after so long, do I really know what “normal” is anymore?

Every day that goes by I find myself thinking more about normal stuff, and less about what I need to do to win the war I’ve been waging for the last 5 months. A large part of this is because I took a fairly expensive and drastic measure and cooked my house to ensure there wasn’t a living organism left to torment me, nothing left to ruin my sleep and cause more stress than I’d ever have imagined possible from such a small creature.

After the thermal treatment I took steps to ensure that even if there were any survivors (doubtful when you consider the temperatures and the durations they were held for) they had no way to get back in (or out), and if by some small miracle they did find their way back in… well, I don’t suspect they would live long enough to cause a problem. I’m still following procedures until I’m clear of the 60 day mark, but in my mind I keep telling myself that it is finally over and I can take my life off pause and get things back on track.

Today was a small step towards doing things I used to do, or at least putting things in place so I can do them again. I haven’t done any real baking (muffin mixes and jell-o don’t count) in probably a year or more, and so when I went grocery shopping today I made a point to go through the baking aisle and fully stock up. My cupboards are still surprisingly empty after dropping a fair amount of money at the grocery store, but I’ve now got ingredients in place to create stuff again.

I hope that I haven’t completely lost the knack, but the good thing about baking is that your mistakes are almost always still edible…

other things in my life that have been ignored for far too long and need to be dusted off as soon as possible:

biking – not since September of 2009, after riding 99% of the days the year before

walking – my knees are too bad for running these days, but I need to get out and be more active now that I have the time and energy (both physical and mental) to do so

taking pictures – and then uploading them to flickr. it’s been so long I can’t remember the log in info for my flickr account.

reading and playing games – it’s tough to do these when you don’t want to be in your house for more than 5 minutes.

there are other things, like writing on here, but I’m enjoying the idea of simply having my friends over for a night of fun fairly soon. having people over and actually relaxing in my house. what a novel concept.

it feels good to be getting back to normal, and I look forward to the day when I can look back at this five month period and be glad it is just a distant memory.