Month: August 2015

Edda, on the loveliest day this week, went to the fair and got to have ice cream,  her face painted and have her hair adorned with a beribboned tiara.  I think she went on a few rides, but she’s not telling me.

Boba, my dearest love, is visiting me this weekend and sharing my pillow.

Jeremy biked to the farm stand and picked up fruits and vegetables and fully loaded all his gear.

Then we went to Wegman’s for dinner.

Jeremy bought me this electric toothbrush as a sign of his love and affection.  I’m the last person in the family to get one.  I’m a little frightened of it, it’s very loud.  I have this thing with oral hygiene – I feel this slight resistance to doing it.  I can tell when I’m in a foul or depressed mood because the first thing that goes is teeth brushing.  Jeremy thinks that electric toothbrushes are amazing and will make me want to brush my teeth more.  I’m afraid it will make me want to brush my teeth less.

At the beginning of the summer, I had all these plans.  Little plans like ramping up my work, reviewing Chinese words with Vince, making orthopedic appointments for Edda, taking vacations with Jeremy (by ourselves!) and decluttering the house.  Of that short, not very ambitious list, the only thing I managed to do was to get 5 trash bags full of old clothes to Goodwill.  Everything else has fallen off of the shelf and been kicked under the furniture where they now live with dusty Legos, old dog toys and a couple of pennies.

This week, we’ve been dealing with not only impressive driving infractions and the MoCo county fair, but also with infrastructure outages and maintenence.  The water was out on Wednesday when the plumber replaced the main indoor sewer line going out of the house because shit was leaking out of it onto the electronic hub of our small household operation (router, server, unused security system and various other pieces of plastic encased items with blinking lights).  On Thursday, a very kind gentleman knocked at the front door an announced that the power would be out for two hours while they installed a new transformer on the street.

Since I do need electricity to do my job, Edda, Keyla and I took this enforced break from work and headed towards Montgomery Mall where I discovered that you can sell saltwater in a spray bottle for $32.

And I also found out that Montomery Mall has this new, delicious food court.  Full of light and nice, modern furniture, the food court did not have that slightly greasy feel most mall food courts have – although it did have a popular McDonald’s outlet. We are eating waffle sandwiches.

The fair continues.  Vince is determined to reach the 120 hours of work necessary to obtain Ironman status.  Last full day tomorrow and then a few hours of clean up on Sunday will bring him to a total of 121.5 hours.

Jeremy went to work at the fair yesterday (Thursday).  Normally a very busy traffic day because of the demolition derby, it was actually very quiet because thunderstorms rolled through.

Jeremy’s all prepped with plastic encased shoes.

Storm rolling into command center Baker…

Hello loves.  I’m looking forward to the 2nd half of the week when I don’t really have to think about anything except polymer chemistry.  Vince has been going to bed at 11:30 and getting up at 7:15 and working in the hot sun all day.  So he often looks like this in the morning.  I forgot to wash any of his troop shirts last night, so today he had to go to work in a shirt that has already been sweated in for 15 hours. Whoops.

I worked Monday and Tuesday nights.  Here’s Vince at the command post Baker.

I don’t know why he is wearing a trash bag.

Here we are ready to direct traffic.  I had a 14 year old boy teach me how to drive a golf cart.  He said that he had already taught another adult how to drive the golf cart earlier in the day.

Take-down and wrap up at the end of the night.

The fair at night:

Charlie wearing all of Jeremy’s crazy safety gear.  Note the flashing LEDs on the vest!

Shhh, I grumble about the fair, but I do really like going and helping out (but it’s better if I’ve had enough sleep).

Having Vince work the fair all the time is almost like having him at sleep away camp for a ten days.  We don’t see  him for any meal.  We don’t hear from him – nothing!  It is so hot today, I’m tempted to let him sleep in tomorrow and then drop him off later in the morning, but we’ll see what shape he’s in when he gets home.  It was in the mid 90s today, he’s going to be wiped out.

