This week's posts: Happy places

Our first frost was a little over a week ago; our first snow happened yesterday.  A week and a half ago, it was in the 70's and one afternoon was almost a bit too warm; this week, we'll be lucky to get up to 40.  We're heading towards the shortest day of the year.  I'm happy in the morning and mid-day, then I feel the dwindling light very strongly.  My throat still gets sore every time I try to sing - even if it's only for fifteen minutes. There's more going on that I don't write about.

And dear husband is going to be gone all week.

I've been feeling very lonely this fall when dear husband goes out of town.  There are a variety of reasons, but, basically, many of the social outlets I've had have dried up or vanished, and I haven't figured out how to get involved in new ones during the school year.  I enjoy homeschooling younger son, and I enjoy talking to older son at dinner, but I need more interaction than that. 

Loneliness, holiday pressure, lack of sunlight, etc. - this could be a really depressing week.  In order to try to forestall that, I've decided a few things:

• Younger son and I (and older son if his schedule allows) are going to the Vespers Service of Advent Lessons and Carols at Duke Chapel on Thursday.  Dear husband went to this years ago and says that it was beautiful. 
• We're going to head over to the American Tobacco Campus at some point this week to look at the lights, the decorated trees, and the gingerbread houses. 
• We're going to get a few Christmas movies that we haven't seen before from Netflix.
• Blog-wise, the important one is that I'm going to write about some of my really local (as in Orange and Durham counties) Happy Places.  None of them will be surprises if you're a regular reader of my blog.  I've written about all of them before.  You may not even find the posts very interesting.  The point of writing them is to cheer myself up.  Actually, just writing about intending to write about them is cheering me up this evening (dear husband just finished packing). 

I already did one thing to help myself - visited a friend, her younger daughter, and new kitten this afternoon.  We chatted about  having daughters in college (her older one), dance, and various other things.  If I start feeling lonely and unlikeable this week, I'll remind myself of that.