Thank God! I am sure you guys were tired of reading my boring thoughts. LOL. Anyway, let’s get to it.

1. Tell us anything you want about your January. 

My January was ok. I worked a lot and realized I will work a lot more in the next few months. Elliot finished up school soccer season, Dakota is playing city soccer, Elliot is reffing those games, Isaac isn’t doing any sport right now and he’s kind of a pain in my ass; just regular teenager stuff. He’s about to be 13 so it makes sense but he’s irritating. And that’s about it! We’ve been brewing a lot in prep for upcoming festivals and whatnot.

2. Lake Superior State University posts a list each year of words they think should be banished from the Queen’s English for misuse, overuse, and/or general uselessness. The 2023 list includes GOAT, inflection point, quiet quitting, gaslighting, moving forward, amazing, Does that make sense?, irregardless, absolutely, and it is what it is.

Which of these words/phrases do you use regularly? Which of these words would you most like to see banished from everyday speech and why? Is there a word/phrase not on the list you’d like to add? 

I guess the only ones I use are ‘absolutely’ and ‘it is what it is’. Some of those others are liberal buzzwords I avoid! LOL. Just kidding – kind of. I can’t think of anything else I’d like to add other than maybe the over use of ‘alt-right’ to describe ANYONE even remotely right of center.

3. February 2nd is Groundhog Day. What’s something that feels repeated in your life right now?

Work? So we earn comp time until May 5th because there’s just SO much editing to be done so my days are: get to work at 7:45, maybe take a 30 min lunch, leave at 5, commute home, start making food before I even get changed, then eventually I sit back down to my laptop to edit some more. Granted, we do squeeze in viewing – we’ve seen quite a few movies lately – but it’s definitely on a loop right now.

4. What’s a food you love that’s named after a place?

Brussel sprouts! Give them to me roasted or pan-seared, covered in olive oil or parmesan or bacon. Oh yeah!

5. What’s the best season of the year to visit your city or your part of the country? Tell us why.

I think Spring, but it depends if it’s a rainy one or not. Some people might say winter since we don’t get SUPER cold but we’ve had a particularly gray and rainy winter so far so it’s ick. I mean, I personally like summer but most people think it is too hot.

6. Insert your own random thought here. 

Good morning! I am not in an amazing mood but I do feel sort of…balanced. Ash and I are going to lunch today, I am staying steady with my workload, and I have my usual distractions (metal bands – really into Lorna Shore, Bad Omens, and older Motionless in White; also, I am just gushing about their singer these days) and I feel like I can hold it all together. As perhaps I have mentioned, my particular job is very busy NOW until session begins. Then it’s a lot of waiting around. We edit all these proposed bills now, prepare them for session, then if/when members want changes, we have to kick it into high gear. So from now until March 7th, it’s a constant stream of editing. I have worked extra hours almost every evening. I wasn’t going to last night but I did. I might tonight because I sure as heck am not tomorrow. I am meeting my friends for dinner and there’s just no way I will feel like it once home. And we all need that downtime, you know?

Actually, I was super excited to look at my calendar yesterday and realize that aside from one soccer game Saturday, we have nothing to do this weekend. I mean, Ell is going to ref Friday and Saturday but other than that, nothing. I think we’re going to clean out our storage area upstairs. I should someday take a pic of it because it’s the coolest, most useful feature of our home. We’ve organized it before but it gets easy to shove stuff up there and out of the way and it gets to be a mess. So that’s on the docket, as well as our usual beer drinking and movie watching. We watched a Korean zombie movie last night called Train to Busan and it was actually pretty heart-felt, believe it or not.