A fun weekend – very social, but also chill. Friday, I drove to Tysons for lunch at Founding Farmers with a group of coworkers. It’s amazing that you can work with a bunch of people for two years and not really know what their body looks like or what mannerisms they have eating lunch. Working from home is super convenient, but you do lose lots of things.
Friday night, we went to Friday Vibes at Main Street and it was karaoke night. Megan, along with Edda, Ginny, Emelina and Joab came. Jeremy was a little under the weather, so he stayed home. It was fun, Edda clearly had a nice time. Friday nights are always a bit tiring, but vibes is always fun.
Joab loves kareoke night, he sung I Just Died in Your Arms.
Saturday night, we went out to dinner with my parents at a place that had a special on Peking duck. Delicious! I’m trying to get Edda to look at the camera. 🙂
A few months ago, I got a landscape designer to draw up plans for the backyard and the front yard. It’s a challenging ecosystem because we have shade, bad soil and lots of deer. And I wanted, as much as possible, native plants. The designer was a lot of fun to work with as she spent an afternoon at our house and then drew this design on graph paper which I really love! (I want to frame these someday). Of course, I don’t know any plants she listed so I would have never been able to plan this myself, but she thought of all the different seasons and how they’ll give different colors in spring, summer and fall and how tall they would be and how to block more traffic noise (we live really close to the freeway).
Right now, our backyard is a Japanese stiltgrass wasteland that grows knee high for years and I’ve done nothing about it. I see the invasive tree of heaven encroaching from the sides which I’m going to try to kill with herbicides this summer. Jeremy really wanted to return the back half to trees, so that’s what we are doing. I did get a landscaper to quote me to put it all the plantings in, but man it was a lot, I totally didn’t want to pay for that, so I’m going to try to do it myself. Bit by little bit. I’m a little afraid that the deer will eat all of it in the nanosecond I’m on vacation, so I don’t want to spend out a ton of money to have it be a buffet for deer. Even if the deer didn’t eat it, I also didn’t want it all to go in at once and then I’d be overwhelmed taking care of it because I don’t want to hire out the garden work (at least not right now).
Yesterday, I went out in the middle of the day – so cold and snow covered yard, and marked out the grid and then placed flags for the center six trees. I’m dreaming of spring.
I’ve been watching the deer eat our neighbors’ bushes. It’s very cold outside and I’m curious about what the deer will eat and/or not eat. They eat a lot of things.
Jeremy went to his first dog training class. Elka didn’t get to go, only one dog was allowed to go and someone volunteered their dog before he could. This adorable six month old golden retriever.
Snow days! I picked up Edda from school early on Friday because the storm was moving in and 2/3rds of Edda’s teachers were like, OK! We really want snow days, so…let’s wear our pajamas inside out, sleep with spoons under pillows and flush ice cubes down the toilet. I was going to implement these tactics, but alas, I didn’t have a chance to because they cancelled school early on Sunday afternoon. And then we rejoiced (or at least all the teachers rejoiced). Haha, Dave, my friend in Minnesota, says everyone in Minnesota is jealous because in MN, the ground is BROWN. It’s not supposed to be brown ground in MN. lol.
Edda is bored, we are hunkered down. It’s a cozy feeling. Jeremy did all the shoveling – I send him hearts. We had a long argument on Sunday morning about hanging maps on walls, but now we are A-OK.
I’m so happy I got fencing around my test tree before the snow fell because I can see where the deer go through the yard. And they did go through a lot, but totally ignored the tree. (They will eat the tender baby branches even without leaves in the winter, for sure.) They messed with the compost pile, but that is a feature not a bug. OK, I’m confident I can keep deer away from baby trees. I ordered six baby trees for the spring: white oak, witch hazel, serviceberry and redbud. I bought the smallest, cheapest ones I could find and fingers crossed that they will not all die in my care. I’ll spend more on the wire cages and the metal stakes. I’m going to try to channel both my mother and my mother-in-law, both great gardeners with completely different styles.
My guitar teacher moved to the studio to new space near the Home Depot and my friend Howard and I had fun trying out the new electric guitar set up. In this new location, he’s next to a quilting store and a bridal store, so in the band room, he’s putting everything through headphones which is so cool. Everyone will have headphones and you can decide to hear more of the singer, or only the bass or just yourself, I guess. So much fun. I’m not in a band yet, I’m patiently waiting for the day when Billy tells me I’m ready. Which may be never.
During lesson time, programs after school were cancelled, and then after care for Edda was cancelled, but not right away – so this involved a lot of texting during class – back and forth with 1. school, 2. after care, 3. ginny – first with confirming that aftercare was open and then…whoops, no, it’s closing! I told Ginny not to come because of the snow and I feel bad because I’m basically cutting her hours, but then it snowed a bunch and then I felt righteous not endangering her life. Elka both likes the snow, and hates the salt. It hurts her paws.
My hand-me-down orchid is blooming! I guess it thinks it’s Hawaii enough in the house because it’s certainly not Hawaii-like outside the house.
Megan is putting on a series of art classes at Main Street, so I volunteered to help her out.
Fun! Notice I have a permanent name tag that I wear a lot. I wear it whenever I’m in a group of people in which I don’t know everyone’s name – which is a lot of times.
Happy new year! It was a nice 2024 – I traveled a lot which was both nice and tiring, Vince graduated from college – a big deal, I was very itchy with two cases of poison ivy. I really excused myself from social media and scrolling the news as a hobby as well, that feel really good to not know instantaneously what is happening in the world. I try to check in once a day, usually a 10 min audio catch up from NPR or NYT – ten minutes is enough. I had to replace all that scrolling with something, so I read more books and I’ve really hit my stride with practicing guitar (I think I’ve reached the advanced beginner level – woo hoo! working on hammer ons, pull offs, slides – it’s a lot of fun, very challenging, but doable). I’m going to start watching more movies.
I’ve cut back on running and added strength training to the mix. My body takes longer to recover and bounce back, but that’s ok and often I wake up tight and sore. I’ve cut way back on eating carbs in the house, though I try to not limit out of the house.
New year’s day, I took down Christmas in the house. Our tree keeps losing needles, how many more years can it keep going?
I’d like to add gardening to the things I do next year, the most important to me is to start small trees in the backyard – I’m looking at you white oak and red bud. And in order to do that, I need to protect the little trees from the deer. This dogwood is like 10 years old and every year, it gets demolished by the deer and each year, we try to protect it. Granted, the first 7 years I was busy with other things – it had a flimsy little fence around it and then for the last 2 years, I first covered it with netting (deer ate through it), next I covered it with finer, heavier duty netting (deer ate through it, though not as much) and yesterday, I did what I should have done in the beginning, I cattle wire fence, four heavy landscaping poles and eight landscaping staples into the ground. Fingers crossed this will work and if it survives the hungry deer foraging in the winter, I know I can protect a bunch of new trees. Fingers crossed.
Happy new year! While we were gone, my parents graciously took care of Elka. Elka’s birthday was the 28th and we were not going to be around for that, but my parents picked up the slack by not only buying a steak, but also a sheet cake with “Happy Birthday Elka” on it.
Look at these two, both loving steak and sheet cake. (My father’s birthday was on the 25th, I’m hoping he got some meat and cake as well on that day!) Happy birthday to you both! Thank you for taking care of each other.
