Where's My Underwear, Dude?

Beautiful sunrise today here in Minneapolis MN. There’s a blanket of clouds low in the sky and the sun painted its rise across it. Blue and pink and gold and red and yellow and finally a pale gray.

It was good to just sit and watch it while doing a little blogging. It’s good to be moving slowly. Because, frankly, today is about the first day I haven’t felt lost.

The last 10 days have been rough on me and my sense of time and place. I have slept in 6 different beds in 10 days. I’ve spent two nights in the same bed twice -- the last two nights here at the Hilton and the previous two nights on a camp cot at my friend’s place in a nearby suburb. Before that, I spent each night in a different bed. Hell, I didn’t spend two nights in a row in the same town.

And there’s been tons of travel. Trains, planes, and automobiles (wait, was there actually a train? No. Just planes and automobiles.). But until I arrived in Minnesota I’d spent some part of every single day traveling to a new place.

• Wednesday, September 15: fly a bazillion miles from Australia to DC; sleep in my bed at home.
  
• Thursday, September 16: drive 40 miles to Manassas; sleep at my sisters‘.
  
• Friday, September 17: drive 135 miles to West Virginia; sleep in an old family bed (with a decent mattress, blessedly)
  
• Saturday, September 18: drive (quickly!) 110 miles to Charlottesville; sleep in a motel.
  
• Sunday, September 19: drive 80 miles to Haymarket; sleep at my sisters’.
  
• Monday, September 20: drive 40 miles to DC; sleep in my own bed.
  
• Tuesday, September 21: fly 1200 (?) miles to Minneapolis via Milwaukee; sleep on camp cot at friends’ house.
  
• Wednesday, September 22: don’t go anywhere! Sleep on same camp cot!
  
• Thursday, September 23: catch a ride to downtown; sleep in hotel.
  
• Friday, September 24: walk anywhere I need to go; sleep in the same hotel bed.

Got one more night in the hotel then it’s back to the ‘burbs (and the camp cot, which works far better than you are probably imagining) for 2 more nights then….well, more of the same.

And that doesn’t include the emotional “travels” of the last 10 days:

• A disturbing visit with my mom who was having a Very Bad Day (the next visit was much better)
  
• A fight with one sister while we were both having Very Bad Days that involved me hanging up on her. (She forgave me, fortunately.)
  
• Nephew’s dirt bike accident that necessitated a medevac and the fast drive to Charlottesville to a pediatric ICU. He’s fine now but I never did get the good cry I wanted to have for him.
  
• A dear friend lost her mother and her best friend on the same day, within 4 hours of each other. And I couldn’t attend her mother’s funeral as I have always intended to do because I’m in Minneapolis.
  
• The general disorientation of being here in the US but knowing that some part of me is still in Australia with Jeff.
  
• The general disorientation of being at a massage therapy conference even though I am not a practicing massage therapist right now.

Oh, yeah, and I’ve got clothing, suitcases, and belongings scattered across two continents/hemispheres, two states, and four different addresses, just in the US.

I’m pretty sure I’ve still got possession of all the underwear I brought with me. I think. Maybe I’ll go check…..