and months, and plus Michigan is pretty when its not covered in snow, and when you don't have to go outside with the bugs much.  That was undoubtedly the highlight of the trip.

Also, there's a cool museum thing in Kearny, Nebraska (pronounced "carnie", as in "small hands, smell like cabbage").  From the outside it looks like a bridge to nowhere over a pretty uninteresting part of highway 80, but it's actually really damn cool on the inside.  If you're ever driving across the country, you should check it out.

Ended up bringing Falkor back because she was literally dying.  She has a terrible mouth infection (mouth rot or stomatitis), and it was messing up her eyes and even errupted out of her little face :(  She couldn't see, so she couldn't eat, and she had wasted down to less than half of her former self.  So we loaded her up, and took her to a vet in Michigan (thanks to the overwhelming generosity of Phug, who probably saved her life singlehandedly), and now she's on meds and I am nursing her back to robusticity using this stuff called Repta-aid, which is like reptile baby formula.  She's being a model patient, eating and taking her medicine very well, better than I had anticipated, and I think I'm seeing marked improvement.  Here she is soaking in an ice bucket at one of the hotels we stopped at: