Mogilalia Monday

mogilalia ~ speaking only with difficulty

It’s the American Thanksgiving this Thursday, so Happy Turkey Day to all my American friends!

Okay, now all you Americans go stuff your turkeys for a minute, I want to talk to everyone else.

Are they gone? Okay. You ever notice how weird the American Thanksgiving is? I mean really. It’s supposed to celebrate the pilgrims and the Indians sharing the fruits of harvest time. Did they really wait until the fourth week of November to harvest their crops? I don’t think so. Their crops would have been buried under a foot of snow by that time.

And what’s with the Thursday holiday anyway? Work three days, one day off, work a day, and then it’s the weekend. Unless it’s just an excuse to hold Black Friday sales, which to me are akin to Boxing Day sales - something to be avoided at all costs. Americans are just so weird!

Okay Americans, you can come back now. We’re done.

When I started this post Sunday night I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open. Obviously I didn’t get very far. LOL

Anyone else out there with SAD (seasonal affective disorder)? I seem to recall last November was unseasonably warm and maybe even a little sunny. This year it’s very Novembery - cold and dark and dismal. I’m okay with the cold (especially when there’s snow on the ground) but not so much with the dark and dismal.

I think if you added up the amount of time we’ve seen the sun so far this month, you might get a whole day’s worth. And of course as soon as I typed that the sun started trying to make an appearance. But that is one determined wind out there - it keeps blowing the clouds back in front of it.

Interesting.... When I checked my blog archive to see if I made any comments on the weather this time last year (I hadn’t, but then I only did four posts for the entire month) I couldn’t help but notice on this same day I was the same number of words behind in my NaNo novel.

I find this rather fascinating because normally I play a game of falling behind and catching up throughout the entire month, but this year I started out strong and kept up my wordage until about Day 13. Then I started falling behind, although I still got at least a few hundred words a day in. But now, of course, I'm a good 6,000 words behind, same as last year.

I had big plans to get caught up this weekend, but yeah, that didn’t happen. Saturday was unrelentingly grey and wet and not conducive to writing, although I managed to get almost 2,000 words in (funny, I thought it was more). Then Sunday I had a lot of other stuff going on as well, but managed to beat the daily goal by a few words. So while I didn’t do the catching up I’d hoped to, at least I didn’t fall further behind.

One of the other pitfalls of the grey weather is comfort eating. Feeling down? Have a cookie. Or a cup cake. Or a bag of chips. Lately my weight has been up and down like my NaNo, only it’s more like lose a little, gain it back. I want to keep on the losing side, but the last couple of weeks I’ve been gaining, so I’m going to have to do a better job of monitoring what I eat. Maybe even up the exercise a bit.

Or maybe I should stop baking stuff. Sunday I started out wanting to use up the overripe bananas in my fruit bowl. This turned into making not only a banana nut bread, but an oatmeal apple bread, a dozen apple tarts, and two dozen mini oatmeal apple muffins. How did that happen? Well, the apples needed to get used up too.

So the apple bread went into the freezer and I split the tarts and muffins with the daughter. Now I just need to stop buying fruit and letting it get overripe. LOL

Don’t mind me. ‘Tis the season for depressing weather and all that comes with it, including maudlin blog posts. The trick to it, as I’ve found over the years, is to embrace the darkness and allow yourself to wallow, but put a time limit on it. When your time is up, suck it up and move on.

So raise your coffee cup to toast a better week ahead!