This was another week we didn’t make it up the mountain. I can blame it on the holidays, but I’m not sure that’s entirely true. The short week, and the latest covid surge, meant many places were still encouraging online business, so I took advantage of it.

When I worked in corporate America, I used the week between Christmas and the new year to rest and recharge for the upcoming flurry of activity. Last year, I needed the break to recover from the stress of a high-tech career. This year, I’m adjusting to yet another “new normal.”

Because we couldn’t get insurance for our home, we’ve been scrambling to gather the resources we’ll need to get the debris cleaned up. The next step will be to finance repair to the infrastructure and, ultimately, a new house. If our region doesn’t get a lot of snow in the next few weeks, we should be able to get the remnants cleared away. The problem is, this area needs as much snow as nature can provide to prevent the kind of wildfires the western United States experienced last summer. If this January is anything like last year, we can probably watch Australia for previews.

With one more short week ahead of us, I don’t expect the next few days to be much different than the last. We will continue to make phone calls, sort through what’s left of my mom’s storage unit, and box up those items we don’t need for day-to-day living. I expect this is the calm before the storm, and after we ring in the new year, life will get crazy busy.