cereal: Furnace twins for the win, JenP.

Today in my corner of Texas, the high is going to be 69 degrees, not 90. This is very exciting.

Furnace twins for the win, JenP.

High-five.

Dana - why, that's almost Richmond weather!

Good luck with the furnace fixes!

I had to turn my heat on this morning, it was 43°F out when I woke up. The cats are now covering the floor vent in my office, so everything seems to be working as intended.

Oh! We have a water heater. That's nice.

ETA: One of my cats is sitting directly in front of the space heater.

It has warmed up here enough that I can open the window. It's really nice to have the window open.

Im excited that just as our weather is finally turning to typical Seattle, I am flying to the east coast for a week, where it will be 80 degrees on one of the days I’m there (?!?). No idea what to pack. Lows of 45 and highs of 80? I’ll be dancing, and working, and maybe running, and sitting watching soccer which if it’s in the sun could be boiling? But after sun sets, v cold?

I've been stressed and depressed lately, and that has manifested (in part) with me not exercising.

Going back to 2019 when I focused on losing weight to deal with my sciatica, I was running as often as 6 days a week, and kept it at 4 or 5 days a week through the pandemic and Jacqueline's illness (where running was a refuge).

Since last year though it's slowed down to 3 or 4 days a week, and after this summer 1 or 2 days a week, and I hadn't run at all for several weeks recently.

And not only have I put weight back on, but I'm getting early symptoms of the sciatica again.

When EM was here the other day we talked about that dynamic of waking up, ready and resolute to exercise and then...not. You start scrolling or getting sucked into videos or whatnot and you piss away your window.

So this morning, I woke up and was resolute....and then started all the bad habits, so I forced myself out of bed and out the door by 9:30 and got my run in.

Also, I did an Accountable Text to EM and she responded that she had gotten up that morning to do her walk.

So I'm here to say it's helpful to have an exercise buddy, someone you are accountable to that motivates you to get moving.

And I encourage everybody to get up and move their body today, in whatever way they prefer. Get some steps in. Get on the bike. Go swimming. Just go for a walk.

Yay for heat and exercise!

It has been in the mid 30s here every night. Supposed to warm up this weekend some. We had actual big fat snowflakes in the air a couple days ago, which was pretty. They didn't even make it to the ground.

Brendon is back in Florida. We headed out to the Albany airport at 2:30 AM on Tuesday and there was apparently a deer convention or something. We saw no fewer than 40 deer in the first 10 miles. Groups of 3 and 4 or some individuals. It was wild. I always call out the deer to the driver for caution, but we gave up and just went with assuming there were deer. Fortunately, none of them decided to jump out in front of us. In her many decades up here my sister has hit a deer 3 times. The last one the deer jumped off a snow bank on to the top of her car. She was quite annoyed.

Today I am trying to organize my new kitchen cabinets. During construction all my kitchen stuff has been moved around many times. And now it is everywhere. No rhyme nor reason. Cleaning supplies, toaster, and wine glasses might be in the same cabinet. Pulling everything out and putting it in some kind of logical order is a process.

On my list tomorrow is going to storage and hauling out a couple area rugs. My walls and roof are insulated, but the floor is not and it is chilly, making the furnace work a lot harder than it should.

There are so many things on my list of stuff to do. I need to vacuum, like everything, clean up the basement that our dog Jarah redecorated with the contents of a garbage bag, clean the bathrooms, put up a shelf in the bedroom for my wife, finish staining and putting together a shelf unit for the kitchen, make some bookshelves for my wife's office, rotate the tires on my wife's car, recycle a bunch of cans and cardboard from the garage, put up a ceiling fan in the basement, mow the yard for the last time this year, go through boxes in the garage and throw way stuff, I've got at least three loads of laundry I need to do, and I really should wax the cars for that matter.