Goodbye 2015. On to 2016: Better, Smarter, and Full of Potential and Possibilities

There was supposed to be more time in this day to write this post, but as with most days this year something came up, or there just wasn't enough time in the day, or, as was more likely, blog posts were running through the brain as the body lay all warm and comfortable in bed. Thoughts, feeling, emotions, words, unable to escape into the internet and land here where they wanted to be because life gets in the way (or a comfortable bed).

2015 was an amazing year - amazing good and amazing bad - full of achievements...like graduating from University with academic honors (magna cum laude), having the opportunity to spend several weeks traveling to a few locations in Canada, starting a new career as a self-employed contract worker, growing a great garden and learning more about the ins-and-outs of that hobby, and while we only completed one painting this year, there is confidence that will pick up when our new studio space (dubbed on Instagram [Yes, this year we "finally" got an Instagram account] and Facebook as 'Frankie's Lady Cave).

It was also a year full of seeing friends, like Club Nette (Skittles, aka, Annette Ford) and Synthesised (Cliff) in Toronto at the 2015 Toronto Tweetup (as well as a slew of others who just won't appear here - but shout out to Blonde Calamity!...sorry everyone else).
And then there was the summer house guests like Cool _Jesse (Jesse) and Synthesised (Cliff). And a road trip to Minneapolis to the Minnesota State Fair where we hooked up with Pudding Boobs (Kim) and had a great night of drinking and catching up.
And then in October, Father, and Baby Brother and his wife came to help put up a large portion of the new garage we're building (well, at this point James has been doing most of the building while we feel useless ...at least until the electrical, insulation and drywall is ready to go up, those we can mostly do solo), and Mother and Angry Brother came too. It was the first time the entire immediate family had been together in such a way in over ten years, since the car accident. (current memory cannot recall if every member was accounted for on Baby Brother's wedding day, but if they were it was certainly not in such an informal familial way).
Dad came two weekends in a row and it was really nice spending that time with him. It was great fun cooking for everyone and connecting with some members of the family we haven't gotten to see much over the years. Baby Brother has turned out to be an amazing man of strength and intelligence and wit (he's a grade A smart ass, and we love it), and he and his wife are perfect for each other in ways that are undefinable.

But

The year was also not so great, as the death of our dog came quickly around graduation time. We lost massive hours at a job we were working at and got denied a more permanent position (such is the bureaucracy of a University in this day and age)
Then later in the year the most tragic of all, the sudden death of Club Nette (Skittles, aka, Annette Ford). Nothing has felt the same since, like there's a considerable amount of air and light missing from the world, the sun only shines half as bright. Given our peppered past of people who have suddenly (and not so suddenly) died, like the first boy we ever liked, cousins, uncles, grandparents, friends...we thought this would be easier to get passed. It's not. It was a massive hit to the heart and soul.

From a mental health perspective it's been up and down a lot, definitely some bad, but there's never enough time to write when the mood strikes to define the bad, or work through the bad like we used to - luckily a trunk full of culled coping strategies over the past couple of years mitigates the harm, pushes it back for some reprieve.
Physically we've managed to stay in pretty good shape - though after the death of Nettie there was a severe uptick in alcohol consumption and we've been working on getting back to better levels because alcohol will straight up fuck with your metabolism and any weight loss attempts. During a full physical (EKG and all) the doctor guessed that we must run because of the low resting heart rate. Not really sure if that means healthy, or is just a symptom or catalyst to the poor circulation. In any case, despite the extra pounds we're as healthy as they get. And the plan is to continue that into the new year. The greatest physical achievement this year was establishing a top run time (of an average of 7.04 mph for 30 minutes) - a run time we have not been able to near in awhile even after being in the gym 3-4 times a week, even when traveling. But that just gives us a goal. In addition this coming year at least one 5K, and maybe a 10K, is planned, which has been sort of a bucket list item since losing a massive amount of weight about 11 years ago and keeping most of it off over the years. It's not really a new year resolution, because those beg to be broken, rather a desire, a goal, a hope, that if doesn't happen, doesn't happen, and there will always be the next year.

This coming year is pretty scary, as uncertainty being self-employed causes much undo stress, but if it continues on the path it has been on it will be amazing. This new venture affords plenty of free time for painting and reading in the winter, and gardening and painting and travel in the summer, and cooking all year round. Plus it brings in more money than we've made at any point in our life...jutting us into a new tax bracket. (also scary!)

The non scary part of the year will be when the garage is complete. This project has taught patience this year, as the hope was that it would be fully complete by October. Unfortuntaly the concrete didn't even get poured until then, and then before anybody knew it there was cold, and snow, and the challenges of building a huge structure (and James is not familiar with how things are built in the USA, as building in England are put together differently).
Plus the garage is massive a massive project. In-floor heating, multiple access doors,six windows. a 34 x 24 structure with the back 12 x 24 space (Fankie's Lady Cave) serving as a painting/writing studio, and workout/yoga space, a gardening space (until the garden shed is built), a hangout space, and a guest area for the friends we've made on Twitter so they can have a nice space to relax and sleep while visiting. There are new visitors planned for 2016 too, so hopefully this all gets done in time! :-)

Before the garage

After the garage (34' x 24')

Meanwhile, all year there have been so many topic we would have liked to write about. 2015 was CRAZY - especially in politics and social issues, and we're always paying attention (thanks to social media it's hard not to), but then sometimes it seems like it's all really been said by everyone, because, well, it's the internet and it probably has all been said, or said faster than someone with a job, a spouse, and hobbies has time to compete with. Writing just falls to the back-burner (hence the scant few blog entries here this year compared to other years).
The one thing that's disappointing about classes being over, having graduated, is that it's harder to sit down and write with no grade or deadline looming over the head as motivation. If there's anything we can be hopeful about for 2016 it's that we can get back into writing, and not just sloppy shit like this blog post, but quality content like the academic papers we've shared with you here over the last few years, or travel entries.

