Just regular folks.

Loves, it was a beautiful summer day yesterday and Kristen and I headed out to paddle! I don’t think I’ve unfurled my paddleboard for a few years and Kristen was out on the water on Monday – hahaha. This is the state of our lives, Kristen loves the water and wants to be near the water and wears blue all the time and I apparently just like water. There was a little moment there where my paddle board wouldn’t inflate, but Kristen figured it out and all was well.

Kristen mentioned that her and her husband had a weekend away without kids for the first time in like 6-7 years and it just floored me. Her two kids are like 19 and 21 and I was under the impression that all couples with typical kids go away for the weekend, like…all the time! I imagine that I would with Jeremy if Edda was able to make her own sandwiches. I went home and I asked Jeremy when the last time we went away for the weekend and concluded that it must have been before the pandemic (but it’s not true, now I remember we went away for one night to see friends in Delaware where we caught our first case of covid).

We have had planned weekends away from Edda, but they have been…odd. We stay within driving distance of the house and go at odd times of the year and it seems kind of pointless and we do worry about Edda while we are away. Jeremy has no interest in seeing Europe, he’s like we did all the traveling before we had kids! He only wants to go places where he can climb up a very tall mountain. I want to see things, but not “tourist places”. I’m really not interested in the Louvre or Big Bend or the place in the US where you go through the little tunnels and light comes in through the tops of the slit in the earth and you have to shove all the other tourists out of the way to make it seem like no one else is in this canyon besides yourself. My favorite vacation is to go somewhere and see friends along the way and eat pizza. I really enjoyed our cross country trips with the dog. I’m kind of not willing to fly somewhere with Jeremy (who I literally spend 24 hours a day with normally) and be that far away from Edda with her random seizures and the caregivers that we have wouldn’t be able to cover the entire day/night anyways. And mostly, we like being at home and with each other. Jeremy makes meals that are better than most restaurant meals, I make desserts better than most bought desserts. Our house is very nice, we like each other. Travel is a lot of trouble. Hahaha. And money. And Ginny asked us if we did travel points via credit cards and we do not because…1) it’s too much to keep track of (I’m already having trouble just keeping track of the credit cards themselves. I have had to order THREE new credit cards in the last few months because of misplacements – at least one of which I found after I ordered the new one already – granted these are Edda’s credit cards so they flit in/out of the house with different people and at different times in different bags/wallets), 2) it’s a rich person’s game and I tend to not like that kind of stuff and 3) we don’t really enjoy traveling in a way that would use points well – like we like to stay in nondescript hotels and eat in ethnic hole-in-the-walls.

I had to kind of sneak out of the house because Elka has an uncanny way of knowing when I’m going to see Kristen. I usually start bustling a rushing around at 8:30 am and Elka’s like – OMG we are going on a super long hike with KRISTEN! But I couldn’t bring Elka onto the water, so…slinking out of the house was for me.

Jeremy loves me so much, he bought me a cordless weed wacker. He knows me so well! I’m going to head out to wack some weeds.

As we grow older, I feel like Jeremy has really gone for measuring and collecting data, and I’m going more towards throwing all that stuff away. Jeremy measures his sleep, steps, heart rate, heart rate while sleeping, blood pressure, weight. All the biking parameters – workout, distance, power, recovery. He wants to do even more, glucose monitoring. He gets mad at his AI watch telling him – you are really ready for a workout! or your workout was too hard! or you need a rest day! As if you can’t really feel it yourself? I measure my weight and my blood pressure daily, but other than that, I try to throw it all away. When Paul was coaching my running, I did much more tracking of my running – the speed at which I did all the workouts, how fast I could run a mile, a 400s, whatever. When I was really, really into it, I could dial in my pace on the track to the correct prescribed pace by feel and not look at my watch.

