The New Year is Starting Slowly - Or I Am Anyway

I'm still trying to drag myself out of the holiday blues and regain my normal schedule.

Reading has been slow.  I've started books but can't seem to stay engaged.  I'm sure it's me, not them.  I'm a little depressed to find that I read about eleven fewer books last year than I did in 2013.  There were a few personal problems last year that made finding time to read and concentrating on reading  difficult.

Since 1968, I've been keeping sporadic track of the books I've read.  Sporadic in the earlier years but compulsive for many years.  I use 3 x 5 cards and file them in a lovely old oak double file drawer.  I decided that I didn't have enough to do with my spare time, so I logged all those cards into a program I created on my lap top.  Now I can sort them by author, title, or date I finished reading them.  And they're all on my lap top, so when someone blogs about a book, I can just open my program and check to see if I've read it.  (Yeah, I bet you remember all the books you've read, right?!)

I hate the holidays for many reasons.  Mostly because my late mother was the spirit of Christmas and since we lost her to dementia and to death fifteen years ago, Christmas hasn't been the same.  I don't miss her less, I miss her more.  But we have three little girls in the family, my grandnieces, two 2-year-olds and one 4-year-old, who made this past Christmas more fun.  They're lovely and smart and thoughtful and funny.

Jack has become obsessed with the jigsaw puzzle my sister gave him for Christmas.  I think she's trying to drive him insane.  The puzzle is a borderless poinsettia, that is, the border is the leaves of the plant.  There are no 'edge' pieces like in a regular square or rectangular puzzle.  But bless his little manic soul, he's determined it's not going to get the best of him!  It would be nice to eat at the dining room table again, though.

The two books I've finished so far this year are The Curious Affair of the Third Dog by Patricia Moyes and Die Again by Tess Gerritsen.  Of the two, I liked the second much better.  The first was slow going.  I also decided I don't like mysteries in which the author spends the last five or ten pages explaining what happened.  I want to know what happened by the time I get to the end of the book.  The Tess Gerritsen book was an exciting, fast read, as most of the Rizzoli and Isles books are.  (God save us from that awful television series!)  I needed something like that to help kick me out of my reading slump.

That may or may not be working since I'm currently reading about five books and although I'm enjoying all of them, I don't feel compelled to get back to any of them.  That's not the way I like to read.  There are still a lot of year-end things to do, especially since Jack and I are self-employed.  There are estimated taxes to pay, files to sort out for the accountant, new file folders to make  -  fun stuff, but someone (me) has to do them.

Jack has helpfully pointed out that even though we may retire this year, I, as the business partner / housewife, will still have all the same chores and duties in my role as the housewife.  I hope what he meant to say was that after he retires completely, he'll have more time to learn how to do laundry, fold it properly, and help with the cleaning (which he currently does sporadically).  He'll do most of the cooking, I hope, but he can't buy groceries because other people in the stores drive him mad.  It's best to keep him away form grocery stores unless I can find one that's open 24 hours a day and he can go in the middle of the night.

Turtle, our cat, is correct.  It is now 5:00PM and she's entitled to her dinner.  So, I'll leave you puzzling over this post and hope to have something more interesting to write about soon.