Month: October 2018

Picked up V from school early because he’s still pretty sick.  I’m glad I was home today to be able to do this. 

We went to Edda’s IEP meeting this morning.  This was the first meeting with her new team at the high school.  These folks have been working with Edda for about 5-6 weeks now, so they are learning about Edda’s strengths and quirks.  (She hates art.) We signed a piece of paper which said that Edda was not going to get a high school diploma, rather she was going to get a certificate of completion, the form also said that she would get modified standard assessments.  Both of those were fine, I’m at peace with not getting a high school diploma.  They crossed out the two other options on the form, one was consenting to the use of restraints and the other was the use of isolation.  You know, Rett Syndrome sucks and everything would be so much better if Edda didn’t have Rett Syndrome, but it’s also kind of like – oh, thank goodness we are not in the restraint/isolation-procedures-at-school territory.  They tried to cut some services, we (meaning Jeremy) gently held our ground.  At the end of the meeting, the transition specialist came to talk to us about adult services.  Edda’s going to be able to go to high school until she’s 21.  And then we enter the world of adult services – something that is daunting, but will happen as sure as time marches on.  They are trying to help us along, even though I don’t want to think about it at all.  The transition person said that our goal for the next couple of years should be to just go to various community meetings that discuss DDA services and financial planning and other things (demystifying Medicaid! exciting.) offered by various organizations and not really do anything else, so by the time you’ve heard it 3-4 times, one will be over the denial and ready to do something.

******

Ever since I lived in Austin, I have a soft spot in my heart for country music.  I’ve been liking this song recently.

******

Do you know how many times a day I’m asked at the hospital where I’m from?  Like 17,000.  Hey Doris – where are you from?  Usually it’s a patient, but sometimes it’s staff.  I know lots of Asian people hate this question, but really, I don’t mind if it’s asked with the right tone and usually it is.  Though I do like messing with them.  I first tell them “I was born in Baltimore.” which is true but entirely unsatisfying to the question asker.  Then they look at me, head tilted trying to figure out how to rephrase the question (but I like to stop them before they ask, no, I mean where are you really from? To which the true answer would be – “I’m really from Rockville”, which probably is even more unsatisfying than the Baltimore line) and then I say, “you know, I’m consider myself American, but my parents were born in China.  And then they say, ahh, China!  I hope I represent all of China well.

******

Vince stayed home sick today.  He’s congested and everything.  Booo.  Tomorrow is the PSATs.  He will have to go into it at less than 100%.   I’ve been trying to get Vince to read more NYT articles out loud to me to bring his youtube dominated youth experience up to SAT level reading (with spotty success).  He gets to pick the article.  So we skip over all the political articles and head on over to the articles about the pot-smoking dad or animals freed from animal cracker jail.  The other day, he read an article about the Instant Pot and came across this line: “After the rice and shrimp had cooked for a mere three minutes, Ms. Ram twisted the vent, which sent forth a rush of spicy vapor with a companionable whoosh.”  Vince totally stopped at that line (after stumbling over “mere” and “companionable”) and declared it was too pretentious to continue.   It’s about the Instant Pot, a completely non-pretentious thing and turned it into something it’s not.  I’m like- the NYTimes is nothing if not pretentious, keep going!   By the way, we did get an Instant Pot the other day after our slow cooker died, and I took it on it’s maiden voyage where I managed to not only cook the frozen block of chicken, but accidentally managed to pressure cook the weird absorbent pad is often stuck to the bottom of a package of frozen chicken thighs.  Whoops, hopefully not too much polymer ingested.

The boys hiked an unexpected 14 miles on Saturday.  The day involved: impassable roads from a landslide, a blocked parking lot, a weird encounter with a couple who provided parking at their house, mosquitos, a marathon, chafing and then, finally, no water at the Saturday night campsite which meant that they aborted the mission and all came home Saturday night.

It was nice to have them all home on Saturday night.

