Just regular folks.

Once you get this old – like as old as I am, nothing surprises me anymore. Like literally nothing. People will be like…I’m going to tell you something that is completely shocking or embarrassing or terrible or whatever, and when I hear it, I’m like, yeah, that sounds about right – it’s all about money, hurt feelings and grief – there is really nothing else. How does one keep going? Really, you have to keep going.

I’ve been indulging Vince. He’s been doing so well and he asks, really, for very little. He’s never been one to clamor for new electronics, new clothes, fancy trips or stunning cars that other people might have that he wants. And now, he’s really on his own, never asks for money, calls me all the time, I just want to squeeeeee with happiness. One of my favorite teenage stories is this eavesdropping story I had at the gas station when Vince was a teen (so now 10 years ago), a mom with her teenage son were standing next to each other filling up the tank for a fine-looking minivan and the mom kind of mumbled how expensive gas was and her kid – half yelling, half exasperated was like – MOM! We need to buy a TESLA! I hear other people’s children put an entire powerpoint slide for Christmas desires. Vince is often happy to delay his holiday requests and birthday requests until a need arises. Vince recently moved into a new-to-him grad housing which was unfurnished and I bought him a new IKEA couch and coffee table for his grad student apartment. He called this weekend from his couch, lying on it in great comfort and he said – now the couch-sized hole in my heart is filled. Thank you mom.

He’s so grown up! And yet, I have regressed by buying on ebay Thomas the Tank engine toys. Here I am happily housing the trains in the roundhouse and the mine (Jeremy is like – wtf about the mine? you know we don’t like mines.) hahaha. Of course, of all the things I brought to the babysitting gig, no one really played with my beloved trains. OF COURSE! of course.

Jeremy was in Kansas City last week as soon as he got home, he was like, I think I need to go to California next week (meaning this week). So he’s gone this morning. We had been planning to drive to Ohio this weekend to see friends, but, in retrospect, I’m very happy that that did not happen. I’m so busy and frustrated at work (my real job), the church stuff (my fake job and now I’m really getting into the underbelly of it all) and trying to get better from this cold and relearning how to exercise. It’s not perfect, but it’s manageable.

I volunteered to help watch six kids on Friday night for a Parents’ night out. I packed well. Sheets for sofa forts, bubbles for the playground, popcorn popper with fancy popcorn, tent, all my Thomas the Tank engine toys, and all the socks in the house for a sock fight.

I showed up and there were not six kids, there were NINE kids which was pretty much our capacity as two of the kids were under two and not potty trained. It was a gorgeous day and the bubble was a big hit – we stayed outside as long as we could, maybe heading in at about 7 pm. I made sure to get the big bubble wand to make enormous bubbles. I helped with the kids from 5-8 pm, but by happenstance, the little little kids were picked up at 7:30 which left 4 of the oldest kids and 30 minutes for me to implement the sock fight which was a big hit and a great way to end the night and, really, fifteen minutes of sock fighting was enough time as we somewhat devolved into some light sibling squabbling. I think I amused the parents at pick up a lot too, which I enjoy – I like being the fun babysitter. HAHAHA. I also like big bubbles and sock fights and it’s not everyday I get a chance to do those things.

Saturday night, we went to Fairfax to see Deb. She declined Edda’s birthday party a few months ago and so I reached out for a chance to see her. I knew she was looking to move into a continuing care complex, but I thought she moved to the Montgomery Mall area, but it turns out she moved to Fairfax! It was a really new one, just opened in 2024 and it was fun to go and see her and eat in the dining hall. This is one run by the same company that runs Gene and Bette’s housing. Deb has lived on her own for a long time in a house that was hard for her to manage and so it was so nice to see Deb making lots of friends and saying hello left and right in her new place. So social! The apartment was lovely and we had a great time! It’s nice to be around young people and old people to keep it diverse, all within 24 hours.

