We arrived home safely last night, after church and a very pleasant brunch with the very pleasant designer and his wife. I offered him a deposit on the new site we’re working on, but he declined. Apparently he could tell I am a tremendously trustworthy person.

When I got home, I found that I had missed a bunch of emails and had to get some work done, but otherwise it was a day of singing and reading in the back street all the way home, with that nice brunch in the middle.

Here’s where we ate — it’s the popular after-church spot in the town where #2 daughter works as music minister. She’s in a mainline protestant church, and the designer and his wife attend another mainline protestant church; therefore we had to have the joke about beating the Baptists to the restaurant. I don’t know whether Baptist church services are actually longer or not, but you always hear this joke when going out to post-church brunch with mainline protestants.

The African Methodist Episcopal church actually does have longer services than anyone else, but you never hear people joking about beating the AMEs to the restaurant. I have no explanation for this.

I’m going to be showing you my pictures from the Big City for about a week, so it’ll look as though I’m out of town on vacation now, even though I’m home. Today I’m showing #2 daughter’s place, for the family. The rest of you are free to go, or to stay. As always.

This is the building where #2 daughter lives. She lives on the top floor. I don’t have sufficient visual/spatial skill to tell you whether she has one of the windows visible here or not.

You have to have a key to get in, and then there’s an elevator to take you up to the top. There’s a gym on the ground floor. We planned to go every single day and never did.

#2 lives on the top floor, which is called floor 6, but the ground floor is counted separately, in the European fashion, so she’s really on the 7th floor in American terms. This is not considered a tall building where she lives, but it would be quite tall where I live.

She has a view of the city from her window.

This isn’t really her only window; she has one in the bathroom, too, with substantially the same view.

Both face east, so you get to see the sunrise.

I thought she lived downtown, but this is not so. She’s  at the edge of town. Also, this city is not that big. It’s one of the 50 largest in the U.S., and the metro area has 2 million people, but the city itself has only a few hundred thousand more people than our state capital, which I don’t think of as very big. It’s deceptive, I guess, because of the metro area. Or else it’s a matter of definition, since the actual borders of the city hardly matter to the experience of living here.

It’s divided into districts, this town, so you have the garment district and the library district and the power and light district and the river district.

I recently wrote an article about urban living in my own state, and found that it took some research to determine the boundaries and names of the various neighborhoods. #2’s city has the districts labeled with signs, so you never have any doubt about where you are.

This is the inside of the apartment, or at least a little bit of it. You can see the kitchen at the left and the dining area at the right, and the desk where I worked last week.

There’s a sleeping space, a walk-in closet, a laundry room, and a large bathroom. The ceilings are very high, since it used to be a warehouse, with all kinds of pipes and things.

Now that I’m back in my own house, the product of thirty years of adult life, it seems to me that I have a lot of stuff. I don’t usually feel that way, though my husband always complains about it.

Anyway, it’s a nice apartment, very compact and convenient. It’s near her work, she can walk to a coffee house or the library, and she could wave to friends in other city lofts out her window, though I never saw her doing so.

I could happily live in her apartment, if there were a balcony. Maybe when we retire, my husband and I will go live near #2 in a loft with a balcony full of plants, and wave to her from our window.

The thing about #2 daughter’s living situation that made me a bit jealous was her grocery store.

You want gefilte fish, ready-made sushi, truffles, pastries, Greek yogurt, or thirty-nine brands of BBQ sauce?  Here you go.

When we went there, we actually bought toilet paper, tea, and bananas. I felt that we were missing an opportunity.

#2 daughter actually does her weekly shopping in the little town where she goes to church, where the prices are lower on staples. This is her local grocery for when she needs something mid-week.

Or, presumably, when she has a hankering for gefilte fish.

Her apartment is not designed for someone who cooks at home. She has one tiny food cupboard and no pantry. There’s a full-sized refrigerator, so she can have plenty of meats and dairy products and produce, and she keeps her baking supplies in the freezer, but her actual cupboard space is sufficient for a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, a small container of oatmeal, and a can of soup. Rice, pasta, beans, lentils, tomato sauce, dried fruit, cereal, bread, crackers, cans of tuna or salmon — these things would have to go in the laundry room.

I was very happy, when I came home, to see that #2 son had cleaned up the house. He got bored, he explained, since he had to work and therefore didn’t come with the other menfolks up for the weekend.

It’s still the weekend, though. My IT guys astonished me by taking today off.

Seriously. One of them was wanting to discuss analytics and linkbuilding on Friday and I said I had stuff already on deadline but I’d watch for him (on my buddy list, that is, as we normally use AIM to communicate) on Monday.

“Memorial Day?” he typed. I took a moment to recover from the suggestion that I wouldn’t be available on Memorial Day. This guy was emailing me last night around 9:00. Why should he care about Memorial Day.

Then it struck me — The Computer Guy had set our meeting for Tuesday of this week, when our normal day is Monday.

And that explains, also, why classes begin tomorrow instead of today, something we’d been discussing in a mystified way just the previous day.

So now you know. IT guys take Memorial Day off, as well as Super Bowl Sunday, the only other day so far when all my IT guys have been offline.

While I have to do my syllabus for the summer and the grocery shopping and maybe also clean my bedroom, I am otherwise planning to take the day off.

Here, to finish up my report on #2 daughter’s living situation, is her knitting. Lovely, isn’t it?

Okay — I just had a file arrive from a designer. What’s up with that? I thought it had been settled that IT guys take Momeorial Day off! Ah — he’s not in the U.S., but in Moldavia, which frankly sounds fake to me. I must improve my knowledge of geography — ah, I’ve looked it up and that name is associated with a medieval principality. Now it is Moldova, which sounds worse. It is in the Balkans, which is why it sounds like one of those fictional states that figure in detective novels from the turn of the 20th century. Except that now I’m thinking those imaginary Balkan principalities might have been real, and I only thought they were fictional.

No matter. As an American information worker, I am entitled to take the day off. I hope you are, too. Have a good time!

Oh man, the client, in NY, just responded to the design. I’m going to get away from the computer before I get sucked into this.