Year: 2017

Vince went to scouts, it’s freezing cold outside, but will be 65 degrees on Thursday.  We had chicken sandwiches for dinner.  Good night!  See you on the other side.

I had Edda duty this morning (Jeremy usually handles the mornings) and the video monitor works great.  I can clearly see Edda asleep at 6:15 in the morning when she is totally suppose to be awake and starting to eat breakfast.

******

Jeremy had an early morning meeting and left the house soon after he woke at 5:50 am.  He had a presentation he had to make today that he’s been fretting about, but when he came home tonight, he said it went just fine.

******

This desk has been sitting on our upstairs landing for years, I’m determined to get it off this week.  It hasn’t moved because I think I can get it magically moved for $35 dollars, but that’s not going to happen and I finally booked movers today.

******

I’m struggling again with the washing machine.  It’s not draining well, I recleaned the pump housing, a cleaned out the drainage tube and caused a minor flood in the laundry room.  Finally, this afternoon I ordered a pump (fully returnable – splurged on 2 day shipping) which will come on Wed and if I can fix it – hooray!  And if I can’t, it’ll be moved down the stairs at the same time as the desk.

*****

Jeremy was suppose to end his day with a bunch of afternoon & evening meetings, but he managed to come home for dinner.  He wanted me to roast a turkey breast with carrots and potatoes, which made for kind of a fancy festive dinner – unusual for a Monday night.

*****

I was inadvertently cool today.  Note the below text exchange between me and Vince:

The “b” there is a slip of the finger, a typo.  When Vince got in the car, he told me that he laughed so hard at my text and Snapchatted it and showed it to all of his pals.  I shrugged and smiled.  All afternoon, I thought I had called him a “bitch” as in “Yo, what’s up bitch!?” which is a usage I am familiar with.  But at dinnertime conversation, it was revealed that this is a new “b” usage which is more like “bro” or “bee-yotch” and has a friendlier connotation, and is somehow affiliated with Timberland boots.  (Adriana, who is in her late 20s and at tonight’s turkey dinner, is also familiar with this usage.)  So in my text, my usage is correct in the teenage vernacular which sent Vince and his pals into (as reported to me) fits of laughter.  And the correct response (which Vince’s friend did exclaim to me into the air at the time the text was shown to said friend) to that text should be “Yo, deadass!”

So now you know

What’s poppin’, b?

Yo, deadass. (Actually I’m still confused.  Is that “Yo deadass!” or “Yo, deadass!”?  Dunno.)

On Friday night, the DC area got about an inch of snow.  This was an odd storm because it was worse the more south you were.  Here in Rockville, Vince lamented that he wished it had happened the day before because then there would have been a two hour delay.  I went with Maxi for a run on Saturday morning in the snow because I thought she’d like it.  Usually I don’t take her because she’s a pain in the ass to run with because she sniffs too much and takes too long to decide where to poop and it drives me crazy.  But on Saturday, I managed to zen that crap out and revel in Maxi’s fun in the snow.

*****

I had to give Edda a haircut right after I ran because that was the only time this weekend that I’d have a block of time.  I usually cut her hair in the garage, but it was super cold all weekend, so I cut it in the house which led to a huge mess on the floor in the bathroom.

*****

The washer is dying.  Vince helped me resurrect it after the haircut, but I think it’s not long for this world.

*****

Kitachi arrived in time to help me even out Edda’s haircut and give her a shower and blowout.  I think the bangs are a bit short, but overall no complaints.

*****

Then I went to Thu’s sleepover birthday party.  I was amused at the invitation so even though most people went home to their own beds to sleep, I was one of the handful of folks who slept over.  I saw some friends who I rarely see and it was nice to catch up.  I know Thu loves stationary, so I got her some Japanese highlighters that are very popular with the bullet journaling crowd.  A some moment late at night, we all pulled out our to-do lists – our own bullet journals to compare notes on how to prepare notes.

I went to the dentist today.  I adore my hygienist, Peggy who doesn’t use ultrasonic teeth cleaning.  Rather, she picks and scrapes all of my plaque buildup with the little metal scraping tools.  I find this very relaxing somehow and I look forward to my dental cleanings.  I deferred the X-rays, as usual.

