Sylvia's Journal

I am glad I had one more day to ease into my new life as a single person. I do miss Axel terribly, and felt quite lonely in this big house. However, the incessant dust storms would have made him miserable, and I am relieved we don’t have to deal with this challenge for him.

To get around the silence of being alone I have the TV on all the time, listening to the same BBC and Euro News stories ad nauseam. At least it feels as if there are other people around.

One of the office cars pulled in this morning with our emergency rations – just in case we are stuck in our guesthouses. I was there when that decision was made several weeks ago. Since then people thought about the content of this emergency food packet.

What was loaded onto our terrace fit into 3 boxes: 2 kg bags of dried fruit, a 3 kg can of California ‘cling’ peaches, several cans of fruit cocktail, several one liter juice boxes, 1 kg of dried milk powder, various packages of cookies, including one sugar free variety and three kinds of MRE (Meals Ready to Eat) that either fell of the truck or were donated by Douglas: Menu 20 (Spaghetti with Meat Sauce), Menu 24 (Chicken pulled in Buffalo Style Sauce) and one repackaged (it must have damaged its packaging during the fall) that includes caffeinated gum and a Honey BBQ Beef Sandwich.

Now that the stuff is here for real I wonder when I should start eating the cookies and dried fruit before they get stale. The MREs and the peaches and fruit cocktails will probably last forever.

In the afternoon I went to my Dari class and delivered the news that Axel was not coming back. Everyone is sad and sends their salaams. In the middle of my class I started to get very sleepy, just when my teacher explained the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs. I keep mixing them up – yet I should know better, having studied Latin during my youth.

Back home I spent the rest of the day transiting from my old computer to my two new ones: the new office one and my own NetBook. Armed with two hard drives I went back and forth, cleaning things out in the process, deleting files I don’t want to look at anymore and removing the duplicates from my music folder that came from endless copying over copies. I have separated the personal from the professional, an intention I have walked around with for a long time but unable to complete. I now have all the time of the world to do this sort of thing.

Tomorrow I will hand in the old laptop with the non functioning keyboard (teaspill) and the external keyboards, uncluttering my desk in the process. It is not much of an accomplishment but I feel hugely pleased with myself for completing this task.