Many years ago, my PCP was Dr. Belcher who I adored and she was part of a 4-5 woman internal medicine practice and they were an independent medical office called Spectrum Family Health. They had a slightly run-down waiting room, but everyone was very nice and I felt well taken care of. Then, it got combined with a local practice conglomerate (maybe 10-15 offices around the DMV) and rebranded as Comprehensive Primary Health. I asked Dr. B about the acquisition and she said that Spectrum could not keep up with insurance demands and would only be able to survive by combining with an organization with a dedicated insurance team calling insurance all day, following up on everything. The practice moved into a brand-new space with kiosks for logins. My lovely doctor B retired and the doctor who took on Dr. Belcher’s caseload, I love – she’s young, in her 30s with little ones, she’s funny and straightforward and on our second visit, because we liked each other so much she gave me her personal phone number. (When Jeremy heard this, he was like…this would never happen to me in 10,000 years.). She’s a big fan of vaccines and vegetables – really? ME TOO! Then, this year, Comprehensive Primary Health got bought out by an insurance company and private equity. Now it’s called CloseKnit. My primary care office is run by an insurance company – and now they are squeezing the blood out of every interaction, not maximizing my health, but maximizing profits. I think there are no independent internal medicine practices left in the local vicinity. They are increasing the workload of every provider, so they can not keep up with they patient load. (I felt this way when I was a provider – how many shifts did I end up distraught because I couldn’t do all the things I needed to do for my 5 patients? – perhaps all of them, now I know nurses take on 6 patients a shift regularly, omg, I would DIE.), and I know it has only increased since the pandemic. My beloved doctor is now setting up her own concierge practice. Basically, for an annual fee, you get twelve unrushed visits a year and an annual physical and access to her 24/7 via text/email. Same day visits are always available and she will call you back if you are worried about something – all medications and tests are routed through insurance, but the visits are not. So, I’m going to follow her to her new practice. Do I feel bad about this? Yes. I have a pretty strong loyalty to public things – I sent my kids to public schools – all the way through university. I’d like to think I wouldn’t do this if I wasn’t … like a friend to my doctor and want to support her new business. I mean, she’s already kind of acting as my own concierge doctor. Edda (and I) went to see her at CloseKnit yesterday as she’s winding down her practice there for an annual checkup – she’s trying to get Edda at-home PT (!) and because she recommended her #1 local neurologist to Edda (who we like) but we realized doesn’t take Medicaid and that is a critical thing because we need Medicaid to pick up some of Edda’s rescue seizure meds ($300 if they run it through only my insurance, but $1 if they run it through Medicaid), she was texting me last night at 8 pm when she talked with her ER doc hubby and remembered a few more local neuros that take Medicaid that they like! 8 pm! Talking at dinner with her hubby! So how much is this going to cost me? like $2500 a year.

Elka-belka took her stuffie on a walk with her yesterday, it was the most beautiful day!

The last week or so, I’ve been strangely obsessed with collecting these metal Thomas the Tank Engine toys from Vince’s childhood. I have about 20 of these, well worn from Vince’s continuous play during the years from 2004-2006? And I started buying more from ebay because they stopped making them in 2009 or so. Yesterday, I wondered if anyone had compiled a list of the complete collection and – yes! someone did. This is what the internet is good for. (omg – the internet is so bad these days. so bad, so hard to use, so easy to be scammed, ads left and right. it’s so hard to have lived through the golden years of the internets and see it just…turn into the slop that it is today) So I lined up all my trains and accounted for them. This is a good collection – finite in scope (less than 200), the items are old, but not too old (no lead in these toys) and they made a bajillion of them, so each can be bought on ebay for about $10, probably less than they charged when they were originally for sale (counting for inflation).

Jeremy was in Kansas City for two nights – one day. He came home late last night, it was only when he was at the Kansas City airport on the way home that he realized that he was flying into Dulles and not National – which was the airport he flew out of and where the car was parked. Doh! So he took an Uber from Dulles to National and picked up the car and came home. Elka, the good dog that she is, jumped up with alacrity when she heard rustling downstairs.

On Tuesday morning, I was just sitting down to work (feeling behind and rushed) when I got an unknown number calling on my cell phone. My usual rule is to never answer an unknown number, but this time I threw caution into the wind and answered it. Verizon, my fickle lover, was back at the church wondering where I was – so I scrambled into the car and was there in 5 minutes. I smiled and said..um, I asked that you folks call me to give me a heads up because the church isn’t staffed all the time. The person holding the piece of paper on a clipboard and kind of shrugged and said – it’s my boss’s job to make the appointments. No matter, I can roll with the random dating/courtship pattern I’ve got with Verizon contractors. Anyways, today was the big day – to see if the conduit from 1960 was still accessible from the telephone pole to the phone room in the building. If so, we can get FIOS pretty easily. If not, I would have to call in a private company to trench a new conduit. Which means a lot of moola which I do not have. I wait with tense anticipation. I thought they were going to send a little robot or camera down the tube, but no. They are working with technology circa the rotary phone. They started pulling on an old string at the end of the conduit – is that string from 1960? Maybe.

New string unwound from the pole.

And god almighty, the conduit runs true. I might have done a little dance of victory in front of three phone technicians. Praise the (hypothetical) lord. OK, so now the conduit is clear, we can run a FIOS line. There are two more random appointments to keep, from what I understand. One to install the line, one to turn service onto the line. We will see. Right now, I’m in a $580 relationship with Comcast and I can’t get out of it. I think if I start dating Verizon, maybe I can play them off each other and get a better monthly rate. You better believe it that I run when Verizon calls.

