Long overdue life update!

July 28, 2024

Hello! It is I, the person who runs this blog. Yes, I am still alive! Please insert long-winded (yet eloquent) apologies for my absence here.

Am I still writing? Yes.

Am I still open for crochet commissions? Also yes.

Am I still available to read Tarot online for a small fee? Again, yes.

But I am also working outside my house 4-5 days a week right now — gasp! — so, I don’t have a published calendar event or much motivation to promote it outside of my social circles. If you’re interested, message me, and I’ll try to provide you with yarn-based or card-based magic. (I have one massive side project/commission going right now that I have never fully believed was going to work out because it’s m a s s i v e, but if you are that person reading this, I haven’t actually given up on it, either!)

So, working. I did not go back into software engineering and most definitely did not return to a corporate job. Back in March, while feeling adrift and depressed after having sent out a few non-engineering-but-still-very-corporate job applications, I applied at a small company when they posted a job I was, at most, fifty percent qualified to do. But I’d been a fan of this company since I first saw an ad for their socks at some point during pandemic life. I had almost exclusively stopped wearing any other socks months before this point, but I had no idea they were even in Colorado, let alone five minutes from my house. Then, the job posting appeared.

I wrote an email and attached a resume — glad I’d already reshaped my wordy tech resume into something that fit on one page — and went grocery shopping, fully anticipating radio silence or rejection. (Nothing like querying literary agents to build this skill, let me tell you.)

The rejection did not come. Two days later, I had an interview, and a week or so after that, it was April and I was suddenly the E-Commerce Operations Manager at FootClothes.

Here is the first photo I took upon arriving at my new workplace.

Jamie, what does that even mean, you may be thinking. Frankly, when I accepted the job, I didn’t even really know, either. But it is now almost August, so I have a whole three months of perspective. It’s a lot of different things and very little of anything resembling my old workdays. (I’ve created a GitHub and worked a bit on some code, but configuring the storefront behavior based on customer tags is a far cry from big data pipeline engineering, trust me.) But I’m really enjoying it.

It doesn’t actually take up my entire life, although I do have to leave the house more often than before. The other reason I vanished from everywhere was because I got married!

Back in 2021, my long-term partner proposed to me, which took me completely by surprise. Not because I had any doubts — we already purchased a house together in 2018, and in 2020, became sort of domestic partners anyway for insurance purposes — but because Jim had completely convinced me that he never wanted to get married. That was fine with me, anyway, as we were both recovering from debilitating long-term relationship trauma. We started dating in 2015, and took things slowly. We didn’t move in together until 2017, and bought a house in 2018 when the opportunity came unexpectedly.

We had originally intended to get married in June 2023, but in 2022, my family life turned inside out and planning a wedding seemed monumentally impossible. When June 2023 rolled around, we were relieved that we had postponed it a year because Jim’s family was going through a hell of a lot. It wouldn’t have been the wedding we wanted if we’d forged ahead with some of the most important people in our lives struggling with health problems and hospitals.

I left my stress-inducing, high-paying software job in 2023. I did not realize just how much of my personality had to be rediscovered and comforted after masking behind Software Employment for over a decade. It took forever to stop dreading “Monday morning status meetings” that were certainly no longer part of my routine. Although I’m incredibly proud of my work last year, it was not an ideal time to spend money on a large event like a wedding, either. I had plenty of savings when I left work; I had a plan for myself, and ultimately, life didn’t follow the easiest route. I didn’t get picked up by an agent, and I decided I needed to split the book in two, which I did… and I worked on it so hard that by the time December 2023 rolled around, I was completely burned out beyond any level I had experienced before.

So, anyway. At the start of 2024, I was fully aware that I needed to find a more reliable source of income, but it wasn’t until April that I fell into a sock pit and found it surprisingly comfy.

June 22 was our wedding day, and it all went perfectly, but I spent about six weeks with little to no energy for anything other than planning the only big party of my life and also learning an entirely new job for forty hours a week.

The wedding was glorious, btw. We held it at the Lumber Baron Inn and I cannot overstate how much we loved the venue, the owners, and all of the staff we worked with. It went by so fast. I’ll put in a WordPress photo thing here with some highlights.

Now it’s about to be August, and I have been married for something like 37 days as I write this. It’s been a super busy few weeks getting a lot of things lined up at work to prepare for our busiest time of year (fall, although I am referring to it as Spooky Season on our product timeline because everything after October 31st is now holiday prep, no matter where we are in terms of seasonal calendars). In an effort to get this post finished and published (not polished, though, no risk of that), I am going to wrap this up without much fuss.

I’ll be popping over to my Ko-Fi page to link this and quickly update my goals and whatnot, but I’m not closing it down; I still plan on offering short stories and other commissioned items there, and what’s currently listed is still accurate. YouTube content is parked for the foreseeable future, because boy, that takes for-ev-er. I do not have a lot of Forever Time anymore. I’m still open to streaming games, but I won’t be able to set up a schedule for a while.

I’m ready to get back to my querying, especially since I have hardly sent any since completing my last massive overhaul (new characters! new villains! new trauma! yayyy) but there won’t be a lot of updates here on that, either. It takes so long to hear back, I mean literally I had a couple of rejections roll in ten months after I sent them, which is a real trip. I may or may not send a follow-up like, hey, you were right, it needed work, and in the time it took you to read it, I’d already rewritten it, uh, here you go!

Sounds weird and awkward, right? Well, it’s me. That’s all I can say.

PS: If you follow FootClothes on social media things, you will probably see more of me.