Year: 2018

Well Edda still seemed under the weather at 6:30 am, though she slept peacefully without any meds through the night.  Ning had already shown up for work and we both looked at Edda with concern.  She still seemed slightly warm.  She measured 37.5 C which is the lowest low grade fever. (We are C for fever temps in the house.  It’s easier to remember and we did our most of our fever measuring in Singapore.  36 = no fever, 40 = high fever).  I gave her a Motrin, sent a text to the bus cancelling pickup and emailed her teacher for another day off and asked Ning to stay an extra hour so I could give Vince a ride to school and head to the gym for a quick run.  By the time I got back, Edda was recovering from a bloody nose and laughing and laughing.  She laughed for a long time and I thought I got tricked into letting her stay home, but it was just the Motrin talking.  I took her upstairs and she took two long naps today, both in the morning and in the afternoon.  I did take the day off of work, I kept her company a bunch and napped with her at times.  It was, again, a quiet day for both of us.

Jeremy doing his thing in Olympia, fighting the good fight.  Though he texted me in the afternoon saying that he is afraid that he’s coming down with Edda’s cold.

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I took a sick day today and spent all day with Edda.  She is snotty & a bit warm & tired – but this isn’t a terrible illness (thank goodness).  She ate well and slept a good bit of the morning.  I kept her hydrated with a squirt bottle and we watched a lot of movies.  I cancelled all the care.  I sent out 5 email/texts in total – morning care, morning bus, school, aftercare and evening care.  Can I say it was a relaxing day?  It was a day of recuperation, not only for Edda, but also for me!  I spent the afternoon looking for signs that she’d be ready for school tomorrow.  At about 7pm, she started laughing at her TV shows.  It was nice to hear and I think it means we are good to go. 

Saturday night, my parents hosted a feast for our Chinese visitors.  We got a selfie.  Whoops, Edda is a little drool-y.  No matter.

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Sunday, early am – Jeremy made his way to Seattle and then Olympia.  This trip was a little unpredicable because the legislative session dates were a moving target.  They are not a set date, even just a few weeks ago.  When he was buying the airplane tickets, he used this Google flight cost predictor thing-y that told him the $350 round trip ticket was probably going to go up to $800 in the next twelve hours and he quickly pounced on the tickets and got them for under $400.  Then he watched the alerts from the flight cost predictor ping him as the price went up to $1250.  He told me that this three (four?) day business trip was to make a 2 minute speech.  Two minutes?  Really?  You gotta calculate the per second cost then. 

He met up (and is staying with) Dennis & Leslie.  They are in the midst of a ton of lobbying to be done during the legislative session as well.

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Meanwhile, while he was flying across the country, we spent the morning listening to many, many speeches about the differences between Chinese & American education & family life.  The ice water is a big thing.  OMG, the poor Americans who go to China hoping to get an ice cold Coke.  Pretty much impossible.   Mom got to pose with the whole cohort.  She was super pleased.

Yifan (Irving) giving his talk:

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I’m sleeping with Edda tonight, she’s under the weather and I think we can both use the company.  I’m hoping not the flu, so far the fever has been mild but the past few nights she’s woken and needed some Motrin to go back to sleep.  But she has the shivers and slept most of the afternoon which is rare for her when she is well.  I spent the afternoon curled on the couch reading a book, listening to her crinkled breathing.  I was on the fence about sending her to school tomorrow, but I just sent the morning caregiver and the bus driver texts to forgo the morning routine.  I think she’s spending the day with me tomorrow.  I’m trying to keep Vince away from her, I’m hoping that we can limit the spread of the germs.

I should not only brag about Vince, I need to brag about Edda who perseveres everyday against her many challenges without complaint, I got this email from her teacher a few days ago.  My Edda!  Feel better soon, love.  xoxoxoxo

Maybe this guy is getting a little tired of posing for pictures?  Vince photobombing in the background.

Trying on  $200 shades at Coach.

I went to the girls basketball game last night (undefeated!) where the Chinese students & host students were honored during halftime.

