Tap, tap. Is this thing on?

To quote Taylor Swift: “It’s me. Hi.”

It’s January 6 – Twelfth Night – and I feel like I am only just now poking my head out of the holiday cave and blinking in the January sunlight. That’s despite working all week (January in the office took off like a rocket) and despite the fact that I mostly worked a regular schedule between Christmas and New Year’s and only took off a day and a half to go skiing. I do have big plans to get to my fun January content starting next week, including my bookish look-back posts about 2022, which are some of my favorite posts of the year to write. And I have a Christmas book haul to show you, of course, and lots more travel content for the foreseeable future Fridays. So all of that’s to come.

In the meantime, some snapshots in words of the mess and chaos and fun and overwhelm of the past few weeks.

• I am home after four days in upstate New York visiting family and skiing with the anklebiters.
• I am hopeful that we will be able to ski together as a family this season, because Peanut – the hold-out – did well and had fun when we went to Jiminy Peak in Massachusetts with my parents on the Friday before New Year’s.
• I am wearing a new pair of my favorite pants from LL Bean, which my mom gave me for Christmas (a black pair, to go with the navy and army green pairs I already had…) and they’re SO comfortable.
• I am also wearing my glasses nonstop because I am OUT of contact lenses and not going to the eye doctor until next week.
• I am planning to take the Christmas tree down this weekend and I have big ideas, that are probably delusions, about culling the ornaments that we never actually use.
• I am also planning, gleefully, a big clutter clearing for 2023, because my neighborhood just got a Buy Nothing group.
• I am reading one of my new books, opened on Christmas morning – The Windsor Diaries, by Alathea Fitzalan Howard – and it is transporting me straight to Windsor in the 1940s every time I pick it up.
• I am glaring at a huge pile of packages in my foyer and wondering why we still have so many packages arriving when Christmas is over, and also who is going to open all these boxes and break them down. Most of the packages are for Steve. But one is a cordless reading lamp that I ordered before Christmas and I have big plans to set it up this weekend and for it to become my new best friend.
• I am also glaring at the situation in my kitchen, which includes a pile of dirty dishes (keeping it real) and a completely broken fridge. The fridge guy was supposed to come and pronounce it dead yesterday so that we could get a new one (yet another thing I will not miss about renting: the bureaucracy and red tape around every broken appliance, and there have been a lot of them in this dump of a house) but he was a no-call-no-show. Great.
• I am panicking a little over the state of my inbox, which is frankly frightening.
• I am anticipating Saturday spent cleaning the house and re-potting some plants, and Sunday on the mountain.

What is your January looking like so far?