alleviating the dread drear of winter
I am really feeling the cold this winter. Lots of chronic aches and pains and energy-suck, and little desire to leave the house. I don't like it much, mainly because it puts in jeopardy my longterm (and longtime) dream of eventually retiring to points Great, White, and North. Boo. I don't want to be a snowbird! I don't! But I don't like having to push myself to perform anything beyond the basic functions.
This weekend I pushed myself to get out and do some holiday shopping (Marshalls, Ikea, online merchants), before allowing myself to do what I wanted to do most - i.e., reading a book of season- and natural-cycle-oriented food essays that made me miss my garden (Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle), while snuggling with cats. Cow!Cat spent his first night indoors last night, since it was horridly raining/sleeting/snowing and blowing miserably. I am relieved to report that no catwomen or resident felines were harmed in the staging of this docudrama. We started out just he and I, snuggled up with the goosedowny quilt and fleece blankets. (Steve, the crazed intrepid outdoorsdude, was camping. In a cabin, thankfully, but camping nonetheless.) About half an hour later Lady braved Cow!Cat's fearsome gaze to curl up at my feet . When I awoke in the abominable hours (i.e. dawnish), Thomas had joined us and was on Steve's pillow. And when I finally woke up for good around 10:30 a.m., Thomas had migrated to within 4 inches of Cow!Cat. Leo and Pixie spent the night in the office, which is Pixie's usual haunt, so I think the only one whose routine might have been unpleasantly disrupted was Leo. But there were no hissings, no growlings, no shrieking and no bloodshed, so I call that a relatively seamless integration. We'll see how tonight goes, now that Steve is home and Cow!Cat has discovered the upholstered chair in Andrew's room. It would be nice to achieve détente between Cow!Cat and Wuss!Extraordinaire Leo.
It seems I'm spending a lot of time commuting between here and Syracuse lately. First was Family Weekend in early November, which involved our staying in a small suite in North Syracuse because all the hotels on campus were booked solid for the weekend long before we ever had a student to visit there. My Mom went with us, it was a gray biting weekend (welcome to Syracuse in any month that is not May, June, July or August!) and we spent it being shuttle-bused around campus and town, and shuttling Andrew to a couple of places said bus doesn't go. (He needed wrestling gear, and the closest Dick's is somewhere in west-west-west Syracuse, a/k/a "Rochester".)
Then I drove up a mere nine days later, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, to collect said kid, turned around and drove home (with him taking over for an hour or so) to host Thanksgiving, only to turn around and drive back Sunday night with him. I stayed over that night because I wasn't prepared to do another 510-mile one-day trip, but that turned out to be a questionable decision because the drive home the next day was through constant rain and fog, and as a result took six hours of pain-in-the-ass high-tension drive time instead of the usual 3.75 relatively easy hours on a clear day/night. And now I'll be collecting him for winter break next Wednesday. We're again overnighting in a hotel, and will hit the Carousel Center for some weekday shopping on December 13, instead of waiting to get home to a ridiculously crowded weekend shopping-season mall here. Good plan, don't ya think? And if the weather turns lousy on the back end of the trip again, he'll be in the car to get some snow/rain highway driving experience. Heh. (Regarding subsequent breaks involving trips home, especially those lasting less than 4.5 weeks and not involving his entire winter wardrobe: Now that he's gotten his feet wet with the Syracuse local transit system I'm thinking he needs to learn how to make his way home via long-distance bus or Amtrak.)
The past week also involved my shipping a TI-81 calculator north, because Andrew somehow managed to lose his TI-89 graphing calculator either during or after Thanksgiving break, and it's nowhere to be easily found in this house despite being approximately the size of a breadbox. He also claims he cleaned up his side of the dorm room searching for it. I'm hoping it will turn up, but the TI-81, paleolithic a remnant as it may be, will get him through calculus and chemistry finals. I'm just glad we could solve the problem before the mass of holiday shipping starts making its way through the mails.
And now it's time to put a few location corrections into Garmin.com, since my GPS was unable to locate the most convenient Ikea to me and instead tried yesterday afternoon to send me to ye olde first-in-the-US former Ikea, now a barren construction site 3 miles away from the "new" one that's been open for at least 2 years.. (It's funny to think that Ikea has been around this area so long that they're trashing their old construction to build biggerbetterfastermore. Especially since large swaths of the country still think of them as the New Cool Kid.) And then to gather up the more amiable of my fuzzy companions, and to bed. Huzzah.
