From the Mind of Trevor Stone

For about five months there I was either getting ready to do a thing on a date, or doing a thing on a date. By mid-May I was focusing most of my free time getting ready for Untamed festival at the beginning of the week or the trip to DC to lobby Congress followed by the jaunt around the Chesapeake Bay. After that trip I quickly got things prepared for ARRL Field Day.

At the beginning of July I decided to go to Burning Man, and also that I was going to figure out a shade structure, so I spent several weekends getting that dialed in, attending Ranger training, getting ready for Dragonfest at the beginning of August, and fitting in all the Colorado Shakespeare Festival plays. After Dragonfest I had two weekends to get everything packed for Burning Man, plus the sudden addition of making sure a good friend could come along at the last minute.

When I got back from Raining Man I spent two weekends unpacking and decompressing, then ramping up for the Peak to Peak Byway 105th Anniversary ham radio special event on September 30th. That was a big success, with a dozen ham radio clubs setting up stations at three sites (Estes Park, Ward, and Black Hawk), and over 600 contacts. The site I helped organize, a blocked turnout at Mile Marker 41, had more than a dozen people participate, operating two stations with over 450 contacts (being in the national forest and thus eligible for Parks on the Air really helped attract attention to our stations). Band conditions were great; we had a constant stream of callers on 20 meters and were making contacts on 15 and 10 meters until 3pm when we decided to tear down due to nearby lightning.

After that, it was time to get ready for my sister-in-law's wedding in mid-October, preceded by a visit by my other sister-in-law, her husband, and a four-year-old, so lots of house cleaning and reorganizing for safety. (Make sure to keep the liquor out of reach of the toddler, and also of the alcoholics.) I remembered a little late in the game that I was supposed to get a suit that would fit a gem theme; Men's Warehouse fortunately had a nice purple three-piece option, and Converse.com had bright purple sneakers in my size. It turns out most of the family interpreted "gem-colored" as either green or purple, so we matched without over-planning things. I'm also now "that family member with a big truck", so there was a trip to pick up wedding stuff, an evening of rearranging the bed to fit the rest of our stuff, and another mother-in-law visit to return all the boxes of stuff. The wedding was lovely and went smoothly, but COVID made an unwelcome appearance, claiming most of the family after returning home. After two adventures in positivity last year my immune system managed to stay negative this time around, but I felt like crap all week anyway.

Last week was a climate and environment town hall with Senator Hickenlooper that CCL had suggested in our lobby meeting in June. This was another long-awaited event, but fortunately other people did most of the work and I just had to send some email, brainstorm on quesitons, and cheer from the sidelines.

Now that it's the end of October I've finally found myself in a glorious state of not needing to urgently prepare for an impending deadline. Advent of Code is coming in December, of course, but I've already got my runner, generator, and other infrastructure ready and I'm studying the Julia programming language as time allows. And I need to start emailing folks who are interested in seeing the solar eclipse in Arkansas in April, but there's still several months before we need to think too hard about logistics.

So it's finally time to chill. I spent the snowy weekend taking care of non-urgent tasks like cleaning a year's worth of papers off my desk, de-toddlering the house, and replacing the obnoxious lightbulbs. I can restart game days (probably targeting Thanksgiving weekend). I should probably schedule all the health care appointments I haven't done this year. There's also low-priority radio tasks to get to, like troubleshooting the transceiver that suddenly stopped working at Untamed, figuring out how to use digital modes on the sBitx I excitedly bought last year and have barely used, and maybe designing a semi-permanent home antenna setup. Maybe I'll start learning Morse code. And oh hey, look at all those books I haven't read.

We were instructed to create a personal map as homework for an all-day team alignment meeting at work today. The general expectation was that it would be mind map style: your name in the center and branches leading to ideas which play an important role in your life.