Anyways, for about a year, I shifted the focus of my workouts to weightlifting and cut back on running and it was…ok. I don’t really mind weightlifting, but it doesn’t really feel like a workout to me. I mean I can spend an hour at it, but at the end, I’ve not sweated, I’m not really even that tired (and it turns out, I’m not very good at it (which is fine, but..also slightly discouraging). And then it turned out that I procrastinated on those workouts and my exercise routine was all wonky and out of sorts. So I switched back to running more a few weeks ago and not just running running (plodding along), but slotting in some intervals or sprints which I have not done in a long time and it feels good to me. You have to kind of learn to be not beholden to the number on the watch or the treadmill. I’m so much slower and heavier than I was even 5 years ago, but I’m not really chasing a number, I’m chasing a feeling.

I miss baking for a crowd! I used to bake twice a week (once for choir and once for Sunday service), but now I hardly bake at all because I have no one to give it to and we are trying to not be slightly chubbier than we are now. I had thought that I might make a zucchini chocolate cake for last Sunday’s service, but the timing didn’t work out, but I made Jeremy buy a zucchini on Saturday and so there was one/two staring at me each time I opened the refrigerator door. So I made it last night and it’s DELICIOUS. So delicious that I think we might eat the entire 9″ cake in three hours. So I froze most of it to try to slow us down. I asked Jeremy if he could taste the zucchini and he said, it was practically a salad, but cooked. So we are dutifully avoiding the stomach parasite that is going around.

Our prescription meds have jumped the shark. It is the moment of inflection where my memory vs the number of medications have stopped coexisting in harmony. Remember when you were like 12 or 15 and you needed to take amoxicillin for 10 days for strep throat or an ear infection and you were like – how can someone possibly forget that they had taken their medication for the day? OMG those old people – I will never be like that. And then wait 40 years, and poof! you are like that. Edda is on three regular meds and at least three PRN meds and now I’m on two regular medication…hmm, three really (see I can’t remember) and now I can’t remember at all which one is running out when and they are all on different refill schedules and different re-asking doctors for refills and so I’m like…giving up. Not really, but I’m tired. I’m literally at the pharmacy weekly, though it feels like every three days. I’m there often enough that I wave and say “hi” in a loud, booming voice and we are friends. You know sometimes, when you go to the gym often enough at the same time and you nod at the people working out with you, but you have no idea their names or their story? Instead of gym friends, I have pharmacy friends. But at least I kindof know their names because they have name tags. I mean these people are friends because they know all the random crap I’m dealing with that I’m trying to medicate out of my life as opposed to many of my real life friends who have no idea. Jeremy is on NO MEDICATIONS. May it be forever this case.

With all the people leaving the church – it includes the person watering the plants and so I’m inheriting many plants from various offices. I’ve tipped over into the state having “too many plants”. So I have to give some of them away, especially the duplicates including this money plant. This one was dying because most money plants sold in the braided configuration have rubber bands or some sort of plastic tie below the surface of the soil preserving the initial braid structure, but preventing the plant from actually growing. So when I got it home, the first thing I did was plow into the dirt and release it from its plastic jail and unbraid the trunks and replanted it. (see? I know too much, but also not enough). And then put it outside on our porch where a huge thunderstorm passed through last night and watered it. Hopefully it will live. I’m actually hoping on giving it back to someone in the church, but it will be some time.

For many, many years, I followed this artist in Philly who has a special needs son and painted pictures of vegetables. We were actually slightly email friends, and so I think she knew of me. I have a special affinity for turnips and she painted lots and lots of turnip paintings, but for a long time, I felt like they were too expensive for me to buy and then when it seemed within my budget, I actually emailed the artist and tried to commission one for me and she answered kindly and said she was working on some and would get back to me. But then I think she promptly forgot. Anyways, a few weeks ago, she had a show in an art gallery in Philly where there was this tiny turnip painting and I knew I had to buy it. I contacted the art gallery and it was a little funny because the person who runs it is a gently soul, but also forgetful and doesn’t use email and wants to get paid by check (also mentioned his colonoscopy and how I should never ever do such a terrible thing to myself). So I did all the things (not the colonoscopy…yet) and waited until the show was over and watched my check cashed and called and re-reminded him that I needed it shipped and paid for shipping and now it’s in my possession and it it luminous. It’s so beautiful and it glows from within. It’s my totem, a slightly underrated item but kind of lovely. Along with my other totems – a capybara and a cedar waxwing.

