Hellooooooo.....is anybody out there??

Joshua Tree National Park, February 2013

Wow. It's hard to believe that the last time I posted here was almost a year and a half ago. And to be honest, I was barely even here for the year previous. Things pretty much slowed to a halt on the blogging front right about the time we found out we were moving from Japan to San Diego, but this very long, very extended blog silence is only partly because of that.

Sure, it did take quite a while to adjust after our big move. Lots of reverse culture shock, and for me, just a general feeling of disconnect after being transplanted to a brand new environment yet again. When I was younger, a new city, or country, was fun and exciting, but I swear, the older I get, the more it feels that moving, and having to start over again from scratch, is a right pain in the a**. Anyway, I don't really know where the time went, but somehow a year passed.

Then in spring of last year, life went a bit nuts. My father's health suddenly declined and he could no longer take care of himself or live alone. So I spent most of the summer in Victoria, and many, many weeks there over the next few months. At the same time I was also trying to navigate the bureaucracy of the Canadian health care system. As an only child, living in a different country, it was a challenge, to say the least, and frequently overwhelming.

About this time, one of our cats became quite ill. Jiro is my cuddle buddy and it was so hard to see him so unwell. After many tests, and finally biopsy surgery, he was diagnosed with IBD (Inflammatory Bowel Disease). Since the worry was that it could be cancer, this was at least some good news. Even now, he is still on daily medication, which if you know cats, is not fun for any of us, but he is stable, and in recent weeks he has even regained some of the weight he lost so he doesn't look so skinny and fragile anymore. To some, he may just be a cat, but to us, he's a part of our family.

During all of this, I also had my own health issues but luckily nothing that turned out to be too serious. We also moved again last December. This time it was just to a different apartment nearby, but it was just one more thing in a very long year. So overall, 2013 was a really crappy, stressful, no good year.

This year actually started out much the same, but in the last two to three months, life finally feels calmer, to the point where I feel I can focus a little on my own life again. So here I am. As for In Spring it is the Dawn, I need to tidy some things up around here, get used to the procedure again, and figure out where I want to take the blog from here. But for now, it's nice to be back.

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