Yesterday, as the afternoon was stretching on for what seemed like forever, and the hands on the clock were taking their own sweet time inching toward 5pm, my coworker noted with a groan that if we thought this was bad, wait until next week, since that would be *five* days and not four. It's hard to go back to a full time schedule after the holidays are over, especially after the last few week of December which are always filled with a hundred different reasons to get out of work. Leaving early for holiday dinners. Days off for the holidays themselves. Taking time off in between for whatever reason we can come up with. And then January hits - and with it, an entire stretch of over six weeks without a single holiday to break up the monotony (and January 1st does not count, because it only starts the month off) until sometime in mid February. No matter how much you might love your job, working in January is hard. And the hardest week of all to work is the week after vacation.

But aside from the pain of returning to work, it's been an otherwise quiet and nice sort of week. Work and home and even time to watch a movie or two - one of which was Art School Confidential, which started out far more promising than it ended. We even did some new-to-us cooking, finally tracking down just what the heck to do with the portobello mushroom caps we bought on a whim last weekend (the first experiment turned out delicious; the second night's experiment was the sort of cooking where we each took a bite, gave a little shudder, looked at each other across the table, and then he ordered the pizza while I scraped the remains into the disposal).

We're slowly starting to make some progress on clearing up the library. I did some major reorganizing of my yarn stash on Monday, and we moved the big shelf into the computer room, where somehow Richard managed to wedge it into the space between the window and my secondary desk (and I do mean wedge - that shelf isn't going *anywhere* after this. I'm not even sure how we will ever pry it back out again), and I cleared off enough shelf space above my computer desk so my slowly growing knitting library has space, thus clearing up more room in the newly wedged shelf unit for bins of yarn. This year I am starting off with grand plans. This year it is going to be all about reducing the stash, and I am off to a fine start with work on a pinwheel baby blanket made from some vintage pink swirled yarn that's been sitting in one of my bins for far too long, waiting for me to make up my mind what to do with it. I still have to take down the big folding table that's in there (which means tackling the random piles of stuff that are on *top* of the table first), but once that's out of the way, we can start thinking about how best to turn the library into a temporary guest room space, since it's about time we had something to offer to friends besides the rather uncomfortable (and slightly broken) futon downstairs.