The house is very quiet without Jeremy and Vince. I think this is the first time that both of them are gone at the same time for days on end. I have Edda, of course, and we spend lots of time together (mainly getting ready to eat, eating, getting ready for bed and sleeping together), but she’s pretty quiet and I’ve gotten used to the constant jabbering of the male half of the family even though I thought, in the beginning, I would never get used to a very talkative house. The first day they were gone was fantastic – a whole Sunday with nothing to do except to amuse myself which I did do and the hours passed in a slow, aimless way that I enjoyed so much in my early 20s. Now I just wish they were home. I can’t even call them because they are some remote mountain somewhere. I’ve been trying to keep busy:
I baked a blueberry/buttermilk cake and a few loaves of banana bread.
Explored the pre-owned bookstore in town. Never been before. Bought a book about Rwanda which I’m 90% sure I will never read.
I added a dog to the mix. Boba is here for the week. His blindness had progressed since the last time I babysat Boba, the milkiness in his eyes is from his degenerative eye disease. I think he’s fully blind now. He does look possessed.
I hand-repaired some of Edda’s bibs while watching a movie a night on Netflix.
I worked with Nat to help her pass her math placement exam at MC. It’s fun digging up all the old math rules that I’ve forgotten. I do wish could do all the problems without looking stuff up, but when you don’t practice everyday, the trig functions slip through your fingers. And Nat is a quick study. I show her once and she understands. I can start with OK, you have a unit circle and this is 0, this is pi and this is pi/4 and she gets it. Sometimes when you try to teach someone, you start with that sentence and you just get a blank stare and then you have to back up even more and then it becomes apparent that you are not going to get there from here within the 4 days that you have to study.
Boba’s mom lent me this wooden puzzle, do you see the pieces are amazingly shaped? I like to imagine that I’m putting it together, but I don’t think I will actually even start to do this puzzle.
Edda’s summer at Camp JCC has been fabulous and it’s all because of Kara. Take a look!
Edda + Kara selfies. Absolutely made my day to get these photos in my inbox.
Jeremy came home from Iowa at 4pm Saturday. Look at this photo! Button-down shirt with tie (+ nametag) in the middle of a corn field. Funny.
Nice flower photo, Jeremy.
He took the new Silver Line home from Dulles which opened that day. There were some very exicited public transportation fans (other than Jeremy) riding the brand new line.
When he got home at 4pm, he started packing for a backpacking trip to Gila, NM.
At 5 am on Sunday (a mere 13 hours after he arrived home), we all tumbled into the minivan and delivered Jeremy and Vince to BWI. Edda and I trundled home and took a nap. By the time I had made breakfast for myself and fed Edda breakfast and had the dishes cleaned and put away, the boys had made it to El Paso. Then onto a train from El Paso to Deming, NM.
Finally to Gila where it is surprisingly green. They headed off this morning – hiking into the cellular-free wilderness. They will come out on Friday. Edda and I are furiously decluttering the house before they get home.
Edda has a molar growing on the inside of the regular tooth line. It’s on the upper left side and it’s coming out in her palate. We tried pretty hard to prevent it from happening (the middle baby molar fell out early) but the spacer wouldn’t hold on her other baby molars, so the space closed and then the tooth came out in her palate. Our regular dentist recommended pulling it out, but wanted us to consult with the orthodontist that she works closely with to see what his opinion would be. I went yesterday and he said that we should just leave it alone. That if we ever needed to put Edda under for other dental work (which I’m sure we will have to someday), we can pull it out then.
I came home to find Vince watching Forrest Gump. It’s one of my favorite movies and it came out during the summer between college and grad school where I worked at the front desk of my dorm sorting mail and hung out at the coffee shop and spent a lot of time doing nothing. It was the Forrest Gump/Pulp Fiction (which was a great movie too, but I’m not sure Vince is ready to see that one yet) summer.
My kiddos watching the movie with me.
This weekend, I arrived home Thursday night around mid-night. Next morning, I woke up to find an excavation on the side of our garage. On Saturday, foundation people put concrete form up for pouring concrete on Monday, right after scheduled city inspection. Pictures 1-3 show the forming from front, side and back. In the second picture, brown ply wood with metals on it is for loading bearing wall. The middle wood structure with light color is just a pile strip concrete for floor additional support – no load bearing just preventing sagging and/or squeaking. The blue line on the wall is the elevation of our additional floor. Two tapping water lines, one for hot, one for cold, are on the wall as well as two drain lines.
While the workers working on the form, I leveled the 3-post structure with screen for vines (picture 4). It is pretty leveled as shown, I think. I used the car jack to jack it up temporarily while digging deeper holes for its posts. Spent all morning just doing that. After, I cleared more blackberries bushes for Mom to plants her stuffs.
Mom is managing all these activities. And after outside is done, she and I will work inside ourselves. Hopefully, it will get completed within two years, or may be three years, no rush.
In one evening, Vince made broccoli for the family and labeled everything in the kitchen.
Vince is spending the week at a fishing camp. It’s a week-long day camp, but they have one overnight camp-out. The bus stop is at our local 7-11. Vince revels in telling me everyday what interesting thing he has found in the store. They sell something which appears to be a fried cheese nugget dusted with Dorito flavoring. This 7-11 is right next to the spot where the old Blockbuster was where I spent countless hours with my high school friends deciding on what movie to rent. And no, we did not get to eat any of the caught fish. Strictly catch and release.
Jeremy is in Iowa this week. That’s where the corn is and he follows the corn crop around. I never thought he would know so much about agriculture. He tells me that it’s a bumper crop this year. This is the text he sent me within hours of landing in Iowa – a candied bacon sundae (and his colleague, Josh, but really, the star is the the ice cream).
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I’m starting to pull together all the information for fall classes in nursing school. I’m starting clinicals this fall, so I needed to get a background check and drug screening done. I’m not a felon! Nor do I have any illicit drugs in my system! I still need to get my TB test done.
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Edda got sent home again for lice. After she got home, I recieved the camp-wide email alert which said that lice has been found and to look after your children’s heads. A little embarrassing. She was generally happier than the photo below shows as we spent a good part of the afternoon treating and combing through her hair.
Now we are just going to comb her hair every morning before camp. I bought a handful of lice combs so we can all comb together – a family activity. It is not unusual to find me, Vince, and Nat at 8 am combing through Edda’s hair while Edda laughs and laughs. A friend called me and recommended the lice lady – a very nice person who comes to your house to delouse a head for $200. We are not there yet. But I’m not above calling the lice lady if we are at our wits end.
What Jeremy wants to talk about all the time is his work. I used to do this terrible thing where at bedtime, I’d ask Jeremy to talk about some work issue and he would get all excited and talk for 20-30 minutes without stopping and I’d gently fall asleep to the rythmn of his voice and the fact that I didn’t understand any of it past the second sentence. Then he couldn’t go to sleep because he’d be all excited about work. To be fair, I don’t do this anymore, it’s a little mean and self-serving.
There are only a handful of people in the world who know what Jeremy works on in enough detail for Jeremy to have a truly satisfying conversation about policy. Jim is one of these people. OMG, the policy chat over pizza and ice cream – the two of them were happy all evening long.