I have so much work to do today, but instead I needed to take a break for art therapy and get some feelings written down. Pretty sure I’m not the only one feeling this way…
My sweet niece Evelyn Grace was born on Thursday! I love her so much that I immediately had an anxiety attack after this picture was taken bc I was worried about hurting her with my germs 🥺 My first aunt goals are 1) to figure out how to manage the anxiety of loving a fragile baby, and 2) learn how to hold her in a way that looks natural.
Here’s a picture of her tired dad, and the only picture I took of her mom, my wonderful sister, which is when she was just about to have a contraction, but she is an integral part of this story so I had to include it. I love their family and I’m so glad they allow me to glom onto them!
I was thinking about which Star Trek character I’m most similar to, and thought maybe it was Geordi… or at least, a past version of myself was, but maybe now I’m more of a Worf/Geordi mix.
Here’s the spiral staircase inside our apartment, that we managed to never fall down even though we had to climb down it every time we had to pee in the middle of the night;
and the 1-square-block where most of our life took place over the last 3 months;
and Pat trying to navigate the narrow bumpy sidewalks with his suitcases as we left Angouleme today ❤️
Joy is good! Joy is necessary! Yes OF COURSE we went to Disneyland Paris on the last day of their Halloween celebration. Scroll through to see a genuinely terrified Nellie (not pictured: white-knuckles clutching the bar), and the dead fox we saw on the train tracks at the beginning of the day. Anaheim still better, in our opinion.
Travel Diary, Part 3: FRANCE! We got here a little over a week ago, via train from London to Paris, then Paris to Angouleme. We learned our lesson about trying to navigate public transportation with 5 suitcases (3 months is a long time!), so we took a cab in Paris from one train to the next. The first song that came on the radio in the car was “Joe Le Taxi” by Vanessa Paradis—one of the records my dad bought when my family lived in Paris in 1989.
I slept for 14 hours our first night in Angouleme, after bibimbap from the Korean spot around the corner. And then we spent the last week just trying to settle in, find a routine, figure out internet access (there’s no wifi in either our apartment or Pat’s studio!). We caught an English-with-French-subtitles showing of BjBj (🫤), found a couple good parks, got library cards, went to the grocery store 7 out of 10 days, Pat got his studio all set up, and began to live our lives…
Travel diary, part 2: ENGLAND! The whole reason we were going to England was so Pat could do a signing at the great GOSH! comic book store in London, but our cancelled flight forced us to miss the event. Still, we got to spend a few days up in pretty little Cambridge. We stayed in a hostel with bunk beds; I took the bottom bunk and got to worry about being crushed to death in the event of a structural failure of the bed frame. We went to the Cemetery on Mill Road, where the graves were all beautifully overgrown and Pat got lots of inspo for his new book. We saw the cows free-grazing in the public park, and on our last day we got to have brunch with my friend Liz (not pictured, but the restaurant was across the street from the college pictured here) before heading to London where Pat stopped at GOSH! to sign a big stack of books, and then on to France!
