Mid-January Blahs

It's cold down here.  It's been below freezing for the past few nights.  That may not seem very cold to people in northern climes, but consider that I live in a 100+ year old house that was built to make Louisiana summers bearable.  Weather-tight, it isn't.  My heater has run constantly for the last three days to keep my house at what it claims is 70 degrees Fahrenheit, but is actually more like 70 degrees at thermostat level and 60 degrees at lounging level.  And I swear that if I wet my feet, they might stick to the floor.

For me, cold = sloth.  All I want to do is stay curled up in bed under my electric blanket.  I haven't done Flylady routines this week, or really anything beyond the minimum necessary to sustain animal and human survival.

Also, somehow, we're 60% through the food budget and only 40% through the month.  And I just discovered that we need to pay the generator people $800 for the next two years service.  It's going to be another month of dipping into the EF, which is much smaller than it used to be since paying off my big family debt.

I am still working on clearing out the closets.  I'm obviously stuck on this one step, and I can't decide whether to skip it and move along or keep plugging away at it.  The more I dig into it, the more obvious it becomes to me that it really needs to be done, but the bigger the task looms.  I knew I had started late on Out With the Old, so I would finish after the new year, but at this rate, I'll be done with the list in 2012.

I am incredibly blessed.  Unlike the majority of people on this earth, I have food security, shelter, and a reasonable expectation of personal safety.  I'm not in Haiti, living in a tent, and waiting for the rapists to come with the darkness.  I'm not in China, where the police detain you for visiting the parent of a democracy activist, then threaten to beat you to death. 

But what am I doing with all these blessings?  Worrying about a messy kitchen and excess money?  Surely I can do better than this.  How do you reconcile the incredible blessings in your life with the incredible suffering that exists in the world?