February, oh February My Nemesis

Well, my relentlessly upbeat quotes from William James didn’t save me from February. Every year I get a mild case of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). I say it’s mild, because I don’t usually need medication and it takes the form of hibernation. I just don’t want to do anything. I want to sleep, eat and watch TV. That’s it. This year it was no worse than usual—but somehow February slipped away in a gray blanket. It didn’t help that February was dim—not with our usual temperature inversion but with Northwest like weather, temperate with light rain showers and gray skies.

This is my excuse for not blogging, SAD, even though I didn’t really even feel sad, just tired. I haven’t had a really bad February in a long time. A bad February is when I find myself crying and sighing all over the place. 

Someday I will beat February into submission.

Brief February Catch-Up

Sundance

The first noteworthy event of February happened in January. That was the Sundance Film Festival. I have a couple of friends that do a little Sundance sightseeing every January and they invited us along. It was silly, cold and fun. It was fun to watch people try to spot celebrities but not act like they were trying to spot celebrities. (I am included in this group.) I saw about a thousand character actors that I couldn’t quite place—but knew I’d seen before.

My favorite star spot was Ron Livingston—the man for handsomely disgruntled thirty-somethings (now 40-somethings—I just looked him up and we are the same age! Joy!). I watched Office Space again in his honor.

The Cake Fight

My daughter wanted to have some friends over after the Valentine’s Dance to decorate cakes. She then advised us to put down a tarp because she thought it might get “messy.” We had at least twenty-four layers that were to make 8 cakes. My husband and I stayed downstairs to kind-of keep an eye on things. Once they were busy decorating we went upstairs for 10 minutes and suddenly things got very noisy. My husband went downstairs just to check on things, because really how bad can things get in 10 minutes. When he came back up his face was ashen and he said, “You are not going to believe this.” I went downstairs and it was beyond words.

The whole floor was this bad!

They had the cake fight to end all cake fights. Good kids from good homes—went beserk for 10 minutes. The floor was so slippery with about twelve pounds of butter cream frosting that we kept slipping and falling. There were frosting footprints in our carpet. The kids were so dirty they had to shower off before they could get into their cars. Our family, my daughter and a few of the perpetrators spent the next 24 hours cleaning. I counted the hours we all spent that first twelve hours after the fight and and it was 43 man hours.  It took another week to completely de-grease everything. Yesterday I was cleaning and I found    chunks of cake behind our blinds. It’s like an Easter egg hunt from Hades.   Face disguised to protect the not-so-innocent

There you have it--Winter reduced me to star stalking and cleaning.