Der Feuervogel aufersteht.

Hello! I'm still here, and I read my flist every day, even if I don't comment ever and am really bad at posting. Various other fora and social media sites have somewhat taken over the space where writing in my lj used to be.

(I'm in too many discords, in a handful of social slacks, and on bluesky. Plus far too many whatsapp groups, because that's what everyone in Europe uses.)

Time for a 2024 wrap-up, I guess? Because I have no idea what I did unless it's in my google calendar, that's what you're getting.

January: started a new freelance gig for a medical journalism/scicomm site. I copyedit for them.

February: took a short trip to Dresden to ref a scrimmage at a rookie bootcamp.

March: I went to a panel discussion about whether there's life in space where a German writer friend of mine was talking; Bear City hosted a multigame weekend (I reffed 2 games and ALTed 2); I went to Hamburg to ref a game. I also joined a gym.

April: I went to Hamburg to ref 2 games.

May: On May Day, I went to a tree blossom festival with a friend. It was fun, even though the trees were all finished blossoming because of climate change. I also went to a table reading of a different friend's screenplay of a book she wrote. I went to Erfurt to ref a double header, and the next day I went to a chili festival with friends.

June: I started the month with a trip to Hannover to ref a game. For some reason, I always thought Hannover was really far away, but it's actually closer than Hamburg and less expensive to get to (if you get slightly shittier train times).

The weekend after that was the European roller derby playoffs, so I spent 3 days watching roller derby, and we had a watch party for the 3rd place and finals. It was fun.

Then I went back to the US for 4th St. Fantasy. I stopped over in Iceland on the way west this year, and tbh given the very short connection time and the fact that you have to go through passport control, I will probably continue stopping over that direction. (I'll get to the flight back soon.) 4th St was great, and I took a lot of great notes in the seminar and a lot of the panels. I caught a ride back east with a couple folks from Baltimore and stayed with friends.

We had a family get-together at my cousin's place, and it was good to see everyone who could make it. Especially grandma.

Getting back to Germany was very stressful, because there was about an hour's connection, and you had to go through passport control, and because I have a non-EU passport, I had to stand in a very long line, during which time I got 5 emails and text messages that my flight was boarding and I needed to report to the gate so I would make my flight. I did the "please let me go ahead, I'm getting all these "report to the gate" messages and they just overhead paged me" thing. Then I couldn't figure out where my gate was because the sign was hidden behind other signs and a queue of people for a different gate. (Also my shoes were loose and flopping because I didn't have time to tighten them after landing.) But I made the connection and had the porridge I intelligently pre-ordered when I bought my tickets.

July: My old roommate Maureen was here for a few days, and we didn't do a whole lot together, but she stayed with me (because she couldn't find a hotel room because of the Euro football tournament). I went to see a special exhibit of Caspar David Friedrich at the Alte Nationalgalerie. It was really cool (and very crowded). His art is mostly about loneliness and survivor's guilt (his older brother died saving him from drowning).

I started a regular video chat with my sister, which we've mostly kept up. I also got a financial advisor.

July is Pride month in Berlin, and I went on the Dyke March with friends.

August: A friend of mine celebrated their successful pregnancy with a mocktail party. I went to a discussion/chat at the local SFF bookstore. I went to a friend's first stand-up show.

I reffed 2 games here, went to Erfurt for a boot camp (where I reffed another scrimmage), and I went back to Erfurt the next weekend for a scrimmage (Saturday) and Team Germany training (Sunday).

Most importantly, I threw a party to celebrate 5 years since my divorce was final. If you'd asked me in 2018 if I'd be celebrating, I would have been confused. But now, things are ok, even if I'm much less financially stable than I would like.

September: I reffed 2 games here, and I hosted a visiting official who gave me fucking covid, so I had to cancel my trip to Hamburg the next weekend, where I was supposed to NSO 4 games.

