↓
 

words and images

🇺🇦✏️✒️📚📔🌜dreamer 🌕 thinker 🌕 aspirant📱📷🚴‍♀️🏕🍄🌻

Menu
  • Home
  • Articles
  • Book Reviews
  • Letters
  • Photography
  • Poems & Stories
  • About Diane Schirf
  • Site Map

Tag Archives: mood

Hibernation

words and images Posted on December 8, 2008 by dlschirfMarch 28, 2020

With snow on the ground, the holidays around the corner, and only seven working days left in the year, I should be in a yee-haw! mood.

And I’m not.

For at least a week, I’ve had PMS or PMS-like symptoms — my breasts are tender, and my whole torso aches with tension. On Wednesday and Thursday I was near tears with frustration. I wonder when — or if — relief will come.

It was a boon to all that I was off on Friday.

Then, with the temperatures in the single digits, I couldn’t bring myself to do anything or go anywhere — not even to read something fun.

Saturday would have been more of the same except I did manage to drag myself to the stores, and J. came over before heading to work and took me to dinner. He arrived bearing gifts — a blue Egyptian cotton comforter set and skirt. Between it and the Vellux blanket, I can’t complain about the cold — in fact, I haven’t even had to turn on the radiators.

Sunday was mostly more of the same. I gave into the mood and slept half the day away, having weird dreams about stairwell traps and Trickster. Finally, I had driven myself stir crazy and made a trip to the store and Bonjour. Not unusually for me, I’m regretting that I didn’t  have it in me to do anything until it was almost Monday — and too late.

How irrational is my mood? Earlier in the week, the wind knocked over two of the lighted wire deer in the garden, and seeing these mere contraptions lying there helpless until the maintenance people set them right upset me almost as much as if they had been living creatures felled by the storm. On Sunday, I was startled and disturbed to see the lobsters at Treasure Island in a different and more prominent place where I couldn’t miss them. I wish Treasure Island would follow the lead of Whole Foods and stop selling live lobsters.

Yes, I’m upset about seeing fallen wire deer and trapped, doomed lobsters.

As I was walking home and reflecting on how self-absorbed all of this is, it occurred to me that this is one of the effects of the colder weather on me. I get out and see people less and turn inward more. It’s not the shortness and gloominess of the days that depress me; it’s the sense of being confined, alone, and lonely. Social activities aren’t always accessible, affordable, or practical. I crave intellectual stimulation, but want mostly to eat carbohydrates, sleep, and wait out the four or more long months until the warmer weather arrives, and once again I feel human.

At least for a while.

Posted in Blog, Life | Tagged behavior, mood | Leave a reply

There goes the sun

words and images Posted on August 29, 2008 by dlschirfJanuary 29, 2021

For me summer ends not on Labor Day but with the autumn equinox. I’ve been in a fall mood for the past couple of weeks, though. It’s more than the unusually cool weather and the early sunsets (now occurring shortly after 7:30 p.m.). It’s the retreat of the sun into the southern sky, imperceptible at first, but now impossible to miss. The angled light is somehow softer — still bright, but not as harsh to the eyes.

Today I realized that my current seat in the garden, which just a couple of weeks ago would be flooded with light by 1 p.m. as the sun rose above the trees and their shadows withdrew, is still in the shade; the sun is low enough in the sky to be behind the Flamingo.

Autumn may be one of my favorite seasons (spring is the other), but behind it lies the bitter, dreary Chicago winter, the winter that just a short time ago I longed to be over.

Posted in Blog, Life | Tagged behavior, mood, weather | 1 Reply

Recent Posts

  • Future of artificial limbs (prosthetics)
  • Hodge, 2001 – 2013 (cat)
  • “Far more happier” (The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes)
  • Pileated woodpecker pair at Sapsucker Woods
  • Eternal flame waterfall at Chestnut Ridge

Top Posts & Pages

  • Top 10 reasons Commander Riker walks with his head tilted
  • Book review: Zitkala-Sa: American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings
  • Memories of South Shore Plaza, Hamburg, New York
  • Wopsononock Mountain, or Wopsy, in Blair County, Pennsylvania
  • Book review: Women in Love
  • Relics: The newsstand
  • Book review: Henry and June
  • Book Reviews
  • Sunset from Coffee Creek Park in Chesterton, Indiana
  • Horseshoe Curve National Historic Site, Tytoona Natural Area Cave Preserve

Archives

Other realms

  • BookCrossing
  • Facebook
  • Goodreads
  • Instagram
  • LibraryThing
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Good viewing

  • Art of John Taft
  • bensozia
  • Bill of the Birds (no longer updated)
  • BrontëBlog
  • Edge
  • Karen Winters Fine Art
  • Mental Floss
  • Musical Assumptions
  • National Geographic News
  • Orange Crate Art
  • Sexy Archaeology
  • The Creative Journey
  • The Introvert's Corner
  • The Pen Addict
  • The Raucous Royals
  • Thrilling Days of Yesteryear
  • Woodclinched
  • World-O-Crap

BOINC Stats

Copyright © 1996–2023 Diane Schirf. Photographs and writing mine unless noted.
↑