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.
Neither of us has ever lived in Delaware previously, but we visited the little state for the first time about nine years ago and gradually came to the realization that this could turn out to be a great place for us to escape some of the bustle and expense of West Coast urban living back to a house of our own again.
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.
It’s been the strangest kind of Palm Sunday, switching between three different Masses online this morning, the palm branches blessed to be distributed at some later unspecified time, the story of the Passion oddly resonant with this backdrop of so much suffering and death.
The usual refuge of taking refuge in a book or something on television no longer holds as much appeal as before, with so many shows and so much reading matter piling up and still somehow unsatisfying.
We find a kind of solace in meeting over the internet as millions of other people have discovered, but it’s a nearly uncharted kind of social interaction place still especially with people we have known for decades but only in the face to face fashion or by email.
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.
© 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. It was four hours in the morning flying
from SFO to LAX, and six on my way back. I was there to hear about what it would
be like to take a transfer from my company’s office in Silicon Valley down to
California, but it was this experience bracketing the work trip which has nearly
completely convinced me that at this time in my life the prospect of moving
even that far from here is not for me.
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.
It was just the way things were here, before the years of drought starting in
the 1970s.
