Month: July 2015

Today was pirate day at camp today.  Look at this amazing costume that Keyla put together!  Arrrrrrr….

Last week, I was in Montana for training. Missoula first, which is where one of our partners are located. They are a fun bunch, very talented considering their location. Of course, they were pretty hospitable too and had planned activities for us after training was over. Here, we all are on a pedal pub crawl. We all get on this wagon that has like 8 bike pedals attached to it and go drinking from bar to bar.  It is a good thing downtown Missoula is dead flat. 🙂

Sunday, we booked a two hour horseback ride. Marissa is a seasoned horseback rider while Kristy and I were totally newbies. Kristy promptly turned into a twelve year old girl and squealed at the sight of the horses. I, however, was completely cocky and told Marissa that I had never fallen from a horse before.  Of course, ten minutes after this horse photo was taken, Ike – my steed – tripped on a log and sent me tumbling off the saddle.  Good thing I was A) wearing a helmet B) in a grassy field, and C) kinda used to crashing from mtn biking so much. Now, I have a perfect record for falling every time I have ridden a horse. 

Since Mom and Dad aren’t on Facebook, I feel compelled to (every once in a while) download photos that I think they would enjoy seeing.  So here’s Donald (in orange) on a horse in front of some mountains.  Looks like fun!

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I dropped Vince off at camp in the late afternoon.  This is the only photo he let me take of him, he shoo-ed me out as soon as the bags hit the ground on the dorm floor.  I offered to put the sheets on the mattress (I’m worried that he’s going to spend the whole week sleeping directly on the mattress).  He wouldn’t let me do it.  He did give me a hug on the way out.

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To wrap up the day, I had dinner with my usual suspects.  It’s hard to get all five of us together at once.  We had to do it in two shifts.  Someday we’ll all be together in both time and space.  None of this virtual stuff.   xoxo.

Vince came home from a week at Chincoteague with Bryson’s family.  It was a week of glorious weather (it was even glorious back home in Rockville), they went to the beach everyday.  I got these photos from Bryson’s mom – crabbing and mini-golfing.  Vince said that they went oyster picking?diving? harvesting? or maybe it’s just oystering?, anyways, they went to pluck oysters from the bay and opened them right where they were standing and ate them raw.  Vince is an adventurous eater. Today, he’s packing for a week of computer camp at Georgetown University.  He’s home for just about 48 hours before he heads back out.

I think these photos were taken on Wed – he came home wearing the same clothes on Friday night.  He said that he took a shower everyday and changed back into the dirty clothes.  Sigh.  I asked him on the next overnight came to shower and then try to change into clean clothes.   He said he would try, but no promises.

This week, I went to the office for the first time in a long time.  I met my friend Andy for lunch and I gave him my copy of “The Martian” that I read earlier this summer where a guy gets stuck on the Martian surface and has to figure out a way to get home – he ends up doing a lot of chemisty and botany and navigational calculations.  He was reading a book about the history of the number e.   We are such dorks.

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Today I had lunch with Eliana and Keyla.  Eliana spoke with Keyla during the au pair selection process 6 months ago to tell her about Edda and Vince and to tell her what living with us was like, but they hadn’t yet met in real life.  I wanted to take them to have Indian food – but both of them said it was going to be too spicy and they preferred to have regular American food.  The au pair program has been wonderful for us, I feel very motherly to these young ladies and, in return, they have cared for and loved my kids.  We make a very odd set of girlfriends though, each one of us in a different phase of adult life, all from different countries – I could see that the waitress was trying to figure out exactly how we were all friends.

I bought Edda a few bras last week.  It was time, she’s starting middle school in a few weeks.  Can I figure out a way to freeze time?  I want neither my children nor my parents to get any older.  I don’t really care about myself, I’m perfectly fine with getting older.  I know that would be weird.  But really, everyone is the perfect age right now!  OK, maybe if you asked my mom and dad, they might think ten years ago would have been the perfect age.

