After a crazy September and October, November has been relatively quiet.  My mother left the first weekend, and things have settled back into a normal routine.  I am participating once again in National Novel Writing Month, and then there was the annual tech conference I attend in the middle of the month.  Then suddenly it was Thanksgiving.

I am just wrapping up a week off work, using the comp time I accumulated during the conference week, and it went by too fast.  I tried to catch up on some things, and then there was the whole eating until we burst thing, and now my weekend is coming to an end and I have a lot of “I wish I had’s” cropping up.

Winter is coming to the high country, though, and the holiday marches forward.   We have had four snows already, the first one was October 5th.  We have had no snow so far in November, and it doesn’t look like we will.  The highest mountains are getting some snow, but not enough yet.  We are hopeful, however.  It has been cold, and the pond behind our house has a layer of ice on it most mornings when I get up, and lows are in the teens and lower 20’s, even if the daytime highs reach the 50’s and 60’s. Those 50- and 60-degree days are great for bike rides and long walks, but not so great for our snow pack and next year’s water reserves.

I love this time of year.  It means I can have the fireplace going.  This is the first time in my adult life I’ve had a house with a fireplace, and we’ve had fires already several times.  I bought 2/6ths of a cord of wood, half pine and half hard wood.  We are set for fires in the fireplace until probably late January, when I’ll have to get another load.  I was lucky to have my mom and her truck here when I got the wood, so I wouldn’t have to pay a delivery charge.  I might not be so lucky next time, unfortunately.

The girls and I put up the tree this weekend.  I usually get a little nostalgic when putting up the tree, but this year it was worse than usual.  My emotions are pretty raw these days for plenty of reasons, and seeing all the ornaments the kids made over the years, and the few I have left from my grandmother, seemed to make me sad instead of happy this year.  Then there were all the Santas Klown and I have collected over the years, and beautiful gifts I’ve received from my sisters-in-law, and it was a pretty weepy afternoon.  Silly, I know.

But now I want to laze around by the fireplace and bake some cookies and start wrapping presents.  Unfortunately, I need to go to work tomorrow, and I ate enough over the last four days, and I haven’t bought any presents yet!  Fortunately, I have a few weeks yet.  And some vacation days to use up.

Wish me luck.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 25th, 2012 at 8:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.