Jeremy has had trouble reading in bed because his bifocals don’t focus in the right place for reading when he’s sitting in bed.  So we went to Costco to get single-vision reading glasses.  These are the pair he picked out:

Edda slept during the choosing of the glasses, she gave Jeremy no input.

We normally don’t go shopping at Costco (we got our membership really for the optical services), but since we were already there, we went ahead and did some bulk and impulse shopping.

Jeremy bought 20 frozen spinach cakes.  (!?!)

Jane is leaving for college this week.  Sunday dinner will not be the same without her.  To new adventures!

We are doing a poor job of adjusting back to east coast time.  It’s 10pm and I’m writing this blog post and Edda is still awake and Vince is out, not yet home.  We are never going to get back to our regular schedule.

Today, we went to Lewis Orchards where they sell all the good things.  Jeremy wondered if we would be able finish the whole big box of peaches.  The problem with buying one XL box of peaches is that they all go ripe at exactly the same time and then you have to eat four peaches in a morning.  It’s not a terrible thing, but it is challenging.

We opted to buy smaller boxes of many types of fruit and not just the one huge box of one type of peach.  Like these plums:

Or these peppers (OK, not a fruit, but still…)

We started in on our fruit challenge on the ride home.  Jeremy is excited about this report that he’s working on for work and he loves to talk about it and I (unfortunately, and a little inconsiderately) like to fall asleep while he talks about all his work stuff.  But I’ve made it an August 15th resolution to try and pay stricter attention to his work when he’s talking about it.  So today, I learned about depleted oil, tight oil and tar sands oil and pumping mechanisms and carbon dioxide as a benzene-like solvent (which I knew) and which fractions are heavy and which other ones are light.  Every once in a while, I have to examine a patent that involves pumping oil out of the ground – usually with a surfactant-based fluid….

I spent the rest of my day with Vince.  Well kind of with Vince.  His boy scout troop is helping directing cars in the parking lot so that the grassy lot just doesn’t become a mass of swarming cars.  The troop gets paid for this and, in turn, I don’t have to help Vince sell popcorn, nor do I have to pay any other fees/dues for the year.   There is a minimum number of hours each scout has to work – it’s about 35 hours, but there are incentives to put in more hours.  Vince told me that this year, he wanted to work the whole fair.  Like every possible minute – so that’s from 8:30 am to 10 pm.  We are on the 2nd day of this, let’s see how long he can hold up.  I think if you work the whole fair, you get some sort of Ironman patch and bragging rights.

But it’s not only the scouts that have to work the fair.  The parents have to work the fair as well – also about 35 adult hours.  And Jeremy and I have no desire to work every possible minute of the fair.  We are putting in our minimums – Jeremy did 5 hours Friday night, I did 6 hours in the hot afternoon today.

I went home at 6 pm and went to Ben and Jerry’s where I had the best flavor ever: Two Wild and Crazy Pies.

Tonight, we listened to all our favorite peach songs: Spanish Pipedream by John Prine and Peaches by The Presidents of The United States.

Good night!  Go to bed!

We flew into LA on Saturday and drove to Newport Beach, about 1.5 hours south of LA.  My parents had driven from Portland on Friday and crashed in Donald’s rent controlled studio and then the next day, headed to LA from there.

We found our rental and got settled in – Edda slept so well in our beach house.  We were just a block from the beach.

On Sunday, Andy and Liz came to Newport Beach from Claremont.  We went kayaking in the inland waterways, not the ocean side.

After the kayaking, we all headed to the beach.

After lunch, Dave came from San Diego.  We went to the fun zone: air hockey, skee ball, etc.

Ferris wheel:

Dave stayed for dinner and we talked about ice cream – a lot.  He’s doing a systematic review of all the Ben and Jerry’s flavors.  My mother and Dave talked about their various fluid dynamics PhD topics.

Monday was San Gabriel valley day.  We went to Caltech where we were lucky to say hello to both of our graduate school advisors.  I thought professors went out of town in August, but they were both there having meetings with graduate students and post docs.  The students all look so young!  We reinacted our first kiss on the side steps of the department.   Uh, slightly embarrassing.

