With a whirlwind weekend behind me, I'm sitting down to contemplate the month ahead.
Can you believe that spring is around the corner?
A gentle start to spring
After what's been a mild winter thus far, it’s almost shocking that spring starts this month. Honestly, I’m not quite ready to leave the coziness of winter, and not ready to venture out into the world more frequently than I do right now.
February was unusually packed, and I’m hoping for a quieter March. A gentle start to the season sees perhaps fewer nights out, more home cooked dinners, and sustained levels of chamomile tea, with the benefit of slightly longer days.
Have a movie, popcorn and Snuggie night
Kev always tells me that I am someone who needs to be productive. He’s right, but behind that trait lie twin fears: that I can too easily become a vegetative lump and do absolutely nothing, and that it would take great effort (which I wouldn’t possess) to pull myself out from that state. These fears keep me fluttering about, feeling comforted by being busy, always doing things, making things, writing things.
Lately though, I’ve been feeling a deep fatigue in my mind and body. I think I need to let myself lump it (if only for a pre-determined and scheduled) amount of time. So Frozen II is in the cards for March I guess.
Hand build for the first half of the month
... And with the next breath I’m setting a contradictory goal to be more pottery-productive this month than last.
When I hand build at home, I’m often focused on only a couple of the same small design or one big item at a time. It gets tricky to keep track of multiple pieces, accounting for drying times between steps on differently sized objects.
But if I want to expand my capacity, I need to start getting comfortable juggling these types of tasks. I made a restock list at the beginning of the year that includes plenty of hand-built items that I plan to make a dent in this month.
Paris
We're booked to go to Paris the last week of this month.
I've been following the COVID-19 virus news closely since it disrupted our plans to go to China later this year. With our Paris trip about three weeks away, I'm keeping track of the now world-wide spread of the virus and wondering what the state of affairs will be by then, which in these times seems far away.
Let's see, and hope for the best.
Learn to accept a change of pace
With renovations and a move around the corner, the changes that the move will bring (specifically, the capacity to begin fostering dogs), and the financial impact of all of the above, our travels will slow significantly. Additionally, the unease caused by COVID-19 makes planning future trips less certain.
So for the time being, we will be grounded following our next trip. I’m having great difficulty coming to terms with this. I long so much and so often for new lands and seas and skies. But I also know that for all the wonderful reasons I have for traveling, I am partly but undeniably driven by the desire to literally fly away from my day to day, specifically my day job. Having a booked vacation on the calendar has been a coping mechanism, and for the first time in years, I’ll have to stay put for an indeterminate period.
What to do with myself?