It was like the movie Halloween, but without the bodies.

Last night the weather was windy, cold, and wet. We'd had some rain earlier in the day. By nightfall the rain had stopped but a cold blustery wind was still blowing, whipping the trees and stripping away what few leaves had survived to this point in the year. Normally I love moody weather, especially rain. But this wasn't the kind of weather that makes you want to bundle up by a fire, the kind that embraces you so that you want to go out with your umbrella and walk in it. It was just the opposite, a whisper of a warning, a harbinger of some unidentifiable threat that made you pull back. Even driving in my car around the neighborhood it was hard to get completely comfortable. I had an itchy sense of vulnerability like I was being watched. Last night we had the kind of weather that would make Stephen King want to write another book.

Is it a new year yet?

2009 ended with me getting sick with a nasty sinus infection in mid-December that had me completely laid out for 9 days, then recovering slowly for the next 3 weeks. I was just starting to get up out of bed in time for Christmas. We had house guests starting Christmas Eve for 5 days and it took all the energy I had. So I never really had any time off to relax and the new year had come and gone before I'd had time to think about it. It has only been in the last week that I finally feel like I'm back to normal. And at this point after struggling through being run down for so long being back at work somehow seems refreshing, which isn't a fortuitous start for 2010. I think I'll go back to bed. Someone wake me when it's 2011.