Just regular folks.

Loves, we had a lovely Thanksgiving weekend. I gave up trying to work at my regular job mid-week and I took all of Wednesday off and planted trees outside and set up the Christmas tree inside. On Thursday morning, I continued to clean the house and move furniture and Jeremy really started in on the cooking. I really enjoy this prep time with Jeremy – we’ve thrown enough parties to know how long things take, so we are busy the entire time, but not rushing and we are keeping each other company. I feel like that is the key to enjoying things.

At four, the party began – we had about 30 people show up this year. Vince/Dani, Bob/Katherine and Emy/Seth stayed on the west coast and went to Portland – we kind of can’t believe that the family center of gravity is shifting to Oregon, but I think it’s happening! Dani got a very nice offer for a funded master’s program at the Oregon State University in Corvallis starting early next year, we are thrilled for them and HOORAY – the holidays are more fun when you have a good plan in place.

There was Jenga –

There was a lot of food. There was only dark meat served from two birds because…well we bought 2 turkeys and Jeremy sous vides them in separate containers. So the plan was all the dark meat and half of the white meat and freeze the other half of the white meat for later. But Jeremy inadvertantly turned off the sous vide-er of the white meat section while he was setting it up, so when he set it out to carve, it was still raw! Oh no! He quickly put it into the oven, where it roasted and was ready when like many hours later after the dessert course and folks had headed out to see Wicked already.

Don’t worry, there was enough food.

I asked for many servings of vegetables without cheese or fat on them and so Jeremy obliged with bright green beans and broccoli and cauliflower which I adored – I love my fiber homework.

We closed out the night we a long talk with the Horowitz family – fun talking about Carla and old memories. Food wise – this was a very balanced thanksgiving – not too many leftovers, not an enormous amount of dessert, just right.

The rest of the weekend was very social and active, but in a low-key kind of way. I planted four trees in our backyard- two serviceberries and two magnolias on a beautiful 65 degree day. This took me four hours which included erecting wire fencing around all the trees to prevent the deer from eating them. (If you take a look at my backyard, I’m growing wire fencing and not much else.) I had bought bare root serviceberries early this year, but they didn’t take, so I increased my expenditure and bought 3 gallon trees, fingers crossed they will grow in the spring. We also saw Megan (who stopped by for an afternoon hang – she hung out while I wrapped Christmas gifts), Pat and his wife Theresa – we all went to see Zootopia 2 (where a huge plot point rests on patent approval! go…patent office) and had tacos for dinner together. Noah came over for a bit to help us move a couch from upstairs to downstairs.

On that note, we spent a lot of time rearranging the house especially upstairs. I finished decluttering our papers (which still left 18 boxes – still a lot, but I’m working on it) and Jeremy and I moved beds, carpets, laundry, dressers all around. The reason this started was because I made my BLACK FRIDAY goal!!!

I made 175 hours of total playtime on my guitar app (not all 175 was this year…, just FYI – I did not practice like 3.3 hours a week lol). It was a good goal, ambitious enough that I needed to play most days, but if I missed a day here or there, I wasn’t terribly behind. I finished my goal on the Tuesday before BLACK FRIDAY and felt triumphant. Jeremy cheered me on – as he does – and on Tuesday he told me dinner was ready and I told him I needed to play 2 more minutes and he said – go for it and then it was done. As a reward, I’m buying myself a dresser – which I think I’ll get to in the new year as this is a high spend month – hence the decluttering and moving furniture around and making space for the new dresser. Now I’m making my guitar goal for next BLACK FRIDAY and what my reward will be. I have an idea, but not ready for telling you yet.

We went out on Friday night to celebrate my mother’s 84th birthday. My mother is stunning and doing very well, but we all cooed over Anita, Ginny’s baby girl who is not only a cutie, but did super well at dinner.