Since I'm a map nerd and we're part of the geo team, I decided to dispense with the node/edge modality and use a geographic map as the base. And since laying out and drawing a map of my own psyche is a more involved project than I wanted to undertake, I started by borrowing from one of my favorite maps: Tolkien's map of Middle-earth. I then carefully positioned some of the key pieces of my life upon the rich geolocated symbolism of Arda, arriving at this interesting work:
( 1.6MiB image )

A lot of people are down on 2008, but I had a great time last year. To recap:

At the end of 2007, I helped tamheals move to Cañon City, the most significant event in our breakup process.

At the beginning of January, I learned that DHL lost my passport en route to the Chinese embassy. Fortunately, Denver has an expedited passport office, so for $150, four gallons of gas, and a few hours I was able to get a passport in 24 hours with enough time to get it to the embassy and back with a day or two to spare.

I spent the last week of January and most of February with mollybzz in China. We visited Kunming, Dali, Lijiang, and Xishuangbanna in Yunnan province and Guilin and Yangshuo in Guangxi province. I taught an American geography lesson to Molly's students and had some relaxing fun in her home-for-the year, Xiamen. On my last day/night, I wandered around Macau and Hong Kong, enjoying the east-meets-west culture. My February LJ posts.

In March I finished the cost calculation project at work. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the smegging basements to calculate correctly. Outside of work I visited my family and some friends with gifts and stories of China. I updated my China travelogue. Not a very exciting month, but I saw some fun concerts.

In April I started playing 4th Edition D&D (a month or two before it was released) with a Dwarf Wizard with an Indian accent. I didn't play much 3rd Edition, partly because I got involved in other activities and partly because I didn't really get into the system. 4E is a fun, well-balanced, efficient system for killing monsters. It's got some neat features and significantly reduces the amount of crap you have to keep track of. I also hung out with some interesting people I met on OKCupid and played games and drums with old friends. I took some interesting pictures after almost none outside of China in the first three months. At work, I quickly added a bunch of new features to our information extraction module. That was pretty fun.

In May, I concocted summer plans, had fun on urban hills, continued adding high-value data extraction features, and played more games.

In June, I went to Apogaea (Colorado Burning Man event), having a great time with awesome burner people in a setting that feels more like home. There I helped build Syncopation Dome, a geodesic drum circle. I welcomed a cool photographer as a summer roommate. I joined another D&D game, saw a great summer solstice concert, joined a conga line and otherwise had fun wandering around. At work, I started researching new ways of doing named entity recognition.

In July I took a week-long trip around Colorado. I started at Valley View (the only time I made it last year!), drove through lovely parts of southern Colorado to Piedra Hot Springs in the national forest, and then checked out Mesa Verde National Park. The focus of the week was the Dreamtime festival where I camped with Justin (a friend from philosophy at CU) and his friends, danced in some absurd costumes, and listened to groovy music with my generation of hippies. I took some good pictures with my roommate's camera. Since I was having so much fun, I didn't get much sleep, which meant I didn't get much effective work done on my open-ended project at work, but I helped a new developer get into our GIS module, the other fun project I worked on at Tyler.

In August, I picked mollybzz up from the airport and whisked her up to Dragonfest. The highlight of the week was 08/08/08: Molly led a workshop on infinity, I led a workshop on I Ching, and we conducted an infinity/I Ching/Chinese dragon dance ritual. I took the cats to Tam's cute new (100-year-old) house in Pueblo. I bought my roommate's Canon digital SLR camera, which has helped me take much better pictures in the last five months. I took a week off work to photograph protests outside the Democratic National Convention. I think the experience was a worthwhile substitute for Burning Man. Since I took almost half the month off, I didn't get much work done.

In September, I hung out with Molly before she left town, saw some cool people in Boulder, played games, and made progress at work. Nothing particularly noteworthy, but I was kind of recovering from all the fun in the summer.

