__Morgana__ Send Message

Hi there. I am alive! It has been about a year since I have been around. Coincidentally, we have been having a cold snap in northern California, so I have started winnowing the stash again.

I see my last sipdown was in 2014 and I was on a roll. I had 163 for the year at that time. Then I disappeared.

Rather than start over for 2015, which is almost over in any case, I’m going to take up where I left off and we’ll call this Sipdown No. 164 as I suspect there will be more before I turn into a pumpkin again. Yeah, I know this is about pumpkin pie. The BF asked for something the other day when it got cooler and as it was Thanksgiving week, I figured this was a good choice. Looking back on a previous note, he wasn’t overly crazy about this when we last tried it but this time around he was much more excited by it.

I thought it was pretty much the same as I’d mentioned in previous notes — a rather ordinary cinnamon spice tea when very hot, but more pie-like as it cools. Even if I was in the market for more tea/tisanes I would probably not put this hugely high on the list but only because I’m not a huge fan of pumpkin pie (the pastry). If you love pumpkin pie, you’ll likely love this as well.

Now to play a bit of personal catch up. I can’t now recall what got me so busy that I abandoned ship in late 2014, but I can say that between now and then I’ve had one of the worst years of my life. Probably the only one worse was 1996, when my mother died and my marriage was about to end.

At the end of 2014, I went to visit my closest friend at her farm in New Jersey. She had been battling cancer for twenty years, and had been cancer free for about 15 of those years, but it started catching up with her and it was pretty clear during the visit that things were not great. About a week after I returned home, I heard that she had died, which was quite a blow. Fast forward to the summer when I learned that I was very likely going to lose my job of 16 years in the fall as a result of budget crunches associated with a corporate restructuring, which indeed came to pass. I have been unemployed since October and beating all the usual bushes looking for work. Frankly, if it was just me, it wouldn’t be so bad — I’ve worked pretty much straight through for about 30 years and it would be nice to have a bit of time off if I wasn’t worried about providing for my kids. But as I’m the sole breadwinner, I have felt enormous pressure to find something else and have been spending most of my time for the past few months in that endeavor. Then, out of the blue, a few weeks ago, I learned another friend died very suddenly. I have to say that I cannot wait for January 1, to be rid of this year.

Even so, I did have some small successes over the past year. I qualified for an associate membership in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, which had been a goal of mine. I sold a few stories and I’ve had quite a few near misses as well, much more than I used to when I first started submitting, so there is that. One might think that having more time to write would be a good thing, and if it was just me, I would agree. But because of the kid support thing which is rather fear inducing I haven’t been able to do much writing recently. I finally told myself I was going to take a week off of the job search last week while the kids were home for “Harvest Week” and it was the first time I was able to relax enough even to read fiction since last June.

In any case, now that I’m dipping into tea again and am compulsive enough to feel that I must record beginnings, ends, and interesting in-betweens with the teas in my cabinet, you may see some more of me, at least in the near term.

I will never in a million years be able to catch up on all the notes in my feed so I’m not going to pressure myself into trying. I’ll just jump in while the jump rope is turning and wave as I go by. ;-)