This and that

    I’ve been packing Jerry for trips since 1985. It started innocently enough the day he was set to PCS (Permanent change of station) he came to my barracks room to wait for a ride to the airport at Capodichino. He arrived with two seabags loosely packed, I repacked them into one, folding the second seabag into the first. That’s all it took. That he could not easily carry that one seabag is for another discussion.

    I like packing, it is the nearest I come to figuring out something like geometry. The culmination may have been when I packed my red Yugo, Yolanda, for a trip from Norfolk to San Diego after I finally got orders to be with Jerry nine months after we got married. Or it was when we moved from a one-bedroom apartment to a two bedroom a few miles away in El Cajon California before Issac was born. I packed everything into boxes, took any furniture apart and then moved smaller things during the week while Jerry’s ship was out. The weekend they pulled in he had three friends and two pickups ready to move the rest. They figured half a day to go back and forth: it took one trip. The boxes were really, really heavy; that’s my M.O.

    If I hadn’t been seven months pregnant I probably would have moved them myself.

    I started this post a couple of weeks ago and was writing about our anniversary but that has come and gone. What else have I been doing? Well, school is back in session and I’m finally getting to my math class, or a math class. I need to take Math 95, beginning Algebra, before I can go on to Math 111 Liberal Arts Mathematics. I’ve avoided Math for as long as I can. So far so good as long as I work problems until my head hurts.

    We’re also in week four of the renovations in the house. The kitchen is looking great, next week I’d expect it to be completed. In the interim, we’ve set up a kitchen in Jerry’s office, the Goat Locker. I’m making Nescafé each morning and we make do with what we can. When he’s on the road it’s very easy. And we’ve gone out to breakfast a couple times. This morning, we went to a cut little neighborhood place in Saint Louis, followed by a fun half-hour at the MauHaus Cat Café playing with cats, and then off to an art show. Fed, catified and happy from looking at art and talking to the artists we came home and napped. Tomorrow a subcontractor is coming to patch and smooth the kitchen walls, and the rest of the crew returns Tuesday.

    Oh, and I’ve started an MFA in Creative Writing, and turned in my first package last night; sort of an antidote to algebra.

    Here are a few random pictures from Jerry’s birthday trip to Maine, we stayed in a fantastic apartment above an ice cream shop and fell in like with Maine. No bear or moose were seen.