It gets better

Yesterday I was in a dark place. Today, the sun is out and the sky is blue and nothing has changed between then and now except the internal weather. Go figure.

So Jeff Bezos of Amazon bought the Washington Post. This is momentous news in my world. The man is a gladiator of innovation and he'll probably now sell Kindles with the Washington Post preinstalled, which will put many other newspapers on their heels.

Estimates are starting to come in for the work that needs to be done on my mom's home and so far they are very reasonable because the people who are doing the work all know and love my mother from when she lived there, or were sent to us by someone who knows and loves my mother, and I cannot tell you the blessings in all of this, with some of them refusing to charge for their labor, and the real estate agent/ project manager, who is the daughter of one of my mother's dearest friends on the island, whose family's shipping and storage business we will also be using, refusing to take any payment until the house is rented and she gets her commission. This says to me that she is very sure that she can get the house rented. And I know that the sentence before last was a very long sentence but I am refusing for the moment to go back in and fix it, which I suppose is my prerogative.

What else? I'm back at work. Our acting editor in chief has been confirmed as the official new editor in chief, which is a very good thing as this woman knows what she is about. I'm in that place where I'm learning new things again, and engaging on a new level in social media for the job, and it feels good to break out of what I already know how to do and have to master something new.

I have nothing much to report. I will soon be going through all the artifacts I brought home and no doubt I will share a few more of the photos here, but not today. One effect of spending the last week tossing and saving and organizing my mother's things is that our little apartment now looks impossibly cluttered, so full of stuff everywhere, and I just want to throw it all out and start with a fresh new palette. But of course, I can't. Not without a plan. Is it time to put out the mountains of books in every corner of my bedroom? In my closets, on my windowsills? Is it heresy to let go of bound books in an e-reader age when there will be fewer and fewer of the three-dimensional kind?

The photos are from places around the corner from my mother's house where we would go some evenings to drink fizzy cocktails and draft off their internet since my mother's house is not yet wired. We will have to wire it in order to get it rented. No internet is a deal breaker, even if you are steps from a pristine beach and various entertainments. We're all not really sure how this overseas landlord thing is going to work out, but we're getting a teeny bit excited by the possibilities.