Welcome to March! And slightly longer days. Sunset is now almost 6pm, which is glorious. Finishing work days before it's completely dark is just lovely. For those of you who don't live at latitudes closer to the poles, the difference between 4pm and 6pm sunsets is everything. I'll handle the cold, wet days just fine,…
We've made it to 2023. Will this be a better year? No matter what, it means that I've now been blogging at this little space for seven different calendar years (2017 to today). When I started TLRE, I didn't realize how much it would change my life. But through the relationships I've made by being…
It's been a couple of weeks since I've posted anything (beyond an update of my Christmas Traditions posts that I originally wrote back in 2017). I didn't want another week to go by, so checking in with a quick update. We spent nine days in Mexico right after Thanksgiving, and then promptly tested positive for…
Somehow it is six days until Thanksgiving? Time has been so wonky since COVID began, but it feels like November especially disappeared in a blink. The weather has continued to be strange here, and I think that's part of it. We're on our second week in a row of cold, sunny days, when normally it…
It went from summer to winter overnight here - and we're seeing freezing temperatures already. My husband had said that they were predicting a warmer than normal winter, but that's definitely not turning out to be the case. Between that and the time change thanks to Daylight Savings, the cold darkness of late afternoon absolutely…
Welcome to September! Hopefully we're now done with the weather in the 90s (maybe even the 80s after this week) here in the Pacific Northwest. Though there are some serious heatwaves going on elsewhere right now, regardless of the fact that we've ticked over into meteorological fall. Climate chaos is just getting started, folks. In…
I find that I am still very much attached to this blog, even if these days it's mostly just a diary update of our lives as we continue through the 2020s and everything that entails. There is plenty I would like to write about (unlike when I first started blogging in 2017 and was worried…
Another Friday, huh? Honestly, I'm ready for life to just slow down a little bit. I keep wondering though, is life really all that busy, or did we just get used to life being slower for a couple of years due to COVID? Perhaps it's somewhere in between, but I think it really is the…
Holy cow it's August. COVID time is seriously weird, all. I hope you're staying healthy - as much as some people might want to talk about how we are in the "postpandemic" phase of life, I know far too many people actively sick with COIVD right now or still struggling with lingering side effects. We've…
I have to say, I'm really sick of noting what week of COVID we're in on these posts. The current transmission rate in our county is something like 20% right now, and that's mirrored across most of the country. While so many people are "over it" and pretending like COVID isn't a thing, we're still…