A New Month
It’s October! Time to get out the Halloween decorations- how exciting. Like many others, I’m looking forward to the Girl Next Door Fall Extravaganza episode for 2024. While I’m waiting, I’ve been amusing myself by listening to their old ones. One thing I love about these episodes is, Kelsey and Erica live in Arizona. Arizona weather is not Florida weather, but there are similarities. Mainly that neither place has a true “fall.” While the rest of the country is (hopefully) experiencing beautiful, crisp fall days, we’re still sweltering in the heat. In this episode from 2016, Kelsey and Erica talked about how they adjusted to fall in the desert. They went through stages of denial, acceptance, and said they are now living in an alternate reality where it IS fall, dammit, because I say so! That’s the way I feel- I put up my decorations and light a candle, so therefore it’s fall. Switching out my decorations (fall to Halloween, to Thanksgiving, to Christmas) also helps make one month distinct from another. In Florida, we pretty much have two seasons: Summer, and SuperSummer. There’s definitely a difference between January and July, but still- most days in January you can still walk around in shorts and a tank top. There are many times that I temporarily have no idea what month it is. I know we all have those moments, but I doubt most people up north get confused between summer and winter. In the absence of external cues, it’s important to me to make one season distinct from the next. Otherwise time slips by much, much too fast. In this week’s Best Laid Plans podcast, SHU discussed how she marks the start of a new month, One of the things she does is switch her screen backgrounds. I like that! I’m going to switch the photo on my phone, and I’m thinking of using this “terrifying” one of Charlotte… Hee hee… actually, she was yawning. But she looks ferocious. Here she is looking like her beautiful self: Magical black cats really do guard my home this month! Do you decorate for Halloween? Do you feel like you need to do something to make your months distinct, or does it naturally happen where you live?