Negative

What's that you ask? A number, the way I feel about onions, walkie-talkie for "no"? Well, my friends, negative would be the temperature I've been living in for the past few days. A constant state of negative. How am I surviving? Lots of clothing, blankets, hot cocoa, and staying indoors. No matter what. I told Travis that I'm not leaving unless someone is bleeding. He thinks I'm kidding! Nope, not kidding. Emergency only.

The negatives have been hanging around since about New Year's Eve. So instead of going out and getting our crunk on, we decided to spend the holiday quietly with Trav's family. His grandparents invited us over for dinner, and his parents came to party as well. It was a pretty tame evening (which isn't always a bad thing), but we felt like the newscasters were having more of a party than we were! There were a few weathermen that seemed to have opened the bubbly before they gave us the nasty news of the negatives.

So we watched the east coast ring in the new year, and prepared for our own time zone's big tada. Well, we're still waiting. It was like New Year's didn't even exist for us! None of the news stations or any other channel had anything special for our midnight. So, at 11:59, we all stood, raised our glasses, and at 12:00 we said "Happy New Year!" and drank our champagne. Like I said, quiet night.

Since I haven't been going anywhere this week due to the extreme dip in temperatures (they say not to spend longer than 15 minutes outside to avoid frostbite), this week has been pretty quiet for me. The deal I was working on for my client in Colorado fell through, so we spent some time looking for other options. We ended up finding 2 that appealed to him, so yesterday I had to drive even deeper into nowhere to take a look. Both are vacant, and neither had been plowed or shoveled in awhile. Travis was kind enough to accompany me on the trip, so he managed to not get stuck in the deep snow at the first house. It was a close one though, let me tell ya! The second house was in a neighborhood (read: plowed streets) but the driveway and walks still hadn't been cleared. So I had to forage through the snow to get into the house. All my work paid off though, because we wrote up another offer this morning. Hooray! Fingers crossed that this one goes through ok!

Before you ask me, I have to admit: I do ask myself all the time "what the heck am I doing here?!?" Well, when the rest of the world is sweating themselves to death during the summer, we'll have much nicer temps! That, and we plan on going to Florida in April, so that's what is keeping me going!

In pet news: Maya is adjusting quite nicely. She and the cats are still not so sure about each other, but everyone is coping. Honestly, it's like she's always been our dog. She listens, she is used to our schedule, and I'm pretty sure that she loves us!

So that's it from the Northlands, we hope your January is treating you much warmer than our own!