Truly blogging into the wind now. Oh well. Forgot my diary in this country I'm leaving behind. I act like it didn't strike a chord with me, I don't believe there's been a big emotional attachment, but I haven't spent this long in one country since I moved out of my parents' house. Curious about what I'll miss. I'm guessing mostly the green - at least we get one last June of it - and the desperate bids to salvage the bits of pre-war architecture, even the industrial stuff, that hasn't been knocked down yet, while allowing enough renovation to make it livable. Let's see. At the moment, with so much admin done but so much grunt work to do to get to the next place, I'm thinking harder about what I'm leaving behind than what I'm getting into.

Just turned down the boys' school places here for next year. It was the hardest bit, emotionally, of this whole process, which is ironic because this whole process wouldn't have started unless we hadn't decided they shouldn't be going to school here. The childhood-ending Gymnasium Godzilla isn't going to is really nice, for a childhood-ending institution. It has a vivarium in the atrium. Nice big one. Recent total rebuild. Looks like well-lit Star Trek. And the Monkey King knows what's going on too, and he's sad about it. The pandemic really fucked up the years we've spent here, but it's still their place, their friends, their sense of everything. What are we doing dragging them out of this sense of place? 

I thought I had accepted it, but I hadn't: parenting is choosing your poison. Not for yourself, because that's just life once you move out of your parents' place. I'm totally comfortable choosing my own poison. It's choosing your poison for other people, for the people you love most in the world, the people who you would literally set the world on fire to protect. But you still have to choose a poison. 

So last week was a pretty big international life admin week - safe to say biggest of my life by some measures and the groundwork for my whole midlife crisis, which should last about 15 years, minimum. And at the point where I bought my fifth piece of real estate - second that week, and fourth country - the agent congratulated me, and it caught me totally off guard. I mean they're very nice people for real estate agents and I was absolutely polite back but honestly, when someone blows all that measurable money on something with such a basically unmeasurable value all at once, isn't the correct response "good luck" rather than "congratulations"? 

All of which contributes to saying, things are trucking along. The F-word's studio got packed up and shipped last week. Everything else gets packed up and shipped in a week and a half, including the boys and I - off to the family to wait all this out for the summer, and let the F-word repay with the sweat of his brow all the admin work I've been doing for the last year or so. It feels good. Weird. One of the things that went with the movers at the same time as the studio was my bike, so when I got back from all the international admin work and I realized I wasn't going to ride a bike here anymore, I got a little misty. I really liked riding a bike here. Keep thinking "oh, I'll just pop on my bike and go get some pasta cheese" and then think nope, nope you aren't. It's a little like when someone who you still need to tell something dies, and nope, nope you can't tell them. I've often thought that moving was a bit like a little death, a practice for death maybe, and the older I get the more I think that, with growing horror. 

Nevertheless, she persisted. Hahahahahahahahah. Idiot.