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Edda’s pediatrician called to follow up with her Lyme disease.  There are certain things with which the Internet is of no use and Lyme disease is one of them.  I can not sort out the crazy from the not-crazy.  All I have is the CDC.  I’m clinging to the CDC – hopefully they are not filled with crazies, but they were a little behind with the protective gear with Ebola, but whatever.  And I also feel this acute resistance to checking anything about it online because I just want to stick my fingers in my ears and go “la-la-la, I can’t hear you”.  Of course, the first question that the pediatrician asks is if she is symptomatic.  Is she fatigued, do her joints hurt?  These simple questions, for me, are essentially unanswerable and I could just put them in the same catagory as questions like, “what is the meaning of life?”.  I’ve been getting texts from Edda’s camp counselor every couple of days saying that she’s tired and sleepy in the afternoon.   I get these kind of texts all the time.  For years.  From all the people.  Now I get these texts and think, crappy, she’s got Lyme.  It’s going to invade her brain and then she’s going to have two crappy things happening to her brain.  Anyways, the pediatrician and I came up with a plan!  We have a plan!  I’m going with the plan and it will be OK.  Or it will just be.

(update: Edda’s counselor just texted me – she had a fantastic day today!  Relief. Now maybe she doesn’t have Lyme.)

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I’m buying myself a brand-new water heater today.  I feel very lucky to have hot water.  Jeremy will be pleased – we got a brand-new super-duper-efficient power-vent 75-gallon water heater.  The plumber apologized and said that we could have gotten the job done for 20% less about three months ago before the new EPA efficiency rules kicked in.  I laughed and said, oh I’m sure my husband helped put those rules in place, we are happy to pay the extra 20%.  Well, Jeremy is 100% pleased, but me?  I’m half pleased – the more virtuous half of me is happy, the more stingy half of me is not really pleased.

Edda had “tacky tourist” day today at camp.  Keyla made an amazing camera out of cardboard and duct tape.  She just needed her own selfie stick.

We went outside for a walk after dinner tonight.  All the way to the Great Falls overlook.  Even though I run within a quarter mile of the overlook almost every weekend, I haven’t been to see the falls in a long, long time.

A bit of sunset watching for everyone.

Edda has decided that her bed time is no longer 8:30pm.  Instead, she prefers to go to sleep at 9:45pm.  This has thown a wrench into our regular evening routine because I enjoy being in bed and asleep at 10 pm.  It has taken me a few weeks to understand that this is what Edda has been trying to tell me – a few painful weeks were I’ve been in bed with Edda from 8:30pm to 9:45pm getting more and more frustrated about how she was not going the *&^&!! to sleep.  Now I’ve conceeded this fight to my daughter, I will be the one to move around when I do certain important things like writing this blog post.

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Vince got invited to a friend’s beach house for the week.  He left yesterday and won’t be back until Saturday morning when then he gets to turn around and go to sleep-away computer camp for a week. Lucky boy.  All I can say is that Vince really knows how to have a good time.  This was suppose to be another unscheduled week for Vince, staying up late, watching movies and playing video games.  Now he gets to do all that, but closer to the beach and without me bugging him to brush his teeth or take a shower.

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I took some head shots for my friend Abaneh last Friday.  I’m happy how these turned out, the background could have been smoothed out a bit more, but I like the lighting.  This was outside in the backyard with her holding a white posterboard in her hands to reflect light back up into her face.

On Thursday, the boys had chartered a boat to go fishing on the Chesapeake.  Everyone dreamed of catching rockfish and eating it at the BBQ we were going to host the next night.  By now, the group of 5 boys expanded to 7 and they all headed out of Rockville at 4 am to make the 6:30 am launch time.  By 8:30 am, I got a text from Jeremy telling me that the trip was a bust.  The day was beautiful, but the swells were really high and that meant that there were a lot of queasy people on the boat.  And to make matters even worse, they could see all the fish on the radar, but no fish were biting!  They didn’t catch a single fish.  They decided to cut their losses and head back to shore early empty handed.

When Jeremy got home, he lamented to me that he thought it had all been his fault.  He told me that after the boat launched from dock, one of the boys saw a sign that indicated that bananas were not allowed on the boat.  They boy asked the captain what the deal was with bananas and the captain said it was really, really bad luck for any bananas to be on board.  Jeremy then realized there was a single banana hidden in the bags of snacks/lunches/etc.  What was he going to do?  Was he going to own up to having a banana?  Do you throw it overboard?  He decided to keep quiet about it.  But that banana did work its bad luck into the trip…  At the closing dinner with all the families, he told the banana story and we did some research that indicated if the banana had been thrown overboard, their luck would have turned around.  Oh well.

Here’s the infamous banana:

Jeremy is relieved to be going back to work.  Wrangling boys as a camp counselor is hard work.  We use a texting program that will not only give you texts on your phone, but it’ll also send the texts to your computer.  Here’s what Jeremy’s evening texting looked like during the camp week: