It's (yawn) January, after all

Oh, I was cracking jokes all day today. Just trying to make it through another dull January day.

If you have noticed the relative absence of posts recently (myself included), I guess it's just due to the season. Kinnigurl mentioned that she thought her latest post was boring, I told her not to feel sorry about it--it's the more boring time of year, so it only follows that the posts about our lives (your version) are also a bit, well, y'know, they're not that dazzling.

My own included, most definitely!

I have had another very busy week at work, and I am getting really tired of it. This pace will continue through mid February, when it will ease off just a little, and then in mid-March it eases off a lot. My goodness! I'll get to spend more than one or two nights at home each week. The extremely busy sports schedule will be over until next September. I'm quite ready for the next few weeks to pass by.

All right, enough complaining about that--won't do anything to make the time pass faster. Besides that, of course, I'm doing stuff for my mom and a local company for which I am a director, and it all means just more pressure and stress. OK, enough about that, too.

This is my least favorite time of the year. The days are short, and it's cloudy all the time. Well, most of the time. All the beautiful green is gone (except for the pines). And while we had a snow shower this afternoon, the real story of our winter so far is how little snow we've had. Right now, the last week or so of January, when we are supposedly in the dead of winter, there's just about 3 or 4 inches of snow on the ground (7 to 10 cm). We had a very warm December, but it's been seasonably cold during January.

The days are getting longer. Tomorrow is supposed to be 2 minutes, 23 seconds longer than yesterday. But when the sun is hidden behind clouds all day, how can you tell? Recently I promised to go out on a pretty winter day and get some nice pictures. But when work has allowed that, the weather hasn't. And vice versa.

One more thing has ticked me off recently--that comet. Comet McNaught is its name, and for skygazers in the Northern Hemisphere, it is, indeed, a big "naught." Because now that it's gotten nice and bright, it's only visible south of the Equator. Grrrr.

I just heard of it on the last night or two it would be visible in our area--we were supposed to look at the western sky just after sunset. But it gets back to that same old problem: How can you tell exactly when it's sunset when it's overcast and the sky is one more or less uniform shade of gray?

Those of you in Oz and the rest of the Southern Hemisphere, enjoy it for me. Supposedly, it's the brightest comet in the last 40+ years and is easily visible to the naked eye. If you live in the right place, of course.

All right, add that to the list of gripes I'm not going to talk about any more.

In my free time (when I get some and am not trying to catch up with blogs), I have been watching the movie "Chushingura." This is the movie based on the true story of the 47 ronin in Japan in 1701 who went to great lengths to avenge the death of their lord. But I've been only been able to watch it in bits and pieces--and the movie is 3 1/2 hours long. From what I've seen, I like it a lot. But my wife doesn't care for movies like that, so I have to watch it by myself, in bits and pieces.

One more joke before I quit. My wife and I had to run some errands late this afternoon--credit union, bank, library, drug store, supermarket. The last stop was the supermarket. The checker asked the normal question: "Paper or plastic?" Silence followed.

"Well," I said, "you know it's January and your brain is only working at half speed when you need time to think that one over."

I know it wasn't brilliant. But give me a break--it's January, after all.