welcome in 2025
2025 dec 7
what's new with the site?- swapped guestbook services;
- updated blog homepage layout;
- completed art page backfill;
- set-up & opened up commissions;
- added new drawings for the week: 5;
- added new review: saviorless;
- added "art tag" link for all currently viewable oc pages;
- added new hotlinked 88x31 buttons;
- took down xmas decorum.
( on a similar note: i added a link on oc pages to their respective tags in the art archive! now you can view lots & lots of art of everyone, beyond the selected pieces in their galleries, which has been my intent for a very long time!! progress!!!!! ) what's new with me? well ... let's see ... the holiday season was unusually difficult for me this year, i feel. i really struggled with socializing & traveling. i'm grateful it's over with, but i'm dreading next year ... i don't know how to say "no" to these things. i'm alright, though. new years came & went -- we stayed up until midnight, but it was uneventful & i was mostly just cranky to not be in bed. i've never felt too connected with NYE & NYD, and i don't like drinking or partying, so i'm not too sure how to celebrate ... i don't have any resolutions for this year either, nor anything to really reflect on. 2024 was a tough year, and i am imagining 2025 will be harder still. i will simply just try my best ... we are in the middle of swapping out our gas oven for an electric one, on the home front -- we had to give it up around xmas eve, so we've been without a proper oven since then, and will continue to be until our new one is delivered end-ish of january. we have portible stovetops that we're using, but it's still stressful ... manageable, but stressful. oh goodness, i almost forgot, but if you are curious about petty community drama: let me tell you a story involving one of our neighbors.
so, it is nearing christmas. it is 5AM on a work day -- my partner & i normally get up between 7:30 to 8 -- and we hear a loud banging on our door. neither of us are confrontational & both of us just want to sleep, so we just pretend we didn't hear it. we weren't expecting anything, after all, so it had to have been a mistake ...... and that's that! i had been meaning to chronicle that here ever since it happened, since it was such a bizarre experience. absolutely horrifying in the moment, but now that it's over with, i can't help but marvel at the absurdity & sheer audacity of that woman. i'd never been attacked by an entitled old person like that before ... that's it, i guess. lol. long entry. i'm hoping my health improves this year & i can get to work on this dang site ... there's still so much i want to do with it. until next time, everyone! take it easy. :~)
then our doorbell rings. repeatedly. it's now 5:30, maybe? we both get up, get dressed, and go to the door. an old woman we'd never met before is standing in the total darkness of our frigid northern hemisphere morning, with her car still running in our driveway, and starts urgently pleading with us. she says, her package was stolen or misdelivered, and she thinks we have it; we inform her we have no idea what she's talking about, she actively ignores every single thing we say & demands we go into our house & scan over every package we'd gotten to make sure none were hers.
with no options, we agree, close the door, and turn to look at our living room. which has no packages. there is nothing to check. she waits about 10 seconds before smashing the doorbell again, repeatedly, and when we open it again & inform her we have nothing, she gets more impatient & cross with us. please understand we have no idea what is going on.
after circling around the conversation for a bit, she eventually tells us that the delivery service she used gave her an address that the package was delivered to -- a house number that does not exist in our neighborhood. she then told us that because our house number was "close enough" to that nonexistent house number, the package obviously had to be delivered here, and that we were hiding it. "it's 200$ of coffee," she explains with ever growing frustration. we offer her a bag of our own coffee as a gesture of sympathy & kindness, and she says ( without seeing the kind of coffee we have, or asking our names, or anything, really ) "oh i don't drink crap from the grocery store, only imported stuff from far away." both of us are beginning to unravel the true nature of this woman, and we understand that we cannot reason with her. but we don't know how to placate her either.
we tell her she needs to leave our property & not come back to us about this issue, because we're utterly uninvolved in it. she tells us ( completely ignoring what we have just said & every other word we have said to her during our entire talk ) she is going to come back & look around a little later, and she's going to call the police about it, because it's 200 united states dollars of imported specialty coffee & she knows we stole it. we close the door after saying goodbye. it's 6AM. we don't get back to sleep.
now, listen: despite our passive natures, both my partner & i try to be friendly & welcoming to people, ESPECIALLY here. we've been renters until now, and we want to feel like we're genuinely a part of this community now that we permanently live here. every neighbor we'd met so far has been pleasant, so this interaction completely took us off guard. we were scared for the entire day, because we genuinely thought this woman was going to call the cops & get us arrested for absolutely nothing; we thought we were going to get stalked & harrassed by her endlessly, because she was so self-absorbed in her own world that she couldn't even fathom a reality where she was not correct in her assuptions.
after freaking out for a few hours, we call the local postal office & speak with the postmaster -- a remarkably calm-sounding woman admist the holiday shipping chaos. ( maybe she just sounded calm because we were both so stressed, though ). we recount our story to her: a neighbor is threatening legal action against us for stealing her package, but we have absolutely zero idea what she's talking about & are just trying to get any information possible to help us get to the bottom of this. kindly, the postmaster tells us they can't give out info like that, but if we gave her our address & our neighbor's address, she could try & help. we don't know our neighbor's house number ( "i'm on the corner with the dog, of course, and if i can come & look around your property for my package, then you can walk down the [ author's note: public ] street by my house" -- baffling statement made by our neighbor ) so we just give her the road our neighborhood is on & our house number instead ... and i hear her take in a sharp breath.
turns out, this woman has been ignoring several phonecalls from the postal service regarding this package. the postmaster tells US to call the police if our neighbor shows up again ( i don't think i would ... but knowing the post basically said we were in the right was an instant wave of relief for me ) and that she'd take care of this. later in the day, she actually arrives at our doorstop with a package in hand; she's double-checking that our house is NOT the intended delivery point, and then tells us she'll be handing this to our neighbor once they can locate her. in what is surely a shocking turn of events, it seemed our neighbor miswrote her address when buying the coffee, not that we stole it or that the postal service stupidly misdelivered it. wow! who could have seen that coming.