Month: January 2014

Re-arrange Garage

Today is a bitter cold day.  However, this morning, I had to drive Rena to have a mammogram and a sonogram done as part of her annual physical.  Afterward, doctors said that “everything is fine.”
With respect to garage, ours is a two-car garage.  The red car, a vibe, is always in the storage insurance policy (not driven) and parks on the right, closed to the entrance. The white one, a CR-V, is used all the time when we are back to Washington DC area. 
The first picture shows the newly installed spot light, for the work bench, plugged in to a newly installed wall socket (on the right with the white wire, behind the box) which connected to the “Study Room” wiring on the other side of the wall.  The mirror and the red ball are for easy parking.
The second picture shows the rack that I just installed for Mom to hang her seasoned chicken parts for drying during the Winter time.  It is very delicious and tasty.  Before installing this rack, however, I have to move the existing soda shelf to the back wall in order to make room for this dried-chicken rack.
I will work on other garage re-arrangements later on.

Headed into deep freeze.

The arctic blast is headed our way tonight. We’ll see how cold it gets here. It’ll get cold, but not as cold as a lot of the country.

Vince had to write an adventure story for school tomorrow. He is so handicapped by his slow handwriting, poor spelling/punctuation ability and slow typing speed. The rough draft which he worked on at school was maybe eight sentences long – a lot of them unreadable as many of the words are misspelled and everything is more poorly punctuated than this blog. As soon as I volunteered to be his typist, a whole, fully formed wonderful story with metaphors and plots twists and details spills from his mouth. I handled all the spelling and punctuation. Since he didn’t have to worry about punctuation, all this funny and complicated dialog between the characters appeared (dialog is the worst thing for Vince to punctuate correctly or anyone for that matter). Is writing the direct act of putting pencil to paper or finger to keyboard? Or is it the actual story buried beneath the mechanics? I’m hoping that the story is the most important part and that the mechanics will catch up sooner or later – either by Vince getting better at typing or computers better at editing.

New Year – back to the craziness.

Edda’s counselors, Izzy and Sarah, from Camp JCC came by to visit yesterday.  We had a rollicking good time – lots of good talks about music (Izzy is a french horn player) and speech therapy (Sarah is working on a speech therapy degree). This was the first time we really had a chance to talk to them, Nat usually did the drop off and pick up at camp so we never had a chance to chat before. They even got to put Edda down for a nap. They are holding Edda’s Peter Rabbit, the last toy that she could really hold on to – up until she was about 18 or 20 months old before she lost her hand use.

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Sliding into the new year now – I feel with the snow day on Friday, we never really got going. Now school for me starts in less than 20 days, so I have my own work that I have to get into some order before school starts. Last term, I didn’t really realize how much work it was going to be. This term, I’m a little scared to balance everything I want to do because I pretty much know exactly how much work it’s going to be. But the term is only three months (OK maybe really like 4…, but three sounds so much better). Jeremy has deadlines at work (we’ve turned into people who work on weekends now, when did that happen?) and Nat is going on vacation for 10 days at the end of January. Going to be fun times.

Video / snow

Jeremy and I are knee-deep in talking about video/lighting/photography equipment.  Jeremy is starting to produce video at work, so he’s gone to Home Depot and IKEA over and over again getting his homemade lighting system to work and then shlepping the whole thing over to K Street on the metro.  Then, at night, I get to go downtown and do mock interviews with him  (he asks me a biofuels question, I answer with what I ate for lunch that day) and tweak the lighting and sound instead of eating at my favorite burger place – Shake Shack (date night! – no burger!).  The playback of the mock interviews revealed to me how much I actually do look and sound like Donald – something that I have denied for my whole life and now I see I am totally wrong and I’m really just Donald in a female and height-challenged form. 

I’m getting ready to upgrade all of my photo equipment – I’m reluctant to spend $ on something I consider to be just a hobby.   So there is a lot of talking and not a lot of purchasing.

DC got a snow day on Friday.  Kids out of school; our whole schedule thrown.  Not as bad as NYC or Boston, but enough to make it a pain.  Our neighbors skied cross country in our backyard.

Zoo.

Jeremy and the kids spent part of New Year’s Eve at the zoo. Very exciting news at the National Zoo – a white-tailed deer jumped into the cheetah exhibit with the natural consequences occurring – poor deer.  Jeremy saw the cheetahs a few days afterwards and reported that they appeared smug and self-satisfied.