I’m going to try to keep this short, because it’s 10 at night and I’m about to turn into a pumpkin.
I’ve been thinking about my next few trips. I have a tentative plan to visit a friend in Toronto in the summer or fall, provided I can legally go into Canada at that point. That remains to be seen.
I also am thinking about finally taking my trip to Carlsbad Caverns or maybe Hot Springs National Park. That will depend on Alex’s ability to travel this year because National Parks have been sort of “our” thing over the last nine years (minus 2020 because 2020).
Then, in 2022, I’m planning to go to Seattle to visit family and to get some pictures, since our Seattle pictures are something that Thomas has. I was chatting with my cousin and he suggested I do some camping. Well, that would probably require Alex, as when I travel alone, I intend to have licensed innkeepers and deadbolts. I’m adventurous, not foolhardy.
The thing is that the idea of camping my way up the pacific coast does have some appeal. As I make whatever plans I end up making, I’ll certainly post about them here.
Gratuitous Amazon Link time! I’m sure I’ve posted this before, but it’s next in my list, so here goes. Today’s book is So You Want to Be a Wizard, by Diane Duane. So You Want to Be a Wizard is the first book in Duane’s Young Wizards series, which is currently ten books long. By the time I finish those books, it may well be eleven books long. We’ll see once we get there.
As anyone who has been reading here knows (Hi!), I’m in San Antonio, Texas. You know, the San Antonio that just had a snowstorm and then the electricity was down for much of the city for most of last week? That San Antonio?
Yeah.
And, as these things happen, I went into a fairly mild depressive spiral around then. I think it was just how haphazard everything was. I didn’t know what I would be doing, job-wise, from one day to the next. Our store was only open for four hours on Monday, and I was paralyzed by fear. I mean, I grew up driving in snow, but I haven’t done it in probably 15 to 20 years. That and there are basically three routes from here to work — a major highway, which was closed, a major street that’s hilly, or a less-major street which isn’t well-traveled at the best of times and where I was afraid I’d have trouble finding the street under the snow.
I was, like, “I wonder how long it’d take me to walk to work from here, because I sure don’t feel comfortable driving today.”
By the time the store opened, my shift was nearly done, so they told me just not to come in. I made it in on Tuesday, taking the less-traveled road, which had been driven on enough that I could find the road, and we lost electricity after about five hours and so we went home about an hour after that.
Wednesday, the store still didn’t have electricity, so we opened late, and then Thursday, the store didn’t have electricity at all.
So, guess what work was like on Friday.
Gratuitous photo time. This is Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, one of my personal light house goals. We’ll probably see this photo again when I do a retrospective of Alex and my trip to North Carolina in 2013.
On top of this, the electricity was off and on at my house. Sunday night we were one of the houses that got the rotating blackouts, 15 minutes on, 15 minutes off.
Then Monday morning, the electricity changed to five minutes on, 55 minutes off while the sun was out. Once the sun set, it was just off. When I washed myself before work on Tuesday, I could see steam rising from the sink in the light of my cell phone. Wednesday night, the electricity came back on and has been on since.
The freezing weather seems to be over. It’s 50 degrees outside right now and should peak at 66 tomorrow.
I’m actually upset that there were so many stressors this week, because normally I love the snow. When it snowed a few years ago, I was over the moon because aside from being a little white-knuckled on the way home, there were no stressors. I knew that my job would be there in the morning, and, while we had to run the faucets to keep the pipes from freezing, the electricity stayed on, so I knew that if I went out and got my feet all wet from the snow, I could dry them off in the warmth afterwards.
I wonder if I could plan a snow vacation this fall. Maybe the mountains in New Mexico?
Another thing I’ve learned from this is that I need some semblance of a routine for my mental health. A while ago, I tried to start heading to bed at 10:30. I don’t have to go to sleep then, but I at least have to be in bed and reading or whatever. I think I’ve even watched a YouTube video or two at this point. It’s 11 now, so I missed that goal for today. Better luck tomorrow.
I’m going to try to get back to blogging on a daily basis for now. I’m going to try to schedule them ahead of time, every other day, so that anyone who reads here won’t be hit with a firehose of blog posts. This will post immediately, though.
Now for our Gratuitous Amazon Link. I went digging to see where I left off on GAL’ing my Goodreads list. Today we have Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett, the 16th book in the Discworld series and the third featuring Death and his family. At first, I thought that this was where I burned out, but, guess what? I still have six more Discworld books to go.
