Year: 2017

Well this has been a week back to routine except that since Vince is still out of town, the house is much, much cleaner & quieter.  Edda has camp all week, we have childcare at the beginning and end of the day – so this marks the first week since Edda’s surgery that I’ve been back at work full time.  And not unexpectedly, I’m a little blue.  I applied for only one nursing job that I thought for sure I’d get, and I didn’t get it.  Also, a visit to the gyn early in the week confirmed my segue into perimenopause as my estrogen levels have started to dip.  Ack.  Anyways, it’s all fine, of course.  When I got my period in middle school I couldn’t believe then that I had to put up with it for decades (into the 2000s!) and now that it’s about to disappear in the next half decade or so, I’m getting all nostalgic.

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Kitachi’s birthday is on Friday, but she’s working only tonight and tomorrow night this week.  Jeremy’s out tomorrow night, so tonight was the night to celebrate!  We made her favorite dinner – tacos and had a brownie cheesecake.  Yummy.  Kitachi is moving to Texas in a few weeks, she’s been with us for over two years now.   We’ll miss her a bunch.  I’m always both happy and sad when our care providers move on…I know they gotta do other things, but they’ve become an extension of our family.   Sometimes I think they know Edda better than I know Edda.  Maybe Edda lets them in on her little secrets that she doesn’t tell me.

Jeremy wore a nice purple tie to work today!

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OK, one last bit about vacation…thank you to Julia who let us spend a week at her house!  It was wonderful to meet her sister, Liz.  We got a group photo at the end of the week, but I’m still learning to use my new camera, so I mistakenly got a fun series of photos of us trying to get the group photo.

Let’s finish off this vacation in this blog entry.  Vacation pictures are mainly fun for the people who went on vacation, I think they make for boring blogging.

Jeremy biked.  A lot.  He biked 300 miles while we were on vacation.  He’s a little obsessed (as soon as we arrived at home, he spent $30 to get access to live streaming of the Tour de France and started watching that all day on Sunday giving me the blow by blow.  Or should I say crash by crash?  It’s not really comforting to me, that TdF.).

There was ice cream almost every day.

There was a lot of napping.

And beautiful 5am sunrises.

Julia’s friend Kendall was there the first part of our vacation.

There was movie watching – Wonder Woman.  I’m very happy this movie did so well but I did have some issues with it.  Diana was a little too clueless at some points in the movie and more dewy eyed than I prefer for my female leads.  I liked Rey & Sarah Connor.  I want my female leads to have more engineering backgrounds, lol.

A game of corn hole.

Sunset.

Lobster.

We split the drive home into two days, stopping off at Bard for the night.  Neither Bob nor Katherine were at home, but Pip was.

And we took him to dinner with Emy and Seth.

Now we are home!

Can I tell you how awesome my friends are?  I wish I could show you all the things they are doing to protect Medicaid.  Soojung cleaned her whole house and then woke up at 2:30 am to do this video for WaPo:

Marta is going to rallies & speaking on the same panels as Pelosi, Booker & Hoyer, you can follow her on twitter: https://twitter.com/MartitaConner.

I was lucky to have dinner with them last night!

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After Vince had safely boarded his flight, we headed back to Alan’s where Jeremy went on a bike ride and us girls went with Alan to Home Depot to purchase an extension ladder.  I love the Home Depot.

Back at home, Hai made a delicious pho dinner.

Matt came over for dinner and sang Chinese opera (?!) for us.

The singing required a fan, which Viviane provided.

Starting at 2:30 am Sat morning, we started getting texts from Vince.  Our foray into WeChat somehow failed and we gave up on it.  Vince has been able to text us via regular texting and Facebook messenger (he’s also been calling using Facebook messenger).  His first text read “I’m in China” and his second text read “I have no service”.  Jeremy spent some time figuring out with T-mobile to remove some sort of block on the account.  Vince found his group & texted a photo and then I was relieved & tried to go back to sleep.  This is a photo from later in the week.  Yes, he’s the only boy!  A complicated double culture whammy – China & girls.

We left Port Jeff and headed to Maine first via a ferry.

And made it to Maine by dinnertime where Jeremy made this for dinner.

And we woke up to this:

And this is how we spent most of our vacation.

Poor Maxi, she couldn’t come on vacation with us.  She tried.  We really had to yank her out of the minivan.  Vince is now halfway through his summer camp in Guilin.  We had booked a flight out of JFK for him last Friday mainly because it was a way for him to get a direct flight to Guangzhou (where the camp started) instead of flying out of DC and switching planes again at JFK or Seoul or Tokyo.  Since we had to road trip to NYC, we decided to make a family vacation out of the whole thing.  We left Thursday mid-morning to go to Alan’s house in Long Island.

First stop: Burger King.  A surprising number of people had decided to wear the crowns at this rest stop.

The Long Island traffic was predictably slow so we didn’t make it to Alan’s house until 5pm.  The two Vs quickly picked up where they left off a few years ago playing this balancing game, though this time it didn’t seem to balance as well.

A quick swim at the beach after dinner.

After spending the night at Alan’s, we left Port Jeff early to get to the airport in case traffic slowed us down.

