Odds and ends - the thirty-minute post

So in the spring I tried the fifteen-minute post occasionally but I think today that's too restrictive - for one thing I still have the lopped-off finger (I'm exaggerating and dramatizing, but it really is painful to type with it) slowing me down. I alternate between using it anyway (half the time the letter doesn't express itself and I have to redo anyway) and trying to type those keys (they are r, t, f, g, v, and b, for the record) with other fingers, such as the middle finger of my left hand. Tricky, tricky, tricky.

So here they are, the odds and ends of my sometimes-way-too-busy, sometimes-dangerously-idle mind:

- this morning I was making a list of things to do before taking myself off to the library to work there for the day on some web sites, and I made this list:

1. newspaper

2. smoothie

3. make lunch

4. pay German bills

and suddenly I was overcome by the thought that I should make a list item that said "drink poison". Why????? I have no desire whatsoever to actually drink any poison, it just seemed like the very right thing to put next on the list.

And indeed, I did put it on the list. The list now reads

1. newspaper

2. smoothie

3. make lunch

4. pay German bills

5. drink poison

6. write [hubby] re credit card

7. pack up

8. go

and numbers 1-4 and 6 are checked off, no. 5 is crossed out, I have a little "1100" in a circle at the top right and "1200" a little lower down, both of those indicating numbers of steps I wish to get to, and they are both checked off as well. I was going to blog from the library too but decided to do it at home with the timer.

But still - I was thinking - what was that list item about? Is it like standing at the viewing windows of the Empire State Building and concentrating really hard on not jumping, or thinking: thank God I am not holding a baby or small child because I would surely lose my concentration briefly and toss it out? Seems related but not identical.

- yesterday morning was super foggy, I was trying to get tons of steps on the pedometer before I ever even left the house for ladies' morning walk, and so I went downstairs to be Felix's walking snooze alarm multiple times, and went outside early for the Herald Times knowing I'd have to go out again a little later for the New York Times (and while inside the house I walked in place constantly in the kitchen while making Felix's breakfast and lunch and my own oatmeal - ended up with 3500 steps before I went off to ladies' walk). Anyway, both outings to the end of the walkway for the newspapers ended up funny/magical. Outing #1 for the H-T netted me the H-T itself in its usual bright orange plastic bag, but there was something shiny on the sidewalk a little further out. So I went over - thought it was some kind of plastic shining there. And no- it was an enormous shiny, glittering star. Turned out to be a little group of leaves connected by twigs/stems/whatever you might call the little things that hold little groups of leaves together, and they were indeed arranged in a perfect star pattern, covered in dew, and reflecting the street lights that were cutting through the fog. Glorious! // And then when I went back for outing #2 for the NYT, the little star thingy was still there but I was smarter now and knew I didn't have to go right up to it, but still I walked around a little - NYT where? (In the past it has been found in the branches of the Japanese burning bush or whatever it was hubby planted at the end of the walk, but also at various places up and down the sidewalk.) Putting steps on the pedometer while looking for the paper, love that multitasking, you know I do. And finding it nowhere, so I looked down the street to where headlights were just then emerging out of the fog, such unusual thick fog for us of a seven a.m., and briefly thinking, that could be the NYT delivery man, but no, the car was coming on way too fast, but I stood there because I was there and I hadn't decided to go back inside yet, takes me a while to decide things.

I also thought this couldn't be the NYT delivery man because in the past, a lot of our neighbors got the NYT too and he would have been stopping at all their houses. But no, he came zooming up and slowed right at my house, obviously him at that foggy hour of the morning, no other cars anywhere and slowing right by me, so I raised my hand to thank him and he hesitated I guess, and called out "dont want to hit you!" - pulled up a little further yet, tossed the paper (in its trademark blue plastic bag) out the window and roared off on his way. I hollered "thanks!", collected my paper and stepped back into the house, very pleased with the magical morning.

Oh, and when I got to Weight Watchers yesterday morning, not having been for two weeks (I was all primed to go last week and have great results but then I sliced off the tip of my finger the night before, which kind of interrupted things), I had lost 2.6 pounds on their scales since the previous weigh-in. Two pounds to go before I don't have to pay as a lifetime member.