It was also a nice celebration because my dad found out that morning that he didn’t have eyeball cancer. I guess at a regular eye checkup a few weeks ago, the regular eye doctor found something “weird” and declared it eyeball cancer and sent dad to the eye cancer specialist. It was a tense two week wait for that appointment as my father settled on the fact that he did have eyeball cancer was going to die from it and spent the two weeks trying to teach my mother how to pay the bills (I’m sure she has forgotten already, as I would have as well), but the eyeball cancer specialist was totally like – that is NOT eyeball cancer which made my mother’s birthday party much more like a celebration. He went to Johns Hopkins again yesterday to another eyeball specialist who also declared it NOT cancer. Whew. Anyways, I also want to give huge props to my parents for taking Uber everywhere. They took an Uber to the appointment in McLean Va and then again to Baltimore for the JHU appointment. They are basically Ubering everywhere that is outside their neighborhood – to which I give a big high-five too. Good job! I don’t have to kill my entire day by driving them around and nor do they have to do driving that is stressful to everyone.

I’m still decluttering – I’m almost done. It’s like everything, the last 10% is takes forever. I found so many fun pictures. When we were so young.

Jeremy went to visit his parents and Alan up in PA taking our electric car and Elka with him. The electric car did fine, Elka seemed a bit pissed – we needed to board her for about 8 hours during the day on Sunday and it was sub optimal, but she’s still alive. Jeremy did lots of socializing which involved music performances and lunches and dinners. All good.

I, on the other hand, stayed at home. Eliana worked both days hanging out with Edda – so I got to go to a Neighborhood of MD meeting, sing in choir, swim. And I also got to go to the Action Auction celebration at night where I won 6 hours of handyman tasks (which I won in a live auction) and I won the raffle for the best parking spot in the lot (which I feel sometimes silly about because I’m within walking distance of the church). I’m on a raffle winning streak. I won a raffle from Camp Hill a few months ago which has a bird house and a beautiful mosaic which I forgot to ask Jeremy to pick up and just yesterday, I won another raffle from JCC which includes bagels, a manicure and golf!

Sunday morning I sang with my friends. Lots of fun.

Last week – Edda had a series of seizures (about 5 in the span of 1.5 days) that landed us back in the ER. As you may recall, this happened last year, about the same time, but that time, I didn’t quite understand how to deploy Edda’s rescue medications and between last year and this year, we’ve used the rescue meds maybe 2 or three times to control her seizure clusters well, but they didn’t work last week. What happens is she has seizures every 6 hours or so. Each seizure, on their own, doesn’t seem too too terrible, but each time, she bites her tongue really hard and then it doesn’t have time to heal when the next seizure hits and then she stops being able to eat or drink or take her oral, baseline seizure meds. We had to take her to an ADULT hospital which is not my favorite, but I headed to my hospital (Holy Cross) – I had a friend working in the ER that day so I felt good heading in (by our car). They were great – they did exactly what I wanted which was to put in an NG tube and gave us a 3-day benzo bridge (which they consulted with CHOP and Children’s who did it last year). It’s weird to walk into an ER and ask for what you want, but that’s where we are. The entire thing took about 6 hours which wasn’t bad. Edda came home with the tube – this was Thursday and we kept it in until she could eat well on her own and pulled it out on Sunday night.

While she was at home recuperating, I was able to go out and play Pokemon Go with Sheela.

Edda made it back to her day program on Monday morning.

And now I feel like the holiday stuff is starting. I’m buying gifts for Secret Santa – I always enjoy how few gifts I buy. I’ll buy fewer than 10 gifts this year, I like to keep gift giving to a minimum. Our big spend, like it is every year, are year-end cash gifts to the support staff at Edda’s program/transport and at-home caregiving.

I went to the volunteer appreciation night at Main Street. The food was yummy and this is another volunteer Caitlyn who hung out with me!

I will tell you that the founder of Main Street intimidates me for various reasons, but maybe we’ll be friends soon enough.

In an effort to keep consolidating, I’m looking through our boxes of memorabilia and tossing things that aren’t important. I totally kept this photo of my cousins.

My boxes of crap – becoming fewer boxes of crap.

I still have a lot.

But this? I found these kitchen/bathroom items carefully wrapped among the boxes and stored for over 20 years, perhaps it doesn’t need to be included with the photos. Once, we had movers move our stuff because that service came with a new job – when we opened one of the boxes, we found out they had packed a basket of trash. lol.

I went to the office yesterday – all the way downtown and back again – and finally met my boss in person after having her for a boss for over a year. It was really fun, I really like my boss’s company.

