I’m a little frustrated with how maudlin this blog has become, but I guess that’s where my mind is at these days.

I’ve also been struggling to keep my posts rooted in the real world. I was going to write a whole post about my kid’s birthday sleepover and it was becoming a meditation on being an overnight guest in other people’s houses and all my deep thoughts about all the sleepovers I did as a kid and… yeah.

I’m sure I’m going to write that exact post eventually but sometimes I just need to pull my head out of my ass.

The problem with the real world is that it’s a little boring. What do I have to write about?

I started out strong with my job applications this year (three applications in the first two weeks of January!) but have failed to keep up that momentum.

I could write about how I switched cat litter brands. We are now a proud clumping household, and I think the cats and humans are pleased with the change.

I could write about how I’m reading Jujutsu Kaisen (manga) so that my oldest kid and I can have a shared topic of interest. I like the characters and the lore, but the fight scenes… dear God. The fight scenes last for entire books. Can we please get back to the character development?

I could write about how I’m trying to get air conditioning installed in our house and it’s not going well. Our house is lovely but the floorplan is not conducive to an air conditioning retrofit. We may end up investing in higher quality/less annoying window units.

I could write about how I am currently planning two trips. This is very unlike me because I dislike both planning travel and engaging in travel. But, we’ve got a short trip to Chicago booked for spring break, and I am in the very early planning stages of a family trip to Japan in either 2025 or 2026. And by “very early planning stages” I mean that I am reading a travel guide and making notes about what we might want to see. I also looked up plane tickets and almost died when I saw how expensive they are.

I could write about how the dishwasher keeps spewing water onto the kitchen floor. I keep attempting to fix it, and then it works fine for a couple cycles (I think because it doesn’t want to hurt my feelings?) and then starts spewing water again.

I could write about how our car got broken into earlier this week.

I could write about how I tried to make myself a grilled cheese using leftover cornbread and it was a massive disappointment. Admittedly, my expectations may have been too high.

Well, I guess there is a lot of real world stuff that could make for an interesting blog post, but instead you’re going to get paragraph upon philosophical paragraph about how my friend Amber’s dad always fried bologna for us the morning after a sleepover.