New Year!

Well well well. Welcome to 2016. We rang in the new year at home, of course. (It's been years since we went out on the town.) It was quiet all night until about fifteen 'til midnight when fools and their explosives (fireworks and the like) came out to make noise for about half an hour.

It's been a lazy week. It started out with snow, which was nice.

We allowed ourselves to pretend to get snowed in Sunday and Monday, only sneaking out for take-out BBQ before the storm really hit. The roads were mostly fine on Monday and completely fine on Tuesday, but we continued our snow-bound staycation nonetheless.

I binge-watched "Transparent" on Amazon, inhaling all twenty episodes in two days. It is beyond amazing, beautifully written and heart-breakingly well structured. I'll probably watch it again before the next season comes out.

In addition to that, I read Come Here: A Man Overcomes the Tragic Aftermath of Childhood Sexual Abuse by Richard Berendzen. It was a recommendation from another book I've been reading by Gavin de Becker (he of The Gift of Fear, but the book I'm reading by him now is is aimed at parents protecting children and teens).  I stayed up all night to finish the book. There was a lot of ugly crying, but it wasn't too triggering, thank God.

I have a backlog of books to get through--mostly non-fiction, biographical stuff--then I want to start reviewing last semester's anatomy & physiology material as well as start looking at the material that we are sure to cover in the coming semester (which begins January 18th).

We dashed up to Durango during the week and came right back down. It was a long day in the car but we got to see the snowy landscape. The temperatures stayed in the teens and twenties, but the road was clear.

In among that stuff, I've been painting and drawing, mostly watercolor and colored pencil stuff, none of it good, all of it leading somewhere. I've never really had much discipline when it comes to painting or drawing, so I'm relying on the acquisition of new techniques and some daily practice to see what happens over time.

And this coming week promises to be busy.

Tomorrow we're meeting my mother, aunt, and brother for a late lunch. 

Then later in the week, I've got the long-awaited appointment with the allergist. That has meant that I've gone completely off antihistamines so that they don't throw off the allergy testing that they will be doing. That has meant that my hives are making me crazy. (They are currently covering my arms and part of my chest and one knee. In the morning they may or may not be gone, but they will certainly appear again sometime tomorrow.)

So that's how the new year will get going.