Sylvia's Journal

Yesterday Tessa left and Joe returned, so we keep an occupancy rate of 3 in our house (not counting Jim across the driveway). I left the house in convoy with Tessa at 6 AM and when I walked out of MSH at the end of the afternoon she had arrived home in London. The homecoming was apparently not quite as joyful as she had expected: Steve was asleep, the house dirty, the plants crying for water and seedlings lying limply in their tender beds. Tessa has some educating to do it seems. Or maybe her father set high standards for male housekeeping: when I come home from a trip the house looks inviting and clean, everything put away and a cup of hot tea waiting. I felt sorry for Tessa as she had hastened home to be with Steve who needed her. That last part was proven to be true, although not quite the way she imagined. The sacrifices we make for love!

We had one more wonderful day with our colleagues from far away at MSH and then slowly people began to peel away to return to their respective countries. Everyone was in high spirits.

I picked Joe up at the Hyatt and interrogated him throughout our slow commute home about the practical applications of systems thinking to the realities in Africa. I am sorry to say we did not come up with a good plan but I got some ideas. For one, I need to take a refresher on the archetypal systems diagrams that may come in handy when looking at the kind of intractable problems we face out there as well as in here.

I made dinner grudgingly because Axel ran off with the car, having been without all day, to take care of some errands. I always dream of coming home to a dinner table set with the meal ready. That doesn’t happen as often as I would like. Working men with their home-bound wives in the 50s had a good deal going for them. I doubt they realized how good a deal it was until the idyll was smashed into a thousand pieces by the societal changes of the 60s and 70s and the first attempts at women’s liberation. I can see why many men were not enthralled with these changes. I like what they liked.

After dinner we went for a postprandial walk around the loop. We had to look up the word as we could not agree on its spelling. It is actually a medical term and has to do with blood sugar. It seemed a good idea to walk before tackling the strawberries with sweet whipped cream, more postprandial sugar.

I ended the walk with muscle spasms that required a hot pad intervention and finally propelled me to make appointments for more physical therapy and acupuncture, starting today.

After the strawberries we watched Roman Polanski’s movie Frantic. About half an hour into the film I could no longer handle the suspense and impending doom and, tired anyways, I went to bed. This morning I pestered Axel about how the movie ended. I wanted all the details. It was less scary that way, and, incidentally, it seemed like good frontal lobe exercise for Axel. I could tell from his frowned forehead and his hard thinking that he was engaged in serious brain gymnastics. Just what the doctor prescribed!