Blog Birthday: Nine Year Review

L'astronave is nine today!

I thought I'd do a little retrospective and write a thoughtful summary, but looking through the archives yesterday, mygod, there's so much (2,236 posts, to be precise).
So I just copied the first line(s) of the first post each year, and chose a photo or two to represent the year. Even that took several hours. 
Here's my hop-skip-jump through the past nine years:

Year 1 began Sunday, October 7, 2007.
 First line of blog post Sunday Morning:

"One of the things I have missed most about blogging (it's been two years [since I shut down my first blog, flightless parrots]) is having a place to keep found words--things I overhear, for instance, or bits and pieces of writing--like a nest where magpies keep objects that catch their fancy." 

 ___________

Here's my bookshelf that year--the one I just (now = 2016) repainted white-gray. Maybe it looks like a magpie's, but actually I'd purged most of my (many) books.

                                               ___________

Year 2 began Tuesday, October 7, 2008.

First line of blog post  
. . . 365 Days, 438 Posts:

"Sometimes you can untangle yourself, unlike Robert Mitchum's character in Out of the Past (left, with Jane Greer, 1947)."


This year I make my first live-action movie, the 8-minute Orestes and the Fly. 

      v  Screencap of me with bink, Fly, costumer, and co-producer.

 ___________

Year 3 began Wednesday, October 7, 2009.

First lines of blog post 365: Marimekko Psycho:

"I'd forgotten there's a Finn Style store on the second-story skyway downtown. 
Yesterday I popped in for the first time and saw a Marimekko poppy shower curtain for $5, down from $49 because a worker had cut a tiny slice in it, opening its packing box."

Right: working on geography book for teens about Finland, in front of the wall that I just painted brown.
I'd painted it sea-green that year for the little movie I was making with bink (based on a Finnish saying, herring are too small for Christmas dinner).

Also made the best of my movies (5:30 min.), with bink:
The Disinherited (A Comic Sci-Fi Western).

 ___________

Year 4 began Thursday, October 7, 2010.

First line of blog post Blog Is Three:

"When I started, it'd been almost five years since my mother killed herself, and I was still dragging her death around."

 ___________

 
The next summer, I walked the Camino de Santiago with bink and Mz.

When I got home, I did something I'd always wanted to do: 
<  jump off the Lake of the Isles bridge.
_______________________________________

Year 5 began Monday, October 10, 2011.
 First line of post
My Eulogy for Susan Barrett Newhall, (1934–2011):

"Over the past few weeks––starting, in fact, around the time Barrett went into hospice––my friend Mz and I have been reading out loud the children's classic Charlotte's Web."

That winter I made Tiny Rhino's Moving Advent Calendar, almost every day for 24 days before Christmas filming a number, something to open (to mimic a calendar window), and a reveal.
This is one of my favorites, with a clip of Sufjan Stevens and the laundromat I used to go to:

 ___________

Year 6 began Friday, October 19, 2012.

First lines of post Grant Driven:
"After 3 months working as a nursing assistant in a nursing home, I pulled my wrist tendon so badly, I had to quit. I also inherited some money from my favorite uncle, who died this spring. (R.i.p., Uncle Tony.)"

wearing wrist splints

__________

Year 7 began Monday, October 7, 2013.

First lines of blog post Staggering to the finish line:
"I turned it in !!!
The ms of the sanitation history book (for teens).
Whew.
I feel like I ran a marathon."

The series of vegetables + spacecraft I water-colored this year are some of my favorite things I've made.

 ___________

Year 8 began Tuesday, October 7, 2014

First lines of post Year Seven, Day One:
"Today is l'astronave's seventh birthday and my first day of my new job: I leave in an hour to go lead activities with seniors [living with dementia] ...and toddlers."

 ___________

Year 9 began on Friday, October 9, 2015.

First lines of post Think Like an Astronaut:
"I've been reading astronaut Chris Hadfield's memoir An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth.
His advice for Humans on Earth is to be prepared for anything,
 . . . and enjoy it."

I start making outfits for rescue stuffed animals, like this Mountie jacket for Black Bear from the Salvation Army in west Duluth.

 ___________

Year 10 begins today, Friday, October 7, 2016.

7/12th of the way through my Year of Living Fannishly, working on getting physically stronger, and hopingtogod we in the USA don't wake up on Nov. 9 to a bloated tangerine as president...