Almost Moving Day

The constant in my life over the past five months has been waiting in line at the Farmers' Market every Saturday morning.  Everyone masked up, six feet  or more apart, waiting.  It's typically been 45 minutes to an hour.  I was confused by how short the line was this morning, only half the block instead of around the corner. Watching the flowers bloom, the leaves fill out in summer, and now beginning to dry out and drop.  New apartments went up on NE 52nd, and now they are almost ready to be lived in.  Every weekend someone moving out, somewhere, and I always wonder if I missed some message.  I don't know why I find comfort in people moving into places, but I do, and they aren't, at least not on Saturday mornings.  Just leaving.

I signed a lease yesterday.  Had a bit of a panic attack afterword, it's more money than I've spent when I've travelled for a month.  I had to get renter's insurance, along with internet...there are a lot of advantages with living with other people and sharing the cost of everything.  And I love the space of a house, and the back yard, the big front porch, all the light in my room, the safety of the neighborhood.  This is one of the safest places I've ever lived, the first college I went to was the other one.

What I won't miss is my tendency of over-functioning.  Of having to clean up the kitchen before being able to cook in it.  Having to wipe up someone else's pee before using the toilet.  Cleaning someone else's hair out of the bathtub, separating food out of the recycling, being the only one that cleans the house.  What will I do with all the extra time?  I've never lived alone.  I never really wanted to.  But it seems like a good time to figure out what I want, need, etc when I'm not always having to compromise.  I don't blame that on anyone else, it's just part of living with other people, you have to make adjustments.

And the person I've been having issues with the most is moving as well, and I guess I could stay, but I'd still be me, and still over-functioning, and I need to learn to not do that, to figure myself out.  So, it's still good to move, plus the whole COVID vs my immune system situation.

I rented a loft, which is somewhat nuts with arthritis.  But I figure I can leave my bed on the main level/kitchen area, and make the loft part a study/meditation/art space.  I wish I'd taken pictures, they don't actually have a diagram of the unit I rented on the website of the building.  My criteria was closet space, a stove, my own bathroom, and enough space to unpack all my boxes and figure out what to do with it all.  I just haven't really had the space.  I realized I've been living out of boxes for 16 years.  It's time to unpack.

Now it's August

It's been cool and gray all day.  Got soaked going out on my morning walk, but figured I'd enjoy it anyway: a break from the heat, and the novelty of rain.  Yesterday, I felt like every time I was in my room, I'd be in a pool of sweat after about 5 minutes.  Two of my housemates had gone to the mountains for the day, so, I didn't need to avoid the main level of the house as much as usual.  Late in the day, I was sitting answering work emails, with an ice pack, as the only way I could stand it.  The diner across the street had given me the ice in a bag because I'd been stung (bit?) by a large stinging insect on my morning walk.  I don't know what it was, I was trying to get a better look at an injured squirrel, and suddenly something large was angrily buzzing near my head, and then I felt like a large rubber band had been snapped on my scalp, and whatever it was flew off.  I didn't find a stinger, and it didn't seem to leave a mark when I tried to look later, but it hurt.  The squirrel briefly rallied and drug its embattled body down the road a little ways.  I couldn't figure out what happened, it almost looked like it had been hit by a car, but we were a long ways from a (used) road.  I don't know what I could've done.  There were a bunch of Coopers Hawks in the area, they probably got it after I left.  I was grasping my head from the pain.  Though, I don't know if it's because of the ice, the ibuprofen, or the fact that it was on my scalp, but it disappeared after a couple of hours.

We still have the bee issue at home.  I got a closer look, and I think they are actually yellow jackets.  They seem to mostly mind their own business, though, if you stay out of their flight path.

No idea when we are going back to work now.  There was a notice that went out today, and it's still remote for a while, until COVID19 cases start going down.  Do realize I could live somewhere else, since even if I did start coming in to work, I could borrow a car to do that.  My lease is up, so I'm thinking about it.  It's just such a strange time.  One of my housemates moved to a country we could still go to at the end of July.  On the one hand, it's seems a bit crazy, but on another one, he's young, he has a place to stay there, and none of us have any guarantees of anything at this point.  Any of us could get sick and die next week, or get sick and have no symptoms at all.  There's no certainty anymore.  There's no guarantee of a "later" to do something.  To save something for.

With my housemates out of the kitchen yesterday, I finally did something with the sour cherries I keep buying.  I love the idea of them, and I enjoy the taste, but I keep not doing anything with them.  I have a cookbook with a recipe for preserved fruits in syrup.  I think it's from Cyprus.  So I made a couple of jars with cherries yesterday.  I used 3 C with 1 1/4 C of sugar, the juice of a lemon, and a cup of water.  I also added a splash of hierbas that I brought back from Galicia.  It's pretty.  And shockingly sweet, which the author warns of, and she calls for 1 1/2  C sugar, so  I used less.  Anyway, I bought some sparkling water and tried it in that, which was good.  And then decided to add some rose water (which I randomly bought a couple of weeks ago, for a pudding or something), and it's a pleasing combination.  I actually drop the cherries in, as well as the syrup, it's sorta' like a fruit tea.  I might try adding herbs.  Looking for interesting drinks that aren't necessarily alcoholic.  I did put the alcohol in, but it boiled from 20 minutes after that point, so I don't think that counts.  My drinking has gone way down since the lockdowns began, it's not zero, but it's like it was before 2017.  I drank socially, or as a way of sitting in a bar to read or write, and none of that is happening anymore.

The other thing I've been enjoying is experimenting with corn and zucchini chowder, and adding fish of some sort.  I throw the cobs in for most of the cooking time (instead of tossing them in the compost), and I've tried smoked salmon (I had some sitting around that I'd bought at Christmas), which was good, and then a mixture of Pacific Cod and Dungeness Crab, which was okay, needed more salt at any rate.  I liked the salmon one more, but it's fine just vegetables, too.  I really enjoy the corn taste, and I'm actually getting zucchini this year, maybe it's the variety, but I don't usually have any luck with it. It's the pale green, smooth one.  I like zucchini.

I think it's started raining again.  And now I'm hungry.