Christmas Resurrected

For the longest time there was no Christmas. My family is not Christian. There was no reason to have Christmas. When I married Wife, she brought to me the concept of:

 "What! No Christmas! Are you 'bleeping, bleeping, bleeping' out of your mind! 

Actually Wife would never use the term 'bleeping, bleeping, bleeping' or talk so demonstrably but displeasure was made know to me.

Hence started Christmas in my life. With the coming of kids, came the expansion of Christmas to a full ritual status. Then children started leaving the home. When they were in college, there would still be family coming back for the holiday. Then children started having careers and began moving far around the country and the world. Getting people back began to get harder and more expensive. Christmas began to be smaller. Then children started having children and the cost and ordeal of getting everyone here was even greater to the point where we all recognized it was not practical to have a big family Christmas.

Christmas for us entered its winter. There were years where we didn't do anything. But Wife in particular seemed to find that particularly oppressive. So a few years ago we decided that even it if was just the two of us, it was important to have some kind of ritual celebration. And so Christmas was resurrected. We have adjusted the old traditions to recognize the reality of just being the two of us. But we went back to buying each other presents which in many ways is comical since we pretty much buy whatever we want for ourselves whenever we want to.

We have a lovely couple of days planned out for the Eve and Day of. Hope you all have a lovely holiday too.

Health - WTF!

Over the last four or five months a number of things have happened that have led to my feeling better than I have for a long, long, long time.

The first has to do with a chronic post-nasal drip and sinus issue. It seems to have gone away. I got some significant relief a couple of years ago from the use of acupuncture. But this summer in response to the onset of asthma my doctor gave me a mild anti-allergy medication. The combination seems to have almost completely eliminated all those issues that caused me to be trying to clear my throat constantly, have stuff dripping down causing coughing and bunches of other stuff.

The second has to do with muscle pain. I used to have to get up during the night to take pain killers so I could sleep. I started taking turmeric about a year and half ago. That helped a lot. And then we got our memory foam mattress. That has seemed to help even more. For whatever reason, muscle pain as a detriment to sleep has seemed to disappear.

I also have more energy. I think a lot of that has to do with the success of my transitioned life that seems to be in almost perfect balance.

As in all things, I am exceedingly grateful and giving of thanks.

On Achieving the Steady State

This happens after each one of our trips. While we're on our trips, I am a blogging machine. Each evening I furiously doing my pictures, trying to get everything done so I can get posts up in real time. Don't always succeed but always try to. And there's tons to write about because we're doing so much.

Then we get home and we transition back into our 'non-travel' lifestyle. Which is very regular, like the ebbing and flowing of the tides (a gentle tide, not one of those crazy tides that goes up and down 20 feet and they use for creating electricity...that would be daughter #2's life...Love you #2). Work fills up a lot of the time but at nothing like the intensity of when I was working full time. I do my hiking. I do my writing. We continue to do this and that to add to the decor of the house. I shop. I cook. I do laundry. I do all the planning and arranging of the next trip.

It is all so very regular and so very not stimulating to blog writing.