How I'm celebrating Leap Day.

By shaking my hands...one as a fist, with rock concert elan and the other as a fist also, but old-lady-yelling-at-whippersnappers-style

Fist Pump 1. I'm hanging out my laundry for the first time this year. I'm so damn excited about this!

Sure enough, the signs of spring are here... The gal I work for (this is the couple who own their internet business) said she couldn't remember the last time crocuses, snowdrops, and daffodils were out at the same time. Usually, they're out in stages, one blooming and fading as the next takes its place.


Fist Clench 2. I'm getting the new Samsung Galaxy S II (?) today. The contract's up and Vodaphone's been bugging me to upgrade. To shut them up, I'm going to get a free phone that I can use when I move home. Because I will move home someday.

Yeah, am celebrating Leap Day with some major homesickness issues. Got an email from MomUnit that sent me into a blubbering spiral of drippy snot and leaky tear ducts. It was an attachment! It was a picture of my dear friend's three children, two of which I've never met. Her children are just beautiful and it's like looking at her from across the classroom that first day I met her in junior high. I want my kid to be friends with her kids.

And there's other children I've never met, which bugs the hell out of me. Because they don't know me and because I've just figured out that I really like other people's kids. I like mine just fine, hell, I LOVE her...but I like other people's kids. Not when I was younger, like baby-sitting age...couldn't stand that. But now, I guess it's because I've got one and I'm all like, ME TOO! So, yeah... a niece that's new last year, SciMan's bestie has a kid and another coming... another couple have two children, one I got to spend time with, the other was born two years ago or so... I don't even know when! My brother and sister are becoming adults without me buying their first legal beers. Who's gonna drive them home? DadUnit's going nuts and no one's stopping it. My former students... I can't observe them from my corner of the school and feel proud. I can only just feel a pale imitation from memory. Some dear friends are getting married this year and I've no way to know if I we're going to be there to see it.

So I want to put everyone back home in a time capsule and insulate them in tree sap so that when I come back I can just Jurassic-Park scientist them and resume where I left them. I want to reel in that false sense of control I had over everyone and cast it back out among them. My pot, it is not stirred.

This is the part of living overseas that I knew was going to happen and I accepted it, but it doesn't mean that I have to smile about it. I had it in my head that I wouldn't go back until this "three-hour tour" was over. If I wanted to be illogical about it, it's mainly because I thought that if I did come home just for a visit, a taco and some Ted's queso filling in as a carrot or a crowbar threatening to pry me off the couch wouldn't be able to get me back on a plane for the exhaustible flight. There's been an exodus in the Americans in the UK online community and I sure as hell am jealous about it.

Because they're getting to not only have the very best in laundry drying equipment (a dryer), they're getting to be present, stirring the pot, making a difference, participating in the life fabric that is quilted by shared experiences.

It was a bad decision to come here when viewed in this context.



But then again, if not for that decision, I wouldn't have the trifecta of spring flowers in bloom in a graveyard that has been converted into a playground next to the Kiddo's school. So, really, little things give back and  compensate for other little things that take away and negate.

Snowdrops you can see, crocuses you can't.