Back to the roots for a happy occasion

I've bought an expensive gift, a nice dress and some accessories. I am off to a family event and a few days of indulgence in everything that is sweet and good about Home Country (since I don't live there anymore I don't have to deal with all the things that are just crappy and dull). See you next week.

On a whiney note

I sometimes see other bloggers talk about how they don't blog much when things are going well and there are no problems to discuss on the blog. For me it seems to be the other way around. When things are going well and I am coasting along at work I have lots of ideas for blogging and the energy to write it down. Lately I been feeling so exhausted that I could barely string two sentences together in my free time, let alone think of anything to say. Quite ironically I'm not even exhausted from working too much, but rather from taking too much time off work to do other things. First my mom and sister were visiting for ten days, including two weekends. Absolutely wonderful to have them around for so long and I genuinely enjoyed it and wished they could have stayed longer, but weekends are my time to catch up on sleep, work, household chores and general me-time, so missing two in a row is noticeable. Last weekend I went to a family event in home country and once again everything here was left to its own devices. I got to spend time with my parents, siblings and baby nephews. It was wonderful to be home and I am glad I came and participated and I made my family happy, but I was so not ready for a new week when I came back on Monday.

I have been working during and in between all this family activity, but I have had NO energy at all for anything beyond work. I have skipped the gym for weeks, I cooked while I had visitors, but this past week I have been really sloppy an taken to lots of ready-made crap food, I left work early because I couldn't stand being there, but did nothing but watch TV once I came home and fantasised every morning about staying home/ calling in sick/ getting another job. I don't hate my job, but I feel a bit burned out right now. It is such a thin line between success and failure all the time and it takes such care and concentration to walk this line for weeks and months on end. It works if I go to bed at a reasonable time every night and have weekends off to pick up the slack at home, but as soon as something happens that throws me off the regular schedule everything slips. Apparently I don't function properly if I don't have two days a week to do nothing but stay at home and be good to myself. I wonder how I'd survived if I'd lived, say fifty years ago, where I don't think I could have expected anything of that sort.

Blogging resumed

What started out as an unwanted lack of internet access during the holidays turned out to be a welcome break from my online life. As much as I like posting here and reading all your blogs it was actually really nice to do something else. Though, I do think it is strange that my parents got wireless internet that doesn't reach outside the living room.

So what have I been up to since I left. I have given up on composing a long and thoughtful post about everything that happened the past three weeks, so a quick bulleted update will have to do.

I visited grad school city and and enjoyed it so much that I couldn't believe it when all my friends were talking about buying houses and moving away. I do remember feeling the same way before I left little more than a year ago, but seen from my sugar-coated point of view now, I just didn't get why anybody would voluntarily leave such a fantastic city - ever. I also visited both of my former advisors and if the city itself made my home sickness grow enourmously the visit to my former university definitely did not. It was great to see the advisors and they were both really sweet and happy to see me, but I am so thankful that I have managed to move on from the academic environment I came from.

I went to see my family for an entire week. I talked to my sisters, spent an entire day doing christmas shopping in very-prettyly chistmas decorated Medieval town nearby with my mom, had lots of food (I say LOTS), talked to my dad about my work and my mom about my life and to my sisters about everything. I played with my nephew and baked christmas cookies with my mom and prepared a lot of food and cleaned a lot of tables. It was absolutely wonderful and I am very happy I took the time off to be with them for more than a few days.

The last few days Fiancé and I drove all the way back home to relax and move into our first shared home before the real world started spinning again.