Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! The weather in the Twin Cities has finally cooled off just in time for my fall semester to start.
I’m really excited about my classes this term – I’m taking The Art of Discernment (which is the final Spiritual Direction-related class I need to take before I can start my practicum) and Queer and Trans Theologies. Queer and Trans Theologies I’m taking asynchronously, and The Art of Discernment I’ll be doing in person starting tonight! Although I am a little bit intimidated by the amount of work that both of these classes are going to be, I’m already enjoying digging into the subject matter, and I think they’ll both be really great experiences.
We’ve been working on reorganizing the storage situation in our apartment for the past several weeks – my husband kicked off this project because they wanted to create a reading nook for me in the office, and that wasn’t possible when the office was half workspace, half storage. I love my cozy little space and am so grateful that the office is less chaotic in general, because it’s also the room where I spend my entire working day.
Today is probably going to be a pretty packed day at work, and I’ll need to leave pretty immediately when I wrap up to make it to class on time. But after a few semesters of almost entirely remote school, I’m looking forward to being back in the classroom tonight!
I think I’ll leave it there for this week. Please enjoy this week’s Nova content:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! I’ve been a bit discombobulated this week – between the holiday on Monday, a sick day on Tuesday, our weather dramatically dropping about 30 degrees in 24 hours…it’s been a weird week.
It’s also a liminal space sort of week. It’s my final week of break before the fall semester starts. I’m going to need to start in on homework this weekend. I’ve been setting up my study schedule, trying to build sufficient homework blocks into my calendar so I can get done what I need to get done. We’ve been working on clearing out some space in my office so I can have a more relaxing environment to study in, which has turned into a bigger and bigger project the longer we work on it.
Change is not something I tend to particularly enjoy. I am a creature of habit and routine, and even though I am excited for both of my classes, there is definitely a part of my brain that wants to resist the shift back into school mode, out of the more relaxed routine of the past month and into a more rigid schedule. It’ll be good, though – most of me knows that. I’m a little nervous about the volume of reading/homework that I’ll have to do over the course of the next 3-ish months, but theoretically it should be doable.
Anyway, I think I’m going to leave it there for this week. Please enjoy these Nova photos:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! It has been another long week at work already. I ended up calling off sick yesterday, in part because I woke up feeling like I was definitely teetering on the edge of a bad cold, but also because I just needed a break.
This past weekend, my mom’s extended family gathered at my aunt and uncle’s house in northeast Iowa for a reunion. I was nervous about this going in – several members of my extended family are pretty politically opposed to the idea of my existence as a queer, trans person, and I wasn’t sure how some of them would react to my husband and I showing up. We also weren’t sure until the day of whether Grandma would be able to make it to the reunion itself, which added to the anxiety – we were pretty sure peace would be kept for her sake if she was there, but if she wasn’t, things felt a lot less predictable.
I am pleased to report that it actually ended up going much better than we anticipated. We got to see Grandma, who was thrilled that so much of her family turned up (including a half-brother she hadn’t seen since she was 17 – she is nearly 96 now!). We got to talk to the family members we really wanted to see, were pleasantly surprised by several people (not that we expected them to behave badly, but we just didn’t know what to expect one way or the other), and the people we were most worried about interacting with we never ended up crossing paths with, which was perfect. Nova was a huge hit with the great-grandkids (and everyone else), and she did great with all the attention from the kiddos – we knew she was good with kids individually, but she’d never been swarmed by them before, and she was absolutely perfect.
Family is complicated. My relationship with my extended family has been largely nonexistent since I came out, although there are certain family members I’m hoping to re-establish and maintain more of a connection with. As someone to whom chosen family is incredibly dear, family, to me, is the people you choose who choose you back. Family of origin can be chosen family (though they aren’t always), and I think this weekend helped me to see that more of my family of origin than I thought might be in that category. It was also really lovely to be able to bring my partner (and my dog) to a place that was so dear to me as a kid – my aunt and uncle are living on the farm that my grandparents lived on for most of my childhood, and I have a lot of happy memories associated with the place itself.
Anyway, I’m going to leave it there for this week. Here are some photos of Nova being a great travel buddy and enjoying the creek at the farm:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! I spent most of yesterday half-convinced it was already Thursday, so I’m glad it’s finally here.
We’re winding down our last week with Miss Mouse, and I’m having lots of feelings about it. I’m also trying to wrap up a bunch of stuff at work before I take two weeks of PTO. Next week I’m going to mostly be working on wrapping up my summer class and getting my final paper done for that, and the following week is Song School! So there’s a lot to look forward to amidst the big feelings about saying goodbye to our little Mouse.
