Alright. I’m 35, and I’ve decided that it will be awesome. It certainly started out that way. Last night I was greeted with macarons and some adorable tiny spoons. Today I took most of the day off of work and did a bunch of stuff I wanted to do. It was just lovely.

I also received some amazingly thoughtful gifts, especially ones from Austin. Items that I already adore, and that show me that he really knows me well. I mean, some are gimmes (cupcake wrapping paper? Obviously. Emergency cupcake? Even better.) But some – like finding a book of maps and statistics about London – are just beyond my comprehension of awesomeness. I’m a lucky woman.

I’ve said before that I do New Year Resolutions, but I tie them to my birthday. That way I have a couple of weeks to get a feel for the new year, what I want to do, and not be faced with anything drastic (like, say, cutting out all sweets unless it’s a special occasion, which starts tomorrow! Hooray!) during my birthday. I think there are a couple of big things I’m going to focus on between now and January 14, 2016 – finding more joy and being less anxious about what others think of me.

I’m betting the joy part is what will be more challenging. I think I’ve already got a healthy amount of it in my life, but I want to celebrate more things. I want to hang stupid paper hearts up around Valentine’s Day, and bake a cake when someone finishes a big project at work or pays off their student loans. I think it’s super easy to get caught up in the mundane to-do lists; hopefully this year I can get caught up in the awesome little things.

The other part might be surprising to some people, because outwardly I probably seem like I’m very willing to speak my mind on things. And it’s true, I am. But only when I feel really comfortable that I’m not going to ruffle the feathers of the people with whom I’m speaking. Other times I hold back, even though I know that what I want to say is what I believe in.

An example from the past week is the horrible shit that went down in Paris. I have complicated feelings about it (and I’m not going to get into now because it’s 10:30 p.m. and I’m still floating on the last strains of the Veronica Mars theme song after finishing the movie), but I’ve not felt comfortable sharing them here because I have this voice in the back of my head saying “what will people think?”

And the thing is, I do care what people think, and to a degree I think it’s disrespectful to not care about it. I loathe people who try to pass off being an asshole for just ‘not caring what other people think.’ I’m talking about feeling more comfortable about discussing things on this blog, or with friends, that might not fit what others are suggesting is the way to go, and that may not even be fully formed arguments. Sometimes I’ll be shown I’m wrong, and sometimes I won’t be. But I’ll be true to myself, and I feel that now is as good of a time as any for that.

So, here’s to being 35. I’ve got about 364 more days to figure it out.

This year was kind of weird. Personally and professionally it was pretty fantastic, but the world around seemed to be going further and further down this depressing hole (see: each of my “What I’m Reading” posts). But within all of those horrible events I saw some amazing people doing amazing things, fighting for their rights and demanding that those who have chosen to look away for so long pay attention.

This year I:
• Traveled to Santa Barbara (twice), Portland, Tampa, Atlanta (work), Philadelphia (work), Alaska, Hawaii, New Orleans, Vancouver (work), Denver (work) and the Bay Area.
• Presented at four national conferences, including one in Canada.
• Was part of a team that helped prepare our county to respond to Ebola, while still managing to do all of our regular work.
• With the help of Austin (obviously) kept our kittens alive for another year. They continue to be adorable, snuggly little jerks.
• Got my act together exercise wise, and managed to end the year down a pants size or two.
• Read and reviewed 58 books for Cannonball Read. I’m hoping to do the double Cannonball in 2015.
• Paid off our student loans (again, Austin was a big factor in this one)
• With the help of many of you, conducted interviews, did research, and wrote the first draft of “How Not to be an Asshole When Your Friends Have Kids.”
• Almost made it all the way through Veronica Mars (just a few episodes left). Thanks to Austin for finally getting me to watch it – it’s SO GOOD.

