When I saved off the last entry ("the things you save from the fire") I said a rather prophetic phrase: "It was time for evasive maneuvers." To recap: I had a bag full of water- and soot-logged fabric that I'd rescued from a co-worker's basement after a house fire. Now what? Math! That's what!

To put it bluntly, my co-worker JJ has had one of the shittiest Decembers I've ever seen. Midway through the month, after a weekend of windstorms here in Portland, we came into work the next Monday to learn that he and his family had been hit by a freak house fire caused by the windstorm. About a week after learning that their house would have to be gutted to the rafters, and they'd be in temporary housing for six months, his wife had a stroke.

He's juggling a gutted house, two teenagers, and a wife who is recovering, but still in the ICU.

As a follow-up to the previous post, I've created a page here, The Oscar Project (http://domesticat.net/oscarproject) so I can track our progress through the movies. I've built a table of the Best Picture winners, as well as the screenplay winners, and started marking off which ones I've seen. You'll see the scattered list of the movies I've personally seen so far, plus the slow march we're conducting back from the beginning of the Oscars.

My memory is a fiddly thing. If I don't write things down, I will forget, and sometimes it is right to embrace the forgetting, but in this case, that's not what I want.

After some joking that we realized wasn't quite so joking, we decided we needed a project, and so Film School is in. Noah and I have started watching all of the Best Picture nominees, in order, from the beginning, and I keep forgetting to jot down our reactions. We started at the beginning:

Perfectionism will get you every time. 

It goes without saying that there's been a change or two around here. Even the definition of 'here' has changed.

Those of you who have been in contact with me over the past six months or so knew of the life changes that I was unprepared to speak of publicly on this blog. Jeff and I agreed to divorce some number of months ago, and I immediately began to put plans in place to relocate to Portland, Oregon.