Parks and Friends...

This title sounds like that of a toddler soap-opera...now seriously: I got bitten by a tick ten days ago.

This brought some disappointment because I wasn't incautiously hiking; in fact I wasn't hiking at all.

My only fault was to have spent 10 minutes in our garden, where the grass is low, to prevent the kids from running on the street, while Ralph was removing the last fall leaves.

Guess the mischievous beast had been on my body no longer than a couple of hours before I found it, still... not a nice feeling; am I a bit paranoid about ticks?
This is because I have seen one (plus hundreds of pictures) and there are definitely nicer species on earth.

Yes, I do feel alright, no symptoms at all but anyway it is too early to decide whether or not to test and see if I got Lyme disease. And no matter how much people tell me ticks aren't a big deal: it sucks!

After this brief introduction, I come to the point.

There is a lot going on recently: we might prolong our stay in the US of  a couple of months, but we need approval from Ralph's employer in Berlin. This doesn't affect our lives as much as it affects our daughter's  since she might start Kindergarten here.

So, basically last week was spent collecting all forms and documents we need for her enrollment, and I had to do more phone calls than I can stand -  quite untypical for a woman, I know - and for those who had the luck to hear my adventures with bureaucracy I will tell you: this time everything went fairly  smooth and everybody was friendly and cooperative.

So, apropos phone calls: in the last days I was hearing from some friends; it is quite complicated to define what a friend is. Maybe I mentioned that before, but I happen not to be there for my friends (and this implies that my friends aren't there for me either) most of the times.

This is not meant as a criticism, it is simply fact.

Nevertheless there is from my side a kind of naïf belief that no matter how far, no matter how long you don't see each other, you can always count on a friend.

And also that the "riding the same wave" feeling you experience with some people isn't ever going to fade away.

This doesn't make me stronger against disappointments, but it is how I decided to live,  sometimes playing silly and forgiving people who shouldn't be forgiven just to stick to my principles (see, stubbornness is my favorite s-word). 

And then, talking about friends, yesterday I was at the Wildwood State Park's playground and met Emanuele and Caterina, a nice couple (he is Italian and she is American-Italian) .
We found out that we have lot in common, fun to say, I don't mean our genes, rather that our perception of life here is very similar.

Caterina works for Delta airlines and was in Venice last week, which made me feel close to home (just talking about that island makes me want to be  walking up and down the bridges and eat Baicoli) as if I could see with her eyes...

The fact that she works on airplanes  also made me think of how Venice looks like from above and how I inevitably feel overwhelmed by the beauty and the calm of the Lagoon.

And by the many phone calls people are doing immediately after landing.

Totally day-dreaming about this, I bent my thumb while coming down a slide (can you picture a frightened face?)...talking about landing...

 I'd be usually pushing smaller people down the slide...