I feel like I said all kinds of stupid things yesterday. First of all, I am not going to read City of God. It’s too long. Second, I am perfectly aware that Lent has nothing to do with second chances at fasting and reorganizing your life, in that the point is not to be engaging in personal self-improvement projects or practicing spiritual disciplines in the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law. I don’t even know if I said that right.

But I did buy the City of God book yesterday, along with another one. Next to Augustine was Selected Writings by Thomas Aquinas. That one I could probably read. I tried to read Confessions earlier in the year and lost interest pretty quickly. Just in the very little of these two theologians that I’ve read, I think I like Thomas Aquinas better. So I used my Barnes and Noble gift card for two new books to add to our library.

I’m not scheduled for any more shifts until later next week. Last night I was able to come home early because they were short on summer day shift today. I asked if I could come back and work it and just reschedule my spring evening training for another time. So today it was me and one of the assistant directors of nursing who is responsible for filling in shifts during days when the floor staffing is short. I was glad she was there.

At some point I’m going to have to be able to do this on my own but I am definitely not at that point yet. She picked up a lot of my slack when it came to calling in orders and doing a monthly assessment on the hospice patient who I could not get to wake up to take her medicine. She came in there and was able to do it. I saw Laura’s dad who was there visiting one of his parishioners and thought of our parents on the drive home.

Tonight Dad wanted to take everyone out to dinner as an end of Christmas break/back-to-school acknowledgment. After that we walked around in a store called Sierra. He found some soap and I found a soft pair of wear around the house pants so I don’t have to wear out my green ones as fast. These ones are light pink. The boys found snowpants. I saw a pink 12lb kettlebell but decided that would not be necessary.

I made myself a giant pot of chicken and rice soup, with baked acorn squash mixed in to deepen the broth. I shared it with everyone yesterday, but they’ll move on to other things. It’ll last the next two to three days at least. This section of winter is one of my favorite stretches of time. With the holiday season now behind us, there’s the season between New Year’s and whenever Lent starts.

Then you have the slow climb out of the dark days, from Lent to Easter where you are given a second chance at fasting and reorganizing your life. By the time Easter comes it seems like years since Ash Wednesday, and people keep talking about spring finally arriving, when in fact it is only what some have called fake spring. It takes another six weeks for the weather to turn and become summer.

The kids slept in until almost eleven today. Dad was up early but fell back asleep on the couch while reading. Even the early birds can’t ignore nature’s cues, though they’ll be back by mid-February. I told him I like when he sleeps in, but I don’t remember when I woke up. We didn’t have Augustine’s City of God. They had it at Barnes and Noble so I might try and stop by on my way over to work on Spring.

There’s nothing very inspiring about pictures with grey skies. I took this one while out for my second or third walk when I thought I better take a picture of something before the sun goes down. There have actually been two separate groups in the CGC over New Year’s weekend. The first was here leading up to New Year’s Eve and the second was here on the actual night. Tonight the camp kids are down in the dining hall and plan on staying over night at main camp. They usually have some sort of reunion over break.

Everyone had a nice night ringing in the new year. I was asleep, but I think that still counts. I really think years are going by faster now, as it seems as though we were not all that long ago beginning another year in January. I feel like gradually I’ve become less reflective over new year’s time. I did make sure to buy a new calendar and new journal. The past three years I’ve filled four composition notebooks with notes and entries. This latest one took about a year.

I set a goal for 8,000 daily steps. It doesn’t hurt to set them. Other than that I don’t have much I’m thinking about in that regard. I would like to do less Instagram scrolling and more actual reading. Fiction, memoirs, church fathers, something other than stupid fluff. I’ve kind of just allowed my mind to be numbed and entertained and while I’m sure that has it’s place I do miss the sharpness that comes with reading other things. My eyes have started changing too where you have to hold out the bulletin or book just to see it.

Time got away
from me today
and it’s late

The year is near
over but many
good things remain

Including a God who
never stops saying
I love you

I made the boys clean today. They’re pretty good about it usually. It’s not their favorite thing to do by any means, but after making them breakfast I was hit with the urge to start cleaning the kitchen, the kind where you somehow end up with three or more garbage bags full of food and old supplements and expired meds from 2018 that you thought you’d keep around in case you needed prescription-strength pain medicine.

And instead of 16 cans of bug spray I narrowed it down to more like 8. We end up with a lot of bug spray around here especially in the summer. There are separate kinds for gnats and ticks because what keeps away gnats doesn’t always keep away the mosquitos. The cats have their own pharmacy section in the cupboard and I got rid of their anxiety medication and antibiotics but kept the dewormer. I also kept their allergy eye cream.

So that felt nice to clear out some more space. The rug underneath the table that I was so wonderfully proud of was taken out to the dumpster. I go through these periods where I’m given this almost cold unattachment to things in whatever space has called for me to address it. They emptied out jars and burned boxes and moved the chairs from here to there. I enjoyed their company and was pleased with the results.

Dad and Elianna are in Hoyleton tonight for a wedding. The wedding is tomorrow, but the rehearsal dinner is happening tonight. I wasn’t really sure how I’d be feeling by now and didn’t want to commit to going along. This was before all of the work stuff happened, which went okay again today but I’m tired. I came home and made ham and potato soup for supper and enjoyed eating with the boys around the table.

It would be interesting to go back and count not only how many weddings he’s done, but also how many of those marriages are no longer together. At one point I could remember more of them and it wouldn’t surprise me if it was even more than half. So many are divorced and remarried now. Our church there was not your typical small-town congregation. He stayed very busy doing weddings and funerals there.

