Okay, here's an idea.

[avevale_intelligencer]

Lots of people have done the census thing, and I've enjoyed reading them.

So how about this?

March 2021: living in modest detached house on Devon coast with Countess and three or four cats. Employed part-time at a local bookshop, but income from books and albums helps to cover bills. Countess still enjoying benefits of miracle cure for diabetic complications discovered in 2017, and finding blood sugar much easier to keep under control when exercise isn't agony. Discussing twenty-volume collector's edition of Mershane Chronicles with publisher, and looking forward to Nycon 26.

If you like this idea, post your ten-years-hence either as a comment or in your own journal. Feel free to be as wishful or as brutally honest as you desire.

Comments

[the-changeling.livejournal.com]

March 2021. David whole and out of pain, able to run in the sun with his happy healthy and exuberant 16 year old son.

Don't give a shit about anything else, if we could get that. Actually made me cry. *sniff*

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Sorry. I'll add your wishes to mine.

[the-changeling.livejournal.com]

No, don't be sorry. Every now and then, it's good to touch the grief. To cope with it now, you have to put it in a box, especially when I watch Hugh clambouring over his Daddy, and play fighting, and I know how much pain it causes David. And when Hugh runs up ans says "Daddy's poorly, and needs help."

But it's good to open it now and then, and stay grounded.

*hugs*

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

March 2021 Living in current house with Kip and perhaps two medium sized dogs. Income from CDs and building canoes helps cover the bills and provides a little slack for savings and money to travel to see friends. Main transport a recumbent bike with electric motor assist for hills, owing to vastly increased price of gas. Debating whether to add solar cells on roof or go in with friend on extra windmill on his property for power generation.

[hurdle1gal.livejournal.com]

March 2021:
living in a 3 or 4 bedroom modest home (with garage) within 10 miles of where living in 2011. Have 2 kids, dog, still happily married. Slowly getting back to full-time job after moving to part time to raise kids. Track website will be flurishing and money coming in, giving me a good excuse to travel some of the bigger track meets of the year. Student loans paid off, car loans paid off. All six parents still alive, healthy, and lucid.

[aunty_marion]

Brutally honest?

March 2021 - I'm getting very old and arthritic, have had to give up archery due to the above, and am no longer driving as I can't afford even an old banger. Govt has changed pension rules again so I'm unable to claim any pension; my sight is failing so I can't read much, and the computer (latest of many cadged from generous friends) is failing (again; as usual), so paid proofreading is no longer even filling the cracks. Arthritis prevents me knitting as much as I'd like, but, thanks to Freedom Pass which is thank ghu still available, I am still able to hobble out to nMC rehearsals, and since the filk cons moved into Watford from 2013 I can manage to get to those without too much trouble. I save what pennies I have for those, and for the occasional trip down to Devon...

[aunty_marion]

And now the more optimistic version...

Having won the lottery AND come up on ERNIE within the space of two years, I have moved out of London to a nice two-up/two-down modernised ex-farm-worker's cottage in the country - not too far from town, though! The diabetic-complications cure turned out to have extra benefits for the arthritic patient, so I am fit and well, apart from mild asthma (which is *so* much better now I'm out of London!). I've joined a local archery club and am doing reasonably well as usual; my new-ish (five years old) car gets me to and from filk cons, friends and family, and the interest from my winnings is enough to live on modestly, despite rampant inflation. The freelance proofreading is also doing well, and few of my online customers realise just how old I really am (despite the evidence of my CV!). However, I still have time for keeping the Chronicles of Mershane tidied up.

I'm still knitting, and have learnt several new techniques, so I am now able to produce ever more eldritch items. I am considering a collaboration with friends on a book of out-of-this-world knitting patterns.

I'm wondering if I should have an extension built (there's a lean-to already...) so that I could host larger houseparties - as it is, visitors have to sleep in the second bedroom-cum-library-cum-computer room, or on the dining-room floor.

2021

[tig-b.livejournal.com]

1. I live alone in a studio 'flat' - no pets allowed. Successive govts have reduced my occupational pension to such a low level that I can no longer travel to see friends and my phone and broadband have been cut off. I still have a free bus pass, but it only covers local buses and I can't use them since the govt left the EU and repealed the DDA. The goalposts for getting any help shift slightly faster than my deteriorating health, I can't afford taxis to get to my GP (who no longer does any house calls) so I try to cope on my own. I spend a lot of time in bed to keep warm.