Jeremy’s been taking long walks with Elka!

Jeremy is so nice to me. He patiently is willing for me to go through all his kitchen stuff one drawer at a time and pick up spatulas and ask him if it “sparks joy” and then we declutter things. He also makes me dinner which I appreciate. We found these plates hidden in the back of some cabinets. We have a pair, they will be displayed. He thinks they are from his grandmother.

So in my effort to get stronger I’ve purposely gained 10 pounds this year – I can’t quite believe it. You can’t really get stronger without eating in a slight surplus to build muscle. But you certainly add fat while you are doing it. Am I stronger? Yes. Am I really strong? the answer is no, I’m still a baby weightlifter. Do I feel strong? Yes. Do I feel chubby? Yes. It’s been a weird year body-wise. So grateful for the things it can do, but also it feels different to be in shape strength-wise than it feels to be in shape running-wise. I will show you my favorite weightlifting motivational video. Enjoy. Do it because it’s hard.

Went to the gym yesterday – mainly to talk because my foot hurts when it’s in a shoe. Very fun. Lots of good news, someone won a competition on Saturday. I like going to the gym and not working out. Hahaha.

I’m trying to do another good full house declutter – I did the first real declutter of the house two or three years ago and now this round, I can see more clearly what I had said I’d keep “just in case” and if I hadn’t touched it in the two or three years, I’m like…huh, this should go. This can make Jeremy anxious – he’s said repeatedly that he appreciates the decluttering, that he knows it has to happen – but I want to declutter on time frames different from him. Like sometimes I’ll go up to him when he’s in the middle of an excel spreadsheet and ask – so do you like all eight of these hats? And then he’s a bit bewildered. He tries to soothe me, I try to soothe him. It’s ongoing.

I got my guitar on my 50th birthday, so it’s easy for me to keep track of how long I’ve been playing guitar – so it’s been three years now. Two years of lessons. I’m having a good time. I have a practice app that I’ve been using for a bit now, it tracks my playing time – I have a goal to play 175 hours by black friday and if I do that, I’m buying myself a v.n. (very nice) dresser that I’ve been eyeing. It’s both do-able and a little hard. I need less than 10 hours, so about 20 minutes a day which I should be able to do. Though sometimes, I’m like…do I really need that dresser? Also, I can tell that my ability to concentrate is not fantastic. This is a relatively challenging fast run of notes that doesn’t last that long and in the middle of it, I can feel my mind drifting from the concentration even though I’ve been committed to concentrating for like 90 second. Gah. I then went to in-person guitar lesson and now I’m good friends with the guitar teacher and there was only one other adult student in the class, so we just talked about random crap with guitars in our hands. I love it.

Then I went to church where I replaced this door knob on the accessible bathroom. I accidentally walked in on someone on Thursday night at choir practice and then three of us spent some time trying to figure out if the door locks and…it does not. So I bought a light commercial doorknob and went in to replace it. I budgeted two hours for this and one extra trip to home depot, but I needed neither – took 15 minutes and BOOM done! Now one can pee in complete, assured ADA door knob privacy. I’m feel extra spicy these days – I got an electrical plug put in and replaced this doorknob in the last week at church. I’m feeling groovy and like I have an entire ‘nuther building to take care of besides my house.

Then I got to go see some bands play from – this is the recital from my guitar school. Again groovy. Wore earplugs which does not feel entirely sociable, but it’s like 95 decibels. Too loud.

Then I came home and worked on fruit cake. This is either going to be delicious or really really weird. A dessert for when people had no refrigeration or chocolate and the only thing they could do to entertain each other was to drink – essentially spoiled fruit juice, I can’t quite decide.

We went to Friday Vibes – Halloween edition on Friday night. We pulled out our tried and true costumes and even brought Elka.