Tuesday afternoon, I found myself at the outdoor pistol range. I’m getting steadily worse which is discouraging. Even my pistol is getting worse – I’m borrowing a Ruger Mark 2 – which apparently needs to be cleaned. My magazines jammed twice during my match. OK, so when your pistol jams and you can’t complete the total number of shots, you are supposed to call something called an “alibi” which means that you get a do over while everyone else waits for you to finish. I haven’t gotten the courage up to do that yet because I don’t want to make 7 other people wait for me. I’d rather take the lower score than make people wait like….20 seconds. lol. I think I shot a total of 10 shots out of 20? I told Susan, the range officer – ummm, the pistol jammed twice, but I didn’t call an alibi because….I’m shy. I continued – I’m working on it! And she smiled said….I get it, I get it.

Yesterday, after dinner, as we were winding down chatting about nothing in particular, Elka kept bounding around us, nose in our elbow pits. Look at me! Look at me! she said. We were confused – this was unusual behavior. And then we realized that even though we had an entire conversation back-and-forth conversation about feeding Elka dinner that evening, I had completely forgotten to actually feed Elka dinner. But she had not forgotten. All these things that I do everyday and now these tasks are blended together in a mash of colorless oatmeal and now that I’m 50 and my short-term memory is going – the question – did you do X today? becomes a guessing game. Did I make the bed? Did I feed Elka? Did I empty the washer? Did I take my fiber pills? (OMG the fiber pills – my bowels certainly remember if I’ve taken them or not).

You know on youtube, there are people who celebrate not only their birthday on the actual day, but spread it out to an entire week? Or maybe an entire month? They buy themselves gifts everyday for 30 days? Could I even think of 30 things to buy myself? Maybe I could. Anyways, I don’t often buy gifts for myself (gifts: I consider gifts to be brand new things at full price, maybe useful, but more likely semi-useful, just desirous and coveted) – but I found this octopus trivet and bought it and told everyone that they bought it for me for mother’s day! hahaha.

On our 5th time through garage declutter (it never ends, really- you think you’re done and the garage looks fantastic and then three months later it’s filled with…crap again) – I’m ready to declutter my kayak. I bought this kayak after my summerlong lessons a few years ago (which I loved) and took it out on the water…maybe 3-4 times. And then it’s been in the garage since then taking up space. I considered selling it, but I’m giving it to Team River Runner, a non-profit that takes veterans and their families out on whitewater trips. I had met a few members when I was out and about. It makes me a little sad that it didn’t pan out, but it’s also ok. Out of the garage you go – take care of all your kayakers, keep them safe and have a blast.

Last night, we were talking to Vince about our imaginary puppy – it’s a lot of fun imagining that you have a puppy with needing to take care of all that extra pee in the house. He said that Dani suggested that the puppy should be named Belka – which the the 2nd half of Elka’s nickname – we go around calling her Elka-Belka. So, you know, we wouldn’t have to change any of our brain synapses, we just would continue saying what we already say all day. Elka-Belka! Elka-Belka! (our other dogs nicknames – Ruby was the Rubister, Maxi was Maximum or Maxerator, I miss them <3). The other suggestion from Dani was to continue the theme of Edda, Elka and go with a four letter name beginning with E and ending with A. Ella, Emma, Edna, Elba, Ezra, Enya, and then we decided to diverge and go to Eddie, Ernie, and hilarity ensued. Edda! Elka! Enya! Dinner!

On Saturday I stopped by Hank Dietle’s to watch Ward, my olympic weight coach, play in his band. I had to give up having long talks with Ward at the gym to do more church things. Which makes me sad. The band was fun – after I do all this church thing, which will take a few years, I’m going to lean into music and take singing lessons and try to get into a band. We’ll see. Too busy right now.

So now that I’m a board member of the church, I try to go to events that folks put on – because I support you 100%. Saturday night was Pride Prom, and I got out my pride dress and made my rainbow jello shots (non alcoholic). This took me two (!) tries. The first time I was in the midst of my illness on Wed, I got up to the middle layers and realized that I had made it in the wrong sized pan and the layers were too thin, and I also subbed milk for the recommended sweetened condensed milk and the white layers weren’t white enough. So I went back to Giant when I was feeling better, rebought all the colors and tried again. It’s not hard to make, it just takes time.

Here we are at the photo booth, Edda is slightly unhappy for this photo, but rest assured, she had, overall a good time. This is my favorite kind of party – dancing starts at 6:30 pm, all hits I loved and continuous dancing, and we went home at 8 pm – in bed by 9 pm. A good Saturday night.

