So what happened in 2023?
I got married
On September 16, 2023, me and Lee-Anne got married. The theme was sunflowers, because they were in season and because I had a story about how, after years of effort, I finally managed to make a sunflower blossom at my old place, the year we started going out.
It hadn't been planned, but on the day of the wedding I got a Facebook notification reminding me that September 16 was the day that first flower blossomed. The wedding itself happened to time itself so that most of the sunflowers at home were blossoming the day of our wedding, and it was the most successful year for them at our current home so far. You can't plan for that type of thing. It felt like the universe saying "You got it right".
The colour was purple, because it's my favourite colour while Lee-Anne's is yellow. The yellow got worked in through the sunflowers and the purple contrasted it.
It was held on her parents' property. We had about 75 people. It was an afternoon wedding. The weather was perfect but the ceremony was at high noon so I was still sweating bullets under the altar.
Some other things happened surrounding the wedding as well, such as getting our engagement photos done, and my coworkers threw us a wedding shower.
On a less positive note, the other major theme of the year was...
Lots of cats died
Top photo is Cassidy. My mother and brother adopted her when she was five, and tragically she passed only three years later. I may have said that she'd only lived with them a year when I announced her death initially. COVID brain messed with my sense of time.
When they first got her, she was incredibly shy. Over time, she became playful and affectionate. Unfortunately, she developed what was initially thought to be a resperatory infection but was later determined to be cancer.
Her death was sad in its own right, but it was an especially harsh blow for the family, as Cassidy was adopted partially to keep the two older cats, Blackavar and Thor company after the then-youngest cat Luna had died under similarly unpredictable circumstances. Both were young female grey tabbies, so it felt like history repeating itself.
By contrast, Thor was adopted when he was six and lived to be over 20. He wound up outliving Luna, Blackavar, and Cassidy despite being the eldest since his entry into the household. His death was peaceful, passing overnight sleeping next to my brother, his favourite human.
Otherwise, a cat that I'd supported someone to adopt around the same time I'd helped with the adoption Cassidy, had a stroke and had to be put down only couple months after Cassidy's passing. If the universe was telling me "You got it right" about the wedding, it felt like it was saying "You got it wrong" for helping people to adopt cats.
Also, my coworker's cat escaped and didn't return. I was pretty uninvolved with that. Still, tough year for cats. In fact, I think all four met their respective fates within a three month span.
It wasn't all death though. It just so happened that Lee-Anne's sister in law was trying to adopt out two kittens when Cassidy passed. This was already a known thing, and because all this happened so close to our wedding, all relevant parties would be in the same location at the same time. It was opportune enough that my mother and brother chose to go through with adopting them.
I was apprehensive to be involved with this because of the recent misfortunes of the two other cats I'd helped to be adopted. Also, they still had Thor who was 20, and the age difference seemed a bit extreme.
I told myself that while this was happening between people in my network, I myself was wholly uninvolved. And they wound up getting along okay with Thor
They named the little black kitten Castor and the tuxedo one Pollux, after a pair of twin gods in the Greek pantheon. I guess this is in keeping with the mythological god theming of Thor, although I think Thor is Norse mythology. They are genetically at least half-brothers to our cat, Finn.
Other things that happened this year...
I finally got COVID
It's a long story, but one weekend I had cause to be in Brampton, then Toronto, then Guelph, then Kitchener. On the Monday I was feeling kind of crumby and called in sick. I didn't think to do a COVID test because almost everyone I know has had it and I'd never tested positive. In fact, I'd lived with Lee-Anne when she had it and I didn't contract it. My mother and brother never caught it either, so I figured there was some kind of genetic immunity in our family.
But as it so happens, my brother was also feeling kind of sick. He took a test, it turned out positive. He let us know, I took one and it was also positive. Mom and Lee-Anne wound up catching it too. Me and my brother both developed symptoms at similar times, but I had more exposure from traveling between cities on public transit, so I think I was the one to introduce it to everyone. Oops.
I only felt bad for the first couple days but I wound up having to take a week off work because I kept testing positive.
I had my fifth work anniversary
They gave me a bouquet of flowers and a $75 Indigo gift card. I knew that everyone gets a speech made for them by their supervisor at the five year mark. I've always thought that hearing mine would be really cringey, and I used to joke that I would have to quit at four years and eleven months to avoid it. But after the rush from the wedding shower they'd thrown me, it slipped my mind that this was happening as well and I wound up getting surprised by the speech.
It was pretty good, to be honest. And now that I've survived it, I guess I'll have to work until my ten year anniversary, which is when I'd get my next one.
This happened in September. So now I have my birthday, anniversary, and work anniversary all in the same month. Just put it all in September!
Take the Heat Off
One of the more surprising things that happened this year was that a fireman somehow got wise to my organization's crisis intervention training, of which I am one of the facilitators. He liked what he saw, and asked if we could create a unique workshop to help firefighters with de-escalation. So me and two others wound up developing a workshop and proceded to present it in small groups over a series of weeks to every firefighter in the city. We called the session Take the Heat Off.
Lee-Anne got her job with Come to Work at the CNIB
And finally, Lee-Anne got a full-time job this year with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. She's with the Come to Work program, which is employment supports for people with vision impairments. She'd done an extended paid internship with this organization on a different team, so she had a pre-established relationship with them, although there was a gap in time between when she completed her previous role and when she started this more official one.
Overall, it was a pretty eventful year. I think I've said that if years were chapters in my life, 2020 would have been COVID, 2021 would have been moving in with Lee-Anne, 2022 would have been diabetes (still have that pretty much beaten, btw), and 2023 would be marriage.
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