12/15/2015: It has been nine years and five days since I have written a log here on the Tamagotchi Planet section of Mimitchi.com.

Nine years.

How did that even happen? I don't know if I should laugh or cry.

I know that the last time I wrote here I did not intend it to be my last time. Usually I will say when I will be done for a while. Unexpectedly a whole lot of changes happened in my life and thus my time to write here kinda fell out of picture and was soon out of focus.

A lot has happened in that time period. Some of it all makes me want to go back and erase certain people and events from my logs in the past.. but that won't erase the fact those things happened. I can't rewrite history. So I will leave it as it was written, because at the time.. the words were accurate. I can't change that anymore than my regrets can change the past.

I know this is a Tamagotchi log, but I know from comments over the years that people enjoyed that I intermixed my life and my Tamagotchi experiences in these logs. For a long while I got very private about things over the years and it became hard for me to share things.

Enough time now has passed where I feel comfortable talking again...

So I will say.. in those nine years and five days a lot of good and bad has happened.

Back in 2006, the year of my last Tama log, I got away from a very stressful job and moved from California back up to Washington State into a nice little town by the Columbia River. Some years later I moved into my first house.. and 8 months after moving into that house I got divorced and moved out of that house. During the divorce, I ended up moving again.. and funny enough I moved back into the city where I grew up. I am now within 40 minutes of the city in which this website was born. Life has a strange way of coming full circle.

When I think about those last 9 years, I would say they were both some of the worst and best years of my life.

The first five years of that time period were easily some of the worst days I had gone through in my adult life. Life was not good.. for a lot of reasons. I was depressed. Very depressed. I felt very disconnected from the greater part of the human race. And I escaped reality by becoming addicted to the game World of Warcraft. I chose to escape.. I needed to escape. Back in those years I felt no hope, I felt lost.. there was something missing and I didn't know what it was. I just was unhappy. I had nothing to be passionate about, all of my drive to do something in my life had been drained away. Some people suck the happiness right out of a person.. and I had lost my happiness many years before that point. I had lost direction and control of my life. I lost my identity.. and eventually just stopped caring.

The divorce marks a dark period in my life.. it was a mix of panic, pain, numbness and despair. It also marks an important shift in life that needed to happen for many years. It was a time when I stopped listening to someone who was only poison to my soul and I started listening to my instincts once again.

It took a long while.. but eventually I was happily divorced.

In that time period right after I moved to California, and in the years following, I lost connection with the person I used to be. I lost what confidence I gained when I first started this website. I lost myself in all of the compromise and unhappiness that I felt. I lost my individuality to others needs and felt pushed to conform to be certain ways. Because I thought that is how things were supposed to be.. I let myself be lead along the path with blinders over my eyes. All of that just grew worse in time. My childhood was garbage, but I had found my identity when I began this website in the 1990's.. and when I moved to California that was pushed aside. I was not paying attention to my own emotional health and well being so I did not realize all of this until life shifted several years later.

The last 4 years has become a time period of growth and change, healing and happiness. In 2012 I began to reclaim my identity. My passion and drive for life started returning. I no longer needed to escape reality because reality was a place I wanted to be. While it took a long time.. the depression eventually fell away.

I wanted to live again.

So where am I today? Well physically I am taking refuge in a basement. Funny again, because I began writing this website in a basement. It is not the same basement. It is the basement of relatives who are letting me stay here while I fix some things in my life.

Emotionally I am much much better. This is the best I have been since the days before California when I was writing this website. I have been healing from the emotional damage I experienced. I feel love again in my heart. I feel passion again in my soul. I feel a peace in my world that I did not have for so long. I know who I am once again. And I have the freedom to be me again, to be my own person.

Financially my life is a mess. But everyone has their financial problems. This will not break me. It is challenging my abilities to make things work in my life, but it is not breaking me. I will be past this someday.

Money has never been all that important to me as long as I'm happy. And anyone who knows me knows that money has never been the key factor in my happiness.

The hobbies and virtual pets and unique things I've been passionate about and love and hold dear to my heart.. that has been the source of my happiness always. This very website is a testament to that fact.

Which leads me to.. Tamagotchi.

If you had told me 19 years ago I'd still have this website online I would have likely laughed and thought you were joking. Seriously.. who plans for that?

There are many regrets I have in my life. In losing my passion and my identity.. I stopped writing. I regret that I stopped writing here. If you look at my list of logs you see where things changed. You see the years and where they stop. That stop is when my passion for life and things that were important to me started a slow descent into unhappiness. You may have even noticed it in my writing.. you may have picked up on it long ago in those other logs.

