So, Happy New Year to my far-flung readers, I hope that all of you and your loved ones have a wonderful year...

It has been an interesting year, and I've been caught off guard by developments more than once.

Miguel and I managed to put together the mammoth autoparts convention, and in the process repaired the holes in our relationship. The high point of the convention was hitting downtown Nashville on a Saturday night and eating pulled pork in an authentically grungy bar, listening to a country band.

I finished my university and even aced the stats course, then we went to England and France. We spent a few glorious days wandering Paris and London, taking lots of touristy pictures and drinking beer.

During the summer, due to the instability of Miguel's job and my fruitless job search, we sold everything we owned and moved to Nunavut. Now, Miguel really likes his job, I've worked at three different and interesting jobs in the last four months, and now it's looking like I'll be working for the police.....

Along the way, the children have grown and the dogs have kept me company, I cut my hair and let it get longish again, I got glasses, and learned to cope in the Arctic.

I was sitting next to my neighbour, Karen, last night, at the New Year's Eve party we attended, listening to people doing karaoke, and Karen said to me, "If I'd told you last Christmas that on December 31st of this year you'd be sitting in the Arctic at a karaoke party, would you have believed me?" I said no. Last Christmas I spent an hour and a half crying on the ferry to Vancouver, and thinking that I couldn't take any more of the situation I was living in. I wanted to drop out of my schooling, when my last two courses started in January, from a belief that I was wasting my time and would never get a job in the field...

Just the fact that we went to a party last night (actually, first we went for dinner with the neighbours, then we went for champagne at another set of friends, and THEN we went to the party) tells me that I'm a long way away from my old life. And it was a fun party, silly with karaoke, off-key renditions of Karma Chameleon and I Will Survive being the high points, and I felt very cosy and friendly. I like my new life, despite the cold. It retains all the things I enjoy (my books, my friends, my family) and lets me out of a lot of things I had grown to hate (my old neighbours' clannishness and judgementalism, my lack of career prospects, the children being bullied at school, Miguel's on-again-off-again job, the expectations...). It's different. I feel (as I think I mentioned last week) that I have regained the idea that neat things might actually happen to me...