******

The last Friday night dinner at my parents’ for a couple of weeks.  They are headed to South Africa for vacation in the middle of next week.

****

Dad feeding Maxi turkey.

Vince feeding Maxi turkey.

I joined a pretentious book group at the beginning of the year.  We are reading Madame Bovary – which I’m enjoying and pretty sure I’ll finish in the next few days.  But right now, I’m in my lull.  My little break in which I feel like I’m luxuriating in 10,000 extra hours.  In Feb, they want to read Crime & Punishment.  Am I really going to read that book?  Whatever.  I guess so.  Here goes nothing.

*****

I bought a video monitor for Edda today.  There are some situations in which I am the only grownup in the house and I need to be upstairs (usually working on school/work/finances/laundry) and she can happily be watching TV in her own room for hours, but she gets stuck in certain positions on furniture and then I have to tend to her for a moment to extricate her.  The sound monitor isn’t enough to alert me to her being stuck somewhere because she is crafty and often won’t cry out when she’s stuck.  When I’m alone with Edda, I hate being on a different floor than her.  But if I’m on the 2nd floor, she can’t really roam our room because it’s a mess and a tripping hazard and doesn’t have all of her TV shows arranged just so. Though I’m paranoid that someday, a door will inadvertently be left open and she’ll tumble down the stairs.

*****
Given my luxury of time, I spend it thinking about how to be more productive and the cool thing these days to do is a bullet journal.  I’ve been keeping a paper calendar/to-do list ever since I was 14, so I think I’m pretty good at it, but Instagram proves me wrong.  Look at this crazy insanity of to-do lists (these thing are not mine!!!):

I’ll show you mine.  I think I get stuff done.

For almost 15 years, I’ve kept this blog.  In the beginning, there were slews of other blogs to follow, many which revealed more than I reveal on this blog (though this blog does reveal a lot of stuff) and I loved, loved, loved them all.  I’m a sucker for personal, memoir, emotional stories.  Most of them were about motherhood, which was fine because I was learning to be a mother, it’s what I was interested was.  Then Facebook became a thing and then the blogs slowly died off, one by one and I was/am a lonely blogger.  All the blogs turned into “Five tips for a fabulous birthday” or “How to potty train your kid in 3 days”.  I felt like I was the last person holding a personal blog for the past 8 years.  But this week, I found them!  I FOUND THEM.  Tiny, intimate, long form blogs written by smart women – scientists, doctors, professors, mothers, wives where they comment on each other blogs in thoughtful and serious ways.  Talking about work struggles, marriage struggles, financial struggles, parenting struggles.  I’m no longer alone.  I’m not yet sure I get to reveal myself to them, I’m much less anonymous then they are, but I’ll lurk for a while and then decide.

*******

I’m slowly getting back into the swing of things which means figuring out how to repair Edda’s old wheelchair so we’ll have a back up wheelchair.

******

Vince is still confusing me.  Does he know the math?  Yes.  Is he acing all his exams?  No.  It is a sign that I will never fully understand even the things I think I understand.  If you asked me, waaaaay back in 1998, when I agreed to forever link my life to my husband’s at the Caltech campus where we had met in a graduate level fluid dynamics class that neither of my future children would be able to slam dunk an algebra test in their sleep, I would have said that you were crazy.  Crazy.  It’s just how the universe fucks with you, no?  Anyways, after 8 or 12 weeks of painstakingly going over his homework nightly, I’ll just tell you that Vince is a writer.  He’s a creative writer.  Once you get past the spelling/capitalization mistakes, his stories are good.  You can tell that he’s thinking about character development, word choice, imagery, a cohesive theme.  He’s making interesting sentences, he’s thinking of plot.  He doesn’t like it though, he’s firmly in the math/science camp which I’m OK with because, you know, I’m practical.  Can you really make a living being a creative writer?  Much harder than being an engineer.  I’m gently asking him to read more fiction, but he resists.  I tell him his talent is as a writer, he’s like – I’m not going to be an author or anything – why bother?

