The year started with me still being on a dating frenzy which resulted in meeting the guy that would eventually become my boyfriend. In March we officially got together. He’s awesome and I love him so much. <3 He’s strong, caring, understanding, and very sexy! ;)

In April I got back in touch with my daughter. I’m very happy to have her back in my life. She also gets along with my boyfriend very well which makes me extra happy. We play games, street chalk and watch Doctor Who together.

In August, someone gave me back one of my old cats, heavily pregnant, and we wound up with kittens. Cute, but not really planned. We did eventually decide to keep one of the kittens, sparky, who I think fell into the big bag of catnip when she was very young because she’s extremely active!

Also in August I have been full time for three years and on hormones for a year.

Then in September I got approved for surgery. I saw the surgeon the next month and it seems that my surgery date will be around May 2012. I’m very nervous.

And in December we had wonderful Christmas dinners. Both with friends and with my parents. And the new year’s party we went to was great! So much fun! :)

New year’s even was great too and I had so much fun. My boyfriend and I partied until late into the night and we were so broken the next day!

Of course these are just a few of the things that happened to me last year. There were numerous other notable events, like my hair catching on fire! :p

Now I’m off to make 2012 even better! :)

Yesterday was the Transgender Day of Remembrance in Amsterdam. The official day is today but it was held yesterday in order to get noticed as much as possible. Which is still needed. A big part of this day is remembering the dead but it’s also to make the people more aware of us and especially the lack of rights we have all over the world.

People were to meet at the COC in Amsterdam at 3pm and at 4pm we were to leave to a memorial monument. Everyone who wanted to could grab a white helium-filled balloon that had a string with a tag attached. On those tags were the names of the transgender people that were murdered in the past year, their place of birth, their age, and their cause of death… If known, as not always all data was properly reported.

The deaths were often brutal. The ‘mildest’ ones were where people were shot in the head, but others died from multiple stab wounds, being burned alive, dismembered, decapitated, ran over and smashed with a block of concrete. It’s pretty horrific to realize that every other day this still happens somewhere in the world, and those are only the ones we know of. It’s a frightening thought. While I realize I live in one of the safer parts of the world (there are no reported trans hate crimes in The Netherlands since 2007) it is still a thought that lingers in the back of my head.

Once everyone had arrived at the monument there were several speeches held by people invested in the trans community. There was someone from the city council, the leader from the trans rights movement in the Philippines, and more but I cannot really remember who they all were right now but their words affected me greatly. A point was made to tell everyone to please become more visible to make people know we exist and deserve the same rights as any other individual. I cried during most of this which only got worse when the part was reached where everyone would go to the microphone, one by one, recite the information of the victim listed on the tag of their balloon, and let it go into the air. There were a lot of them. Too many. And as was made clear, they weren’t even from all the victims of the past year, that number is even greater.

The sadness was overwhelming but I’m still glad I went. I’m also glad my boyfriend was with me because there is no way I could have gone through all of this on my own. It definitely left an impact.

Talking about a whole variety of subjects.

Well the other day I got this weird message after 1am via my Formspring.me account. All it said was:

Hello, are you the previous owner of Buttons? I would like to know if you want her back?! If not I will bring her to the shelter.

Especially that last line bothered me greatly. It sounded very threatening.

I managed to retrieve her email address and mailed her all my info. I did not hear from har at all the next day so the day after that, after I found her phone number, I called her and asked what was going on. She apologized for the crude message and that it wasn’t her intent. Still, I wanted Buttons back and asked when it could be arranged. She said she could bring her by the next day around 3pm.

That next day she calls me just before 3pm saying Buttons had decided to take a long walk and hasn’t come home yet and if I would be alright with her bringing Buttons by on Sunday instead. Just as I agreed to that Buttons walked back in the door and they decided to bring her by today anyway.

Despite her apology and the reasons she gave me as to why the cat had to go away I was still a little weary. They only stayed for a few minutes after they dropped her off and afterward I noticed a bit of blood on the wall. Buttons must’ve hurt herself on the drive over here in her cat cage. A tiny part of her left ear was wounded.

She settled in pretty quick, hissing at the other cats but more than eager to be petted by me. She ate and drank and seemed to be doing well. Once I got to check her out a bit more I noticed her very round waist. It looks like she’s pregnant and that they neglected to tell me that.

So while I was finally down to just one cat, in just a few weeks I managed to get back up to three, with the possibility of winding up with a few more in the near future. Not exactly how I planned this.