So ladies' morning walk continues to be fabulous. This morning we talked about connections and boundaries between us and our nieces and nephews (hi, Amani! - I actually didn't mean you this time!), and helping family members talk about things that get worse with isolation - and then Ellen told us about a book she's very excited about called The Belly Fat Diet and Beth and I are both rushing off to get it today. [Correction: this afternoon now, written from the library - I knew there was something wrong with that title. When I got to the library I asked for the Fat Belly Diet. That was wrong too. It's The Flat Belly Diet. Whatever!]

But meanwhile I'm still on the Step Diet, or rather I bought the book, read part of it, and am tracking steps and upping them every week and doing some of the things the book says to do, and of course I'm a Weight Watcher as always. So I guess I'm layering the oomphs that come from each of these places.

Night before last hubby spontaneously said: you look skinny! Now when does that ever happen?! (I was wearing my yellow sarong with the black salamanders all over it [my first sarong of the many I now have (purple with yellow and green frogs, blue with yellow butterflies, red with black geometries, and black with big splashy dragonflies, sadly ripped but I wear it anyway) and in fact the one that was given to me by hubby and the boys], tucked up around over my chestiness and falling down straight from there [the pedometer was clipped over my right breast because where else was I going to put it? - and I had to be getting those steps, you manage what you measure and all that] and so now I think: can I recreate that look in an item of clothing that won't be falling off every three point five minutes the way that tucked sarong does? Alex????)

Honey bunnies, the timer is ticking super fast towards zero, and it was lovely to hear back from some of you (you know who you are, Sabine and Annette and Kim and Lisa!), and I'm going to put a couple more people on the automatic-e-mail send-out thing now that I know how to do it.

Crazy thought (another one) of today: fussing in the kitchen, remembering this morning's walk where we were united in the interest in the belly-fat-busting diet, I resurrected an idea I've had in the past: since there doesn't seem to be a Weight Watcher restaurant anywhere I can just go to, how's about *I* make food here every day for me and all my friends and they come here to eat good wonderful Weight Watchery food, all fresh and yummy and handmade and point-labeled and nutritionally balanced.

(This thought, in case you didn't know, is crazy a. because I can barely cook for the people who's here already [although a lot of that is because their eating needs/desires are at odds with mine] and b. there is no time - and yet still, still, somehow I'm wondering/wishing.)

The timer has not only dinged now, which it usually does with a minute to spare, but actually also wound down its ticking and stopped making noise entirely, so I'm going to say hasta la vista and start going for items 7 and 8 on the checklist. Maybe I can also get to 1300 steps before I leave the house.

Grounded and Injured

I haven't blogged in over a month - nothing to be done about that now, it's onward and looking forward now. I have all sorts of blogs-in-my-head that roll by, and all sorts of reasons not to go writing them down / typing them up - first it was that they were silly little spurts of things and I had some people down to get e-mail automatically when I posted, and I decided I didn't want to have their in boxes so spluttered and cluttered.

Then it was that I had tooooo much to write.

And now?! - now I have a big white clump of gauze on my left index finger and it's surprisingly in the way - not quite as bad as yesterday and the day before, when I had a very large multi-layer wrapping with a big fat immovable blue thing as the outer layer - not only could I not use the finger to type, but it also kept getting in the way and hitting other keys, and keeping it off the keyboard meant I couldn't quite reach the keys . . .

Ah well. The injury itself is minor, I was cutting a medium-sized cucumber with a very large knife and my smallish finger got in the way. So let's talk about more interesting things.

I wanted to write about being grounded in Bloomington and what grounds me, and even though I've been thinking about this for over a week, it is only this morning, as I sit here and type this, that I realize not only am I grounded here but that in my worst times in Berlin, grounded is exactly what I was not, and that when I was doing better, and then so very much better, I had just managed to ground myself there.

Here it seemed so easy and obvious from day one. On a very literal and immediate level, for one: leaving the house to walk outside is just a matter of opening the front door and walking out. Then I am on the ground, on the walkway, on the sidewalk, under the trees, in hailing distance of my neighbors, ready to hit the pavement for a walk or a jog. In Berlin it was just that much farther from inside the apartment to out on the street - via air-walkway, stairs, multiple doors, more stairs, walkways and high walls to, finally, a pretty narrow sidewalk. I grew to love it but this is just EASIER.

