Month: August 2024

Busy Sunday! In the morning, Ning came over and we talked about gender. Hahaha. Recently, I’ve had some feelings over transgender-ness (not myself, I’m solidly she/her) that I wanted to suss out with some friends and I have done that in the past week. Nothing makes me feel older than this topic, except for maybe tiktok. OK, everything makes me feel old. Anyways, Ning, being from Thailand and about half a generation younger than me, has a unique perspective on gender as, really, lots of people change their gender all the time in Thailand and it’s considered normal and no one gives them any trouble. You don’t need to go to a doctor, you can start transitioning anytime, people admire transgender folks. It’s no big deal. So I will take this to heart and let it be. Which is really what I want to do, make it no big deal and let it be. And I will.

Then we went to lunch with Maryam and Tom at one of my favorite restaurants, Panera. We are planning on going to Las Vegas to celebrate Tom’s 70th birthday in late September and we worked on logistics and planning of which there is a lot. Maryam loves Vegas and loves glitz and nightlife, we are a little more lukewarm about Vegas – dare I say that Jeremy and I are prudish (gasp!), but we want to do what they want to do. It’s a big party – like 25 people, we aren’t the only ones going, so I wasn’t sure how much “hanging out” we were going to do together. The main party is Saturday, but they were flying out on Wed and we might have condensed the time we spent there, but everyone seemed to want to hang out and get tattoos together (Jeremy – absolutely not), so we came home and matched their flights. We are as game as we are going to be for gambling, tattoos, piercings, little chapels, and fake Venetian canals. We were kind of excited for Edda to pull some slots, but turns out you need to be 21. So no slots for Edda.

In the evening, we went to Sunday night dinner where we talked about everything except politics which was a lot of fun and laughing, until someone was really excited to talk about politics and then like 70% of us left the table even though we ALL AGREE on politics. Literally, so tiresome and, well, tiresome and kind of exhausting.

And then Vince asked me for a photo of my college class ring. And I felt old all over again. In the last millenium!

A nice, quiet weekend. Some socializing today, but yesterday, a day of puttering around the house. I’ve been slowly working on our front entry which for 15 years has really just looked like a shipping warehouse, full of opened amazon boxes, piled mail bubble wrap and discarded shoes and turned it into a little plant sanctuary. The plants are mostly cuttings or gifts from people and I’ve found pretty pots here and there and I’m enjoying taking care of them (mostly). I’ve watched lots of plant-y youtube videos of people with 100s of plants in their house – that’s not me, but I’m having fun.

This weekend, I finished sewing up the little red curtain that I hung from our glove table that we made together in a woodworking class when we first started dating to hide an enormous blue recycling bin and white plastic trash can for all the incoming mail and trash that can fit there. You know how your house looks totally normal to you and then a friend who has never been there walks into the room and then you are a little like – yikes? That doesn’t look so great, that big pile of something-or-other? I’m not very self conscious about the house, there are people here all the time (almost everyday), I generally won’t “clean up” before company, but…still sometimes.

Jeremy worked his plywood skills and finished out the wood shelves for this wrought iron shelving and I’m hoping to paint it next weekend. I’m thinking a bold red for the iron and pale pink for the shelves. I invision plants of this shelf as well, but this will be well far away from windows, so it’ll need some grow lights installed which I’m a little bit hesitant about.

And finally, Jeremy spent the weekend moving TVs around. The TV in Edda’s bedroom was really small and very slow to load, so we got a new TV for Edda in the living room and then moved the living room TV up to Edda’s bedroom. This involved moving bookcases around and mounting hardware around. As we were moving the books around, we laughed and said who would have ever imagined that paper books wouldn’t be a thing anymore. These are mostly books from Jeremy’s college era.

Something ate this. A deer? A rabbit? Those damn rabbits. So cute, yet so hungry.

I took the morning off and went paddleboarding with Kristen at Black Hills. We tried to get out early as it was going to be hot and we had a great time. A lot of talking on the paddleboards, some paddling – I’m actually kind of nervous standing on the board, I’m much more comfortable on my knees or sitting, but I’m practicing and did not fall in not-on-purpose. We may have taken a dip in the middle of the lake on purpose. The lake was quiet, but not empty. I love doing these things on the weekdays. Great day! Poor Elka, she saw that I was packing up to go somewhere fun and she loves going on hikes with Kristen, and I would have love to have taken her, but she isn’t trained to actually go on a paddleboard. I’m hoping to work on that in the next few weeks.

Sometimes, it’s a pain to do these things, like you gotta lug your stuff out of the garage and then lug it to the body of water and then pump up the board and then get wet, but it’s actually not that bad and the reward is wonderful. Kristen actually has an electric pump for her board and I pumped my board by hand faster than the electric pump – so, I impressed myself. I also touched plants with my body and really, really scrubbed down in the shower afterwards and I’m hoping to ward off my summer streak of poison ivy (which is still bothering me and won’t be 100% cleared by the time I finish my course of steroids, but it’s much, much better than it would have been.)