So you may have noticed that it's been a while since my last post. There is a very reasonable and easily explained reason for this: we haven't been doing anything. Really. Well, no, not really. But we haven't been doing much, so it hasn't seemed necessary to update the blog until recently. And, as I've procrastinated on doing so for the past few days, I find it difficult to determine where I should begin.
Before I begin, I'd like to apologize for the color of the font on my previous posts. I didn't realize until just now how difficult it is to read, having mostly been looking at the black words on a white background that I'm typing presently. I'll try to sort it out when posting this entry.
The days here tend to blur together, so perhaps I'll just write about things as they occur to me. But, to keep with the sentiment of the title, I'll talk a bit about Liesl and my emotional state while being here. I believe that I can honestly say that I understand manic depression now--or bipolar disorder as I believe it is now referred to.
The irony of our situation is incredible: we're in one of the most beautiful places in the world, probably, and yet we confine ourselves to staying indoors. The weather is rainy, which I love, or sunny, which Liesl loves, and yet we make excuses not to leave our house. We know that going outside--even just for a short walk--makes us feels one hundred times better...and yet we couldn't drag ourselves off the couch or out of our chairs to get a breath of fresh air. It would take an immense effort to even get dressed some days. There were days when we simply didn't get dressed, and didn't so much as open our front door all day. These days we would sit in the kitchen or the living room, watching movies, using the internet, eating...wasting away. Sinking into the blackness of depression, unable to surface. The possibilities of things outside with which to entertain ourselves seemed unappealing and inconvenient. The idea that we would be here for two and a half months, and that we'd only been here for a couple of weeks seemed like a death sentence for our optimism. This property, while gorgeous, is also foreboding, lonely, and sad. We don't see other people really, save occasionally our neighbor and our hosts. We haven't even met our next door neighbor, the only person in the area that's close to our age. And so, without anyone to draw us out of our moodiness, we would remain captives of our gloom until we mustered up the will power to force ourselves outside.
Then the world would flip.
We would breath the fresh air, see trees and grass of the greenest green, gaze at the beautiful lake, walk in the enchanting forest, bike to town, go for a run, take a walk...and life would seem to have endless possibilities. We would laugh and chat, and promise ourselves and each other that we must, no matter what, at least go outside every day. It was worth the push of getting ourselves outside to feel like this, a thousand times lighter and happier.
Here are some great pictures that Liesl took:
But we would still relapse, not go outside at all, or at least not until the late afternoon, after we'd already had a thoroughly depressing day in our large, empty house. Part of the reason that it feels so empty here is the lack of "homey" things, pictures or posters on the walls, cases of books, knick-knacks and the like. It's just blank.
But this cycle of inside depression and outside mania has thankfully, come to an end for the most part. We've gotten used to making ourselves go outside now, and it's not only become easier to leave the house, but actually appealing.
I've been running. Last week I ended up running for 50 minutes, probably something like 4 1/2 miles I'd guess. Since then I've been going for jogs more frequently, generally every other day. I'll go for twenty minutes, thirty minutes...it's great. I'm getting way more comfortable with running. I used to have quite a love/hate relationships with running, half the time loving the feeling of accomplishing something, of the wind rushing past, the remainder of the time resigning myself to the fact that running is way too challenging, that I'm just not a runner, and that I should quit because it's way too hard. But I'm in a good climate for jogging here--it's cold, but not freezing, and even if it's sunny it's definitely not too hot to exercise. So running has become much more natural for me, and much for enjoyable. Though, unfortunately it's dark now, so I won't be jogging tonight. It's a bit creepy around here and night, and it just generally makes me uneasy being out alone in the dark here. Normally I like the dark, I used to mostly walk at night, but not here...
Just a side note:
The roads here are very frightening, particularly for walker and joggers. There are no sidewalks--these are country roads we're talking about--and people seem to drive incredibly fast around here. (This is a song from Liesl's much-loved Camp Stevens playlist. She listens to that playlist constantly. And if she's not listening to it she's singing it. I now pretty much know all of those songs by heart).The streets have two lanes, if you're lucky, and are very narrow. Often the road is only one lane, albeit a slightly larger one, and cars have to pull off at turnouts for big trucks headed in the opposite direction to pass. I nearly had a heart attack yesterday as I was jogging when car passed so close to me that I could feel the slipstream of wind from it right against my arm. I think the car almost touched me actually, and I couldn't hear it much in advance because I was listening to music. It freaked me out. The worst is when two cars are coming, one from each direction, because no one seems much interested in slowing down, so what happens is that the car on my side tries to pass me while the other car is coming the other direction, inhibiting the first car from using the other lane to pass. They do slow down and wait for the car that going the opposite direction, but it's still a bit nerve wracking.
Riding in a car is a little scary here too. They just drive a lot faster on windy roads that we do. At many a bend in the road it seems that the car might just go careening right off into the plants. The cars here pretty much all have manual transmissions, which makes for a more bumpy ride that the average Californian is used to. Personally, I've never even driven a stick-shift. It seems really difficult and inconvenient. Riding in cars here reminds me that I used to get carsick pretty frequently. I haven't much in the past few years, but I do feel a little queasy driving here though. Liesl gets more carsick here than I do though, so she rides in the front when we drive to town with our neighbor to go grocery shopping.
Another hazard of running is the bugs. There are a lot of bugs here, mostly mosquitoes and I think some sort of gnats or something. I'll be jogging along and suddenly I'll be engulfed in a cloud of flying bugs. I'll sort of cough and blow air out of my nose to stop them from going into my mouth or nose, and wave my arms. Normally doing all this--while still jogging forward--will take care of the bugs. Nope, not here. I'll put my arms back down and be smacked in the face again by multiple tiny flying bodies. They're just everywhere. Getting out of one swarm of them takes a while, so I just cover my face for a bit and look up tentatively to check that the air is clear before jogging normally again.
