On the road again

We went to Center City today to have lunch with a friend. The company was good and the food was sublime - a neat little Ethiopian place. It always amuses me watching K eat Ethiopian - she took to it like a natural, grabbing her injera and dipping it in the nearest pile of stew.

Every time we venture into Center City, we keep saying we need to do it more, that we live in a big city with lots of stuff to do and we need to take advantage of it. Then we go back home and get caught up in our routine for another couple months. In our defense, it's really hard these days to make plans when both of us work alternating days on the weekends. January has been pretty easy in that regard, but next month B has a couple Sunday shifts in addition to the two Saturdays he always works. So I think there will be only two weekend days next month where one of us isn't working. This doesn't lend itself to a devil-may-care, fancy-free museum-visiting lifestyle.

I realized last week that it's been a year since we moved to Philadelphia. Last year at this time, we were sitting in a new house, surrounded by half-unpacked boxes. And this year, we're, um, sitting in a new house, surrounded by half-unpacked boxes. Look how far we've come! If I move next December though, it will only be at gunpoint, so we will have made progress. And there certainly are signs that we've acclimated - we own Wawa travel mugs, we refer to Roosevelt Boulevard as "The Boulevard" and don't worry for a second that people won't understand us, we know to expect that as soon as the light turns green, someone will whip around and make a left turn in front of oncoming traffic. We haven't started saying "youse" yet though, so we haven't gone completely native.

We may have been here for a year, but most of our thoughts lately are plotting how often we can leave. Currently, our only firm vacation plans for the year are working at Acen again after a two-year absence. The current plan is to drive out to Michigan, drop K off to get thoroughly spoilerspend the weekend with her grandparents, drive down to Chicago for the convention, drive back to Michigan to pick up our spawn and drive home. It occasionally seems a bit masochistic of us to use a large amount of vacation time and drive 1000 miles for the privilege of working in the volunteering salt mines of an anime convention, but we've really missed it. And more importantly, all of our friends that will be there.

Other potential trips: I have a cousin getting married in Colorado this year, so my mother would like to go to the wedding and has suggested that K, my brother and I come along. We had discussed spreading Dad's ashes in Colorado, so this would be our opportunity. But we don't know when the wedding is yet, so that's largely up in the air. The other completely up in the air possibility is that my library is closed Easter weekend and B has Good Friday off (way to go with the separation of church and state, city of Philadelphia!). Since I've already established that we won't have another weekend off together until the end of time, let alone a long weekend, I absolutely refuse to stay home and do nothing. Boston is a definite possibility, or even just Connecticut to visit my aunt and uncle. Or even just drive over the bridge to scenic New Jersey. Just so long as we don't waste the opportunity, dammit.