Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! Yesterday was the Winter Solstice, so every day from here until June is going to get a little bit longer. And today it is very wintery indeed here in Minnesota.
I’m going to need to take Nova out soon, and I’m not especially looking forward to it.
Happy Hanukkah to my friends who celebrate! And a Merry almost Christmas to those to whom it applies. It’s going to be a busy weekend despite the cold as we celebrate with family. I am hoping to guard tomorrow as a mostly free day where I can relax, do some intention-setting for the new year, and catch up on sleep, because the rest of the weekend is pretty packed.
I don’t have too much else to talk about today, so I’ll leave you with your weekly dose of Nova:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! I really wish it was Friday, but alas, it is not.
It’s been a decent week here. After quite a bit of frustration and feeling really demoralized by one of my classes, I was able to meet with my professor before class on Monday and work some things out, and I think I’m in a better spot – while there are still things I’m finding frustrating, I at least feel like I know what I need to do to make it through the class now.
It’s been cold in the Twin Cities this week…below freezing in the mornings most days. Nova’s been happy about it, at least. It’s supposed to hit 70 again this weekend, though. I don’t mind the cold so much, but I do wish the weather would pick a general range and stick with it. The up and down tends to make my joints hurt.
The weather and the shorter days are making me want to hibernate. I’ve been knitting a bit more, which is lovely and cozy, but also a challenge to balance with schoolwork. Next week is symposium week at school, which means no classes, so I’m taking a few days off at the beginning of the week to get caught up on some things. I’m really looking forward to that.
I think that’s about it for this week. Here’s your weekly Nova fix:
She’s a pro at relaxingPeanut butter jar!Someone had SO MUCH FUN at the dog park
Hello, dear readers – we’ve made it to another Thursday. I am particularly grateful for calendars and to do lists today, because I definitely forgot about blogging until my phone reminded me this morning.
I am…weary. Classes are going pretty well, things are good at work, everyone in my household is staying relatively healthy and well, but I am just exhausted. I’ve been a bit sniffly the past few days, so maybe I’m fighting off a cold, or maybe it’s my body’s reaction to the fact that I woke up yesterday to an actual temp of -15 outside and a windchill of -35 and I just want to hibernate. (It has warmed up significantly since last night, but it’s supposed to start getting cold again over the weekend, and the variation in temperature mostly just makes my joints ache.)
My Tuesday class, which I usually go to in person, was moved to Zoom this week because our professor had a covid exposure a couple of days before. Thankfully she seems to be okay, but for safety we all Zoomed in from our respective spaces. My husband also had a music class Tuesday night, so we were both occupied with our computers for a while and Nova was not happy about it, which was a little distracting. But we made it work, and hopefully we’ll be back to in-person class next week.
I am feeling a little behind for tonight’s class – I finished the readings and the written assignment in plenty of time, but the professor for this class records the lecture portion of the class on Tuesday afternoons to make the Thursday night class an hour shorter, and I haven’t had a chance to watch the lecture yet. I’ll have to figure out free moments in my work day to get it done, I think, which is not ideal.
Really, though, it’s not been a bad week. I’m just so tired…
Anyway, I leave you, as always, with some Nova photos from this week:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! It is COLD in the Twin Cities this morning. The high today is going to barely creep above zero (we’re currently sitting around -4 F); currently we’re seeing windchills in the -20 F range. I am grateful we don’t need to go out much, and glad my husband was able to take Nova out for a nice long adventure/walk yesterday so she’ll hopefully feel less cheated that she can’t play outside much today.
The time has finally come – this afternoon is orientation for seminary (over Zoom), and Tuesday I have my first class. I’ve taken this afternoon and tomorrow off from work to attend the orientation and finish getting my ducks in a row before the semester really kicks off; I have some reading I need to get done before my classes next week. I’m nervous and excited in mostly equal measure. A lot of the nerves are around going to class in person – I really feel it’s the right choice for me right now (I know from past experience that I struggle more with online learning), but with Omicron it’s definitely nerve-wracking. I just got a bunch of N95 masks to wear to classes and I’m somewhat comforted knowing that students need to be masked and vaxxed to be on campus and that the number of people in-person for my classes is relatively small in rooms that are quite spacious. But it’s still a thing I’m anxious about, for sure. (At least, as my husband pointed out to me the other day, this is an anxiety grounded in reality?)
