Hi, I'm Caroline.

One month ago today, I received an email informing me that my time at my current employer had come to an end. There was no warning, no indication this was coming (though to be fair, the last six months felt pretty rocky at the company level). I had a chat with my team lead that morning, our usual 1:1 check-in, and I was chugging along with my work. Within minutes of receiving the email, my access was cut, and that was that. It was an astonishing and brutal end to a 13-year career with this company. I spent 30% of my life there! And I, along with something like 280 colleagues, were treated to the tech layoff special.

If you go back through these archives, you’ll find my former employer all over this blog – mostly good stuff! I had some good times there, met amazing people, and was proud of my work. I wrote “day in the life” pieces to promote what a cool workplace it was at the time – because it was! But things changed, as they do.

Am I bitter? No. I have an amazing life, there’s no need to be bitter. My job was just that – it paid the bills, helped put food on the table, but it wasn’t my identity.

Am I angry? You betcha! Had I walked out of my own volition six months ago, I would have been treated to a sizable severance. As it is…let’s just say I’m grateful we have another source of income. My loyalty was clearly misplaced, and the whole experience has been insulting…but also a reminder and a learning experience, so I’m thankful for that.

So, I’m taking this opportunity to step back, re-evaluate, and breathe. I’m free. I’ve spent the last month doing whatever I please – writing, celebrating Tim’s birthday, weeping gently into my blankie over the new season of The Last of Us (okay more like ugly crying but still). I’m thinking about my dad, who passed away ten years ago this year, and how much I miss him. I’m cleaning out closets and cupboards and budgeting and daydreaming about what comes next.

I’m unsure how long I’ll keep this blog. If it disappears, I’m still at sixhours.tumblr.com (The Hellsite^TM is unfortunately still owned by my former employer, but I was there well before it was acquired) and my artsy fartsy stuff is at carolinemakes.art.

Oh, right, I have a blog. It’s been a busy spring and summer!

I went to Madrid with my team in March, probably one of my favorite work trips so far. Just a beautiful city and lots of fun; the cooking class was especially cool, although I’ll go easier on the sangria next time.

March also brought the solar eclipse to our region of Maine, so we hung out with family and marveled at how many people came to our tiny town in the middle of nowhere just to watch a few minutes of totality.

Then Mom and I went to Mexico for a family wedding. It was my first time in Cancun and my first time staying at an all-inclusive resort. There was a lot of lounging by the pool and the ocean and a really good party.

We took a family trip to Prince Edward Island at the start of the summer and further cemented my belief that I must live there someday.

Plus there were all the usual anniversaries and annual rituals. Tim and I went to St. Andrews, New Brunswick for a little anniversary weekend away. Gwen got braces! The kids just started eighth and tenth grade, and in a few days, we’ll have two teenagers instead of one. The march of time is inevitable and exhausting and I love it.

And when I’m not traveling or working, I’ve been spending a stupid amount of time on Tumblr and Discord. I got back into writing fanfic for The Last of Us so that’s where most of my creative brain energy is going. I’ve written over 200k words since the start of the year, wild! The fangirl in me is thriving.

Tim: “Noticed we’re out of flossers, so I ordered some.”

Me: “Oh, thanks. We’re almost out of toothpaste, too, could you-“

Tim: “Yeah, I ordered that, too.”

Me: “…I just got very turned on.”

First! Over the holidays, I ditched my Etsy shop and started hawking my wares on my own website at carolinemakes.art. This is the first time I’ve built a “real” website on WordPress.com, which is pretty funny when you consider I’ve worked there for 10+ years.

Why’d I make the switch? Well, Etsy’s increasingly draconian policies were starting to chafe a bit, and I learned I can use my printer in an automated fashion with WooCommerce. At some point I may even put up some original paintings if I can get them photographed and mocked up. Knowing me, that won’t happen until next Christmas.

