What I've Been Up To This Week

*Battling a very bad case of dry, inflamed skin.  After waking up during the night and sobbing hysterically for a while because my skin was so itchy and painful in places (crazy, right?), I walked to the doctor's office yesterday morning and got a lovely steroid cream that is already doing wonderful things for my skin.  It was actually a very nice walk to the doctor's office -- only 1 mile away; it was snowing but neither very cold (about 15 degrees F) nor very windy; about half of the walk was mostly shoveled clear and the other half was in powdery snow about halfway to my knee.  I also had a migraine at the time (caused by getting under 4 hours of sleep for several nights in a row because of the stupid itching) so being in the cold was really great for that.  But the walk back was kind of tough going -- I had to walk into stronger wind and heavier falling snow for about the first half of the way, freezing my face; the snow had gotten deeper but also wetter and harder to get through; I had a sort of heavy bag I had to carry over my shoulder (as Robert put it, like Santa Claus) because the snow was too deep the last half of my walk to carry any other way without it getting caught up in the drifts.  But my tall Sorel snow boots were totally awesome.  My feet were dry and warm the entire time.

*Reading books.  I am working my way through the Horatio Hornblower series right now, and I read two of them this week.  I followed that with the second book in the amazing Temeraire fantasy series by Naomi Novak.  How do you take a story set in the British naval side of the Napoleanic Wars (you know, like the Hornblower series and the Patrick O'Brien novels I love) and make it even better?  Add dragons!

*Applying to jobs.  I applied to two state jobs (research/evaluation) today -- I was able to use the same resume for both, so that was pretty easy-peasy.