Here's something I should have thought of yesterday - people who are allergic to things should know what those things look like.

I spent some time outside today, pulling these massive weeds out of the front yard. Getting pollen, dirt and other assorted 'outside' detritus on my face, in my clothes, in my hair. Suddenly, and without warning (except that little niggling 'What are you - stupid?' voice in the back of my head) I started suffering the most massive allergy attack of my personal history. Sneezing, eyes pouring years, throat swollen and raw. Luckily, I was wearing contacts, which seem to have prevented my usual worst symptom of itchy-like-hell eyes. After I came inside and recovered for a little while, I looked up what I'd been handling. I was pulling ragweed and carrying it around my yard!

I deserve what I get.

Interesting. I look back and see that the last time I posted anything, it was the day before we started our 12-hour shifts. And now it's only a few days until we go back to our 8's. Mixed feelings. No more 4 days off at a time, but also no more stretches of days when I feel like I don't even live in my apartment. This last time I came off my 4 on, I felt like I'd been away. I missed my cat. I couldn't remember putting things where I found them. Just odd.

This stretch is another boring, nothing going on kind of 4 off. Today is laundry and groceries, and maybe some more Buffy season 3 watching. My goal is to not turn on the TV until the evening. Stupid box is sucking my life away. My fault. I actually made a list of other things I can do. I seem to have this need to be perpetually entertained lately. I can't seem to do anything without something going on to amuse me.

The seasons are turning again and my favourite time is back. I love the autumn so much that it causes me to get all gooshy inside when I step out into a particularly perfect fall day. The smells, the sounds, and most of all the sights. The sun shines less harshly, the wind feels playful, as if it, too, is winding down after a hectic season, and is now glad of the time to play and move about in the coolness, flinging leaves about in cheerful patterns.

My heaven will be mostly autumn.

But there will also have to be the first snowy winter evening when the silence is palpable and tactile. When every sound seems amplified by the silence and by the perfect, still blanket that covers all the ugliness of the dying year. When the snow lies in small heaps, taking away all harsh edges and corners and leaving a smooth, softer world.

And a spring day when you can feel the earth stirring, awakening in smells of earth and water, with the first buds appearing and every crocus a miracle. When you don't know how to dress, because you feel the warmth as a delicious contrast that makes it seem balmy and comforting and invites you to shed your layers of wool and let your skin feel the sun's rays.

And a summer day full of warmth, when the air smells dry and carries on it the scents of dried grass and the songs of the crickets and the frogs swell into an outlandish and delightful cacophony of sound as darkness falls.

So here goes my pathetic attempt to inject some meaning, life, interest to my everyday happenings.

I would like to say that this will be a way to keep people updated on my doings, point out interesting things that are happening etc etc etc, but the sad truth is that I am in the Mariana trench of ruts, and can't see a whole lot happening in the next stretch of my life.

Right now, I'm talking to Ted, who is currently in Prague. Well, if I can't do much, at least I can have a vicarious life through others. He's taking courses over there. It's always startling to get an email from someone that starts with greetings from a foreign country - especially when you didn't know he was going. But nice.

I've been suffering from what you might call a spiritual and physical lethargy lately. A laziness of body and soul. I'm finding different reasons for it, but I have a horrible feeling that it may all be laziness.