Author: Christine

Volunteers for the local Red Cross were included in one of the first few waves of healthcare workers to be assigned vaccine appointments here in northern Italy, so here I am, two days after my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine!

For what it’s worth, I went through quite a bit of internal wrestling over this: did I, a healthy 34-year-old who does one to two ambulance shifts per week, really deserve a coveted vaccine slot? If I didn’t take mine, would it truly go to someone more deserving? My mother, my boyfriend, and my closest friends basically unanimously voted yes and probably not to the above questions, respectively, and so when the long-awaited email asking for our name, date of birth, and Italian health code came through, my shaking hands typed in the info and tripled checked it.

Continue reading “Vaccine!” →

Dearest internet, we did it! We chose all of the floor coverings and bathroom tiles for the new house* and it didn’t even take seventy billion hours! Only, like, sixty-nine billion hours. Not even.

(*The house is actually an apartment, but I will continue calling it a house. Not because I’m under any illusion that it is a house, but because it just sounds more natural to me. To ponder: is that specific to my US/suburban upbringing where most people did, in fact, live in houses? Do people who grow up in a big city find it natural to say, like ‘when we move to the new apartment’? Note to self: find person who grew up in a big city to ask.)

Continue reading “Tile day!” →

I am feeling rather slog-y (sloggy?)… slog-like! I am feeling rather slog-like today and then I am also feeling guilty for feeling that way because really I’m so lucky. Perhaps if I set a 15-minute timer on whining about this I can perk myself up and get on with the day? Worth a shot, right?

Continue reading “Slog, Fog, Smog” →

Good morning, world! I write to you from one of my favorite kinds of days: I call them after-the-storm days in my head, because they’re the type of day that feels to me like taking a deep, restorative breath after a storm of activity. They’re usually accompanied by finally getting enough sleep after a few nights of short-changing sleep in favor of whatever the storm of activity involves. For example, this week has so far featured:

Continue reading “After the storm” →

We have arrived at an exciting stage of new-house building: the crazy snake-pipes that will heat our future apartment are in! Now, I already thought that the concept of under-floor heating was pretty cool: we have it at the apartment we are renting now, and it makes going barefoot in winter very cozy, not to mention getting out of the shower. The bathmats are always toasty! How delightful is that?

Continue reading “Weekend house visit: crazy snake-pipes + vaccine!!!” →

Among the things I really love as a translator: when someone (who clearly has never required a translator before) informs me of how long they figure the project will probably take me and therefore how much I should charge for it.

Continue reading “Saturday morning annoyances” →

There are already countless (and more eloquent) posts about what happened yesterday, but it also feels wrong not to acknowledge it in some way. Plus, what good is a blog if you can’t bang all your feelings out into the keyboard in a moment of national crisis?

I (naively, I guess) felt relief that Saturday after election day a few months ago. I knew inside that there was still so much work to do, that I could no longer feel right continuing to sit by and let the work of democracy happen (or not) around me while I went about my business and traipsed in to vote every two to four years. (I want to specifically own up to that because, until the past four years or so, that’s what I did. I thought that democracy just chugged along, and as a citizen, I just needed to make my contribution by voting. I think I see that that’s not true, now. I still don’t know exactly what form more active participation should take, but I do think that it is necessary. As evidenced by the deplorable actions we witnessed yesterday.)

Continue reading “January 6th, 2021” →

HABITS TO CULTIVATE

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how to fit more good things into my daily life, and I think the most obvious way to do it is to make those things into habits. However, one problem I’ve been running into is lack of time: most of the things that I want to fit in require about 30 minutes each, the way I’ve envisioned them. So it seems like my options are either to settle for less time on each… or fewer habits to cultivate… or not to aim for daily habits, but rather a few times a week. I find the latter option pretty appealing, because there are some days where I just don’t feel like doing one thing or another. I suppose this might be a sign that I just need to force myself to do it anyway (maybe that’s how you actually make a habit? Force yourself to do it even when you don’t want to?) but I kind of want to try it anyway. (I’m a sucker for trying things that everyone says won’t work. And then they usually don’t and I keep trying them again anyway. Not sure what that says about me, but nothing particularly flattering, I guess.) Okay, so here are some of the things I’d like to fit in more often:

Continue reading “21 for 2021, part 3” →

I am planner homeless! I should probably not make light of homelessness. I apologize.

To rephrase: My 2020 planner ended two days ago, having generously tacked on the first three days of 2021 to finish out the week. And I am now without a planner, because every year, I skid into the Christmas season with a million pending projects to ‘just wrap up before the holidays’ and push choosing next year’s planner until after the holidays. And so every year I am planner-less for the first couple of weeks of the year.

Continue reading “Planner-less-ness” →