Poo... Winter is nigh.

Well, kids, here we go again. It's 12 noon and it's only 66°. I can feel the depression setting in. Soon, it will be time to retire my cute tubetops and 37 pair of flipflops in exchange for dumpy frumpy winter clothes. Which, honestly, isn't my biggest complaint, considering I'm not 22 anymore. No, it's just the muddy funk that comes over me once this time of year starts setting in.

Ohio winters aren't terribly cold, or horribly blizzardish. That's actually one of the reasons I hate them the most. If there were a solid 2 feet of snow the entire winter, I might honestly not head so deep into depression this time of year, every year. No. It's the combination of cold, and frozen solid ground, and gray skies that does it for me. It leaves nothing to do. No snowboarding, no sledding, no snowmobiling, and usually no iceskating. It's just cold.

This time of year, fall, is almost worse than winter, because I spend a lot of it anticipating winter, not to mention, tending to my horrible hay fever. The combination of allergies and spending 75% of your workday scrubbed in at the surgical site, sterile, is never a good combination. You spend a lot of time hiding runny noses and watery eyes behind your mask and eyewear. There aren't a lot of things worse than sneezing into a mask.

I compare the feeling to this: I've had jobs I've truly hated. But you do what you've gotta do for the sake of eating and surviving. Eventually you get to the point that when Friday comes along, you get excited. I mean you're counting down the hours and minutes to the weekend. Staring at the clock. But then once you clock out that Friday, the countdown begins again for when you have to go back to that shithole again. Sundays are ruined because Monday is the next day, and this anticipation for it becomes overwhelming. It gets worse and worse every weekend. When you get to that point, you start calling in for no good reason. You wake up to your alarm clock with it already in your head you're not going in. You call in to work, with that guilty feeling in your gut, cause you know your aunt really didn't die, or you aren't truly passing kidney stones. But you've got the bit down perfectly. This is when you know it's time to move on.

I've got the same knot in my stomach about winter. It gets worse every year. This year I made a good anxious attempt to get out of our lease and move to the south. And not the south of Ohio, the south of America. Some place close to the equator would be great. I don't care how hot it is, just find me a place with grocery stores or restaurants that chill the place to arctic so I can cool down. Some place that rain is something that happens but instead of it happening for 12 days non-stop, it just rains and then it's beautiful again.

Anyone that knows me, though, knows I have a pretty bad case of ADHD. I like a change of scenery about every 3 months or so. This includes living arrangements, jobs, boyfriends, pretty much anything stable. And if I can't find a reason to change them, I make one up. (Subconsciously, or otherwise.) So I'm wondering if this is what's going on. Winter is such a boring time of year.

But then I went to the kids' open houses at school, and I found a brand new feeling. It had something to do with the comfort of seeing the same teachers, the same kids, the same parents. It felt a little okay. I realized something then. I can be all the ADHD I want, but I think my kids need a little stability. So, here I go again, another year in northwest Ohio. Maybe this year will be like the third month of my relationships. Once I get over the three month hump, it's all downhill from there.