Melancholy

I've decided that I get incredibly restless during that week between Christmas and New Year.  It's not a new sensation, but perhaps it is one I have finally acknowledged.  It's the slight anti-climax after the Christmas rush, combined with the knowledge that I have whole days to do as I wish and let my mind wander wherever it wishes to go.  I am not convinced this is a good or safe idea!


I have a love/hate relationship with this week.  I think last year I referred to it as my Twilight Zone week.  I'd liken it to feeling slightly stir-crazy.  I overdose on my own four walls (which I do love), my excited children (who I do love) and my dogs (who are not so bad really).  I think they are all just in my face too much, especially the dogs.  I need a 5-minute time-out.  Perhaps someone could put me on the Naughty Step?

(me with Daughters Number One and Two on Christmas Day)

With time off, I didn't have to get up and be anywhere at Silly O'Clock in the morning, which is absolutely wonderful, and this year, more than any other year since living in Canada, we had many people to see, invites to dinners, and people over to visit us.  We feel more settled than at any other time.  But comfortable (and comforting?) Skype chats with webcams with family and friends back in the UK still highlight that relationships here are still in their infancy really.  


We and our newer Canadian friends are all still getting to know each other to some degree, which can be simultaneously exhilarating - because I am inherently a nosey and sociable old bag; exhausting - because you feel you must try and remember every new fact about someone, their awful sister, their complicated jobs and their child-birth nightmare stories; and finally, and potentially the nub the matter, maybe I am not quite myself because I'm not yet sure if they are like-minded foodies with alcoholic tendencies, or will think me a complete lush if I polish off one more glass of wine, washed down with a choccie muffin.  (That's a small glass by with the way, and a low fat muffin of course.)

(the girls burn off some of that holiday energy!)

I love my lazy days, away from the politics of work.  New Christmas books beckon and I actually have the time to read more than three pages before my eyes fall shut.  But more free time leads to actually paying attention to the news and properly reading the newspapers.  Trust me - this is not a healthy activity!  This past week or two, I have found the TV and newspapers so full of death and destruction - tragedies galore.  There's too many people out there who have had the shittiest start to 2011 imaginable.  If I let myself ponder and empathize, I can get bogged down with sadness at the unfairness in this world.  So I try not to, then feel bad anyway.


I also spend the week looking around my home and getting unnecessarily frustrated with silly and not-so-silly little jobs that require more time and money than I have at my disposal.  It's that "out with the old, in the with new" concept that some silly bugger circulated when the new year dawns, and this somehow transfers itself to my utensil drawer, the picture in the downstairs loo, that tatty pair of jeans that cannot last another year and the annual desire to learn the piano which I never quite address.  I am surrounded by everyone else busying themselves with new year resolutions - which I learned a long time ago is a complete waste of energy for me.  But maybe that piano thing could work.


The weather has been kinda cold, dull and windy.  Well, winter, really.  Aha! - lightbulb moment - maybe that's the issue - maybe I am not a winter person.  It's still far too long till the clocks change, the earth warms up, the plants wake up and the landscape turns green.  How I do love green!

(but who needs green when you get this every few days?)

So what is in store for us for 2011?  Who knows?


I aim to shift the two pounds I put on last week and then show some serious attitude to the next ten.  Put 'em up!

(and look - I finally achieve tall-skinny winter shadow legs!!)

  
I can plot and scheme our once-in-a-lifetime Disney extravaganza scheduled for the Spring.  Did I tell you I hate rollercoasters?!  Bring on the cute animals and water-parks please.

I will take each day with my gorgeous husband and beautiful children as the precious gift it is.


And as I get back into the rhythm of life this week, I will shake off these melancholy moments and rush headlong into 2011 with a rocket up my bum and my hair on fire.  And it won't be long till I'm bemoaning the fact that I need a week off to just catch my thoughts!