The time has been passing like normal, like it is when you are not new somewhere, but when you live somewhere. I had expected that around March or April, things would smooth out for us, that the endless list of chores would start to taper off. Yesterday, I came home and Yoko had moved the new sofa to an acceptable place in the living room and I hooked up the speakers to the laptop and finally fixed a recurring problem the computer was having. The lamp is now in the corner, giving us warmer, incandescent light rather than the harsh florescent lights in the house. Some of my expenses were paid and the bank account will not go to zero this month. All these things lead to a sense of normalcy, of evening out. A new kind of normal.