I’m awfully tired right now, sad and pretty down. My freelance colleague, Lena, died of cancer on Sunday night and it’s affected the whole team. We’re all really dragging and it’s hard to concentrate at work or at home, or even while driving in between. We sent her a card last Friday and all I keep thinking about is that I didn’t get to say goodbye to her and she didn’t even get our card in time, and it just sucks.
Work is insane as well, which doesn’t help.
I come home and power-walk on the treadmill for 30 minutes almost every day but my heart isn’t in it. Right now, nothing is really holding any appeal. I find myself sitting and staring into space, or playing endless mindless games on the iPad, …I can’t seem to really get motivated about anything.
It’s spring, and the sun is shining and it’s gorgeous out, but I don’t feel like there’s any way to enjoy it when my head is basically locked into my screen for 8+ hours a day.
Our plane tickets home for Toronto and Michigan are FINALLY purchased after a major struggle…the prices jumped 10,000 SEK in the 4 days between when I first looked at flight options and the day I could actually buy them. I was afraid we’d not be able to go (again)… since 40,000 kronor is just ridiculously expensive, and we still have everything else to pay for on top of that. But with the help of my friend Russell, and 2 hours on Skype, while we tried desperately to find a decent price to the right destination, we finally found something that worked…I was so relieved. Until I was actually entering the personal info and discovered that my American passport expired last week.
GAH.
So I’ve spent the last 3 days running around getting the photos and the fee check and the shipping label for the postage-paid return envelope and the right envelope and the forms filled out and I’ll be mailing the damn thing off to the Embassy tomorrow. We have to get Martin’s Swedish passport renewed as well, but it’s not such an emergency, at least.
Karin comes home tonight sometime between 3 and 4 a.m. from the ski trip she’s been on all week. She has to go to school tomorrow (it was one of the conditions of going on the trip at all, since the kids were allowed to take Tuesday and Wednesday off) and I expect she’ll be a zombie in the morning.
I hope the sun sticks around for the weekend. I need to sit in it for a long stretch and lift my face to the sky and literally recharge.