Just regular folks.

My godchild texted me and asked if I was doing anything special for the 4th of July and I texted back – just being sad. We are heading into a heat wave which will descend on DC, temps over 95 for days and days, perhaps peaking this weekend in the 105 range. The DC mall is particularly hot, that unshaded expanse of grass is where some of my hottest memories are – trudging from museum to museum that seem close together on the map, but are infuriatingly far apart during a DC summer. It just feels like the flames of hell are descending upon us and it is our own doing and now we must deal with it. My beloved country – (give me your tired, your poor – your huddled masses yearning to breathe free – come here! come hear! come try, we are trying together!), descending into a flaming pit of disaster, we are suppose to be better than this. We can be better than this.

I read/listened to an an astonishing 9 books during the month of June. This might be my record since…maybe middle school? I wondered how I did it because the month was so insane – but here’s the real story. I had already read half of Hello Beautiful the month before, and I had already listened to more than half of Every Good Boy Does Fine maybe 6 months ago. There was a vacation with waiting time at airports. Maybe being intensely busy and out of my mind makes me want to pick up more books? I did not exercise very much, nor did I practice guitar very much, it seemed to me that I didn’t even seem to work much. Jeremy was gone a lot, so it also meant a lot of time with just me and Edda – which I guess this month meant reading time. It was a great month of reading – State of Wonder, Hello Beautiful, A Hymn to Life, Every Good Boy Does Fine all 5 stars.

Jeremy and I have such different tastes in books, last night he was talking to me about Asian history – he’s plowing through audiobooks on history focusing on Asia and I was telling him about my sci-fi book about a dying Earth and another planet that seems perfect to repopulate the human species but the space humans – after being asleep for 2,000 years are going to have to fight a bunch of sentient spiders the size of a checked piece of luggage. What can I say? Jeremy was like….spiders? we are going to have to fight spiders? And I laughed.

I’m a little irritated at myself for being irritated. I know, this is counterproductive, but it happens often (well, maybe every few months) and I’m never sure how to handle it. I feel like everything I need to do is annoying and people are annoying and, most of all, I’m annoying. I do so many things to try and counter this feeling, I try to do less, I try to do more, I try to exercise more and I also try to rest more. I try to do more “fun” things, I try to do more “work” things. I try to be grateful for all that I have, and that I’m so lucky to choose to do all the things that drive me crazy. I try to excuse the feeling and I try to scold the feeling. I talk to more people and also, I retreat into myself. And then I get mad at myself for being so unfixable. Hahaha. Mostly I just have to let it pass. I feel like I should not have these moments of irritation because I am so lucky and what the (*#& is there to be irritated about? Literally nothing.

Lexi is a professional bug person – an entomologist (as opposed to an etymologist, or an otolaryngologist). And she brought her bugs to church.

Elka takes Jeremy on walks and tells him where to walk and she led him straight to church where she remembered Sunny, our church admin, giving her a treat last week. She was hoping to get one again today.

Also, Elka and Jeremy got stuck in the rain and called me to come pick them up. Haha, I was laughing telling Jeremy that Elka asked to call an Uber to come pick them up and I was the uber.

Kimchi has returned home to her human mother. The energy in the house has gone down like 95%. Hahaha. Those working dogs, they really need jobs. I asked Jeremy to take this photo of the three of us, all I can say is that stretchy pants need to go. I’m trying, but really, I love them and I’m slightly chubby these days, so what can I do? I’m thinking about it, but also not really.

Edda’s been having a series of seizures for the past few weeks. A few at night which we could not figure out if they were seizures or almost seizures – she seemed perfectly fine during the day and they were only every three days or even once a week or so. And then she had also a “gentle” one on Friday morning – I sent her to camp and then when she got home and Ginny showed up and I was explaining the seizure activity to her and she had one right in front of Ginny and me. This time stronger, but none of this, thankfully involved her biting her tongue. So we got her settled, she had dinner and then I proceeded to give her a bridge of clonazepam over the next 36 hours which knocked her out. I call this colloquially “rebooting” her brain. So it’s been quiet around here, I think we are going to stop the bridge today and have her recover from it enough to send her to camp tomorrow. It so weird that we are so used to Edda’s seizures that this was all happening in the background of the week. Poor girl.

