Less of the Same, More of the Usual

Dearest Rachel –

The beauty of a morning flight is that, when you arrive, you still have most of the day to ‘enjoy’ the place you’ve landed in. The… dare I say ugliness?… of that same situation on the return trip means that you’re dropped right back into the responsibilities of home that you neglected by being away; responsibilities that you kind of forgot you even had until you ran up against them.

I’ve gotten used to a certain level of running (okay, walking) around in one city after another, albeit with breaks from one port to the next. Indeed, Daniel and I have been getting a kick out of beating our step count from one destination to the next, from Reykjavik to Halifax to Boston (each of which had us beating twenty thousand, and the last two twenty-five thousand), so we’d gotten used to covering a lot of ground in a day. And let’s be fair, upon arriving at home, We knew that we were going to do a lot less of that going forward. But now that we were home, what we were going to be doing was a lot more of the usual ‘running around’ that our life here entails

A lot of it had to do with deadlines; we had a whole bunch of coupons that needed to be burned at our local superstore.  In fact, we had trouble checking out, because yesterday was the expiry date for those coupons; the automated checkout machine didn’t recognize them. We had to get help from an actual staffer there. And I’ll be honest, I think she may have entered in too much in the way of discount – I even said so at the time – but she basically indicated that I shouldn’t worry about it. So at this point, I wasn’t going to.

Upon leaving the store, one of the idiot lights on my dashboard went off it’s an icon it seems that my oil was starting to run low. It was somewhere around 10% or so when we left, so I guess it wasn’t a surprise that it claimed to need immediate attention, but that took another hour out of my schedule.  Which, again, wouldn’t be such a big deal if it weren’t for the fact that I still had another deadline to take care of.

That particular deadline had to do with our taxes. Since we don’t earn a wage upon which taxes are being withheld on a regular basis, we have to make our payments on a quarterly basis directly to Uncle Sam and Uncle J.B.  That was due yesterday, so, if we could get the checks written, signed, and put in the mail, we would be fine.  The problem is, we still had to get the vouchers printed out to accompany our payment so that the state and the feds would recognize what our checks represented. We don’t actually have a printer; we use 1 so rarely kind of like that we’ve decided not to own one.  Instead, we use the one of the folks’.  The problem is, their computer is so slow that it took me an hour to get those four pages printed – two vouchers each for either of us. And then, when I got home, I realized I had printed my two vouchers twice.  I had to go back come on spend another half hour at the folks’ (which I wouldn’t mind under ordinary circumstances, but it was getting late – not only did we have to worry about the post office closing, but we still had to be at church by five-thirty).  And wouldn’t you know it, but it was as if I got every red light on my way there and on my way back on this second journey. Oh boy… yeah, I was home all right.

Even the trip to the post office was a little bit fraught. We got there with plenty of time (thankfully, the place is open until six), but the clerk informed me that it would have to be taken to the Palatine clearinghouse in order to be postmarked. She assured me that it would be postmarked that night, but remarked that “if you wanted in postmarked in front of you, you shouldn’t have put a stamp on it,” which confused me until she reminded me that the machine-printed stamps they put on would automatically have a date on them, which would serve as proof that the payment was made on time. Nevertheless, at least she was assuring of the fact that this would be sufficient as well; I just wouldn’t see it in front of me.

After all that, though, you can probably guess that I was getting a little frantic. To be honest, by the time we got to church and Sparks, that whole two- or three- hour period spent there was almost restful in comparison. But at least, we did get to that point, with pretty much everything taken care of. And honestly, as a start to resuming my regular life, it’s probably best to get hit with the most life can dish out. Once we got through that, anything else would be the proverbial piece of cake.

Although that’s another thing there’s going to be less of, and more of the usual rummaging through the kitchen for whatever we can find. At least we’ve gotten the place restocked… and then some. But that’s a topic for another time.

Until then, honey, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.