We are into summer already here. Olivia spent today doing summer kid things: playing in the neighbor kid's sprinkler, jumping on our trampoline, eating Popsicles. She skipped her afternoon nap and collapsed in our bed after dinner, spent.
People keep asking how I am settling in and truth be told, I don't know that we are. Aaron goes off to work each day for 10 -12 hours and Olivia and I fill the days with a little of this and that. A bike ride to the grocery store, swimming at the Y, too many videos of Shaun the Sheep.
I have had few conversations with people here, being that I am mostly chaperoning a 2 year-old. Still, a surprising number of people have managed to insert the word "Yankee" into an otherwise innocuous sentence. It's done in a "just kidding y'all" way, but I end up reacting internally like "yeah, put it there pal!" Less Yankee and more Philadelphia.
The house is still a hot mess. You'd have thought we'd just arrived yesterday rather than 3 weeks ago. It makes me crazy and unsettled to have it this way, but it is flat-out boring for Olivia to watch me unpack, so we end up playing rather than getting things in order.
The last two nights I read a whole book. It was a great feeling to have that head space back and to realize that Olivia is reaching a stage where I can back off a bit and regain some of my old muscles.
So what do I think of Charlotte so far? Couldn't tell you. Our little patch of green is good for the kid and the dog, so we'll start with that and see where it leads.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
We Are Not Lawn People
This I have learned after a week in Charlotte. I suppose this shouldn't have surprised anybody. Aaron grew up in a desert and I grew up with no front yard and a back yard that was mostly marsh. The intervening years for both of us have been mostly in cities. Neither of us felt any sort of hankering to get back to the land, if anything we'd prefer to be closer to take-out.
Our neighbors on all sides and across the street have well-tended yards, indeed since I have been here all have mowed at least once. Our backyard is a jungle in comparison and we don't own a mower. Every day or so we look at it and comment that we really need to do something about it before it rains again. I have more than once not been able to find the dog because she was laying down in the tall grass and therefore out of view.
We are probably not going to do anything crazy -- like buy a mower -- but we haven't even asked a neighbor kid if he wants to make some extra money by doing our lawn occasionally. There just seem to be so many better pursuits.
Our first week was marred somewhat by Olivia getting sick with a virus and spiking a temperature. Of course we hadn't yet found a pediatrician, so we ended up at the ER with her shaking and vomiting and Aaron and I scared and unsure. Four days and four sleepless nights later she is still not back to her old self and the house remains in a state of neither here nor there. Everybody is tired and disoriented. Boxes are unpacked in each room, there's a big bare spot in the kitchen where a table and chairs should be and instead a trampoline sits.
I feel like an anthropologist at times. In some ways Charlotte seems more foreign than some other countries I have been to. Quite a few times I have been completely unable to understand what someone has said beneath their southern accent. At those times I have this sort of split reaction of feeling idiotic on one hand and on the other wondering "was that just English I heard? What the...?"
A series of "you're not in the Bay Area anymore": This week the NRA had their big annual conference here at their HQ and NASCAR is having it's season opener as well. The Charlotte Tea Party had a rally. Rednecks and redneck wanna-bes are everywhere with slogan t-shirts and incomprehensible placards. There are more churches than you can shake a stick at, and yet my uncharitable thought upon seeing so many was to wonder why Charlotte still has a higher-than-average crime rate?
In that same anthropologist vein: people are much nicer here. They take time to answer questions and acknowledge you with a wave and a smile when they drive by and you are walking. They say "how you doing?" rather than hello. The pace is slower and transactions are less -- well, transactional. The drivers are generally polite and somewhat hesitant almost, rather than trying to get somewhere as fast as possible.
I expect, when in Africa say, to not expect things to be like home. In the southern US I kind of expect more continuity. Example: I have been hunting for my favorite snack, freeze-dried apples, which are readily available in California or CT. Went to 4 different grocery chains -- from high-end to discount -- looking for them and found nada. I finally asked an employee in the produce department if they carried freeze-dried fruit and he thought I meant just dried fruit. When I clarified it he said, not meanly but not smilingly either, "you must be from California or some such place."
I got back in my car frustrated at not being able to find something that is not a specialty item, it's just fruit for God's sake, and a simple pleasure for me. Ended up almost in tears at feeling again like the new kid in school after so many years of it. I really want friends here and a community for us. There have been so many desires deferred these last three years that waiting, even to orient, is a rock in my shoe.