This weekend I pushed myself to get out and do some holiday shopping (Marshalls, Ikea, online merchants), before allowing myself to do what I wanted to do most - i.e., reading a book of season- and natural-cycle-oriented food essays that made me miss my garden (Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle), while snuggling with cats. Cow!Cat spent his first night indoors last night, since it was horridly raining/sleeting/snowing and blowing miserably. I am relieved to report that no catwomen or resident felines were harmed in the staging of this docudrama. We started out just he and I, snuggled up with the goosedowny quilt and fleece blankets. (Steve, the crazed intrepid outdoorsdude, was camping. In a cabin, thankfully, but camping nonetheless.) About half an hour later Lady braved Cow!Cat's fearsome gaze to curl up at my feet . When I awoke in the abominable hours (i.e. dawnish), Thomas had joined us and was on Steve's pillow. And when I finally woke up for good around 10:30 a.m., Thomas had migrated to within 4 inches of Cow!Cat. Leo and Pixie spent the night in the office, which is Pixie's usual haunt, so I think the only one whose routine might have been unpleasantly disrupted was Leo. But there were no hissings, no growlings, no shrieking and no bloodshed, so I call that a relatively seamless integration. We'll see how tonight goes, now that Steve is home and Cow!Cat has discovered the upholstered chair in Andrew's room. It would be nice to achieve détente between Cow!Cat and Wuss!Extraordinaire Leo.
It seems I'm spending a lot of time commuting between here and Syracuse lately. First was Family Weekend in early November, which involved our staying in a small suite in North Syracuse because all the hotels on campus were booked solid for the weekend long before we ever had a student to visit there. My Mom went with us, it was a gray biting weekend (welcome to Syracuse in any month that is not May, June, July or August!) and we spent it being shuttle-bused around campus and town, and shuttling Andrew to a couple of places said bus doesn't go. (He needed wrestling gear, and the closest Dick's is somewhere in west-west-west Syracuse, a/k/a "Rochester".)
Then I drove up a mere nine days later, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, to collect said kid, turned around and drove home (with him taking over for an hour or so) to host Thanksgiving, only to turn around and drive back Sunday night with him. I stayed over that night because I wasn't prepared to do another 510-mile one-day trip, but that turned out to be a questionable decision because the drive home the next day was through constant rain and fog, and as a result took six hours of pain-in-the-ass high-tension drive time instead of the usual 3.75 relatively easy hours on a clear day/night. And now I'll be collecting him for winter break next Wednesday. We're again overnighting in a hotel, and will hit the Carousel Center for some weekday shopping on December 13, instead of waiting to get home to a ridiculously crowded weekend shopping-season mall here. Good plan, don't ya think? And if the weather turns lousy on the back end of the trip again, he'll be in the car to get some snow/rain highway driving experience. Heh. (Regarding subsequent breaks involving trips home, especially those lasting less than 4.5 weeks and not involving his entire winter wardrobe: Now that he's gotten his feet wet with the Syracuse local transit system I'm thinking he needs to learn how to make his way home via long-distance bus or Amtrak.)
The past week also involved my shipping a TI-81 calculator north, because Andrew somehow managed to lose his TI-89 graphing calculator either during or after Thanksgiving break, and it's nowhere to be easily found in this house despite being approximately the size of a breadbox. He also claims he cleaned up his side of the dorm room searching for it. I'm hoping it will turn up, but the TI-81, paleolithic a remnant as it may be, will get him through calculus and chemistry finals. I'm just glad we could solve the problem before the mass of holiday shipping starts making its way through the mails.
And now it's time to put a few location corrections into Garmin.com, since my GPS was unable to locate the most convenient Ikea to me and instead tried yesterday afternoon to send me to ye olde first-in-the-US former Ikea, now a barren construction site 3 miles away from the "new" one that's been open for at least 2 years.. (It's funny to think that Ikea has been around this area so long that they're trashing their old construction to build biggerbetterfastermore. Especially since large swaths of the country still think of them as the New Cool Kid.) And then to gather up the more amiable of my fuzzy companions, and to bed. Huzzah.