Lots of Edda and guitar and weightlifting.

On Thursday night, I went to the MCPS kickoff meeting for Edda’s transition year, meaning that these are the people who are going to help me find Edda a grown up situation when she graduates from high school in 2025. It’s very complicated and emotional and kind of word-of-mouth-y which I kind of hate, but it’s also OK because I’m kind of determined to find Edda a place to live apart from us by the time she’s in her early 30s. The funding for Edda is shifting a lot right now, the state used to pay directly for services (traditional funding model) that Edda would sign up for, but now, families are given a lot more freedom in how her day will look (self-directed funding model), but it essentially means that Edda is like a small corporation in which she hires/fires staff and programs. Which means that in reality, I run payroll and HR and stuff and find appropriate things for Edda to do, etc. So this night, I tasked myself to talking to vendors who provide day services and will take the self-directed funding. These are the same vendors who did provide traditional funded programs, but are just now transitioning to accept self-funded funds and there are hiccups (like not getting paid), but as time passes, I think it’ll be fine. I’m not really worried about finding a program that will take Edda from 9-5, I’m more focused on this apartment building I intend to build in the next 10 years with about 4-10 of her friends with staff and programming that I invision happening so I can take a long nap everyday and not worry too much about what Edda is doing. Because I like to take naps.

On Friday, I went to a noon presentation at Main Street about how to incorporate your values into the workplace. Again, a bit of networking and free food and it was nice. And then afterwards, there was a meeting with her Adult Life Planning person from her autism waiver program. There are other little social things that I did because I like to do them, but it’s really hard for me to schedule these things and be outgoing and then not come home and need a nap. I really should just turn back to work and work on some patents quietly and quickly because I have a block of a couple of hours, but it’s really hard for me to do.

Jeremy’s spent the week recovering from this really long cold. He and Edda are both like 87% well, but not 100% and it’s been dragging on for weeks now. Never terrible, but never really good. He’s also had a hard week at work in which he questions everything he’s ever done and ends the day exhausted and lying down on the couch. You know, this zoom thing is both good and bad. It’s great that we get to all work from home, but it’s also bad in the sense that building trust and friendliness in a group is really, really hard – even when everyone is kind of invested in that happening. I’ve been working with a zoom group in my new role at the office for over a year now, and it’s fine, but I know so so much less about these people than I would if we had spent a year in offices right next to each other. You lose so much.

Anyways, to divert his frustrations at his slightly ill body and his work situation, he’s been rearranging our gym – mounting TVs and fans directly to the walls. Moving things out of the way, ordering new flooring. This is totally ridiculous but we really enjoy our time in this space. It’s much less embarrassing because we are both into it and spend a lot of time working out here.

I’m also really enjoying my guitar lessons and slowly getting better and even better, getting to know people. I went to the performance this Saturday for a couple of hours. It’s really, really fun to watch people who are really really good at what they do. Also, one of the bass players is an olympic lifting coach (and intending to break some national lifting record for 70 year olds in December) and Jeremy’s into that so we are planning on starting to go to practices in the near future. They meet on Sundays at 10 am and I came home from the band performance and asked Jeremy if he wanted to go and I think I sprung it on him too quickly and he said – I gotta wrap my head around lifting around other people….lol. We’ll see how it goes. I’m excited to learn how to clean and jerk.