January 07, 2026Bogged Down

And we’re off!

... well, maybe ...

The New Year has arrived and is already zooming by.

Hopefully all the Christmas décor is safely packed away, but, honestly, in just a few weeks another year will have flown by, and we’ll be dragging it all out again. At least that’s what it feels like to old-timers like me!

Now that our family situation with our elderly mom has ended, I was really looking forward to the holidays this year, but, dang it, if the flu didn’t show up and shut me down for over a week.

While the rest of the family carried on with food and festivities for Christmas,I was laid up in bed trying to breathe. I got better soon enough to manage a quiet New Year’s Day dinner with hubby, the cat and the visiting dog, but after also missing last year's holidays, it was just a bit anti-climatic. Pooh.

I hope that by the time this blog is live, I’ll be up off the couch, but as of the day this is getting written, it’s not looking too good. I feel like I’m trying to push a rope uphill, and I’m getting nowhere fast.

Now I’m beginning to panic, because I’ve been pushing that stupid rope for months now, and the lack of progress is about to be my undoing. I’m so behind, I doubt I’ll ever catch up. I vacillate between beating myself up and trying to cut myself some slack. Neither side of that seems to help very much.

I’m a creative who has come undone! Aaaarrrggghhhh!!!

I've looked forward to writing blogs again, because getting thoughts on paper seems to clear the fog out of the old brain. There’s something powerful and therapeutic about dumping onto paper all that emotion and turmoil inside your noggin. And there it lies ... out in the open where you can see it, ponder it, wrestle with it. And it can’t hide in the shadows anymore.

I got the November and December blogs up without too much trouble, despite finding out again just how much work they are. Before I had to stop because of taking care of my mom, I had a fairly good schedule of getting blogs written and turned in every month. But when mom came, I got more and more behind until I finally stopped blogging.

Now that I'm back into it, I've discovered again just how much work they are and how carefully I need to schedule the writing to get a month's blogs planned and completed in a timely manner.

I've also been surprised – now that mom's gone and my days are mine again – that when you go for a long time being tightly constrained and limited in how much you can create, to suddenly having wide open time and freedom to do whatever you want, it's a little overwhelming. You don't really know where to start.

But start we will, despite my apparent efforts to sabotage myself ...

Let's hope that when this appears in January, that I've already started working on February's updates, and that I'm finally back into the flow again... we can only hope!