Just regular folks.

So the trees came yesterday..AND I WAS READY. The deer cages were up, my new hose reel was ready to deploy. I’ve been focusing on weight training for exercise…grrrr… I have never felt so prepared to garden. I soaked the trees in water for an hour or so before I plunged them into the ground. The oaks and the redbud were substantial in size….

But the serviceberry was….a nine inch stick with like three old man whiskers for roots. This is totally not going to be able to live in my backyard….because it’s a stick. But I tied a red ribbon around it so that I would not mistake it for trash and then did plant it into the ground. Then the watering involved turning on the water spigot which I had turned off for the winter and, also sending a text alert to Jeremy with excessive water use threatening entire house shut off, and getting myself moderately wet by errant and unexpected spray, so…in other words, a success.

We’ve lived in the house since 8/8/08 and I don’t think I’ve spent so much time in our backyard as I have the last two days. Let’s see what happens. Elka is here checking out my work. I did have her outside with me on a leash while I was working.

Felix and I did our first driving lesson together yesterday. (Sometimes I think I do nothing all day, but then…I do do stuff. It all goes into the ether). I had been passive aggressively putting it off. For all young, new drivers, the state of MD makes them take a 30 hour class and then three 2 hour driving sessions from a third party company. Felix is done with the class, but they scared him and said that there was a possibility of failing the driving sessions and you’d have to pay an extra $65 to retake the driving sessions. So then he was like, I need to practice with you (meaning me) before I do a session and I’m like – I really, really hate teaching new drivers how to drive, so I want you to take at least 1 two hour lesson before I sit next to you in our car. Anyways…I put it off for a while, but I relented first (why is that always the case?) and we drove to the twinbrook library which involved driving on Rockville Pike, Viers Mill road, backing up, parking, three point turns and then finally pulling into our garage. He did great! Totally ready for sessions with a professional driving instructor. And we have to do like 60 hours of this….omg.

I recently got a promotional postcard from MIT noting that my beloved Hayden library had been renovated. I last visited in 2019 (my 25th reunion which I had a disappointing time at – never had I felt so badly and out of place about my alma mater, so I might never go back), right before they started the renovation, so I was able to relive the gloriousness that was the old library. MIT’s undergraduate is mid-size, so I didn’t know everyone by name, but it meant that there were lots of familiar faces – anyways, when I met someone in graduate school later, they said – I recognize you, you were always in the library and it was true. Now, I know this is all relative because when you go to a school at MIT, it’s really easy to feel stupid (even though you are not) and I felt stupid a lot and I got through with the determination of a mouse in the middle of the night in the attic that won’t stop scritching, scratching away for hours keeping you awake. I spent so much time at the library. I remember it was my goal to study about 10-12 hours for each exam, and I did 95% of my studying on the first floor of Hayden.

Hayden library was…not pretty. It had metal shelves full of dusty books. It was crammed to the rafters with technical books with thick bindings that you could touch with inscrutable titles and I never referred to them at all. It had little staircases leading to nowhere. There was the tired but friendly all night librarian (!) that I became friends with like you’d be friends with a barista now. But it had enormous wooden tables and that I could spread out four feet wide and four feet deep with my notes and books. It was never crowded unless it was finals, but there were always a rotating group of fellow study-ers for a collegial feeling.

I rewarded myself after each 30 min study session at the library to go upstairs to the magazine section to read People Magazine – which inexplicably the library had a subscription to. Anyways, can I be disappointed in the renovation? There are no books! It looks like an airport lounge or any regular office space. I mean, it’s nice. But also so not nice. (Also, there are no people in this tour video, so maybe that it also swaying my reaction). It’s no longer open 24 hours. Haha I’m an old curmudgeon. I’m spending a lot of my time trying to recapture the feelings I had in high school and college without phones, without being so tied to the computer.

