Update.

I went to Rachel’s husband’s service on Wed night at a Korean church – the whole thing was in Korean so they gave me a little headset where a person would translate the service into English for me. Rachel is my work wife at the hospital, she’s a Korean immigrant about 10 years my senior. Maybe about 5-6 months ago (after working together for more than 2 years), she look a liking to me and started to cultivate (in her words) and older sister/younger sister relationship. I did not know how much I was looking for a relationship like this. Sometimes you find things you didn’t know were missing. She insisted that I call her if I was stressed out and I would (at work, not yet while I was at home, I was working up to it – I don’t like leaning on people even when I should) and she’d help me out (she’s been a nurse for almost a decade). I’d, in turn, help her with light grammatical corrections on her papers for NP school and she’d text exclaim – my papers are so good now! your English is beautiful! to which I’d text answer, I hope so, it’s my native language, lol <3. (Please don’t look too carefully at comma placements/grammar in these posts. lol <3) She looks after me and often brings delicious Korean food for lunch for me and then I’d bring home Jeremy’s carefully made lunch uneaten and I have to apologize to Jeremy because my other spouse is feeding me at lunch. Anyways, I was sad to say goodbye to her husband, someone who I had never met before. And I got to say my condolences to her daughters who gave beautiful eulogies in Korean (and the translator couldn’t bear to translate in the first person, which is what I was expecting and translated into the third person which threw me off for a good 5 minutes.)

My work colleagues attended as well, but for some weird reason, I saw none of them come in or out or anything even though I was early and, I thought, in full view of the only entrance? So confusing, but the photo was there on the group chat later in the evening. Anthony, my manager, is front and center in the blue blazer. The funeral was the next day, on Thursday, at about noon.

Emy’s cat is well loved by us and neighbors. Ivy does miss Emy though – I can tell. And Vince found out surprisingly that he’s slightly allergic to cats and I kind of told him not to touch Ivy and he doesn’t listen to me and scratches Ivy’s head and says, but he’s so cute! And then he sneezes and has itchy eyes.

I couldn’t resist and I ordered this cat water fountain for next-day delivery from Amazon prime because my other cat friends have it and I wanted Ivy to have the pleasure of moving drinking water and I just like it. I’m not sure Ivy likes it very much.

I’m so proud of myself, I hit 1,000 workouts on my Peloton treadmill this past week. Now many of those workouts are 10 min warm ups and 10 min cool downs and many days I’ll string three 20 min workouts to have an hour long run, but still. I was so disdainful of having this treadmill in the house, I didn’t want it, I didn’t want the Peloton content, but I wanted to run and I didn’t want to go to a gym. Now I preferentially run on it even when the weather is good, it’s so convenient (Edda is often by my side) and the content is very soothing to me. And a thank you to Paul, who still, after all these years, is coaching me even though I’m getting older, slower, and tired-er. Even though I’m boasting about these workouts, I wanted to say that these days, I feel like it is the only thing I get done all day. The whole day will pass, I will have just 1) slept, 2) fed the family & cat 3) cleaned up and cleaned up again and 4) done the workout. What happened to work? paying bills? fixing the dishwasher? figuring out my identity theft? unclenching enormous, overflowing email boxes? following up on school/camp paperwork obligations? all those have been shoved aside. I had to take so much time off work, ignored various admin stuff, and just kind of buried my head in the proverbial sand. If you had asked me 10 years ago, if I was overwhelmed and grieving and almost 50 years old, would I prioritize going for a run over almost everything else, I would have said, you were out of your freaking mind. I would prioritize eating potato chips (which I have done this week as well). Actually, truthfully, I think I would have said I would have prioritized work.

I am getting photos from Jeremy in Germany, but I’m not there to experience it, so it’s hard for me to blog about him without him here or me there. He saw Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in Munich. I thought there was only one and that it didn’t live in Munich, but there are a few (6?, 7?) and yes, this one is in Germany.

Jeremy had to get a covid test (even though he’s vaccinated) to return back to the states and that took a bit of running around (three trips), but he got it done and it’s negative. (Thank the lord.) Today is the last day of his trip, tomorrow he flies home from Munich and back to me.