The year, so far

I love that I have a record here of my hare-brained ideas, so I can go back and see what worked out and what didn’t. The future ain’t what it used to be, as some wise guy once said, and this year’s future has turned out to be something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike* what I pictured way back in January. I thought it was time to revisit our theme for the year, endurance and duration because, damn, what an enduro it has turned out to be.

Back in January, I was mostly thinking of the physical side of endurance, largely because we’re turning 60 this year. Finishing a decade has a way of honing your ideas about what’s important. Being physically able to keep on keeping on, to the extent that it is in our control, is priority number one. That part of it we’ve hit out of the ballpark, to oh-so-cleverly use a sports analogy. We’ve knuckled down and have gotten much stronger.

The duration part was meant to be about how long we were going to park it in any one location, travel-wise. To stretch our patience, to generally go slower and live more deliberately. That we’ve also done exceedingly well on, but not at all in the way we intended. This year turned into the waiting game when the apartment we were moving to got postponed again and again, testing our patience. The settling in has also gone on and on, far surpassing my forecasts. We’ve shopped till we’ve dropped and have spent weeks covered in plaster dust and paint. We bought a washing machine and had to return it when it didn’t fit through the damn door by half a centimeter. We’ve spent eons eyeing up drapes. We’ve had date nights at Ikea’s restaurant for crying out loud, 3 in fact. This is, however, what we signed up for when we signed a lease on an unfurnished apartment, but it’s a slap upside the head reminder of how divorced we’ve become from nesting and from the idea of home.

Our glamorous lives, and the new apartment (such as it is at this point), in photos:

Yeah, the whole place is a dump and a disaster, but look at that squat!

The place is so big, we have actual hallways.

Lunch on the bathroom floor because it was the only place both sunny and clean.

The beauty of the Ikea dinner is you don’t have to assemble it yourself.

In between projects and disasters, we hosted a brunch to celebrate a friend’s birthday, another friend’s successful visa application, and oh yes, our new digs. A glimpse of what the future holds?

So what now? I’m daring to look forward to our base being settled to the point where we can leave it, but only after allowing ourselves time to sigh and be here to enjoy it. Will that be November, December? And then it will be January again, and time for new predictions and a new theme of the year.

Cheers,

Maer

*To paraphrase the late, great, Douglas Adams.