Oh yeah, this place.

I haven’t written here in so long I had to re-enter my password when I signed in. I actually have about five posts saved in the draft folder, almost ready to publish, but my mind has not been here recently. We’ve been balls deep in visa paperwork for the past several weeks, and hopefully about to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but in the meantime, the non-visa paperwork part of my brain is pretty useless. Earlier this week, I was trying to find a way to get to Dublin to see Maggie while she’s there, and at one point I thought, “If I go to Dublin for four days, that nice salsa Jay and Patti sent us will go bad before I get back.” Priorities! Basically every thing I’ve said out loud for the past week, you could have responded by making an unkind and non-politically correct face and sound, and I couldn’t have argued with you.

What else is new that is shareable with the internet. Not a lot. Oh, I know… the other night I was suddenly seized with some ideas of how I wanted to dress this fall? Which is sort of weird because I’m not about to enter high school, and for the most part am a pretty boring dresser. I blame it on reading lots of crap magazines lately when I switch my brain off from visa mode. Anyway, I actually wrote these ideas down on a list and took it shopping with me—not that I can afford to buy anything at the moment; it was mostly a distraction mission. And. AND! One of my ideas that I thought was so clever and original was all over the place, and three others were things that apparently don’t exist. Does this mean I’m avant-garde? I’m not wearing treggings so it’s hard to tell.

I’m going to miss England when we go. I like to grumble about it, but I really do love London. I’m simultaneously nearing the breaking point of missing home—beyond missing people, just missing things. I miss my bed, I miss my bathrobe, I miss my desktop computer that doesn’t have an outdated operating system like this abacus laptop I brought with me. The other day I caught myself reminiscing about the sound our laundry room door makes when it closes. Kind of a whooooof-click, muffled by the carpet. Siiiigh.

I’ve made myself two separate lists, one of the things I miss about home and one of the things I know I’ll miss about London. The emerging theme is Places I Like to Sit (and Talk/Drink/Eat). I’ll miss a lot of British television, which is funny because the only American show I miss is 30 Rock, and we can watch that here. Sweets are better here, but it’ll be great to have real pizza again. This quickly devolves into bad stand-up cliches. White people be dialing the phone like this, black people dial like this! One thing for certain is that after a year of living with just a fraction of my belongings, I have a whole new understanding of what I actually want and need. Not that I don’t want and need some really superficial, unimportant stuff: now I just know which stuff. There will be a massive cull once I get back. If you need a bunch of black shirts and old lip gloss, let me know.