I got notice that my bare root trees that I ordered months ago shipped to arrive at the house today! And I was like, I’m not ready, I’m not ready! But it was a beautiful day yesterday and I (having bought the supplies the same time I ordered the trees), spent a few hours outside setting up 6 tree guards for the main 6 trees I’m going to plant: white oak, serviceberry, redbud and witch hazel. There are a few extra white oaks I’m going to try to plant with kiki’s tree tubes and see how that fares against extreme deer pressure. We will see. It feels so nice to be outside, my daffodils give me joy, the sun further wrinkles my face. And we go on. (Also! I found a porcelain top to one of our little pitchers in the compost pile! Who knows how long it’s been there….)

Watching Jeremy rock a tiny baby to sleep and cooing so sweetly makes me fall in love with him all over again. Swoon. Made my heart explode.

So, I misjudge a lip on a driveway while I was e-biking to guitar lesson (with the guitar on my back) and I fell off my bike – basically on my maiden e-bike voyage. OF COURSE. It happened at very low speed and it was one of those falls that happened in very slow motion so I could think to myself as I was falling, god I’m so stupid and ridiculous, I hope I haven’t really hurt myself. Mainly only my ego was bruised and my knee skinned. Aa kind runner who I had just passed, helped me off the ground and onto a park bench and was so concerned and didn’t want to leave me. We were about 50 feet from a busy-ish intersection, but on the quieter cross street, and my favorite interaction with this kind runner was – I said: I’m on the phone with my husband and he’s coming, and there are so many people around, it’ll be fine. And he said, looking around – what are you talking about there is absolutely no one around, I can’t leave. How many fingers am I holding up? I mean, it was kind of true, there was no one walking/biking around and everyone was in their cars whizzing by, but by this time, I had called Jeremy to ask him to pick me up with the bike – he was already at Costco getting ready to do all the grocery shopping for Edda’s birthday party. But he put all his stuff back on the shelves and came to get me.

Then, to make sure I was totally OK, I went back to Costco to go grocery shopping with him. Costco, though beloved, is not my favorite shopping experience. The parking is terrible and the fact that you can only by like 18 pounds of bacon at a time, which is what we did, we bought 40 pounds of bacon.

I spent the rest of Saturday just milling around the house, doing nothing.

Sunday, I ventured up to Fredrick where I worked on my snatch. I’ve been practicing at home, but I still don’t have the movement down right, especially the end of the lift. Jeremy has decided he’d rather bike on Sundays, so I’m going weirdly by myself, even though I consider it Jeremy’s sport that I was tagging along with. This was the first time I went by myself and I worked improving my snatch with like – 15 kilos which is like so little weight. That is not even up to a regular olympic bar weight with no weights on it. I honestly have no idea what I’m doing there, except that they are so nice and want me to keep coming back. There are like…serious competitors at this gym. A master’s national champion, a person who clean and jerked 145 kilos – OMG. I’m like…so not strong.

Sunday afternoon, I went to see the Washington Master Chorale with a new-ish friend Lexy. I would have never gone without her invitation, and it was amazing. They were performing Rachmaninoff’s “All Night Vigil” choral piece which was one of his favorite pieces apparently. I had no idea. Initially when Lexi invited me, I thought she was inviting me to an actual all-night vigil/protest which I was like…um I don’t like staying up past 9:30pm. But this was a 65 minute piece starting at 5 pm. So grateful I got a chance to hear this performance. I got my exercise by walking back and forth from the metro.

Our water main was leaking a little while ago (holy crap was my feeling when I saw it), so when we got it replaced, we added this “smart” water shut off in-line. I know, I know, AI is going to take over the world in a few years, but man, it sometimes shuts off for no reason that we can tell. Which I guess is better than being not shut off while your house is flooding. When it shut off mid-day this week, I realized that I don’t have the app for it on my phone, only Jeremy has the app for it and he was downtown for the day. So I was texting him, trying to get him to figure out the error code and turn it back on via the app while I was trying to decipher what the little hand drawings were on the green dial. I eventually figured it out and turned the water back on with my hands and not an app. But on the same day, I also coincidentally realized (because I was doing insurance crap (which is one of my least favorite things to do right next to estate planning crap) that involved adding Felix as a learner to our car insurance) that we could save $82 a year on our homeowners insurance so that was that. Our smart water thing also is telling me that we have a very small leak in the house somewhere. Like teeny-tiny. Somewhere mysterious and unknown to me because I fixed (two Amazon orders and one return and one trip to the Home Depot – total cost about $30 plus about 90 minutes of my time spread over about 4 days) the most obvious small leak (Jeremy’s sink in the primary room’s bathroom) that I could see a few weeks ago and still, we don’t pass this smart water thing’s micro pressure test is does every morning at 2 am.

