Ambivalently Blissful

Right this very moment, I am sitting in the apartment, surrounded by what can only be termed “blissful silence.”  My mother and sister are here for the weekend, having brought the kids home from a weeklong visit at her house – have I emoted, yet, on just how wonderful it was to be able to get the worst of the move done without having the kids underfoot?  For everyone involved, it was the right decision, no question – and we’re still largely unpacked, so it was a lot of people crammed into a crowded space.

My mother, as always, was desperate to escape to the beach for a few hours, especially since the beaches near the apartment are much nicer – and much closer – than the beaches near the house in New Hampshire.  (Both are ridiculously closer and nicer than anything she has available to her, in upstate New York.)  Normally, this would be a no-brainer: I would pack up the kids and myself and we would all head eastward, and happily so.

But this time, I have work to do; somehow, my transcription work has not been doing itself, and I’ve had a very hard ime finding uninterrupted time to attack it.  Doesn’t help that my computer is slowly dying, and the simple act of booting up takes 20 minutes or more; once I’m up and running, I can get the typing done, no problem, but sometimes getting to up-and-running inches me just a little closer to an aneurysm.

So, today, I opted to stay home and work instead of wandering barefoot in the sand, watching the kids run around, looking for baby seals… yeah, responsibility bites.  But it’s a job I like, and it’s important to me not to flake out on my boss any more than is strictly necessary (I had to return a file, half-done, earlier in the week because I overestimated how much typing I could do in the days immediately prior to a move – and I even tried typing in the car on the way to my mother’s, but couldn’t get it done).  So, fine, I’ll make it up to myself sometime soon… worst case, it can wait a few weeks, and then I’ll bask in the beach when Gretchen and I go back to Martha’s Vineyard for a weekend.  I won’t even bring my laptop, then.

And even cooler?  Willem took the kids.  He is a man who tolerates the beach, but certainly doesn’t have the visceral intensity of beach-hunger that I have; if all of the beaches were suddenly replaced with concrete sidewalks, he’d shrug and continue on with his life.  But he volunteered to go, even at the risk of being stranded there for several hours while my mother goes on one of her several-mile meanderings, just because.  He’s a keeper, I think.

So, enough with the babbling – I’m off to type.  Just like a real grown-up.