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I went a little bit December crazy with social engagements, although not as much as in some years. After getting back from Melbourne we had the Marriage Equality rally, a family dinner for Jock's birthday and an National Computer Science School reunion on the last weekend of November. NCSS (or its earlier variants) was probably the only nerd camp on the east coast I didn't go to as a teenager, but Andrew went to the inaugural one and it influenced a lot of things, especially his choice of university. He was disappointed I think to be the only student from his year there.
I remember being much more tired that weekend than I am now, but there's probably a couple of factors there, one being that I was schlepping into uni most days at the time and the other being filling a whole weekend with bonus schlepping.
I then developed some sense and had some quieter weekends. Andrew went diving without me for the first time ever (we've very occasionally had different buddies and I once dived while he was seasick but never has one of us been out on a boat without the other). I didn't really properly absorb the idea that you can't swim after childbirth for a while until quite late in the piece. No diving during! No swimming after! What was I thinking? The ocean has finally warmed up enough for me and my hormonally elevated body temperature and we had a good swim at Manly on a remarkably calm day the weekend before Christmas. I can spend a lot more time bobbing in the surf than most people now, even if I did have a mild contraction for every wave that got me in the belly.
Christmas Day was foretold as a day of doom, by people whose slant on the entire New South Wales climate is whether or not it is sunny in Sydney. The forecast flooding in parts of the state didn't eventuate, but many areas did get a lot of rain, so it would be churlish to point out that... it rained all day. Luckily I have an inbuilt psychological requirement for a certain amount of rain anyway; Andrew was unwilling after Christmas to go for strolls in the misty glasses-fogging rain. We catered Christmas for the first time, as my family came over for breakfast and then went north to Mamie's for a lunch of meaty death. I played in the sand on Terrigal beach rather than heft myself along for a walk in the sand.
Most days now I spend a fair bit of time sitting around and plotting and executing shopping trips. Now that New Years is past this should ease off. I still am not properly mentally set up for organising New Years when we don't have a view of the fireworks any more (we had a good one when we lived in North Sydney from 2003 until 2005) and it seemed like a bad idea to go anywhere last night when the traffic and public transport would both be so difficult. So we had Pete and Jono around and played Catan and Guitar Hero. I felt obscurely connected to the geeky North American tradition of skipping the prom for gaming. I like games like Catan in theory but it's not often something I make time for. I would be pleased with my game except that Andrew has also only played twice, and won... next time, Gadget.
Honestly, at such an important transition my inclination would have been to do something bigger in some way, possibly involving a starlit night and a beach and fire. My relationship with Andrew dates from August 1999, so overlaps the noughties quite neatly and even more neatly Janus will be born in the next few weeks, so the teens will be very much about a boy.
Originally posted at http://puzzling.org/logs/diary/2010/Janu
cynical
