Goodbye, January

Well, we've just about made it to the end of January. In anticipation of February, the chocolate month, I bought a whole lot of Valentine's Day candy at Target last night. I know, I know, I'm diabetic and the kids need healthy food to grow, and nobody needs this much chocolate. But in fact we do need this much, and more. Also, the Reese's hearts are really good.

It's been a very January month, especially the last couple of weeks, with all the snow and cold. More snow is due this week, and some truly frigid cold for a couple of days, to welcome in February and all that. Fortunately, the boys seem to have decided that wearing long pants to school is OK this year, though Teen B still comes to the breakfast table in shorts at least half the time. Teen A currently wears a size men's small in Target-brand exercise pants, so we now own six pairs of them and he only has to wear shorts one day a week, usually Saturday or Sunday. Today he wore shorts to Starbucks, our usual Sunday morning outing (we've started calling it the Church of Starbucks), but changed into long pants to walk to Safeway where he meets a friend to hang out. It's a long walk to Safeway, 1.8 miles according to Google Maps, but he's decided it's worth it. Yesterday he also went there, but then they walked on to their school, another 7/10 of a mile, in order to slide on the ice there. 

Whatever floats your boat. I would not walk 2.5 miles (and 2.5 miles back again) in order to slide on some ice. I can do that just as well, unintentionally, in my driveway.

Speaking of my driveway, it has a lot of ice and packed snow on it right now because I did not handle things properly on Thursday. After the heavy snow on Tuesday I did do some shoveling, but after however much came down on Thursday, I pretended I had a snow removal service and did not go out to inspect the damage until Saturday afternoon, at which point we were in trouble. 

A nice neighbor snow-blows the sidewalks for us, but we have to do our own driveways and walks and whatnot. It is very important to start shoveling as soon as the snow stops falling, not wait two days and then say, "Oops!"

Oh well, at least we didn't get two feet, like the East Coast did this weekend. Just 5.5 inches on Tuesday and I don't know how much on Thursday, maybe 3 inches or so. I hope we just get a little this week, but I haven't seen a prediction yet.

Snow is a good thing -- we need snow -- and so I must not complain. 

I felt a little low again this week. On Thursday, in the snowstorm, I got my hair cut, and my stylist and I got into a conversation about the fires, who we knew or had heard about who lost their homes, what we had given in terms of money or clothes or whatever. It just brought it all back into the forefront of my mind, and I felt sad the rest of the day and all day Friday. The newspaper had a lot of articles about it today and I read some of them. One was a happy story about a couple who had to drive off without their two horses, but later someone found their horses, even though their barn had burned. I think the saddest stories are the ones about people who couldn't find their pets and had to evacuate without them, or weren't home when the fire happened and couldn't get home, so their pets died in the fire. I have spent a lot of time thinking about how I would manage to get the cat carriers from the garage and the cats into the cat carriers, if a fire threatened us. The most likely scenario is that I would get Sillers into a cat carrier, because she's fairly slow moving, but the Baby Kitty would run away and hide and we'd lose him. 

Well. It's good to think about that stuff up to a point, and then I have to back off and not think about it for a while, because it's so upsetting. It's very difficult to hit the right level -- think enough about it to be able to make good plans, but not think about it so much that I get upset.

I'm working my way along through The Tale of Genji (which you can see in the background in this photo), but don't expect a "reading post" any time soon. As I mentioned in my last two posts and will surely mention a few more times before I'm done, the book is 1155 pages long! For a while I was trying to read a certain number of pages per night, but I finally gave up. I'm currently on page 494, which is fine. The book is divided into six parts, with 6-12 chapters in each part. I am midway through Part 3, about to start Chapter 25. Each chapter is very self-contained, and I read that in the long-ago past the book was sometimes published as a series of 54 separate booklets, corresponding to the 54 chapters. 

I find that some chapters are a lot more interesting than others. The less interesting ones can really drag, making me feel as though I will NEVER finish this book, but, for example, I found Chapter 22 to be quite gripping. So I try to pace myself, read a chapter before bed, once in a while two chapters, and then maybe read a chapter during the day as well. Today I've already read two chapters and I'll probably read one more at bedtime. And on we go. I expect I'll finish in about two more weeks, though I'll have to take a break to read the book for the book group (which fortunately is short), because we meet on February 7th. It's really hard not to set Genji aside and pick up something short, just to boost my book count for the month. I'm resisting. I keep reminding myself that reading short books just to boost my book count is ridiculous.

One night this week I had a dream that I was living in 11th century Japan. It was quite terrifying.

As it is the end of the month, I should make some plans for February, or at least for the coming week. In February I would like to...

• Do the taxes and send them off to our tax preparer. She sent out her "organizer" yesterday, so I plan to work on it this coming week.
• Put the Christmas stuff away! Groundhog Day/Candlemas is almost here, so it is time. I took the ornaments and lights off the tree and put them away yesterday, but I still need to finish dismantling the tree. Maybe tomorrow or Tuesday.
  
• Finish Genji and possibly start my second book for the Challenge. Oh, and the book for the book group.
  
• Go back to my middle grade novel and work on it some more.
  
• Eat a LOT of chocolate (and Girl Scout cookies, which are being delivered on February 13th) but also get a lot of exercise. I did better with walking this week and hope to continue that. Also, I'm still trying to get myself to start lifting weights again. And then there's snow shoveling.
  
• Continue with all the needed medical stuff. I see the orthodontist again tomorrow morning, sigh, and after that I'll probably have to get a tooth pulled, and then a week or two after that the brackets will go on. More sighs. I also see my new doctor -- a replacement for the one I got so unhappy with last year -- in mid-February, and I need to make eye appointments for the kids and probably myself, and then probably the dermatologist again for another skin cancer check, and on and on and on. Also, the twins need their booster shots!

That's all I'm going to plan for now. I have a feeling I need to leave a lot of time and energy for the braces, because those are really going to make a difference in my life. Alternatively, I might be making too much of a big deal about it -- maybe it won't be an issue at all. We'll see. But this week -- orthodontist, taxes, put the tree away, do some reading and writing, and survive another snowstorm. Oh, and eat chocolate. It will soon be February, after all.