February Books

I read a dozen books in February.

Weekly album and thoughts

February is the least photogenic month in the year. I love taking pictures and looking at pictures, but something about February in the Yakima Valley just kills my photo-interest. February was also a bit of a holding pattern for us. Day one of track practice was set for February 28th, so I kept feeling this urgency to enjoy my husband's company while I could. A few weeks ago, Jeff signed a new coaching contract, effectively ending his days as a "carefree" assistant track coach (coaching a group of 20 distance runners) to the much more intense position of head track coach, with five assistant coaches and over 80 teenage participants.

February Sunshine

This has been the gentlest February of all time! February was pretty warm last year, but it was also much windier and more volatile outside. So far February 2022 has been mild and sunny with only light breezes--plenty cold at night, but with sweet yellow sunshine warming up the daytime. Our tulips poked up leaves this week, and yesterday I saw a happy yellow crocus blooming in our front flower bed--the first! I know enough about the Yakima Valley to know to enjoy these gentle days when they come. February can either be endless frigid hard gray blizzards or soft and sunny, but March is always ferociously windy here. We are doing our best to make the most of the gift of this sweet tender February while it lasts. 

Happy Birthday to Rose

Rose turned eleven years old on Monday! We began celebrations a day early and had the local grandparents and cousins over for birthday mac and cheese dinner on Sunday night. We set up a folding table in our family room for the adults, and the kids ate at our kitchen table a few feet away. Our little house was bursting with family and life, all celebrating our sweet Rose girl. Everyone chowed down on the triple batch of macaroni and cheese that I made (3 pounds of macaroni noodles!) with roasted veggies and kielbasa sausage on the side. We had one small bowl of macaroni leftover. 

January Books

January: the month of cold gray darkness. Thank goodness for sweet bubblegum books to keep it at bay! This month I especially appreciated my happy fluff-books because they balanced out the heavier topics I encountered in my non-fiction reading. Balance is essential when it comes to learning about the social injustices in our world. Based on my reading list this month, it takes six happy fluffy books to offset one heavy nonfiction book.

Slow Recovery

Tired and slow are the two most accurate adjectives for how this week went for us. Tired and slow. Evidence of that can be found in these journal excerpts:

Monday, January 24th: Tired. Last night I felt normal but tonight I feel extra fatigued, with a headache. And my cough is still going strong. Ugh. I tried to be moderate in my activity level today. I did less than 20 minutes of arm-targeted yoga and walked 2 miles at a nice easy stroll. My bum leg only ached very faintly after the walk, but my walk definitely made it ache more than it did before the walk. Blah to that. Rose went back to school today, but everyone else stayed home, including Jeff. 

We had leftover soup for dinner tonight. We listened to the first 15 verses of Moses 7, read by the app, and talked a little about them--they were doozies, so we didn't have a very enlightening discussion but we did our best. Then we had family game night where we played an Amber adapted version of Sleeping Queens which took about five minutes. Since that was so short, we played a game of Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, where in Jeff and I took all of the card forfeits so Amber (whose reflexes are slower because she's younger) wouldn't be sad. 

Omicron one by one

 Omicron has paid us a visit. It started with me, the only one of us who doesn't go to school every day. I started feeling off last Wednesday (January 12th), but didn't feel bad enough to put life on hold until Friday (Jan 14th), when I spent all day huddled in a recliner in the corner of my bedroom, watching a K-drama on Netflix. It was a snow day, minus the snow, with a whole lot of slick ice, so Jeff and the kids were home from school. Jeff did everything and I have to say it was such a relief not to have to push through a sickness. I resisted succumbing to how rotten I felt until Jeff sat me down and turned on the TV on Friday morning. 

My symptoms weren't terrible, just fatigue, headache, stuffy head, and a cough. But I sure didn't feel good! My appetite was gone and my body was limp. On Thursday when I was starting to accept that I was coming down with something, I went to our local free Covid testing center. There was a line of close to 40 people standing outside in the 33 degree rain waiting to be tested, so I turned around and went home without getting tested. What was the point? I was going to stay home while I was sick, regardless of what sickness I had, and standing outside in the cold wet for hours with a bunch of sick people just to get tested seemed like it would do more harm than good. 

Remembering Grama Brown

My grandma Lamona Brown died on Friday, January 7th, 2022. She was such a kind intelligent talented lady. One of my most frequent memories of her is of what she said every time I saw her. She would open her long arms wide and say "give me some loves!" in an invitation to hug. Even though I didn't get see or talk with her very often (about once or twice a year) in my adult life, I always felt her love. She was the epitome of patient enduring to the end and lived her last few years blind in a frail body, while her mind stayed sharp.

Snoweek

Sunnyside caught the edge of the enormous snowstorm that pounded the northern and western parts of Washington last week. The first day of school in 2022 was a snow day at home, and there only ended up being one day that week where school kept regular hours--we had 2 snow days and 2 two hour delay days in the first week of January! That kind of uncertainty made it hard to get into a daily routine, but we enjoyed our first big snowfall of the year with snowmen and lots of hot chocolate, and even managed to do some much-needed household chores on the side.

December Books

Another year of reading is in the books. Pun intended! I thought I'd add my other yearly stats to my December books post. In 2021:

• I read 188 books: 27 non-fiction/166 fiction (24 audiobooks, 31 re-reads)  
• I ran 1350 miles  
• I biked 568 miles
• I wrote 150,000 words on this blog (probably closer to 145k of my own words, subtracting all of those delicious book quotes that I shared each month)

Compared to last year, that's 15 more books read, 18 more miles run, 237 more miles biked, and 5-10k more blog words written. Honestly, after the shutdowns of 2020, I did not think I'd do more of my three R's in 2021. I don't aspire to do more of my favorite activities each year (balance is key), but I do like seeing the stats of how much I have done those activities. I love to read, run and write! (My biking kind of died out during cross country season, but hopefully I'll get back in the saddle in springtime.)

Skating into the new year

The canal in front of our house froze into a thick slick smooth sturdy surface in time for some New Year's Eve ice skating. It was THE BEST ice we've ever had! Smooth and thick and wide. There was zero liquid water under the ice--it was frozen solid straight through its one foot depth. We had to shovel some snow off of it, but not too much because it was a thin covering and we could mostly skate through it. Jay chose not to skate. Rose got very frustrated while getting ready to skate (bunching sleeves and tricky skate laces). Jeff laced up his black figure skates and calmly glided up and down the canal for a while before heading inside. Once Rose was done skating, I helped Amber into our women's size 8 skates (they were huge but I laced them tight for her). Amber and I had a blast skating together! We were out there for over 2 hours.

Christmas in Denver

 After we had our family Christmas at home, we flew to Denver for Christmas part 2 with my side of the family. We left on Thursday, December 23rd and got home on Wednesday the 29th. It was a slightly confusing mid-week to mid-week trip, but traveling at those times was the most economical and gave us a cushion of at-home time on both sides of our trip, to relax and recover. Our direct flight from Pasco to Denver was so sleek and easy. There was a little turbulence, but other than that the 2 hour 20 minute flight was smooth--always a relief to my motion-sickness-prone constitution.