2. They finally sorted out my asthma. No more steroids helped me to lose some weight and get a bit more mobile, plus the new free mobility scooters are so easy to use on all public transport. So I can still travel to visit people and get to at least one con a year.
I get free physio every week, it helps so much with the joints and keeps me moving.
My rented flat has a spare room and enough space for small parties, and I finally learnt to write music as well as lyrics for the group I sing with. My 21st original song has just been published and I've had 12 short stories and 25 poems published.
The new libray just round the corner is great, they will order anything I want to read!
Oh, and I have two cats.

Re: 2021

[tig-b.livejournal.com]

Although you may have noticed they didn't 'cure' my dyslexia?

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

A bit wishful thinking, but it's possible.

March 2021. Living in a Grade II listed house in a small Bedfordshire village, converted to run off the discreet solar panels in the thatch. There are woodpeckers nesting in the trees at the bottom of the garden. Still married to Dave. Work as the head of the development team in the UK's biggest e-learning company, and still visit the old offices in Hitchin once a week. Meant to be cutting down to part-time work as I gradually ease towards retirement, but actually doing six-day weeks because it's so much fun, and employing a cleaner and gardener. Health and energy levels back up, playing harp for fun in the evenings. Gloranthan novel finished and published (online, of course - paper went out with the dodo). Transport - one of those little electric flyers that became popular last year, plus the bigger car for long trips. Computer: thought-operated connection to the Cloud in every room.

[dickgloucester.livejournal.com]

I do like this!

[murphys-lawyer.livejournal.com]

March 2021: still happily married to the were_gopher who is enjoying a nascent career as a guerilla accountant in the Outer Leeds barrio Resettlement Area, mostly succeding in stopping people having their money and posessions seized by whichever foreign mega-corp is acting as HMG's baliffs this week. I work from the scratch-built communal dwelling we share with three other families, alternating between keeping the firewalls and intrusion detection running and Google at bay on our part of the local FreeGrid, and rehearsing the seventh annual case to stop Hal from being conscripted into "New National Service". I'm helped this time by the "independent assessor" from Atos saying on the record at the preliminary hearing that having Aspergers doesn't stop you from being cannon fodder: she thought none of us spoke French.

Jodie has a job, and a flat, inside the gated zone that is Leeds Commercial and Financial Ltd. She visits from time to time, and we all enjoy it, but we don't talk politics or economics. It's too painful.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

2021: Living in a snug, three-bedroom house in rural Vermont with cflute and our children. Grace is in her last year of high school, attending a local class for the gifted while she takes part-time college courses, and is on her way to a small college on the eastern seaboard where she's planning to study marine biology, just as she always said she wanted to do. Joseph's in his second year of high school, taking college level math and keeping himself in great physical shape because he wants to be an astronaut and he knows that means being both physically and mentally top of the line. He's taking flying lessons, wanting to get his pilot's license before he gets out of high school.

We've been married for seven years, after a lovely wedding that included all our friends singing to us. We don't get trouble from anywhere we travel in the United States anymore, about the wedding; even the places that don't yet let same-sex couples marry will acknowledge those made in other states. And most states allow it these days anyway.

I'm teaching eighth grade combined English and social studies in an experimental school for gifted students, that draws from all over Vermont and some from elsewhere in the US and the world; some kids are day students, some boarding. I get one group for three hours solid in the morning and one group for three hours in the afternoon. We learn what we, as a class, decide to learn, but we use our reading, writing and research skills on whatever topics interest us. cflute manages a department at a major teaching hospital in Burlington. We fly [Unknown site tag] in for a weekend every two months to rehearse for Tempered Glass, which has four successful albums out and gets invited every once in a while as GoHs to a filkcon. I've won one Pegasus award for a song I wrote. TG has won one for performing.

In addition, Grace, cflute and I perform together as a three-voiced harmony band, singing things I write and things Grace writes. She's been nominated for a couple of Pegasi also, and will probably win one before she gets much older; she's a better songwriter than I am.

cflute does a lot of cross-country skiing, given where we live, and is in great health because of it. I've been the beneficiary of a new medication for fibromyalgia which makes it all but go away for me as long as I keep exercising properly, and in order to accomplish that, I've acquired a lovely little blue-roan Appaloosa mare, whom I have to take care of every day and ride at least every couple of days (although when I'm busy, either Grace or Joseph are glad to ride her too). All that currying and brushing and riding keeps me in the kind of fit shape that my illness needs to stay at bay, and I hardly remember what it was like to be unable to get out of bed or spend most of my days in pain anymore. Grace, likewise, has outgrown her childhood pain disorder and is healthy and lively, often busy with her schoolwork or her friends but always still loving her family most of all, just as she did when she was a little girl.

cflute and I are starting to talk about what we intend to do after the kids are both in college and not living with us most of the time. While we both love our jobs and don't intend to retire anytime soon, we'd like to start traveling more. We have a long list of places we want to see, and between my school vacations and cflute's being so well respected in her job as to be able to take her vacations pretty much when she pleases, we can start considering how to knock some of those places we've always wanted to see off the list.