One of the reasons I took on the nursing job (there are many) now is because I sensed that my marriage needed a rebalancing.  It’s hard to explain, but I think that marriage is all about power, who is basically “more important”.  It doesn’t really matter what the outside world thinks – it’s not really about status outside the marriage, it’s how power is managed within the relationship.  Maybe I shouldn’t generalize.  Maybe I should just say this about my own marriage.  It’s not at all that we were ever in a rocky place or even slightly unhappy place, it’s just nice to take turns who is generally accommodating and who needs the accommodation.  We’ve done this back and forth – let’s see a bunch of times already:

Moving to San Jose 1996: Doris
Moving to Austin 1999: Jeremy
Moving to Taiwan/NY/Singapore/NY 2002: Jeremy
Moving to MD 2007/getting jobs in DC: Doris
Working from home for Doris 2010: Jeremy
Getting the nursing job 2018: Doris
(maybe Jeremy would disagree with this list.  lol.)

I, for many years, had done most of the accommodating.  Since I worked from home, I did all the appointments, the house repairs, the kids shuttling/scheduling and Jeremy knew that I would take care of it.  Not that, at moments, I didn’t yell at him for not doing his “share”, but it was so much easier for me to take care of this than for him.  (I would, about once a year, get resentful for going to all the dr. appointments and make him promise take off a whole morning to do a dental appointment or something and then in the morning tell him to forget about it and I would go ahead and take the kid/kids).  When the 2016 election rolled around, I could see that Jeremy was prepping to try to get a job within the (Clinton) administration and that would require hours and hours of time away from us, but when it turned out that wasn’t going to happen – I basically decided it was time for me to be accommodated in the marriage – at least until it is possible to get an pro-environmentalist in the WH (soon, right?  fingers crossed).  So Jeremy is doing the dental appointments, the early half-day pick ups, the IEP meeting, the emails to Edda’s new team at school and this weekend, he’s taking Vince and various Boy Scouts on a 2-day hike/backpacking trip.

Everyone was grumpy today when I came home at 5 pm.  Jeremy had picked up Edda early from aftercare – so he left work at 3pm to make the 4pm pickup time.  Jeremy hadn’t eaten and was starved.  This weekend backpacking trip was haphazardly organized because Jeremy didn’t know he was leading it until Tuesday night and then he was mad that he was going to have to give up not only a good biking weekend, but also a weekend with me where I wasn’t going to be working at the hospital.  Vince was mad because it’s mid-terms now and he’s worried about some grade and because he’s worried, he broke our cardinal “no-work-on-Friday” rule and did homework on Friday afternoon instead of going out with friends or taking a nap.  At 5pm, the boy scouts still needed some rations for the trip and we needed dinner.

Jeremy seemed frazzled and I asked if I should take Vince grocery shopping and he said – yeah, and can you pick up dinner too?  Maybe Popeye’s?  So Vince went and bought some Hungry Man soups while I waited in line for fried chicken.  When Vince and I pulled into the driveway, Vince was like – I see Dad in the doorway waiting for the chicken.  I said – dad?  you mean max, right?  Vince said – nope, Dad is totally waiting in the doorway for the chicken.  We had fried chicken for dinner (Jeremy said, I feel much better now), I gave the boys a quick hug and kisses and now it’s just me and Edda at home.

I’m strangely “on vacation” this week.  It’s strange because I’m still working and the house is still running on its regular schedule, but I’m completely and totally relaxed in a way I haven’t been since about mid July.  I closed out the fiscal year at one job, the other job is a week of boring but kind of necessary classroom training with a regular business schedule. I’ve already done my first two weeks on the unit on my own and I’m still OK and I know if I did the first two weeks, I can keep going.  I’m sleeping like a rock (now that I’ve written it down, I know it will disappear), I’m going to sleep early, I’m sleeping in, I’m coming home and having dinner with the family.  I backed off on everything, exercising less, I’m eating luxuriously,  ignoring email, and generally having a good time.  Ha ha ha, this is how I like my vacations.  I’m trying to catch up on book club. Vickey already finished Watership Down.  I’m on page 15.  I was going to give up on this, but Vickey said that she wanted to talk about the ending with me, so maybe?  I’m not sure.