Off to the Huntington Gardens.

To Rose Hill cemetery, the resting spot of my paternal grandparents.  We swept the tombs and cleared them of overgrown grass.  It’s a nice spot. We gave them some roses.  Donald and I talked about our visits with them and our cousins during summer vacations of our youth.

To the Verizon store where we thought about converting my parents over to smart phones.  (We are going to do it!  Not now though.  Thanksgiving.)

Went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant where we saw my cousin Caroline who was 15 at our wedding and is now an assistant professor at UCLA in urology.  When did that happen?!  Anyways, she’s doing a public webinar sometime soon where I can sign in and ask her questions on Twitter.  I don’t have a Twitter account, but I might have to start one just to ask her all my important urology questions.

The next day, we went to the Getty with Charlotte.  The Getty was amazing, I’ve always wanted to go but when I lived in LA, it was newly open and so popular, you had to make reservations way in advance.  They have little iPods loaded with information, not only from the curators, but also sometimes from the artists themselvs.  I only listened to a few of them because I wanted to talk to Charlotte, but someday I’ll go with nobody and just listen to the commentary and look at all the art.

We had a nice lunch in LA and then instead of going to the Science museum, we went and bought my parents a Tesla.  OK, no, we didn’t buy them a Tesla.  We just tried out a Tesla.

Then we ditched Donald at the airport so he could go home and do some work and make some money so that he can buy a Tesla for the rest of us.

The next day, Vince had a double ear infection, so we took him to the Minute Clinic.  This is the third time this summer.  He’s never had trouble with ear infections in his life and this summer, he just looks at water and both ears get infected.  We are going to run through all the types of antibiotics.

I was worried that we were at the beach, but unable to go to the beach because our most enthusiastic beach go-er was down for the count and therefore, a bit at a loss of what to do, but the Minute Clinic was just 2 miles away from this Ramen place that had over 2000 reviews on yelp.  At first, I was a little nervous because it was in the food court of a grocery store, but the minute we stepped in, it was like we were instantaneously transported back to Singapore.

Vince with his Asian pose and a Totoro backpack.

To-to-ro, totoro.  To-to-ro, totoro.

That night, we went out to a restaurant in Newport Beach where we snagged dinner during happy hour.  My mom got lost at the beach on Sunday and had to be rescued by handsome lifeguards in a pickup truck.  This made her happy.  I got her a lifeguard shirt which made me happy.

On our final day, we managed to squeeze in an hour-long visit with Julia and the kids hung out in her back yard playhouse on our way out to catch our flight.

Jeremy and Julia were excited to talk about bus rapid transit and the new Metro line nearby.  LA has a subway!

How did this happen?  My friends are starting to turn 50!  Happy birthday, Patti!

*******

This is a quiet week here in Maryland.  Vince is home doing nothing.  Edda is in her final week at camp.  I’m working, signing up for my OB clinical on Thursday at 12:00.00 pm.  If I was younger, I’d rank the 6 or 7 options in order of prestige.  My ranking order these days is based only on distance from the house.

Vince’s answer to so many questions these days is “meh”.  I ask him how school was – “meh”.  I ask him how the movie was – “meh”.  I ask him how the food was – “meh”.  If we both met Taylor Swift at the same time, I’m sure it would be – “meh” as well while I would be beside myself, unable to speak, with star struckedness.

So when I picked him up from the splurgiest computer camp ever where he spent a week with five of his closest friends who he convinced to ask their parents to also splurge in which they allow them to play a networked computer game called portal which means nothing to me and I asked him how it was and at first he said – “meh”, I looked at him again and said, “Really? because you know what a “meh” answer will mean for next year”, he looked at me again and gave me a big hug and said that it was “awesome & amazing & the best thing ever, thank you”.

They did make them go outside every once in a while.  They even made them make art outside.  They were required to shower at least once every 24 hours.  They were required to change clothes every 24 hours.  The counselors were trained to notice if the boys (and a few girls) showed up each day in the same clothes.

Here’s Vince getting his camp-end award from his counselor – code name Colossus.