Beloved Boring White Thursday

Rolling back the clock (I really must make up for recent lost blogging time), I'm choosing to recount our last week in March, the week following our return home to Zürich from Rome. Of course, every human in existence would find Rome infinitely more engaging than our following week. Every human except perhaps one...um, yeah, me. A week full of the most mundane tasks possible, the kind of mindless errands that would drive anyone crazy, and yet a key week in my (obviously fragile or disturbed) European psychological evolution.

I'll set the stage...pretend for a moment that your teleporter is finally functioning, but it has a persistent annoying glitch that you can only teleport to Europe. So be it. So let's say you plan a weekend trip to pop over to Paris, or to Heidelberg, Germany or to Lake Geneva, Switzerland or to Rome. But five minutes before you leave, with packed bag nearly in hand, someone (not sure who) announces that closets have suddenly been outlawed and then empties the contents (stacked and organized, not too messy) of every closet in every room onto the floor. All your clothes and shoes, all your jackets and boots, sports equipment, old blankets, all those things you own but don't really want to see every day, everything in every room now sitting on the floor. Well, indeed! Annoying, certainly, but not enough to cancel your trip, right? So...hit the button and off you go!

So here's the psychology, correct me if I'm aberrant here. You don't enjoy your weekend in Paris any less--banish it from your mind, it's not worth it! But on your return home on Sunday night, it's regular-life time again and you have no earthly idea where to put all that junk. So work on it for two weeks, spend your weeknights shopping instead of relaxing, and then order some dressers or cabinets or whatever even though they won't arrive for a month or two, even though you'd rather not spend the money, move some junk to the cellar...you know, it's fun, dig right in and make a dent! Oh, and did I mention it's drab winter outside? Then after two weeks, take a weekend break and bloop on over to Germany. Germany rocks! Certainly the unsettled home situation doesn't make Germany any less great. But I'm sure you can see the pattern. Two cool semi-drunken days in Germany, then a mere four weeks of regular life and now you've made major progress, furniture shopping is almost all done, some furniture has arrived (deliveries are fun too!), maybe 2/3 of the junk is really put away. Keep it up, you're doing great, not too many eysores left! And so on...

Add to that example removing every other boring yet necessary foundation of daily life and not speaking the native language (i.e., not understanding phone calls, letters, notices, warranties, deliveries, rental services, etc.) and it's a mountain to scale, even if not you're working every day. Welcome to Expatriatism 101. Given such a lengthy list, no end may ever appear in sight...but I now believe that end may actually exist. Or at least a vicinity near an end. I may have entered that vicinity the week of March 24, specifically on what I'm now calling White Thursday, March 27 (the counterpoint to Black Friday, Jan 18, the day my computer and espresso machine broke in unrealted incidents).

That week's end capped my first Zürich haircut without both my head and wallet being scalped; locating a vendor that fixes espresso machines and him actually working on mine (try that at home even, not so easy); my first dentist appointment (four months overdue); our first IKEA trip with a CAR (thanks to temporary ownership by our Zürich/Chicago/Hyatt friends) enabling same-evening delivery of a bedside table, TV stand, floor light and soon-to-be-delivered large, cheap storage cabinets; exploration and eventual mastery of the city's grand Recyclinghof (also thanks to the car) allowing disposal of five months worth of cardboard boxes, Styrofoam and old glassware; Hobbes's first Zürich bath and haircut (with a significantly less crazy groomer than that weirdo back in cowtown Breite in December--still a really bad haircut, though); and finally finding an appropriate set of shiny new dog bowls for Hobbes.

But why White Thursday? Because that morning we received delivery of an office desk and chair that we'd ordered back in early January, 10 weeks later. Sheesh! Which meant moving my computer after three months from our only other usable table--the dining table--to an office. And also finally unpacking several large Dell boxes ordered and arrived immediately before our move from Chicago--boxes not yet opened after five months--for a long-coveted, sweet desktop computer station setup.

So that week's laundry list of activities would cause even the most sedate homemaker to consider leaping out the window, right? Funny to say, now that it's over, I wouldn't trade it for a month's vacation.