What is grounding, besides that? Well, my fellow middle-aged ladies, gathering daily at 7:45 at the corner of tree- and aqueduct-lined Southdowns and the park. Three to seven of us five days a week, some arriving on bikes, some on cars, some on foot, and as I walk down Southdowns towards the park in my twenty-pound vest I strain to see who's already there and generally can't see anybody, but miraculously as I arrive thinking OK, today's the day when there's nobody, suddenly - there comes Alex from the left from the parking lot, and there comes Sue in her trademark red sweater emerging from around the corner, from behind the trees, on her bike - and there comes Ellen on the right emerging from behind a post where she was stretching - and that was just today (in truth, Susan was with me so I knew I wasn't going to be alone, but Susan also had to leave right afterwards). Other days, Beth then drives up alongside me and slows down and waves and then goes to park and hurry over to meet us; and sometimes Jenny, if she hasn't been outside when I left my house with gorgeous black Maggie the dog, shows up as we all converge on the corner, at a run. And then the only problem is - how do we maneuver around town, so many of us, walking and talking - and how many conversations can we juggle, are we all in one, do we break into several, am I missing something over there, can we reconfigure? And we do, we manage, and by 9 a.m. we're generally all home again, having been out in the sunshine and air, having talked about kids and work and worries and enemies and e-mail and friends, about our bodies (oh, did I ever write once before about the fun we had walking around the campus of Indiana University talking loudly about middle-aged sex and feeling righteous about educating the student body???) - having seen the wind chimes and crystals hung from the trees along Southdowns (today it was a lone leaf hanging in absolute midair - the implied spider's thread was completely invisible) and baby Maksim out for his morning stroll on Papa Kon's chest and the apples available for the plucking just over the wall from Fritz and Leela's house, and the bright red chili peppers that appeared one day in a beautiful cluster out somebody's walkway and the next day the sign: help yourselves. (Just down the street from the U-pick'em herbs.)

That's grounding. Also video chats with my parents, Daddy stroking his long and ever-growing white beard with great pleasure, Mommy chipper in the middle of her miraculously short and relatively-easy-on-the-body post-lumpectomy therapy. And the occasional phone conversation with my busy but cheerful sister. And having the large boy home for a week between Berkeley and college, and sorting out decades' worth of games from the games cupboard, carrying furniture up and down the stairs, carrying books hither and yon, driving carloads full of things at a time to Goodwill, moving around in this house which is ours and despairing at the state of it but also feeling ready to change everything around.

I think I got off the track a little but these things really *are* grounding, when I lose my way (I did that yesterday for a while - no editorial work; hard to type; Max didn't need me when I was ready to help him and just as I was about to start on a project of my own he did; I was just off my rhythm and flustered and flummoxed and frustrated) - when I lose my way, it comes back down to: feet on the ground, move around, walk. I'm working the pedometer double time, I've got a book called the Step Diet that is both infuriatingly complex and incomprehensible and at the same time stunningly simple in a way, but mostly it's just given me the new push - I need to walk and walk I do.

More later, but it is grounding to write this. Imagining: maybe Erika or Anja will read it in Berlin, or Irene, or Kim, in Hamburg - or Ellen in Bloomington, maybe even Lisa in Toronto if she hasn't given up on me, surely Ruthy in Austin eventually. Love and greetings to you all - more shoutouts next time. Susanne and Sabine, Annette and Bianca - my Berlin walking and talking and play-reading buddies - hello to you! I'm keeping it set up that this goes out to you automatically for now, hope that works and hope it's OK. If I start blogging more like daily that might get annoying!

bits and pieces and layers of life

Monday, August 17th:

I spent large parts of this morning putting clothes on the line outside. I knew there was a 40% chance of thunderstorms but the sun was shining rather insistently.

Then I was doing some things online, including pieces of blog posts I'd started writing and one of which I'd actually meant to post days ago but quite apparently it never went out. (Thank you, dear Lou, for making this clear to me!)

And on top of the beat of the classic radio station and the whir and rush of the rotating fan I started to hear something else, some other louder whir and rush - I was literally outside 10 minutes ago looking at what might already be dry, taking those things down, and putting up the second load of laundry - so as I was sitting here fussing with the blog and hearing the rush and whir I thought no, that can't be rain - looked out the window ahead of me and the sun was just as bright but there was something about that noise, so I went outside for a second and sure enough, it was raining and everything was soaked all over again. I started to try to pull it inside but I was getting soaked myself and the clothes, I thought, would do better outside when it got dry again - and in the time it took me to write this paragraph, though my shoulders and arms are still wet from my seconds outside, it has completely stopped raining again and the sun is shining!