Back to the grind, it was pouring rain here most of the day, so it wasn’t the best day ever weather-wise to haul ourselves out of bed earlier than usual.  During break, Edda was up every day (her usual) at 5, 5:30 am.  The grown-ups took turns getting up at 5, 5:30 am or luxuriously sleeping in until 7:30 (one day I slept in until 8 am (glorious!), but that turned around and bit me in the ass when I couldn’t fall asleep the next night).  Vince often didn’t come out of his room until noon.

Here’s Vince 5 minutes after he woke up and 5 minutes before getting into a car.  He came looking for me to sew a small hole in his sweatshirt.  I’m like, huh?  You gotta leave in 5 minutes and I’m in the middle of my most productive time at work (6:30 am – 8:30 am), you just gotta leave me alone.  And you’ve had that sweatshirt hole for at least a month.

********

Jeremy sent Edda off to school in the new orange wheelchair and then did a bike workout in which he watched a video of some other person riding a bike (I found this odd).

*****

Gong-gong came by in the afternoon for Chinese lessons and he ate some of my pepper-jack cheese and didn’t ask me at all to buy outdated electronic equipment from Amazon.  (True story:  In the past week, I’ve ordered Dad a corded phone & a 1.44 MB floppy disk reader).

Gong gong also ordered Max around and gave her some treats.

****

Edda had a nice day today, all smiles and laughs when she came home.  Jeremy made all grilled cheese sandwiches for us for dinner tonight.

Jeremy took some photos of me and a pug (Margaret) at last night’s family dinner.  I want nothing more in life (uh, I guess in death rather) to be reincarnated as a suburban dog.  I’d get to nap a lot, I’d get to eat a lot and people will love me for ME.  Even if I become deaf, hairless, bark at unseeable things incessantly and fart a lot.

******

I’m slowly coming to the realization that I think I’m going to miss the Women’s March on the 21st.  I think it might be a big deal but we are suppose to be away on a big weekend get-away, just us grown-ups.  These weekend get-aways are not easily planned, I made child care arrangements way before the election completely forgetting about inauguration weekend, probably thinking then that it would be a NBD weekend, though if the whole thing had gone the other way, it totally would have been a Women’s March with a different tone.   As the Women’s March edges closer in the calendar, I’m hearing more & more chatter about marching in it from my various liberal media sources and then I think I should go, that I shouldn’t miss it.  Blah.

******

Edda’s feet make me sad everyday.  I think this one, the right one, is deformed past pretending it’s not deformed or that it’ll get better or that it won’t get worse.  Flared out like a comma from the ankle. Poor thing.  Sometimes I’m overcome by panic that the foot will become deformed so much that she won’t be able to walk anymore.  Then I have to consciously release that panic before it possesses me with an unrelenting grip.  I made these beautiful feet (and spine) in my belly and now I’m powerless to watch it all fall apart in front of me.  Ah, Edda!  I’m trying.  I’m trying.

*****

My mom gave me this sweater for Christmas and I tried it on today.  I think I need to find an ice rink and learn to do a triple Salchow.

****

Megan came by to visit in the afternoon.  She’s home for a bit from travels abroad.  She used to work closely with Jeremy, but now she does other things.

Evidence of last night’s party.  I didn’t hear a peep from the boys until their mothers came to pick them up at 11 this morning.

******

Met the sunrise on my run this morning.

******

Spent the day cleaning up, the tree came down, boxes got recycled.  I ate a lot of Christmas chocolate.

*****

On our way to Eric’s for Sunday night dinner.  Vince doesn’t often come to Sunday night dinner these days, though Edda is always up for it.

It was a low turnout tonight.  Just us 5.  We talked a lot about headphones and dogs farting.

I said in my last blog post that I want nothing more than what I have.  That is true.  But I also want to have all the things I don’t have – more time, more ambition, more experiences, more friends, more family, more travel, more creating, more learning, more strength, more patience, more money, more drive, more influence, more love & more work.  Hahahaha.  It’s a little terrible.  Oh well.  Hopefully I’ll get all of next year to work on that.  Someday I’ll open that multi-million dollar medical device company (something with adhesives, they are cool) and then I’ll have to shut down this blog.  Or I probably won’t and this blog will continue.
  
******

Vince is hosting our NYE party.  We plan on being asleep at midnight.

Starting the party right with hot dogs and popcorn and holiday crackers.  xoxo, see you all on the other side.