End of January 2019

     So, it's the last day of January, 2019.  It's barely above zero degrees today, but super sunny and clear.  We went out for donuts this morning and brought them home to eat with our own home-brewed coffee rather than the so-so stuff they sell at the donut shop.
     Why am I rambling about this?  Because, perhaps, I have nothing better to do, just thinking back over last year and thinking about what I REALLY want to do THIS year, as there are a couple of really big milestones that I hit this year.
     The first one is I get to celebrate my 10th Anniversary to my husband.  The second, I celebrate my 40th birthday.  Guess I'll have to change my blog's description from a "thirty-something" to a "forty-something" very soon, eh?
     I find, though, that even though I'm looking forward to both, I'm also not looking forward to the stress that undoubtedly I have to go through in the meantime.  I wish I were a wizard (hence the picture here) that could just foretell the future.  Or, even in a hazier sense, see if I get to enjoy myself this year rather than just following along, wondering what I'm doing with my life.  I surround myself with things I like, but as I'm sitting in my computer room, I'm thinking seriously that I need to change things up, that things are stale and I'm unhappy with a lot of things.  Maybe that's the reason that I have been so unhappy lately - that even though on a smaller level some things have changed, there's also a lot of things that haven't changed and maybe I really need to do something about it!
     The problem with days like this one, where I feel trapped inside and find myself staring aimlessly at the computer screen or television, my mind goes blank.  I sit there thinking, "what did I want to do today?  What should I accomplish today?  Where do I want to go?"
     And when it's cold, or raining or snowing or just not a sunny day, I sit there going, "nope, nothing I need to accomplish, and it'll be annoying to go out today, and I really don't need to buy anything anyway."  But maybe by the end of the night I realize I was supposed to do the laundry today.  I had wanted to clean the sheets on my bed and the towels in the bathroom. That I want to clear off my desk in my room because it's become too cluttered.  That I need to change the pictures on the walls because I'm tired of looking at them.  That maybe I should have gone out to take my books to the used bookstore to sell off because they're collecting dust and I haven't actually read them in a decade.
     So, what did I accomplish in January?  To sum it all up, not much.  I had a week off of work in order to recover from the holidays, only to return to a disaster as if nothing had been done while I was gone, and I had to make up for every single thing that I didn't do while I was gone.  And then three other keyholders all went on vacations and I suddenly have to do ALL of THEIR work TOO!  So here I'm catching up on MY stuff that THEY didn't do, and keep up with all of THEIR work, because I wouldn't just leave it for them!!
     All the relaxing I actually managed to do was destroyed.  I got one weekend where I got to hang out with some friends, but by the end of it I'd dropped too much money on the most awesome leather bodice (which I'm sure I'll wear a whole lot more once the weather gets better and I have conventions to go to again) and yet I was also super annoyed that my house guests, although they thanked us briefly for letting us stay with them, also didn't follow our house rules, destroyed the guest bed, and never said a word about the fact we cleaned off their car for them from snow before they left!  I really didn't want anything to do with them at all when they left, especially since they were so grouchy at us as we took them back to our house so they could go home.  What kind of appreciation IS that?
     There...now I have a title for my next blog...house guests.... stay tuned!