Month: September 2016

My clinical on Mondays got moved to today because Monday was Labor Day.  We walked around downtown Gaithersburg (the most diverse city in America), we’re suppose to do a report about Gaithersburg as a community – I’m not really sure how much we found out today as we got coffee at a cute coffee shop.

Got a lady to open her antique shop a little early.  I do like community health, I could do public health in the future.  I’ve learned that no one ever remembers what drugs they have been prescribed.  Heck – I don’t even know the name of the antibiotic I’m taking right this moment.

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Gong Gong got a new math student today (Sam).  They are learning how to bisect angles.  “Ridiculously easy” reports Vince.  We’ll see how the test goes tomorrow.

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It was back to school night for Edda.  We had a minor childcare mix-up, Kitachi thought everyone was going to back to school night (I was unclear) and so we did end up taking Edda back to see Mr. Twigg.  But first: a hamburger for dinner.

We <3 Mr. Twigg.

Edda’s having a great time at school – lots of happy smiles when she gets home.  She does love Mr. Twigg too.  And for us, we met 2 other families in Edda’s class and they were really nice.  Like really, really nice.  This never happens.  I can’t tell you how many back to school nights we’ve gone to where we are the only parents that show up.  But we had a lot of fun this back to school night.

Jeremy turned 48 today, we tried to celebrate well.  I have many faults – one of them being my lame approach to celebrating birthdays.  I always try to improve and sometimes it’s futile, but yet I continue on.  Edda, Vince and I hosted a birthday breakfast at 6 am.  OJ, bacon, lox, eggs.  Decadent for a weekday breakfast.  Flowers too!  Yes, we are all wearing crowns.  We were also very sleepy.

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Vince is rubbing in our high school rivalries.  Ha ha!  Edda’s going to Wootton though, I’m looking forward to that.

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Gong gong is helping Vince out with math everyday.  #soblessed

 

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At dinner, we had Edda’s new care giver, Adriana, and Kristina, one of the coordinators of Edda’s care, to teach Adriana how to fill out her time cards.  It was a full house to sing happy birthday to Jeremy – we’ve been eating way too many sweets and there are so many sweets to come in the next few weeks – so instead of a birthday cake, we had a birthday burrito (which was dinner).

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Donald got us a surprise (!) birthday gift – some way to super duper upgrade our wifi network.  Vince was the most excited (he claims he has a weak signal in his room) and wanted us to start working on installing it at 9:15 pm.  We are also excited (see Jeremy), but 9:15 on Wed night is too late to do any sort of home improvement plan.  This weekend!  Then everyone can come over and surf the interwebs  to their heart’s content.   Good night!  See you on the other side!

Back to school.  We are a little tired from the weekend activities, but I guess that’s good.  My doc called me today about my UTI last week.  Apparently the culture grew E. Coli bacteria that was resistant to cipro, the doc told me to stop the cipro (sorry, can’t do that, my last pill was on Sat) and start taking some other antibiotic.  But last week when I took the cipro, I immediately felt better.  Is it all in my head?  Half of all medicine, I swear, is just in your head.  That’s why I laughed when the vet offered to do acupuncture on Ruby’s arthritic legs – because Ruby would have no idea what’s going on, so the 50% benefit you are getting by spending the money and thinking that the acupuncture will work is lost on the dog.   Though Jeremy thought there might be a second order effect, that I would feel better getting Ruby acupuncture and Ruby would feel better when she sensed that I was feeling better.  So now do I take the other antibiotic even though I feel FAN-TAS-TIC (not really, but yes, regarding the UTI).  I think in my efforts to not make any bacteria more antibiotic resistant, I have failed and sent into the world invigorated and fortified E. Coli bacteria, off to colonize other unsuspecting urethra.

Happy Labor Day!  Here’s Vince and Hector with a dry ice soap bubble.

Here’s our time lapse dishwasher install.  We didn’t start installing it until 4 in the afternoon – quite late for us and we’d already spent 3 hours in the sun at brunch earlier in the day so we were tired and sun-worn-out.  It was not an auspicious start.  But I’m very happy that 1) we did not need to go at all to Home Depot and 2) we did not argue one bit.  Not one bit.  We were often just about to argue, especially when we started to get hungry, but we backed off and had some sandwiches and went back to work.  I think we were both on our best behavior – lots of please-s and thank you-s.  That goes a long way.

Ruby is sleeping on our couch.  It makes me happy because it means she can still jump up on the couch.  Almost once a day, I tiptoe to where she’s sleeping quietly and peer ever so nervously at her body and wonder if she’s dead.  But she’s not dead, not yet.  She’s just sleeping.  She’s having trouble going up the stairs now.  I started lifting weights earlier this year because I need to be able to lift Edda, but really – now I need to lift Ruby.

