All winter, my mother has been giving everyone she knows a huge bucket of persimmons. I happily eat them, they are really good. My mom packaged a bunch of them and shipped them here and there – all the way to California. The tree is so large now that she can’t pick the ones from the top, but a bunch of tree contractors spied them and asked to pick the ones from the top and look how laden the tree is with fruit. There must have been over 1,000 persimmons! I have at least 20 of them in my tummy. I’m glad those got picked. My mother hosted a delicious dinner for us on Friday night and we had a good time and yummy food, but Jeremy said…I feel slightly not well which was a bellwether for things to come.
Jeremy spent a lot of the past week outfitting Elka. It has dropped below freezing for a few days and Jeremy bought Elka a jacket.
Then Elka got salt in her paws and it hurt her, so Jeremy got her shoes which she didn’t like very much but mostly tolerated.
Sunday night, we celebrated Katherine’s birthday Sunday night by hosting a party at the house. Jeremy made a delicious chicken dinner from all the recipes from a book that Katherine had made notes in. It was delicious and the party was generally a success – but Jeremy was feeling under the weather and, therefore, the mask. He asked his parents if we should reschedule, but they demurred – so we went ahead. He’s still not feeling well today, fingers crossed no one else got sick. Maybe I should get a quieter tablecloth? This is our regular tablecloth because it’s easy to wipe down and you can spill and entire spaghetti dinner on it and not really see it.
I think I’m enjoying Christmas more this year than in years past – perhaps because we decided to not get gifts for everyone living in the house together. Perhaps because I know we aren’t going to be traveling, nor are we having guests for the week. Everything can be quiet and low key. And I’m so excited to be singing in the Christmas Eve service where I can sing a really beautiful arrangement of Angels We Have Heard on High which is one of my favorite Christmas songs. We started practicing it last night – that really adds to my holiday spirit.
Jeremy and Elka stopped by our neighborhood coffee place, where everyone knows Jeremy and Elka and Elka always gets the same order – a pup cup of whipped cream. Here she is waiting patiently for her order. Note the name “Pup” on the cup.
Jeremy is speaking my love language these days, slowly getting rid of trash and extra things – cleaning his areas. Swoon. There is a piece of IKEA furniture that he’s had next to his bed for years that have cubbies and each of the cubbies has what I describe as…trash. But I didn’t think that I could ask him to clean it out or anything because…it’s really his space. But yesterday, he moved it into his office, cleared out all the trash and the corner in the bedroom is now blissfully empty. And I kissed him. And then he said…maybe we don’t need these extra bowls in the cabinet…haha.
Including this little Playmobil nativity scene I bought used on ebay after last Christmas.
Here is my youtube year end results. I do know a lot about luxury purses, but I do not own any. hahaha.
I did not listen to a lot of music this year, I focused mainly on learning music – but apparently Taylor Swift got knocked out of the #1 spot for the first time in like a decade by Rachmaninoff! I kind of can’t believe it.
To go to a choir concert last night. This was put on by the Montgomery College Choir and Chamber Singers – so so beautiful, 2 pieces in Spanish by contemporary composers. I love the opportunity to hear choirs – I sing in one more often than I get to hear one. The two pieces were one with piano and the other with classical guitar. Really, really enjoyed the classical guitarist – so different from the guitar I’m learning. I also loved it because it started at 7:30, ended at 8:30 I said hello to a bunch of people I knew and I was back home in my pajamas at 8:45. (sooo, remember I won the best parking space in the raffle? the lot was packed last night even though I was early and someone had parked in MY SPOT. lol. It was ok, though I must say, I pulled into the lot thinking…omg, so packed, I’m so lucky I have my very own spot – and…no.)
Grrrrr…vicious doggie. I love my stick. Grrrrr. Look at how white those teeth are…I brush them most nights. Elka might have the best teeth in the house.
We brought our pre-kids couch downstairs from Jeremy’s office. We spent so much money on this couch before we had kids declaring that we were done with IKEA furniture forever…and then we had kids and entered two decades of IKEA furniture. This couch is very dirty and in need of reupholstering which is on my list of things to do, but it’s a nice, solid couch that has moved from the bay area to austin to new york to dc with us. Jeremy spent some time digging around in the underbelly of the sofa and found the following: many scissors, letter openers and and entire iPhone! It’s the iPhone 2 from 2008? I don’t think I owned the iPhone 2, I think I started with the iPhone 4.
