Whoah.
Did last week seriously happen?
Yikes. Yeah…yeah it did. Here, pull up a bean bag…I’ll fill you in. (I don’t have any bean bags…but I’ll bet even imaginary ones are comfy.)
First of all, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all you guys…I hope they were all awesome for you. Some of them were awesome for us.
Christmas was a little hectic but totally fantastic. Good time with family, good food, a long-awaited coffee date with one of my favorite bloggers, and honest-to-goodness homemade eggnog. That stuff was, how you say, le bomb.
What I really need to talk to you about, however, is New Years.
Now, I hate to focus on the negative, but if I don’t find a way to pull something positive out of a crappy situation, then I’m not doing a very good job at keeping up my optimistic label. New Years and the days leading up to it were utterly lame.
After the Christmas festivities, we headed to Kearney to spend time with Paul’s parents and our friends. I ended up going out on Wednesday night for the first round of Karaoke I’ve done in almost 4 years. (I know, I know… 4 years!? When I did the math, I could barely believe it either.) The Karaoke was so much fun. Some of my favorite people were there, and I even ran into one of my favorite people in the whole wide world from High School.Love Shack, Material Girl, Waterfalls, and Stay, (My Karaoke Staple) were sung, and I came home super happy.
The next night, Thursday, was Paul’s and my night to go out to dinner and grab a few beers with our mutual friends. Paul’s mom and dad were babysitting, and the night was ours. We went out to dinner, had a great meal…
And then I got the flu.
Now, I’m not talking about the “Man, I’m so tired and my body hurts and I’ve got a fever,” flu. I’m talking about the “Man, I’m so tired and my body hurts and there is an epic battle of such terrifying proportions being waged in my stomach, that both sides of fighters have decided to violently flee the scene,” flu.
Yeah. Sorry.
So, there we were, stranded at my poor in-laws’ house, while I loafed about feeling like crap. Charlie didn’t understand why I wasn’t getting up to play with him, so he cried at me and pulled the blankets off me all the time. Paul, who had been taking care of both of us, got rewarded for his efforts by…
…getting the flu. On New Years Eve…right about the time everyone is stressing out about finding someone to kiss. By this time, our trip to Kearney had lasted two days longer than it was supposed to, and Charlie had decided that my cell phone needed to take a leisurely dunk in my Gatorade. I’ve successfully filled my brain with images of a trash can that hadn’t been emptied, half of our apartment being burned down, having an eviction notice stamped on our door, and random, surprise bills cropping up that I had forgotten to pay.
I’m happy to say that we did remember to take out the trash. Halfway to Omaha we remembered that we actually took out renter’s insurance this time, so even if our apartmenthad burnt down, we’d be okay…and all of our bills are paid and we blissfully got to sleep in our King-sized bed last night. And Charlie NEVER got the flu.
Life…is so good.
So. It’s a new year. People are making resolutions. That unpleasant stretch of days has helped me decide on mine:
I will not let outside circumstances ruin my outlook or my attitude. I will look at the cold, hard, facts of what I have, and I will appreciate them, and use them to power through my rough patches.
I know this can be more easily said than done…but I think that 2012 might be a little tough in the needing-to-stick-it-out department, and I need to make a conscious decision to be positive. Also, I need to take more pictures of Charlie. Oh, and I seem to have forgotten the most important resolution of all:
I will get a flu shot.
Who’s got resolutions? I want to hear ’em!