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Yesterday Vince found out he got into the IB program at RM.  Most kids start their freshman year and apply from around the county.  They reopen the program up to kids whose home school is RM so they can participate their junior/senior year.   Vince, despite his applying on his own with very little said from me (it’s one of these things where if I push for it or express too much interest/attachment, the resistance builds and the opportunity gets shut out without consideration), is leaning away from joining the program.  It’s a complicated algorithm of what the program emphasizes (not STEM and therefore you have to (gasp!) read more world literature and do more writing) (minus) and the students who are already in the program (minus) and the fact that they get gift bags and pizza Fridays (plus).  I don’t get it.  What the heck?  You get into one of the most coveted programs in the county and it’s right here and the extra work that you’ll have to do is maybe 7-10% and you are going to turn away from it because of an extra book reading assignment?  But then maybe you are going to go do it because they have pizza twice a month and a free sweatshirt?  I am so practical – it looks good to colleges, you just do it, esp if you are a 0.5 Asian male interested in engineering in a wealthy school district.  Anyways, I’m not making him do anything, he gets to decide.  He knows if I had the choice, I would do it, but I’m not him and he isn’t me.  (Though historically, I did apply for the Takoma Park/Blair magnet program in the 7th grade when I was living here.  The school was all the way on the other side of the county.  In 1984?  Sheez, so long ago.  I got in and then…turned it down.  I remember my parents letting me decide and I stayed up two nights thinking about it. I turned it down because I would have ended up having a Beltway 495 commute when I was 12.  Thus began a lifetime of picking things because they minimize the commute. And I did just fine w/o the magnet program.) Though I did convince him to take another year of (non-required) Chinese class.  Jeremy watched that interaction last night with some amusement.  Vince protesting, me cajoling, back and forth, back and forth.  Me holding my ground, yet! Trying! to! keep! the! conversation! light! happy! jokey! Jeremy sighed and said – you two! 

Chinese exchange student week continues!  No waiting on new purchases – going to school with new kicks!

Wed night, my parents hosted a dinner at Matchbox and invited another family who is hosting two exchange students.  This is Isaac’s family, Vince’s pal.  Vince & Isaac co-founded the Beyblade Club which meets Thursdays at noon.  Come and join them, donuts monthly!  I haven’t spent much time with Isaac’s parents, it was fun to get to know them.  The mom is 1/2 Chinese and the dad is 1/1 Chinese, so the kids are 3/4 Chinese.  I asked Ben, the dad, what they are feeding their exchange students and he said the he reverted back to Chinese breakfasts!  Rice porridge, buns, soy milk.   I was aghast!  You’re not serving them American breakfasts?!  They don’t like American food, he replied.  I said that we didn’t even ask, we served, for breakfast, pancakes, cereal & one-eye giants.  I’m sure the enchiladas for dinner the first night were confusing.

This was a fun dinner.  My mom & dad had a blast, it was nice to see.  It’s gotta be a little weird for the students to come all the way from China to see what America is about and land at a dinner table full of Chinese people.  Or maybe it’s comforting. 

We had a two hour delay today for…nothing?  There appeared to be absolutely no snow on the ground.  MSPS was totally confused and sent three email messages that went like this: 1) it’s a 2 hour delay!, 2) yeah, that’s true, it’s a 2 hour delay, but we’ll check again at 7 am and finally 3) um no, yeah, it’s still a 2 hour delay.  The kids slept in, Vince made pancakes for breakfast and we shuttled them off to school.

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Then in the afternoon, I drove the kids to Montgomery Mall.  I don’t think I’ve ever gone shopping with Vince in this particular teenage way of wandering around from store to store and trying on shoes and clothes and admiring Gatorade branded shoes.  It is both fascinating and boring.  Yifan had permission from his mom to buy two pairs of Air Jordan shoes and two pairs he did procure.  Yikes!  Super expensive.  But I guess cheaper than if he tried to buy them in China.

I think this is an Adidas jacket (I guess that is the cool brand these days, though I don’t ever consider it), doesn’t it look like one of those old Member’s Only jackets?

Another Adidas jacket, this time with orange on the inside.

And no trip to the MM would be complete without sitting in the Tesla.

Sometimes I ask Jeremy to do things and he happily agrees and then he promptly forgets to do them.  He doesn’t do this on purpose.  He just forgets.  We’ve had many arguments how this forgetting doesn’t mean that I’m not important to him or that the task isn’t important, it just means that he’s really good at forgetting.  When I’m in a good mood, this sounds like a reasonable argument because I know it is true.  When I’m in a bad mood, I’m like WTF is that kind of crappy excuse?!?  But there are a few things that he gets to with alacrity – almost overcompensating for forgetting all the other things.  One of them is energy consumption.  He likes to think about energy consumption macro at work & micro at home. I was paying the bills today and noticed that our gas bill was crazy high.  $225?  Usually it’s well under $200 for a winter month.   Last month, for example, it was $125.  Gas heats our basement and our first floor, we have a ground source heat pump (geothermal) for the upstairs.  I texted him, in the middle of the work day, just an FYI – hey dude, the gas bill about doubled, maybe there is a gas leak? or maybe the tenants are using the gas fireplace all the time?   We should check it out. And within, I swear, 30 seconds, I have graphs of heating degree days for the last three years with the accompanying 4 week rolling average with analysis/commentary of our energy consumption.  Anyways, the conclusion was that it was a terribly cold month, and therefore, it was a reasonable bill.  We also always buy an energy star appliances at Jeremy’s request.  Sometimes there is only one model. Our dryer, I think, is the only energy star model, it’s hard to dry clothes without a lot of energy input. We put it on super saver mode and it takes almost 90 minutes to dry, but it does end up drying everything. Also, the fridge (which somehow self-resuscitated itself from its brief illness and is happily keeping cold things cold – so I estimate that we’ll get another six months from it) would cost $300 – 500 dollars more to save $8 a year on our energy bill which is weird, but maybe the energy star model has better shelving?  who knows. 

