Back in Florida for Christmas for the first time in I can’t remember. It’s definitely warmer than in our nation’s capital, but it’s still chilly, especially in the mornings. My motivation for 10k steps daily has waned a bit because mornings are 38 degrees. Since I do not have a lovely gym right across from me and am reduced to pounding pavement, there’s not a lot to encourage me to wake up and go. Especially since A. it doesn’t lead to weight loss and B. there’s nothing else to do all day anyway, so I can walk around the neighborhood later.
This chapter of No Place Like Home should be two months
long; I’m not due back for language training until the end of February. I may
have scheduled something earlier, but I honestly can’t tell from the schedule.
There’s a two-hour class I have to do in a couple weeks, but beyond that, there’s
nothing.
It’s all about Zippy. Yard work and massive home repairs are
on the calendar as soon as 2024 hits and there’s also the matter of getting a
new side view mirror because Zippy toasted the current one. It’s held up by a
lot of tape and a prayer. This is no vacation.
I have a ton of leave to burn, though, and penciling it out,
I will still have a bunch left over when it’s all said and done. It’s a little
bit crazy, but it’s a nice crazy to have. Right now, I have three pots of leave
and they all runneth over.
Anyway, Christmas at home is fine; Batgirl is happy to have
another human to rub her tummy. We don’t do anything for the holiday, but I did
get to a Christmas Eve service, which was nice. What’s not wonderful is having
three people in the house and only two bathrooms; I’m having to share a tiny
bathroom and I’m crammed into the third bedroom, which has little spare room.
That’s bad because I have all my Sandbox furnishings – 400 pounds – with me.
Much of it is in the garage and I’ve gifted Wendy some stuff I brought, but the
rest has to hang somewhere. It’s household stuff, so I’m not using it, but it
has to stay somewhere until it gets shipped to my next post, which won’t be
until September.
It's crowded, so when I had the opportunity to cat sit for
almost a week and have a whole bathroom – as well as Netflix and the whole
house – to myself, I jumped. YAY! I spent Monday-Friday elsewhere, catching up
on some movies, including the wonderful Christmas film “Love Actually.”
While there, I did try to walk a little. There’s a circle
and I’d do that every morning, popping in a “Stuff You Should Know” podcast and
throwing on headphones. Somehow, though, upon return, I can’t find the
headphones anymore. It’s no great loss; they’re the wired ones that come with
the phone, and the left one stopped working about three weeks ago. It’s a
mysterious loss, though. It’s not here; it’s not there, but it has to be
somewhere.
And now that I am back at No Place Like Home, I don’t have
any headphones. Somewhere in the 400 pounds of stuff, there’s a wireless set
but I have no clue where and don’t feel like digging. That wireless set is the
third set of those I’ve bought. A cheap pair I got in Vilnius blew out and I
left those on the free table. The first set was with me in Minsk. I remember
one really cold morning (there were a lot of them) I went to the big grocery
store and, in that no-man’s land between the first sliding door and the second
one, the left one fell out!
Man, that was upsetting. I hunted and hunted for that thing;
I mean, it couldn’t have gone far; it’s not like I didn’t notice it had fallen
out. I got on my hands and knees and looked underneath ATM and vending machines
– places no human eye (or hands) should ever encounter. But no dice.
Eventually, I bought a replacement off eBay but quickly
discovered (quickly after the agonizingly slow delivery, anyway) it wasn’t exactly
the same and was therefore not compatible. (Say mine was model 831 and the new
one was 832.) Bummer. I went with the wired forever and then caved and bought
the cheap ones in Vilnius. Pair No. 3, the one in a box somewhere, is corded
together so I’m not worried about losing those, but I have to find them first.
While unpacking, I rooted through my backpack and felt
something hard in this little bungie thingie on the strap. It’s for your MP3
player or something; I never use it. (My backpack dates to MP3 players.) I dug
through the mesh to identify the object and it was my long-lost headphones!
Truly a Christmas miracle.
Weirdly, I found the mismatched set in my 400 pounds of crap
and reunited Lefty with Righty and tossed them in the charter together. A blue
light blinked suspiciously, but Lefty charged up like a trouper.
That thing fell out of my ear well over two years ago and I
hunted forever for it. The whole time, it was lodged in mesh maybe 8 inches
from my ear
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