Grrrreetings, friends!

I’d hate to jinx things, but I feel like I am on the mend. The new meds I got at the doctor on Thursday seem to be helping, and my cough has turned from crazy, incessant, uncontrollable attacks into something slightly more controlled and productive. Never mind the fact that last night I woke up and had a horrible coughing fit that led to my unwilling ejection of a piece of leftover wedding cake from my stomach. Sure, that wasn’t fun, but on the whole I feel like things are improving. I will return to good health! At some point!

In other news, I am just really ready for the holidays this year. I’m of course excited about Thanksgiving, as I’ve kept mentioning, but Christmas! Winter break! Cold weather! Snow? Bring it on.

I am already itching to bust out my holiday lights and paper snowflakes and pine cones and appropriately scented candles. I think this year I am going to splurge and buy myself some Voluspa candles. They are so pretty and smell so amazing. Yup. That’s it. I’m doing it. Someone please alert me when they have their winter scents available. (For some reason the “branche vermeil” scent is $45 on Amazon right now and I’m assuming that reason is that it’s last year’s leftovers? And when they have more supply the price will go back down?)

I think I’ll go ahead and set the Christmas wheels in motion right after our Thanksgiving celebration. Never mind that we won’t have time to get a tree that weekend (see family-related delay of Thanksgiving until Saturday). I won’t need a tree in order to start Christmassing this place right up. I feel happy just thinking about it.

Here in Alabama we’ve finally gotten some genuinely cold weather in the mornings (in the 30s, I believe) and I am so enjoying it. Winter is my favorite. I think people often assume I’m complaining if I come in from outdoors and yell, “DAMN, IT’S COLD OUT THERE,” but no. That’s a cry of joy you hear.

When the weather stays in the 80s well into October, it’s easy to feel like there may never be relief. Winter may never come. Perhaps this is how life is now; perhaps in moving to the Deep South, one has given up any hope of ever feeling a bracing wind or smelling snow. But no. Winter is coming.

Even if it doesn’t snow down here, we’ll surely see some in Iowa this Christmas, where we’ll be traveling to visit my in-laws. Christmas is the only holiday break long enough for a substantial trip up there, so that’s become our standard holiday plan (my family at Thanksgiving and/or spring break, his at Christmas).

I love traveling up there to take part in all of the big-family activities — visiting aunts’ and uncles’ houses, little nieces and nephews coming by to go sledding in the fields, and of course the caroling. I come from a smaller, more scattered family, so I never grew up with this kind of tradition going on. It’s so lovely.

That said, I also somewhat long for a future time when we can stay home for Christmas and maybe have our families come visit us. I feel like that’s the kind of thing you can expect only after you have kids, though. (So basically I only want to get pregnant for the following reasons: to not have to clean the litterbox anymore and to have an excuse to stay home for the holidays. I kid. Mostly.) Really, I just think it would be nice to set up our Christmas tree and such and then be able to stay here and enjoy it throughout the season, rather than having to leave it for 10 days and come home to a dried-out bunch of kindling.

Either way, though, I am ready for the season. I’ve just got to get through two more weeks of classes and a week of final exams. I can almost see the twinkling, pine-scented, egg-nog-soaked finish line from here.