I don’t write about it very much here, but my life has taken on a very social vibe. Hours and hours of chatting with folks. Formal meetings, one-on-one check-ins, little phone calls, weekday weddings. When I first started this, I was exhausted after each interaction – I remember needing a nap. OMG, I thought there was no way I could sustain this. You do have to be “on”. Even when I know the person well, it’s not like spending time with myself when I’m fully relaxed and control of my own time. But I feel like I’ve built up my endurance somewhat. Now I can have these interactions and not be exhausted after each one. So many things in life are practice – don’t like public speaking? Do it a bunch of times and it’s ok. don’t like to make a phone call? Do it a bunch of times and it’s ok. Don’t like running? Do it a bunch of times and it’s ok. It’s not that you’ll love it, it just generally becomes a regular thing that you do.

I don’t often think about my life if Edda was a typical kiddo, but this morning as I was rounding the corner on a pile of laundry, it occured to me that if we were truly empty nesters, perhaps we’d sell the house and move downtown to an apartment or condo? Wouldn’t that be fun? I think so. Perhaps fewer deer downtown?

My friend Hiroko got married at the Rockville courthouse on Thursday! Have I been to a courthouse wedding before? I don’t think so! It was a lot of fun – very quick and then we went to a pub afterwards where I celebrated with a small group of friends by day drinking a margarita.

Friday, the air quality was not good. We pulled out our n95 masks.

Poor Elka. No mask for her. But some fun stalking baby deer.

Here’s Gene’s light setup. Do you see the 4 sets of lights? At least the plants are happy.

A big oak tree next door came down yesterday. I did have an inkling that this would happen as our (new-ish) neighbors had mentioned this briefly to me – though they mention lots of things to me and many times it doesn’t happen. I remember when Mike and Alice (the previous neighbors) decided to take down four trees about a decade ago because the trees were literally hunched over the house and impaling the roof with dropped branches. There was this last tree which was outside/inside the deciding circumference. Alice wanted it down because it shaded the back porch and made the house dark, but Mike wanted to keep it up as it was an oak and not a tulip poplar. So it got to live out its life for another 10 years. So it went down yesterday in 100 degree weather in a plume of sawdust, gas-fumed chipper and sweaty hard working arbor crew. Yes, I’m sad. But our neighborhood is slowly turning from a deeply wooded neighborhood, to a less wooded neighborhood as both trees and tiny run down houses come down for new-build construction. Though I mostly love the trees, I also am terrified with the stronger summer storms that one will fall right on the house and squish us all.

It was a semi-rough day for Kimchi as she ate something that didn’t agree with her and so there was both diarrhea and puke. None of the poop was in the house (good girl!), but she is the quietest vomitter – no sound at all! So I’d find random piles of puke all over the house. She wouldn’t eat breakfast which worried me because…she’s not my dog – but by midday, she did drink water and by evening, she did eventually eat her dinner. She kept us up on Tuesday night (in retrospect because her tummy was upset, but we didn’t know that) and has a strong desire to sleep in the bed. So Jeremy and Elka decamped to the guest bedroom so they could sleep more soundly. Kimchi was not happy with that situation for at least 20 minutes.

We are dog sitting Kimchi again and I was so impressed by her behaviour on Tuesday. She did well through the night and tried really hard to do sit-stay on the mat during dinner. We usually let Elka just sit under Edda to get the dropped food (this is Elka’s “J-O-B”, we all need one), but with Kimchi in the mix, it got to be a little too much, like the dogs were climbing on Edda and almost at her mouth like French kissing a piece of chicken salad from the masticating Edda. So we made them sit-stay. Which is a lot of work, but the dogs pretty much understood.

I bought 42 colored pens which make me happy. And, of course, instantly organized.

