Spring!

I'm getting older. Winter never used to affect me until I went to college. The first year or two of college, I refused to acknowledge that winter was hard on me. However, my grades generally told otherwise; I could easily lose a letter in certain classes, which would rebound for Spring Quarter (where the concepts were even more advanced). Now that I'm out of college, I don't have to worry about my grades, but I can still get crabby and I definitely get very cold!

I like the concept of Groundhog's day. Its a harbinger of Spring, even though it has no bearing on the duration of the winter months. Growing up, I kind of came up with my own series of events that heralded the coming Spring. Crocuses, robins, and my birthday were all very real symbols that winter was melting away. My birthday is March 21st, so its either the day of, or the day after the first day of Spring (that's a pretty good indicator, eh?). Even though robins typically winter over in Ohio, it seems as though they become more vocal the closer we get to Spring.

This winter has been pretty tough on me. I get cold really easily and have been bordering on exhaustion almost every night for the past 2 months. Its interesting, because work was much more stressful in the summer and fall, but for some reason, I just haven't had the energy that I did 6 months ago. The nights have seemed darker and colder than I ever remember. However, I have noticed the last few weeks that the drive to work isn't quite as dark as it had been. I've also noticed that there is a little more green peeking through the brown and the snow. This evening, as I was walking our trash to the curb (of which there was almost as much recycling as there was trash...go us!), I heard a couple of robins chirping in the nearby trees.

I've got to say, I'm really looking forward to this summer. When I was in college, Rachel and I used to travel to regional Focus meets on a fairly regular basis. For the last few summers, I haven't able to get out of the state for any meets, and even a lot of the local meets were hard to get to. This summer, I'm fairly optimistic that we're going to have the opportunity to attend a few regional meets and make a few new friends. There seems to be a pretty intense interest in the Focus community to resume the regional meets, so I'm hoping to make it a priority to get up to Michigan and over to Pennsylvania for a few meets.