Next year we’re going to Portland, to London and Paris to see friends, to Canada for the women’s World Cup, and (hopefully) to Napa to help friends celebrate their birthdays. I plan to make more headway with my book, Austin and I will dive back into learning French and Spanish, and the kittens will somehow learn to vacuum their own hair and clean their own litter box.

I know that friends and family faced challenges, sadness and even tragedy in 2014; some can’t wait to kick this year to curb. However 2014 treated you, I hope that 2015 is your best year yet.

Cheers and see you on the other side.

This experiment with the blog post a day has been fun and interesting. Not all posts have been winners – and I’m pretty sure my last one is just going to be some Halloween costume pictures. But it’s forced me to work on my writing, to be creative, and to form and articulate my opinion on things more regularly that the occasional random (and usually irate) posting.

I’m not going to stick with it, though, because November is also NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month). While I’m not trying to write a novel, I am writing a book, and I’m going to focus my writing on that during November. But I’m sure I’ll be back on here for the occasional book review, weekly wrap-up, and angry tirade.

So, short post, but I had to share that after my post last night about Navient, I got a tweet from their social media people. Note that I didn’t tag them or @ them in the post; their company name just happened to be in my post, and they must have done a search. At 7 a.m. I got the following tweet:

“Hi Ashley! We’re going to look into this for you. A social media specialist will be reaching out to you today. Thanks! Liz”

Now, my post talked about how they were somehow even worse than Sallie Mae. But now I realize they actually are still Sallie Mae. Just re-branded. And just like how when Blackwater changed its name to Xe Services it didn’t suddenly stop being a firm full of mercenaries for hire, Sallie Mae hasn’t stopped taking advantage of customers just because it changed its name.

No one from Navient contacted me today – either in response to my email from yesterday or as part of their social media strategy. I don’t really expect to hear much from them at all, actually, beyond eventually some letter telling me my loans are paid off. And when we get that letter in the mail, or on email, I think I’m going to frame it.

And then I am going to do a very happy dance as confirm that I never have to deal with that company again.

As part of my attempt to sort out my IRS issue, I decided to pull everything I have in storage. The goal was to see if I still have a bunch of old documents from when I first purchased the stock in question. I did (hurrah!), but I also realized that I had a lot of other stuff that I don’t really need.

An example is my pile middle school and high school yearbooks. This might be controversial for some folks, but I have no real need for my yearbooks. I don’t ever go back and look at the notes written, or even the pictures. That might be because I’ve always loved taking pictures, so I’ve got a lot of pictures from when I was younger. And those giant books take up a whole lot of space considering how often I look at them.

Another example is the giant stack of articles and papers from my studies in London. That took up an entire plastic bin, and it was much harder to part with. On the one hand, I have all my notes and papers saved online and backed up. But on the other hand, I probably can’t access the list of articles I read again. It seemed a little bit like accepting that I won’t be pursuing further study in the field. Which is accurate, and has been accurate for a couple of years, but the finality of actually throwing it in the recycling bin gave me pause. Still, I did it, it’s gone.

Other items, like photo negatives and my college diploma, I’m keeping, but I was able to consolidate way down. I also pulled out my old homecoming tiara and sash to give to a friend’s daughter to play dress-up. By the time I was done, I’d reduced three 2′ x 2′ x 2′ tubs to a handful of items that I could spread throughout the apartment. As a bonus, our storage unit now only has Austin’s climbing and camping gear (which wouldn’t be in the house anyway), and a taken-apart bistro table and chairs that we hope to use when we finally buy a place to live some day.

Austin is going to clean out the guest room closet on Sunday, which hopefully will result in a big trip to Goodwill in the afternoon. The key now is to not buy things that will fill that space back up.