Other things that happened this week…a fire alarm went off in our building and we ended up wandering around outside for about two hours (everything’s fine, we think it was probably a small kitchen fire or something), but the up side of that was we ended up wandering over to the library and finally getting our library cards. Nova’s been really happy that there’s more snow on the ground again. I’m working on putting some routines in place in my day to help make transitioning back to being a student a little easier.
And on that note, I think I’ll leave you, as always, with a few Nova photos:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to another Thursday. I hope you’re all safe and warm and well. The weather here in the Midwest was particularly wild last night – a friend in Kansas heard reports of tennis-ball-sized hail in her county, we were under a tornado watch here in St. Paul, there was a ton of wind damage across several states…also, it was so warm yesterday I took the dog out in a t-shirt, and this morning the windchill was in the single digits Fahrenheit. My body and brain both struggle with large temperature and barometric pressure changes, so it’s been a day. Thankfully, we are safe, and while the dog was disappointed by the disappearance of the snow in yesterday’s heat wave, we should be getting a bit more today.
Other than wild weather, it’s been a pretty nondescript week. I did finish a sweater, which I’m really pleased with:
I love when a finished project looks like it did in my head!
I started this sweater back in May, didn’t work on it much for a lot of the summer, finished the body back in October, and then blew through the sleeves in four days earlier this week. I also knit a hat for my littlest nephew last week. This is the most knitting I’ve done in quite a while.
Other than that, I don’t have too much else to report. My first regular session with my new therapist went really well; we’re not meeting this week because she’s traveling, but I have a good feeling that this will be very helpful (it already has been). I’ll leave you with the requisite Nova photos from this week:
Every walk with Nova while there was snow on the ground looked something like this.Dreaming about snow while playing with her BarkBox snowman toy.She found the last pile of snow after everything melted and didn’t want to leave it.Nova and Snow
Greetings, dear readers, and welcome to another Thursday. I am extremely scatterbrained this week. It’s been so hot and sticky here in the Midwest (and I shouldn’t even complain, because it hasn’t been as bad in Chicago as it’s been in the Twin Cities), which always makes me a little crabby. I overheat pretty easily and humidity does weird things to my joints and it’s just hard to focus when you feel like you’re melting. Even though my desk is basically directly in front of our window AC, it’s still pretty humid in our apartment, and it’s like my body knows that it’s hot outside and is responding to that instead of the cool air I keep trying to plant myself in front of.
We’re moving in three weeks and I’m trying (with middling success) not to panic about everything that needs to get packed between now and then. I know it’ll all come together, and we’ve done a good job of making lists and keeping track of all the logistical details, but there’s this part of my brain that is absolutely convinced that I’ve forgotten some major detail somewhere along the line. Anxiety, woo!
This weekend we have a handful of social things set up that I’m looking forward to. And in between packing and socializing I’m trying to decompress with Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing on my Switch Lite (I was knitting a sweater but it is obviously way too warm to have a pile of wool in my lap right now). I don’t play a lot of video games and I don’t play any of them very well, but it’s good to have a thing I can do where my hands are busy but I’m not doom scrolling.
I think I’m going to keep this one short, because I have already gotten distracted after basically every sentence I’ve written, and I don’t have a lot of other coherent thoughts. I hope you’re all hanging in there. I’ll leave you with a clip of the inspiration for the title of this blog post. I’ve seen Kiss Me, Kate exactly once, probably close to 20 years ago, but fragments of this song get stuck in my head every time the temperature rises to uncomfortable levels:
I remember literally nothing else from this movie, but this song spoke to me lol
Well, we’ve made it to Thursday. It feels like it’s been a long week already, for no real reason. After taking all of last week off for what would have been Song School, getting back into work this week has been a bit of a struggle. I’m just tired.
