Imminent Winter

I’m excited we’re almost at the start of Winter proper (we are, as of the time of writing, 8 days out from the winter solstice). My spouse is happy after the solstice passes, mostly because the days start getting longer again. I love it since it’s the shortest and darkest day of the year. Bring on the cold and gloom! I feel like the colder months pass too quickly, and just by the time I get used to having them around, we go back to warmer, then hot, days, and the bugs come back, ugh.

In any case, I enjoy having blankets and wearing long-sleeve shirts and coats. We had a long, busy week, and I’m hoping next week goes fairly quickly, since after that is a 2-day week – we have Christmas off, and then I took the two days after it off! So that 5-day weekend will be lovely. Time with the kitties, videogames, movies, whatever, reading, &c. And just hanging out. I love my job, but I also love taking time off when I have a chance.

We watched a bunch of TV tonight. Hung out with the kitties. I’m now listening to some music I pulled off of backups, and which I’m thinking of bringing back into my regular collection. I still need to tag up and prep my Bandcamp music from last week, which I’ll do soon. Probably too tired for it tonight.

I like the cold and the gloom. I do not like summer heat or bright sun. I want grey gloom and snow and rain and cold and ice. I don’t like shoveling snow, unfortunately, but it’s nice during the winter when I don’t have to mow the lawn for a few months. We turned off the sprinklers, ideally permanently, since I don’t want to waste the water watering the lawn. So the lawn, front and back, looked pretty sad by late autumn, but that’s OK. It’ll get moisture and such from snow over the winter, and it’ll come back, and by March I’ll probably have to start mowing again. I would honestly rip out the entire lawn and put in gravel or something. I don’t see the point of lawns at all. Some people are so proud of them, but they are, again, such a waste of water. Utterly unnecessary. I am down for xeriscaping.

I like having this space to jot down my thoughts.

I want to take my telescope out and look at the stars in the backyard on a clear night. We can actually see a decent amount, despite the city lights, in the darkness around here. I like looking at the skies above and the relative emptiness of Night, stars twinkling in the vastness. I miss going up to the mountains. We haven’t been to Rocky (Mountain National Park) for awhile and I’d love to go there, but a lot of the year they require reservations. And it’s spendy to get even a day pass. I wanna go on hikes up there.

We have other national parks here, like Great Sand Dunes, and Dinosaur National Monument. We were going to go camping over Labor Day, I think last year or the year before, at Dinosaur, but ended up cancelling. It’s a drive for us, but it would be nice. I hope we can do that trip again. And I want to go to Scottsbluff, NE. My spouse really wants to go to Mt. Rushmore. Now that we have a new car, I think that would be lovely. We would have to plan it out a bit with the electric car, but I think we could make it work. Fully charged, the car can go about 319mi tops, so I think we could make that work. I am sure they have chargers en route and nearby. I liked the idea of going to Deadwood, mostly since I was watching the TV show, but sadly the show bored me and I don’t really care. But I bet the town is cool to check out, so we may do that after Rushmore.

Anyways, in 2025 we would like to do more travel around Colorado and nearby, rather than focusing on elsewhere. But I do want to see my family in Oregon at some point next year, probably late summer. Otherwise I hope people end up visiting us. I like hosting people and showing them around, I love living in Colorado.

OK, those are my scattered thoughts. It’s a Friday night and I’m tired but I wanted to write some stuff into the aether. Thanks for reading <3