Jeremy extended his business trip until Thursday night which is totally fine, I support him 100%, but things have been a little hectic here and I’m overwhelmed and scattered. Two of the five full time staff members at the church resigned this week – which is basically the only thing about the resignations I can write on this blog, which means that the entire mess has spilled over into extra meetings, extra extra meetings to either pre-prep for the extra meetings or debrief from the extra meetings and couple with that hurt feelings, exhaustion and frustrations that I’m trying to help other people through and my general unhappiness of the entire situation has dominated most of my week. And now we are stuck trying to hire back for those positions and to do basic things that offices do like….run payroll so everyone gets paid. On top of that, I’m dog sitting Kimchi which I had promised to do when I thought Jeremy was going to be in town – when he called to tell me that he needed to extend the trip, the first thing he said was – I’m so sorry I can’t help with the dog. And I said – ahhh, it’s my own fault. Don’t worry about it. I have not dog sat Kimchi before – Elka and I’ve met Kimchi before and we like Kimchi, but Kimchi is feeding off my anxiety and is kind of an anxious dog (everytime I move anywhere in the house, she jumps up with alacrity and perks up and says with her eyes – don’t leave, let’s leave, can you find me some cattle to herd? please, please, please, please, please? I really can not exercise this dog enough, I’d need an entire working farm to satisfy her) and so we are all anxious together. Elka is not entirely satisfied with the situation, but is tolerating it like a gracious host. From her perspective, I’ve traded a calm person who took her on long walks everyday to a dog with a very strong neurotic streak that takes her spot on the bed beside me.

Kimchi’s mind: I will protect you from any moving object and you will help me find a cattle farm.

I’m trying to do things and not sink too much into a mood – I impulsively bought ceramic pots at home depot (which I always think are overpriced and am always waiting for it to be cheaper) and repotted plants that needed to be repotted. I’ve been reading. I’ve given up on baking a little bit, because church is quieter over the summer and I want to bake on Tuesdays, but there is no one to eat anything until Sundays. (I’m exploring freezing things….)

I also went to my doctor who is now my concierge doctor (long story, I know, now I have a rich person doctor) and we talked for an hour about all my issues and concerns (I’m have very few health issues and feel generally very good, but I have a few issues I’m trying to tweak) and I finally went on blood pressure medication for my slightly elevated BP (this wasn’t even on my list of concerns)- hypertension runs on both sides of my family, so I was patiently waiting until the day when I would start. I usually run 135-145/80-85 and I have for many years (I take my BP every morning since 2021), and I started 2.5 mg of amlodipine and now I’m running in the 120s/70s. So far so good.

Things are good here – Jeremy’s on the west coast again, leaving Wed and supposedly coming back on Sunday night. But during a phone call today, he indicated that he might stay until next Wed. This is what happens when meetings pop up that might require Jeremy’s presence – but then is it worth flying home for 48-72 hours from the west coast? The answer from both of us is no. It’s just better to stay there than to haul your aging body back and forth over time zones.

Jeremy and Elka are a bonded pair. Jeremy takes found chicken bones from her.

Elka is forlorn when she knows Jeremy is gone.

Jeremy feels the same way.

I’m working through tough personnel situations at the church, it’s been interesting, but also tough and draining. I decided in order to take my mind off the stress, I decided to try making a layer cake. I think it turned out well, but it’s enormous!

I had a lovely quiet weekend with my family, mostly hunkering down from the heat. I baked chocolate chip cookies (which I haven’t really mastered yet – I haven’t found the exact recipe I like) and a blueberry butter cake. Edda was completely bored as we did not really leave the house and she complained in her steady, monotonic way.

Sunday service was lovely, it’s the end of the congregational year – who knew that churches follow the school calendar in this particular way? I did not, but choir is over for the summer, things lighten up and there is more space to just putter around and relax. And today is a beautiful breezy day. I am grateful.