I spent a bunch of time yesterday in the bowels of the church looking at architectural drawings from the 60s and the 80s. This was a lot of fun, now I understand why the buildings are so wonky and weird. I didn’t know there was a renovation in 1986 – get this, when the building was built in the 1960s, there was no kitchen built because they didn’t want women to be relegated to the kitchen. But can you imagine a church without a kitchen? Apparently, no because in 1986, they decided they needed a kitchen. It’s not like because of feminism, one doesn’t need food anymore, you can just have men in the kitchen!

I took Elka to this meeting, she had a great time – the entire thing was interesting. The plans were in the basement and we trudged down there expecting no one to be there, but it was filled with moms and kids running around, some trying to learn math, others just tumbling over one another, some running to greet Elka, others shying away from her. None of us regular congregants knew that the space was used in this way! It was fun.

I felt so much better on Thursday and so I put in a full day of patent work – still not working out (physically) yet, I think I’m going to ease into that later in the week. I’m increasingly having more and more conversations with patent attorneys about how they use AI for their work and how it helps them out a lot, saving time, analyzing charts of data, summarizing patents. It’s not that I don’t try, I try a bit here and there (kind of hoping that it’ll help me out the way other people tell me it will – like maybe it’ll cut my search time in 50%) and kind of remain unimpressed. Maybe I’m not using it the right way, maybe I’m ornery and old. It’s just..not very clever. That’s what I want – even at my regular job which is repetitive and one might say, boring – it is in finding the magic in the mundane that is human. I know AI is still a baby, so maybe it will grow into a capable adult. Or else it will just bypass that capable adult stage and slide right into all the ways in which we are terrible to each other. Anyways, the funniest part of my conversation yesterday with an attorney was not about patents, rather it was about the attorney’s children’s school which sent an email out pleading with parents to not send AI generated emails to the schools asking for stuff. I mean, does it feel good when you get an email that is AI generated – even if it says all the right things, doesn’t it feel not quite right?

In the fall, I’m going to go to NYC to see a Mozart opera with my friend Dave. Dave is a big opera fan. I’m mostly a fan of Dave and NYC and I’ll finally get to meet his sister and niece which I’m very excited about and I’m only somewhat tolerant of opera. (People are so interesting, really! I love doing things that other people love – Dave can talk for hours about opera and sometimes I let him do that to me, and I then I forget about 85% of what he says (not on purpose, it’s just because I don’t really understand/care about opera). And then I ask him again and then he tells me again, happy (I think) for the opportunity to talk about opera at length again. (I met another person who is as passionate about the movie Home Alone as Dave is about opera. The Home Alone conversation veered into how many times have you met macaulay culkin? To when did you get your home alone tattoo of mc slapping his hands on his face? Listen – AI has got nothing on people.))

Anyways, this opera chit chat brings me to my most charming find of the week on the internets. This opera clip of a song from the Magic Flute by Mozart. This couple is so cute and they are in love in real life and engaged to be married and you can feel it in the music and their joy at singing it together. To love and be loved – that is how it goes.

Yesterday, I took the day off entirely to rest and try to recover from my illness which at points during the day – I was like my head is going to split open and I’m just going to have to pick the pieces off the floor and shove them up my nose. I spent most of the day in bed reading/sleeping and scrolling. I did, at one point, get woken up by a call from Verizon (I’m trying to get FIOS installed at the church), and the technician was at the church trying to get into the phone room! I rushed over there in my pajamas and my throbbing head in drizzling weather to meet him and said – you folks were suppose to call/email me to set up a time to come over, the church isn’t staffed all the time and he sighed and said – they don’t tell me anything, it just comes up on the computer and I do what it says – it didn’t used to be like this. This is the 2nd visit from Verizon – which basically was the same as the first visit from Verizon and now some third visit is going to come by sometime from some people to do some things (hopefully different from the first 2 visits). I’m actually happy it’s gotten this far, as it started by no one calling me back for months and being on hold so long I had to hang up.

I finished Gone Girl on audiobook last week. I had read it before, but it was not satisfying this time around. I really dislike unreliable narrators. I don’t mind if you have dementia and are unreliable in that way, but if you are just straight up lying, it’s terrible to go through an entire book that way. It’s so hard for me to find good books to read, it can’t be too much like real life, full of trauma, abuse, etc. Where is the beauty? I need beauty in my life. I’m reading The Everlasting now – fantasy – time travel romance. Full of swords, love and dragons. It’s not bad.

We’ve been thinking about getting a new puppy. Jeremy spends a lot of time on instagram looking at doggies. I sigh because it’s work, but I will tell you that Jeremy is the main dog carer this time around. He generally walks Elka about 5 miles a day, I think they have a secret language together. Elka got kicked out of the coffee shop a little while ago and was nervous about being tied up outside while Jeremy got his coffee, but now she’s a champ and relaxed and often gets pets. Jeremy sidled up to me last night and said, it’s not our puppy, it’s Elka’s puppy – she wants a puppy and she’ll take care of the little one. lol.