On Friday, I asked Jeremy to run some errands with me, the first to the bank to see if we could add my name to the safety deposit box (fail. only jeremy is on it) and to see if the key I had worked (fail. $150 to drill into the box – though I rooted around and really found the key! we will try again and not spend the $150). And then we went to Lowe’s to by my Christmas toilet.
And then I spent the afternoon trying to install the toilet – I do enjoy toilet installation in a weird way – it sounds impressive, but it’s really pretty easy. There is an issue with the basement toilet install in which the subfloor is too low compared to the inlet of the toilet (I knew this)…so I had my dad and Mike eyeball the situation and we came up with an idea to work around the problem. Mike, as he was helping me make a template of the base of the toilet, admired it and said – this is a nice toilet! And I laughed because I had been texting my girlfriends earlier in the day about not finding the toilet I wanted and they came back with all these different features and styles of toilets that they had bought recently. I wanted none of these things, I wanted what Mike admired which is a nice, reliable flushing mechanism (which matched the internal flushing mechanism of the other two toilets I had replaced in the house before the pandemic). I want the Honda Accord of toilets. This is usually my metric of all the things I buy, please, I just want the Honda Accord of things – not crappy cheap, but reliable and reasonably priced and super boring – but maybe you can add a sticker on it and make it funky.
Also at Lowe’s I bought a card table for $30 because my parents were coming over to teach Sofie how to play mahjong and I don’t have a standard 4 person table. My mom walked into the house and took one look at the table in its plastic wrapping and was like – I have so many tables, why did you buy this one? I should have brought one over! I asked if hers folded (it did not) and I said it was only $30 and I need to be able to put it away and she still looked at me as if I had wasted my valuable hard earned money, but by the end of the night, I think she secretly loved it because she asked where I bought it and I said Lowe’s and then she went wide-eyed and said Lowe’s sells mahjong tables? And I laughed.
On Saturday, I took Gene to see the live simulcast of the new opera The Hours. It premiered in New York at the Met on Tuesday, and I thought Gene would be interested (opera geek.) and he was. I invited him a bit late and most of the tickets were sold out! Who knew there were so many opera geeks, but I managed to buy two not in the front row – but seated separately, which was fine. I had had a terrible night’s sleep the night before, so I did take a nap during the first act (warm, dark, with music which, to me, had no melody and was constant, a perfect storm for an afternoon nap) which refreshed me and soldiered on through the rest of the performance. Vickey encouraged me to prep by watching the award-winning movie (there was no time to read the book), which I did spend 3-4 nights watching in 15-20 minute bursts and so the nap did not hinder my enjoyment of the opera, because I understood the plot. Did I enjoy the opera? Maybe? I was very impressed, but mainly I enjoyed taking Gene out to see something I knew he would enjoy.
I slept terribly the night before because Vince came home on Friday night. His flight came in at 9:30 and Jeremy went to pick him up and I wanted to stay up to see him, and I almost did, leaving the lights on in the bedroom letting a podcast or a youtube show run on my phone. He came bounding in close to 10:30, full of west coast alertness and and happiness and tried to have a long conversation with me about his grasp of fluid dynamics and I hugged him and shooed him away and then I couldn’t fall asleep from the excitement. It’s a bummer to me that in order to sleep well, I can’t really do anything exciting after 7:30 pm.
We tried to host Nat, Dara, Ning and Brian at the house on Saturday night, but as I walked in (late!) from the opera, I realized that they were hosting in our house. They were cooking! It was a really nice night where we chatted about being married and did the inaugural lighting of the thrift store Santa (which I didn’t find in any thrift store (I tried three) and had to buy from Etsy).
On Sunday, I made a pie, went for a run and spent time with my children. Vince showed me some of his notes from school. This looks hard. And it’s sideways, I’m sorry, I’m lazy to rotate it. Did I ever used to be able to do this? It seems impossible to me.
And then we celebrated Eric’s birthday with the chocolate silk pie I made. Happy birthday!
And happy holidays.
