This is the week when many bloggers do a recap of their year. I don’t remember much of mine. It’s a fascinating blur of going to work, cleaning, paying bills, and remembering to not throw my new favorite shirt in the dryer so it wouldn’t shrink. It was hair appointments for cut and color, a tooth that wreaked havoc for months, some blood work and a mammogram.
It was Montana in July.
The biggest blur was this month. It was seven parties with a couple more on the books for New Years. We each had our work parties to attend while the others were dear people whose homes we were honored to be invited to. That is a lot of parties but at no time did it ever occur to either of us that we could decline any of these invites unless there was a conflict. Maybe my mom’s words echo in my mind. “If you say no too often people stop inviting you.”
And now that it is all winding down I am worn out. I have eaten too much, drank more than I should have and spent too much on party clothes. If left alone at a buffet table I could clean a hostess of her plate of olives and wipe out the Chex Mix, and yet those aren’t even my downfall.
On Saturday we were at a party and Mark was doing a show and tell of a 3-D printer anthrax toxin protein. Our hosts were the parents of a high school girl who worked this summer in his lab and she was daily involved in this undertaking. She beamed with pride seeing the outcome of her work while Mark was in his element explaining their science project.
Somebody asked me if I ever know what my-husband-the-scientist is talking about. I usually do not. I told them about the dinner in Montana for an infectious disease conference he was attending. Terms about Ebola and MERS were thrown around so casually they made my head spin. At one point I wondered, “Is there anyone here like me? Is there an introvert with a splash of social anxiety who wants to keep me company?”
Maybe not that time but as soon as I said that on this Saturday night I was met with some like-minded souls who answered with a resounding “me too.”
Now the time has come to close out this year and ring in the new one. Let’s kiss and hug the ones we love and hope for the best year ever. Then let’s stay inside, pull up the covers and dive into our stack of books so that next December we can take our shy selves to our parties and say to the stranger next to us, “Have you read………”