First Week

Tomorrow it will be Friday already. Time goes much faster when you are staying busy. I am so glad to be back at work, and I think this was a huge step towards being the me that I recognize.

It feels good to be doing something useful. It makes me feel competent, except, of course, when I feel incompetent. Today a seventh grader said to me, "I have no idea what you just said. I didn't get one single thing about it." Ah. Seventh graders. I had forgotten how they are! I said what I had said again; in fact, about three more times in different ways. By the end I seemed to have communicated more successfully.

Last week I posted a couple of status updates on Facebook about electricity, and several people commented that they could tell life was back to normal, since that's what I used to obsess about pre-earthquake. Again this week we are having power problems. On Tuesday night we had a big storm and the city power went out. Our inverter (battery backup) lasted through yesterday afternoon (we do have a generator, too, but it isn't working), and then last night we slept without any fans. It was very warm and sweaty and the air was filled with the whining of mosquitoes. Our quality of sleep suffered. I kept thinking, though, about people sleeping in tents, and my situation didn't seem so bad. Still, I hope that the electricity will come on again tonight as usual.

And tomorrow it will be Friday, the end of a week of "normal life." Normal is so beautiful; I never appreciated it before the way I do now.