The New Normal

As most of you know, I have experienced an awful lot of upheaval in the last few months. My parents died, on the same day. My cat died. I traveled more than I would have liked - I did enjoy all of the trips but it was very disruptive to normal life. I moved to a new home. And so on.

Arbitrista and I have been looking forward to getting things back to normal, or, as we've been thinking of it, the New Normal. Because "normal" is nothing like the "normal" of six months ago. Some of the changes are quite good: I received some rather big life insurance payments, which allowed me to pay off my shockingly large amount of credit card debt, with enough left over for some nice new things. Because I'm no longer paying $1500 a month on credit cards, we can afford to pay more rent, so we moved into this nice house with a big backyard.

Which meant we could do something we've been wanting to do for a long time - get another dog!

Meet Zelda:
As you can see, she's made herself at home already. She's a rescued collie, three years old, and a former puppy-mill breeder (poor thing!). We've got a lot of work to do with her - she's still pretty new to being a house dog and doesn't know any commands (although she learned her new name in about a day!), but she's very sweet, extremely good on the leash (no pulling at all! the exact opposite of Gatsby) and housebroken. She LOVES the cats - and they seem to like her too, which is a surprise. Because Gatsby is such a submissive dog, she's quickly become the alpha dog for probably the first time in her life and she snaps at him a little more than we'd like, but we're working on it. They usually get along fine except for when he has a rawhide bone. She thinks all rawhide bones belong to her.

In addition to a second dog, we needed some new furniture for the house, including a proper dining room table, our first Real! Grownup! Sofa! (this one, in blue - it has not yet arrived), and, as always, more bookcases. Less than a year ago we bought a set of bookcases and a wine bar from Crate and Barrel that we loved. So we bought, uh, a few more. Behold! The dining room!

Close observers may notice that we also have a second bar... as it turned out, we had too much booze for just one bar. The one on the right is devoted to whiskey and whiskey accessories. For the first time EVER, all of our books - and all of our booze! - all have a place, even the paperback fantasy novels that Arbitrista has had to keep in a closet since we got married. (For the record, the books pictured above are only about half of our total collection - the rest are downstairs in the living room.)

Yes, I'm still very sad and working to adjust. But there are some good new things in our lives, and we're definitely experiencing a major bump in our standard of living. I didn't get a tenure-track job in the last season, but my job here is going well and I intend to stick around for a couple of years. I'm applying for external funding and my boss is talking about getting me promoted to Assistant Scientist which would be very cool. I could see myself doing this for awhile; I like research and I don't miss teaching at all, and I'm starting some very exciting and novel work involving things ending in -omics. We like it here and we both have stable positions and we make enough money, so I'm not going to stress any more about finding a job and getting out. (This doesn't mean that I won't be applying for jobs next year, though... I'm just not going to get all worked up about it.)

So, for the next few months, I'm going to try to relax and get used to the New Normal.