I haven’t been doing the best job of keeping this blog updated. Now I understand why there are grants for people to not have to work at all while they write. Julia’s in daycare from 8am to 4 or 5 pm, and still all of my various writing projects are progressing glacially slow. My German class/increased household duties now that Patrycja’s gone take up my mornings, until about 10:30 or 11:00. Then I’m hungry, and although it’s tempting to just grab a pretzel or falafel and keep going, I can’t really afford that. So I have to go/stay home and cook something, which takes at least another half hour. Then I have another hour bus/S-Bahn ride into Munich.

More often than not I’m going into the city for social reasons. Meeting with friends during the week is good for my sanity and my German (or sometimes my French) and kind of necessary since I don’t have time on the weekends anymore. Sometimes I go to the library to write, but not so often and only for an hour or so, because at two or three I have to head home and make Julia’s bottles and walk to the daycare. That takes some time, and I have to get there early enough to get Julia’s shoes on her and convince her to relinquish whichever other child’s toy she’s been playing with.

Then I have to take care of her until one of her parents comes home. That could be any time between six and eleven. But even if it’s early, I don’t have a quiet place at home to work, and the library is an hour away and closes at seven. Now things may get a little better because I can sit outside and write, although that would probably have to be at some kind of café, and I’m back to the limited money problem. I guess I could go back to the city at that point and sit in a park, but that takes an hour each way and then I still have to come home and clean the kitchen and Julia’s toys and get to bed at a reasonable time.

So I panic at little when I realize that I only have 80 days left in Germany and not much more time before I have to go to back to school. So I’ve gotten around to thinking about leaving my job a month early. I don’t need a visa to stay in Germany any more since it’s fewer than 90 days now, and my parents just deposited an embarrassingly large gift in my bank account for traveling. So the fact that I don’t really have to be an au pair any more, combined with the fact that I get paid late and don’t generally have free time on weekends makes it tempting to duck out early. Still just an idea though.