Month: October 2020

ahhh, today might be the first day at my desk job that I won’t feel the steady ache of back pain. I could almost function, but not really function. I spent a lot of time alternating between my desk chair and laying on the floor. I was at the hospital on Sunday and I floated to the covid unit, but I didn’t have any covid patients, I was on the clean side. I had only 3 beds all day (total of 5 patients), but I still felt like I was running around and tired. I don’t mind floating, it’s nice to meet new people, but I really treasure having my regular coworkers.

We spent the first weekend home emptying Vince’s room and converting it into my office/quilt room (I haven’t touched a quilt piece since the beginning of the pandemic. I’m not sure when I’ll get back to it).

We moved Jeremy to the guest room for his office.

We moved my office out of our bedroom in order to take delivery for my new treadmill. We are turning my old office space into our home gym. I haven’t been running very well, but I’m hoping to get back into it soon. I need the treadmill because before times, I probably did about a quarter of my running on a treadmill (too hot, too cold, too rainy, too lazy (sometimes it’s easier to run on a treadmill because you don’t need to think about self-propelling, you just have to think, don’t press the damn stop button)) and without access to a treadmill, I couldn’t do those runs. Also, we have less childcare than before since Edda’s school is closed, so I needed a way to run while caring for Edda. So now I have this beautiful treadmill.

Emy was in town on Saturday, she was helping a friend move. We had dinner together. This might have been one of the few meals we’ve had on our back porch in the over decade we’ve lived here.

One might think that now we’ve been home for over a week that now I’ve settled into what I consider to be our “normal” (well, pandemic normal) routine. But we’ve been really busy and my back has been hurting and there is still a lot to do even without Vince around and I feel scattered and completely unsettled. I’m COVID negative (took from Friday morning to Tuesday night to get the results) and my back pain has eased up. I have no problem doing my nursing job – it actually feels good to move (though I had an upcloseandpersonal encounter with bed bugs last shift – some may argue that that’s worse than COVID ugh – those scrubs need to be burned they are sitting sealed in a bag in the garage – maybe we’ll boil them?) – and I have a lot of problems doing my patent job. This sitting still and looking slightly down for a long time is the most painful (non)motion for me. We moved a ton furniture around in the house and got rid of a room full of IKEA furniture in the process (got rid of is a relative term, it’s all still sitting in our garage ready for the dump). I need to paint a closet today. Many of my daily habits are out of whack, I’m hoping to get on top of it all soon. Hahahahah. Who am I kidding? Kitachi, our main caregiver, got notice that her school is reopening in about a month – so we’ll have to scramble to figure out something because it’s going to open ahead of MCPS. Her school is for kids with behavior problems (like constant screaming. she’s told me about days like that) – so those kids need need to be back in school.

One of the casualties of my lack of daily habit stuff is the lack of blog posts. Sorry!

I’ll quickly recap the way home from Davis and then we’ll consider ourselves caught up.

We saw Andy and Rita in Flagstaff. Andy broke his elbow that morning falling on a wet/icy bridge. He was scheduled for arm surgery the next morning.

We saw Scott and Sheila in Taos. Lovely hotel. Edda had a massive nosebleed on their down comforter and they charged us $450 for it. If I knew we were going to pay for the whole thing and not just the cleaning fee, I’d have taken it with us and had it cleaned.

We saw the land that they are going to build their house on.

And I got a tumbleweed.

Per Laura’s rec, we stopped at Slap’s BBQ in Kansas City for lunch. This was our only true “foodie” stop. The only place where there was a line to place an order (even for lunch on a weekday). We ate a lot in our minivan. I downloaded about seven chain apps and I had gotten good at placing orders for pickup a new Paneras, Dairy Queens, etc about 20-30 miles down the road so we would just drive in a pick up.

We saw Seth in Columbia, Missouri. Jeremy enjoyed a bike ride with him.

We had a lovely homemade Thai curry in the backyard. It was great to see him!

And finally, we saw Paul in Columbus, OH. I forgot to get a photo! We had Indian food for dinner and met their crazy dogs. Columbus is only six hours from home, so the next day we were home in our garage and sent this photo to Vince.

We are back in Rockville. We got back yesterday afternoon – Sept 30th. The same day that Vince started his first day of classes. Ever since we left Davis, I’ve been having some upper back pain that can be excruciating at certain times and most other times, it’s just a low level ache which tires me out. (I still moved two mattresses and old office chairs to the dump myself today despite my back. Maybe I’ll regret that later. It doesn’t hurt to lift mattresses and hurl them over a small wall into the vast dumpster below, but it hurts a million billion a lot when I try to tuck a phone between my ear and shoulder so I can talk to a friend while making a sandwich or when I go from lying flat on the bed to lying on my side at 3 am.) I tried to get appointments at PT or a chiropractor or a massage place, but then I realized that all the screening questions for COVID ask if I’d traveled within the last 2 weeks. Since the only thing I’ve done is travel in the last 2 weeks, I’m getting a COVID test tomorrow. In order to get the COVID test, I needed to make up a symptom (which includes muscle aches) in order to get the test – they still aren’t doing symptomless testing at the CVS even though the doctor wants a test for me to go into their office. Anyways, I’m still hoping my back clears up in the next couple of days without doing anything and that I’m COVID neg. I want the back and the COVID test to be back to baseline by the time of my next shift – Thursday.

After Yellowstone, we spent two nights in Jackson, Wyoming. Vince called it Ocean City, but for skiing. Jeremy went biking.

Vince and I went thrifting.

Edda went hiking in the Tetons. (about 0.25 miles from the parking lot to the overlook)

We loved the washing machine in the room. We used it many times.

We left Jackson, WY headed to Reno, NV. Ate at a school bus burrito stand on the way.

In Reno, we had this beautiful accessible shower. I was planning on showering Edda every other day, but we were pretty lucky with accessible showers and got to shower her more than that.

In Reno, Jeremy rode up the Geiger Summit – a favorite training spot of Greg Lemond when he was a teenager.

After Reno, we made it to Davis on Sunday the 20th in time for lunch at the famous In-N-Out where we declared our coast to coast trip complete.

We checked into the hotel and Vince went for a bike ride around campus.

These cows are across the street from Vince’s dorm.

Move in day was Tuesday. On Monday, we went to Fry’s to buy a monitor.

We shipped some stuff via Amazon to the Amazon depot on campus and checked that out.

We moved Vince into his dorm on Tuesday.

He put the BLM sign up in his window.

We said goodbye on Wed. In front of the cows.

And then we headed back to the east coast without Vince.