All the Chinese girl exchange students wanted to take photos with this blond/blue eyed 6’5″ host student.  He started joking that it would cost them all $5 to take a photo with him.  lol.

Tonight, we headed to a hotel in downtown Rockville to meet and pick up our Chinese exchange student.  We had a regular American, hotel buffet dinner.  Here is Vince with a couple of his own classmates while we waited for the Chinese kids to enter the room.

If you remember, these kids come from my mom’s high school in Chongming – a suburb of Shanghai.  Mom and Dad came to dinner and my mom seemed to have a great time telling everyone that she was class of ’59 (!).  She even brought out an old yearbook.  Here’s our student, Yifan.  He’s following Vince around for the week.  We have one day, Saturday, to plan a fun thing.  We asked Yifan what fun thing he wanted to do because I’d thought we could go see museums, skiing or rock climbing, but the thing that he (and all his classmates) want to do is to go shopping.  For sneakers.  So I guess we’ll be going to Montgomery Mall, Tysons & the outlets a bit north.

Edda was only slightly vocal during the speeches (when they run longer than necessary, she does not mince words).

Vince’s HS principal & the coordinator of the exchange!

Vince left very early this morning to spend a weekend camping with the scouts.  We had a quiet day at home – I worked a little, Jeremy went biking.  Edda had a caregiver in the afternoon, so I spent some time at a quilt shop.  We had a simple salad for dinner.  Now to bed early! 

A few weeks ago, we found ourselves done with an early dinner on Saturday night and all looked at each other and decided that maybe we could see a whole movie together.  This rarely happens as we all have our own things we like to watch (and this is what we make fun of each other for watching): Jeremy: biking videos, Doris: ASMR videos, Vince: will it burrito? videos, Edda: Finding Nemo.  We settled on Zootopia (which is a fantastic movie btw) and there is a famous DMV scene where the fast bunny protagonist runs into a groups of sloths running the place.

Yesterday, we lived that experience at our local DMV to get Vince his learner’s permit. I had made an appointment online for 1:30 pm, but that did not seem to matter much as no one referenced any appointment time and we waited in line just like everyone else.  We got to the express branch about 15 minutes early and immediately found the line so long that it pressed against the door and we kept needing to scoot out of the way to let people in and out.  I reminded Vince about Zootopia and he was like – yeah, but I didn’t think it was really going to be this bad.  He had made the poor DMV virgin move of not having a fully charged phone and no battery backup.  He asked if we could sit down at least because about half the people in the room were standing in our line and half the people were sitting down.  I said that we had to stand in this line first to get a number and then we get to sit in line with the other people.  All week I had kind of gently tried to get him to practice taking the test & reading the booklet (to no avail) – not because I super care about him passing or not passing – but mainly because I would hate blowing another afternoon at the DMV if he didn’t pass.  But pass he did!  It only took us 2.5 hours.

Besides the frustration of waiting, I love the people watching at DMV because I feel like it’s as good of a cross section of the community as you can get sitting in a random room for a couple of hours.  You’ve got all ethnic groups, all socio-economic groups and all age groups from babies hanging with their moms, to people like me with their teenagers, to old grandmas with walkers hanging out with their adult kids.  And we are all suffering the same suffer.  On the way home, Vince asked if he could start driving and I said that I needed to figure out about adding him to our insurance.  He asked how much it was and how much it was going to cost to insure him and I said that I’m anticipating that it’ll double our insurance.  He groaned and said – argh!  I’m going to have to be an adult so soon!  Like I’m going to have to get insurance and do all my own laundry and not spend all my money on random crap and not eat only Oreos for dinner.   Here he is covering his zit so you don’t notice it.

My parents are back from their trip to Morocco, and we took them to see Vince’s one-act plays.  Vince was on the lighting crew which was a little boring because there were so many kids signed up and not that many jobs.  These one-acts are written and directed by students which means they can run a little angsty.  For example, the first one was a musical about a young lesbian who has not recovered from the loss of her partner four years ago and who just got fired from her job.  The second one was about a dysfunctional family where the father has been working so hard, he’s not been home for more than 2 days in the past 25 years and his wife and daughters are berating him for abandoning them.  Oooooof, it’s hard watching marital/family fighting acted out by a bunch of 16-18 year olds.  The kids did a great job even though the material was so serious.  Luckily, they throw in one professionally written play – this year was the Importance of Being Earnest which was quite funny.