Weekly Update - Jan. 5, 2023

I'm still having a little bit of trouble wrapping my head around the fact it's January. It could have something to do with the fact that I feel a bit as though I completely missed December.

• I've paid the bills and have yet to write the wrong year. I must really want to say good-bye to 2022.
• Life continues on a positive trajectory. Each day is still a little bit better than the last. Sleeping is still a bit of a challenge, but her primary care doctor agrees that after so much disregulation for so long that it could take a bit to get the sleeping back in order.
• We are back to below freezing temperatures and I couldn't be happier, even if it does mean I need to carry water out to the barn. The mud was so disgusting. The horses pretty much stayed in their stalls and dry lot for days because while the pasture does not look great, I really don't want to wreck it completely. I've decided that if winter would stay at 30 degrees or so, it would be just about perfect. Then it could go up to the 70's and that would be perfect, too. I don't want much, huh?
• Our tree was so dry by Christmas that every time someone went to get another present, if they accidentally knocked a branch, all the needles from that branch would completely fall off. It was bad! So bad that I took it down on the 26th and no one complained. But I've also learned that my need to take Christmas down fairly soon after the actual day is because of the tree. With the tree gone, I realized today that our decorations are still up and I hadn't really noticed. I think I will deal with them this weekend.
• We did a couple of light days of school yesterday and today. It was an easier way to work ourselves back into our schedule after so long off. I didn't plan to take the entire month off, but you know how our December was. At one point, people would ask what we were doing that day and if we were doing school. My reply was survive and I don't know. So we have a few things to catch-up on. But having really looked at the plan over the past couple of days, I think we can easily be caught up by the end of January at the latest.
• It turns out that some people won't actually be adding math in next week because they just now told me that they are finished with their current book. The new books need to be ordered, so it's not just a matter of going upstairs and grabbing the next one. Some people were not sad.
• I've been kind of knocked on my heels today by the death of my friend.
• L. announced yesterday that she has plans to make an entire army of platypuses out of clay and give them each hats. G. suggested that one of them needed a fedora.
• We moved the table saw off the back porch, so after trying another roosting spot and being moved off it, Jodie the chicken seems to have decided just to go inside the coop with the others. I had gotten pretty good at carrying a chicken under my arm so I had a hand to open the coop.
• My mother had two copies of the new Louise Penny book, so is sending me one of them. I am very excited. It also means that I can give up my 294th spot on the hold list. I had made progress because a couple of weeks ago I was in the 600's. 
• The other day when I got back from the grocery store, H. came quietly up to me and said, "I'm sorry, Mommy, but I broke something." It was a picture frame that is totally fixable and even if it hadn't been, it would have been no big deal. In fact, I think I had broke that same frame once before. But really, I completely wanted to celebrate. Feeling safe enough to tell me something like that has been an ongoing challenge and here she was voluntarily telling me before I noticed the broken item. You can bet I told her how proud I was of her being so brave to tell me. Never before have I been so happy to have something broken.
• I don't make resolutions, but I did make a goal for January... finally finish washing and ironing the linen tablecloths we used at Thanksgiving. I got the napkins (all 20+ of them) done last week in a calm(er) moment. I actually don't mind ironing napkins, but I really dislike ironing tablecloths as you probably figured out. And because I know someone will comment... they are linen, so need to be ironed wet. I could just wash the tablecloths and set them aside until I need them, but it would then require washing them again, Plus, I know myself well enough that I won't choose to use them at that point. By forcing myself to get them done before they are put away I stand a better chance of actually doing the job. 
• Y. has had a two week break, but bright and early at 8am tomorrow (a Saturday), she'll be up for her Mandarin tutoring. That 13 hour time difference is a killer.
• We did get to watch Death on the Nile, the movie done by Kenneth Branagh. It was visually beautiful in a very sanitized version of Egypt sort of way. But, boy, I disliked his Poirot in this even more than his Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express. We were also more than a little dismayed at how nearly all the characters were completely different. Now we need to find some other versions to compare.
• We have D. home for one more week.
• P. has been gone to work at a horse show all week, so Midnight, her cat, has been back here. Midnight does not like it when P. is not here and has been terrorizing everyone at night looking for a place to sleep. In the early morning hours today,  Midnight got into our room. All of a sudden a cat landed on my head. He jumps so high that it truly feels like someone is dropping cats on the bed while you are sleeping. At least that's what my brain decided had happened when he landed. It took a minute to sort out what was going on.

And with that I'll say goodnight. Here's to a much calmer weekend this week.