I looked at the calendar today in disbelief. It said January 10. I hadn’t blogged or written for a week. How could that be? Well, simply put, I’ve had the holiday blues or blahs. I’m climbing back out them; I felt my assent rising sharply yesterday afternoon. And I’m so happy to be see light just above me.

I had lots of excuses to cover the truth. My computer “died” three weeks ago, just before Christmas, and though my son resurrected it several times, it lies in a coma beside me. We’re keeping it on life-support ’til next week so that we can transplant its brain into a new one. And of course, there are all those holiday decorations that simply had to be boxed up, which then required a thorough house cleaning, during which time I discovered that the carpets needed cleaning as did the living room furniture, and a new duvet cover needed to be purchased as soon as possible, all of which required shopping and scheduling and shampooing. Need I go on?

One day it was bitter cold (for Arizona) and home-made potato soup sounded so good, and of course that required a trip to the grocery store, lots of chopping and peeling, and stirring white sauce, and making sure it didn’t burn on the stove for hours. The smell of the soup was wonderful, but it suddenly required bread bowls to put it in and of course, some brownies for dessert. That meal took a day.

We had frost which meant covering plants at night, uncovering them mid-day, straightening them, placing them in the garage, dragging them back out around five pm to start the process all over again.

I’m making excuses of course. Below all that activity sat a deep solid core of sadness – I won’t call it depression as that’s too strong. Picking yourself up after six weeks filled with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years is difficult. It’s hard to find something to look forward to in early January. Easter is way too far off, even spring break (if I were working) is two months away. Valentines Day means little to me anymore – I’ll share a writing on that with you later in the month. It takes about a week to struggle through the let-down, release the anticipation I felt before the holidays, and simply return to a normal pace, a normal schedule. So for all of you who experience the same holiday blahs, I hope they were short-lived this year. Today I go for a massage; I open up the text books for my classes which begin next week; and after nine days of sadness, I find a smile when I look in the mirror and I finally begin the new year.