I wish I had kept writing here.

Tamagotchi made me really care about making websites. Actually.. Mimitchi did. I started making websites before Mimitchi, but Mimitchi lit a fire in me that made me continue the website out of love for my Mimitchi but also my ever growing love with Tamagotchi.

Today it is my friend Dennis who inspired me to write here again. Actually.. Mimitchi did too.

On September 4th I hatched the first Tamagotchi I have hatched in a very long time.

This situation came about because my dear friend Dennis really wanted to hatch a Tama with me. And he was very encouraging about it and upbeat about it. Eventually I said I would give it a try, but only if he chose which Tama I should hatch. He chose my German red and yellow clock face Tamagotchi. I set that one aside on the nightstand and awaited a day we would both be on and ready.

Having not run any in so long I felt under confident and unsure about the whole thing. I still was feeling a bit disconnected from Tamagotchi from the years of not playing with them.

However.. talking with Dennis, reading his website (Ginjirotchi.ca) and looking through my Tamagotchi made me miss them and made me think it was time.

So on the afternoon of that September day.. it finally happened. He with his clear blue Tamagotchi and me with my German Tamagotchi.. we did our little group hatching over Facebook.

He wanted to get Ginji. And I just wanted mine to live.. haha.

Over the coming days we checked in about what was happening. I tried so hard not to pause.. and succeeded or came very close to if memory serves. Eventually he got Ginjirotchi. And being that our time zone differences were off, mine took a little longer to change. But somehow.. I too managed to get Ginji. Ginjirotchi my favorite P1 Tama, the first tama I have seen in years. I was happy to see his twirling dancing smiling little face.

As time passed eventually my Ginji passed away on September 18th. He passed away several days before Dennis's Ginji. I am sure I know why. One morning I left the house to go to the post office and thought I was going to be gone only a half hour. Since it was a while before Ginji was to wake up, I just left him here on the nightstand and headed on out thinking I'd be back fast. Turns out I had to go off and do some other errands with my mother so I didn't get back here until over 3 hours later.. and Ginji had been all alone. He didn't leave that day, but I am sure it quickened his departure. The day he left I had been out of the room... so I missed him leaving. I'm not the best caretaker when I am working I guess.

Time passed and Dennis kept hatching his Tama's but I found myself very busy with work so I tabbed that Tama and didn't hatch one further.

I had talked for a while with Dennis about hatching Digimons together and was excited at the idea of it because I never really spent the same amount of time with Digimon as I did my other Tamagotchi in the past. A couple of weeks ago when I went to make sure my Digi was working properly in preparation for the hatch.. I found one of the batteries had leaked acid on the inside. I cleaned it up best I could but had to get away from it as the smell was not a smell that felt safe to breathe. I hope I can get him back in working condition again down the road. I am pretty unhappy about that one still. I'll have to figure something out.

In November I had sent Dennis one of my clear light blue P2's so we could hatch two of the same together. And on December 5th Dennis and I decided to do the hatching. We did this with his friend Shawn in a group chat over Facebook. At the time I was feeling a bit better about my ability to raise a Tamagotchi and so I knew this time I would get to an adult. I was not all that confident about getting select characters though.

I had to work a whole lot so unlike the first time I ended up doing a lot of pausing during the growth stages.

As the Tama grew I got only the healthy characters along the way. I had a couple of mishaps and thought I had missed some disciplines but it always turned out I did not.

Eventually the day had come...

I will post here the little thing I wrote for Dennis the other day (slightly edited)...

[I look down at the Tama]
Tongaritchi: [stomp... stomp... stomp..]
Me: .....
Tongaritchi: .....
Tongaritchi: Fine fine, I'll change!
[Shimmering changing sound is heard]
Tama: [Blank screen]
Me: .............
Tama: [Screen changes and a familiar face appears]
Tama: Hello, old friend...
Me: Smiles...
Tama: [Momentarily focuses in intense concentration...]
Me: Gee, thanks for greeting me with a poop.
Tama: [Toothy grin, ear flick]
Me: Someone hasn't changed a bit...
Tama: Pyong, pyong
Me: Boing, boing


Mimitchi Smiles.

I wrote this log and included all of the stuff about my life here today because I have always shared with you what has happened to me in the past. I feel like I would be betraying my true self if I let things stop me from sharing the truth of what has transpired while I have been away. While too much detail is more detail than anyone wants to read about.. I tried to convey things from my emotional perspective because the last 9 years have been nothing short of emotional. There is much more to say, but those things will have to wait for next time.

And there will be a next time.

Music expresses well for me how I feel. I would say this song is a good image of how I feel lately. Enjoy.