Baby, It's Cold Outside

I'm a rather solitary person by nature. I think it was why I was able to work night shift for 7 years. When I was single, it was easy to stay on my night schedule and do the solitary activities I love, like sewing, beadwork, reading, etc. When I met my husband I was still working nights and I worked them for 2 more years before making the switch back to days. It's much harder working nights when you live with a dayshift person.

All of this is to say that it is in my nature to spend time alone, although I love having a partner now and spending time together. When I get the opportunity to spend time alone, however, it is nice. As happens to most people who get married, that precious alone time becomes less and less frequent.

My husband's brother is in Portland this weekend from New York. I would have liked to see him, but I didn't have it in me to make the 700-plus mile round trip this weekend. It's been a long exhausting year, and so we aren't even planning to travel for Christmas this year, which is rare. I really needed a weekend to do nothing--no school or studying, no traveling long distances. So hubby is in Portland visiting his dear brother, and I am sure they are having a great time together. I would like to be there, but as it happens I have some alone time this weekend instead. It's been a very long time since I have had that.

I've done a lot today already: went to the sale at Joann's Fabric to get a new pair of sewing shears, got things to make a holiday wreath, and then made it and hung it, and now I've just gotten back from a run. This evening I plan on sewing and organizing the basement, and then maybe watching a movie and knitting. I'm not doing one bit of studying!

The running is going slow--I wasn't able to get out there during the week for various reasons. I'm still averaging less than 5 miles a week so far. But running in the cold is better than I anticipated, since I hate being cold. I found today that although my lungs want me to stop, I keep running longer because my legs start to get cold when I walk. Bonus!

I saw something really cool when I ran around the little park by our house. It has a pond, and people were ice skating there. I've never lived somewhere that you could actually ice skate on a pond! It looked like the cover of a Currier & Ives catalog. (Remember those?) Most of the people were preparing for an ice hockey game, but a few people were out there figure skating. It's not a very big pond, but the weather is perfect for it: it's been very cold, single digits at night with highs in the 20s during the day, and so it's been too cold to snow, and there isn't much on the ice to sweep away first. I'm not a cold-weather gal, but I loved seeing people out there skating on a pond. It made it feel very small-town, which happens a lot in Spokane actually.

I hope everyone's Christmas preparations are coming along well. Ours are pretty much done. Normally we go to my brother's house for the holidays, but his wife just gave birth to my first niece this week. As much as I would love to see them, and meet little Kiera, they are very busy with the new baby, and we are too tired to try braving the snowy mountain pass this year. So we are having some friends over for dinner and games and movies on Christmas evening. I'm really looking forward to it. We'll go see my family after the holidays when the mountain driving is a little less stressful.