It still plays Totoro one of Edda’s all time favorites <3
Loves, we had a lovely Thanksgiving weekend. I gave up trying to work at my regular job mid-week and I took all of Wednesday off and planted trees outside and set up the Christmas tree inside. On Thursday morning, I continued to clean the house and move furniture and Jeremy really started in on the cooking. I really enjoy this prep time with Jeremy – we’ve thrown enough parties to know how long things take, so we are busy the entire time, but not rushing and we are keeping each other company. I feel like that is the key to enjoying things.
At four, the party began – we had about 30 people show up this year. Vince/Dani, Bob/Katherine and Emy/Seth stayed on the west coast and went to Portland – we kind of can’t believe that the family center of gravity is shifting to Oregon, but I think it’s happening! Dani got a very nice offer for a funded master’s program at the Oregon State University in Corvallis starting early next year, we are thrilled for them and HOORAY – the holidays are more fun when you have a good plan in place.
There was Jenga –
There was a lot of food. There was only dark meat served from two birds because…well we bought 2 turkeys and Jeremy sous vides them in separate containers. So the plan was all the dark meat and half of the white meat and freeze the other half of the white meat for later. But Jeremy inadvertantly turned off the sous vide-er of the white meat section while he was setting it up, so when he set it out to carve, it was still raw! Oh no! He quickly put it into the oven, where it roasted and was ready when like many hours later after the dessert course and folks had headed out to see Wicked already.
Don’t worry, there was enough food.
I asked for many servings of vegetables without cheese or fat on them and so Jeremy obliged with bright green beans and broccoli and cauliflower which I adored – I love my fiber homework.
We closed out the night we a long talk with the Horowitz family – fun talking about Carla and old memories. Food wise – this was a very balanced thanksgiving – not too many leftovers, not an enormous amount of dessert, just right.
The rest of the weekend was very social and active, but in a low-key kind of way. I planted four trees in our backyard- two serviceberries and two magnolias on a beautiful 65 degree day. This took me four hours which included erecting wire fencing around all the trees to prevent the deer from eating them. (If you take a look at my backyard, I’m growing wire fencing and not much else.) I had bought bare root serviceberries early this year, but they didn’t take, so I increased my expenditure and bought 3 gallon trees, fingers crossed they will grow in the spring. We also saw Megan (who stopped by for an afternoon hang – she hung out while I wrapped Christmas gifts), Pat and his wife Theresa – we all went to see Zootopia 2 (where a huge plot point rests on patent approval! go…patent office) and had tacos for dinner together. Noah came over for a bit to help us move a couch from upstairs to downstairs.
On that note, we spent a lot of time rearranging the house especially upstairs. I finished decluttering our papers (which still left 18 boxes – still a lot, but I’m working on it) and Jeremy and I moved beds, carpets, laundry, dressers all around. The reason this started was because I made my BLACK FRIDAY goal!!!
I made 175 hours of total playtime on my guitar app (not all 175 was this year…, just FYI – I did not practice like 3.3 hours a week lol). It was a good goal, ambitious enough that I needed to play most days, but if I missed a day here or there, I wasn’t terribly behind. I finished my goal on the Tuesday before BLACK FRIDAY and felt triumphant. Jeremy cheered me on – as he does – and on Tuesday he told me dinner was ready and I told him I needed to play 2 more minutes and he said – go for it and then it was done. As a reward, I’m buying myself a dresser – which I think I’ll get to in the new year as this is a high spend month – hence the decluttering and moving furniture around and making space for the new dresser. Now I’m making my guitar goal for next BLACK FRIDAY and what my reward will be. I have an idea, but not ready for telling you yet.
We went out on Friday night to celebrate my mother’s 84th birthday. My mother is stunning and doing very well, but we all cooed over Anita, Ginny’s baby girl who is not only a cutie, but did super well at dinner.
It was also a nice celebration because my dad found out that morning that he didn’t have eyeball cancer. I guess at a regular eye checkup a few weeks ago, the regular eye doctor found something “weird” and declared it eyeball cancer and sent dad to the eye cancer specialist. It was a tense two week wait for that appointment as my father settled on the fact that he did have eyeball cancer was going to die from it and spent the two weeks trying to teach my mother how to pay the bills (I’m sure she has forgotten already, as I would have as well), but the eyeball cancer specialist was totally like – that is NOT eyeball cancer which made my mother’s birthday party much more like a celebration. He went to Johns Hopkins again yesterday to another eyeball specialist who also declared it NOT cancer. Whew. Anyways, I also want to give huge props to my parents for taking Uber everywhere. They took an Uber to the appointment in McLean Va and then again to Baltimore for the JHU appointment. They are basically Ubering everywhere that is outside their neighborhood – to which I give a big high-five too. Good job! I don’t have to kill my entire day by driving them around and nor do they have to do driving that is stressful to everyone.
