I'm back!

The trip was pretty much uneventful (at least in my personal life; it seems that at least one Large News Item has to happen when I am off on break).

It went by pretty fast and yet at the same time I'm always surprised when I come back home (here) and find how little has changed. I guess we got some rain while I was gone - my birdbath was filled up (it was empty) and the newspapers were wet.

Oh, yeah. I guess the newspaper carrier never got the message that they were supposed to hold my papers. Arrrgh. I called it in several days before I left. It's fortunate I live in a low crime area; I always thought a pile of newspapers on the front step was basically a "rob me" signal.

I have a few things to do tonight; I need to prepare a Sunday school lesson (not very inspired right now; I'll read the prompts and see what I think of). I also want to take down my decorations as it is, after all, Epiphany, and therefore the right and proper time by which they should be down. (I'll talk more about over-break projects and presents later, over the next few days).

I totally cleared off my mantel before Christmas - it had become kind of a catchall for stuff - to decorate it, and now I'm kind of thinking, rather than putting the junk (most of which found other homes) back up there, I might do a seasonal decorating sort of thing: maybe do "ice" for January (get out all the cut-glass and pressed-glass antiquey things I've bought over the years, and white and silver candles, and anything else I have sitting around that looks like it goes. And maybe swallow my Blinding. Spinster-Girl. Hatred. of Valentine's day and put up red and pink girly fluffy things for February. And green for March. And flowers (real or fake) for spring...it's an idea that seems somewhat appealing but it also strikes me as the sort of idea that I'd eventually let drop in the regular everyday busy-ness.

And I've been thinking a bit about resolutions, and changes, and that sort of thing. Now, I don't really make New Year's Resolutions. Part of it is, it feels to me like the time isn't ideal. The holidays are over (with really nothing, at least as far as I'm concerned, until my birthday or even Easter; I don't "do" valentine's day or St. Patrick's Day and most of the other holidays are sort of the civic variety which you don't really celebrate). It's winter, usually it's cold and grey and you're already kind of down because all of the things that seemed so sparkly and so pretty before Christmas now seem kind of out-of-place and maybe even a little sad and tawdry and you have to put everything away and you usually wind up breaking something and there's cleanup to be done and also something to be figured out for those leftover cookies which you really don't want to look at anyway even if you hadn't eaten too much over the holidays already....So I think it's a bad time of year to say "You need to change." It's kind of, go ahead and kick me when I'm down.

There's also a more personal reason why I don't like the typical New Year's resolution. I'm someone who has been, at various points in the past, really plagued with perfectionism. As in the sort of, "If you don't lose 20 pounds no one will love you and you will die all alone." or "If you don't cut back on your hobbies and devote more time to research, you will not get to keep your job and you will die all alone under a bridge somewhere." or "If you don't eat healthier you will get sick and frail before your time and since you don't have a spouse or kids to care for you, you will have to hire a succession of caretakers who will rob you blind and then probably leave you to die all alone..." Not every year (or not every month; there was a time in college when the start of every month was seen as an opportunity to Change Something Bad About Me.). And you know, I've kind of grown out of that. I've come to peace with the fact that I will most likely die alone (but, God willing, that will be 60 years in the future). I've told myself that losing 20 pounds because that's the only reason men would notice me is a stupid reason and not true. And I've told myself that my hobbies are like my children; I spend about as much time knitting in an average day as a good parent would spend playing with their kid.

But at times I still feel that old sense of Not Being Good Enough. And you know, it's frustrating to deal with.

And, funnily enough, there was an article in Real Simple (yes, I read Real Simple. Laugh if you must: yes, it is in some ways an utterly forgettable magazine with each issue and yet I still feel happy when I open the mailbox and see it in there). Alice Hoffman wrote it. (Alice Hoffman! She didn't feel good enough sometimes! And she's actually DONE SOMETHING with her life!)

Anyway. She got at the heart of why I'm uncomfortable with so many New Year's Resolutions:

"I thought about all those New Years when I believed myself not thin enough or smart enough or good enough, when my list of how I wanted to change the future went on and on, when I was convinced that by making New Year's resolutions, I would somehow become a better person. And then I thought what my grandmother had known all along: What a waste of time.
I became well again [for Hoffman, it took a diagnosis with and treatment for cancer for her to come to this realization]. Now, rather than holding myself to impossible standards and setting myself up for inevitable failure, I look past imperfections. I won't be a better person; the quality and texture of my life will be no richer, nor will the people I love most love me less because my weight fluctuates or because I conjugate a French verb incorrectly. So when it comes to the New Year, I resolve only one thing: to do my best and see the new year through."

That said: I also think far too few people try to make "fun" resolutions. Too many resolutions have a tone of the punitive: eating less, balancing the checkbook, putting more money away for retirement or kids' tuition or to pay down debts.

So I am making one little tiny resolution that I think is a fun resolution: I have five years or more of "Cooking Light" sitting on my bookshelves, and several years' worth of "Eating Well" and other magazines with recipes. I am going to begin going through them, and a couple times a month (up to once a week, depending on how my time goes), I am going to choose a recipe I've never tried, one that I think I will like, and I will make it.

I am especially going to concentrate on slow-cooker recipes; I think my Mondays this semester are made for them: I go to campus at 7 and get home shortly after 5 (I teach a 3 pm to 5 pm lab, so depending on how much cleanup there is I could get home anywhere from 5 pm to 6 pm). I figure I can measure out the seasonings and cut up the veggies and stuff Sunday night before I go to bed, refrigerate anything that needs refrigerated overnight, and then Monday morning, dump it all in the slow cooker and turn it on. And then when I come home at 5, tired and hungry, dinner's all done! I particularly like the thought of walking in my front door and smelling my dinner all cooked - that's something I never get to enjoy except when I'm visiting someone else who does the cooking.

I also think I will cook more on Saturday afternoons, perhaps aiming at things that will be good leftover.