I can't tell everything that's happened so here are bits and pieces:

we've been back in Bloomington 2 weeks. Forgot a piece of luggage in our building the day we left, hubby went back in a taxi rushing home and back while Felix and I waited nervously after checking in at the airport. Flew from Berlin to Newark uneventfully, in Newark we waited forever to find out our flight to Indianapolis was canceled, so we spent an absolutely delightful day in New York and flew home a day later.

Got home late Monday night, dear neighbors Jenny and Michael met us and drove us home and what a wonderful welcome that was, also flowers and balloons and edible goodies in the house from four different sets of neighbors, then the next morning more friends and neighbors visiting, and promptly at 12:30 midday Tuesday, 12 hours after we'd gotten to our house, a thunderstorm started, lasted only minutes I think but our power went out and stayed off for 21 hours. What a welcome!

Since then:

Felix has started school, is enjoying 7th grade, he's taking French and going to play percussion in the band, he has some good teachers and he's enjoying seeing all the old friends again, the schoolbus leaves from 2 corners down at 7:27 in the morning and brings him back around 3:15 p.m., a big difference for him and me from last year. Also in school, instead of multiple breaks with lots of running around, they have NO breaks for running around, 30 minutes for lunch, one 45-minute physical education period of which they are changing in and out of their clothes for probably at least 15 or 20 minutes of it I would guess. Hmph. But he's doing fine so far. Has two dog-walking jobs this week, and looking forward to soon buying the computer he's been saving up for.

And I? I'm walking with my ladies of my ladies' book group, so happy to be doing that. We're meeting every weekday morning at 7:45 and we walk for about an hour and it's wonderful. Catching up on everything, talking about everything, starting the day with friendly faces and funny stories and other people's family woes to add to our own or put ours in perspective. 

Haven't got my editorial work up to speed, my clients have to get used to the fact that I'm back and working, but I've been talking to a lot of friends and neighbors and consulting more formally with my buddy and blogspiration Ellen about the idea of pushing my coaching work harder - the writing coach work but also starting up weight-loss coaching with some clients locally and maybe farther away. It's keeping my mind busy thinking about what might work.

Went to a wonderful concert Saturday night, our neighbor and friend Jason Fickel telling hilarious stories about growing up in Kansas in between folksy/bluesy (I'm not so good on genres) songs he wrote and that he sings and plays with a number of other wonderful local musicians, including our very good old friend Boo on trombone with a plunger making it go woo-woo-woo. Lots of friends and neighbors there.

As I told niece Fanny in a little blog just for her: the fridge here is huge! I mean, it was our fridge before we left, and I do recognize it, but the fridge we had in Berlin, and three more just like it, could fit, I'm pretty sure, into the fridge part - and then there's the whole freezer part below. In fact if you rearranged the shape of the fridge we had in Berlin but kept it the same size, I think it could fit into the door pockets of this fridge here. I'm just saying.

And I've been to three, no four at least, grocery stores since we got back, and a few days ago I was at the least funky-organic-sophisticated and most down-home-Indiana one of the ones I ever go to, and the shopping carts were an outrageous size. And I was pushing it around and I wanted to get maybe ten things but I kept feeling like I should put more things in the cart. So the last few days I've been going to the natural food co-op instead more, where the baskets are a more reasonable size and the food is more local and organic.

And I'm sorry, I got kind of offended when people in Berlin said "oh, everybody in the States is fat" but when I look around here in Bloomington it is pretty striking how different the body shapes are here. 

So those are some impressions. It's nice to be back, though, and I do feel anchored. 

I'm wearing my twenty-pound weight vest for ladies' morning walk. We start the day talking and walking and, as Jenny said, she goes off to work with a smile on her face when we start like that. It's not always the same group of us but four or five or six of us cycle through - there have always so far been at least three of us. I'm loving it, and my ladies tell me I got them up and running (OK, walking) again, so it's good to feel that I can do that.

I've gone over many, many pages of rules and instructions from Felix's different teachers that we had to sign, and sheets of information to fill out for the school administration, most of which I had already filled out. They now have multiple phone numbers for us and our address and e-mail addresses, and the names and phone numbers of half our neighbors, in about 8 different places.