The party was way more crowded than I thought it would be, and I overheard that one of the residents had to bring their dog back to their apartment because the doggie was not a service dog. Technically, Elka isn’t invited to the party – but sometimes we get a pass… anyways, after I heard the dog/apartment gossip, I got self-conscious and tried to make Jeremy take Elka back to the car so we wouldn’t get in trouble. But Jeremy’s like – I’ll take Elka and if they scold me, so be it. But then a few minutes later, after Elka had eaten a hot dog that Jeremy happily gave her, I asked Jeremy again to take Elka back to the car for the rest of the party because – even if he had Elka, I felt like they were going to scold me and not him. Because, no one scolds Jeremy. He just has that privilege. He acknowledged that feeling, and took Elka back to the car for the rest of the party.

Really, no one enjoys Halloween more than this crowd. We accidentally left our porch light on, and there were a few trick o treaters, but literally this year we DID NOT BUY ANY CANDY. Not even for ourselves. So poor them, they got nothing.

Edda won best costume! And got a nice lanyard which I’m going to put to good use.

Jeremy and Edda went home and almost straight to bed, but I kept partying. Elka and I walked down the block to a fire pit. It was cold, but I had a nice time meeting new-to-me people with little kids. And I enjoyed some candy there.

Then I came home and finished the night off with some liquor. I’m going to make a fruit cake! This is Claire Saffitz’s recipie – with Grand Marnier. It takes two months – almost a bit too late for Christmas, but in time for New Year. And it makes two and should keep for years Claire says. So I’ll make one for this year and save the other one for NEXT YEAR!! Crazy. And then I crawled into bed and Jeremy snuggled and said I smelled like a campfire. And then I asked if he could smell the chlorine undertone from my swim in the afternoon (because I can’t run because of my broken toe). Ahhh….nothing like eau de smoke and chlorine to get one in the mood.

Jeremy is spending a few days downtown for work. He’s working a lot. The house is falling apart a little bit, we are both too busy to “reset” it every night now.

It’s time to declutter the house again. I feel it being too crowded. I think I like a fall cleaning 🙂

The most important news is that during our Arizona trip last week, I got emails saying that Edda’s adult service snafus got cleared up and she was good to go back to her day program. And on Monday she went! We are all much happier with this little daily outing and grateful that it took only about a month to clear up. Hooray for small victories. (Edda’s bus below:)

Also on Monday, I managed to break my toe (I think) doing the thing I always do to break my toes which is that I dropped a weight on it while I was weightlifting (only 5 pounds). The last time I did this was the day the pandemic was declared in March of 2020. That time it was like 20 pounds and I couldn’t sleep the pain was so bad, but I also didn’t want to go to the hospital because…pandemic. Anyways, the only thing the hospital did that was helpful was to give me some painkillers, and this time I didn’t need it and so…here it is, undoctored and just waiting until it fixes itself. I’m bummed to take a few weeks off of running in the most beautiful running weather, but I switched to swimming and met up with Claudinna at the pool who is a dedicated swimmer and so I have more incentive to stay at the pool longer because swimming is so much trouble and harder than running.

And….look. Zeke is back. So this cat now has three names that people are calling him – Zeke, Rupert and Chicken. Anyways, I knew this when I gave him away – Chicken is a very vocal cat. Especially at night when us humans tend to not be vocal and really don’t want anyone else to be vocal. But I was hoping at the new house, he’d settle down… but no, he did not. I was texting Christine, our tenant in the basement, that Chicken is 95% awesome and 5% intolerable. And you can just tell, Chicken wants so much to be an outdoor cat. He spends his time at windows meowing as if you are torturing him by keeping him inside. Anyways, I got a text from the person I gave the cat to that Zeke wasn’t working out and I kind of knew that this was the 2nd or 3rd home he was being kicked out of and then I called all my kitty lovers and asked if they were going to shame/judge me by keeping Rupert as mostly an outdoor cat (he’s fixed, so no baby kittens in his future). And then I agonized a bit over Zeke. Because I love Chicken, he’s adorable. He’s like my toxic cat lover who I love but can’t really live with. He doesn’t have a job and just always asks me to make him food and a bit ungrateful, but then snuggles and lets me pick him up and is so soft. Anyways he’s back and I found yet another home for him (not mine) and it’s gonna be great. Or it’s not and he’s gonna come back.

Within 5 minutes of him being home, he jumped into my plants. And then we moved the plant further away from possible launching sites and then he figured out again how to get into the plant. I’m sure now Elka is eating poop from the litter box.