Merry Making to the Max

December is eight days old, and kind of sort of started looking like December a day or two ago, and may or may not really look — and feel — like it starting today, but already it’s made me look and feel about 100 years older.

In the Before Times, and I can’t really tell you what these times were before, I could manage a life that consisted of full-time work, two newspapers and other reading material daily, pets, and full social involvement that meant meetings, concerts, lectures or dance classes nearly every night of nearly every week.

These days I am not really working full-time; my newspaper is electronic and seems to take all day to get through the opinion section alone; tending to animals requires multiple hours away from work; and social engagement is generally limited to Skype lunch and Sunday breakfast, each two hours in duration.

Until I reached Holiday 2021, when it is Dec. 8 and I am darn near holidayed out. Let me hasten to say I have enjoyed each component of my holiday activity, but it feels like the season should have ended already, if not a week earlier.

In a calendar that rivals anything from when I was at my best, here is how life has gone since the Tuesday before Thanksgiving:

Lynn and I hosted friends we'd been trying to schedule dinner with for a month;
Thanksgiving hosted by friends;
Trip to Denver for family Thanksgiving;
A day in Denver with old friends;
Dinner with a friend in town for one night only;
Birthday dinner downtown for a friend;
Gunnison's Night of Lights, back in force after an absence last year;
Hosting the Pat's festive holiday party;
Holiday concert staged by the Western Not State music department.

This means I have been thrown out of my current and long-standing routine 10 of the last 16 days. Not that this wasn't all fun -- I enjoyed every one of these many festive happenings -- but I can no longer manage a schedule like that and manage anything else. 

Gone for the last two weeks was pretty much anything else: work was an afterthought; household chores -- other than cleaning multiple times for assorted guests, several of them allergic to pets -- non-existent; and blogging was a vague notion in the back of my head, no matter how many topics struck me.

The purpose of Gunnison’s Night of Lights, an invention of the local chamber of commerce, is to get people in a festive and not coincidentally shopping frame of mind. It is intended to kick off the holiday season, not mark the end of it, but I can’t help but hope, this morning, that my holidays are calming down. They probably aren’t — I’m headed to our annual homeowners’ association meeting tonight after taking time off work this afternoon for a home visit from one of Na Ki’o’s many vets — but I can no longer live this lifestyle that was once my usual modus operandi.

So now that I am marking the holidays as over, Mother Nature has decided she might finally be feeling the spirit of the season. Maybe. Here is the snowfall forecast for Gunnison for the next couple days, depending on whose weather service you care to believe: No snow. Two inches. Four inches. One foot.

My weather of choice, Weather Underground, puts us mostly in the snain category tomorrow, with rain and snow, possibly up to 3 inches of accumulated snow. Since Wunderground told me the other day it was going to snow and snow and snow for 12 hours straight, resulting in an entire inch of snow, and it managed a dusting during some hour when no one was awake, I’m assuming half their total, or less, is a more realistic expectation.

Then, I’m told, we should expect to slide into negative numbers that could possibly reach double digits, which seems particularly harsh after showering us with 50- and 60-degree days during my entire social rumble.

So I’m just not sure what to think of the remainder of my holiday season. I whirled my social wind when it felt like fall, and now that it maybe might could be winter I’m ready to hibernate. Or at least slow down enough to make sure bills get paid before I get everyone thrown out into the snow both at home and work.

With Christmas over two weeks away, though, and us all now knowing just how much I can cram into that sort of time frame when pressed, I could end up whirled right through to the end of the month. Here’s ho-ho-hoping that’s not the case, but whatever happens, let it be merry and bright, hm?

Something new from Kara’s favorite (Sheerio!) and one of mine.