We've dropped our workout routine. I'm going to get back into conditioning in addition to jogging soon though. I think Liesl is over it though.
In other Liesl-related news, she hasn't had a cigarette in three weeks! Go Liesl!
In somewhat more somber news, her thumb is not only still numb, but it's actually gotten worse.
I've been reading Sherlock Holmes a lot lately. Such great stories, really. I've read nearly all of them, and I'm quite sad that I'm almost finished. I just finished The Plague last week, which was excellent.
Liesl is in the middle of The Tao of Physics. When I asked her if she was reading it in her special place she laughed, "Ha, NO." Her interests generally lie in activities other than reading.
We've been going grocery shopping about once a week. The most important thing on our shopping list: peanut butter. We now buy two large jars of it at a time. I for one just love peanut butter in general. I'll eat it on toast, or really on anything, or just right out of the jar. While Liesl normally doesn't care for peanut butter much, she is a great lover of Thai peanut sauce, as am I. I showed her how to make it, or a variation of it. It's just peanut butter and soy sauce, but it's amazing, and we've been eating it on everything. We went through two jars of peanut butter in less than a week.
I made pancakes recently, and, as we don't have any maple syrup, we ate them with chocolate spread and peanut butter and jelly respectively. These are my pancakes:
Yes, we've reached that point: in lieu of our lives being fairly indistinguishable from those of a retired couple, we've sunk to that level of inactivity from which an unprofessional food blog will likely ensue.
Today we went kayaking, for the second time. It was wonderful, and--needless to say--beautiful. Up until today I was rather let down by how un-Octobery it feels here, but the color of the leaves today did not disappoint (I took the top one, and obviously the one of Liesl; she took the other two):
Fortunately, it's impossible for our house to get extremely messy, because we don't have the sort of useless shit around that normally clutters homes. But we are by no means inhibited from making a mess (we're sort of ashamed of this, but we literally spent three days procrastinating on taking out the trash and recycling. We actually stared putting our recycling on the floor since the trashcan was too full. And all we need to do to get rid of the recycling it is to walk down the stairs, outside, and into another room; the trash goes into a bin only fifteen feet outside of that room). Our kitchen is often a mess, but we've generally gotten a lot better about keeping things clear and in order.
Update: Liesl and myself have been going a bit stir-crazy to say the least. So it came as a happy event when we were invited to a post-wedding party for our hosts daughter and her new husband. There must have been, I don't know, forty or so people at the gathering, which took place in the Big House. It seemed rather fitting for it be there; it's exactly the sort of house in which one feels that large parties should be held.
Liesl and I walked in through the laundry room door, which leads to the large industrial kitchen. Robin was in there with some relatives, preparing some delicious looking for for the guests. We passed through and entered the dining room, and boy did we stick out like a sore thumb. We were both wearing jeans, and a jacket or sweater, and looked disgracefully casual. The other guests were wearing suits or dresses. We consulted each other for a moment about whether we should go back to our house and change. We did. We re-entered the building, looking much more formal, though we certainly didn't have any really fancy clothes to change into.
We stood around awkwardly for a bit, not really knowing anyone all that well, if at all. We had some stilted conversations with a few people, but gradually socializing became easier. We had a couple of memorable conversations that went something like this:
Party guest: "Hello. Are you family, or friends?"
Liesl and/or I: "Neither. We aren't related to anyone here, or each other. We're living in the Bailie's flat over there. We don't really know anyone here, including the bride and groom. We just met them once a couple of days ago. They seem nice though."
Guest: "So, uh, what are you doing here?"
Another memorable moment was watching the slideshow. There was one for the bride and one for the groom. The bride's was the one of particular interest to us. As we sat watching the pictures of her childhood, we each individually realized that many of the photos of her were taken where she grew up. In other words, in our house. Awkward! I made a mental note to mention this funny observation to Liesl, but a couple of minutes later she whispered to me, "Steph...that's our house!"
The party was really fun though. It was just so nice to get out and actually see other humans. Liesl made the astute observation that we hadn't seen children in such a long time. It was funny to see little kids in fancy outfits running around the Big House. Everyone seemed so alive, quite a contrast to the often zombie-like state we lived in at our house.
One thing I've learned here, something that I kind of already knew, but had never fully realized, is that not having any obligations is not as ideal as it may seem. I have to admit that it's actually nice to have some obligations (no, I am NOT in any way wishing to go back to high school). But having some sort of work to do, some kind of project to work on...having something is better than having nothing. Theoretically, many people might wish for two and a half months of free time, but realistically, most people probably wouldn't want it. At least not if you're so far from other people, so far from the city. I guess it would be a vaguely different story if you were in a very populated area, near a lot of friends and a lot of things to do.
To remedy this sort of black hole in our lives, we've begun planning some trips. We're going to Belfast at the end of November to see Rancid. This is significant not only because they're one of the best bands ever, but because they were quite a factor in the genesis of our trip. We were driving to Anaheim to see them when the idea of our trip really formed. We're also hoping to go to Dublin and couch surf sometime in the next couple of weeks. In addition to these two trips, we hope to take some day trips to some places that are relatively close to where we are (though not within biking distance).
We've been watching so many movies. We're watching Braveheart at the moment. I'd really like to go to Scotland at some point if we can afford it.
Update: Braveheart was actually filmed, or at least some of it was filmed in Ireland, very near to where we are. Our neighbor told us that they used a castle nearby. One side of the castle was supposed to be in Scotland, and the other side was supposed to be in England. Pretty funny that they felt the need to do that with both England and Scotland right across the water.
Cheers,
Stephanie
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