Bloggin' On: Odds and Ends (The Weekend Before Thanksgiving 2019)

It's been almost four years since I last saw East Wind Lake. (Picture by the author)

Hello and welcome once again to another edition of Odds and Ends, my blog-within-a-blog where I step out of my usual role of entertainment writer and sometime political commentator. It's Saturday, November 23, and (as you can tell from the post's headline) it's the weekend before Thanksgiving.

Right now, the temperature in my corner of Florida is 77℉ (25℃) under mostly sunny skies, which is nice because it's not too hot nor too chilly. The forecast low is expected to be 61℉ (16℃), but since I'll be indoors, I won't feel that slight nip in the night air.

I'm a bit tired - not to mention somewhat out of sorts - today. I went to bed late last night after trying to watch The Empire Strikes Back (the 2011 Blu-ray edition) with my significant other. We didn't see much of it; we both fell asleep well before the film reached its midpoint. I think that waking up early in the morning has a lot to do with that; I am not, by nature, an early riser, but my present circumstances have turned me into one. Even on weekends now I wake up at seven or so in the morning, and that happened today. And because I don't know what time we went to bed, I don't know how many hours I slept; all I can say is that I feel like I didn't get much sleep.

I also have a headache like you wouldn't believe. I'm sure that it's partly caused by a lack of rest, but mostly due to my routine. I do spend way too much time at my desk, staring at a computer monitor and tap-tap-tapping at my keyboard. It's an occupational hazard - I am, after all, a writer - but at the same time I don't take enough breaks or try to do many of the things I used to before 2016. I write quite a bit almost daily, and when I'm not writing I'm wasting time on social media or, less often, gaming. It's not healthy, but it's what I do now to keep from being a sad sack and/or a jerk to the people I live with now.

As Thanksgiving 2019 approaches, I am trying to not be weighed down by homesickness or regret over selling my old house and moving to my current abode. It's not easy because the townhouse where I used to live had one thing going for it, and that was its proximity to the places I needed to go to in order to get groceries or run most of my errands without depending on anyone else.  If I ran out of milk or eggs or bread or Stouffer's French Bread Pizza, Winn-Dixie was only a third of a mile away across NW 97th Avenue. (Yes, Miami-Dade drivers, which are among the rudest on Earth, made crossing that roadway a perilous adventure worthy of an Indiana Jones epic, but at least I had a Winn-Dixie within walking distance.)

And if I didn't feel like cooking, I could walk that same third-of-a-mile distance to Denny's or Megaperros, although the former was usually less pricey. I can't do that here; the distances are too vast for such a walk.

So, yeah, life changes can be good, for the most part, but they have a flip side. Frustration, regrets, limitations...you name it, I have to deal with it.

Anyway, this will be my fifth Thanksgiving since Mom died in 2015. She died in July, so my last nine months at what used to be home saw all of "my first (fill in the blank) without Mom" observances. My first Thanksgiving without Mom (which was also my last Thanksgiving in Miami)...my first Christmas without Mom....my first birthday without Mom...all of those occasions were the last ones that I spent in Miami. And even though I understand that there was no way that I could have afforded to live in my townhouse unless someone else moved in with me to help me with the upkeep, I sometimes feel sad that I had to leave.

As far as my plans for the evening go, I don't have any. My head hurts, and I don't feel like doing much besides maybe reading or listening to music.

So, until next time, Dear Reader, I will take my leave of you. See you on the sunny side of things.