Busy weekend! I feel good – mentally that is. It was a tough beginning of the year for me – so it’s nice things are on the upswing. I’m trying to take advantage of it all. I did most of these on my own – Jeremy is working A LOT. So he worked a lot and exercised a bit. Eliana came both days and took Edda out on lunch adventures.
Friday night, I went to Billy’s band – the Sonic Spell at That’s Amore – a suburban bar that closes at 10 pm. I had a great time, chatting with other students of Billy’s and dancing a bit. Watching drunk people I didn’t know play air guitar. Watching 80 year old grandmas cut the rug. Goals! Now I’ve gone to enough of these to know: 70-80 db is loud, but comfortable. 90 db is loud, but you can hold a conversation with the person next to you if you yell a bit. 100 db is extremely loud and hurts your ears and no conversation is to be had. You can get the decibel readings on your watch. Always bring your earplugs (which I did) – I told Billy during the break, I care less about the hearing loss and more about acquiring tinnitus which is a huge bummer.
Saturday morning, I volunteered at Main Street’s first ever neighborhood safety day! I was busy from 9:15 to 1 pm easily. Helping set up, moving furniture, signing people in, it was a lot of fun for me. I’m happy I found such a nice place to volunteer at –
Saturday afternoon – I met Sheela at Target at Rio and played two (!) hours of Pokemon Go with her. I had told myself, only one hour because 1. how much Pokemon do you really need in your life? and 2. it was really really hot. But we bounced from shade tree to shade tree and tried to catch them all. Here we are in a cafe, cooling off after Sheela became concerned that I had brought no water at all and was worried about me dehydrating and passing out.
Friday night – we (Jeremy, Edda, Felix and me) ventured into Pike and Rose where we had ramen for dinner and, now I know this, traded dinners with everyone because, well that’s just how we roll. And then we went to Sur La Table where Felix bought gifts for us to thank us for his sabbatical stay – he bought a really nice pepper grinder for Jeremy and he’s been eyeing for a while and he bought me beautiful cotton oven mitts (I have silicone ones that were NYT’s number one pick, but they suck and are not very satisfying) so the new ones will be wonderful when I bake!
Felix can be particular about what he eats, so he hemmed and hawed about getting this baked bear cookie ice cream sandwich. Which we did end up getting and splitting four ways! Enormous. Totally enough for 4 people. Delicious.
Sunday, I took Felix to the olympic weightlifting gym. I was a little nervous about how it was going to go – would he not like the vibe, would he not like the people?, so I had planned a day of it, a little lifting, a little lunch and bookstore. This is about 30 minutes from the house in Frederick. I haven’t been in like 6 weeks because it conflicts with singing in the choir. But Felix took to it like fish to water. Like mosquitos to blood. Like a moth to flame. LIke Elka to rolling around in smelly things. He’s really good at it, the coaches were astonished that it was his first day and when he walked into the gym, he didn’t really know what a snatch or clean/jerk was. Anyways, I was done after an hour, but we stayed until the end of the session which, I think was an additional 90 minutes and we’ll go back the rest of the weekends we can before he leaves. There were people lifting more than 300 pounds over their head and Felix was like – I want to workout here. Hahaha. Everyone was encouraging him to continue training in Sweden… we’ll see.