Wowza.  Fr*nces won the Nob*l Prize.  Not only did she win the Nob*l Prize, but I was a grad student in the lab at the time when she was first developing the idea/technique that would win her the award.  Many, many group meetings where I listened to directed evol*tion mini-lectures.  I often was unhappy at those meetings, I knew then that I wasn’t supposed to be in graduate school, but I was not sure where I should be instead.  I often wished Franc*s would serve cookies at the group meetings (which I think were scheduled every Friday afternoons).  I guess I would have liked to have known then that this would happen now because maybe I would have been more, uh, attentive? grateful? aggressive with my pipetting? or ambitious and less depressed, angry and lonely.  I was only depressed, angry and lonely at the science.  I was falling in love with Jeremy which was fabulous, so it was a dichotomous experience.  (I did not work on the Nob*l Prize winning research, I worked with Vidya on another project, which ultimately failed, but sealed my friendship with Vidya, which, in my opinion overall was a good trade).

******

Tied with this news about Franc*s is a backwards look at the trajectory of my scientific career.  Each time there is an news article about how women are not represented in science or in the boardrooms, how to encourage confidence in young girls regarding STEM, how to make science interesting, blah, blah, blah, I feel often, that I’ve failed in my life’s mission.  That I was given such a strong push and encouragement – my mother, the only female engineering student in her class in college, my college senior thesis advisor, the first female tenured in our department, and now my graduate advisor who won the Nob*l Prize (5th women in Chemistry!) and I married into a family who knows all the ins/outs of academic life and finally, Jeremy, who, if I had told him early on I wanted to make a go of it at an R1 university or run a large company, would have said, yeah – go for it, I will support you 100%.  There was really nothing stopping me except whatever limitations I had placed upon myself.  Why didn’t I do it?  Why am I doing what I’m doing?  Often I think what I’m doing is lame, that I didn’t live up to my potential and all the opportunities that were offered to me.

******

I still struggle with helping Vince with his physics homework.  At least it’s motion, once you get into e & m, I’m toast.

Our new fridge can fit an entire large pizza box in it – no problem.  So if you want some leftover pizza in the morning, c’mon over, we are ready for you. I mean, before we owned this fridge, we’d leave it out on the counter overnight and it was 50/50 whether Max would get to it before you could.  Now we are 100% sure (or maybe 99%) sure it will end up in my tummy and not the doggie’s tummy.

Since my schedule at the hospital is still unpredictable – I didn’t know I wasn’t working this weekend until 4 days ago and by then we had arranged for Eliana to work today because Jeremy wanted to do a bike race in Virginia.  And then I didn’t want to cancel Eliana’s hours, so she was by most of today to hang out with Edda.  Because she was here, I got to go for a run, grocery shop and really declutter the house.   Thank goodness.  The house was really getting to be embarrassingly disgusting. 

Jeremy actually left Saturday night to a hotel about 2 hours away.  The race started at 8 am today Sunday – the Alpine Gran Fondo.  He was excited.  He was optimistic.  Trying to get into the top 10% overall, which he thought was doable.  He had a fast friend that he had kind of arranged to ride with, the weather was going to be great.

He rode almost 7 hours.  In this type of race, they count only the uphill parts of the course.  At the very start of the race, his bike computer suddenly died (and then tried to come back to life, but got stuck in an unending reboot loop) which was unfortunate, because although he managed to turn on Strava on his phone to record the race, his bike computer is connected to a power meter on his bike, but the phone is not – so he lost all the power information that he usually has and he didn’t find his fast friend and he did the whole 110 miles by feel which is not something he usually does.  So, he feels like it was a good ride under the circumstances.  He thought he could have done better, but it’s hard for him to day because he has no data to compare to his other rides. 

Molly (and her mom Lauren) came over in the afternoon for a bit.

Rory too.  He knows more Chinese than I do.