Thrihyrne

What joy! At last I have a resolution about why my mail's gone missing for weeks. I received an incredibly thoughtful and articulate response from the main person at the post office associated with my zip code. He personally responded to all 3 of my requests! As a kind of full circle amazing moment from my early childhood when I got my first pen pal and was able to write letters to someone, this morning I posted a thank you card to this postal employee.

The response was so gratifying, I'm posting the whole thing.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Dear Ms. Lee,

I regret learning of the inconvenience you have experienced.

The Postal Service is aware of the frustration and disappointment caused when we do not live up to our commitment of safe and reliable mail service.

Upon reviewing the forwarding information in our database from you, I discovered your mail has been looping due to two forwards in our system from you. When you move from one location to another, a change of address is needed to get your mail to you. If at any time you return to the previous address, cancelling your change of address is the correct step to do. By submitting a new change of address from the current address back to the original address, we have two active forwards for you which means the mail circulates back and forth. Your parcel, and your mail, is stuck in a loop right now.

I have contacted the Central Forwarding Service and cancelled the forwards for you so the mail will restart at the original address, and not forward to 97202. Eventually, all the looping mail should make it's way back to our station for delivery. It could take anywhere from 1-3 weeks for all of it, depending on where in the loop each piece is.

An apology is no substitute for good service, but I want to offer one on behalf of the Postal Service. We appreciate your reporting this matter to us. It helps to know the kinds of difficulties our customers have so we can work toward improvements. The information you have provided will be shared with management as they continue their efforts to improve service performance in your area.

Thank you for the opportunity to address this matter with you. Please accept our sincere apology for any inconvenience this matter may have caused you.

Sincerely,

Bryon J Suski
Lents DCU Supervisor

This link is to the local-ish yarn dyers whose yarn I'll be using for my first KAL, or 'knit-a-long' for those who aren't familiar with knitter acronyms. The fun of a KAL, especially this, an MKAL (mystery knit along), is that you don't know what it's going to look like at the end. You get clues along the way and knit it as it goes, hence the name.

Midwinter Moon MKAL

I'm using super vivid colorways, too, though I only have 2 of the necessary 3 skeins so far. I've happened to purchase 2 skeins (at different times) of the actual yarn weight recommended and in the kits, and honestly didn't know what I was going to make with them, so this is serendipitous to the max! Shown in the photo are the colorway "Orange Crush" (wound up) and a special fund raiser colorway, "If I Want Exposure, I'll Get My Tits Out" still in skein form.




As an aside, in doing this picture, I discovered that my website was suspended due to me not having updated my credit card expiration date. So I suppose this is all fortuitous!! Sorry for the ads on tinypic. Once my site is back up, I'll upload the picture there. :P All fixed!

Today was a perfect, perfect time at ladies' sauna. Perfect timing in terms of it being not busy (only 3, maybe 4 of us total during my 90 minutes there; like having the entire spa to myself!), and also weather— upper 50s, some blue sky (after heavy rain when I first got up at 7:45 and then a thunderstorm predicted at 2 o'clock), and some fast moving, low white clouds to admire while cooling off after the steam room and dry sauna. I've begun saying that going to sauna is my going to church, and it really is. While there, I connect with the Divine, I celebrate my Divine self, the beauty of the Universe, and revel in the tremendous gratitude I have for where I am on my path. Going there feeds me spiritually and physically. That's just as good as being in choir at this point in time!

Getting integrated back with Women for Sobriety has been another positive facet in my world. For any of you who read this and aren't familiar, it's a non-12 step, women-centric, secular, feminist approach to living an alcohol free life, focusing specifically on how different it is for women with alcohol use disorder (though that term wouldn't have been bandied around back in 1976 when it was first started) than for men. There are 13 Acceptance Statements, recently updated in 2017. In contrast to 12 step verbiage, the Acceptance Statements are all about empowerment. It's felt so positive to be back in touch with this community, both online and in person.

( The Acceptance Statements here under the cut )

I really love Tama Kieves. Very excited to get to meet her and attend a workshop of hers in person! And today's nugget of insight was so inspiring, I decided to share. :)

So of late I've been really struggling with how to define myself. In the past it was easy. I was a writer. End of story. But now I don't know how to define who and what I am. I'm not defined by my recovery journey, I'm not defined by my work, I'm not defined as a writer since I haven't written anything in about a year-and-a-half… I don't have a tribe and I'm finding it very difficult to make one. I'm Evan's partner, but that doesn't seem like a full definition of who I am. I suppose right now I'm just Kristi, on a path — putting one foot in front of the other, trying to retain my integrity, and make choices that I can be proud of both now and down the road.

