For anyone wondering (if I am even read at all) why there were several days without a posting: I had left my quiet life in the mountains to catch up with family and friends.
This meant dashing down the mountain Thursday morning and getting home in record time to pick up the mail before the post office shut for lunch; having lunch with the current house-person (yes, yes, I’ll admit we “sinned”: code name for going to McDonald’s); having tea in the afternoon with my regular weekly-tea friend; then enjoying dinner at the Café du Centre with youngest son S and his girlfriend A. A true celebration as she had just passed her Masters of Art with honorable mention!
Friday it was physical therapy, receiving the bed and mattress I had loaned to my friends who live “in the upper part of the village”, then dashing into town for lunch with my oldest son. That evening I first picked up youngest son for yet another mad dash to his flat to recuperate all their plants (at least there is always someone at my house), then back into town for dinner (totally immaterial to the plan) and catching up (the whole point of the evening) with someone I met the first summer I returned to Geneva, i.e. 40 years ago. I have yet to find a good way to label her as saying “with my oldest friend” could perhaps be misinterpreted. And the sentence: “the person that I have known the longest here in Geneva” seems a bit unwieldy. We didn't solve all the problems of the world, never mind our own, but we both always walk away from our short time together feeling better about ourselves and everything - a true friend.
Saturday morning it was coffee with M, followed by her and I moving son number one (in age, let there be no value/judgmental labeling here) back to his flat after a year of subletting. We were moving from a 5th floor apartment with a tiny elevator so made many trips. Things on the other side were much better as the couple who had sublet his flat were there to help and the final 10 steps large and deep as opposed to the small, rounded and rounding staircase at the bottom of the elevator in the first building.
Then it was dash (obviously my current favorite word) home and pick up my suitcase (which travels to and fro, up with the clean wash and new things to read or for work, then back with dirty and the finished) and return to the mountains. Only time for living it, none for recording – and that’s the way it should be, mostly.
Once here, I had a lovely large flat-screen TV (thanks to the move), so of course last night there was no time for blogging, but rather had to set up the new and much improved TV.
All of which brings us, not only to Sunday, but to the last day of the month, which is also the last day of the first six months of 2013: a whole other blog could be written on …”where did the time go?”
Still, Sunday, June 30: usual let’s-wake-up-early then roll over and go-back-to-sleep. Yikes the local restaurant/coffee/bread deposit business had been open a half an hour already and I needed to get dressed and get my Sunday paper. Now, we are not talking about the Sunday Times or anything here, but there are 5 or 6 sections and it is easily 5 times as large as the daily paper – just perfect for reading with breakfast. By then it was mid-morning and my landlady came down for something, we chatted and by the time I finally booted up the computer it was almost time for lunch.
Thus, without stopping to catch one’s breath, we segue into the Fast Food part of the title.
I learned many years ago, whilst dealing with work and family, that meals were not necessarily things that took hours to prepare and that, effectively, one could make healthy, tasty meals with sometimes little effort and time. Today’s was a good example: spring greens, some Chinese cabbage, a few cherry tomatoes, some grilled chicken, sautéed mushrooms and onions, a few very thinly sliced rounds of both green and yellow zucchini, feta cheese for flavor, a sprinkle of pumpkin and sunflower seeds, salad sauce and parmegian cheese – 10 minutes. If would have been even faster without the chicken: healthy, tasty, quick.
Now for a walk in the sun and coffee on a terrace.
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