By and large, it was a quiet weekend. I didn’t feel great on Saturday, so I napped in the afternoon, messing up my plans for a productive day. But I felt much better when I got back up in the evening, and Rudi and I took a trip down to the garden to harvest some things that we ended up not eating, followed by a trip to Trader Joe’s to pick up some more things that we ended up not eating. We did eat some things already living in our fridge, though, thereby making room for our new acquisitions. We watched Rudi’s Red Sox beat the Yankees, and then I watched the Mets beat the Padres. I knit and then listened to my audiobook.

This morning I sallied forth to the farmers market. I bought a lot of strawberries and the first zucchini and green beans of the season, as well as a variety of other odds and ends.

I spent the later part of the afternoon at the pool for my first real swim since August 2019. (I’ve been to beaches since then, but either temperatures or rip tides made me decline to do more than dunk myself and then run back to my towel.) It was glorious. I swear the pool was Bahamian blue (or at least what it looks like on tv) and the trees practically glowed green, but that may just have been my joy at some sense of summer normalcy.

I pulled some spring greens out (all the arugula and some of the spinach) and yanked more violet leaves and bunching onions in an effort to find places for all my new plants. A few remain to be planted, which will force me to leave work at a reasonable enough time to spend an hour at the garden early this week. And then Rudi and I watched the Kennedy Center Honors before he retired and I raced the clock to finish my audiobook. (Downloading to your phone is very convenient, until you’re at the last day with more chapters remaining than you’d like before it stops being playable.)

The week ahead holds our baseball seat lottery for the rest of the season, hopefully my volleyball championship, and possibly a belated birthday outing for Rudi.

I hope you have a great start to the week!

I got a head’s up tonight that more changes are coming at work. This will mark the fifth major shift in as many months that touches either my department or the organization, and I admit that I’m struggling to keep my head above water. Each time I think I’ve processed and adapted to a change, a new one comes along that threatens my newly adjusted footing, and this latest wave is the biggest one yet.

In the long run, I will be fine. My department will be fine. The organization will be fine.

But in the short term, I’m scrambling and feeling unsettled and just wishing for some solid ground beneath my feet.

My parents live a bit off the beaten track, not so far that someone wouldn’t hear you if you called for help, but not so close they’d immediately be able to tell where you were.

It’s relatively quiet here, especially at night, but mostly quiet as defined in country terms. Overnight, you won’t hear traffic, although on rare nights you get a troop transfer flying overhead. I can hear peepers and crickets and other outdoorsy creatures marking time. When Rudi and I came upstairs to bed, we could listened to a very chatty owl. Sometimes you hear a second one, but if there was one tonight, I think they were both in the woods out back. Last night when I woke up in the middle of the night I heard a fox or a fisher cat screaming. It was very disconcerting, even if I did know it wasn’t a human making those noises. (See above.)

At home, I get cars passing by at all hours, although overnight, there are fewer of them. The birds start calling around 2 a.m. and stay chatty until dawn. You don’t hear the cicadas in my neighborhood, but you do in some others. Rats periodically scrabble past.

These aren’t the sounds I grew up with mostly (my suburban neighborhood was far closer to what I get here), but they’re what I’ve become used to.

I got something like 12 hours of sleep last night, and I didn’t need to take a nap during the day. Amazing!

I hugged my mom for like five minutes straight.

I’ve got no focused thoughts, so you’re just getting random tonight:

1. I just (just) finished reading a novel about the challenges of making friends as an adult, Serena Singh Flips the Script, and I think I might send a copy to a friend (whom I made as an adult) with whom I’ve fallen about of touch. (It’s my fault; she sent me an awesome snarky Christmas mug and it is my turn to reach out.)

2. I’m going to my first baseball game in a year and a half tomorrow. I’m excited. And also nervous. My current personal mask guidance is that I wear one in indoor public places (whether required or not) and on my wrist (to signal I’m a good citizen and happy to put one on if you are wearing one) outdoors. This feels like a reasonable course of action given our current knowledge base.

3. Friday, we’re heading up to visit my parents. I’m over the moon to see them, but I’m starting to feel anxious about leaving Corey. He will have a cat sitter stop by each day, but I know he’s used to being with us all the time and will be lonely. (He’s currently sprawled across my lap, with his nose tucked into my elbow.)

4. Karen and I are also planning to see each other, but we discovered our favorite lunch spot did not survive the pandemic. I am sad for the owners and employees, who were always very nice, even when we snuck in just before closing time and for the residents of the town, who’ve lost a solid mom and pop restaurant.

5. A girl (fine, middle-aged woman just like me) Rudi and I went to school with makes glass-centric jewelry, and I’ve been lucky enough over the years to own a couple of her necklaces. Today she was having a sale on her rings, and … I splurged. There is absolutely no reason why I needed a gigantic signature piece ring, except that it spoke to me. I had even nicknamed it.

6. My apartment is still a mess. I wonder how (if?) it will get clean(er) between now and when we leave.

7. One of my volleyball teammates is moving away after this week’s game. Another after next week’s. We had been a dozen in the beforetimes, and now we’ll be down to eight. My heart is breaking a little bit.

8. I told colleagues I’d sent two emails out last week — and while I certainly intended for both things to go out, the fact that they remained undone was eating at me. (One was just a head’s up email, but to some important people, and the other was to a designer who had another project I’d asked him to finish first, but still. That’s not the point.) I got one email out this morning and the other out tonight, and I feel much less guilty.

9. I buy flowers at Trader Joe’s because they aren’t horribly expensive and seeing them atop my fridge is good for my mental health. Sometimes they don’t do well (nearly all the spray roses I bought last week quickly dried up, but they were pretty in their crinkly, crackly form, too), but the purple puff mums I currently have make me very happy.

10. I saw this on Twitter earlier this week, and it spoke to me so much that I promptly burst into tears. I share it with you in case you also need to hear that you accomplished something really important over the past year:

11. Corey and I want to go snuggle up with Rudi, so it’s time to sing our adieux.

Good night!