I’m very ready to wrap up school for the summer. I’m really enjoying my Buddhist Scriptures class…and I’m really starting to feel the fact that I didn’t get any time off between spring and summer term. Thankfully, after this class wraps up I’ll have about a month before fall classes start.
Last weekend I did a fun project – I built a mechanical keyboard with a case made out of (generic) Lego! I bought the kit online after seeing several social media ads for it. I had a lot of fun putting it together, and I’m really enjoying typing with it! Here are some photos of the process:
Other than that, I’m just trying to keep my head above water at work for the next couple of days. I really need this PTO. Thankfully I didn’t feel like I really needed it until this week, but if I wasn’t taking this time off, I’d be on the fast track to burnout right now.
I will leave you, as always, with some doggo content:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! I hope you’re all hanging in there. It’s felt like a rather long week here – I’ve been fighting the beginnings of a cold that seems both unwilling to vacate the premises and also not bad enough to make me seriously sick, so I’m just vaguely congested and fatigued and annoyed about it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about neurodivergence this week. The past couple of years have been an adventure of discovery around the various ways in which we are a neurodivergent household, and learning how to let down the neurotypical masks we’ve built up over the years. One of the interesting things that has happened for me with this gradual unmasking is that I’m increasingly aware of my own sensory sensitivities, and finding it harder to pretend they’re not an issue. Temperature regulation is part of it – I have always been someone who runs warm and overheats pretty easily, but my tolerance for being hot seems to be decreasing with time.
The big one for me, though, is sound. I’ve never liked loud noises (with the exception, as a teen and young adult, of sometimes enjoying loud concerts), but lately I’ve been noticing just how much noise can overload my system. Hearing trucks in the alley while I’m working (on the opposite end of our apartment from where I work, through a door) can be anywhere from mildly distracting to terribly grating. When listening to music, I find I’m often putting my headphones or speakers at the lowest possible setting (and if I’m wearing my over-ear headphones, I often have earplugs in under them). When the dogs start crying, I’m much quicker to get overwhelmed and find I need to remove myself from the room more often.
I have had a sort of parallel experience with queerness and transness that is helping me to make sense of this, somewhat. When I was first beginning to understand my own queerness, I still spent a lot of time mostly closeted. But the more I came to understand and appreciate that this was part of who I was, and the more I connected with other people who had similar experiences, the less energy I seemed to have to pretend to be someone I wasn’t. I want to be able to celebrate my queerness, not hide it, and my tolerance for pretending to be someone other than who I am has decreased dramatically over the years. This journey with neurodivergence feels similar – the more I come to understand how much of my energy has been devoted to maintaining a relatively neurotypical mask, and the more I let that mask drop (and sometimes even find I have energy to devote to other things), the less interested I am in trying to maintain the appearance of being neurotypical.
I’m grateful that I have a lot of tools to keep myself regulated when sensory stuff gets to be too much. I’m grateful for a whole bunch of loved ones who are also neurodivergent and the support we give each other. And I’m grateful for an increasing societal awareness of neurodivergence and the people who are pushing to destigmatize and depathologize our awareness of it.
Anyway, I don’t know if I have a point I’m trying to get to with this post, but this is what’s been on my mind this week. I think I’m going to end it here, but I’ll leave you, as always, with some quality doggo content:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! I’ve been all discombobulated about what day it is this week – we had Monday off for Juneteenth, and I think not a single day so far this week has felt like what it actually is.
Despite it being a four day work week, it’s been a long one so far. Work has been fairly hectic, and I had to do a presentation for my class on Tuesday night (which went well, despite Mouse insisting on making an appearance in the middle of it). It’s also going to be a somewhat busier-than-usual weekend – Twin Cities Pride is this weekend, and I’m going to be volunteering at my seminary’s booth for a couple hours on Saturday (after I take Nova to the groomer for a much-needed brushing out).
Mouse got another adoption application yesterday; they sound like a good potential fit, so we’re waiting to hear back from the rescue about scheduling a meet and greet. The person showed interest in a few different dogs, so definitely no guarantees, but fingers crossed. As much as I don’t want to say goodbye to Mouse, it’s breaking my heart to see how panicked she gets every time we go outside, no matter what we do. Once she does find her forever home, we’ve decided we’re going to pause on looking for a second dog at least until I’m done with school. This has been a wonderful experience in a lot of ways, but it’s also been a lot of added stress, and I think I need to be more realistic about my capacity right now.
I think that’s where I’ll end it this week. As always, I’ll leave you with some doggo content:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! I don’t know about you all, but I’ve felt for the past couple of days that this week should be farther along than it is…it’s been a long one. Work has been kind of bananas, and summer term at school started this week.
