Wobbly Wake-up

Dearest Rachel –

I think it must be a symptom of old age – or at least, of the aging process itself. I either wake up hours before the sun does, or I find myself sleeping in past what I would consider to be a reasonable hour. And some days, like this morning, I manage to do both.

To be sure, the early wake up had more to do with another one of those dreams, and the need to react to it. I’ve told you plenty of them that are fairly strange and hard to figure out, but you can also relate to the ones that feel so real, so ordinary and mundane, that when they’re over, and you wake up wondering whether it really happened, or whether it at least had a grain of reality it was wrapped around.

Of course, since I don’t exactly have a morning routine as such, I don’t experience something as complete as Calvin does here, but little snippets of real life that keep me guessing whether something really happened – or needs to. In this case, it was a simple email from Ellen. Normally, it’s one of those emails that checks in with the girls and myself as to whether we’re getting together of an evening (usually Friday these days – not that it holds any benefit out of being the beginning of the weekend for most of us anymore, but that’s how things have developed), but for whatever reason, she was enthusing about the upcoming trip to Israel, and certain sites we would be expecting to visit.

The thing is, while we’ve traveled with her before (you took her in lieu of me several times to the island, as I recall – and of course, there was DisneyWorld and the Liberty of the Seas), I don’t recall even considering asking her to travel with Daniel and me to Israel this November. For now, her priority with vacation days is to see her mother, much like yours was until her passing. And any travel for now would require her to take her cat along with, and that wouldn’t be possible for an overseas trip like this one. Finally, for my own part, were I to invite her on a trip, my first priority would be one last trip back to the island (along with Erin and Kerstin, if possible) to see you off as per your wishes. As it stands, however, I suspect I might well get your diamond back before I get the chance to do that (although progress on that front has been considerably slower than I’d been informed – not that I’m in any hurry).

But as I said, her email seemed to be full of places she was looking forward to, and so grateful about being able to go that I started questioning whether she would have wanted to take such a trip. I know I haven’t made arrangements, but if she was so keen about it… well, there was still time to sign her up. I texted her about it; I expect she’ll be as confused about it as I was when I woke up, and most likely turn it down, but I’ve made the offer I wonder if I wasn’t asked to.

***

Anyway, after taking care of that business, I rolled over and went back to sleep, only to find it well after seven when I woke up. Now, that would probably still be rather early by your standards (or maybe extremely late, depending on how long you were staying up – I’ll still never fathom your ability to pull an all-nighter, both when the situation called for it, and when you were simply that distracted by whatever fun activity you were doing), but I like to take plenty of time to wake up, eat, dress, write and do whatever else I feel the need to as part of my morning routine (yes, I know I said I didn’t have one – it does vary a lot from day to day). Two hours is something of a minimum, and I would be considerably behind my self-imposed schedule at this rate. So I bolted myself out of bed.

Big mistake. You know how, after a morning together, our legs would be a bit wobbly? Maybe it wasn’t quite so bad for you, I don’t recall, but it was pretty consistent for me. Well, that was how I felt as I got up out of bed. I didn’t quite lose my balance and fall down, but I could feel my legs as they tried to accustom themselves to verticality. I’m assuming this is fallout from all the walking I did yesterday, and I don’t know if this bodes ill for those new shoes.

I’ll end up finding out, though, as I got a text from Lars this morning, asking me if I might walk with him this morning. It’s rather out of character for him to do so on such short notice – and he even admitted to and apologized for it, not that it upsets my non-existent schedule – so I wonder what might be up. That makes me sound suspicious of motivations, but it’s more a case of honest curiosity.

It makes me regret having bothered to shower this morning, if I’m just going to work up a sweat in a few hours. Still, I skipped yesterday, and that was more than sufficient for me to go without. However, I do hope that it will give the water heater time to recover; it wasn’t exactly cold this morning, but it never really got anywhere past lukewarm. The last time this happened, we had to replace it after more than thirty years of service – but this time, it’s barely been five. Wonder if I need to find someone to look at this thing, rather than mess with it myself and make things considerably worse. At least it serves to wake me up in the morning, after all this.

Anyway, I’m off to start the day. Wish me luck, honey – I’m going to need it.