Another tough year.
Mochi finally lost her battle with cancer, and we had to put her down on May 4. She did amazingly well, and was in good spirits, right up to the first of May. But it finally got too much for her. There has not been a day since then that I have not thought of her, and missed her. She was the source of most of whatever joy I experienced for several years, and I lost a big part of myself when I lost her. Yuki hasn’t been the same since, either. Mochi was what kept him interested in things, and now he seems kind of lost.
On a brighter note, Joanne’s last scans show her to be cancer-free, and we have every expectation that she will stay that way. Those scan results were a huge relief.
We went to Ashland, Oregon for our 25th wedding anniversary (basically), and spent a few days there, and a couple days in Portland. The big attraction in Ashland is the theater, and it was always enjoyable on our previous trips. But this time the selection of plays and the direction and performances were just not to our liking. Even Twelfth Night, a play that I like a lot, was so badly done that we left at intermission. But back in Portland we went to a really fine performance of A Streetcat Named Desire at the Portland Center Stage theater at the Armory.
We went to Arizona in August and spent a week in Flagstaff with my mom, then spent a few days in Bisbee. The weather in both places was excellent, except for a little rain, and it was a pretty enjoyable trip.
Finally, at the end of the year we spent 6 days in Loreto, Baja California. It was a good time to get away, because the temperatures fell to the 20s in Seattle the day after we left.
I was pretty disengaged from life for most of the year: losing Mochi just made everything seem like it had turned to ashes. So I didn’t help much with the garden, and let a lot of other things go. I’m hoping to change that this year.