Back to "Normal"

This weekend marks the end of the holidays. I've taken down the external Christmas decorations, helped my mom remove and pack up her decorations, and now we're looking at the Christmas tree coming down today.

In our household, the end-the-holiday weekend will extend to tomorrow night. The UT Longhorns play in the Fiesta Bowl tomorrow night, and the kids go back to school on Tuesday morning. Bad combo.

While I mostly worked through the holidays, they brought the satisfaction and normality of an annual holiday season to what turned out to be a truly hellish year. For a month or so, we had the rituals of the season to distract. Now, it's back to normal life, and while I'll welcome the increase in free time that letting go of the holidays brings, I'll miss the distractions.

We are now less than 3 weeks away from the Obama inauguration, so we can expect an increasing drumbeat in the press about that historic day. Maybe normal won't be so normal over the next month. Maybe, with all the changes in store for us, we won't even recognize "normal" after six months.

This blog is about adapting to a new "normal." We'll all have to get better at adapting going forward. It's a new year, and about to be a new era. Dare I say, "Bring it on!"