2003: A Year Gone By

Well, it's another year gone by. Overall, 2003 was a year wherein my life did not change overly much, though there was some gradual slide into change. As of today, here's the two events that I'll remember most from the year:

My Grandmother's Funeral: My Grandmother Appel was just shy of 80 and she'd been slipping into the throes of Alzheimer's for a couple of years, but her death was still a shock. It's the first real "natural" death that's occurred in my family, and so it makes me think of my own mortality. Her husband had died of some sort of brain disease a year or so before I was born and one of her sons had died a couple of years ago of complications surrounding Alzheimer's, but those were both early deaths; this was not. At the funeral the entire Appel clan gathered together in St. Louis for what I expect to be the last time. None of my cousins have kids yet, but we're all moving on, forming our own families in our own corners of the country. The family tree has truly branched, and without its solid trunk I can't imagine it all pulling together again--though honestly it's my dad's family who's really the furthest out; the rest have stayed closer from all growing up in the midwest, while we moved to California.

My Infectious Fall: I actually hope this to be a quickly fading memory by next year, but right now the infection I've been fighting with for the last three months or so seems like a very big deal. I'm getting close to the end of my second course of antibiotics and still have the occasional pain and fatigue, though as before the antibiotics have caused a large improvement. I'm still worried that it'll all come back a few weeks after I'm done with the antibiotics again, and that we'll be moving on to a third course of antibiotics and a fourth. The deep fatigue during my periods of sickness has been the worst of this all.

Here's the rest of the year:

Work: Last year over the holidays I was setting up my home office; this year I've been working in it for a 12 months, minus some problems last January thanks to DSL-company immorality (still waiting for them to be regulated as a utility like they should be). As of the middle of the year we cut back on staff to help balance our budget, and so I'm now working in a micro-sized company. I was doing that at Chaosium, 5 years ago now, and that was one of the reasons I left. However, things are different now, with a wife (and cats) at home, and so I don't feel quite the need for external socialization that I did then. The company's still a little wobbly, with us trying to close our last budget deficit, but it's at least close now, with some obvious places for improvement. It still makes me feel nervous though. I'll be happy when we can get Skotos entirely stable, as the last couple of years have required a bit more hyper-responsibility toward work than I'd like.

Home: At the start of last year I was still hovering between two offices, with my home office setup in our house's back room and my old office still partially setup in what later became our Junk Room (and what was later cleaned just before our house was appraised). That's now all dealt with, and my "new" office has picked up a year's worth of clutter. I keep wanting to clean it up better. Other than the fact that the Dining Room is getting a lot more use nowadays, for gaming, our house itself hasn't changed that much in the last 365 days. Except Kimberly & I now own it. Or, at least, the bank does with the loan being in my name.

kimberly_a has been doing a lot better toward the end of this year and that's nice. She went to the gym with me a couple of times in-between my bouts of illness and generally has been much more willing to be up and about, which is a great contrast to earlier in the year (and just remembering back to our trips to St. Louis and Seattle, where she really had to push herself to be around people and out touring). Before the last couple of months our main forms of joint entertainment were TV, movies, and the occasional trek out for dinner, but since November we've been playing lots of games--in fact, she's been wanting to play them more than I. Another nice change.

K. and I have also done a pretty good job of continuing our honest communication that we learned with Ricky in 2002.

Gaming: Besides gaming with K. I've also been continuing regular board game nights. It started out two years ago, when Kimberly was living elsewhere, as a Poker night, mainly to have friends about. It went on hiatus for a while, then returned as a Skotos games night, which was mostly filled with Settlers of Catan and other trade-related games, as I worked toward the development of Galactic Emperor: Merchant Kings (which now seems further away than ever because there's so much else at Skotos to do). This year I really learned about the full breadth of German board games, helped out by a series I wrote on strategy games for TT&T toward the start of the year. The game nights have become a mostly weekly thing and go beyond just Skotos folks. I've been reviewing tons of the games I've been playing and have even been getting review copies from folks for review, which is nice.

Over on the RPG front, I finally stopped hosting that gaming after something like 10 years. It was a bit much for Kimberly, especially after her final blowup with DK. Gaming now rotates, mostly between KW's house and DP's. I've been pretty flaky in attending RPG gaming since the move. Some of that is an immense sense of relief about 10 years of having to be there every week. Some of that is that I really don't like going down to Union City when KW is hosting. And some of it has been the sickness, as I regularly feeling so tired and exhausted that I can't imagine doing much other than sleeping (which I did throughout gaming the one time I made it down to KW's house this year, when seidl was visiting).

Travel: There were 3 trips for the year, which is 2-3 more than I like.

May was St. Louis for Grandma Appel's funeral.

June was Seattle, which was an honest-to-goodness vacation. We stayed with wolfieboy and cindygerb. They were wonderful hosts and good company, and Seattle was interesting, but I was beset by illness that I now think were related to to the infection that set in during the fall, since it seemed to be triggered by the exact foods that my doctor said to avoid (chocolate, caffeine, alcohol). Stil, it was mostly relaxing.

July was Indianopolis, for GenCon, which was work-related (and exhausting).

Leisure: Toward the start of the year I was still taking up free time with programming for RPGnet (where I wrote a new review system) and Skotos' Hegemony (where I finally finished my Advance Orders) but that's since fallen off a lot, I think because I'm now working at home and need better transition. I've also cut back my TT&T column to biweekly. Conversely I've been writing a damned lot of game reviews. I really need to figure out what the end-goal of the reviews are. If it's understanding board game design I may wish to start tailing off on the reviews, and move on to the next step.

Slightly further away from work, I've been reading more this year, completing books every 1-4 weeks, rather than every month or two which was more common in 2002. I've also stopped reading single-issue comics and have moved totally over to trades (losing only one comic in the process, The Legion of Super-Heroes, with everything else I read being cancelled or being regularly trade-paperbacked). I'm still trying to catch up on the trades of some of the series I read.

I've played a couple of computer games during the year. In January it was Civilization, a Christmas gift from christopher_a, then Zeus and Poseidon, which I bought with a Target gift-certificate from Kimberly's mom. Toward the middle of the year it was lots of zAngband, then Galactic Civilizations, on loan from Chris. December it was Age of Empires, another Chris gift. I also played a number of online board games, including our own Gang of Four and Queen's Necklace, Klear's Samurai (which I finally bought), The Settlers of Catan, Tycoon, Furio (or something like that), and most recently Blokus.

And that's pretty much life for the last 12 months. With Kimberly's health improving, I'm expecting there might be some real changes before the end of 2004, but horses, carts and all that. I'm also hoping that we get Skotos to the point where it isn't as stressful any more.

Less stress in 2004 would all-around be nice.