Giving Back to the Blog Community

I'm finding that having my own blog comes with a major downside: apparently, the only way that new posts show up is if I do them myself. This seems to me to be an inherently unfair division of labor, only partly compensated by the fact that I have 100% artistic control here. Of course, if my blog readers would write more comments, there would be interesting new things for me to read whenever I open up this blog. I blame myself for not making your responsibilities here clearer from the very beginning.

Other news this week: I have lined up replacement movers. Literally as my plane was pulling away from the gate at Charles de Gaulle Monday morning, I was on the cell phone begging with the alternate moving company, explaining that although I understood that his company was fully booked June 23-24, given that I'm not getting back to France until June 11, if he sent movers to take away all my belongings on June 19 and I had to pack most of those belongings myself before that date, I was quite literally going to have a nervous breakdown. This sob story turned out to be quite effective, because he agreed to have the movers pack everything for me, for the same price as his original I-pack-myself offer, if I agreed to June 19-20 move dates. So I've lost 4 days of move prep time, but I have a signed moving contract and don't have to pack myself with 4 days less prep time. At this point, that qualifies as good news!

I do still have to do 5,397,813 things between now and June 19, but I expect to be able to delegate many of them to you, my loyal readers (those of you on the left side of the Atlantic can breathe easy; this will mostly concern the right-siders for the time being). I need to file my U.S. tax return by June 15 and my French tax return by June 24, and as we all know, you kind of have to do both of them in order to have all the numbers you need for either one. Since Isabelle has already filed all her income taxes for the year and knows all the ins and outs of both sets of forms, it only makes sense that she take over this task for me. And since my friend A is a communications expert, I imagine that she'll want to take charge of the sale of all the furniture and appliances I'm not sending back to the U.S. Anyone need a 1994 rock-hard futon? (See, A, I'm really bad at this marketing stuff by myself. I need you . . . .)

Another major event in my life this week: I went to see the movie Sex and the City on Wednesday. Those of you who read Eric with a "C"'s blog know how much he was looking forward to this movie, and I of course felt that it was important to my American reintegration to see it now. So after work at the Corporation on Wednesday, I decided to take a 20-minute walk over to a nearby movie theater. Unfortunately, during those 20 minutes, Washington was hit by a monsoon, and even though I had an umbrella with me, I arrived at the movie theater looking not unlike a shipwreck survivor dragging herself onto shore. I thought the movie was cute, but I probably would have enjoyed it more had water not been flowing from my clothes as I sat shivering in the air-conditioning for the entire show. My enjoyment of the movie also decreased drastically when I got back to my hotel afterwards and discovered that my computer case is apparently less watertight than one might hope, and that my poor little laptop was not monsoon-ready. After blowing a fan on the computer all night long, the keyboard and track pad seem to have dried out and be working correctly again, but the water damage to the screen appears to be permanent. The France-shaped blot on the screen (although poetically appropriate) is distracting, but I can read the screen well enough to work, so I guess I don't have to buy a new computer immediately, in the midst of all my moving expenses. However, since it's obviously Eric with a C's fault that I had to go to the movie in the rainstorm in the first place, I imagine he'll want to buy me a new computer (probably best to wait until I get to MN to pick it out myself; you wouldn't want to run the risk of choosing the wrong thing for someone as Particular as I am).

See how many opportunities there are for my readers to give back to the blog community?

But the best and most important news of the week is this: my mom's back surgery went well on Tuesday, and although she had a very bad day on Thursday, she was doing much, much better yesterday and sounding more like herself. It's going to be a long recovery process, but in the end, she should have significantly less pain than pre-surgery. And in a few weeks, I will at long last be living near enough to help out when my family needs me to.