Have I taken a long enough hiatus? You know the drill. When I’m going through something, I don’t blog. Well, this past year has been a doozy and its not even over yet.

When you’re young and imagining your life’s trajectory, you imagine it to simply go up. For the longest time, that was the way life was for me  — in fact, I celebrated every birthday with relish because I believed “every year just gets better.” Not to say that my life is miserable; far from it. But I’ve definitely hit a valley, after riding peaks for so long.

Let’s see if I can condense it all down. In July of 2012, Trinity got laid off from Fox Sports. It was an unexpected punch in the gut. We’d been looking at buying a house. So what can you do? I nearly freaked out, nearly canceled Chris’ first birthday party, but I’m glad I didn’t. But its been a slow slog to financial recovery, and we’re not even there yet — even though Trinity got a new, full-time gig with the Orange County Register in March. Jobs at the Register doesn’t pay as much as LA jobs do (I remembered that from when I got an offer for an online gig eight years ago), plus there’s the new, much longer commute (which weirdly takes about the same amount of time as the commute from West LA) — which of course may lead to him needing to buy a car sooner rather than later. Of course during Trinity’s unemployment and even post-unemployment, finances are still tough — the only purchases we can afford to make are necessities like food, utilities and gas to get to work, and if there’s anything extra, it goes toward the boys’ clothes, because they just keep growing.

Then there was this summer’s debacle. When we finally got our tax return — and thank God we didn’t owe any taxes; Trinity had the foresight to have taxes taken out of his unemployment from the get-go — our initial thought was to buy a car for Trin. But when I thought about it more, I realized our first priority should be moving somewhere closer — either to my work or Trin’s work. We spent several weeks looking at places in the San Gabriel Valley, Burbank, etc., not really settled on where to aim our search, and then our landlady gave us 30 days notice to move. Another punch in the gut. As a result, we had to focus our search and aimed at being closer to the boys’ daycare, since we didn’t want to disrupt their lives by moving AND changing their daycare all at the same time. We’ve now been in our new place — in the Valley — for nearly a month.

I’m a little on the verge of panicking. Hey, if I can’t write it here, where can I? We’re still in economic recovery, and we have a laundry list of needs — not wants, needs: new shoes for the boys, new “big boy” car seats for Chris (for two cars), clothes and shoes for Trinity and I (since we’ve held off on purchasing anything for ourselves for the past year). Plus, of course, we’ve just moved, so there some furniture purchases we actually need to make to make our home livable, without so many boxes everywhere. This morning, I woke up an hour early to look for freelance jobs, and I have to wonder — will that really help? I have no idea.

Was there a purpose in putting this all down? Probably not. But this has been my refuge for the past 15 years, and while I know blogging has changed, I still need this to be my online journal.