Stream of Consciousness: Life

January and February feel very long to me. I think it's the endless cold and snow and the fact that few events happen in our lives in these two months. We have a few things with friends and Superbowl plans but other than that it's life and nothing else, which isn't bad at all.

It was so refreshing to have Carson around over Christmas break that now feels bittersweet having him back to the grind. For awhile there he was dropping me off at work (and I was enjoying having my own personal chauffeur and windshield scraper) and picking me up and that was nice because even though he'd hit the books or take the car to his office to study, it was nice to see each other several times during the day. We've spent lots of time apart in our relationship and since Carson's been in grad school it feels normal to have just one night a week together. One thing that is new is that we are having a consistent night together for date night, which has never happened. We have Community Group on Mondays, Carson has class till 9:30pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and then he works at night on Friday, Saturday and sometimes Sunday. Guess how often I make dinner? That's right, not often.

I have Poison Oak again, which is just very strange and mysterious. My time outside has been limited to hurrying from the car to the house to work to Target or the grocery store. I haven't been pulling weeds or so much as touching a tool outside. I wore the Tshirt I wore when I first got Poison Oak in September, but I've washed and worn it probably five or six times since with no problems. And the weirdest part to me is that the Poison Oak is on my ribcage, which is not usually a place that gets such things unless you're doing yard work in a sports bra, which I wasn't. So that's been the most exciting thing lately. It was a flare up and has been healing really fast (about a week and a half in and it's mostly faded, while last time it took over two months to finally go away) with the application of calamine and super hot showers.

Because it's been cold, and so cold that our heater is overworking itself and still won't get past 63 degrees (which feels downright cold in our poor drafty house), I've been spending 90% of my time huddled under or on top of the electric blanket on our bed. Once again, that thing is the best thing that ever happened to a cold weather hater like me.

I've been trying to keep myself busy on these chilly days, so I've organized the upstairs landing (aka my craft area), moved the DVDs up there and done a load of laundry a day to give myself something to actually do. It's far to cold to think about running (my lungs feel like they'll explode when it's cold) so I've been running up and down our stairs and doing exercise DVDs. Carson on the other hand ran home the other night wearing shorts in NEGATIVE FOUR DEGREE weather.

I went through my old backup CDs from high school last week and found some serious blackmail... mostly blackmail for myself, since my braces days were long and unattractive. But it was fun to relive memories and to see how my friends and I dressed and even to look through the pictures and realize that there is a lot that I don't remember, which is saying a lot if you know me.

One thing I've been doing this year and hope I'll continue doing is to organize birthday cards for the month a few weeks before the month starts and have them addressed and ready to send out ON TIME. There's a post office at John Carroll so I just send them with Carson and he mails them for me. So far my plan is going well and it's January 23rd so that's 23/365 days of success.