May 17, 2007
|
Family update
|
4966 hit(s)
We're at the point in the new house where things are settling into a configuration that it will take energy to change. The daily stuff -- dishes, linens, like that -- has found a home. We've mostly sorted out the "office" space, which is dominated by my all my junk, of course. Books are on shelves (yay, Sarah!), if not necessarily in an uberorganized way (that's actually the secret for getting them onto the shelves, like, this year). Ditto CDs. Sarah's been steadily hanging pictures on the wall, which has been nice. One, it makes the house look more lived in. And two, it's been interesting to look again at things like family pictures through someone else's eyes -- I've had the same pictures for a long time, to the point where I don't really look at them much, but unpacking them after the move, hanging them, and going through some of the family history has made them lively again.
Less critical stuff is just where it is. For example, after some work to make it possible to at least walk through the garage, the effort to organize it has stalled. It would be easy to wake up a year from now and realize that the chaotic state of the garage is not, in fact, how we want it, just what we've gotten used to. The major obstacle has been all along how to get rid of stuff, especially stuff that we can't or don't want to just give to the Goodwill. (I have had some success with craigslisting a few things ... as long as the price is right, stuff will move. Free is a good price.)
Sabrina is back from school already; those schools on semester seem to get out way early. Her immediate task has been to seek summer employment. She called me yesterday and told me she'd gotten a very part-time (weekend) job at a place that sells upscale paper products -- giftwrap, cards, etc. This will be, I believe, her first hourly job. The plan is to find a second, also part-time job. In the meantime, she's biding her time till her friends finish school and start coming home themselves. She's got no car of her own, which seems inconvenient to me, but she says that's ok. She's thinking about some musical activities, but some of those, such as attending a musical day camp, would interfere with employment. TBD, I guess.
Zack will be done in a few weeks, and in a kind of milestone development, he'll be staying up in Bellingham. He and a friend are getting an apartment, and if things go as planned, he'll be moving in at (I believe) the beginning of July. Since the lease starts then and they'll be paying rent, he figures he'll just stay up there and find the same kind of job in Bellingham that he'd otherwise have here in Seattle. Because his major (physics) has so many dang requirements, he's given idle thought to trying to fulfill one or two requirements with summer classes, but that remains at the might-could-do stage.
On another interesting front, the next project for us is to plan a wedding. We're working backward from the most important part, namely the honeymoon ("eat dessert first"), and have booked a package for Hawaii. It seems that Sarah and I are the last adults left on the West Coast who have never visited the Aloha state. There's certainly no shortage of choices, and we've polled friends and scrutinized guidebooks. In the end we settled on Maui, with a notion that maybe-maybe we could shuttle ourselves to another island for a diversion. We'll see when we get there.[1]
The actual wedding part is currently under debate. Planning even the simplest wedding can seem burdensome, and more than once we've considered -- and indeed, been advised several times to -- run off and do the deed, then celebrate at a convenient time. It is hard, as Sarah notes, to stay focused only on what you want, and not be swayed by what you perceive others to want or expect. In one exercise, we made up a list of everyone we might consider inviting (a kind of biggest-case scenario), and got to about 100 people. Even accounting for whatever percentage it is of invitees who don't come (I'm sure wedding planners have a statistic), that's looking to be too many for anything remotely formal. My friend Steve suggested screw it, have a bash with a big pot of chili and BYOB. Very tempting, actually.
So that's the update. Even with Sabrina home, I'm still kind of waiting for summer to start, psychologically speaking. It would help if we got some consistently summer weather around here. Maybe after Memorial Day. Then for sure I'll get cracking on organizing that garage.
|
|