Not finding any small offices to rent downtown this year - turns out in this economy everyone who used to have big offices is downsizing to the small kind I was always wanting and having. So we're going to reconfigure things in the house for me to work at home again for a while.

Oh, and Annette, Bianca, Susanne, and Sabine, I am putting you down to get automatic e-mail with this blog when I write it because it seemed like accessing the blog was not necessarily so easy for you. If you'd rather not get it please do let me know! I miss you and our walks and play-readings! And there is NOwhere in Bloomington to go swimming with fish and ducks and herons and no clothes. 

And oh, sorry, one last thing: we *are* going to start a play-reading group here in Bloomington - in German!

married 21 years

Friday was anniversary #21. Slept in a little, packed and puddled around, had a couple of spousal fights brewing but we/he/I headed them off, sleepy Felix got up slightly before hubby and I were off to lunch.

Final lunch at the institute, many good-byes.

Biked into the woods with hubby, jogged 25 minutes, and then jumped into the lake together. I wanted the lake, he wanted a jog first, it all was very nice. (Turned out though the lake was lovely temperature for me but he was freezing - something to do with distribution of body fat [I mean distribution between us, not distribution on individual bodies].)

And then we came home, collected Felix, and headed off on our beloved double decker (yes, the roof got thumped again on the first curve of Koenigsallee, still no midnight tree maintenance), all the way to the end of the line in Kreuzberg - got out and Felix had a farewell döner (in Bloomington they have them too, at the Trojan Horse, but they're called something else) and I bought some clothes! and we went to buy the T-shirt the prospect of which had coaxed Felix out of the house, browsed some touristy shops which were actually amusing and bought a few things for the folks back home (I nixed the concentration game that involved matching cards where instead of finding identical pictures it was matching left and right breasts - called Busen-Memory), and sat down for a lovely few minutes in our favorite cafe, Josephine, on Bergmannstrasse. (Basically the last outing we had with Felix, sometime in August of last year maybe, we went to the same T-shirt store and the same cafe. Comforting.)

Then we power-U-Bahned back to the Ku'damm (the bus ride had been lumbering and sleepy), sent Felix off one direction to catch the bus home and walked off ourselves in a different direction to meet sis- and bro-in-law for a belated birthday dinner for her. It was soooooo pleasant, a wonderful mild evening at a table outside on a tree-lined street with people strolling by, excellent food and fabulous service and all four of us happy to be out together in a good mood chatting and talking and eating and hanging. 

And it never stopped! Anja and Alexander had promised to get on their bikes and zoom to meet us after sis- and bro-in-law were going to have to go home to Fanny and the babysitting grandparents - as it happened we had fifteen minutes all of us together, and then we went off with A & A for a stroll around some blocks and ended up in a dark cavelike bar with comfy red seats and pretzel sticks and got to chill and say good-bye for a while longer. And then we taxied home.

So it's Saturday morning, yesterday was lovely, I'm in no way slept out as we say in German but I have to have my oatmeal now because it's off to meet more friends for more good-byes (Annette, Sabine, some institute friends) at 10 for breakfast, and when I go out for breakfast I always have to have my oatmeal first. Then it's home to finish packing all the ridiculous junk that is lying around. 

Love to you all, thank you for listening!

power blog!?!

Saturday morning, August 1st

We're leaving the house for the airport to fly home to Bloomington in about 24 hours and ten minutes. Last days of Berlin!

Last Tuesday I wrote in the wee hours of the morning. I did get back to sleep, I went off and walked with Annette, and then had a wonderful sendoff from my Weight Watchers group. They wished me well and said they'll miss me and gave me flowers; I didn't think to bring them flowers but I brought them my address and told them truthfully they were the best Weight Watchers group I'd ever had and I'd miss them truly too! 

And later on Tuesday I did make it into the lake, which was wonderful. And packed boxes, if I recall. Lots of 'em.

