February

February is moving along and the weather is very weird. So hot. In the high 50s most days, in the low 60s other days. I know it's not as bad as southern California in the 80s, but it's very peculiar for Colorado to have such a long stretch of warm weather. I hate to think of how this will affect the snow pack.

We did have an excellent snowfall at the start of the month, beginning February 1st and continuing on through the 2nd. Here's Rocket Boy trying to shovel out on the 2nd. (I helped -- I didn't just take pictures.) Someone "borrowed" our best snow shovel, but we still had two others. Weirdly enough, a week later they gave it back, so I suppose I should remove the scare quotes, but it's not as though we sanctioned the borrowing. In the meantime Rocket Boy had gone out and bought a new snow shovel, so now we have four. Growing up in California, I never thought I would co-own four snow shovels.

I tried to take a picture that showed how deep the snow was (nearly 17 inches), and I think this one of Clifford's partially-shoveled driveway shows it pretty well. The high walls of snow. It really was a big dump, and as soon as it stopped we began worrying about how long it would stick around and what a mess it would be. But a few days later we warmed up and the snow began to melt, and now a week later it is almost gone. That's a very short lifespan for 17 inches of snow.

Now apparently it is spring, much much much too early. I sure hope winter comes back, because I don't like this. Even wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt with a light sweater, I'm too hot during the day. I'm actually thinking of pulling my summer clothes back out. Or buying something new, but I shouldn't do that. I've been successfully resisting shopping, since we have so little money coming in, and I don't want to mess with that. But still. Springtime is shopping for new clothes time. OK, it's not spring. Weird, though. If the groundhog hadn't seen his shadow this would make more sense (in an alternate reality where we really do use groundhogs to predict the weather), but he did. We're supposed to have 6 more weeks of winter, and instead it's 60 degrees.

I've been avoiding the blog because I don't want to write gloomy posts, but tonight I feel a little more chipper. We're surviving, it's not so bad. I would say for me the number one worst thing about Rocket Boy being unemployed is not the reduction in our income, it's the fact that he's home all the time. Tuesday and Thursday from 8 to 2:30 I want to be alone in the house so I can get my work done. Instead he is there, sitting at his computer while I sit at mine, typing away, not paying attention to me, but still, impossible to ignore. It's not that I don't like my husband, it's just that I work so much better alone. I like to talk to myself while I work, play music, do all sorts of things I can't do if someone else is in the room, or even the house.

Yesterday (Thursday) I was so unhappy with him being there, it was almost agony. OK, focus, I told myself, looking at my long to-do list. And then Rocket Boy would shift in his office chair and it would CREAK, and I would think GO AWAY. NOW. But I can't say that. I really can't. Where could he go? We don't have any other place in the house to work. Anyway, he's depressed because he's unemployed. I can't add to that by telling him I want him to go away. So I suffer in silence. And yes, I know it's not really suffering. The rest of the world has it much worse than me. This is why I'm not blogging much right now! I know I'm the most selfish, whiniest person in the world -- but arrgghh, it's AGONY.

So, good days and bad days. I'm still trying to take responsibility for stuff, still trying not to wallow. Sometimes I have a really bad day; more often I have sort of blah days. Not a lot of happy ones. But I'm trying. Not spending much money, cooking more. Doing my work, reading to the boos. We just started The Long Winter. I had stopped reading aloud the Little House books after Plum Creek, because I thought Laura gets too old for the boys to relate to her. But The Long Winter is what I always want to read during the winter, even a winter that is pretending to be spring, so I thought what the heck, let's do it. I've read two chapters so far and they're very interested, even though no snow has fallen (in the book). Thank you, Laura Ingalls Wilder, for being such a mesmerising writer.

Tomorrow we are going back to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science -- our third visit in two months -- making use of that membership I bought in December. They have a new exhibit about chocolate. Should be fun. And on we go.