Sylvia's Journal

We did not have dinner ready when our darling children came home from work; Axel had been with a client all afternoon and I had been digging in my inbox. It is rare at our house that everyone is actually doing paid work, but that’s what was happening yesterday; it interfered with household duties.

Even though dinner was not ready and because a sliver of daylight was left, Tessa, Steve and Axel went for a walk, with Chicha accompanying them happily and pretending it was her first walk of the day. After that we all pitched in and dinner appeared just in time before any system breakdowns.

We sat around the dinner table eating this hastily prepared meal and heard the stories of Tessa’s day (so-so) and Steve’s day. His (first) day had little to do with lab animal husbandry, for which he is hired, and much with HR orientations and paperwork. He is also learning, through trial and error, the lay of the land and of public transport South of North station.

Even though we did not talk much about Steve’s new laboratory work, my dreams were full of lab technicians in white coats and lectures about not contaminating the data.

The dream from which I woke up this morning had nothing to do with labs and everything with large natural catastrophes. I hope it is not one of those predictive dreams. I was in Haiti, sitting on a terrace with friends and colleagues at the bottom of a huge mountain with dark and angry storm clouds overhead. And then all hell broke loose. The storm consisted of boulders the size of a Smart car that came hurtling down the mountain. Everyone else around me seemed to take the storm in stride and not even looking where the boulders landed. I found myself tracking each boulder and actively ducking when one bounced over the edge of the terrace. Thank God for alarm clocks. It was a relief to wake up and find myself safely in my bed and the boulders gone.

I have a sense that this is about the world financial crisis. I heard much news yesterday about the storm it is raking loose in the rest of the world; boulders that can squash you if you don’t watch out. So far we have dodged the boulders and kept from being squashed but we have lost a sizeable chunk of our retirement savings.