As a way to stop scrolling mindlessly, I’ve really tried hard to incorporate books into my daily life. I’ve been doing pretty well since the beginning of the new year – I usually have one going physically and one going auditorily. My general goal is to always have something to read and to spend about 10-15 minutes a day reading. And I try to grab the book instead of my phone. But I get sad that I can’t read all the books. At this rate, I theoretically should be satisfied with about 24 books a year – one a month in each format which is less than a 1,000 books if I continue at this rate and am lucky enough to live into my 90s with enough eyesight and cognition to read books. So, sometimes I get antsy when I’m reading what I consider to be an “average” book and want to rush through it and get to the next one. (I always put down a book I don’t like or dislike, but there are many books that are…fine.). But then I remind myself that most of life is average and fine and it’s ok. It’s better than watching makeup videos on youtube. Right?

I also can get jealous about people who read many, many books. The same way I get jealous about anything that anyone is doing a lot of. People who run a lot, cook a lot, decorate a lot, do 10,000 things with their kids, work a lot, practice a lot of music and are very very good or knowledgable. I want to do it all. Everything all the time. But I will have to settle for just a taste of all the things. Some people go deep. I skim on the surface but try to go everywhere.

I’m grateful that I’m still able to explore widely and try different things and meet different people. It’s been a wonderful week of wonderful complicated things. “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

While I was away on the cruise, I didn’t buy any wi-fi package (I was going to – there were a few church meetings that were going on that I could have attended, but then I shrugged and said – I’m here with people I don’t see very often. I’m off my phone, it’ll be good.). I was in/out of service on their little Disney island – enough so Jeremy could monitor the location of my beach chair, but not enough for me to text him. lol.

I took my godchild Scott and my godfamily, Ning, Brian and their two kids Noah and Tristan on the exact same Disney cruise that I took in 2009 – a three day cruise to the Bahamas. I try to round us all up together at least once a year, and everyone’s ears perked up when I mentioned the possibility of a Disney cruise. So that’s what we did. The kids were almost the perfect age – really the perfect age is 7 which only Noah was, 3 being a little too little and 16 being a little too old, but we had a good time interspersed with predictable episodes of complete meltdowns – don’t let the photos fool you. We had fun for sure, but there were also moments of complete overwhelm, overstimulation and too much sugar (only the 3 and 7 year old. the rest of us were pretty chill…). Hahaha. Disney remembered that I had cruised before in 2009 and, that by itself, was very impressive.

The most important thing was that we got to spend time together and chat and that we did. We all flew in from Maryland, Kansas and Texas the night before. I tried to make everything the simplest thing imaginable, so I booked the hotel which is located basically in between terminals A and B at the airport. I booked the Disney transportation from the hotel to the cruise and back again. All the travel logistics went very smoothly.

Disney was unbelievably well run, everything was clean – not a single hair in the bathroom after cleaning, all the high-touch areas shone to a high gloss and they corralled us unobtrusively from activity to activity and from venue to venue. There were about 3700 guests on the boat, and about 15oo staff – all were kind and helpful and made the vacation very special.

Now I’m back home, back at work. It’s in the mid 90s here. Now I feel very slothy – it’s hard to motivate yourself to do anything in the heat. sploot.

I was going to completely be by myself on Sunday – I wasn’t going to church service, I was thinking that Sunday dinner with the family wasn’t going to happen, I was happily puttering. Trying to clean up the house (which is a disaster. when J leaves, all the food stuff falls to me. Mostly I have the luxury of making things dirty and leaving plates all over the house and he gathers and washes them all. he will do this also for my baking hobby, though I try to clean while stuff is baking, but he probably does 50% of my baking dishes. so this means there are dirty plates all over the place and remain unwashed for a few days, I don’t never do them, I just don’t do them everyday which is standard protocol if you don’t want fruit flies or ants), go through the mail, practice guitar, read a book, nap.

Turns out, this didn’t happen. I did end up going to church on zoom, which was interesting, I’d never done it before and was happy to see the service from that perspective and it was announced our new interim minister who is an Asian woman! Interesting. I washed dishes while listening to the service.