First things first: we’re still a single-dog household. The dog we met on Saturday was not a good personality fit with Nova. Thankfully, someone with the rescue who’s a certified dog trainer was able to sit with us and the two dogs and help us better interpret what was happening. Turns out Nova is not the kind of dog with the maternal instinct for teaching another dog how to be a dog. She needs a companion who will let her be top dog but will still engage and not be overly submissive. So, we’ve learned things about Nova and the rescue is willing to work with us to find a better personality fit. We’ve sent them a list of other dogs we’re interested in meeting, and they’ll set something up with us based on what they know of those dogs and Nova. We’re doing our best to be patient and to trust the timing will work out the way it’s meant to.
As I was looking over the syllabi for my two summer classes over the weekend and setting up my homework plan for myself, I realized that I had probably bitten off more than I could chew. We’re traveling the last week of the term, so that means I’d have to get final projects in a week early, and the one class I was planning to take asynchronously had a LOT of work due each week in addition to the big final paper. I talked it over with my husband and thought it through, and decided to drop the asynchronous class and just take one class this summer. I’m feeling much more settled about my summer schedule now, and much more confident that I can succeed without burning myself out. It wasn’t easy to let go of the idea that I’m supposed to be able to keep up with that level of work consistently, but I’m doing my best to give myself grace and remember that I can take my time.
And I think that’s where I’m going to leave things this week. But first, some Nova photos:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! I was supposed to go back to work on Monday, but thanks to some paperwork-related nonsense around potential accommodations, I still have not been cleared to return. So this week has felt like a lot of hurry-up-and-wait.
I’ve been trying to keep myself occupied while I wait. This week I’ve helped a friend brainstorm about a game they’re designing for a class, gone to lunch with my mom, worked on my spiritual direction website, read, listened to podcasts, listened to music…and spent a fair amount of time compulsively checking my email, waiting for news about the work situation. I don’t mind the extra time off, but the waiting isn’t my favorite.
I don’t have a whole lot else to report on this week, but I’ll leave you, as always, with some Nova content:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! It’s gone from late winter straight to summer here in the Twin Cities this week (it was in the 40s last week, and yesterday we almost hit 90F), which has me feeling very thrown, and grateful that it’s supposed to calm back down to a much more seasonable 60-something in the next couple of days. Still, I’m glad for the sun that’s come out and the feeling of life re-emerging.
I am also re-emerging – this is the final week of my medical leave, and I’ll return to work on Monday. I’m a little nervous, and part of me wishes I had another week or two off. But at the same time, I’m looking forward to getting some structure back in my life. I don’t honestly know if my anxious brain could handle one more unstructured week.
In the meantime, my Comparative Religious Ethics class is wrapping up this week, and I’m trying to get my final paper written before the deadline (tomorrow at midnight). I have accepted (mostly) that it’s not going to be my best work. I think I can get it done in time, and I’m happy to see that I have a bit more focus than I did a couple of weeks ago, at least.
I still have another month of my Spiritual Direction class…because it’s through a different university that’s on a different timeline, that class will end right before my summer classes start up. I’m a little bummed that I won’t have a break between semesters, but at least this is the less stressful class. This summer I’ll be taking a class on Buddhist scriptures and one on early Christian theologies. I’m looking forward to both of them.
As I get further out from surgery, I’m trying to remember to stop and appreciate the feeling of rightness in my body. It feels more like it’s…mine. The fact that I never have to worry about menstrual cramps again (which I occasionally got mild versions of even after almost a decade of taking testosterone), or that if I were to lose access to testosterone, will never need to worry about my period coming back, is giving me an even deeper sense of peace and rightness within my body than I expected. So that’s cool.
I should get back to homework, so I’ll leave it here for this week. As always, here’s your weekly dose of Nova:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday. It’s been another wild week at work, and I’m scrambling to get everything I need to done, because surgery is now officially less than two weeks away. I am excited and anxious and a little bit overwhelmed, but I’ve also been completely bowled over by community support leading up to this, and for that, I am grateful.
Last night I went out for drinks and dinner with two of my best friends, and it was delightful. I’m finally starting to feel more connected here. It took a long time for me to feel like I had connections when we moved to Chicago in 2012; having to leave those deep connections when we moved back to MN in 2021 was hard, and I’ve been struggling a bit to figure out what community looks like for me here. But reconnecting with old friends has been lovely, and I’m tentatively letting down some roots in a handful of other places – an in-person D&D group, a potential songwriting group, my seminary classes…it feels like I’m starting to settle in more, and it feels nice.
I don’t honestly have a ton to talk about this week – a good 90% of my brain is focused on surgery and everything that needs to get done before then, and there’s not a lot else going on. But I’ll leave you, as always, with some quality Nova content:
Accidental Fudge 