A blur. Yes, that’s a good word to describe the past week. It’s been a lot of non-stop helter-skelter, hurry-scurry, running to-and-fro trying to tie up the little bits and pieces of life that underpin it and allow us to do the big things.
Although I could eat fast-food all the time, I’d rather make a couple trips to the grocery store to buy some salads, soups, and sandwiches and get the refrigerator stocked. Getting the essentials into stock at the house is, well, essential. But there’s more to it, of course. The salad wouldn’t taste good without croutons and some sort of dressing, and since I couldn’t ship any of that from my last household, I had to buy replacements for all the things that were in my refrigerator in Germany.
Yesterday I had the satellite dish installed. Yet another first for me! I’ve never had to have satellite-related equipment installed before. I’m not sure anyone else in my family has ever had satellite TV before.
I’m told that in Germany, the satellite dishes are more prevalent in poorer areas than in more well-to-do areas. Most of the genteels have cable TV. Satellite is apparently for immigrants who want to get a broadcast from back home, wherever that might have been–Russia, Turkey, Romania, etc. I pointed out that the little American enclaves we tend to live in all have satellite dishes, too. Why criticize poorer immigrants, we Americans don’t bother trying to assimilate into the local culture, either. I guess the difference is a DEROS!
In what little spare time I have, I’ve been trying to read Crime and Punishment. It’s pretty lengthy, and I haven’t quite figured out what’s going to eventually happen to the anti-hero. If one of my literary friends wants to e-mail me and converse regarding the deeper meaning of this book, by all means, get in touch!
I need to wrap up Don Quixote as well. It was too big to carry from Germany to Japan, and I was only halfway finished reading it when I departed Europe. I like it a lot, maybe because I feel like I sympathize with the good Don?
I should have Internet access within the next week or so. Until then, blogging will be somewhere between ‘virtually nonexistent’ and ‘I won’t be doing it.’
Oh, did I mention I tried a mini-Triathlon last weekend? It was a 400m swim, a 10k bike race, and a 5k run. I finished in 1:07:02. It was something like 21 minutes slower than the guy who won. I did alright on the swim, I was in the end of the middle of the pack. But the bike race killed me. Now, I had to use my wife’s steel-frame mountain bike (I don’t own a 12-speed or a racing bike or anything, and my aluminum-frame mountain bike was down for repairs that I couldn’t perform). I did okay going uphill, which constituted the first 1 km of the bike race, but once we got to the level, quite a few people went racing on by me.
I said "participants" because since I’ve never tried a Triathlon before, my goal was to finish. Most of the rest of the folks were "competing." One of the folks told me I ought to try competing next year, and an easy way to start would be to get a racing bike!