I went to Elstercon in Leipzig. It was very small and in a crowded space, and I only knew a couple people there, so I attached myself to them and hoped they would introduce me to others. I feel like that would make a good essay topic, how fandom spaces (in Germany) are insular and not particularly welcoming to newcomers. Much like the rest of the country in general. I decided to skip Sunday and go to the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, which is a monument to people kicking the shit out of Napoleon's troops. There's an exhibit about the battle and various artifacts that were found on the battlefield with a scale diorama of the battle. And there's this fuck-off huge sandstone monument with nearly 400 stairs (they tell you helpfully at the bottom when you begin going up the tower) that's just ... mad. After that I met a derby friend who lives there and we got cake.

October: I met someone I matched with on a dating app for coffee and cake. Nothing came of it. The cake was amazing, though.

I went to Hamburg for a tournament (scorekeeping). I stayed with a skater/official who lived in Lüneburg, which is about 45 miles south of Hamburg. She lives in a massive WG - a full duplex with a dozen rooms and 9 residents. She's lived there for 10 years or something, and the WG was founded 12 years ago. People have come and gone over the years. Friday evening we cooked together and ate with everyone from the WG who was home and interested (I think we were 8?). I want to live like that. Maybe not with so many people (or with 2 usable kitchens (kitchen 2 is mostly for drying laundry)), but the sense of community is something I miss.

The next weekend, we hosted a double header (I reffed both games).

The huge news from October is that I had my visa renewal appointment, and, if you didn't guess, they let me stay, even though I don't earn enough money for the government's liking and none of it is from German sources (aka "you don't have to live in Germany if you work for a Canadian company"). So he extended it for 3 years (the maximum on a freelance visa) and gave me "Erwerbstätigkeit erlaubt," which means I can get an actual job (full- or part-time).

The sad news is that my grandma died. She was 95, and she'd been saying for years that she was "too old" and "ready to go," so it wasn't unexpected, but it's still sad. She had a good run, and she was with it until the end. I'm doubly glad I got to see her in June. I can't make her memorial service (in January) because I have an appointment to pick up my new residence permit 2 days later, and that can't be moved.

November: I'm not going to talk about the US election.

I went to a discussion of space law at the SFF bookstore. It was interesting.

I took a day trip to Rostock to ref the first roller derby games ever in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Which was really neat to be a part of!

I met a derby friend (who's Irish and lives in Hamburg) and wandered around the Bergmannkiez (so many food) and got cake at the cake shop I mentioned earlier. After that, I went to a book club at the SFF bookstore (which is in the Bergmannkiez) to discuss The Saint of Bright Doors, which is one of my favorite books of 2023 (only about half the group liked it).

I also picked up a short-term editing gig through a writer friend, the pay from which is going to fund my trip to Norway in February. It should run partway through January.

December: I went back to Hannover, where I was head ref for my first real game. It went well, and one of the coaches said he liked my communication style in official reviews. I don't really want to be HR; it's too much responsibility. I did it because a friend was head NSO and begged me to do it.

I had an interview for a minijob I applied for. I don't know how it went; German interview practices are extremely different (you tell them how old you are! that's illegal in the US!), and even though I prepared, everything fell out of my head. I was supposed to get a call or email yesterday, but I didn't, so I assume that's a no. (I'll see if I can find a contact email to follow up at.) So I applied for another minijob at a different store, in addition to the other open application I have. I just want another 500 euros a month, man, then I can maybe get my own apartment (lol, there's nothing available for 600 a month here).

I went to a Christmas market with someone I matched with on a dating app. It was fine. We're meeting up again on Thursday and going to the Wall Memorial (because they've never done any of the tourist things here). I don't think I want to date them, but I'm always happy to collect more friends.

Tonight I'm going to a white elephant party, and tomorrow I'm meeting a friend for dinner (Japanese), after which we're going to game or watch a movie or something.

And that's 2024 so far! I want to say I'll post more regularly next year, but I say that every year.

I've been slowly becoming aware of needing to get a new phone, if only because my Pixel 5 was 3 years old and google was going to stop supporting security updates for it sometime this year. And I keep getting emails about the new phones on offer and all this shit.

But my Pixel 5 worked just fine until suddenly it didn't. The power button got stuck, somehow, and it decided that the slightest nudge was a long press, so it started the emergency SOS protocol a bunch of times before I was able to go change the setting (so long press was "assistant" instead). Then it would get stuck in a boot loop because it thought the power button was being held down. That was pretty alarming. So I managed to get it to power off and STAY off, and I left it for like 20 minutes before turning it back on, and the power button was no longer possessed. Hallelujah. But something got messed up with the button press to take a screen shot, which was also not ideal.