Wednesday was an ucky day. The morning wasn't bad - four boxes got picked up and carted off, I updated my resume and projects list to give to the people here at the institute who might send some editorial work my way in the future - but the afternoon and evening were not nice. Hubby went off into town to browse and bop and had a marvelous time in galleries and cafes and I stayed home to get things done and/or nap but I didn't nap till the last minute and so it was short, and I didn't get things done really, I just sat around having a headache and minding that there was still so much stuff in the apartment, and feeling bad and fussing around online, and it felt awful. So instead of meeting hubby and old friend Klaus at the Literaturhauscafe at 7, I rested at home a little longer, showered, and then walked the bike a ways while phoning my father (mother had been in the hospital overnight). So it felt like I got a little exercise, and connected with my family, and then I got on the bike and rode the rest of the way to meet them, had a mostly nice evening there, and rode home on bikes with hubby. 

Thursday I woke up early with the alarm clock. The night before I had been very frustrated I once again wasn't going to have a chance to sleep in, but when I woke up Thursday morning I was happy to know I was off to go get the excellent niecelet. Thursday was a wonderful day. Early morning bus ride, the bus waited for me while I jogged up the street as hard as I could while hanging onto the three different bags/packs that were hanging off me and banging against me as in various ways as I pounded up the street (the bus waiting like that is a once-in-a-blue-moon marvel) - then I got to notice and enjoy the place where, in the last several weeks, something (a branch surely?) always bangs hard on the top of the double-decker as we round the first curve of Koenigsallee - I'm kind of amazed nobody's come to do their efficient middle-of-the-night trimming - and then on the bus I finally started reading the book Anja loaned me over New Year's (!) which was immediately engrossing - I got to sis-in-law's and niecely's house early and walked up the many flights of stairs still reading - and there was bright bubbly Fanny happy to see me, her mother ready to ride off to work on her brand-spanking-new (am I overusing the hyphens yet?) mom-mobile (beautiful sturdy black bike with state-of-the-art baby seat in back), and Fanny and I had a few hours together, breakfasting, reading, and then walking down steps, down more steps, waiting for and riding the U-Bahn, getting out and walking the wrong way and then the right way, strolling along the Ku'damm with Fanny in and out of the stroller and enjoying her raisin breadlet, buying organic fruit together, and then finally getting back on the bus to finish our trip and ending up looking for the ducks who were nowhere to be found and then riding upstairs to see Felix and hubby - Fanny has so much to tell us all in her amazingly articulate two-year-oldness (what is it about our nieces and the verbal precocity?) and it was just lovely to have a friendly, curious, talkative, cuddly small person who likes being with all of us, and she and I finally snuggled down for a nap and I *really* wanted to just stay there and sleep through it all with her!

But after a half an hour maybe of snoozing with her I went off to the kitchen and started processing all the many vegetables and food stuffs in the fridge and on the counter because it had become real how many (few) meals and hours were left to be had in this apartment. Cooked carrots with ginger and orange juice, sweet potatoes slice-boated in the oven, regular potatoes home-fried on the stove for Felix, noodles for Fanny (weren't too popular) and corn on the cob for me, green salad for hubby and me . . . and sis- and bro-in-law showed up a little later to get Fanny and had time to sit down and have some of the bounty too, and there was still even some later when people came home with us in the evening.

Anyway - this was to be a power blog and I'm lingering. Just to say - Thursday there was still time for a nice long afternoon nap, I skipped the final institute dinner to walk into the woods with my weight vest on, long phone call with sister in Texas back from her visit to our parents in California, then wonderful swim, then on the way back phone call with parents though the cellphone ran out of minutes in the middle, and only then did I go join the dinnering instituters with the dinner all gone which was good for me, and later more people came back to our house. Thursday was good.

And Friday gets its own blog, I just decided. Sorry this was longwinded it meant to be short - just to say it's been an up-and-down week, and the things I figured out early in the week were good and to be savored DID turn out to be good and savorable - time with Fanny, time in the lake - it took longer to find time with hubby and Felix but we even did that too on Thursday.

in-the-moment moments

I'm typing this up Tuesday night, July 28th.

This morning, on my way to the second bus stop (the one I go to when I've missed the bus at the first bus stop, just so I can walk a little bit instead of standing around), I pulled out my notebook and wrote:

"in-the-moment moments:

- just now, watching a man lay fat-capital-serif-I-shaped cobblestones in a nesting and repeating pattern on a beautiful patch of very flat, perfectly leveled strawberry-blond sand in a piece of hte opened-up sidewalk. (On the sidewalk on the other side of the narrow street, a different man was picking similar cobblestones [bricks?] off a pile on the sidewalk and loading them into a wheelbarrow. I was late to meet my friend Lou for our pre-Weight Watchers walk so I couldn't stay to find out what the relationship between the two sides of the street might be.)