Thursday night, we celebrated pi day at choir with….pie. Of course.

Friday we went to Vibes – Jeremy and Edda are very good at friendship bingo – you walk around and try to fill out squares with names of people that “have visited another country” or “likes spicy food” or something or other.

Megan came and hung out with us, she borrowed my nursing fleece and inadvertently had two names for the evening.

Look, I loved my yellow outfit so much on Wed, that I wore it again for an entire new set of people. Lol.

Jeremy and I took yesterday off work (mostly) and took my parents to Longwood gardens, about an hour west of Philadelphia. This is a place that I personally had wanted to visit for a while now, and I wanted especially to take my parents as well as I thought they would like it too. I had wanted to go during the holiday season, but the timing never worked out (my father had cataract surgeries) and it was very cold and the tickets were always sold out, so we decided to postpone it until spring. It was a beautiful day yesterday, I love going on the weekdays because it’s not so crowded – I did not need to buy any tickets in advance or make reservations for lunch. They just renovated an enormous glass conservatory and rebuilt the restaurant, so I was excited to go and check it out.

One always worries that the long drive (about 2 hours) & expense (both in time and money) would not be worth the attraction in the end, but Longwood did not disappoint at all. It was delightful, fun and though Jeremy needed to be back home by 3ish for a meeting, we did not feel rushed – we saw only about 30% of the grounds, though we saw 100% of everything under a greenhouse.

There are two main conservatory buildings – one old and one new. The old one was fantastic and unbelievably lush and full grown.

I loved the children’s area where everything was pint sized and I got to brush a statue’s teeth. There are lots of fun fountains in the children’s area and we saw a few very wet, very happy toddlers.

This seemed to be a quarter mile of green wall which is the *hallway* for the bathrooms.

The highlight, for sure, was the orchid room. They have a few thousand orchids in their possession and a few hundred are on display in the orchid room where they do get rotated daily.

Then we went to lunch in their newly renovated restaurant and had a great time. Both the food and service was delightful and excellent – we started with this elegant cheese plate. And then we took a walk around the grounds to help with digestion and take a look at a field of crocus (which pretty much were the only outdoor flowers in bloom).

Overall, a delightful and wonderful day trip. We timed it so that Jeremy would slide right into his 3 pm meeting at his desk, but we did hit traffic on the way home, so at about 2:30, I switched with him driving and he started his meeting in the car and then I dropped him off first at the house and then dropped my parents off at their house.

On another note – I’m completely enchanted by this outfit that I put together which included rented pants and this ponco of my mother’s that she gave me and I remember her wearing a lot when I was about 5-10 years old. It thrilled me to wear this combination which I did not realize was possible until the morning I got dressed.

Jeremy, good husband that he is, about 10 minutes before we left to pick up my parents, went into his closet to change into his yellow shirt which also delighted me. We are goofballs that are ready for spring.

I’m not really good at taking photos these days, so words will have to do.

We finally got our heat pump dryer delivered after about a month of waiting and during the entire month, I’ve patiently been hanging laundry to air dry. We were using very crunchy and stiff bath and hand towels because that is what happens to them when you don’t tumble dry. Because of missing the dryer, I did get into the habit of doing laundry everyday (which I don’t really enjoy), but it means that I don’t have a huge pile of laundry to fold in my office which often led to unfolded laundry that littered my office well into the work week (which I also don’t enjoy). I was prepared to not like the new heat pump dryer, because I thought it would underperform the former, regular electric dryer, but it has gently surprised me. It works well, is quieter, dries within the time range I’d like it to, so I could do like 5-7 loads in one day if I wanted it to. I love that it doesn’t vent to the outdoors and that we can finally switch the positions of the washer/dryer set so that I can stand in the middle of the open doors that will fold out like wings rather that fold together like a book blocking me from either open orifice.

