January and February are hard months. The holidays are over with all the anticipation and hustle and bustle. The sun hardly ever shows up leaving day after day of gray clouds and muted light. Happily, our family has Steve and Kirsti's birthdays to celebrate (today, in fact. Happy Birthday, Steve and Kirsti) and our anniversary to commemorate at the end of January. There IS Valentine's day mid-February. But, overall, these two months seem to last forever.
With the new year, I have made some resolutions to resume more practicing, to ride bikes at least three times a week, to paint regularly, and to return to doing family history projects. And, I was able to do a little bit of all of the above this past week. I pulled out my string bass on Wednesday for the first time since returning from our mission! And, I couldn't believe how much stamina I have lost just playing the thing. I could only last fifteen minutes! So, working up to a thirty minute practice session will be a goal of mine this year. Steve and I only got out once on our bikes this week. Weather was mostly to blame. I actually did a small oil painting yesterday. That was satisfying. And, my effort in family history was more last week than in the past six months so that was good. But, the overall feeling I get when I reflect on the week is that every day felt like the same and what did I accomplish? I blame it on the clouds.
Tuesday, I needed to drop off some sewing projects to Kyle and Micah so I loaded up the dogs and we had a nice visit with Beckie and Kyle at her place.
Larkin came over for preschool on Thursday this week due to Southerland scheduling issues. She and I took the dogs on a nice walk. Along the way, she enjoyed the outside Christmas decor that was still up in a few yards. She loved the purple oversized lights that lined a walkway. And she spent several minutes petting the rainbow unicorn on another lawn. I was able to make the walk with relatively minor pain - I guess my PT exercises are working. Here is Larkin with a stick she found along the way....
The dogs continue to be a joy. We are settling into a nice daily routine. Linus gets stinkier faster than Sally so Steve took a turn at bathing him yesterday. Happily, he is agreeable to the ordeal. I remember our dog while growing up - Jingles - LOVED bathtime. Whenever he heard the bathtub water running, he also came running. A funny story: Mom and Dad had a shower and Juli and I always showered in our tub/shower so water filling a tub was truly a signal to Jingles that it was time for a bath. We had houseguests one time and the woman started to fill the tub for HER bath. Well, imagine her shock when she saw Jingles in her bathwater!
We DID get some good movie watching in. We saw "The Good Dinosaur" for the first time. What a quirky, cute movie! And pretty scary at times. We watched the Netflix original "The Midnight Sky" and that was very good. Poignant, compelling. It caused me to have a restless night's sleep after we saw it because I dreamed about it all night. We saw the first episode of the PBS reboot of "All Creatures Great and Small" and it looks like it will be an enjoyable series. And, we watched "Despicable Me" from our DVD collection and that never ceases to make me laugh and feel warm inside. ("he's so FLUFFY").
This week is looking kind of like last week (Big surprise - it IS January and a pandemic) but we'll just keep on keeping on.
No comments:
Post a Comment