Ground fog.

I love the fog. We have it so rarely here, and admittedly it is a pain in terms of driving because of the benighted souls who insist on driving the speed limit, or faster. But it is beautiful. When I drove in yesterday, I was sitting at a light just east of downtown. I could see a bit of park to my right, another bit of park to my left, and absolutely nothing beyond the traffic lights in front of me. It was as if there were no buildings, and I was entering a great and spacious* preserve. Fifty feet past the intersection, the skyscrapers reappeared.

Magic.

I now have a laptop, and Skype. The sons fixed up his mother’s laptop for him before he passed, and Middlest tweaked it for me. The Nook that Squishy gave Beloved for his birthday last September is charging, and we will get that set up for me when I come home tonight. LittleBit might be here when I get home. That would be seriously cool.

I got those three small tasks done that were on my list, and it’s on to the next few. While I am at work today, Middlest will shred the check blanks from an account I am closing. I am a little sad to say goodbye to the John Wayne checks we ordered last year, especially since there are so many left. But they made Beloved smile, and that was the point. [I just realized that I also needed to shred both debit cards. Done.]

*great and spacious: not in the Book of Mormon sense. (It’s in 1 Nephi. Look it up.)

Still no knitting, and it’s not because I’m not feeling the love, but more that everything is taking so much longer than I’m used to. I had a moment of frustration at work yesterday at having to switch from one task to the next before I had finished the first. I can do task-task-task, albeit not with my usual lightning speed. I am not quite up to toggling, but I am sneaking up on it. I get a little more done at work, every day.

When my father died in 1990, I was a stay at home mom, and the children’s father was in chiropractic school. That was a season of overwhelming grief. When my mother died, I was midway through earning my Associate in Applied Studies. Mom’s death was a little easier to grieve, because I did not have hours and hours at home to ruminate.

I am being careful not to let myself get too busy to feel. I worked really hard to arrive at a place where I could safely acknowledge my emotions, process them, and use them to help me make informed choices. I tire very easily just now, but it’s physical and emotional weariness and not depression. There is only so much that I can do in a given day, and this whole past decade has been one of learning to recognize my limitations, work to that point or just a smidgen past, and then stop.

I am hoping to walk over to the courthouse on my lunch hour today and file those affidavits of heirship. At the very least, I will take them to work and lock them safely in my desk.

I did a little retail therapy last night. I had given Beloved’s mother a gift card to Barnes and Noble last year for her birthday, which she had not spent. When the sibs were here helping us deal with the influx of boxes from her storage unit, his sister found the card. Beloved was going to spend it on himself, but never did. In excavating a corner of his desk, I had also found other cards we received as wedding gifts. Last night I went to Barnes and Noble and bought the first season of Downton Abbey. That ate the Barnes and Noble gift card. I handed over a VISA card, with no indication that there was any value left on it.

To. The. Penny. The clerk and I both went, “Wow!”