I made it to Salt Lake just after midnight local time.

The new airport terminal is not made for someone low in sleep or mental reserves. I had to walk at least a mile from gate to get to the car. (Rudi made it the ten minutes from the air b-n-b to the airport before I got out of the building.) I’m sure it’s lovely in the daylight, while you’re waiting for a flight, getting to see the sun set over the Wasatch front. I look forward to experiencing it that way.

But the empanada I had from a new-to-us Venezuelan restaurant for a late supper was excellent — and weighed about a pound. (There’s a second one in the fridge.) I can see why there was a line.

We’re going to start the day with a trip to a farmers market and then either head over to the house to assess or to see Rudi’s mom.

Have a good Saturday!

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. A coworker and I surprised a young woman who’s reported to us both by making donations to support her half marathon charitable cause.

2. Getting to spend the night of my dad’s birthday with him and my mom. This was the first in-person family birthday celebration since COVID began.

3. I ran into a former colleague as I was running an errand. Since leaving the company, she’s moved to my neighborhood.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

Honestly, my decision-making abilities have been down the toilet for a while. Sometimes I know I’m making a questionable decision, but the thought of having to prolong it outweighs the smarter voice. And sometimes I’m so caught in the mental vortex of trying to do too much with too few reserves that I’m literally going in circles from one task to another, without ever actually getting any of it done. I understand that sitting down and tackling one thing at a time is the smarter decision, but I don’t have the ability anymore to distinguish which thing needs focus until we’re in a danger zone.

I keep putting one foot in front of another, which counts for something, but honestly it counts for less and less every day. Can I call out exhausted for the rest of the year?

I need to refill my emotional and mental coffers, but the trip to Salt Lake doesn’t really seem likely to offer that. And I’m starting to wonder if this is just going to be life from now on, with nothing ever being great again. (To be fair, nothing is horrific either. Everyone is healthy and safe and I realize how lucky I am that I’m starting from that baseline.). I know everyone is struggling and my situation is neither unique nor interesting, but without getting some prolonged space and energy to recharge, I just don’t see how to keep the daily grind from grinding me up, too.

Rudi heads to Salt Lake tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll join him Friday night. His mom suddenly moved into assisted living earlier this year, and he’s been working on getting her house emptied out so it can be sold. We’re hoping the next few weeks are the final push in this process, and I’ll go put in my work detail for a week. But before I do, I have a few things I need to wrap up here:

• Get through three more days of work (and the attendant to-do list there)
• Put the herbs Mum sent me home with into the ground and harvest anything ripe
• Get a flu shot
• Win a volleyball championship
• Get stuff back to the library
• Clean the apartment (didn’t happen before CT; looking less and less likely to happen before SLC)
• Make sure we have enough supplies for our cat sitter
• Do laundry
• Pack
• Get myself to the airport with enough time to catch my plane (should be super obvious, but it’s not)

I guess I’ve got my marching orders for the next few days…

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday at That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share our favorite bookish settings:

1. The beach (It’s not enough on it’s own to make me bring a book home, but it’s always enough to make me read the blurb.)
2. Christmastime (Ditto. And, actually, it’s usually enough to make me take the book out from the library.)
3. London (In pretty much any era.)
4. D.C. (Unless they do a terrible job of it. I stopped reading a book once because of the way they described the fountain in Dupont Circle.)
5. Victorian England (The setting of many of my favorite cozy detective series.)
6. New England (Again, unless they do a terrible job of it. I gave up on a book recently because she used a real Connecticut town in the entirely wrong part of the state.)
7. Autumn (Everyone’s just happier in fall.)
8. The 1920s (It always seems such a glamorous time…)
9. Modern Paris (I’m less interested in it as historic setting, but I’d be delighted to follow cat burglars up the Eiffel Tower or into the Louvre.)
10. The 1980s (Many of my school years were in this decade, which means I have a nostalgic fondness novels (particularly y.a./kidlit) sprinkled with banana clips and Trapper Keepers.)

How about you? What places or times immediately make you give a book a second look?

Ha!

I’m not sure where people get the idea that the country is so much quieter than the city.

There are two owls — one down my folks’ driveway and one somewhere further down the hill — chatting about potential meal options.

Something or maybe some things (Deer? A bear? Smaller nighttime critters trying to stay out of someone’s supper plans? The dog in the house up above sometimes hears it too. ) keep traveling through the brush uphill, stepping on downed branches and sending loose debris tumbling down the bank.

And that doesn’t take into account the crickets and peepers.

So, nope, not quiet here at all…