Just regular folks.

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.

It was a relatively quiet weekend as we mostly stayed inside because hell was raging outside. At some point, DC was the hottest spot in the entire nation and I feel like we deserved it. We celebrated Joab’s 11th birthday with a tres leches cake which Ginny told me he liked, but turns out he didn’t like – he likes chocolate. Oh well. I did bring the leftovers to church where it got eaten very quickly. We celebrated the 4th of July with burritos and tres leches cake.

Elka was scooting around on her butt, so I went to youtube and learned how to express anal glands. With Jeremy as my vet tech, and Elka ever so patient, I milked that anal gland and expressed weird brown liquid from it and I was very satisfied and Elka was too. I do enjoy popping pimples, and this was a very different and larger version of that.

Bubs, our resident downstairs dog, was scared on July 4th when thunderstorms rolled through. Bubs’s parents were not around, so she whined to come upstairs and we comforted as best we could. Bubs has the largest head I’ve ever seen on a dog.

Edda had a pair of seizures on Sunday to close out the weekend, so we put her on a bridge of benzos and I have to contact the Rett Clinic today to catch them up. She’s home today recovering.

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.