I still miss Jim, of course. I’ve been cat-sitting for Annie until she goes to her loving new home, which means I have been at his house quite frequently, for an hour or two at a time. Yesterday, it being Saturday, I made cinnamon rolls and took two over to his house along with coffee. For a little while, I sat in the chair where I would always sit, across from the chair in which he would always sit, and I thought about him. After a while I went into the office where Annie likes to sleep and sat with her for a while, reading poems from a book I found on his shelves. It was a lovely morning.
2021 is officially begun. I am working on the freelance project again. My wordcount went up a bit, and the deadline slid a bit, so I have another 10k to do before the end of January. This is still great fun. I do want to finish it before the deadline, though, so I can start getting up to speed with American Tour again.
Since the new year, my in-box has also filled with theses and dissertations to be read and commented on, all of them ASAP. Wish me luck!
After Jim died, I started reading obsessively as a distraction, the ten books of Bruce Alexander‘s Sir John Fielding series. They’re long and extremely well written, exactly what I needed, but now I am coming to the end. Now what? I haven’t read any Agatha Christie since my teens, so I ordered used copies of the Tommy and Tuppence books (I can’t read on kindle) and a few of the better other ones. I hope that keeps me for another week or two. My job is going to start getting in the way of recreational reading, in any case.
I decided not to visit my mother this month, after all. It’s been a year since I’ve seen her, but with these changes to Covid, we agreed that a ten-hour drive with who knows how many gas/restroom/food stops was probably ill-advised. Jim was my Covid bubble, and the cold weather means I am not even having patio cocktails with anyone, so I should be all right until the vaccines finally find their way to my tier. In fact when we come out of this, I will have been so isolated that I expect I’ll catch every cold and stomach bug out there.
It snowed two days ago, and when I woke up, everything was white, covered in snow or rimes with fog-ice. It reminded me of Minnesota and Wisconsin, and made me long to be back in the cold lands. Until I was 27 I mostly lived in northern Iowa and Minnesota; I still miss days so cold you can hear the air hiss.