It was a lovely summer weekend, though I was anxious going into it. I was anxious because we were hosting and also, I have a patch of mold that I need to figure out what to do with in the main floor guest bathroom. You host, and this two inch patch of blackness can just perch in your mind for weeks. We had a ten-person dinner party on Saturday night. We like to host, but it’s been a little while since we’ve hosted regularly. For many years, we put together Sunday night dinner at the house for 10-14, but that hasn’t happened in about two years since Gene and Bette have stopped driving and we all go to them. It was supposed to be a thank you party for the canvass team at the church for doing a great job this year from the board, but like 4 days before, it seemed like only a few people could make it and I groaned and was like omg, no one wants to come to my party! unhappy face and Jeremy was like – it’s totally OK! It’ll be OK if it’s just us. But in the end, it was really fine and fun and dandy. I spent the day in the kitchen with Jeremy which is one of my favorite things to do with Jeremy, I’m baking, Jeremy is cooking. Neither of us talking very much, just very companionable. (Though Jeremy was like, if we do this more often, we have to be more explicit who is in which section of the kitchen).

At the same time as cooking an entire meal for ten people, Jeremy helped Ginny cook four chickens for Joab’s birthday party on Sunday. All ovens were in use.

Sunday was busy with church-y things, I stopped by Joab’s birthday party and met a new friend.

This is what the chicken turned into – the amazingly delicious tostada. OMG, she is such a good cook.

Gene and Bette are getting rid of all their good liquor. We only took home the port. There was also this very complicated plant light situation which Jeremy got himself in the middle of which I mildly disapproved of, so I kept my mouth shut. Gene has a bunch of plants on a windowsill that need more light, so Gene bought long lights and jerry rigged them up from the top of the window. Now these, generously speaking, radiate out from all sides and look like you can land a plane on the window, reflecting every which way – blinding all who dare look at the window. Jeremy decided to help out by buying the same type of lights but shielded with a cover that would – theoretically – aim the light only down towards the plants. And for whatever weird reason, Jeremy bought them in a pink hue. So as we were manhandling all this liquor fighting over the Johnny Walker Blue Label, Jeremy was trying to mount these lights on the window. Now – a few issues – the shielding really only works if your eye level is above the shield because instead of like 360 degrees of light from a rod, you are getting like 160 degrees of light. It’s like instead of getting pie in the full face, it’s just misses your right cheek. Still not super great, unless you like pie. And it’s also pink – I’m like why did you get pink? And Jeremy was like – it’s what Bette wanted! Anyways – the 2nd issue was that Gene would not let us get rid of the first set of lights! So now there are four sets of unattractive lights with random power cords and command strips and metal chains in the main window of the dining room. And, thus, we ended the night, with a more cluttered window, but less cluttered in the liquor cabinet.

All this is layered on top of the fact that I have spent a long time on houseplant youtube watching people who have hundreds of plants set up grow lights to encourage their full sun plants to flourish in the depths of winter in a room with no natural light. It is very difficult and expensive to make this desired look anywhere near normal/good and not like a fluorescent ceiling of a 24 hour Walmart at 2 am. So difficult and expensive that I decided, in my own house, if you can not survive in the low light conditions of my house – please go ahead and die. And I will replace you with another plant who will try to survive in my rugged environment. ( I do have a few plant lights because I like to experiment with full sun plant – most notably my venus fly trap which needed not only a plant light like 4 inches from it, but also distilled water. I kept this plant alive for one year until it caught a fly naturally in my house and ate it and now, because it needed both hipster light and water, it is now….dead. Anyways, this plant light is very attractively housed in a mid-century-modern thrifted desk lamp. Which is far as I can go with plant lights. I draw the line right there. ) All my houseplants, if you go to Hawaii, you will find them the size of trees – towering over buildings and mountains – delighted in the sun and humidity. It is so hard to have Hawaii in Maryland, if we could figure that out, we’d all be sipping island drinks with little paper umbrellas at home.

