Since Summer

At the same time a bad time can seem to drag by, it can also slip out of your hands all too easily.  This summer's litany of crises - the car accident, the cancer scare, the this and that and the other not even worth reiterating - left me in poor form at work, and not exactly overachieving at home.  My job I have been doing far better, over the past month or so, and see no reason to expect another backslide.  At home, I tend to just be.

Ill for a week at New Year's, I really missed the advent of a new period, in a way, and it has caused a mild kind of cognitive dissonance.  The holidays properly finished, the new year usually feels ... like *something*, anyway.  But this year I just feel like Christmas happened, I got sick, and came unmoored.

It's not altogether bad, but some of the more domestic symbols of passing time have been blunted.  Christmas decorations went up, to be sure - but not all of them, in the name of the pets.  Then the two of them blew the last remaining good fuse on my good new/old-fashioned lights, and so the final week or so with my tree all messy thanks to Gossamer climbing it, it was also unlit, on top of being ungarlanded and not much decorated.

They also did the most horrific things to Joseph and the baby Jesus from my nativity, but that is a separate story.

Just that - a major signifier of the season, at my house, never was quite complete, and ended at a bit of a limp really.  I took the tree down Christmas Day, and may have demolished everything.  I honestly can't even remember for sure, because the illness came on three days later, and I was out of things for the next week.

Back to myself, somewhat, back to work before everyone else was, cocooned in a period of hermetic oblivion and solitude, January got off to a hurry, and I have hardly seen it come and go.

Have gotten things done, but not enough things.  And so, today, instead of housecleaning, some things to *do*.  I made four calls to local fencing companies to request they call me to set up estimates.  One was actually there, so that one is set.  I reached out on a consultation too.  Dug into the SEVEN months of bank statements I haven't checked off (ugh).  And started in on those stacks of books for research.

Next up - mending the little hole in that one sweater, and a button to sew on that one coat.

As I said to my mom a little while ago, "It's amazing the amount of stuff you can accomplish without ever getting up off your butt."

"That sounds good ... and bad!" she said.

Exactly, mom.  Exactly!