Shari.com: Three-Minute Blitz

I hereby give myself three minutes to squeeze in one more post before 2022 leaves this space with only a couple of doodled verses for the year, and the form it shall take is a list of topics, unedited and possibly overlapping and redundant and each absolutely underexplained, Ready? Breathe! OOF:

Genetic genealogy: time to finally tackle my grandmother's uncharted spots and try to untangle her intermarried eastern Kentucky roots and try to tease out her Carolina Lewises from that mix - an ongoing project this summer break.
Crochet, crochet, ole, ole: made a blanket in December as part of an advent calendar Crochat-ALong. So much drama. Such ugly colours. Completely fun and will pay the hefty price to have it shipped to me again from the UK next year.
Hello Fresh 'n Easy Spoons: Kept up the meal kit services started in August 2021 for the entire year. Hit a backlog a few times, but we are ending today with only one meal left in the fridge and the next delivery not until Monday. (Haloumi with roasted capsicum on couscous, if you're wondering.) I did have a whole post going about this but left it in another tab, didn't save it in progress - just a chain of rookie events, really, that led to me never really articulating how, thanks to meal kits, I'm very down for crushed nuts on pasta now.
NaNoWriMo finally happened. Yeo, I can't believe it either. And I made the most of it, earning every badge (including the tricky one for over 1667 words every day), Yeah, some of the writing - heaps of it, really - was dictated and is no doubt such a garble that I'm not sure if I'll decipher it enough to know what I was saying, but - for someone who has long maintained that I have no fiction writing skill in me - this was kind of a big deal. I learned that the passing curiosity of an idea that I had in early 2020 was good enough to explore but also was a vehicle for me quickly hating almost every character, and so that's where the fun came in, making these people's problems interesting to me, even if I didn't want to befriend them in real life. Likewise, slamming out a sometimes literally unintelligible first draft made me remember that I do like editing "big" things (as in other people's manuscripts, essays, etc.), so maybe I will enjoy editing this... in 2023. Or not. I'm just glad to have earned the T-shirt. (Even if you have you to purchase it in an ugly shade of electric blue instead of black if you want the Fat Girl Size. I'd link, but - you know - THREE MINUTES!)
The rabs are great. Still no excessive touching (more than a passing boop) is permitted if you don't have dried apple in hand, but they do like to binky their way in the same room to lounge and watch us.
Mike's non-urgent but still-dreaded gallbladder surgery slated for just before Christmas was postponed due to holidays/COVID wave/more urgent surgeries. He's taking it okay.
I had all upper-school classes in 2022. While one was absolutely pants academically and caused me new kinds of stresses, it was ultimately nice not to have to do behaviour-related paperwork (until I had a relief lesson). Next year I may be this lucky again. It's a bit up in the air right now.
Taught all year in a mask. Was one of the few who didn't get COVID. Got to cover the lessons for many teachers as they all caught COVID... more than once... and am cynical about that, but that's people for you. They just need to breathe really closely to each other even when it's possible to step back a little. Apparently. Not sure if I'll mask up for 2023. It's the right thing to do - the officially advised thing to do - but the social pressure not to (and sometimes actual bullying from students) is real when you're one of only two or three teachers masked on site (admin doesn't count).
Playtested three new board games from a major publisher. Wish I could say more. One is a ... argh... I really can't even reveal that much, but people will be stoked.
After five years, all of the garden trees are clearly very happy. We may have macademias and almonds this next year! So many avocados! Lemons well above the roof! Silvereyes call us home! Just don't ask about the day rat or the dead rat. Guard your mandarins, people.
That's more than three minutes. I have a cold Dr Pepper to drink and rules to learn for Tiletum and some DNA matches to sort and a husband that needs a kiss because I hear him cooking that haloumi even as I type.