My freedom, my in-between time is waning. I finished my French yesterday morning, finished my initial transcription of all my YouTube data in the afternoon, dressed up more than I needed to and went to a party for my supervisor in the evening (a litre of ale in an hour is a bit much, but I love those walks home), and went home to nothing to do. I got up this morning, made breakfast, made lunch, made coffee, talked Naomi into going to school with her mom, and I left for a long walk to school. Fifty-five minutes in the sun. The sky was sky blue (I was listening to Wilco). I got to work, wrote a couple of emails, had coffee with a good friend and colleague. Talked about the future. Had lunch. Read some. Listened to Christopher Hitchens talk about foreign policy.
This has been an ideal day off for me. Day off in the sense that I have had nothing pressing in on me, no deadlines. Soon, I will have a flood of essays from Birmingham to mark. I had to edit and work on my syllabuses for Middlesex, those classes starting two weeks from tomorrow. But I feel like I am turning the corner. A post tomorrow about the ending of two years of my studies, the halfway point. But today, I feel like a kid on a swing at the highest point, right before starting to fall back again. I am weightless and in the sky, above everything. I can just barely feel the world starting to pull me back.
Yoko and I had our yearly, we probably should do some financial planning, conversation. It’s hard when you don’t know where you’re going to be in two years and have four different kinds of currency. Hard is the wrong way to put it: difficult to work out. But we did a little bit of shuffling here and there. We have more or less weathered the recession: things seem to have gotten as bad as they will get about a year ago. The good news is, when you have different currency, you can always trade ahead if you are patient. And you just wait. A lot of our financial plan relies on waiting and not trying to make money quickly, ever. 2.5-3% annually. I think it’s a good plan. Ask me in ten years.