No Theme

 It's cold today, drizzling rain and a bit of wet snow. The mountains were harder hit with snow, though they are covered with clouds now. It's snowing very gently as I write this.

I could not sleep until around three a.m. last night. I slept until a little after seven, got up for an hour and then went back to bed for a couple more hours. After a quick blunch, I started decluttering and reorganizing my craft desk and putting away my card making supplies. I'd like to sew a bit this afternoon, but I also need to declutter and reorganize my sewing area before I can do that. The dust was starting to get to me (I'm allergic to almost everything that makes up dust--so you think I'd dust more, but there it is. My hands and eyes are nice and itchy now.)

What's been going on? Not much really. We still have our Christmas stuff up, though I unplugged the lights on the tree and mantel. I heard recently about the Amish having Christmas, New Christmas, and Old Christmas. Christmas on December 25th, New Christmas on December 26th, and Old Christmas on January 6th. So our things will stay up through New Christmas. Or maybe I'll never take them down. I'll be the Miss Havasham of Christmas, complete with disintegrating Christmas tree. 

I've been reading some. In the mornings when I sit in the sun (which didn't happen today because no sun), I've been going through the backlog of New Yorker magazines that are sitting on our coffee table. (I had a subscription to The New Yorker years ago and I let the subscription lapse, seriously, like three years ago, but the issues never stopped coming. Week in and week out, we get The New Yorker. They're relentless.) Anyway, I'm in the midst of a profile of Sarah Jessica Parker. I'm also starting to re-read Kurt Vonnegut's novel The Sirens of Titan. I've forgotten how amazingly weird his stuff is. When I grow up, I want to be Kurt Vonnegut.

I've also been cooking lots. Dinners have been very cold-weather friendly. This week, I made a new recipe for curried lentil soup (it was a vegan recipe based on an Ottolenghi recipe and it was not good) and I made chili so that we could have Frito pie (low sodium Fritos, man!). For dinner last night, we had junk food: Five Guys takeout. I had a bunless cheeseburger and Dave had a grilled cheese. We shared an order of Cajun fries. Tonight, I think I'll make some sopa seca. It's easy and comforting and doesn't take much if any thought.

I had a tearful moment last night over Chance and the thought of losing him. I've been extra nice to him today in the form of lots of pets and treats. Dave interrupted his work day to take him to a non-existent vet appointment today. (When they got there, they were told the appointment is tomorrow.) He's having some treatments done for his arthritic hips. Yes, it's rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but it does bring him some relief, so we'll keep doing it. 

Sigh.

The grief I feel about this is all compounded with a backlog of other grief; my lost relationship with my father and his ten months ago death is a big player here. It feels never ending sometimes, grief.