- being in the lake, whenever I'm in the lake, which is why I want to get back there!

- being with niecelet Fanny whenever that wors which is why I should just make it happen!"

---------

and indeed, I wrote that this morning and thought about it during the day and so tonight I went and jumped in the lake, it was truly lovely. (And I had a thought, as I often do when I'm bobbling around in the lake - today the thought was that I really should organize my Facebook friends into different groups and categories, and surely it wouldn't even be that hard?! - college friends / Bloomington friends / book group / women's group / family / childhood friends etcetera.)

And then I called sis-in-law number one and made a plan to have young mistress Fanny to spend the morning and into the afternoon with on Thursday, about which I am very pleased.

So - off to pack up and pack up and pack up so that maybe tomorrow already the packing of boxes etcetera will be behind us and we can truly live in the rest of our Berlin moments.

5 days to go

Wow. When I write it like that it's not a lot of time!

My cold is abating but not all gone. We haven't sent any more boxes since last I blogged but we've done a certain amount of sorting and packing. I haven't been exercising since I've had that weird shaky-weak about-to-break-out-in-a-cold-sweat feeling, if-I-move-around-too-much-I'll-be-completely-exhausted kind of a thing. But I've been eating, for a few days it felt like it was good for me and good for my cold, but now the weight has crept up higher than anytime so far in Berlin and it does not feel good and it's 3:26 a.m. and I can't sleep!

So - I've made a little list of things to do in the morning to get myself back on track (I should say: start getting myself back on track). I want and need somehow to:

- take a few kilos back off

- get things packed and sent off

- spend time with hubby and Felix

- get sleep, get sleep, get sleep!

- keep saying good-bye to so many people

Hubby is clothes-shopping for himself and Felix. I don't quite see myself managing that for myself, sadly. I wanted to try to spend at least a half day with little Fanny niecelet before we go but when? when? how? not sure. I had promised to send my resume and info about what I do to one of the administrators at the institute; surely I can do that today? Shouldn't take more than an hour, if I just sit down to it?

There have been so many good-byes. Wonderful visits from Kim and Christian from Hamburg and from Johanna from Berkeley; before that Adam and Nina from New York. A very nice final meeting of Friday morning writing group. A lovely, lively, jampacked final meeting on Sabine's balcony of Wednesday night play-reading group (we read Chekhov and a hilarious one-act play called The Tragical Tale of Melissa McHeiny McNormous McWhale - I recommend it - just google it). This past weekend lots of family, last visits and connections with our nephews, with madre-in-law. I haven't been to Weight Watchers for 2 weeks in a row, 2 weeks ago it was Felix's sixth-grade graduation plus a rehearsal at the institute for our hilarious group songs for the institute good-bye party; last week it was me waking up and realizing I had to go back to sleep and sleep all morning because I was truly unwell. 

So this week, this morning, lying in bed at 2:30 a.m. I was wanting and wanting to go back to sleep and finally realized it wasn't happening, and so I'm up to make lists, have tea, write this blog, do some e-mail, and then hopefully surely certainly, with my mind unburdened-er and the sleepytime tea working its magic and the Ibuprofen likewise, go back to sleep for a few hours before I wake up to have breakfast, meet my friend Annette in front of the Weight Watchers meeting place so we can walk for an hour, and then go to the meeting and say good-bye and, as I write this, I realize they (Frau Krüger, the leader) will surely want me to say final words of wisdom as I leave and I'm going to have to say: what can I say? I fall off the wagon and all I can do is keep getting back on. 

I haven't been back to my beloved lake since last Sunday (this is Tuesday early early, 9 days later) - yesterday was a hot day perfect for it but I was holding out to be fully over this cold. Maybe today? Lots of Iranian demonstrations near the Brandenburg Gate. New people (Americans, young people, scholars for the institute, who knows who else) flooding into Berlin as others are leaving in droves, it's a big city, it's a mecca for foreigners, people come, people leave. 

Our friends in Bloomington are putting out welcome mats for us and that is a lovely feeling. I've drunk my tea and made my lists and written this blog and now for a couple more e-mail messages and back to bed.