Part 11 - A Better Weekend

Alrighty. Our fourth Monday. Time to shower and get to work. Something Addie only has to do once more, on a Monday, before she starts her professional leave. We should also be moving at the end of this week (just in time, as our new lease is due to start just three days before we are due out of our temporary accommodation).

The biggest challenges confronting us, right now, are the logistics of the move, then the logistics of getting Addie safely to the hospital. Then the logistics of getting baby back home. I suppose there’s a mess of details to prepare our new apartment for the homecoming, and… to date, my brain just can’t quite seem to engage with that problem. Instead of anxious spins, my head feels okay just taking from the top of the stack and working that problem for a while. Then moving to the next.

Addie is getting ready to head to the office. Something she hasn’t done this consistently since COVID struck our home state in March of 2021. My morning consists of a dog walk, a vet visit, grocery shopping, negotiating any terms possible in our housing contract, figuring last minute details on how (and how much, exactly) we are going to pay, trying to get a little exercise, then settling into my part-time gig. But before you and I both drown in the monotony of every day life, let’s explore the weekend a bit. It’ll be more fun for everyone.

This one was better than the last, which got teary and lonely. We committed to not just sitting around the apartment this time around and succeeded. Saturday, I took a long run using a guide book that was lent to us from one of Addie’s colleagues. If you’ve ever watched Emily in Paris, this woman looks exactly like the French magazine editor. ¹ She carries herself with the same confidence, is precisely as polished, sometimes wears her hair in the same split style just passed shoulder length, and is about the same age. We’ll certainly be buying our own version of this guide and trying to knock out as many of the 200 hikes as we can over the next couple of years. To get home, I had three 8-minute rides on heavy rail, light rail, and a bus, respectively.

Sunday, we were invited by a different pair of adventuresome colleagues to bus to a small town festival and then on to a wine and boat tour. The bus ride was 40 minutes through small townships and vineyards. We sat. We enjoyed the trilingual singer and a couple glasses of the local vintage. We walked the peaceful river path, looking across a national border into a foreign land. Then we journeyed home, this time via bus, light rail, bus.

It started with severe physical discomfort, a call to a triage nurse, and a stressful hunt for a pharmacy, and ended with a sleepy listen to the first wave of NFL games. A good arc, and probably our best weekend here (so far).