Second! I got really into The Last of Us TV show over the break and started writing fanfic again. I haven’t painted in weeks; all my creative energy is going into this story that apparently has to get out of my head now. I’ll hit 50k words on this thing today. Being a single-fandom girlie for so long, writing for characters that aren’t Mulder and Scully is weird, but fun.

In that vein, I’m back on Tumblr at sixhours.tumblr.com. So if you want to watch me lose my shit over a certain brown-eyed Chilean-American actor, or whine about how The Last of Us ripped my heart out of my chest and ran over it, or join me in fawning over X-Files gifs, Tumblr is the place to be.

And I lied! There’s a third thing!

I turn 41 today. 40 seemed like a big, scary number at first, but I’m really enjoying my 40’s so far. Happy birthday to me!

https://www.tumblr.com/sixhours/739706236991373312/me-to-my-imaginary-boyfriend-pedro-pascal-oh

Work took me to Munich in November, my first trip overseas since before the pandemic! I opted to arrive a couple days early to acclimate to the time change and do a little exploring around the city before our division meetup, and I’m so glad I did, because once the meetup started there was very little time for extracurriculars.

The conference hotel was right next to a large park with lots of walking trails, so I tried to get out every day for a wander. It was cloudy and gray most of the time but still in fine autumn form, so I have a lot of photos of foliage in the park.

On one of my free days I took the train out of Munich to see the Nazi concentration camp and museum at Dachau. That place could be a post in and of itself, but I would feel weird sharing the photos; it feels disrespectful. Suffice it to say it was a worthwhile and intense visit.

And then there was the meetup! I reconnected with so many people I have missed dearly and met colleagues I’ve worked with for years but never met in person. We worked on projects together and attended learn-ups and as usual, I was exhausted by all the social interaction the end of day 3.

Unfortunately I must have picked up a stomach bug, because the last night of the meetup I had to bow out of activities and cuddle with the toilet for several hours. 😛 That was miserable, not gonna lie. I was already feeling homesick after such a long trip and being very ill and sore did not help. Thankfully Automattic covered the bill for an extra night at the hotel and a rescheduled flight home. It’s always an adventure!

The minute we crossed the bridge, I felt at home. Passing quiet, tiny towns in the dark of a late autumn evening, I felt welcomed by this tiny Canadian island. Home, like the potato fields of Aroostook County, but with a salt smell in the air that reminds you the sea is just on the other side of the horizon. Home, with Pride flags flying and rainbow stickers in the windows, and with more diversity on one tiny island than I’ve seen in my whole home state. Home, a safe place with a deep sense of community and the same stoic resilience I’m used to from New Englanders, just in the Maritimes.

No place is perfect, but I think PEI is perfect for me.

As family vacations go, it was a rich one. We explored Charlottetown’s restaurants and shops, and ate Cow’s ice cream every night. We drove up to Brackley Beach, enjoying a warmer-than-average day searching for sea glass and shells and skipping iron-rich stones into the briny, ice-cold water. I forgot to pack my painting kit, which gave me an excuse to support a local art shop and try some Canadian-made paints from Beam (now I need all of them, damnit). I had the fried fish at Richard’s seafood for the second time in my life, and it’s just as tasty as I remember. Gwen and I took a late-evening walk to her favorite playground at Victoria Park.

When we left, I felt a familiar pang; the sinking feeling in my stomach I used to get when returning to boarding school after spending a long weekend with my family. The feeling that I was leaving something vitally important behind. I, not for the first time, Googled our eligibility for citizenship. Tim started looking at homes, eyeing the prices.

I think we might do this. Not right away, but someday, sooner than retirement.

I think this might be my mid-life crisis, but it’s a good crisis.

I’m way behind on posting these, but I had a great meetup with my team in Lima, Peru back in September!

I wasn’t prepared for just how big Lima is. The traffic was wild, and more than once I had to close my eyes and hope the Uber driver knew what he was doing. The weather stayed mostly gray, which was a pity, because the view over the Pacific would have been lovely with a little bit of sun.

