Birthday recap: breakfast! I got dressed in something pretty (for the first time in weeks, summer is mostly grubby gardening / cleaning / crafting clothes here) and even put on jewelry (pretty ring a friend bought me in Santa Fe, made by local indigenous folks at a store vetted by Emily Mah Tippetts as actually getting the money back to the right people, thanks, Emily!), and took myself off to a cafe (Fairground, which is nice and big and airy and pretty empty on a weekday morning and has lots of outlets) to work for the first time in…months?
It’s weird, this used to be part of my regular routine, but pandemic, you know? But it was SO GREAT. I got a bagel with lox box, ate half of it and saved the rest (good choice, as there was much eating to come), and pounded through three hours of e-mail work with ease. There is much e-mail work left, because I’ve had an incredibly hard time making myself deal with it lately, but this was very good for a start. Yay, me.
Kevin and I are wanting to spend more time together that isn’t just lying in bed watching TV, so I think we may try to do a little more cafe working together. We used to do it a lot before kids, but got out of the habit when the kids were small, because childcare, y’know.
But I like working alongside him — what I liked best was sitting in a Borders and both of us working and periodically getting up to browse books and then sitting down and working some more — sadly, there isn’t anywhere in Oak Park we can do that right now. The two bookstores we have, both great, don’t have cafes, alas. But working in a cafe without a bookstore attached is still good.