Edda and I on a car ride over to Eric and Colleen’s for Labor Day brunch.

We had a lovely brunch yesterday with Julide and Andrew and their kids.  They bought a house near Needwood and redid the whole thing to be accessible.  It’s fantastic to visit people to have a 100% fully accessible house – this basically never happens, even with all the special needs families I know.   Edda had a particularly great time at this visit – laughing, walking well and enjoying scones.  Vince and Hector spent a lot of time playing with dry ice.

You can’t be a minor to buy dry ice, so when I was checking out at the grocery store – the cashier asked if I was old enough to by dry ice in a joking, conversation making kind of way and I said that indeed I was old enough.  And then he asked what I was planning on doing with the dry ice and I told him that I was promptly going to give it to a minor to do crazy crap with it.  And he replied “you mean science experiments?”.  ha ha ha, at least we wore safety glasses.  That makes it science.

And I met Sam, the house cat.  mmmm, I <3 cats.

Jeremy bike a lot today.  He sent me a virtual beacon so I could keep track of him – it’s suppose to text me if he crashes, though he warned me that reviews of the app indicated that it was hypersensitive and that it might signal a crash even though he actually didn’t crash.  I’m glad it didn’t text me and I didn’t have to figure out if it was a real crash or a fake crash.

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Vince spends a lot of time at Sam’s house.  Like a lot of time.  Maybe all day today?  Vince hangs out a lot with Sam, so much so that I always think he’s imposing on their hospitality.  They even took him out to the fancy place where they throw bits of chicken at you?  Teppanyaki?  Anyways, we retaliated by taking the bunch out to Ben and Jerry’s.  Turns out Sam’s cousin V is visiting from Michigan, she’s down a kidney from Wilms tumor – a childhood kidney cancer – and in the middle of a long chemo course, but she was feeling well and able to come out for ice cream.  Do I get to call tweens / high school-ers cuties anymore?  A bunch of cuties.

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We are finally replacing our kaput dishwasher.

Our new dishwasher – a consumer reports rated #1.  Only the best for us.  May you have a long life and serve us well.  We are saving the $150 installation fee by installing it ourselves.  May the force be with us and enable us to just drop in this baby with very few trips to Home Depot.

Look, lucky for you the internet doesn’t have smell-o-vision (yet).  Our old dishwasher with stinky water at the bottom.

First.  A surprise text from Donald.  He says hello from Burning Man.  I hope he’s having fun.  But not too much fun.  Sometimes I wonder what I would be doing if I was still single.  Would I go to Burning Man?  I suspect I would be sitting at home with my 17 cats in my pajamas watching Netflix eating takeout Chinese.

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Second.  Mom’s back in town!  Which means the reinstating of our Friday night dinners.

Vince having a laugh with the parents.

Gorgeous sunset on the way home.

Someone is very happy these days.  So happy that she was still laughing at 9:15 pm.  Go to sleep!  So I can go to sleep!

I’ve been battling a low-level UTI for 5 days now.  I could almost kind of ignore it, so I did.  I ignored it and did all the things that I needed to do and sometimes I could even forget about it.  I did a full day of clinical and met all sorts of people in section 8 housing, I did all my work, went to class, I managed the start of school for the kids, trained a new helper for Edda, I did all the workouts I wanted to do and I drank a lot of water.  It didn’t go away, but I kept telling myself, it’s so mild -you can barely feel it.  But I did feel it.  And I went to the doctor today who scolded me for not coming in earlier and getting the script for cipro.  I told her that I didn’t like seeing her.  Not that I didn’t like her personally (because I do really like my PCP), but I just hated going to see her and I hoped that she understood.  Also, I have this thing about antibiotics, I don’t like that they are overprescribed because I want them to work when I really need them to work – like for kids with pneumonia who can’t clear their airway effectively or for people who have (for whatever reason) have suppressed immune systems – so I try to do my part and slog through trying to coax my own immune system to do its thing and work it out. To which the doc said – you tried!  For 5 days!  It wasn’t until I was waiting in line to get the antibiotics that I admitted to myself how crappy I felt.  Then I went home and took the med and told myself that I’ll just lay down for a minute and then before I knew it, it was 1pm.  I took the rest of the day off sick.  I feel better now after a six hour nap and some antibiotics.  It’s not just the recovery from the UTI, sometimes I just need a break from taking care of stuff.  Sometimes I want someone to take care of me.  MEEEE!!!  ha ha ha.  sigh.  

While I was waiting for the script to fill, I went to Levande, our local new French bakery run by Koreans.  I had an almond croissant.  It was quite good even though Vince said this picture made them look like poop.