Our neighbors on all sides and across the street have well-tended yards, indeed since I have been here all have mowed at least once. Our backyard is a jungle in comparison and we don't own a mower. Every day or so we look at it and comment that we really need to do something about it before it rains again. I have more than once not been able to find the dog because she was laying down in the tall grass and therefore out of view.
We are probably not going to do anything crazy -- like buy a mower -- but we haven't even asked a neighbor kid if he wants to make some extra money by doing our lawn occasionally. There just seem to be so many better pursuits.
Our first week was marred somewhat by Olivia getting sick with a virus and spiking a temperature. Of course we hadn't yet found a pediatrician, so we ended up at the ER with her shaking and vomiting and Aaron and I scared and unsure. Four days and four sleepless nights later she is still not back to her old self and the house remains in a state of neither here nor there. Everybody is tired and disoriented. Boxes are unpacked in each room, there's a big bare spot in the kitchen where a table and chairs should be and instead a trampoline sits.
I feel like an anthropologist at times. In some ways Charlotte seems more foreign than some other countries I have been to. Quite a few times I have been completely unable to understand what someone has said beneath their southern accent. At those times I have this sort of split reaction of feeling idiotic on one hand and on the other wondering "was that just English I heard? What the...?"
A series of "you're not in the Bay Area anymore": This week the NRA had their big annual conference here at their HQ and NASCAR is having it's season opener as well. The Charlotte Tea Party had a rally. Rednecks and redneck wanna-bes are everywhere with slogan t-shirts and incomprehensible placards. There are more churches than you can shake a stick at, and yet my uncharitable thought upon seeing so many was to wonder why Charlotte still has a higher-than-average crime rate?
In that same anthropologist vein: people are much nicer here. They take time to answer questions and acknowledge you with a wave and a smile when they drive by and you are walking. They say "how you doing?" rather than hello. The pace is slower and transactions are less -- well, transactional. The drivers are generally polite and somewhat hesitant almost, rather than trying to get somewhere as fast as possible.
I expect, when in Africa say, to not expect things to be like home. In the southern US I kind of expect more continuity. Example: I have been hunting for my favorite snack, freeze-dried apples, which are readily available in California or CT. Went to 4 different grocery chains -- from high-end to discount -- looking for them and found nada. I finally asked an employee in the produce department if they carried freeze-dried fruit and he thought I meant just dried fruit. When I clarified it he said, not meanly but not smilingly either, "you must be from California or some such place."
I got back in my car frustrated at not being able to find something that is not a specialty item, it's just fruit for God's sake, and a simple pleasure for me. Ended up almost in tears at feeling again like the new kid in school after so many years of it. I really want friends here and a community for us. There have been so many desires deferred these last three years that waiting, even to orient, is a rock in my shoe.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Home Again?
Arrived here in Charlotte on Mother's Day. Truck with all our belongings had arrived the day before and the house was piled high with boxes. New Home, take 3.
Every day Olivia has said "I want to go home." Each time we tell her "You are home. Mommy and Daddy and Sadie are here. This is home." This does not mesh with a 2 year-old's logic. Then where is the playground? Where are her friends? No, can't be home.
Aaron is still getting the lay of the land in his workplace. He finally got his ID badge so he can go to the loo unescorted and his log-on IDs so he can have access to all the databases he needs.
I got a call from a recruiter yesterday for the first time in probably a year or more. It was for a job that I wasn't any kind of fit for, but I thought it was a good portend.
It was a good thing it was not a good fit because I was so out of practice talking about my professional experience that it was clear I need to do some warm-ups. And figure out what I want/can do in this weird economy. Is there a job for me out there? Hellloooo?!
Every day Olivia has said "I want to go home." Each time we tell her "You are home. Mommy and Daddy and Sadie are here. This is home." This does not mesh with a 2 year-old's logic. Then where is the playground? Where are her friends? No, can't be home.
Aaron is still getting the lay of the land in his workplace. He finally got his ID badge so he can go to the loo unescorted and his log-on IDs so he can have access to all the databases he needs.
I got a call from a recruiter yesterday for the first time in probably a year or more. It was for a job that I wasn't any kind of fit for, but I thought it was a good portend.
It was a good thing it was not a good fit because I was so out of practice talking about my professional experience that it was clear I need to do some warm-ups. And figure out what I want/can do in this weird economy. Is there a job for me out there? Hellloooo?!
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