Ya think December is busy and then WaTcH oUt, here comes January. Tits dancin', arms and legs akimbo, flailing and wailing as it so UNmiraculously marches its dreary ass through.
I don't like the month.
Do you?
It's a bleak month where the holidays are over, the skies are cloudy, the days are short, and depending on where you live, it's cold. 10 days in, and we got our first significant snowstorm of the year (re: season). From that point, I decided the month's motto was gonna be "roll with it." Remember that.
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| My fancy Trixie Mattel hat I got for Christmas |
I started January still getting over Covid, which wasn't super cool, but it was what it was. And with that came, y'know... the new resolution of trying to enjoy my life more. It is hard when you feel crummy, but again... it is what it is. There were other resolutions to start enacting as well, ones I don't necessarily write about every year (who cares if you want to lose weight? That's just life, not a special thing you should do because it's a new year).
That being said, I wanted to lose weight.
Something I'm pretty proud of myself for was starting intermittent fasting, where I drank a gallon of water every day, stopped eating at 7pm, and didn't eat again until 9am. This didn't last long, but lemme explain why.
I'm an early riser; I'm typically up by 6am and working at my desk. Some days I'm up earlier than that; others, I might stay in bed an hour later. But I start the day with some coffee and I need either Oat milk or creamer in it, which is a no-no for the fasting. Part of me feels like it's for the placebo effect of just having a warm cup of something to drink in my hands, and less because of the caffeine, but it did get to a point where I was falling asleep at my desk at 8am because I just couldn't keep my eyes open. So I adjusted, the gallon of water continued, the "no eating" after 7pm continued, but I shifted the morning stuff.
I think intermittent fasting can work great for some people; I'm just not one of them. But now I know at least! So that's worth, y'know... a stick of gum in the pocket or whatever you might say. It's also not a bad thing to stop eating at 7pm, which I've been strict about (apart from the occasional dinner with friends that runs later or something), and it keeps me from wanting to snack later.
The bulk of the month was pretty quiet in general, I took a lot of it to just sorta chill and enjoy my last couple weeks of living alone. I had a work trip to Arizona that I'd be leaving for on January 18th, and I didn't want to start any crazy house projects before that. So I was just vibin', fastin', and planning out the year ahead and all of the exciting things on the way.
The trip to Arizona was a good one; it's always nice to meet and connect with the people I work with (many of whom I've known a large part of my life and, as such, consider them extended family anyway). After a few days of work-related stuff, though, I stayed with Katie and her family. This is never a bad time, if you ask me because there are few places where I feel as welcome and as comfortable just being myself as I do when I'm there.
This was also gonna be the brief rest I got before flying onward to Maine for the big event. But FIRST, I had to get to Maine.
And Delta was reallllly on the struggle bus regarding my travels.
I won't get too into it because I don't want to sound like a whiny bitch (even though sometimes I really am), but suffice it to say, I won't ever schedule flights at the end of the day again if I can help it.
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| Thrilled in a hotel. |
I landed in Detroit at about 6 or something, and my flight to Portland was supposed to take off at 9pm. Well, it got canceled, whoops, and because it was due to the weather, airlines do nothing for you. So Andrew was awesome and got me a hotel room, and after a $37 Uber ride to go 6 miles, I got like two hours of sleep before rising at 3:30am to make sure I was on the shuttle at 4:30am to get to the airport by 5am to take off by 7am.
But not to Portland, no.
Flying to Portland meant flying to Atlanta first, then taking a 10pm flight that would've meant arriving near midnight, and I just wasn't going to do that. I flew to Boston instead. Once in Boston, I took a BUS to get to Portland.
And though it all sucked and was a big inconvenience, I was actually really grateful for the experience because, for starters, this had never happened to me before. Also, I had never taken a charter bus on my own. Know what? That was a delightful experience that I would be very willing to do again. Comfy seats, quiet, everyone slept (most passengers were people I was supposed to fly with the night before), and it was only a couple of hour's worth of driving.
