Life is good

Winter in Klamath Falls is awful. Snowy mountain passes make leaving town a treacherous prospect and the sense of isolation can be stifling (I just want a decent place to shop. But it's not worth a 2 hour + drive through snow to get to Medford).

This year's not so bad. There's no snow yet, which makes it possible to leave town (although the lack of more than one consecutive day off puts a damper on things). But I remembered something. This town is ugly in the winter. It's brown and drab and while the sun is usually out — a nice change from the Willamette Valley — everything at eye level is just boring. A few feet of sparkly white snow helps things. So I'm missing the snow. And it's only a little bit because of the $400 snow tires I bought that won't be paid off until after the legal date to remove them.

The tediousness of winter aside, things are good here. I don't make much money, but I still love my job and am in the profession I want to be in. The job itself is stable. I'm lucky.

Things are going well with my new relationship with "Kansas," (the nickname a friend came up with for my boyfriend). Having technically been single my entire life, referring to someone as "my boyfriend" still feels foreign, but it's definitely a great thing. The relationship is at a place that's very comfortable for me now. Trying to work spending time together around our very different work schedudules is difficult, but I think sometimes that makes the time we do have better. Tonight is one of the nights when I wish we could be together. We won't have any time away from work until this weekend (fortunately, a long one for me), and I can't wait.

The other day, Kansas and I were in the store and somehow the topic of astrological signs came up. When I explained my very amateur analysis of the differences between Libras (me) and Virgos (him), he said, "How do we get along?" I can't think of any ways we don't. We still have much to learn about each other, but there's nothing yet that I'd describe as a negative. There are things we disagree on, and things each of us finds weird about the other, but it's all good for now. The things I'm still learning make me more interested. Lately, the little things are making me the happiest. It's a feeling I'm still not quite used to, but one that makes my day better. I'm in danger of becoming one of the happy people I used to hate, and I'm a little flummoxed by the fact that I'm this happy in Klamath Falls, the place I spent my life trying to escape.