A Trip to Idaho for Christmas

My husband and I spent Christmas in Idaho with his family. No, I did not "eat a potato". This is cattle country, not potato country. And I actually spent much of my time in Washington state, because the town Marc grew up in is right on the Idaho/Washington border.

Here's a journal of each day and what I did. It's honestly pretty boring, and I'm not sure you're up to the read...

Enjoy. :)

Real Life Sucks.

At some point, after you're out of highschool, or college, you're bound to realize a few things. The things you realize will, naturally, depend on your expectations, your situation, and your previous situations, but I think these cover the basics.

A) Paying bills is hard. Having an amount of companies that demand money on a scheduled basis, well, that gets hard to keep up with. It gets harder and scarier the more that there are, but even just a few demanded payments of your hard-earned money are rough.

B) No one told you it would be this way.

C) Finding a good place to live, a good job to work, and good people to spend time with is hard. It seems so easy, right? If it was/is for you, I want to say, "Just you wait..." but maybe you're one of the lucky ones. Hold on to it.

D) Your time doesn't seem the same as it did in school. Either you have a lot more and you don't know what to do, or you never have enough hours in the day to do what you need to do, but either way, you might just feel like somebody switched up how fast the clocks go.

E) The world kind of sucks. Yep, let's just accept this one. See, the thing is, it doesn't suck less in highschool, you just know that highschool is a limited-time thing, and you can just power through to get to the end. Life isn't a limited-time thing. It just keeps going.

F) FML. You're bound to say it, feel it, think it, or just know it.

G) Sometimes, the best approach is a few hours off with a good CD on repeat and a slab of something warm and baked. Unless your problem is obesity.

So, I guess what I want to say, is this:

Yes, it sucks. It's hard. It always was, and always will be. There are people your age who know how much it sucks because they're there too. There are also older people who can connect and maybe help you out, depending on what's wrong. Biggest thing to remember: This too shall pass. Maybe not like highschool, or like a bad excrement, but it will pass, whatever it is. Whether it's as sucky as a kidney stone, or as simple as a jackass on the freeway, it will pass.

Oh, but just because it'll end, doesn't mean you don't have to work hard between now and then.

Living Sky

If you asked me what my favourite colour was, and I answered, "The colour of Saskatchewan skies." Would you think blue? I might. My first thought would be the ocean-deep, diamond-bright, dazzling azure of a mid-day mid-summer cloudless day. But I would also remember the thick dark almost-black blue of a moonless night, as well as the soft baby blue that midnight fades to as dawn takes over. As pink, red and orange streak one horizon, the other is dappled in an almost-touchable soft shade of blue.

And to think of the sunrise, one can hardly not think about the sunset. All the colours of the sunset. There's crimson red that paints itself across the sky in wide streaks, the orange that dashes boldly closest to the sun, the deep purple that replaces blue except for where red still paints the sky, the yellow that just swallows up the entire sky for all of five minutes, and of course the pink that soft clouds are dipped in; the shade of pink unicorns and little girls' rooms should be. The sunrises have a similar pallet, but the tones are subdued, and sleepy. Who can really expect them to be as bold as their evening counterparts so early in the morning?

But when you think the colours of Saskatchewan skies, do you think of grey? The heavy, pressing, all-encompassing grey that envelopes the entire province all winter? The heavy dense clouds press low to the ground, and fade into the snow covered fields until you can't distinguish the horizon, threatening to swallow you up if you let yourself go. The ocean of grey only relinquishes its grasp as spring starts to melt the world and brown creeps back in, and then slowly all the other colours of the skies come back to life at their appropriate times.

And there's that orange; when the clouds are low and heavy so the streetlights reflect off of them and light up the whole world with an eerie orange glow. As well as the orange of the huge harvest moon that hangs so close you could probably touch it if you reach hard enough.

And the forgotten colour; white. The wispy white of thin clouds spread across a pale blue, or the plump fluffy white of perfect clouds. And the white of a winter storm, where snow is blowing so hard and thick you can't see the neighbours, or distinguish the road from the air from the house.

So what is my favourite colour? As the season, the time of day, and the level of humidity change and pass, so do my favourites. I live, love and breath the living skies. I relish in them, let myself soak in their personalities, their vibrancy, their very life. Every one of these colours and shades is truly the colour I love just as it dances its way across the skies of my home and heart.