I only have one more day of photos from our Italian adventure to edit and post, but I don’t feel like it right now. I’m feeling a bit disappointed (disappointed!) (does anyone else hear Kevin Kline’s voice yelling that every time they use the word?) (No? Just me?) with myself over having posted so very little this past couple of months. Really, I could do better, couldn’t I? I remember the days when I posted all the freaking time. Yeah, glad that’s over with too, but honestly, a LITTLE more effort would be appreciated. Up duff, Slaughter-Ek, etc.
It’s just so…busy all the damn time. And not really ALL the damn time, just enough to keep me doing other things. I keep wanting to just crawl into bed and hibernate for a moon or two. Each week is a pressure-countdown to relief on Friday, each activity or event an ordeal; even the ones I look forward to. Urgh, I say. And it’s not that I’m exceptionally fatigued or anything, I’m just…I don’t know. Blah. Gah. Meh. Finding it hard to face the increasing darkness of another winter, I guess. Still a month to go before the solstice and the promise of the return of light.
We’ve had snow already, this past week. Snow! And not just any snow, but HUGE, fat floaty white flakes, the kind you think of when you think of how snow was when you were a child. It stuck, for a while, and then quietly melted away under the pinging, dinging onslaught of continual rain. It wasn’t enough to do anything with, but it brightened things up for several hours.
I had a health check up last week, too. Our company has an agreement with the insurance provider and everyone is being called in, apparently (voluntarily, of course). I’d never had a real health check up, apart from pregnancies, so I thought, hey, why not? Turns out I’m old, overweight, half-blind and going deaf. Heh. As if I needed a doctor to tell me any of that! I haven’t had the follow-up with test results and doctor meeting to actually verify that self-diagnosis, but I’m mentally prepared for it, all the same. They took blood, blood pressure, and did a lung capacity test. On Wednesday when I go back they’ll also do an EKG, go over the test results with me and I can ask questions, assuming I have any.
The kids and I did a pretty big clean-out this weekend, though we’re far from done. I filled several bags with books, both their rejects and 2 bags worth of mine that I was finally ready to admit I wouldn’t read again. Pared 6 boxes of various crap toys down to ONE, and filled 4 bags with outgrown clothing. Need to get it all to the charity boxes or into the garage before Saturday, as we’re having our massive Thanksgiving dinner party potluck then!
Today was the only relatively mellow evening at home for awhile. The rest of the week is busy, busy, busy. That same busy I was referring to earlier. We just started reading A Christmas Carol for Little Big Bookgroup and I’m finding it hard going. The language isn’t really conducive to bedtime reading, and most of the words are WAY above the vocabulary level of my kids. In one way, that’s good, as they do ask for definitions, but on the other it makes it very hard for them to simply follow the storyline. It’s been a bad week for books so far. I had borrowed Under the Dome from a friend (in hardcover: what a brick!) intending to finally give Stephen King one more chance (after having discarded him in disgust in 1983 at the end of Pet Sematary).
I read 3 chapters, growing increasingly disturbed and uncomfortable. It’s not that he isn’t a good storyteller; he IS. At least he’s a hell of a story CRAFTER, but I find his lovingly detailed insistence on unnecessary graphic violence so off-putting that, despite my beginnings of engagement with some of the characters, I skipped to the end, read the last few pages and put the book back on the shelf to return. Sorry, Stephen, I’m through with you, for good this time.
Next Tuesday is the AWC Meeting and the annual Holiday Cookie Exchange. I have to bake NINETY-SIX cookies on Sunday and need a really basic, easy recipe with no exotic or expensive ingredients that makes a LOT of cookies quick. Any tried-and-trues? I was thinking maybe something like these or maybe these.