Friday!

I'm never even sure what day it is, most of the time.  I look at my phone and it tells me that day, date, and time.  And it is an "old fashioned" flip phone!

I had a semi busy day.  Went to the chiropractor.  My sciatica has been killing me, so that was a good thing- going to see the chiropractor that is. Then I went to the gym and got my membership started up again.  I had it halted when I was waiting for surgery and as I recovered.    I am planning to start going in and working out slowly, next week I hope.  I also called the Breastfeeding Center and told them that I am ready to start working again.   We can use some money.  And I get to do what I love while getting paid for it!  

The guy from Sears was supposed to come and work on the dryer between 1 and 5 today.  He came at 11:00.  I was not home.  Nick was here.  But we had timed our activities to be here during the hours we were told.  Oh well.  There was a service charge- which we knew about.  But Nick said that the guy took about a ton of lint and fuzz out of the inside of the dryer.  I saw it in the trash bag.  Amazing!  repairing the dryer will cost over $400.00.  Or, I should say "would".  We are going to have to go and buy a new dryer.     I even have to re-wash last weeks laundry because it has a burned smell from the dryer.   Oh well.

Somewhere, somehow I came across a web site with pictures of Shamian Island.   This is an island inside the city of Guangzhou, China.  The US Consulate in Guangzhou is (or was) on this island, and we lived there.  I felt so many feelings looking at these pictures.   I have seen many of the places where the pictures were taken.  We lived in the annex to the White Swan Hotel and used the pools and the restaurant there a lot.  We could even call for room service.   I was just starting to know my way around, and had enough of the language to get a taxi and to shop at the market- more or less.  I'm sure that if we had been there for the whole two years we were assigned to be, I would have really gotten to know my way around really well.

A few months ago I started to write about the various kitchens we have had in the places we have lived.  I need to go back and read my blog posts to see how far I got on that project.   I said back then that I would like to write about the bathrooms in our various homes.

There are things I have liked, and things I have disliked about everywhere we have lived.  There have even been things I loved about the places we've lived.  I have gained something and left pieces of myself everywhere we have spent time.

Tomorrow we plan to attend the memorial service of the man who was our linguist at the State Department when we studied Thai in 1975.  When we came back from Australia in 1998, and I joined the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Fairfax, imagine my surprise when I saw this man at my church!  And so, tomorrow we will share memories and learn things about a man we knew for almost 40 years and probably didn't really know at all.