Sometimes, I get very jealous of people who are religious. The assuredness that someone is taking care of them, looking out for them. A warm, supportive embrace knowing your struggles and tells you, go on, you are doing great, keep trying, I’ve got your back. My husband is wonderful, my friends care deeply, my family will help me, but, there still remains, for me, a need for someone to take care of me without wanting anything in return. All human relationships require a back and forth and maybe I want something that only gives to me. As I was writing this, I guess I want an AI friend? Is that where this is going? My AI friend will ask nothing of me and knows all my secrets? Sigh. OK, that’s not what I want. Maybe I have no idea what I want. Now I think I’m doing this: god=ai. Gah. This is not what I want. Hahaha, maybe I’m rebelling – Elka used to love to snuggle with me at night and press up right against me. But now, she’ll snuggle if I make her and she’ll do it for about 10-15 minutes and then she’s like…ummm, I gotta go. I can’t sleep like this.

I’m still struggling with a bunch of church logistics and craziness. This is a three year term and I’m like one month down, 35 to go. Now, we are at a very confusing point in the capital campaign process where we’ve gotten a bunch of wildly different proposals ranging from under $10K to over $50K and I’m stuck. I’m stuck! I literally have no idea what I’m doing. And it was apparent that I was stuck and so a lovely, competent project manager who is a congregant stepped in an provided project management advice and spent a long time drafting up like a 40 page document for project managing – this is for you! to help you!. And I really like the underlying ideas, and I’m 100% grateful for the efforts, and I’m going to implement a lot of the ideas but I’m having a tough time digesting this enormous document. He freely acknowledges that he used AI to compose it, turning a weeks long project into two working days, but I’m struggling to 1. read it and 2. edit it. It’s unwieldy to edit because it’s not really written by a person. It’s written by a machine and it’s self referencing and a little recursive in a way no human (I think) would write? So I have no experience editing a document like this. So I am procrastinating.

I was looking for a project to keep my hands occupied while I was at meetings/sermons/waiting rooms, etc. Reading was not cutting it for me, you can’t read during a meeting and waiting rooms, the wait is too short and I have a small anxiety about my name being called that I can’t really concentrate on a book. I was discounting knitting or crochet because…how boring. I was thinking about rubik’s cube or coin manipulation, but then I was like..this is super ridiculous, I need to knit because it’s really perfect. There are actually other people knitting in these situations, so it’s perfectly acceptable. In the past, I’ve stopped knitting because I’ve been concentrating on the outcome (everything I make is ugly), but I need to reframe to the process. I’m only knitting to keep my hands busy and to calm my mind. There is nothing else I ask from it. It is only there for that. I do not acutally need to make anything, to figure out anything, to make any progress in the craft. (The last time I knitted was in 2023 and I knitted three or four hats in a row and then I got too greedy and tried a brioche knit which overwhelmed me and failed and then I put my needles down and I didn’t pick it up for three years. I will not attempt to do that again.). This is my rage against the AI/algorithmic slop. Don’t pick up the phone, pick up the book. Don’t pick up the phone, pick up knitting. Call the people. Host the thing. Bring messiness together. If it’s messy, it’s what it’s suppose to be.

I’m in a blue mood – I think mostly because Edda had the pair of seizures on Sunday and we’ve been back and forth with CHOP on how to manage it. And how to manage it was, in essence, to reboot her brain for three days. We’ve done this before when she’s needed the feeding tube because of her swollen tongue, but we’ve not done this at home when she’s not bitten her tongue. So on Monday and Tuesday, she was home and groggy from the benzos, sleeping on and off and just a shadow of her normal self. It’s both kind of “normal” as both of us have worked, laughed and taken care of each other, but it’s also sad for me that Edda’s brain works so poorly and she suffers from all this crap.

Jeremy switched our phones from T-mobile to Google Fi over the weekend for our phones. We’ve been on a grandfathered plan for more than a decade, but T-mobile is getting rid of grandfathered plans and so Jeremy switched us. We really just want a plan that is seperate from the purchase of a phone and no one wants you to do that anymore, I guess. I don’t need a new phone every two years. Now I really like to skip like 4-5 generations.

The world is an entire shitshow, I’m trying to not let it get me down, though it’s a hard thing to do.