Major Life Update

 Guess who's back, back again. Katie's back, tell some friends. Okay, two years ago I wrote a post about being back, and I've not posted much since, so let's try this again shall we. Let's start with a life update. Towards the end of 2021, I slid into depression. I started feeling overwhelmed by everything in my life, so I started cutting things out. I stopped checking my email (I've got like 3 months worth of emails I need to sort through now, most of them junk), stopped getting on Facebook, basically stopped doing everything that wasn't work or family related (I even stopped entering Goodreads giveaways), and I really cut back on the family related stuff too. There was even one day at work where I could not for the life of me put a smile on my face (I spent most of my day crying in fact), which is not helpful when you work in food service and guests expect you to smile. When I started to come back from the depression, I joined a gym and signed up for personal training, which may be helping the depression because exercise gives you endorphins and endorphins make you happy (and happy people don't kill their husbands, they just don't). I've lost some weight, and I was starting to see some improvement in my physical strength. Then I took vacation for the holidays so we could visit my in-laws in Illinois/Wisconsin/Iowa, and I caught Covid.

After spending 10 days doing literally nothing because I couldn't be on my feet for more than five minutes without being extremely winded and needing to use my inhaler, I've lost some of my gains. And I can't even just jump right back into workouts like I was doing before to get back there. Fortunately for me, my personal trainer had Covid just before I started working with him, so once I told him that I just had it, he's been very understanding of my current limitations. But I'm currently frustrated with the situation. 

The last thing I did to free myself up is quit every single book that was on my Goodreads currently reading shelf (all 20+ of them). They are all back on my to-read shelf, because I might still want to read them, but honestly that number was overwhelming too. I'd like to say that I'm going to never have more than four books on my currently reading shelf from here on out, but I know that's an unrealistic promise for me to make. 

Now I just want to be more active here on the blog, but I still need to figure out what that's going to look like for me. I'd like to participate in weekly memes again, but I don't have a lot of time to visit other blogs, so I'm not sure if that's for me anymore. I will return to reviewing the books I read, with the exception of the books I proofread (those will just be spotlight posts). And I may try to post some more frequent life updates, and reviews of other products as well. 

But if you've stuck with this post this far, please leave me a comment that I can write on a sticky note for my office wall. It needs an update. - Katie