Waiting for the bounce back.

It’s 2023 – you probably noticed. It was all over the news. The internet, or at least the corner I wander through, has been filled with people rounding up their achievements in 2022 and setting out their intentions for the coming year. I explained in the last post why I don’t have one of those, and how our year got rounded off in a rather unexpected way.

There used to be a regular pattern to the end of one year and the start of the next. The excitement of the run up to Christmas (with three kids, you can’t avoid some excitement – it’s contagious). I’ve always had the kind of jobs where you don’t get a huge chunk of break over Christmas, and there’s no holiday allowance to book. That makes the days off more precious, and those weird in-between days, when I go back to work, but all the adults in the workplace are still away, fun and relaxing. In the Home Library Service, those days between Christmas and New Year are our Off Road week, where we don’t make any deliveries, but catch up on stuff in the office that we need time for – reorganisation, changing the shelving, looking at delivery routes and stuff like that. Again, it’s a quiet time in the library, and the senior staff often take the time off. It’s a fun time to be there, and low stress.

Then the New Year would kick off, and it would all be fresh and exciting again. So much possibility in those first few weeks, where whatever new routine I had assigned myself was still functioning, and the exceptions hadn’t materialised to spanner everything. I would be exercising, writing, planning… But not this year.

The Kidney Stone incident really knocked Christmas for six. I feel like I barely saw the kids when they came to visit, and I spent more than half the day in Emergency. Nobody got any real Christmas dinner. I got into work for one of the Off Road week days, but the stone kept me home for the rest of it, and then I got worried about Mrs Dim’s cold. She still hadn’t shaken it, so we took Covid tests. She and I were positive, Tiny Weasel was not.

So there we go, after nearly three years of dodging the bullet (you know, by getting vaccinated and being responsible and wearing a mask etc) we finally got it. Which meant I couldn’t go back to work on Jan 3rd, like I should. Worse, Mrs Dim didn’t get to do her first trial morning of return to work today, which she has been so looking forward to – it’s been a very long time off work for her.

So the beginning of this year feels like the inversion of all the others. It’s been a bit of a mess, a disorganised shamble to the finish line of 2022, and a rocky beginning to 2023. I’m hoping that means we get an inversion of the usual trope for January too, and we suddenly find things pick up, instead of falling apart. Fingers crossed.