So excited for the 2 Groupons that I bought over the weekend: 3 classes with The Circus Project (thus far I've signed up for a flexibility class and an aerial fitness class) and 2 weeks unlimited with Industrial Barre. I'm also going to sign up for a free week of classes with Pure Barre for this coming week as it will be the last one when I'll have free daytime to go work out. Yay for group exercise that's new and different!

So I'd reached out to a couple of recruiters I've worked with in the recent and not-so-recent past. One was literally just about to go on vacation, but we'll touch base next week. The other had a billing and customer support role that she thought I could be a good fit for, and it is literally three blocks down the street. I wouldn't even need to ride the bus! I could come home for lunch! They seem pretty hot to trot in regards to filling 2 roles, and I'm walking up there for an interview at 2:15 today. The pay is bottom of the barrel, but in many ways, that doesn't matter as long as my quality of life is positive. I do want to know more details about what the actual job entails as it's part of a larger collections agency, but if I can get more actual billing experience and potentially remove the "A" from my CPC-A by using my coding skills, then all the better.

Did I mention it's 3 blocks down the street? Just checking. :)

I'll post later after my interview, but I believe that with my EXTENSIVE customer support background and recent certifications and being a mature member of the workforce, this should be a no-brainer. I enjoy interviewing, and I'm mostly wanting to find out what kind of training they provide and what a 'typical' day looks like. I do want to be sure I won't be isolated like I was at ZoomCare, but hell, I'll give just about anything a try for 3-6 months that's that close. It's a 9 month contract to hire but they review contracts every couple of months and apparently the other 2 people that this particular recruiting company has placed are already getting pay raises. Sounds good to me!

I'm trying very hard not to do a large 'fuck you' to the Universe right now, as I'd gone so far in the interviewing/vetting process with a company I really thought wanted to bring me on, Squarespace. They declined my candidacy today after 5 process steps, and I admit to being more than a little heartbroken. I loved their office culture, their office location, and the thought of being able to learn so much about their beautiful website templates. *sigh* That it's so soon in my time being alcohol-free feels like a giant metaphorical carrot had been dangled in front of me, only to be yanked away and a big, "PSYCH!" yelled at me to challenge me in my earliest days of recovery fueled by Antabuse. On the plus side, Evan and I had a conversation last night and since I am committed to being alcohol free and staying on Antabuse, even if I have to order the fucking pills from India, instead of finding yet another place to hang out for a few months until I returned to the apartment, I'll be returning home next weekend. Having that stress resolved has made this disappointment much easier to put into perspective. Which is, "Squarespace's loss, someone else's gain." I'm not in desperate financial straits, and I have a skill set that someone else will need a drool cup to handle. It's just disappointing.

I've decided to try blogging again, albeit in a quite abbreviated way. I'm working to withdraw from Facebook pretty much altogether, but I do wish to share things from time to time. So I'm back here at Dreamwidth! I'll also be using Google+, but just found out they're shutting it down. Oh well. Mostly this is my own kind of journaling, as I don't really expect any or many comments or feedback or anything. That's not why I'm doing it. But here goes!

A thought that's kept going through my head yesterday and today: I may have needed to break everything in my life in order to put myself back together in a new, transformed way.

So much has fallen into place since the darkness of mid-November, as well as me aggressively taking steps to ensure my long-term emotional and psychological health. One of the best things that happened recently is discovering that contrary to how I understood it, I'm not limited to 6 visits with my current psychiatrist— I can continue seeing her until my medications are all sorted out. It does mean that at some point I will need to find someone else, but it doesn't have to be at the front of the list right now. And she does what I want this person to do: work with me in support of the Sinclair Method as well as finding an effective anti-anxiety medication. She's starting me out on Effexor which has a lot going for it: it's an SNRI (which I haven't tried before- the SSRIs I've tried in the past did nothing) and it supposedly has a side benefit of counter-acting some menopausal symptoms. SCORE!! I'm in this for the long haul, so I'm going to start a kind of mood journal as I've done in the past to be able to see patterns and any new effects over weeks and months. It's all very positive.

This past Friday Evan and I went to the Airbnb holiday party and I had a successful, fun time. That's also a huge win for me. Appropriate amounts of alcohol were had, we stayed only as long as we wanted (and took our leave as the general volume in each room was becoming more than I could tolerate), and I was fully present for getting to see many friends and colleagues who'd come in from their 'remote' locations to join the festivities. This trend going to events and having a good time without being sloppy is one I'm very happy about.

I have a lot of reading and then beta'ing upcoming, plus finishing DotW. My totally manageable goal is to have the first rough draft done by the end of my week off around New Year's. At that point I'll reach out to a couple of people to read it and give just general feedback. Then I can decide whether or not to do more of an overhaul or to send it to a particular literary agent. Once that happens, I can think about writing the third and final novella with Reggie and Kelp, I suppose!