Then I saw that there were some ripe pears I wasn’t going to be able to get to – so I made a dessert and while it was baking Megan texted and wanted a place to go with James and insisted that I didn’t have to entertain them or spend the afternoon with them, but they were going to go get ice cream and really, how could I refuse Edda and Elka (and me) the opportunity to get ice cream? It was a beautiful day and we spent a little bit of it outside with friends.

Jeremy is having a good time in California. He needed to get gas and hunted around for gas that less than $6 a gallon.

Jeremy is having a great time in California – doing his thing. Actually, the most interesting thing (to me) is that he got invited last minute on a WORK BIKE RIDE. We’ve heard about these mythical rides – usually middle aged white men in the Bay Area do bike rides for meetings. Basically, it’s the new golf. Jeremy hadn’t been on one, but he finally did go on one and the person who hosted him is very fast. Jeremy remains fast, though he will say he’s slow these days, but not as fast as this other guy. (Jeremy quite admires this other guy, they had a good time, though Jeremy (I think) wasn’t thinking he’d ride so hard this trip). I’m quite busy here, work has seen some improvements over the last few weeks, a relief really, so that it a slight burden off of my shoulders.

Ginny and Megan have helped out a lot minding Edda for choir practice and a donor appreciation gathering that I needed to attend. I was telling Jeremy, sometimes I resent the constraints that Edda can place on my schedule and other times I’m slightly grateful – oh, I’m so sorry, I gotta leave because Edda needs to… or I have to go check on Edda. Or, I’d love to do that, but I can’t because I need to be with Edda. And then I can stay home, not do the brief remarks, peace out early, not go out to the activity and stay in my pajamas and then hang with Edda while we read a book or just nap.

The first day Jeremy was gone which was a Wednesday, I dropped off some homemade cookies (my favorite – oatmeal raisin with chocolate chips) and two watermelons midday to the Police Appreciation Day at the Izaac Walton league. (I had wondered out loud to Jeremy – do you think I should bring a knife and a cutting board? It was supposed to be lakeside – far from the kitchen , so I wasn’t sure if there was going to be cutting utensils there. But I also didn’t want to leave one of our kitchen knives lakeside all day in the random hope that it would be returned to us. And Jeremy said – it’s a gun club, Doris. Someone is going to have a big knife at the party. ) There was a signupgenius and I dutifully signed up (part of being a member includes 6 hours of volunteer time a year, and I figured this was an easy lift for me) – taking all the watermelon spots and 1/3 of the dessert spots. I show up 15 minutes early for the drop off and already the place was swamped with watermelons and cookies. I felt a little redundant. There were about 10 people there already setting up and they asked me if I was staying for the party and I laughed and said – no I need to go back to work. Remember that? When you did stuff in exchange for money? And they all laughed and said that perhaps I was running late for work. I’m totally ready to retire. If I stopped working, my time is already 100% accounted for, I’d hang out for six hours on a random Wed eating watermelon and cookies with friends.

So the thing that I’m trying to learn with the church thing is how to not have the need to have everyone like me. I really enjoy having people like me and most people do like me. But already, I had someone scold and taunt me in front of 15 people on Tuesday night. I got kind of weepy afterward when I think of for the next 2 years, anytime I get up to make any sort of neutral remark, this person is going to get up and basically be a bully to me in front of everyone makes me unhappy. The crazy thing is that I basically agree with this person, so it’s even weirder that I’m being harassed by a person that I AGREE with.

Let see – what else is interesting? Megan hung out with Edda on Saturday afternoon because I wanted to go to a thing and then afterwards I had dinner with Megan and Edda. Megan and I were in the middle of having a long conversation about everything – medication, buying habits, cats, summer and Jeremy had sent me a text. And I ignored it – I think I didn’t even realize that I had gotten it and then Jeremy was like….hmmmm, I wonder what Doris is up to? And then he checked the living room camera and realized that I was eating dinner with Megan and he overheard, briefly, our conversation and then was slightly mortified with himself and quickly turned it off and then was like – I guess Doris will text me later.

I got stuck on this connections puzzle and I texted Dave and he said – “I didn’t get purple, but I got blue first” which was enough of a clue for me to solve it. I just had to imagine myself thinking like Dave. lol.