Annus Novus - hee hee, "Annus"

 We had people over for New Year's Eve, as usual - the same people as the Christmas party, but a scaled-down version of the festivities, with music and conversation and usually a game or two. This year I had bought Canadian charades, which was very fun and amusing and would have been really difficult if we hadn't decided to forego using the timer. I enjoy observing the different processes employed by various players of charades. Some people pick a card and immediately grab their head as if the difficulty level has given them an aneurysm while others just get on with it. If the first technique doesn't get any good guesses, some people will change it up while others go with just repeating the same gesture or ceasing the motions altogether and just staring at everyone expectantly.

The two things I had to act out were Portage la Prairie and Lake Superior. For the first one I mimed putting a canoe on my head and Matt got it immediately, while half the room had never heard of it. For the second I acted like I was diving into a body of water and someone eventually got Lake, and then Collette guessed Lake Superior before I had to mime looking down my nose at everyone. Various other clues were Winnie the Pooh (Janet mimed sitting on a toilet and someone got it from that), Just for Laughs Comedy Festival (that was hard), smoked salmon, and Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, which I got only because Michael has talked about it many times because he wants one, and he was really mad that I got it first. 

The pics are mainly to show that when people come to our house they all wear thick sweaters, while I will be sleeveless and still too hot. I also offer cardigans and fleecy reading socks.

The whole "2026" thing is hitting me kind of hard emotionally. I guess something about being past the quarter of the second century I have lived in, along with this being the year I am officially past mid-fifty, is making me feel old and apprehensive. I am trying to stamp that out, because otherwise I feel like my mood is better than usual for this time of year. I had my first alcoholic drink of the holiday season at the new year's eve party, and didn't sleep at all that night. I feel like I recovered from the flu to eighty-five percent, but the cough and snottiness has not subsided entirely. I had stopped taking my opioid cough medicine and cold medicine because I had been taking them for two weeks and that seemed like a lot. I realized yesterday it was kind of dumb not to take the medicine when I still needed it, so I took it all at bedtime and slept for ten hours.

I get Anne Helen Peterson's Culture Study substack, and she said something like "I know it's cool not to make resolutions, but I'm not cool so I do". I feel the opposite, like it's expected to make resolutions and I'm a loser for not wanting to. Some combination of low self-esteem and being raised with Catholic guilt AND the Protestant work ethic just makes me feel like resolutions have to be punitively burdensome, and I will either accomplish them at great personal cost, or fail at them at great personal disappointment. The past year has been good for exercising more - the year before I never made it through a single thirty-day Yoga with Adriene program, and this year I made it through two, with other sessions in between. I also started tracking that and most other exercise in a notebook at the desk in the yoga room. Sadly I am too lazy to go up and find that notebook and count how many days I actually exercised, which would be the obvious next thing for this post. Oh well.

I feel pretty happy about the fact that much of my reading was instead of doom-scrolling also, and that I stopped scrolling my phone in bed in the morning. This is also my eighth (possibly ninth) year working in libraries when I didn't actually believe I would ever have a library job while I was doing my diploma. 

My current plan is to keep doing what I'm doing and putting more effort into not feeling guilty about what I'm not doing. Or about sleeping when I need to sleep. Also, I think I'm going to make a list of small achievable goals and another one of really good things that are already in my life, and paste them up somewhere really visible, because I have ADD and lack object permanence. 

More books tomorrow!