Three years since my last journal entry here... jeez. I ditched my Twitter page back in 2020 and nuked it entirely in January of 2021, so I didn't record a ton of goings-on in that time. Here's a brief overview of how things have gone:

2021: We got a cat, a fat orange boy named Wiskey. I took up film photography and enjoyed it a lot. Went to Florida with the family and  wackycamper and had a great time. I started making better money at work and felt pretty good about life in general until about September, when we found out we had to move again after being at that apartment for only a year. Our speculation is, being peak Covid housing crisis here, they wanted to hike the rent way up, but could only legally raise it by a certain percentage, so they just refused to extend our lease instead. They also tried to screw us out of our deposit, but they weren't aware of the other tenant protection laws they were violating, so we got it back in full, and they were very very salty. We moved to a house much farther south of town, pretty much the only thing available in our price range in the time we had to look. As soon as our stuff was moved in, I took some time off to visit my family. My Subaru died around 600 miles into the trip, which is exactly what I needed on a trip to try to destress. I got lucky and found someone to tow it, relatively cheaply, the last 200 something miles to my parents' place, where I left it behind. I drove back in a Cadillac I bought from my Dad, which I didn't really want, but car is car, I guess. We got another cat just after Christmas, a tuxedo boy named Thug, a sweet boy who thinks he's a tough guy and likes to pick fights he has no chance of winning.

2022: Ended January with a case of Covid. Felt like a really bad cold for about two days, then got better of the course of the rest of the week. I bought a project car in April, a 1992 Dodge Stealth R/T. I tried working on that, but the weather was often uncooperative, and we had snowfall until June. Never got it running right, and eventually it stopped running. Life was otherwise fairly uneventful until Summer, when I went in with Wacky and some other friends and bought a local distillery from the owner, who we'd been friends with for years and felt it was time to move onto a new chapter in life. We've been chipping away at all the legal garbage related to opening it ever since. I started to feel increasingly isolated at the new house because of how far away it was from... everything. I lost a lot of my motivation to take photos because there just wasn't much to photograph that I hadn't already done dozens of times before. We also had a nearly nonexistent internet connection because there were simply no services out there, even a cell signal, which didn't help. I sold the Cadillac and bought a Honda Element, which I adore. I took that on a road trip to visit my parents in October, full of anxiety on both the trip down and back up because of the last trip I took, terrified I was going to have car problems again, but it performed without a hitch, and I had a much more relaxing time with my family and was able to enjoy myself. We finally got Starlink in October. A lot more expensive and still not ideal, but much more reliable overall. I ended up getting into VR gaming and bought a Quest 2.

2023: I swear this year flew by faster than any other before. I feel like I didn't get up to a whole lot aside from working. I kinda didn't, really. Over 2023 I posted up all the art I got that I could track down, which was fun to go through and enjoy again. I bought a few nicer film cameras in hopes of getting back into photography, but I never kept up on it. Developing film myself used to be fun, but it became far too tiring of a process, and paying to have someone else do it wasn't very economical, and it all had to be shipped to someone because there were no local options, so I kinda just stopped. In May I got a Valve Index. I spent a lot of time in VR games. By the end of summer, we got pretty close to getting the distillery in operation, and I took up an interest in watches. Not always a cheap hobby, but practical in that I can wear a watch anywhere and it's always useful. In October, my family came up to visit for the first time in five years. We went to Glacier National Park and a few other places in the area and had a great time, and I got some beautiful photos. But not long after that visit, the company I'd been working for ran out of money and shut down. Everyone was laid off at first, but they restructured and brought people back on. I was fortunate enough to be one of them, though not at first. Then just weeks after getting my job back, we got the call that we would, once again, have to move. We had more time this time, and more options, but we moved into a much smaller place, back into an apartment. I had to do a lot of downsizing and got rid of probably half the things I owned just to not feel suffocated. I sold the project car at a heavy loss just to have it gone. We have stable internet again though, and we're right near any store we might need to shop at, so it's not all bad. We ended up moving during the holidays and were officially out of the old house a few days ago. It's going to take me a very long time to shake the feeling of never being secure in where I'm living.

My one desire for 2024 is just... a really nice boring year. I'm tired of life-altering events, and tired of the once-in-a-lifetime things that happen all the time now. I've stopped making plans for the most part because nothing is predictable any more. I'm trying to stay positive and remain thankful for the good things in my life, but the lack of stability is really starting to wear on me.

That's about it. Happy 2024, hopefully.