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End of August
Aug. 30th, 2013 02:36 pmThe kids are off for a four-day weekend now. Hopefully the weather is nice--it's been incredibly hot, interspersed by thunderstorms that don't really cool things off, just make things more humid. But it would be nice if we could get out of town and go somewhere. There are a couple state parks nearby, and it would be nice to find some kind of nature area to flee to.
The house is getting more livable, in the living room, anyway. We have a ceiling fan that needs to dry out a bit more before we use it again--thanks to a severely slanting floor upstairs, the bathroom is prone to flooding, and we had an incident with exploding lightbulbs the other night when a kid was showering... But we have some furniture and some curtains and most of the boxes (not all) are out of the main living area. And we even got a mountain-scented air freshener to help the old house smell. It's still too hot to sleep upstairs, so aside from the bathroom, no one ever goes up there. We'll have to deal with it sooner or later...
With all the kids in school, I've been able to start writing again. Well, planning and plotting and getting things set up to hopefully finish some works in progress. The summer was simply not good for writing, not when we were packing away all our belongings, and traveling, and spending time being homeless. So after all that stress, I'm finding I have a lot of unwinding to do. Listening to music, reading, drawing, even just napping. It's helping, even if it sounds backwards. When you've spent the past year mostly just having that feeling of holding on by your fingertips, you need to remind yourself that there are other things to think and feel, too.
The thing that's so unexpected, though, is the culture shock. Or reverse culture shock. I expect things to be different in a new place, but I feel like I've been in another country for a long time. The wilds of Idaho to midwest suburbia. I mean, I've been in a mall before, but it's been a looooooooong time since I've lived in a town with one. And so I walk through it, my brain slowly going, oh yeah, I remember things like this. There are tons more stores than we had before (great if you love shopping, overwhelming if you don't). The food tastes different (where is my good Broulim's bread??), the radio stations I'm looking for are gone (they seem to play all of three songs total here, even though there are many more stations than we had in Idaho). There are things we have to think about again that we didn't in Idaho--safety issues (both traffic and crime), and of course the return of humidity, which my body pretty much can't handle at all. I feel like when I've moved to another country that looks similar on the surface--hey, they even speak English!--but the underlying context and logic are foreign. I'm used to knowing all my neighbors, but after three weeks, I've exchanged words with all of ONE. We did manage to wave to the next door neighbors when we accidentally crossed paths, but otherwise, we don't see anyone to talk to if we wanted to. We might as well be living all alone on the moon. I mean, we don't have to be best friends, but it's just nice to recognize their faces? We still don't know if anyone actually lives on the other side of us, or if people just stop by the house once in a while. I'm sure we'll figure things out, but right now I just sort of feel like I'm unplugged from everything familiar. Maybe when it cools down a bit and people aren't hiding out in their refrigerators. I guess we're guilty of that, too... But it's all a bit disorienting.
The good thing is time for writing, and the fact that we aren't currently packing. So that's good, right?
The house is getting more livable, in the living room, anyway. We have a ceiling fan that needs to dry out a bit more before we use it again--thanks to a severely slanting floor upstairs, the bathroom is prone to flooding, and we had an incident with exploding lightbulbs the other night when a kid was showering... But we have some furniture and some curtains and most of the boxes (not all) are out of the main living area. And we even got a mountain-scented air freshener to help the old house smell. It's still too hot to sleep upstairs, so aside from the bathroom, no one ever goes up there. We'll have to deal with it sooner or later...
With all the kids in school, I've been able to start writing again. Well, planning and plotting and getting things set up to hopefully finish some works in progress. The summer was simply not good for writing, not when we were packing away all our belongings, and traveling, and spending time being homeless. So after all that stress, I'm finding I have a lot of unwinding to do. Listening to music, reading, drawing, even just napping. It's helping, even if it sounds backwards. When you've spent the past year mostly just having that feeling of holding on by your fingertips, you need to remind yourself that there are other things to think and feel, too.
The thing that's so unexpected, though, is the culture shock. Or reverse culture shock. I expect things to be different in a new place, but I feel like I've been in another country for a long time. The wilds of Idaho to midwest suburbia. I mean, I've been in a mall before, but it's been a looooooooong time since I've lived in a town with one. And so I walk through it, my brain slowly going, oh yeah, I remember things like this. There are tons more stores than we had before (great if you love shopping, overwhelming if you don't). The food tastes different (where is my good Broulim's bread??), the radio stations I'm looking for are gone (they seem to play all of three songs total here, even though there are many more stations than we had in Idaho). There are things we have to think about again that we didn't in Idaho--safety issues (both traffic and crime), and of course the return of humidity, which my body pretty much can't handle at all. I feel like when I've moved to another country that looks similar on the surface--hey, they even speak English!--but the underlying context and logic are foreign. I'm used to knowing all my neighbors, but after three weeks, I've exchanged words with all of ONE. We did manage to wave to the next door neighbors when we accidentally crossed paths, but otherwise, we don't see anyone to talk to if we wanted to. We might as well be living all alone on the moon. I mean, we don't have to be best friends, but it's just nice to recognize their faces? We still don't know if anyone actually lives on the other side of us, or if people just stop by the house once in a while. I'm sure we'll figure things out, but right now I just sort of feel like I'm unplugged from everything familiar. Maybe when it cools down a bit and people aren't hiding out in their refrigerators. I guess we're guilty of that, too... But it's all a bit disorienting.
The good thing is time for writing, and the fact that we aren't currently packing. So that's good, right?