So I used the 15% discount from my emails to get a new Pixel 8, and if they give me the full trade-in value of my Pixel 5, I'll have gotten it for about a third off.

But I probably need to get new bike tires, because I completely failed to inflate them the other day. I'm going to try my roommate's standing pump, because it will undoubtedly work better than the little hand pump I have, but if that doesn't work out, it's off to the bike shop (where I'll spend more money).

I was in Dresden for 24 hours last weekend; the first 6 were spent at roller derby, then I slept (and had my phone misadventure), and in the morning I meandered a bit through the old city. There were supposed to be a bunch of protests (mostly counter-protests to a planned fascist march), but fortunately nothing started until after I was gone. I was worried, because the old city was one of the meeting areas (near the main station), and one of the counterprotests was meeting at the Neustadt station, which is where I got my train from). But I didn't encounter any fascists or counterprotesters, though I saw 2 guys get out of a pick-up truck with some stickers that looked kinda fash in the train station parking lot.

Dresden is my second-favorite German city. It's got a very different vibe from Berlin, and I like it. I would probably rather live in Hamburg than Dresden because of the politics in Saxony (that's where the PEGIDA assholes come from. The Wikipedia page gives "of the West" as the translation of "des Abendlandes", but Occident is more accurate for the shitty racist connotations.)

9 months left on my current residence permit. I hope I can a) get an appointment at the immigration office in a timely fashion (hahahahhahaahaahhah lol) and b) stay here. I'm not eligible for permanent residency because I'm here freelance, and that has a longer requirement -- 5 years instead of 3 if you have a real job. But you can bet I'm going to apply for PR as soon as I'm eligible (January 2027) so I can apply for citizenship. (Permanent residency is one of the requirements for eligibility. There are a couple others that I don't qualify for, like a blue card from an EU member state, or a citizen spouse.)

They changed the citizenship law, but it doesn't go into effect for another couple months, so what's currently on the website is the current law. It's supposed to make it easier, but in all the reporting I've read, there haven't been any specifics. Some people are supposed to be eligible after 3 years if they have "good integration measures," but there is no information anywhere on whether that applies to freelancers or only people with real jobs or only EU blue card holders or what. But I have plenty of time to figure it out. As long as they let me keep staying here, because I can't afford to live in the US.

I wouldn't have health insurance (though I would probably qualify for Medicaid again in Maryland); I would have to buy and insure a car and pay for gas. Yeah, I could just get a job at fucking Target idk but like. I'm able to have real health insurance here and I don't need a car; the new copyediting gig basically covers my fixed monthly expenses (rent, insurance, roller derby dues, bus pass, storage unit), so I'm only digging into my savings for groceries and incidentals.

So anyway, expect more panic starting in September or so.

The calendars I ordered were supposed to be delivered on Wednesday, but the packaging was damaged, which means it has to be sent to a central location, where the contents will be verified, and then it will be repacked and sent to me. The last time this happened was with an order of cat supplies, and it took long enough that I ordered another bag of cat litter 3 days later, and it arrived several days before the original shipment.

So we will see how long it takes a box containing 4 books to get to a central location, verified, and returned to me. I don't understand why it can't be done locally; it's not that hard to find the packing slip and compare the contents, right? I did find takers for the extra notebooks, though.

I've started at my new gig, and it seems like it'll be a good fit. I haven't actually done any of the work yet; I've been added to the slack and google workspace and project management thing and the airtable, I've been oriented to the workflow and stuff, and I've been assigned a handful of things to edit, which I will look at on Monday. (They're paying me for 10 hours a week or thereabouts, and nobody works on Fridays.)

I should go for a walk or something, because I haven't since Tuesday, but it's still cold out and I'm going to complain and be a big baby about it. (I did YouTube videos Wed and yesterday.) Tomorrow is roller derby, so I'll get plenty of exercise then.