In October, I spent a bunch of time learning and thinking about the economic crisis and the election. I also made sure to enjoy the beautiful Colorado fall, taking several walks including one getting out the vote for Barack Obama. My wide-scope work started coming together, and I got my first set of numbers for phase II of the information extraction project. I also finished my five-month project listening to all of my CDs.

What happened in November? I volunteered with the Obama campaign on Election day and celebrated as sanity returned to the American electorate. Several times later that week I found my eyes tearing up, overcome by a sense of wonder and beauty. I took an 8-year technological leap forward and bought a MacBook Pro. I continued learning about the economy and playing games with friends. I made a tasty curry quiche and brought Michelle's parents and their Uigher exchange student to pie night. I made good progress on my project at work and struggled to decide when I wanted to officially quit and scamper off to Central America. I worked out a recipe for coconut oatmeal curry cookies/bars. I also didn't fail to write a novel.

Much of December was butt-ass cold, but I spent lots of time relaxing at home and learning stuff from the Internet. I decided I'd quit my job at the end of March, which will give me more time to transfer knowledge and achieve a sense of accomplishment, but may mean I get a lot wetter in the jungle. I bought some neat books for my parents, made mixed CDs for friends, and generally didn't stress about the holiday season. I took neat pictures of sunsets, sunrises, and snow.

In 2008 I saved over $20,000, visited lots of neat places, listened to lots of music, improved my photography, and kept my life simple and mostly uncluttered.

2009 got off to a great start with a hut trip outside Breckenridge with Michelle and her family. Pictures of that to come.

Tam and I are splitting up.

She got a job as an LPN at the Colorado State Penitentiary infirmary. She's moving to Cañon City at the end of the month. I'll stay in Lakewood (aside from a break I'll post about soon) for the next several months and then make some changes of my own.

Some readers already know this; to others it may be a surprise. I do not at this time wish to write about all of the details of this process, but if you would like to discuss it over lunch or instant messenger, let me know. Over time I'll blog more about my inner perspective on the past, present, and future.

Some key points in FAQ form:

You're breaking up?! Why?!?!

When we agreed to get married, one condition was that after a few years we would reevaluate our relationship and decide if it was worth continuing for the rest of our lives. With the benefit of experience and insight into each other's personalities, we can see that, though our relationship features many positive aspects, we can tell that it's in neither of our best interests to stay together for a long time. Tam has important needs that I can't meet; I have important needs that Tam can't meet.

If you had reservations originally, why did you get married in the first place?

We'd been together for eleven months and lived together for five and a half. Tam was too sick to have a job and be in school at the same time. We didn't know what was wrong, and she was concerned about health insurance and other bills. She asked me to marry her so she could have the support she needed. I had reservations about making a lifetime commitment after knowing each other for less than a year, so I agreed to provide that support "at least through the end of school."

So... you got married for health insurance?

It's not the only reason. We loved each other, and still do. We've taught each other a lot about life. But it is true that we would not have entered into a three-way legal relationship (husband, wife, and State of Colorado) if universal health care were available or if my employer offered health coverage to cohabitants.

Do you guys hate each other now?

No. Our relationship doesn't follow a lot of norms. Just as our marriage didn't have a lot of elements traditionally associated with such an arrangement, we don't fit the stereotype of an angry, bitter divorcing couple. We haven't argued about who gets to keep what stuff. We've probably argued less in the last six months than we did in the first six months we were married (perhaps because now we know what's likely to set it off). I'll help her move at the end of the month; she'll give me a massage after we carry all the stuff in to the apartment. She'll call me when she has a question for a computer nerd; I'll call her when I have a question for a nurse. When your relationship is based on caring and open communication, bringing it to its natural conclusion can be a very healthy and positive process.

Who gets the cats?

We're still working that out, it's the most contentious issue of property division. "You take Kitty Boy!" "No, you take Kitty Boy!" They'll stay with me at least until she moves in. When I go out of town, they'll switch custody. After that? We'll figure it out.