I usually welcome the coming of cold weather, but I think there is something about living in Norway and Sweden that has beaten that out of me. It feels today as though we jumped from the last moments of a none-too-friendly summer directly into early winter. Forget autumn. It's not coming. It's freezing (okay, maybe not literally…). Warm beverages are not helping.

Nightmares are sometimes so real that they beat the tendency to idealize out of me.

Paying bills is mundane also… and likewise beats the idealism out of me.

Then there's school. The studies I do to keep my brain churning (burning?) without a purpose behind it.

Then there's loss. Again and again and again.

And a picture of the area around me.