When things get hectic, blogging is the first thing that goes for me. It always has. I’ve tried to keep up during hard times over the years, the biggest adaptation happening when Forest was born to some themed posts to keep me going. And it works, usually. I certainly don’t want to quit writing here. When you’ve been putting your writing online in some form since 2002 it is hard to give it up because you’ve turned into one of those hardcore old-style bloggers and, well, I don’t want to stop blogging yet. But….writing and reading blogs has been more time consuming this last year. And I need to adapt…

Thinking: The last time I did one of these was in December and I lamented then that I hadn’t done one since August. I don’t have a very good track record lately, do I? Well, a lot has been going on behind the scenes. First off, we have new feline overlords! I first found Rusty and Dusty on the Petfinder app back in January. Forest and I had started looking for cats and I was favoriting ones that were kid friendly and those who were in bonded pairs. These two were brothers and they had/have three sisters. Chris wanted to wait until we took our Arkansas trip before we started…

(this is a video, should load, give it a minute, if not click the photo and it will go to Flickr where you can watch) I’m hoping to have the mental space (and electricity) this weekend to write-up more about this week. Until then a few bullet point items. Currently at 11:58 am on Wednesday 2/17, we have electricity. It came back on last night at 3:45pm and lasted until 8:45pm when it started doing rolling blackouts through the night. It stayed off from around 6am until 9:45 this morning and we settled in expecting to have it off the rest of the day. Still might. *who knows* Last night…

The full story will have to come later this week (hopefully) but Snowpocalypse 2021 is well underway. Or rather, Power Grid Armageddon is well under way here in Texas. After knowing this storm was coming for the last week, we finally got about 3″ of snow last night in the wee hours of the morning. It looks gorgeous! The downside, about 4:30 am we joined the millions of others across the state and lost power. It has not come back on. My parents are without power and my brother and SIL and their family were without until this afternoon and got it for a few hours before it went out…

My update last week was a little too soon on my end. I started taking a turn for the worse on Wednesday and by Thursday and Friday I had no energy, my congestion was much worse, my eyes hurt, and I was very tired. Thankfully on Saturday I started feeling better energy-wise but I’m still fairly congested. Forest also took a turn Wednesday through early Friday, spiking fevers on and off and even vomiting overnight Thursday/Friday. Luckily the fever broke and while he has some congestion he is returning to normal a little bit more every day. Chris seems to be the best out of all of us at the…

I thought I’d share a quick post for those of you without social media and don’t see my posts there… Forest: He’s getting better but still have some congestion and a cough at times. We’ve been alternating children’s Zyrtec and Tylenol cough/cold/flu and that seems to help when the congestion gets annoying. Chris: He’s had it the worst out of any of us. Yesterday he finally started turning the corner with less congestion but he has brain fog and gets tired easily so there is a lot of resting going on. He’s still downing medicine and vitamins. I think he will have this cough for a good while. Me: Surprisingly…fine.…

Forest at the school district COVID-19 testing center this morning. Well. Here we are. The plague has arrived at our house, courtesy of the elementary school. Forest was slightly congested late Wednesday night and early Thursday morning and we gave him Zyrtec and went on our merry way. It is almost spring and he *is* back in school so germs are going to be rampant. But last night he sounded worse and overnight he slept horribly and this morning we knew we couldn’t send him to school. Our district has a free testing site during certain hours so off Forest and I went. Really, I thought it was going to…

Well, let’s recap this wild, strange, and insane year! January Somehow I went to Florida! How was this in 2020? I left Billy Goat Day thinking that in 2021 I would possibly come back and go to the FT Kick Off and then maybe hike through Big Cypress with the thru-hikers, and possibly convince Chris to come along. Ahh, dreams! Travel! Those were the days! I still laugh when I remember seeing folks wearing masks in the airport (more so on the way to Florida) and they weren’t necessarily folks from Asian countries (to be clear, this was still very few people, but more than the usual International Traveler sort…

Thinking: Wow, I haven’t written one of these up since August! It has crossed my mind a couple of times to sit down and write one but I never made the space to do so. So, here I am, sitting down in the last month of this very insane year of 2020! If you’d asked me in January or February this year what December would look like I would not have said, “Sparingly going places, thrilled to go to the grocery store as an outing, wearing masks like nobody’s business, and pondering a very different Christmas season than is typical.” And here we are. We’re on the home stretch but…