On Monday we weathered the scariest storm I’ve seen since moving to Chicago. There were hurricane-force winds across the city and an actual tornado hit our old neighborhood. At our place, the trees outside our windows got pretty beat up, and there was a power line down (thankfully not one that affected us. It came and was gone in a span of less than ten minutes, but it was definitely terrifying for that brief window – we live on the third floor and didn’t have a basement to hide in, so we were huddled in our hallway hoping for the best.
The rest of the week has been okay. I’ve been so tired – getting up in the mornings is a struggle. But it’s almost Friday, and I get to play D&D twice this weekend, so that’s something to look forward to.
It’s a pretty miserable day in Chicago. It’s raining hard: streets and sidewalks are flooded, and despite my umbrella, my pants are completely soaked after walking the four blocks to the bus. It’s so dark it feels like I’m heading to work at 5am instead of 8am. This is quite possibly my least favorite weather to be out in.
On top of that, I’ve been inexplicably nauseous for most of the week. I don’t know if it’s anxiety or a stomach bug or something else entirely, but it’s been annoying and exhausting and demotivating.
Still, I’m trying to push past my inclination to succumb to the miserable weather and my miserable stomach and get lost in a sea of misery. I don’t know how much of it is optimism and how much is pragmatism: there’s life that needs getting on with, and misery isn’t really conducive to that.
So here are a few happy things that have happened this week:
I got to have a Skype date with my best friend and catch up for the first time in too long. We’ve both been busy lately, so the moments when we get to connect feel particularly special.
We went to a preview reading of The Civility of Albert Cashier. Chicago folks, you want to go see this when it premiers here in September. It’s an incredible (and true!) story, with a great cast and music by our friend (and folk musician hero) Joe Stevens.
I’m finally getting a new work computer! This seems like a silly thing to be excited about, but I’m the IT guy and my computer is at least five years older than the computers of most of my coworkers who I’m assisting. It should’ve happened months ago but kept getting pushed off. I’m tentatively hopeful that this new machine will freeze less often and be a less frustrating user experience overall.
It’s been another week, and there’s been more awful things going on in the world. According to the Washington Post Fact-Checker, every single day of the current regime has brought with it a slew of lies (and these are just from the Dorito-in-Chief himself). Which is unsurprising, but, you know, horrifying. It’s also been in the upper 50s-60s Fahrenheit. In Chicago (and it was in Minnesota, too, when we were there over the weekend). In February. But don’t worry, our government no longer believes that climate change is real, so it’s fine, right? (Deep breaths, deep breaths…)
Still, life goes on (for now), so I’m trying to make the most of it. Here are some of the things that have made life a little more manageable in the past week:
On the recommendation of S. Bear Bergman, who decided he wanted to be able to get some news to start his day without getting inundated by it on Facebook first thing in the morning, I subscribed to theSkimm. It’s a little email digest that hits your inbox first thing each weekday morning and gives you some of the major news items of the previous day. It’s helped me feel like I’m in the loop without feeling the need to start my day off miserable by reading everything on social media, and that’s been really helpful.
I’ve been writing a lot. Much of this had to do with this week’s assignment from my songwriting class (part of which stipulated that we sat down and freewrote for half an hour three days in a row). A lot of what I wrote for the assignment had to do with Liberty and Justice and how we’re failing to honor those values that we tend to think of as being core to what America is. It was cathartic, even if I feel like the end product fell a little short of where I wanted it to.
I’ve picked up embroidery again, for the first time in about a decade. (When I was recovering from getting my wisdom teeth out in high school, my mother sat me down with an embroidery hoop, a tea towel, a pattern, and some thread to keep me entertained and out of trouble. I picked it up a couple of times after that, and always enjoyed it, but didn’t take any of that stuff with me when I moved to Chicago.) I bought a dozen handkerchiefs and some iron-on transfers and am enjoying how fast it is, particularly compared to knitting. (Not that I have any intention to give up knitting, but the instant gratification is a nice change of pace sometimes.) Here’s my first finished object:
a little green leaf embroidered onto a white handkerchief corner
So tell me, friends, what are you doing to make things bearable for yourselves these days?
Accidental Fudge 