Andrew picked me up at the bus depot, which I keep chuckling about because of just... privileged existence, I guess; I never thought I'd need to be picked up at a bus depot.
Yay, experiences!
We had a great day in Portland, his final day living in Maine, going for lunch and getting some beers at a couple different spots. Eventually, it was time to just "not," and we went back to his apartment for the evening. It's funny, I'm usually the one asking people to help me move, so to be on the other end of it, it's such a weird, displaced feeling to be in a space that's all packed up. We connected my laptop to his TV and watched Aquaman 2 (barf, what a dumb movie), and then went to bed.
In the am, the adventure started right away. Andrew's rental truck was not at the nearby Home Depot as he had thought, but it was an hour away. So we started driving through the sleet that was coming down, and by the time we got to the Home Depot where the truck was, it was full-on snowing. Then I drove his car back to Portland, and he drove the truck, and I tried not to crash in what wound up being just shy of two inches of snow.
Fun start!
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| The dreaded 3rd Floor Walk-up |
Once safely back in Portland, it was an hour of hiking up and down the narrowest stairwell ever to get the apartment emptied. To Andrew's credit, he was VERY ready for the movie; everything was tidy and packed, and he knew exactly how he wanted to load the (small) moving truck.
But there was no escaping those stairs.
We hit the road around 11:30, not far beyond the planned time, and the snow had stopped by then. It was still misty and kind of raining, though, so the drive just wasn't "fun." And to be fair, neither of us was expecting a barrel of laughs because it's still a drive across the country in the ugliest month of the year (sorry, January fans (but also, who are you if that's true?)). Once we left Maine... then New Hampshire... then Massachusetts... we were into New York. And I've gotta say, even in a dead month where there's no snow around, and it's all brown, New York is a really pretty state.
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| Frozen streams |
I took many pictures on the drive and looking back at them, they just look like blurry pictures from a car, but that's ok. It's not the point. I can look back at probably two hundred pictures in my phone taken from trips over the years that are totally crap and would never be worth posting or printing.
But they take you back, right? That's what matters.
Anyway, the shitty picture above was a common sight, and it was from the melt and freeze of streams coming off these cliffs; it was really cool to see. Just that pure white punctuating the rocks, talk about nifty.
We drove for what seemed like forever, mostly through fog and mist, on our way to Hamburg, New York, which is just south of Buffalo. I think we made it there by, like... 9:45, maybe? We got checked into the hotel and got to bed an hour or so later, but we didn't actually fall asleep until after 1am. Back up and at it at 3:30am, on the road by 4am.
Drove through a brief stretch of Pennsylvania, then the purely riveting world of Ohio (luckily it was so early that we didn't have to deal with ANY traffic or many vehicles for hours). Then, it was on to the illustrious land of Indiana.
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| The weirdly nice Indiana rest stops. |
The day seemed shorter than it was, mainly because the first five hours were dark, and then there was more fog, mist, and clouds. Andrew and I chatted on the phone a lot, I think the entire way through Chicago until 3 hours later when we got home because delirium was setting in, and we were beyond exhausted. We got back around 3pm that afternoon, went and had a lackluster dinner at Olive Garden (but it hit the spot), and then it was home.
It's weird to live together again, I won't lie, but not in any sort of bad way. It'll be an adjustment, but I think it would be an adjustment for me to live with anyone again. You get so used to doing things on your own all the time, and how you want things and when you want to do things and WHY you want to do things, that anything throwing that into question just gives you pause. And again... not in a bad way. Just a way to adjust to, and, uh, what was the month's motto? Oh yeah.
Roll with it.
So what else happened in January? Work continued, as ever, on the house. I played all the way through all three Spider-Man games on the PS5 ::tips hat:: and cried harder at each game. Discovered I love sumo citrus, Cosmic Apples are the tits, and that I still know how to babysit on the fly. Started wearing my hair occasionally in a bun, decided my beard makes me look older (thanks a lot, white hair), and continued building those ever-elusive plans for the big March reveal. Surprise!
Ciao for now (c:
