Year: 2008

I’m thinking that in a month or so, I’m going to bike to the Metro. But where to find a bike? I need a bike that can be rained on and perhaps stolen, so I didn’t want to spend more than $20 – $50 on it.

I had heard in that in hipper places like NYC and SF, there is a cool bike called a fixed gear bike, it’s a bike with one gear and no brakes. I figured now that’s gotta be a $50 bike because it doesn’t even come with brakes, but noooo, it’s like $800! People, come on, that is just silly, it doesn’t even have brakes!

And then I remembered in the basement, Donald’s old BMX bike. Dusty and forgotten, it needs to be loved again!

OK, Donald, so what do I do now? Both the tires are flat, I guess I’m going to have to find the bike pump. And it’s missing the front brakes…

As America celebrated its 232nd birthday, I spent the day working. Since Jeremy’s been out of town, I’ve been shortening my hours to not make Yvonne watch the kids for 13 hours straight which is how long I’m away from the house each day on a “normal” day. So I’m making up the hours today and tomorrow.

Since I work for the Department of Commerce, I thought it was fitting that I spent the day working, chugging along and doing my own part to make America great. OK, kind of silly, but I had to give myself a little pep talk, I was at work while the rest of the country took the day off to BBQ and go for a swim.

I’m still liking my job, which is incredible because I have never really liked a job before. Can you see that I have the periodic table tacked to the wall? I get to refer to it every other day or so.

I also took this opportunity to to hunt down office supplies; today I found this filing rack for my folders (pink – first actions, red – amendments, blue – restrictions, black – abandonments, grey – advisory actions!). I work for a self-funded agency, we get no taxpayer money, my salary is paid from the fees collected when a company files/maintains a patent and I think because of this, there are very few office supplies to go around. I basically get some pens and pencils. I don’t even get a pencil sharpener or a three hole punch, so I go find office supplies in forgotten, dusty bins in the Xerox room.

Jeremy packed me a sandwich which I ate at 9:45 am.

Jeremy’s out of town this week. Lucky guy, he gets to go to San Francisco and eat good cheese. I will not deny that I was a bit miffed on Sunday when he was scheduled to leave from Dulles – Jeremy really stabilizes the house routines – without him, I’m content to serve peanut butter, a bag of chips and some flat Coke for dinner. I’m not an inspired homebody.

At Port Discovery last weekend, I got my face painted:

Last weekend, we took Vince and his best friend from kindergarten to Port Discovery in Baltimore. There is a McDonald’s located right next door to the Children’s museum. We went 3 times to the McDonald’s over the course of the day – junk food all day long. Ugh. Makes one’s tummy spin. (At least I managed not to get ice cream in my hair.)

They have a 3-story rope/climbing jungle gym which is the most elaborate indoor jungle gym that I have ever seen. The two boys were freaked out and totally scared to go across the rope bridge that was suspended 3 stories off the ground, but Edda – she and I crossed the rope bridge and shimmied down a rope tunnel so high up in the air that even I couldn’t look down and laughed the whole way.

A regular sighting on my midday stroll.

I took off work today to spend some quality time with Edda. We went to see the dentist, our new neurologist, the physical therapist and to top it all off, I got to get my first (baseline, routine) mammogram. Nothing of note happened, dentist went fine – no problems, the neurologist wants a 24 hour EEG! Surprise, surprise. And my boobs are AOK!

…hippotherapy, I found this video in the Washington Post about a horse ranch in Montgomery County. I don’t think it’s the same place Edda went to, and it’s more about the horses, but hey, some moody B&W photos.

… and nerdy and sweet

So I thought I had an appointment with Sen. Milkulski’s health legislative aide this Wednesday at 11, but after a series of unanswered emails, I no longer believe I have this appointment.

I had written IRSF in advance of this supposed appointment to make sure that all the information that I had gotten at the conference still applied. One of the major supporters for the $500,000 earmark is Ted Kennedy, who is undergoing treatment for cancer right now so I didn’t know if it was OK to still say that he was supporting the cause, since I guess he wasn’t actually going to be there on the Senate floor when someone yells out, “so does Rett Syndrome need half a mil?” because he’s busy fighting his own battle. Turns out that the major turning point of this earmark happens tomorrow afternoon at some sort of “marking up” session, so we’ll know by tomorrow if we’ve got it or not, so this appointment Wed. morning now seems pointless anyways. Sigh. I know I know nothing about how the political system works, but I’ll figure it out someday.

Is it possible to learn to love a season? I have always disliked summers, I loved being in school with my friends and working on projects and classwork and I always found summer to be too hot and too long and too boring. My summers were often filled with odd jobs with no sense of purpose except to wait for the fall when my hectic schedule would start all over again. Perhaps I did not know how to relax.

Somehow this summer seems special, I think mainly because this is the first summer off my kids have had. In previous years, we’ve been on the Singapore school system – where it’s summer all the time and their big “summer break” is 6 weeks during Nov-Dec or else it was daycare which ran all the time.

It hasn’t been so hot here (although even writing that sentence I know has doomed me to weeks and weeks of unbearably hot days) and I see the carefree joy in my kids with late sleeping schedules, no homework, Popsicles day and night and having just a more relaxed schedule.

We just had a cookout with hamburgers and watermelon. Yes, summer isn’t too bad.

Went swimming yesterday at the pool. Edda does not love, love, love the water like a lot of other girls with Rett Syndrome do. I think she remembers how warm everything was in Singapore and everything in comparison is cold, cold, cold.

We put on this little wet suit to try and keep her warm, I think she did enjoy it a bit more once the suit was on. Jeremy is not a huge fan of the pool, as you can see, he’s trying pretty hard to protect himself from the sun.

Vince is slowly learning to swim. He has learned to propel himself forward in the water, but is still lacking the critical skill of taking a breath without needing to stand up.

Edda loved the snack bar, look at the blue tongue of summer.