A few months ago we got a notice from the IRS saying we hadn’t paid our taxes for 2013. We had (and had the fat chunk of missing savings to prove it). Of course the notice arrived after 5 p,m. on a Friday, but I was able to get a hold of someone and after a couple of hang-ups, an hour on hold, and some frustrating moments, I confirmed that it was an error. Before that my only other run-in with the IRS was due to an old business license. Their system didn’t update that I had closed that business with no income (I’d gotten it so I could do consulting work if needed when I moved back to Seattle), so I thought maybe this was yet another attempt to collect taxes from defunct business. Especially since it was addressed to my given name and not my current name.

Nope. Nothing to do with our 2013 taxes, or my non-existent business. From what I can tell, someone screwed up, and I might owe a whole lot of money (like, high four figures). It looks like a company I had securities with is reporting that I made X amount of money from that, and I didn’t report it as income, so I owe about 20% of X, plus a bunch of penalties and interest. First off, I never got that tax document. If you know me, you know how super duper anal I am about things like finances. If it turns out my information was wrong, and I do owe that money, I will pay it, although I’m not okay with paying penalties or interest because I didn’t actually do anything wrong based on the information I had. Also, because I’m so anal, my first thought was to log into my accounts and look for late tax documents, or something I could have missed, but the ones I view don’t match up. If they were there and they matched, that’d be that. But it’s a little hard to prove the negative of I never got it (although the fact that it still isn’t here does help).

Oh, and did I mention that this is from two years ago? Not last year, but 2012. So I’m even more confused, because why didn’t that information come out when they do their regular checks in the twenty months that have passed since that tax year ended. But thanks to some advice my mother gave me when my checks were stolen in 2001, along with my last experience with the IRS, plus Austin’s general calming influence in my attitude, I didn’t lose my shit. I didn’t pick up the phone and try to get someone to answer all my questions. I ate my dinner, turned on a crappy movie, and started doing research so that I could figure out what to say when I do finally call tomorrow. Because the reality is I might end up having to dig super deep into savings to fix an error I unintentionally made in 2012 (if it all ends up being correct). And me being angry about it right now, or being short with the unlucky IRS agent who takes my call, isn’t actually going to change any of that.

Holy shit, you guys. I think I’m becoming an adult. Weird.

Just browsing the interwebs, seeing if anything interesting happened while I was at work today, and I came across this. In case you can’t see the article, from what I can gather, it appears that the national Fox station is forcing the company that owns Q-13 (the local Seattle affiliate) to sell to the national company or else it will end the relationship with Q-13. They’d go with a station up in Bellingham instead, which would be sort of odd considering the news would be focused on that area and not Seattle.

Why are they doing this? Well, one of the only things that Fox is good for is showing NFL games (and these days I’m not really that thrilled to watch those anyway), and when the NFL team in your market is the defending Superbowl Champions, that ends up being worth quite a bit of money. So apparently Fox decides that if you won’t sell them your TV station that makes lots of money, they’ll stop working with you, and put you out of business. I get that they have a choice in who they work with, but there’s something really off about awarding a contract, and then essentially putting the company you awarded it to out of business because they ended up making too much money.

But it’s Fox, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Right now there is a lot of attention focused on Ebola Virus Disease (EVD). It’s been causing death and illness overseas for many months; interest in the U.S. didn’t rise much until the first U.S. citizens were infected and transported back for treatment. And now that a man has died in Dallas the media is focusing even more on the disease, even though thousands more have died before him in western African nations. It seems we don’t care about death and destruction much until it arrives in our neighborhoods.

Some media outlets do seem to be trying very hard to provide quality reporting on this issue; others, however, are not doing a great job. There are people yelling for us to close the borders, or prevent ill U.S. citizens from coming home for treatment. The topic seems to bring out the worst in some people – some are even angry that hospitals in the U.S. are willing to accept these patients. With that in mind, I hope that as you consume media about EVD, you consider the source and compare the information provided to the scientific facts that disease experts are sharing. If this is a topic that interests you, please consider informing yourself directly at the source. The CDC website has a ton of really good information on this disease, and is a great place to start understanding what it is, how it is transmitted, and how it is contained.