Punk slobber

Punk slobber
Originally uploaded by lkwalker71.

As I was saying, Anya’s difficulties with the move have been the most important element influencing our own adult-sized perceptions of the transition so far, and in turn they've been the issue that’s most preoccupied us over the past week.

Since we arrived here on Saturday afternoon, local time, she continued in the vein she began in that darkened cube of a room in the Seoul airport, waking up about every two hours, regardless of the time of day or night, wanting to be fed. She seemed cranky for lack of a good, long sleep. We’ve tried hard to institute a routine: to get her down for a nap about a half an hour after each feeding and to get her back to sensing that night is the time for sleep. Thankfully, the last couple of nights she has done a lot better, with about a twelve-hour night from 7-ish to 7-ish, broken roughly in half by one middle-of-the-night feeding.

Surprisingly, the sunrise and sunset are pretty late here in Vlad (at least until this Sunday, when Daylight Savings Time ends), which means that we three have been rising pretty much in the dark. We go to one of two sitting areas and watch the sunrise as the adults drink their morning coffee and the munchkin has her milk.

Our place here is really big – without our stuff having arrived, too big and empty and echoing. (The latest report on the surface shipment of the bulk of our household effects gives an ETA of mid-December, which is not too bad at 2 months after our arrival. But: hello, frozen Herdez.) Hopefully our air freight will arrive soon. Not surprisingly, one of Dan’s first shopping priorities was to buy us a small stereo system, so that we can at least have some music and make our life here feel a little more familiar, and the place seem a little less empty.

We do indeed (as we had been told but found it hard to fathom) have four floors of living space in a townhouse whose footprint is a bit larger than that of the two-floor townhouse we had in Bethesda. Which obviously translates to a great deal more space. Like most diplomatic housing, it is furnished, and we are still trying to figure out how we want to situate the various kinds of furniture that were provided with the place, and, accordingly, how we’ll want to use the various spaces. The ground floor is set up with a sitting room toward the front, and a laundry room and storage, and entry to an [extremely!] unfinished basement behind that. Second floor has full dining room and a couple of armchairs in front area, and a large kitchen to the rear. Third floor has a master bedroom and a second bedroom, where Anya sleeps. The fourth and top floor has another bedroom in the back and a sort of undefined room in front, which opens out onto a balcony the width of the place. We plan to use that top floor as a study for me and a fairly well contained guest suite when all of you folks who promised a visit come to town (hint, hint).

Part of the issue with figuring out how to use the space is really the placement of bathrooms and kitchen, as well as the sheer number of floors you need to traverse to get from one place to another. We think we’ll use the top floor also as our main TV room and family living room when we don’t have visitors, and keep the second-floor dining room less crowded and also a bit more neat and presentable. But it sure will be a drag to go down two flights from the TV room for any drinks or snacks! Spending time on the second floor alternatively requires a trip up one flight for a bathroom, both for us and for any guests we happen to round up in our social life here. Finally, the lack of a phone jack on the second floor (and the fact that doorbell and phone ringtone are identical) means that if you’re in the kitchen or the sitting area on the second floor, you take a gamble either racing upstairs to grab the phone or galloping down to the front door when someone rings. I figured out the hard way this morning, though, that you’re fairly safe if you always choose to answer the phone, since the doorbell has a phone-based intercom. Which means that, if I’d gone upstairs when someone rang today, I not only wouldn’t have missed the mystery caller who waited long enough for me to see that no one was at the door but (of course) hung up the second before I picked up the phone. And if by chance it had been a live visitor, at least I could have let them know via intercom that I’d be down the two flights to the door in a jiffy. In any case, beginning to plan for how we’ll use the space is kind of fun, and hopefully we’ll get some help moving some of the furniture around and installing a phone jack on the second floor before too long to work out some of the kinks.

But enough complaining about the oh-so-terribly-spacious digs we’ve just moved to. I know -- nobody's feeling my pain. Next time I’ll start describing our environs, which will surely be more interesting.