When I told my mom my plans to transition from male to female she was of course very scared. Scared that this would turn out to be a ‘phase’, for one, but also scared that I would be bullied, beaten up, or worse. While I’m lucky to live in a country that’s pretty tolerant about these things it’s not like it doesn’t happen at all so I could understand her concerns.

I also could not have done this at a worse time for her. She had only recently lost her other son, my older brother, and now she was to lose the last one she still had. That was not an easy thing for her to come to terms with.

Once the initial shock wore off it slowly started getting better, although she still had a lot of trouble with using the proper pronouns and calling me by my new name. Over time that got a lot better. She now calls me Julie and refers to me as her daughter which makes me very, very happy! :)

Then when I started to date a lot she was also scared a bit. Considering I tend to hook up with guys really fast I can understand her fear of me potentially meeting the wrong guy and it go horrible wrong, or even violent. Hell, the last guy I met up with I had only talked to for a few hours the night before. So I can definitely understand it but it’s how I choose to do things.

Doing that had the nice bonus of finding my boyfriend though, along with meeting some nice friends along the way. :) Of course I went non-monogamous with my boyfriend after a while which is something my mom didn’t quite understand at first. If I loved him so much, why would I want to see other people? But that’s just how I prefer to live my life and while it is nothing she could ever do herself, she doesn’t judge or condemn me for it.

When someone criticizes me, she defends me. When I need her help, she stands by me. When I need to talk, she is there for me. She has always stood by me even when things were rough, she didn’t disown me, she never stopped loving me.

Thank you, mom. You’re the best and I love you. :)

Zim was left behind by abusive owners (I really, really hate animal cruelty) when they moved away. Some family members of mine took care of him but they already have older cats and that didn’t really mix.

He was hiding underneath the couch for most of the first day, but I took him out a few times to let him examine the apartment a bit. Later that night he already did much better and it wasn’t long before he started to want my attention and such.

It’s been a fay days, and now he’s pretty much completely acclimatized to his new home. He’s been outside, played with toy mice, and he doesn’t even yell at my other cat Pongo anymore. :)

For clarity: Zim is the red one. Pongo is white with black spots. :p

A while ago my boyfriend said I had to have had my hair cut before the next time I would see him. So I got like 8 inches of hair cut off, got bangs, and highlights! :D

We don’t celebrate Halloween in this country. Which makes me very sad :( Apart from a few clubs doing supposed Halloween-themed parties (which tend to suck) nothing is done here. No trick-or-treating, no decorated houses with gravestones and grim reapers, nothing. It sucks.

Luckily I did have something to do that day as it also happened to be the day of the Gothic and Fantasy Fair this year. It was two days actually, Saturday and Sunday, but I only went the Sunday as it isn’t very close and OMNIA would be performing on Sunday only so the choice was easy.

It was all indoors so I didn’t have to worry about bad weather or anything so I worse my cybergoth outfit. Which, I have to say, I look so much better in now than I did a few months ago. I was too damn skinny back then. Sadly, I have no pictures at all from me at the fair as it was pointless to try. It was really crowded, there were shittons of people there. Though some guy did walk up to me and wanted his picture taken with me. He put his arm around me and had (I think) his daughter take the picture. Who knows, it might wind up on the internet somewhere.

I had a lot of fun there, there were a ton of kewl stands, nice people, and of course, good music! :) I love OMNIA so I made sure to get there early. As soon as I heard them do their sound check I went out there. Still had like an hour to go but with OMNIA you have to be there early or you’re gonna be standing at the back.

Their concert was awesome but I expected no less. The instruments did suffer a bit from the heat indoors so some retuning had to be done in-between songs. At one point it was so bad that Jenny had to go backstage to tune her hurdy-gurdy cuz she couldn’t hear and told the rest of the band to just play something else until she was done. They actually started to play Tenacious D’s “Fuck Her Gently” for a bit until she got back.

The concert was long and they played a ton of my favorite songs. Old ones like “Etrezomp Ni Kelted” and new ones like “Toys in the Attic” and my current favorite song, “Wolf Song”. So pretty. <3

Of course there was a lot more to do there than just watch OMNIA play. There were a lot of kewl stands with awesome stuff. I was mainly looking at clothes and hoping to find something nice. I tried on corsets at two different stands. As I wear the smallest non-custom made size it can be quite hard to find a good one. at one stand I found one that was just looked awesome! The model and size were perfect, but… it was blue. I’m looking for pink, black, or a black/pink combo. I do have her email address so she can look if it happens to be available in either of those colors.

I was also looking a lot at boots as there were a few stands that sold Demonia boots. I currently own two pairs of boots by Demonia but I want more cuz they’re so awesome. <3