Brain dump

*sigh*

I need to get a few things out before I try to have a really productive Monday morning. Sometimes that is just the way it is.

***
We had a super-productive weekend, despite the fact that it rained ALL DAY on Saturday. Persistent, cold rain. Nasty nasty nasty. I'm glad I went to the gym to run in my new running shoes (looove new running shoes) since they would have been decidedly NOT new by the end of an hour run in the rain!

We got so much done, though - planning for our vacation (!!), which starts next Monday (!!!), ironing (me), washing sweaters (me), financial stuff (husband), errands (husband), planting of annuals (both of us), stuff for the HOA (husband), baking and cooking (me). Whew. We were tired and sore this morning after so much productivity, but goodness does it feel good.

Of course, now I must have a super-productive week to help me get off on vacation on the right foot. :)

***
I'm really excited for this vacation - we are heading to London, and I have not been there for about 20 years. My husband has never been there. So we're going to be exploring an unfamiliar place together, for really the first time as a married couple. Everywhere else we have gone, one of us has been there before. I'm excited, too, because I hope this is the start of relatively regular vacations for us. That was definitely NOT the case while I was in school and then my post doc, and I know that for us, at least, travel is one of the things we keep saying we can do because we don't have children / don't have to save for college / don't have to worry about choosing child-friendly locations. I'm really hoping that turns out to be the case - when we started discussing trying to travel more, shortly after we gave up on having kids, I was not entirely sure that 'more travel' was something I would look forward to.

***
I'm really sad about our lack of local friends, and I can't figure out a way to fix it.

We had friends here - mostly mine from school + their spouses - but since we have been back and I have moved into a faculty role, and our friends have slowed down significantly in their own school paths and had children, we just don't have as much in common anymore. To the point where we are not invited to do anything with them anymore, and we don't invite them over, either. It's just...awkward.

For us, it's awkward to have them over because our house is SO not childproofed, and there is nothing fun to play with. And it's hard to pack up a kid and take him to an adult friend house. We know that. But we also know that when we were invited over to the houses of our friends with kids, then we were always the outsiders - the ones who didn't have kids at the birthday party, or the ones who had to accommodate when something went awry for one of the families with kids. We just...don't have much in common with them anymore.

This really hit home this morning - and, really, is what prompted this post - when I looked on Facebook and saw that a formerly-good-friend (the family with which we share our farm share, for Pete's sake!) had posted that she enjoyed celebrating her graduation (finally) and her son's fourth birthday with "good friends". Which, I'm thinking, means that we are NOT good friends, since we were not invited to anything. We were definitely closer to them before, when their son was much younger - and more portable - and when we had more in common. We stayed with them when we first got back to town, for a couple of nights before we closed on our house. We talked about how nice it was that our houses are 5 minutes apart. We talked about all the things we would do together. Now? Not so much.

Another friend called for the first time in MONTHS (maybe 6?) when her husband's mother died suddenly. I am honestly not sure why she called - they were heading out of town for the funeral, and everything was taken care of. I offered to do whatever they needed, but they didn't really *need* anything. So we sent a card -and offered, again, if they needed us to do anything - but haven't heard from them since.

I just... I don't know what to do. We've talked about this ad nauseum, husband and I, and haven't really come to any satisfying conclusions. We are not religious - we are not going to meet new friends at church, trust me. We don't have friends in our neighborhood - they are either a) older than us by 20+ years, or b) have multiple children. We don't really have friends from work - I am significantly younger than most of the other faculty, and I'm not so sure about the other faculty who started with me in the fall. My husband is in a management position and doesn't really want to socialize with other people from work. He is no longer doing as much music as he once was. We just.... we have no social life. And while I am not a social person, by any means (solitude!I love solitude!), it ...rankles? irritates? annoys? makes me sad? that we really don't have anyone we can turn to for a dinner out, or an evening of playing goofy Wii games and hanging out. Or, really, anything.

I said to my husband yesterday - this was following a study interview in which the mom basically said that she gets no support at home and that she doesn't turn to her husband for anything anymore - that I don't know what I would do without him. And that is completely true. If - I hate to even type this - but if something happened to him tomorrow? (or to me?) I just don't know who we would call, locally. Well, probably the backyard neighbor, because she gets things DONE. But we're not what I would call *friends* - we're friendLY, definitely. But again, they're 20+ years older than we are, and have a totally different life than we do.

I don't know where this is going - this is really a brain dump in that regard - but I do know that it still makes me sad that 3 years into living here again, we are so disconnected from others in the community. And I just don't see a way out of that.