Made it to February

It always feels like such an accomplishment to reach February -- January lasts SOOO long and is so boring and so dreary. I actually know quite a few people who were born in January, and I always think that must have been nice for their parents, to have this gloomy month cheered up by a darling newborn baby to care for. This was kind of an odd January for me, in that I read almost constantly during it. In fact, my book list for 2019 already has 19 books on it (18 in January and one so far in February). I looked back at my book lists, which I started keeping in 1980, and I've never come anywhere close to reading 18 books in ANY month. Some of these were kids' books, and some were books I started reading in December or even November, but still. I mentioned this achievement to Rocket Boy and he said, "Must be escapism," which I thought was unfair. On the other hand, perhaps it was escapism. I had a great wish to escape January and I succeeded through books. Good books, though -- nonfiction, memoirs, serious fiction -- not just mysteries. I enjoyed myself.

It was a fairly warm month, although we did have a few little snows. Nuisance snows, as a meteorologist described them in a news article I read. Truly they were nuisances -- just enough snow to make it hard to get to work, and then by the next day enough was gone to leave wide swathes of ice everywhere, making it REALLY hard to get to work. I worked at home on some of the icy days, but I have a hard time getting anything done at home unless I have a very clear, do-able assignment. I realized the other day that I hadn't taken any photographs of any of the snows, possibly because of what a nuisance they were. So I hurried out before it got too dark and took a couple of pictures. See? Enough snow to cover the lawn and make a mess of everything else.

I'm trying to think of what else to say about January, now that it is over and can't hurt me. We didn't do much, just amused ourselves with simple pleasures like reading, watching videos from the library, and the occasional chess game. Every January my insurance company sends me some big bills (one due in January and one due in February), and every January I am surprised by these bills and wonder how on earth I will ever pay them. And then the property tax bills arrive. So one of our traditional January activities is called "Making do with less," i.e., not eating out and not buying anything except at the grocery store and the pet store/vet. It always reminds me of how much I hate cooking, but we also make do with a lot of cheap packaged stuff. I used to be so good about making soup from scratch on the weekends, but this past year we've embraced the world of Progresso canned soup. In fact, almost every Monday that's our dinner. Sometimes we fix two different cans of soup -- maybe chicken pot pie soup for the boys and split pea soup for Rocket Boy and me. Sometimes we have something we all like, such as clam chowder (that's on the menu for tomorrow). RB makes his special garlic bread (olive oil, various spices, and slices of garlic), and we're all happy. I always take a moment to feel bad when I take my first spoonful, thinking of the delicious homemade soup dinners of my childhood. It's sort of like saying grace. And then I think, well, you're clearly a dreadful mother, but here we all are around the dinner table enjoying our canned soup, and it's going to be OK.

And now it's February, which always seems like it's over before it really gets going. We have lots of things on the calendar already: the kids' last ever elementary school conferences, various school-related activities that I've signed up to help with, Valentine's Day, two days off school (the 15th and the 18th) which I will take as vacation, and Rocket Boy is scheduled to go to Tucson for a job interview (he'll be gone the 17th through the 20th). He made the arrangements for this trip in early January, assuming at the time that he would have heard from his St Louis job prospect by then and would have to cancel this trip. But as the trip draws closer, the other organization has been silent, so it looks like he's going to Tucson. We have no particular hopes for this: the company has flown him out for job interviews before and then never contacted him again. But he's looking forward to having them pay for a trip to Tucson, where he went to graduate school. So it'll be a busy month, as well as a short one. This photo shows what our front yard looks like today, as the nuisance snow slowly melts into mud. Happy February!