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Tuesday, June 10, 2003
Do you know, I hadn't actually remembered making the late autumn postings. In fact, I also didn't remember last July's either. I've been racked with guilt about this log, thinking that I hadn't actually updated anything since last Memorial Day! I'm not phenomenally far off the mark, but it's not as abysmal as I'd thought.
For example, we're in our "new" apartment, which is not a mystery to the huge crowds who have actually read this (no one, since we've told nobody about this). We moved in over last Thanksgiving weekend. It was without a doubt the absolute very best move of my entire life. We had from Tuesday before Thanksgiving to begin moving stuff in. That is, they decided to re-finish the floors, and managed to do a rush job, and then just gave us the rest of the month to make our transition down two floors. In the evenings, Javier and I would tag-team packing boxes, moving them downstairs, then unpacking them if at all possible (closets, books after our neighbor helped us manhandle our bookshelves down), kitchen supplies) in order to minimize the "junk in boxes" problem of moving. Then on Thanksgiving Day, Javier, Galen and I just spent the lion's share of the day trucking things down two floors. I am not sure that Galen even changed out of jis jammies all day! Galen, for his part, was tremendously proud of being allowed to traverse the distances "all by himself," and never forgot to take at least one toy with him when going downstairs. No matter that it was often one marble, or a plastic dinosaur -- every little bit got us closer to the finish line. We even managed to cook a turkey with stuffing and sides that evening! The next day we had the "help" come to get the heavy stuff down, and clean up afterwards. Everything was finished in three hours! Mich came and was invaluable as always...
The effect of having more space was immediate, and has been so far permanent. We're SO MUCH HAPPIER and SO MUCH MORE RELAXED living in our new home. We've actually discussed whether it is as simple as the fact that we can actually get some distance from each other when necessary, or if there was an evil "stress curse" that was placed on our old apartment, and to which we almost succumbed. I think our true assessment is a combination of the two. One of the nicest things about our new place is the fact that Galen can actually run through the apartment. Not only is there the room for him to actually work up a respectable velocity, but we aren't beset with the additional headache of "the lady downstairs sleeping" who (quite typically for NY apartment dwellers) made our morning/evening lives an anxious nightmare in the old apartment. I would nervously hiss at Galen to tiptoe, and playing in his room in the mornings was forbidden because the "lady downstairs sleeping" needed to rest rather more than other mortals. Probably because it was just so exhausting for her to bang on the radiator pipes with her iron bar. No matter how many times we passed her door while carting our lives downstairs during the move, Galen would never fail to mention that the lady downstairs sleeping just moved upstairs.
So, the other strange, but somehow predictable, effect of getting more space was our inevitable propensity to fill it up. Approximately three weeks after moving in, we discovered that I was approximately two weeks pregnant. I'm now a full, and burgeoning SIX MONTHS, and expecting a little brother for Galen on or around September 4-7th. Life is so funny sometimes.
As for everything in-between, I'm afraid that a great deal of it is destined to be lost forever, but I shall try to fill in the chinks as best as possible. For one thing, Javier had a lovely vacation to Turin and Florence this year. Sorry, I mean, he had a one-day teaching assignment in Turin, and a lovely vacation in Florence. This is the Italy trip that I was to accompany him on. :-( Nuff said -- he'll post photos, I hope, along with some of the phenomenal watercolors he made while there.
I myself haven't done a great deal in the intervening time except work and try like anything to stay awake long enough to get Galen to bed. My evening seems literally to end at about 9PM. I have just enough energy to get the boy to bed, then creep to my own. Poor Javier is left to his own devices, but he utilizes the time remarkably well in his new "studio / office" working on his painting etc.
posted by Dorothy 2:18 PM
