We’re officially a 2-person household again as Karin is in the process of moving out from under her parent’s roof and into another (temporary) apartment with a friend, this time in Malmö. Since she is working at Flyinge school, which is literally less than a 5-minute walk from our door, and will have to pay an alarmingly high amount in rent each month, plus deal with parking there, when she could continue to live here for free, I am a bit boggled by her choice, but she’s young and cool and ready to be on her own. And since she has now made the decision not to start university next month which would have entailed a move to a new place and new lifestyle, I guess this is the next best thing. Independence that she can pay for with her salary and a place to drop in and sleep overnight when needed. She has to be at work here in Flyinge at 7:45 each morning and with rush hour traffic from Malmö or having to take the trains/buses all the way, she’s going to be having to get up awfully early every day to get to work on time…and if she chooses to spend the nights more often here or at her nearby girlfriend’s, then I will REALLY question spending money on rent for a place half an hour away.
Ah well, I guess they have to figure it out for themselves, right?
I just realized that I haven’t written anything about Karin not starting university this next month as originally planned. Universities are still mostly online only here in Sweden, and with her program being international, approximately 70% of the students in her program can’t get here. Her expectations for university life were thus completely wrecked, and she decided to defer for another year. She has applied for a couple of courses in Malmö but is on the waiting list, so we’ll see. At least she has a full time job! After losing her job at Axis unexpectedly at the beginning of the summer due to shortsightedness on the part of her managers who didn’t give her the correct contract for the correct dates, and having her other part time job as a boule guide dry up, also due to the pandemic, she managed to snag a job working for Flyinge school for a month and a half until school ended. They liked her so much they asked her to come back full time in the fall, so she’s been working since school started in the middle of August.
Her room is echoingly empty, even though there is still a lot of stuff stuffed in her closet and some overspill into Martin’s plus some miscellaneous boxes and bags. I’m thinking maybe I’ll move my treadmill into it, which would make the TV in the playroom watchable again from the sofa. Or the art table that we put in Martin’s room after our bedroom renovation. We don’t know at this point if, or when, she might move back in. I suspect she’ll go from there straight to college next fall (assuming she makes enough money to keep paying her rent and bills in this apartment). After university, which would be 3 years away, I’d be awfully surprised if she moved back home. And by then I’ll be pushing 60. How is that even possible? La la la I can’t hear you.
I haven’t written in ages because honestly, I don’t seem to have much to write about. Even my random thoughts and musing seem bland and repetitive to me most of the time. I’ve managed to persuade 2 people to step up for AWC board elections and with the 1 other person who volunteered and the majority of the board staying on, we only have 1 more position to fill, and it’s the least important. In fact, it’s a position that I personally think we could do without, so we’ll see. We have the board elections coming up at the end of September but we still don’t think we can have an in-person meeting and on top of things, the hotel we’ve been using for our monthly meetings up until the start of the pandemic, just drastically raised their prices and because we waived dues for this year (due to the pandemic and not being able to have activities and meetings), we can’t afford it anymore. It’s always something, isn’t it? We had just gotten the board positions pretty much filled, which was a fairly stressful process, and now this. Urgh.
We also moved into our new office headquarters, a brand-spanking-new building, the week before last, and I’ve been working on site for 3 days so far. I’ll be in the office again Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday next week as well, before I rotate back to working from home. We’re on the 7th floor, facing northeast and my team is sitting in a fairly large open landscape room with huge windows and a fantastic view on 3 sides.
We still haven’t settled exactly how we want our desks arranged and the discussion has been unexpectedly painful and drawn-out since there are so many opinions and so many individual requests: sit by a window, not sit with backs to the window because of the light/reflection (which is impossible in this room anyway), move away from the entrance, not sit with backs to traffic and/or entrance, keep our teams together, not have to walk behind someone else to get to your desk or be the one someone else has to walk behind. I think we’ve had 7 different sketched-up suggestions for arranging the room so far and we still haven’t arrived at one that makes everyone, or even the majority, happy. We are not allowed to move our furniture ourselves, though one of my teammates and I already did rotate our desks because both of us were sitting with our backs to the entire room, which was very uncomfortable. I actually like how I have my desk now but I know I won’t be allowed to keep it that way. Sigh.
Also, I’m pretty sure summier over since, although I have yet to see a sugar beet on the side of the road, the spiders have made a concerted effort to move into the house. I’ve seen at least 3 large daddy-longlegs in various places inside today. Maybe they think since Karin has moved out, and we have 2 empty bedrooms that there is plenty of room for them.