They didn’t let us go back with Vince, so he managed the all of security and check in and boarding.  For a moment he was all excited because he thought they had upgraded him to first class.  We were all excited for him!  But it turned out he was just in economy (+);  instead of 9 across, his section was 8 across.

Edda enjoyed her time at the airport.  She likes climate controlled places with lots of flat open areas.

There he goes!

The visa is secured, the money is exchanged, the Imodium is packed.  New wallet, new fanny pack, & new haircut.  He learned how to use a credit card & debit card all around town.  We watched all the orientation videos & downloaded texting apps which aren’t blocked.  All I’m hoping is that someone will pick him up at the Guangzhou airport at the appointed time/location.  Vince is like – what do I do at customs?  I’m going through that myself, right?  I have nothing to declare, right?  Yeah, sweetie, you have nothing to declare.  He seems mostly excited and not nervous. Kelly, his violin teacher, told him not to follow any strangers and I’m like, he’s gotta follow some strangers or else he’ll be stuck in the middle of a Chinese airport.  Then Vince suggested an amendment – I’ll only follow strangers if they happen to have the right T-shirt.  Go on your adventure-y adventure Vincie, but come back to me soon.

I’ve been in a funk for the past few days where everything is irritating for no reason.  I think I’ve been in the house too long, or the house is never empty with just me in it, or I’m not busy enough or just everything is actually very annoying.  Edda is doing so well (how can I really be annoyed when everything is going great!?), tolerating all the outings I can manage to take her out on including renewing my drivers license (I can still drive without my glasses even though I always wear my glasses) and my Goodwill drop off of bags and bags of decluttering.  The house is always bursting with crap.  Annoying crap.

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Thank you sherah, for your lovely gifts.

We were just thinking about the Green Mesquite where Ruby swallowed a whole rib in one big gulp back pre-Vince&Edda.

Damn, I miss that dog.  Vince will have to go to the GM someday.  <3

So much cooking from Vince in the house.  There were steamed dumplings on Friday night with wrappers made from scratch and pork that was ground at home.

On Sat, Nat was caring for Edda during the day and Vince convinced her to make HOMEMADE DONUTS together.

Jeremy and I came home from our separate outings at the same time to find:

The donuts were excellent.  Saturday was Maxi’s made up 7th birthday (made up only because we don’t know her real birthday) and she celebrated herself by stealing and eating the 7 remaining leftover donuts that were sitting on top of the dining room table.  I wonder if she actually gets up 100% on the table to eat all this stuff?  She also ate a whole pepperoni pizza on Thursday to warm up for the donuts on Saturday.  She is a slightly terrible dog.

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And I got my first quilt back from the long arm quilting place!

Jeremy is obsessed with biking now (as I’ve mentioned before).  He blames the election.  It’s fine, but it creates more of a scheduling headache now that he wants to ride everyday.  We are such different people when it comes to working out.  I like to work hard, but I’ll stop working hard if I know I’m about to hurt myself.   Jeremy, on the other hand, will just ramp up his workouts until he gets injured.  Right now he’s trying to learn to do an easy ride which seems incredibly difficult for him to do.  He’s a little self conscious because now his has all his riding buddies who track all their training online (who manage to ride 50-80 miles on a working day.. how is that possible?) and he doesn’t want to throw an easy day in there.

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Last night we were talking about other differences in our personalities – mainly my fondness for being a generalist and Jeremy’s tendencies to being a specialist.  I like to start many things and quickly can become pretty good and there are flashes of being very good at it, but I feel like I never reach the level of complete mastery.  I never like the details of anything that I do and I feel like I’m forever banished to the competent entry-level position, always one of 10,000 cogs (literally).  (I’ll tell you now these are the things I’m thinking of starting just this week:  writing a novel, learning the violin, rock climbing- all exciting to me, but I’ll never be Hemmingway, Midori or Honnold which in my deepest of deep disappoints me terribly even though I know it’s OK not to be that much of an expert.)  Jeremy, on the other hand, feels like he’s an expert in a field that no one is interested in anymore and that his expertise has kind of limited him in what he can do and that how can he start over now that he’s built up this reputation and experience?  He insists to me that you only need 3-5 years to become an expert (to try and encourage me to become an expert),  I don’t quite believe that. And I tell him, it’s so much fun to start stuff! Anyways, and it all goes on.  We’ll see what the future brings.

Vince hosted a sleepover last night which started like this:

and ended like this:

Summer is in full swing for Vince, staying up late, getting up late & eating Hot Pockets and playing lots of video games.  We asked for two things from this sleepover: 1.  don’t be too loud at night & 2. please fall asleep upstairs in your bedroom.  Neither of these things happened.  I can sleep through anything, but Jeremy had to get up to yell at them at 10:30 pm and then Eliana had to call them (after trying to text sleeping me) to be quiet at midnight (though she was nice about it and didn’t say shut up, rather, she asked – so when do you guys think you’ll go to sleep?).  This morning, when Jeremy, Edda and I came downstairs at 5:45 am, all the boys were sleeping in the sofa pit (it’s a long story why we arranged the couches facing each other so we have a huge sofa crib), so we just started making coffee and Edda started watching Blue’s Clues while trying to sit on a couch with a sleeping boy on it.

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Eliana took Edda blueberry picking today!