Lots of things confuse me.

I went yesterday to the dentist and she mentioned that I had a huge canker sore on the inside of my lip and didn’t it hurt terribly? And I kind of had noticed, but not really – you know? Sometimes I can just block these things from my daily experience, but I have been feeling extra run down these past few days and even today, so probably from this cranky canker sore? ughghghgh…

I keep telling myself that I’m going to take “fun” photos, but I take only “useful” photos – like where I parked the car. Apparently, the new car will tell me exactly where I parked it, if only I download the app. But I kind of refuse to download the app because…I am old. So there we go. I LOVE the new car. But also, I completely don’t understand it. Why did it not lock all the doors when I started driving? Why when I push “driver 2” on the settings panel, it sometimes goes to the seat positioning I want, and other times, it positions the seat to accommodate Big Bird and the mirrors slant down as if I want to see turtles crawling under my front wheels? I do not know. So many things I do not know. And will continue to not know.

I’ve been trying very hard to not buy new things. I mean, I still buy lots of new things, but I try to buy old things too. Like – all of my queen size duvet covers in the house decided to self-shred a few months ago. I bought them when the children were 5 and 3 – so almost 20 years of tossing, turning, pee, vomit, dog hair, (sex!), etc. So instead of buying 5 sets of new sheets for over $150 each, I went to ebay and bought 5 covers at an average price of $35 each. Some were new, most slightly used – some had curious george printed on them. I may have bought batman sheets. I also wanted to fix Edda’s bath chair – this is a $2000 chair which has served us well, but the wheels have stopped turning because hair has gotten into them. So I tried to take them apart to fix them, but they are somehow machine pressed together and un-take-apartable. So I emailed the manufacturer and asked how to clean them. And they said – well, we recommend cleaning them often. That was their only suggestion – often. I would clean them often if I could get to the mechanism. They also offered to let me buy replacement wheels which isn’t what I wanted. I want these old wheels, but without hair.

I’m also slowly becoming the building manager at my local unitarian church where I sing in the choir. I love the choir, I kind of love the building and I enjoy the people, it’s the whole “church” thing that still gets to me. We will see how it grows on me. I got handed over the keys to the furnace rooms, the electrical rooms, the back rooms. (The previous building person is moving to the country about 2 hours away. And I also think that there needs to be some female presence on the building team, I have been wearing very nice dresses in which I had sung in to look at water heaters and electrical panels.) So they got a new $50k HVAC system installed this summer and it’s….almost perfect. Just almost. It’s like when you are at a restaurant very hungry and you see your delicious,well-balanced meal sitting on the little pick up area between the kitchen and the servers and your server is like – totally busy – but keeps walking past your burrito, falafel, steak, or eggs Benedict. The HVAC is installed, it works, you can change the fan/temperature, etc. But…the controls are circa 2018. And the contractor didn’t stay to instruct anyone on how to program it and instead left a pile of manuals. So you have to walk to each room (because each room has its own temperature control) and change them manually, the scheduling is difficult, you can’t change the temperature by yelling at Alexa. It’s so difficult that the staff hasn’t even programmed the time into each control – to which the church admin groaned and said – it doesn’t pull the time from the air? And I said….no. I suspect a fancy controller is a whole extra expense/system. Jeremy and I talked about it last night (he watches lots of construction on youtube – from DIY all the way up to insane custom installs with tight tolerances) – you need pay extra for the high end construction where the customer service is higher.

Elka is the boss of Jeremy. Jeremy is trying to train Elka to fetch and more importantly to come when called. And Elka knows what the command it and can do it often, but a lot of the time, she gets distracted and doesn’t want to do it. And she often tells Jeremy, I’m not going that way, let’s go this way. This is Elka telling Jeremy (after an hour long walk) – I’m not going home. To which I texted Jeremy back – I think you live outside now. In Jeremy’s professional life, no one is the boss of him. I think people are (slightly) afraid of Jeremy – I was slightly afraid of Jeremy when I first started dating him (don’t worry, it’s long gone, he is a goofball. No one should be scared of Jeremy). But Elka bosses Jeremy around like a true alpha/beta relationship.

Sometimes I eat banana fast, and other times I eat bananas slow. This wreaks havoc on our banana supply-chain management and just-in-time banana delivery system. So I made this chocolate banana bread last night and it should have cooled for an hour or so, but we needed to go to bed at 8:30 so we pulled it out of the pan piping hot.

So we store a tiny bit of ice cream in the freezer – our emergency ice cream for when Edda has seizures and bites her tongue and won’t eat anything except ice cream. This often happens when only one of us is home with Edda and then you are at a conundrum. Do I go to the store with Edda to get the ice cream – because often times you have given her a benzo and she’s high as a kite and very limp and heavy. (I know, we can instacart ice cream over – I’ve done that before). So I bought some ice cream with a stern warning, this is Edda’s ice cream and it’s for emergencies only. And so last night, I was going to put Edda to bed and then enjoy the cake and break into the ice cream – because clearly this was an ice cream emergency. But then Jeremy looked at me and said, you are going to put Edda to bed and then steal her ice cream? So then I sighed and said, OK Edda gets it too. And we all had a late night sweet.