I’m still feeling pretty tired this week, but I think I’m slowly adjusting to the colder weather and darker days, and (hopefully) coming out of the funk I’ve been in for the past few weeks. It’s been a good week, overall, and I have a few things I’m smiling about:

1. Our new passports arrived on Saturday! My partner and I took last Monday off from work to get passports squared away (we needed to reapply in person since we were both changing names and gender markers). We paid for expedited service, because we wanted to be sure they were done before the end of the month. They estimated the wait time at two or three weeks. Five days later, there they were! We’re still waiting on the passport cards and our old passports to come back to us in the mail, but the actual passport books are here. It’s a huge relief to have that done and to know that our applications were approved, because while we were pretty confident we had everything in order, but you never know what’s going to happen with gender-related changes. Also, my passport was from when I was 16, so it’s nice to have one that’s not expired and that actually looks something like me.
2. We put our Christmas tree up. I have complicated feelings about Christmas (really, I have complicated feelings about celebrating Christian holidays in general), but the lights and decorations have always been some of my favorite parts. We have a fake tree that I got the first Christmas I was in my first apartment by myself, so it’s been around a few years now, but it’s still in pretty good shape. I have more ornaments than will fit on the tree without even figuring in my partner’s ornaments (I got at least a couple every year growing up), so we had to do some thoughtful curating of what we wanted to actually put up. The end result is quite lovely.
3. We’re planning Christmas travel. We’re going to take a whirlwind trip north to Minnesota over Christmas weekend. We won’t really get to see friends, but we’re seeing both of our families (something I would not have predicted had you asked me two months ago). So that’ll be an adventure.