When it Rains, It Pours!

Happy New Year!

Yep, a bit belated. The first 14 days of the year have been kinda rollercoastery in the fullness department.

Seriously, I think I had the awesome luck to be otherwise occupied just about non-stop the first 7 days in very happy ways. Visits to friends, invites to dinners, birthday celebrations, etc. and so forth. I was all coordinated with work and social calendar and times were awesome and good...

Then last week hit, and I was at work until just near 8 PM for too many nights in a row with all deadlines being 5PM yesterday and dear lord am I happy to see the end of that week.

And now it's the Saturday of a three-day weekend and I'm typing this from bed, which aside from going out to get a burger for lunch? Is the only thing I've done today...and this makes me immensely happy.

Oh wait, I lie, I actually stepped into a bookstore on my way home from lunch to complete my niece's birthday gift (eight...EIGHT, she's got to slow down! I'm so not ready for her to be EIGHT!). She wants to learn cursive, but the closest thing I've found is a cursive practice book. I'm hoping they still teach cursive at her school and this can be something extra...but I keep hearing that's no longer in fashion...which is kinda sad, but not really.

I mean, I gave up writing cursive years ago...summer of 8th grade to be most precise. It was not "cool" to write "just like the nuns do!" Or so that was the comment that stuck in my head. I was in a study skills course the summer before starting at my high school and we had to write something...who knows what the actual assignment was, but after 8 years at my elementary school with the constant insistence from various teachers that my writing looked like horrible chicken scratch when I printed anything and that I could only fake "neat" handwriting when I used cursive, I'd be damned if I was going to be labeled a messy writer at my new school!!!

So I painstakingly wrote out my multi-paged paper in cursive. Only to have the girls in my class eye me rather warily because OMG Becky! Who writes like that? How old fashioned! Her writing looks like Sr. HolyWater's! (We were all products of Catholic schools, the big difference, apparently, was that they had recently been taught by them whereas I'd had Ms. T. Except she'd been a former nun, hadn't she...hmmm.) This was still a bit of time earlier than I was DRESSING like them, so I was caught between a nun and a chicken scratch place. I chose to squawk from that point on. And 22 years later it seems to still be affecting me.

I was supposed to mail off my niece's gift on Friday, or so I'd planned, but then (see working until 8 PM above), completely spaced it as I slept through my alarm and rushed rushed rushed just to get out the door before my first meeting of the day (you know, that makes it seem like I have an important position at my place of drudgery, don't you believe it). And then, as I realized my lack of present to mail when the outlook reminder started flashing (yes, yes I do remind myself to mail packages, go to the pharmacy, take a lunch break, don't you?) that I never got around to looking into the cursive book.

"Cursive!" I thought...and laughed out loud a little as I lifted and shook my fist! It really had been a rough week. But after confirming with my SIL that I actually had four more days than I'd thought to get the present down to LA, I breathed a sigh of relief and stickie-noted a reminder to go to the bookstore today.

I may have a pile of laundry that I'm totally ignoring, but I feel like today has been a total win from that little accomplishment. It's amazing how 7 days of awesome were so decimated by 7 days of awful that on day 15 I'm calling this a big win. Oh 2011, what will you have in store for me this year?!?

And just so we won't have a total pictureless blog, I've been playing with my camera again:

During my end-of-the-year vacation I visited the Smith Tower as well as picked up a replica of the needle...and now I may be on the verge of starting a pewter building/monument collection! Good thing these aren't as popular or portable as those stretched penny machines, and that I don't actually go anywhere ever, or we'd have a problem.