And now the good news

[murphys-lawyer.livejournal.com]

March 2021: still happily married to the were_gopher who is enjoying a nascent career as an extra-science teacher at the local secondary school, specialising in what's not on the National Curriculum ("Now, class, after you've prepared your Uranium Hexaflouride...").

I'm on course to be one of the last Old Civil Servants, having spent 40 years in the same Department. I start working part-time later in the year, alternating weeks with the various companies who are looking for new/old blood. If all goes well, next year I'll offically retire and start full-time with one of them. It means my extravagant, gold-plated pension (hah!) is deferred for another 10 years, but at least I'll have one (or the Weregopher will). In my spare time I'm writing my memoirs: a fair amount will be redacted, but I can tell you that the final chapters of autopope's ninth Laundry novel bear an uncanny resemblance to the incident involving the Cabinet Minister, the Microsoft Security Chief who was somehow still working for the CIA, and the alpacas.

That's right, Bruce Schneier picked up on it too...

Hal is a legend among his peers in social gaming. He's in demand as the "Leeroy Jenkins" tester: go into a setting and start seeing what breaks, so the developers can see if it either can be fixed and made unbreakable, or whether the breaking is actually a good thing. I have no idea how he does it, and I don't think he does, either. What I do know is it earns him enough to be financially independent.

Jodie's currently in Milan doing a live arts degree and mentoring first year undergraduates in the same. The last of her Ayn Rand fixation has died away and now she's channeling Baruch Spinoza and Henry Moore in equal quantities, which is doing wonders for her NetChannel ratings and merits the occasional spot on the local TV channels.

[danceswithlife]

March, 2021: Living in an intentional community that includes partners, friends, colleagues and lovers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Part time professor and thesis adviser in spirituality at local university. Project manager for a non-profit collaborative education organization that paid for my Ph.D. Several published books on depth psychology, personal myth, terraspsychology and progressive Christianity. Spiritual mentor to about ten people. Working as fill-in clergy (sermons, celebrate Eucharist) at several local UCC and Independent Catholic parishes. Owner of a franchised business/network that mimics Heinlein's P.S. We also walk dogs. Patron of several writers, artists and musicians. Travels each year.

[howeird]

March 2021: The artificial heart implant was a success, which brings the tally of replacement parts to 12: Two kidneys, one pancreas, two knees, one hip, three vertebrae, one liver and I'm also counting both hearing aids. Life has been much better after the chip was embedded in my brain which continues to treat my food addiction. Who would have thought one could survive happily on three little green wafers and 24 ounces of water a day. Excuse me, 0.75 liters of water. Never will understand metric at a visceral level. And for the record, soylent green is not people, it is soy and algae and cats.

I'm fully retired now, thanks to my Wisconsin State Employee pension. I only worked for them for a year (telecommuting from my beachfront cottage on the shores of the Andaman Sea) - unions are a wonderful thing.

Have to log off now, my girlfriends have dropped off their children for me to babysit while they make their next porn movie. The kids are great, I can't wait till they are old enough to filk to.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

March 2021: Having spent my last £1 coin one month on a lottery ticket and then snuggled up in bed using the last of the electricty to watch the Lotto draw, I discover that I am suddenly a multi-millionaire. I spend the next few weeks in a bit of a daze wondering what this all means, before seeing the dosh actually arrive in my account, and deciding to buy a car. I am briefly obstructed in this by the need to update my driving license, but after quitting my 5-hour a week job I finally manage to hire a friend to come to my place every morning and nag me out of bed, and thus eventually get around to finding and sorting out the paperwork.

It belatedly occurs to me that I ought to pay off my still outstanding 40k of debts before buying any more toys, so I get that done next. Then I sleep for a week, overcome with a blissful sense of a quartet of planets having been lifted off my shoulders.

Getting used to the idea that I can now afford to pay for a decent fried breakfast or lunch anytime I want one, I spend a pleasant afternoon in the local cafe pondering my next move. I embark on a hunt for a property that's a lot bigger and more comfortable than my current gaff, somewhere between here and the M4, whilst wondering about the possibility of setting up a filkish commune/suite of appartments somewhere...