The appliance delivery happened on Saturday – the same day we drove downtown to buy a new ebike. We’ve been talking about this for a long time and we need an extra mode of transport between the three of us. We drove downtown so I could try this particular bike out which advertised, as it’s lowest setting, a person with a height of 5’2″ which I am – though on a good day, I’m 5’3″. Really, we needed a way for Felix to get to work (about 5 miles) without exhausting himself and/or asking us for rides.

Saturday evening – Jeremy mentioned that the dishwasher was only capable of running the regular cycle and would’t go into the express cycle and I asked him if, maybe, we not buy a dishwasher that day, because Saturday was shaping up to be a rather expensive day already, and I didn’t want to fold in another dishwasher as well.

I baked pistachio lemon bars on Saturday morning which I sampled myself (and the family too) and then brought the rest for coffee hour after the church service. They were, I thought, OK, but apparently the NYTimes had featured that recipe that week in the general cooking section, so lots of people had read about it and thought about it and were dreaming of those lemon bars.

I’m having a lot of fun at the UU church these days, I miss so terribly a place where I go and there are lots of people just there. I don’t have in person work (for which I am grateful I still get to stay at home), I’ve become used to being alone. And though it feels hard to leave the house sometimes, when you do, interesting things happen. I love that music is part of my life, like all the time. I’m grateful for the piano lessons as kid, so I understand at least some music theory and how to read music.

Sunday night, we went to Sunday night dinner. Francie is having a big surgery in a week or so… Colleen had asked if Francie could stay with us while they are traveling to France to visit Sarah, I had initially hesitated only because we are kind of full up with Felix and Ginny is on maternity leave and so I’m doing lots of Edda care myself (I recently asked Eliana to come both days on the weekend, because we’ve lost a bunch of care for Edda) and I thought it was a kind of minor surgery, but the surgery is bigger than I thought it would be, so I have a feeling Francie is going to be here for 10 days in April.

The daffodils are coming up and delighting me.

Megan and I volunteered at Main Street on Saturday which involved a ride in Megan’s new Prius with the high tech package that she’s really excited about. It’s actually really, really impressive. It parallel parked itself in a space and you can constantly see everyone all around you. Very, very fun.

What was also fun was the volunteering –

I had a really great time hanging out with friends and drawing.

Meanwhile, Jeremy went on a long bike ride and got himself ice cream for lunch.

And he practiced off leash with Elka.

Who found a bone. Of course.

Since my big decluttering of the house a few years ago, I’ve been eyeing Vince’s stash that he hurriedly packed before headed off to college. They are in about 8-10 boxes sitting in the basement on shelving that I’d like to reclaim at least about 75% back for ourselves. I’m so pleased that we’ve made great progress on household organization – it all takes time and effort, but I feel like the house is lighter, more organized and that I know most of what exists in all the closets and storage that we have. I’m better about thoughtfully buying things we need because I know what we have and more easily get rid of things that we don’t need – usually donating it, sometimes going to the dump. It’s hard to let things go, it’s for sure a skill that you get better with practice if that is something you want to do. We’ve also made great progress on keeping the house relatively neat. This all takes time and I could not have done it when the kids were little and there was so much of their stuff around and the simple fact that I did not have any time and my interest was very low.

It’s been fun going through clothes and, of course, many of them have memories and I’m going aawwwwww a lot.

I found these shoes that are too small for Vince and I thought they fit perfect for me, but they are a little too big. Which is a shame because I like them.

There is a lot of stuff here. It all is musty and needs to be laundered. But we still don’t have a dryer! Fingers crossed it will come tomorrow. I also know this is all Vince’s stuff and I wouldn’t declutter anything without his permission, I just want to make it easy for him to look through it and decide quickly. I know he’s game. He’ll be home in a few weeks. I already made an eye appointment for him. lol.