The biggest highlight (aside from spending time with the team, which is a given) was the food. So. Much. Good. Food. Many pisco sours were consumed, and we tried several local specialties — seafood, causas (dressed mashed potatoes), blueberries the size of my thumb. No guinea pig, though!

For our activity day, we toured the catacombs under the Basilica and Convent of San Francisco and went on an elaborate guided street food tour. My legs and feet were killing me by the end of the day (lipedema is a PITA, literally) but my stomach was happy!

I had a lot more anxiety about this trip than normal, though I’m not sure if that’s a lingering post-pandemic feeling or just the itinerary being long and tiring. I left home in the early afternoon to drive to Bangor for a hop into New York, then took a midnight flight directly to Lima. When the plane doors closed on the Lima leg, I had an intense feeling of panic; eight hours in a crowded plane was *not* where I wanted to be at that moment. I breathed through it and obviously made it to the meetup intact (and relatively well rested, all things considered).

I got into the city well before the rest of the team, and before our AirBnb was available, so I spent my first few hours hanging out at a fancy little restaurant (with really good breakfast) before meeting my teammates as they arrived. The next four days were a whirlwind of work, eating, socializing, seeing the sights, and travel back home. Phew.

… and I get to do it again next month for a much larger meetup in Munich! Yay?!? 😅

We ended the summer/started the school year with a day trip to our favorite city across the border, Fredericton. The highlight was painting ceramics at Clay Cafe; looking forward to seeing the fired results when we head to PEI in a couple weeks!

I’m not usually one to share my dreams; no one needs to know what goes on in the dark, weird corners of my subconscious, and most of my dreams are pretty typical (read: boring) anyway.

But I have to write about a recent one, because for the first time in my 40 years of dreaming I had an actual honest-to-god lucid dream. For those who never watched Inception, a lucid dream happens when you become aware you’re dreaming but you don’t immediately wake up.

To set the stage, I dreamt I was at a meetup. Since I started traveling for work, meetup dreams are pretty common. Usually there’s an element of anxiety — a missed flight, an inability to re-pack everything I’ve magically acquired in a five-day stay (random stuff like old toys, boxes of books–mind clutter), a plane crash, an inability to find the meeting I’m hours late for — but in this dream, my team (not my actual team, because that would make sense, but random people* who I took to be my team) and I were just hanging out.

* As an aside: Do other people have dreams that feature casts of complete strangers? Sometimes with backstories and personalities unrelated to anyone you know in real life? Does anyone else find this weird, that your brain just makes up whole people for the purposes of nighttime entertainment? Just me? Anyway.

We went to lunch at a café, then back to the house where we were working. We’re all sitting around a big table talking about what to do next, and I started thinking to myself how strange it was that we were going home tomorrow but we’d only been here for three days, and that didn’t make sense, because three days is a pretty short meetup. Then I thought, “Wait a minute, my next meetup is in Peru, and this is not Peru…”

At which point I slammed my hands down on the table and said, “This is a dream! I’m dreaming!” and my colleagues looked at me like, “Yep, we know.”

Miraculously, I didn’t wake up at that point. I stayed in the dream, and kept talking about how this wasn’t real, how I could do anything I wanted, and how cool was that? My colleagues were totally unfazed.

Then, as if to prove to myself I was lucid dreaming, I said, “Look, there’s Pedro Pascal!” and voilà! There he was. And I was like, “I could just go make out with him right now! Because this is a dream! Anything goes!” My colleagues agreed. But did I make out with Pedro? Noooooooo. I just ignored him and continued to gush about how not-real this whole situation was.

Then I stood in a line for a while? And got some fruit? And a lecture on how unhealthy my eating habits were?? All while chattering to my colleagues, who looked at me with growing disdain, about how this wasn’t real, how I was having a lucid dream and could do anything I wanted! Wow!

And then I woke up. No steamy Pedro scenario. No flying. No superhuman strength. No summoning my dad from the dead so we could have a real conversation.

Think of all the things you could try in a place where the only limit is your imagination! And I just...stood in a line for a while. And ate some fruit.

Even my subconscious knows I’m lame. 😒