The drive started out sunny, but traveling forty miles north in I-35 brought back the standard layer of thick, disgusting winter clouds. Who knows when I'll see sunshine again...could be April. Once again, the world around me looked like it had been painted with a palette that I can only describe as "Shades of Death", featuring brown, dark brown, dead grass, gray, dead leaves, off-white, and winter filth. Fantastic...but I suppose that transition from sunshine into dreariness was a perfect visual metaphor for the way I feel about leaving vacation behind and going back to work.
The next ten weeks are my least favorite of the year. Starting with the return to work tomorrow, the immediate future holds nothing but five-day weeks, bitter cold, and short, dark days. The only holidays between here and Memorial Day aren't even real holidays! We've got Valentine's Day, which is a nationwide candy and flower sales scheme, and St. Patrick's Day, which is little more than an excuse for people to justify excessive drinking...in many cases despite a lack of true Irishness. Throw in a few absurd bank and post office holidays, and there's absolutely nothing to look forward to until way beyond February.
It's back to reality tomorrow--a return to waking up to an alarm at a ridiculously early hour, and back to spending the majority of my time around coworkers instead of friends and family. Not to mention, of course, the official end of eating delicious food prepared the way I like it best: by someone else. A chunk of my New Year's evening was spent preparing remarkably flavorless food for work tomorrow:
On the bright side, the days are getting longer, and I guess there is a light at the end of the cold, dark tunnel...summer will eventually return, but it seems so far away...
When did this baking of the chicken start?! All I can recall for years is non-stop boiling of the birds.
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