I have archived and locked the pre-2015 entries on my Livejournal, as part of a wider process of tidying up and looking over material from the past, the better to eventually create an official archive. I won’t shut down LJ, which is now a mirror for my WordPress site. Those of you who read it there, rather than here, will still see posts, business as usual. I’ve simply closed the door for awhile on a ten year chapter of my life that, mostly, doesn’t seem very relevant to the now. I’ll browse through, over time, and cherry pick out any good bits for reposting.
This journal-combing process extends back in time to the pre-Internet era; I kept diaries when I was in my teens, and I’ve been looking back at those too, sometimes with surprise and delight, often with embarrassment. Teenaged alyx telewittered a lot, OMG, so much, and affected to care about hockey, and had handwriting that makes my current scrawl look like the calligraphy of some ancient, highly trained Empress of Japan. At fourteen, I documented my early menstrual cycles in bracingly gross detail, and (cringe) occasionally with diagrams. We should send someone back in time to teach the concept of TMI to the little children of Alberta, perhaps sometime in the early Seventies.
Cool discoveries abound, too, though: teen Alyx drew a lot of cartoons, weird distorted bobblehead portraits. She often reports working hard on various writing projects (some original, some fanfic) and she read a shocking number of books.
Year fourteen is the only of the handwritten diaries I’ve reviewed in detail, and there’s a lot that’s missing: things I can remember that were happening at home and school that simply get no mention. This was, in part, because I couldn’t count on the entries not being read by others. I was about sixteen, I think, when I made a truly secure hiding place for my journals. We’ll have to see if the content changes when that happens, or after my past self leaves for university.
is on the 
, on the other hand, and Sophie in particular got under a few readers’ skins, and not always in a way that led to true and enduring love. I decided to take this as a sign that I’d become better at characterization, especially since most of the reviews were, in fact, raves. Anyway, it might simply be the effect of a lingering head cold, or the fallout from a rather unusual week, but right now I’m thinking my only sane response is to go “La la la, can’t hear you!” and think of something else until my head clears.
. We’ve had so many chances to do so over the years–I think people have lent us the DVDs on three separate occasions, and we never quite managed to pop one into the gadget before sheepishly returning the disks. It’s been one of those gaps that was almost embarrassing to admit to, what with me being such a raging Paul Gross fan. But it never happened, until now, and it’s almost–but not quite–too dated. It’ll be good prep for seeing His Almighty Grossness and Martha Burns in 
