It has been a month, y’all.

[+] About 30 minutes after I posted my last entry, I received news that one of the people I was close to in Montana had died. Julie was one of my “Montana moms”, and she was one of the people who dropped everything to be with me when I was in the hospital after having Daniel. She was one of the hosts of my baby shower, and she was just an amazing person. I had planned to spend my New Year’s Eve putting my January bullet journal spread together, but I ended up playing phone games and crying instead. There will be a funeral in Washington for her in March (because she is from here originally), and I’m going to try to go to that since I can’t go to the one being held in Montana this week.

[+] A week later, I received news that Emily De Ardo had passed away. According to the tribute on her page from her Aunt Mary, she was hospitalized with pneumonia over Christmas. She was a double lung transplant recipient, and I think the pneumonia just overwhelmed her body and her lungs. Her book, Living Memento Mori, is one that I have gifted to people. She played the heck out of the hand of cards she was dealt in life, and I will miss her blog posts.

[+] My church’s parish administrator quit very abruptly on New Year’s Day, so I have been filling in to do the bulletin and the email newsletter with help. (For those who don’t know, I am the “geek-in-charge” at my parish.) It has meant learning Adobe InDesign, and my first week with that was frustrating because it isn’t like anything except maybe Microsoft Publisher. I’m used to being amazing at everything I touch, so I had to confront my perfectionism on that front. After that hard week, I’ve had an easier time.

[+] We ended up having two snow days last week because we got 4 inches of snow over a two-day period, and western Washington doesn’t know how to handle snow well. It was pretty, and it is thankfully gone now due to some rain.