Sunday I'm going to Potsdam for a tour of the plants hibernating in the orangery, which I stumbled across doing research for a short story. It's only 10 Euro, and I have unlimited regional travel, so getting there is free. It's an hour and a half to get there, so I'll probably aim to get there a couple hours before the tour (which is at 2 pm) and walk through the castle park in the horrid grey and maybe rain until it's time for the tour. It'll be starting to get dark after the tour.

I wish I could remember if I already bought a book about Sanssouci; I enjoy having the little histories at my fingertips, and they have better pictures than I'd be able to take. I might have the one about Charlottenburg. (If I do, they're in storage, because I don't see them on my shelf.)

It's been quite a year, I suppose. I kickstarted a book; I spent a weekend in Reykjavik with my sister; I went to 4th St Fantasy and saw friends. I officiated like 40 roller derby games this year, most of which were after July 1. I was out of town more weekends than I was home. I think for 2024, I'll limit myself to 2 away games a month and not just apply for ALL THE GAMES!!! because I can. (I enjoy doing it, but I need to not burn out about it.)

The big news is that I got a JOB that starts in the new year. It's 10 hours a week copyediting for a website, and it doesn't pay a lot, but it should be enough for me to cover my monthly expenses except food, which is much better than living entirely on my savings, which I've been doing since I moved here.

(I'm paying 550 a month in rent, 9 for mobile phone, 25 for dental supplemental insurance, 10 for roller derby dues, 10 for apple TV, probably 100-150 for health insurance (I'll find out in about a month what my new rate is going to be with my increased income), 60 or so for a storage unit, 49 for public transit, plus groceries, misc whatever, and cat supplies.)

(I have to keep the storage unit because the basement storage isn't secure and was broken into recently and my two good suitcases were stolen, so I have to replace them, ugh.)

What would be awesome is if, once I finish my kickstarted book and get it into the world, people buy it and I earn money from that, and I get my current novel polished up and one of the small e-book focused publishers picks it up and it sells, and I get additional income from that. (I'll KS the novel if I have to, but my god that was a pain in the ass. Plus apparently we're supposed to offer tchotchkes and super collector's edition hardbacks with full color dust jackets and sprayed edges and ... yeah, fuck all that noise.)

I want to try to write every day, maybe starting today, since it's the turning of the year, because I've been feeling adrift, I guess. Keeping track of things would help. I can take 20 minutes a day most days.

I don't believe in tarot or the supernatural in general. You can read any meaning into the cards in hindsight. Sometimes I just like to draw a card or two for funsies, to see what I can focus on (because you can find relevance in ANY card to something in your life).

I have the Shadowscapes Tarot, because it was a relatively inexpensive way to get a lot of art by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law, and I love her art style.

So, anyway, I picked a card for my 2022 energy and I got the chariot, which is overcoming obstacles and moving forward through hard work. I mean, yeah? My big obstacle right now is not having any income, I guess, and my plan to overcome that is basically more of what I've been doing except looking for additional potential revenue sources. So, pulling the chariot told me something I already knew.

But if I believed in it, I'd take it as confirmation that I'm on the right path.

I had my visa appointment yesterday, and it was approved for THREE YEARS, which is the longest amount of time one can be issued.

So today I filled out a very long form for the Finanzamt to get a tax ID for a business (as a freelancer, that's what I need to be). Unlike the US, you don't just use your tax ID number (the SSN equivalent) to file (business) taxes. And German taxes are due the end of the calendar year, so you can't get a tax advisor right now for love or money. But I won't have any German income for 2021, so I should be OK.

I have a person lined up to file my US taxes for 2021, so that's a good place to start. I also have some German tax advisors bookmarked for later.

I need to open German bank accounts, but that's on my list for next week. Once I've done that, I will need to send my documentation to the person who's managing my application for the artists social insurance thing, and I should also get in touch with the insurance broker again to make sure I get my application for one of the gesetzliche Kassen filled out properly.

(I know what the icon says. I don't seem to have uploaded the "invisible queer" icon I had over on LJ.)

