95838767 © Publicdomainphotos | Dreamstime.com
Once again we are moving, this time all the way back to the East Coast of the United States to the state of Delaware. Now that my parents are no longer living the biggest reason for our moving to California is no longer present, and an urge to simplify our lives seems to be calling us. Pamela also lost a family member who lived near Sacramento earlier this year who was the last member of that generation of her family living close to us.
Here is a time capsule from the Covid-19 plague year for future readers who might be interested in what it was like around these times.
The cold rain has come back, comfort to those who worry about drought, but making it difficult to go outside to take in a little bit of exercise. Spring has been as slow to come as it has been every year, and since it doesn’t snow here we don’t have the receeding line of old drifts to tell us how much progress we’ve made since the beginning of January.
unsplash-logoEugene Triguba
Last week we picked up our fifth car this month, a white Nissan Versa. It’s a little snug but will be fine just for getting around.
We have this because car number four, a Nissan Altima, is in the body shop to repair a scrape it acquired a few hours before we bought it. The seller agreed that the repair would be done at their expense without our having to argue about it, and we’re hoping it will turn out fine.
© Alexey Kondratev
ID 8616636 | Dreamstime.com
By this time four weeks from now we will have moved to a new place in Alameda. The preparations for taking possession of this condo are well on their way thanks to a whirlwind two weeks of activity. They tell us it’s a slow season for people hunting for a home because of the holidays and the rise in interest rates, so we haven’t had to compete with other people for the same properties.
The job where I am working now is going away by the middle of next month, so there is some urgency right now to work out some alternate work arrangement, and no way to rig up some sort of a remote engineer position. And so, yesterday I was booked on the short flight there, and ended spending about ten hours waiting in airports because some cloud cover appeared in Los Angeles and some rain fell in San Francisco.
When I was a kid growing up in San Francisco everybody was well versed with rain, which seemed like it could come down at any time except during the warmest part of the year in September-October. We didn’t have advanced materials to protect us from the elements then like Gore-Tex and super-hydrophobic coatings for our windshields then. I was a traffic boy in elementary school and we often went out in the mornings and was often sent out wearing a rubberized slicker with brass clasps like the one on this Etsy page.
