A cool fountain in one of the many courtyards of Aix.
Okay, 6 goals in order from last to first:
Number 6, Parler le Français. I had thought that learning French might be at or near the top of my list — and it is something I’d like to do. The problem is that it gets out-competed by other goals because of how time consuming it is. I’m in France, sure, so improving my French is as simple as speaking to the shop-keeper or bus driver. But that only gets you so far. I’m not about to go live with someone else’s family to immerse myself in the language, and I’m not ready to commit to three hours a day of classwork at the local language school, which seems to be a thing here. Sign me up for a one-and-a-half-hour class once per week and minimal homework, and I’ll try my best. Might this goal work it’s way higher as the year proceeds? Time will tell.
Number 5, Become a Better Cook. I knew I wanted to work on my domestic skills once we arrived here, and sure enough, this seems like a good thing to pursue. There’s plenty of good food and I have the necessary time to a) think about what I’d like to make b) shop and c) cook. Tonight: Chicken Marsala as presented by Chris Kimball, America’s Test Kitchen dot com.
Goal Number 4: Travel to New and Exciting Places. Absolutely. Still a big point for this year. We’re off to a good start so far, and I anticipate a continuation of the trend. Today we made plans for visiting some of the classic Roman ruins in our area of France — one of the best preserved Roman temples is only about an hour from here and a colosseum from around the year zero is not only still in decent shape but is still used. Same purpose, too, more or less (bull fighting). We’ll be going to Florence around Christmas. The kids have a school break in October, so… Spain? I doubt this goal will shift downward.
Number 3, Get Fit and Stay Fit. Sounds so trite! And boring. Also: do you need to travel halfway around the world to go for a run? No. But this year is a chance to break routines and create new ones and, while my exercise routine wasn’t terrible, it was a bit tired. I want to make sure I enter the next period of life (I won’t name it, just describe it as that period of life where one sees one’s kids grow into teenagers, etc, etc) in strong health. From our home in Aix, I can go on the most fantastic runs for whatever distances I’d like — and the routes are hard, so even a brief run is great workout. And I find I enjoy running so much more when the scenery is spectacular. I haven’t purchased a road bike yet or joined a gym with a pool. I thought I would do both, but I’m not sure it will be necessary. Improving my fitness: Goal Number 3.
Number 2, Advance My Career. Seems out of place in a blog by someone who’s taking a sabbatical of sorts, moving away from offices and colleagues, ducking out of the daily grind, but in my own idiosyncratic way it makes a lot of sense. Again, by breaking routines, I get a chance to focus on developing expertise and skills I might not have time for at home. For example, programming skills. Expertise related to the nexus of design and development and user experience. By experiencing the distance that I’ve imposed on myself — not only physical but mental distance — I get to benefit from, hopefully, a certain kind of clarity. I spend a lot of time at work thinking about how to make technologies easy for people to use. When you’re immersed in those technologies, it can be difficult to separate the intuitive from the learned. Blah blah blah. Getting a little jargony.
Anyway, I’m spending more time working remotely than I thought I might and I’m enjoying it. One rather straightforward reason: it’s a solid, known thing that grounds me at a time when it’s easy to feel ungrounded. But even if I didn’t have the grounding relationship of a remote job in Boston, developing my abilities related to design/dev/user experience is something I value highly for the year. I certainly want to return to the U.S. ready to jump back into things. And I want to take advantage of the extra time I have to learn things well and do things well. All of the aforementioned: Goal Number 2.
And number 1, the Top Goal for the Year: Spend Time With My Family. This was always a big motivator for the year, and it still is. Our kids are getting older, still kids but more independent and mature every season. This year is an incredible chance to be together and do things together in a way we’d never get to experience at home. One good thing about having this as goal number 1: I’m pretty sure we’ll succeed. Why? One thing I could have predicted about this year is that we wouldn’t know anybody — so far, an accurate prediction — so our main social outlet will be with one another. This isn’t a static situation, obviously. Jack and Dmitri are already meeting people — Jack spent a couple of hours Friday afternoon hanging out in Aix with three new friends from school; we’re going to host a classmate of Dmitri’s tomorrow afternoon along with his mom and dad, so right there we’re expanding our social circle by about 150%.
But even as the boys social circles and ours continue to expand, we’ll be spending more time together than we did in Cambridge. We’ll be taking more weekend trips (see goal number 4 above). We’ll be having more new experiences together, which tends to foster closeness. We’ll be eating more delicious meals together, per goal number 5 (actually, that’s probably not true. We eat delicious meals together at home as well; that’s just how we roll). What I can say is that over the past few weeks, the whole summer really, we’ve had lots of good, quality family time together, and I’m planning to keep it going. Goal Number 1: Time with family.
Rhymes with Lyric 