Kitties, Flurries, and Firewood

 This weekend was full of fun chores, in that I finished my paper before the due date, so I had time to go into some of my optional quality of life enhancing tasks, such as tidying up various rooms in the house and chipping away at my long list of useful, short, but not strictly necessary tasks. It feels good getting to check a bunch of stuff off my list. It's maybe a little bit of cheating, because most of the tasks are easy and quick, but many do add various quality of life improvements, and they all reduce my feeling of overwhelm, when I look at my task list and notice it just keeps getting longer and longer each week.

Part of that is I think I need to remove some of the things from my "this week" list, and do them later. Part of it is there are things I've done a while ago and just forgot to check off, or that I've waited so long on, they are now moot and need to be deleted.

But a bunch of them are just quick simple tasks, and so it seems like more work to move them off my list and then move them back on at a later time...

In any case, it felt nice to not just bailing water out of a sinking ship to keep it above water, but actually making some improvements to the ship. In the Eisenhower priority matrix, that would be the "Important, but not Urgent" quadrant, where much of the most impactful action takes place, because it is preparing for the future and the long haul.

It snowed yesterday, which was magical, our first snow of the season. it was so big and fluffy, it looked like the cottonwood seed fluff that blows around during summer. And there was a little bit of snow dusting the ground, this morning. Needless to say, it's time to winterize the house, Suzannah made sure all the hoses were unscrewed (we burst a pipe last year because we didn't get the hose unscrewed soon enough, so we were trying to be extra careful this year) and I turned the heat tape back on for the water shut-off valve in the garage. 

The frost has really made the trees accelerate in their shedding of leaves. The last week saw some of the most beautiful colors going on. Just walking under a maple tree at this time of year is like color therapy, they are amazing.

We get to run our fireplace now, and are thoroughly enjoying it. As are our kitties. Super cozy. We're trying to keep it cooler this winter to save on the heating bills, and part of how to do that is use firewood and stay right in front of the fireplace, which is where we want to be anyways.

OK, I think that will do for now, I've got another paper to get started on, and then helping Suzannah set up for her father's 80th birthday!