I’m still decluttering – I’m almost done. It’s like everything, the last 10% is takes forever. I found so many fun pictures. When we were so young.
Jeremy went to visit his parents and Alan up in PA taking our electric car and Elka with him. The electric car did fine, Elka seemed a bit pissed – we needed to board her for about 8 hours during the day on Sunday and it was sub optimal, but she’s still alive. Jeremy did lots of socializing which involved music performances and lunches and dinners. All good.
I, on the other hand, stayed at home. Eliana worked both days hanging out with Edda – so I got to go to a Neighborhood of MD meeting, sing in choir, swim. And I also got to go to the Action Auction celebration at night where I won 6 hours of handyman tasks (which I won in a live auction) and I won the raffle for the best parking spot in the lot (which I feel sometimes silly about because I’m within walking distance of the church). I’m on a raffle winning streak. I won a raffle from Camp Hill a few months ago which has a bird house and a beautiful mosaic which I forgot to ask Jeremy to pick up and just yesterday, I won another raffle from JCC which includes bagels, a manicure and golf!
Sunday morning I sang with my friends. Lots of fun.
Last week – Edda had a series of seizures (about 5 in the span of 1.5 days) that landed us back in the ER. As you may recall, this happened last year, about the same time, but that time, I didn’t quite understand how to deploy Edda’s rescue medications and between last year and this year, we’ve used the rescue meds maybe 2 or three times to control her seizure clusters well, but they didn’t work last week. What happens is she has seizures every 6 hours or so. Each seizure, on their own, doesn’t seem too too terrible, but each time, she bites her tongue really hard and then it doesn’t have time to heal when the next seizure hits and then she stops being able to eat or drink or take her oral, baseline seizure meds. We had to take her to an ADULT hospital which is not my favorite, but I headed to my hospital (Holy Cross) – I had a friend working in the ER that day so I felt good heading in (by our car). They were great – they did exactly what I wanted which was to put in an NG tube and gave us a 3-day benzo bridge (which they consulted with CHOP and Children’s who did it last year). It’s weird to walk into an ER and ask for what you want, but that’s where we are. The entire thing took about 6 hours which wasn’t bad. Edda came home with the tube – this was Thursday and we kept it in until she could eat well on her own and pulled it out on Sunday night.
While she was at home recuperating, I was able to go out and play Pokemon Go with Sheela.
Edda made it back to her day program on Monday morning.
And now I feel like the holiday stuff is starting. I’m buying gifts for Secret Santa – I always enjoy how few gifts I buy. I’ll buy fewer than 10 gifts this year, I like to keep gift giving to a minimum. Our big spend, like it is every year, are year-end cash gifts to the support staff at Edda’s program/transport and at-home caregiving.
I went to the volunteer appreciation night at Main Street. The food was yummy and this is another volunteer Caitlyn who hung out with me!
I will tell you that the founder of Main Street intimidates me for various reasons, but maybe we’ll be friends soon enough.
In an effort to keep consolidating, I’m looking through our boxes of memorabilia and tossing things that aren’t important. I totally kept this photo of my cousins.
My boxes of crap – becoming fewer boxes of crap.
I still have a lot.
But this? I found these kitchen/bathroom items carefully wrapped among the boxes and stored for over 20 years, perhaps it doesn’t need to be included with the photos. Once, we had movers move our stuff because that service came with a new job – when we opened one of the boxes, we found out they had packed a basket of trash. lol.
I went to the office yesterday – all the way downtown and back again – and finally met my boss in person after having her for a boss for over a year. It was really fun, I really like my boss’s company.
Jeremy is so nice to me. He patiently is willing for me to go through all his kitchen stuff one drawer at a time and pick up spatulas and ask him if it “sparks joy” and then we declutter things. He also makes me dinner which I appreciate. We found these plates hidden in the back of some cabinets. We have a pair, they will be displayed. He thinks they are from his grandmother.
So in my effort to get stronger I’ve purposely gained 10 pounds this year – I can’t quite believe it. You can’t really get stronger without eating in a slight surplus to build muscle. But you certainly add fat while you are doing it. Am I stronger? Yes. Am I really strong? the answer is no, I’m still a baby weightlifter. Do I feel strong? Yes. Do I feel chubby? Yes. It’s been a weird year body-wise. So grateful for the things it can do, but also it feels different to be in shape strength-wise than it feels to be in shape running-wise. I will show you my favorite weightlifting motivational video. Enjoy. Do it because it’s hard.