2016...it's peeking right around that corner, mere hours away...full of possibilities...full of potential...potential sadness, potential happiness, potential success, potential failure...how you look at those things, how you act on those things is up to you. Make the better decision, the smarter decision, the healthier decision, and just try, day by day, to be a better you, inside and out. No, it's never easy, but what else do you have to do but try?
Don't let the rampant hate that saturated 2015 via social media and mass media and the internet in general leak into 2016 and overtake it. Hope for better, strive for better, be better.

Happy New Year, family, friends, readers, lovers, haters...May 2016 bring you all that you deserve.

Transcribing Crazy

We had been searching for a short story we wrote in 1995 for several years. We mentioned some of its content once in a blog post in February of 2011 (Franks First Love).
A couple of months ago Mother returned two plastic totes of stuff she'd had in storage for lord knows how many years. Stuff we hadn't even remembered we had, reeking of musty moldy old paper.
They turned out to be veritable time capsules, which included a 1999 screenplay adaption of a 1984 book called Virgins by Caryl Rivers that we did for fun - it had been a favorite book at the time. (We had even contacted her back then, she wouldn't give us "rights" to do anything with it, claiming she was writing an adaption herself. Still remains to be seen).

Anyway, in all these musty belongings was the story. Fifty cursive written pages of the first, and only complete, short story we ever recall writing.

Surprisingly we weren't as eager to page through it as anticipated, instead flipping to the back pages where we remembered that people who had read it in those days had written short "reviews". Raves of "excellent", "couldn't stop reading!" "very impressed" "gave me shivers".
Eleven people had read it and liked it.
Apparently it was easy to impress tenth grade high school students.

The story was so transparent in nature that a few of the readers knew exactly who the male character in the story was based on. Perhaps that's what made it more titillating to them.

Anyway, four months ago after being reunited with the document, we left it on the coffee table...and then put it in a drawer...or so we thought.
Somehow it had gotten misplaced the last few months while we were engrossing ourselves in University classes. It took quite the search today, which resulted in accidentally cleaning parts of the house, (Oh, the horror of accidentally cleaning!) but we finally located it.
Sitting down with a mug of coffee we started typing, cleaning up the horrifying grammar, the atrocious use of language, the repetitive sentences...and that was only into the fourth page...where we had to stop.

It seems that a page at a time, with breaks in between, will have to do for now.
Turns out we were fucking crazy, like, darkly fucked in the head. It's supremely disturbing that at the age of sixteen we wrote this story. By the fourth handwritten page the female protagonist had two vivid "hallucinations" about wanting to kill the boy that she had loved. The fuck. She totally makes us look sane.

Honestly though, it's also not written very well. Okay, it is written well for the first story of a sixteen year old. Reworking it a bit will help. WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY! (haha!)
Perhaps even expanding on it would be a fun task. One of the common themes in the reviews was that many who had read it would have liked a different ending.

Of course, since the man who the main character was based on hasn't been a complete stranger over the last few years, it could easily turn into a short novel at this point.

It still doesn't change how disturbing it feels to be transcribing the manuscript. Maybe it'll be a good drinking activity.

Projects: A Journal Entry

We have a culinary degree, well some of us. Never is there more indication of our varied abilities and education variances than when we can't remember the proper way to boil pasta. Do we put it in cold water and bring it to a boil, or boil the water and then add the pasta?! That's culinary school 101 for fuck sake.

That was yesterday. Maybe she (Ivy) can't cook, but she's an artist, and definitely can inspire some of us in our cooking. She started working on some cool new projects, which we're mostly keeping under wraps for the time being, sharing it with key people we trust, before we unveil it here. What we can say is if you are a person who uses creative therapy (writing, poetry, art, music, dance, etc.) to manage and express your struggles, or experiences, with mental health issues, then we're going to want to hear from you, whether it's a blog, or you want it to have a presence on the web. That's all we're saying about that, for now.

We only fear for anything we start because what appears to be procrastination to others is more of a struggle between us, some of us don't want to have any part of certain projects we undertake, particularly this one,  which some of us wanted to start almost a year ago, in a slightly different form, meaning it's hard to get some of us to work on the things we need to work on. This blog is really the only exception, and some days it's a struggle.

Untitled India Ink on paper
by Frank et al,  2003

We're hopeful though, that we can find a partner outside of ourselves, down the road, to help work on the project.

We have too many projects.

Yesterday Ivy bought some India ink, and the appropriate nibs and handle for doing some artwork. We've only done a couple India, our best being Untitled. It's been almost years since she picked up the ink.

Meanwhile, our sleeping schedule is off the charts again. Thankfully we're getting 6-8 hours, which is awesome...but it's turning into a 4am bedtime...we'd like to blame Twitter, but we really can't. Our mind reels with communication, the good kind lately, for the most part, but also massive headaches.

Thankfully writing helps, and we can go back and see what we've written to each other and try to find some understanding.

Tonight after James gets done with work we'll be off to get the car he purchased Monday night on Ebay. We have to take a train to a nearby village where the man we bought it from will pick us up at the station. We're pretty excited for wheels.