I’m grateful our marriage has lasted this long. Twenty years may not seem like much to some but to me it very much feels like we “made it”, that is, we’ve crossed over into another place, where familiarity breeds not contempt but more love and peace and rest and security. At fifteen years Andrew Peterson wrote a song called Dancing in the Minefields. I like it, though I feel like many other songs could be still be written.

Over Thanksgiving I downloaded a social media app called BeReal. I only did it so I could keep in touch with my sister more. It’s a silly app where you take a two-sided picture and then post it whenever the app tells you it’s time to post. You don’t have to post and you can post late if you want to. The post almost always ends up being a selfie for one picture plus whatever or whoever is on the other side of the camera.

Ethan doesn’t have it, but Miles’s brother Graham does. His mom let him get it so he could keep in touch with homeschool friends. Miles used to be homeschooled which is one reason he and Ethan became friends sophomore year when Miles started high school at Lutheran High. His family is Baptist, and Ethan used to say that Miles was the most Christian person in the entire school. I do agree he’s a nice person.

Josh says to me on occasion, “Don’t you remember what it was like to be 19?”, like tonight when our son texted and asked if he could stay at Laura’s a little longer. She lives over a half-hour away and I thought I was being perfectly reasonable by establishing a curfew time for 9:30. Same for Elianna, when I texted Miles’s mom to pass along the curfew message because we hadn’t come up with a time before she left.

I guess I don’t approach it with the same sentimentality. I’m more thinking about going to bed and having kids home from all their places before I do so. Oh well. I did get to see her on Graham’s BeReal in their living room, which is the only reason I posted something in the first place. You can’t see anyone else’s picture unless you post yours. I don’t post every day but I do think it’s kind of funny to play around with.

We moved the card table back into the living room today. It has mostly become a catch-all for the kids’ stuff. They did attempt a puzzle but one of the cats got into it and I don’t think anyone’s attempted one since. So I put the checkboard on it and the boys did play with that a few times more today. I cooked a real lunch for everybody which is always a nice reset after being out of routine. Tomorrow I have to work again.

Today was my third day working on the summer unit. I did change my mind and told my boss that I’d like to go ahead and cross train now which is when you train on all three units. I had thought it might be better to get really comfortable with one unit first before trying to learn another unit in the meantime. But I think it’ll be okay. One of the things I like about this job is the potential there is to jump around. I like jobs where you are versatile and can plug into different spots as needed.

Lots of people are currently sick there. We’ve been having to wear N95 masks since I started and probably will for the foreseeable future. It’s not that there are necessarily active outbreaks at the moment, but this time of year people coming in and out will bring sickness in. In the short time I’ve been there I’ve seen and heard of several cases of flu, covid, and just generally not feeling well. I’m feeling better than I was last week and my voice is mostly back now, so I am thankful for that.

There are a few sick residents also. Today was a busier day because there was only one nurse so the two of us had the entire unit. I’m currently not burnt out on nursing so I was fairly indifferent and slightly enlivened by the challenge. I also felt like I was actually able to help. But yes, it’s the kind of thing you don’t want happening day in and day out. So far I seem to be liking it here and it seems like each day I’m feeling more and more comfortable in the environment and with the work tasks.

The sun came out for a short while today but mostly it’s been damp and grey. We’ve had a good couple of days doing Christmas things here and with my husband’s side of the family. Yesterday it was raining but today we went to the cemetery to visit my father-in-law’s gravesite. His headstone isn’t ready yet, but they do have the platform where the stone will be placed. He and my mother-in-law will share a headstone.

Before that we’d gone out to the farm and walked around. There isn’t a set move-in time with the house. My guess would be another month or two but that’s only a guess. Right next to the new house is the old farmhouse where my husband’s father grew up. The plan was to have it demolished once the new house was done. We walked around inside and I was surprised at how much stuff was still in there. I guess when they knock down a house you can leave anything you don’t want inside and they take it all away.

There’s going to be an auction for the farm equipment and all the things still left in the shed. For Christmas my mother-in-law gave each of the kids an ornament that was made out of a picture of them and Papa. She had one made for herself as well. It’s one of him standing in the doorway of the house while it still was only a wooden frame. He looked handsome and strong and just like himself, our many ways to remember him.

The day began early at 3:30AM. For the past several years we set an alarm for the middle of the night. I started doing this when the kids were old enough to want to stay up and catch us setting out presents. It actually used to to cause me anxiety to think of sleeping through the alarm or considering the ramifications of what would happen if morning came and we hadn’t put out the presents.

I told him I didn’t think we needed an alarm. I’m typically up at some point during the night. So we didn’t set one and he woke me up around 3:30. I really considered not getting up. He’d manage fine and then I wouldn’t have to fully come out of my drowsy state. There was not a good enough reason though not to, and to stay there would’ve only been selfishness and laziness on my part.

And neither of those things are helpful in marriage. Soon I was into the normal rhythm of things. The presents were wrapped, the stockings all stuffed. All we have to do is set everything out and manage the plate of cookies they leave us. He took a bite out of each one. He offered me some but I didn’t want any. Not only do I not particularly care for sweets, but bites are less forgiving with women.

We came back to bed and he fell asleep. I tossed and turned for a while then turned on my thunderstorms. The details here are momentarily fuzzy, in that I do not know if I began talking after I had fallen back asleep or before. I started talking about regret, and feeling like I maybe hadn’t done enough when his dad was on hospice. And there’d be no way to know because no one would tell me.

I recently said it, “You have to listen for the feeling behind the words.” It’s so easy to fixate on words themselves, a surefire way to go round and round with problems. And before too long I’d spiraled into bitter nonsense and I was the one who was crying again. But this is my portion, a part I’ve seen I’m supposed to be changing. Before long we were back to where Christmas was meant to be.