there’s no place like home…or all around the world

There was a special luxury– and I do mean luxury– on the days when I was unemployed and when I managed an early shower and to sit and write this blog quietly at the dining room table for a couple of hours.  Rainy days offered one sort of luxury for writing, sunny and cold another, and sunny and warm and breezy still another.  I miss it.

I will not stop writing this blog.  I will not stop writing this blog.  I will not… Please don’t stop coming by to visit.  I’ll be back in the swing of this, one of these days soon.  Tonight I blocked out about an hour to write, and then realized there were two problems with our email that really had to be solved.  So instead of sitting and writing– I called Verizon.  I am not exactly a booster of Verizon but tonight I cheer the fact that I didn’t have to wait in a queue at all and reached successively– Unippi, in India and John, in Mexico.   They were both excellent.  Capitalism really, really stinks in so many ways– destroys lives and people and things we love.  But I did like reaching Unippi and John in their respective places in the world.  Each helped me a great deal.  I hope their lives are not made miserable by their work.  And that they get paid a decent wage and have health benefits for themselves and their children and clean water to drink and time away from their work too.

This is simply update.  No more, no less.  I have serious things to write about and funny things as my daughter approaches her 11th birthday.  I have things I’d like to write about my work and what I am learning not only about the world, but about myself, in this job.  And I have a need for sleep and so I say goodnight.

Bermuda Blog triangle

Here’s another post that begins like this, “Oh my goodness, OMG, oy, oy,oy.  I miss blogging.  I miss sitting at this very dining room table and in my light– (we don’t really get direct sun in this room), bright, quiet dining room and writing.  I miss it, I miss it, I miss it.”  I miss dropping what I’m doing at 3:10 and racing to school to pick up my daughter.  I miss a lot about my old life, but the thing is I am really loving my new job.  From my very, very brief experience, a legislative job is, just like in West Wing, full of long days and myriad dramas.

As for the work itself; It’s interesting.  Engaging.  Sometimes funny.  Fun. Fast-paced and demanding.  There is such a range of different and  serious and intellectually challenging and just interesting things to do and to learn and to master each day.  I often have to force myself to get up and walk out the door to get out for lunch– just to move around.  I could sit at my desk and work on the next thing and the next all day.  I’m having the most serious back trouble I’ve had in years and it’s not dissipating– and I miss my family.  But I am having fun which is not exactly what I expected to hear myself saying at this point.  I don’t know what I expected, but I am surprised in many ways.

All that said, I miss three things terribly– more time with my daughter and partner; being out and about in the world in a certain way during the daytime– and the breezy, or drudge-like or thorough, intent or inspired and contemplative work of writing.  I’ve been writing a lot in my work, but not here.

To solve one logistical problem I am determined to head out soon (as in soon in the days-not-months sense) and I will buy an iPad– because I have a lunch hour and I occasionally have that hour actually free for the start of an interesting idea to be written.  But one definitely should not blog at a government computer.   (Actually, that was a detail of the movie Julie and Julia that nagged at me and distracted me like a sore tooth– the fact that she wrote much of that blog from a government office– I worried the whole time that one of the sub-plots of the movie was going to be her getting fired for blogging at work…).  So for sure the purchase of an iPad will enrich someone other than me and perhaps that will be the extent of it, or perhaps I’ll get to write more often.  Get in a groove.

I have much more to say– about all kinds of things going on, but I am dead tired.  So, so tired.   Daylight savings time and a busy weekend did me in.  So I will just have to promise to write again soon.  Sooner than the last post which was Leap Year Day.