I'm asexual. Now you're aware.
( tmi? )

One of the hardest things for me to adjust to, mentally, was that I don't actually want The American Dream (TM): big house in the suburbs, picket fence, 2.5 kids, all that stuff. All my years growing up, I learned from the media, from books, from family and peers, that the outward signs of success were a free-standing house in a good neighborhood, or a townhouse if you had to, and that these were the things good Americans should aspire for and acquire.

So, I got the large house in a subdivision. And after about 10 years living there, I started dying inside. I didn't have contact to anyone that didn't require driving somewhere. I had to drive to the bar, to the grocery store, to the downtown, to the park. (The main good thing was that, being a subdivision with lower traffic, running on the streets where there weren't sidewalks wasn't particularly dangerous.) It was around that time that I started building my plan to move to Berlin, where I felt at home in a way I didn't feel in a lot of other places.

I grew up in Frederick, MD, about 50 miles from DC and the home of Fort Detrick. (It was almost literally in our backyard at the first house we lived in.) At the time (the 80s-90s), it was a fairly small city, but growing as a bedroom community for Bethesda or even DC, as housing prices went up and up in Montgomery County, and Baltimore, to a lesser extent. I've been back a dozen times since my mom moved away around 2004, because one of my uncles still lives there. It's grown very poorly. The terrible intersections around the mall are only worse. The main road into downtown from the south (off 270, at this same horrible intersection) is two lanes. You want a bus? Good luck. The only positive, I guess, is that you can get the MARC train, which will take you to Baltimore (I think) or to a station where you can transfer to Metro for DC. There are tons more subdivisions, many more people, correspondingly increased traffic, and nowhere to put any of it.

Even though I grew up there, I don't feel at home there. I have nostalgic feelings, I guess, for downtown and Baker Park, and the handful of times they flooded the empty field by our second house (by the covered bridge) in winter for an ice skating rink. Could I feel at home there? Maybe, but almost certainly not anywhere I could afford to live.

I like going into DC, because it's alive and has public transit (to some extent, even if the Metro is as old as I am and hasn't been kept up at all), and you can do things there. But you still need a car, pretty much, if you want to do things like get groceries or visit friends/family in MD or VA.

But after the divorce, when I was living in a 2-BR apartment, I spent a lot of time figuring out what I actually wanted. I want an amount of space I can reasonably keep clean/tidy on my own. I want a balcony, and I need a bedroom separate from the living room. I don't want to do yard work, but maybe have a container garden on the balcony. I want to be able to walk to a bus stop or subway station (or both), to grocery stores, and ideally to restaurants, but I'm fine with hopping on the bus to get to one. I don't want to need a car.

There aren't a whole lot of places in the US that meet that description, and the ones that do are unaffordably expensive. But Berlin meets those criteria (although the city has a lot of problems, usually involving a lack of money), and it just feels right to be there.

I'm waiting for this pandemic to be over, or at least under some semblance of control, so that the EU will let us plague-bringers in (because we won't be plague-bringers anymore). My American dream is in Europe.

Today I intended to go for that walk, but I still didn't manage. I set 3 pm as a target, but I was still working on things at 3, so I couldn't go then. And then a little later, the sun was low and I didn't want to go.

But I got the outline for my NaNo project written and one of my friends is giving it a read-over for sense and stuff.

This week would have been Viable Paradise (24 I think), but they wisely cancelled it for the pandemic back in March or April. One of the staff members, who was in my year, organized a zoom call for one of the Thursday night traditions, and that just let out. It was fun and a little bittersweet, remembering my week on the island 7 years ago. My class is still mostly in touch through a group slack (it's VP 17 and some of our friends), and we had a con earlier this year, which was basically a dozen or so of us hanging out on zoom and talking about stuff. I got to talk about etymology and roller derby.

I won't say I didn't learn anything at VP - the instructors were good, and it helped solidify some of the things I know instinctively from being a reader for 40 years - but the biggest thing I got out of it was a couple dozen new writing peers, many of whom have become friends (and one of whom is letting me live in her guest room). There's also the very large community of VP alumni, though a lot of the early years people are off doing their own things because there was much less internet-community-stuff back then.

For people like me, who are terrified of introducing themselves to strangers, being able to go to a VP meetup at a con (when those exist again) makes it less terrifying. Especially because you know some people who know a lot of people and will introduce you.