Yesterday was Epiphany in the Christmas/Christian calendar, and the “official” day to take down Christmas, if it’s still up, unless you don’t want to – because you should totally do you.

I am trying to decide what to do with our front door. The dog loves to stretch against our exterior door and his claws have wreaked havoc on our paint. I scraped off all that he loosened, and thought I might expose the varnished dark brown wood underneath, but that’s as much as I could get off without scraping the varnish finish. So I am now leaning toward sanding and repainting the darker green of the mantle (which you can see a tiny bit of on the right – basically a semi-gloss version of our dining room color, which is two steps down the card from the wall color in this room). Taking down Christmas is the basis for my next YouTube video, which will hopefully go live early Tuesday.

In other news, I returned to work yesterday, for real, and for the first time since July 2019. Same job, but on a very, very part-time basis this time. This is how I dressed like a grown-up:

Finally, I am continuing to dress with my 33 items and loving it. I am starting to itch to declutter from what wasn’t included in my capsule, but I’m holding off a few days more. I am running a Minimalism Game/variant on Facebook, and we just did kitchen and moved into living rooms for now, and we’ll get there in due time. In the meantime, this is what I wore January 4/5…today I haven’t bothered to get dressed because I be-bopped around all day in the sweats and tee I wore overnight to take down Christmas, and I’m exhausted by a number of things that are going on with me and with family and with life (starting to work outside the home again might be part of it, but this was also an over-scheduled weekend and something had to give), so we canceled our plans for tonight and I’ll plan on a nice, hot shower later instead, maybe with one of the new shower bombs my sister-in-law gifted me for Christmas.

This is a tough season for so many, and I’m feeling it, too. It’s dark, people are packing away lights, we’re tired, but our connections to others are also largely over, except for our routines: work, school, etc., with few breaks or warm days with sunshine to look forward to for a while. Which is all to say:

Take care, you.

xo, Roo