5 year blogversary!

Ok, today has been frustrating in minor ways so it's a good time for a post about exciting news.  Where I live, getting a name change involves having the proposed change published for 4 weeks, so first you wait for a letter saying that the publication has begun and at the end you get a letter saying that it's all over and you take that second letter back to the court house and schedule a court date.  I've been watching the mail for the first letter and it has arrived along with the page from the paper that has my little notice :)  Everything is spelled correctly, so that is good!

Reading through the other notices is completely adorable.  Most are changes of last names or "Americanizing" first names.  Most of the time there are parts of the old name that remain (including mine) but there are a couple where a complete overhaul is happening!  I do wonder what is behind the name changes of those who are printed in the paper; everyone has a story and even though the steps of a name change are pretty simple, there's a lot of work to be done with notifying everyone and changing information EVERYWHERE.  While the cost is not out of the realm of possibility, I had to save up for it for a long time to make sure I could still afford to change all of my info after paying the court fees (a new drivers license, work ID, checks and bank card, etc, are not expensive on their own but it adds up when you do it all at the same time).  I think it's hard enough that most people don't just wake up one day and just file the paperwork without doing any preparation.  One person is changing from "Jerry Dean" to "Geraldine" and there could have been quite a lot of work that went along with that name change!

I'm so excited for all of them and I hope they are as happy with their changes as I am with mine!  I'm going to post the page on the refrigerator :)

.....

My first blog post was on this date 5 years ago.  It is so wonderful to have moved through and beyond the things that happened.  Toren's death still has me shredded, but that was just one part of it all; I didn't know that was the start of losing everything that was important to me.  Divorce was brutal but I'm so glad to not be in that marriage anymore!  It feels like I dodged a bullet (you know, aside from the whole part where I'm still in therapy from being in that relationship for over a decade and he has been difficult to set boundaries with).  Losing the house was embarrassing, but I do prefer living in this little house and it's wonderful to not worry about expensive repairs.  My career is still directionless and I don't know if I'll ever be able to return to reproductive health research, but I'm doing well trying out different topics and even getting some publications.  I have a great boyfriend and am in a relationship where we sometimes get mad at each other but overall we have a good time together and, very importantly, I feel cared for.

I guess, if I had known five years ago what else was coming up I would have been very discouraged (to put it mildly).  If I had known what was coming I wouldn't have even tried living through it because I wasn't strong enough, but I am now.

A lot of the blog authors who were writing when this blog began have moved on and I've wondered what to do with this blog, especially since I don't write or interact with other bloggers often.  It still feels like an unfinished journey though so it's staying up and public, however, very soon I'll be taking down posts discussing struggles with my current relationship because my boyfriend and I have started a health blog and I think I'll put a link here, which means SnuggleBunny is about to lose his anonymity!

Anyway, here's a song I'm liking lately.