I was in a grumpy mood yesterday. It was raining most of the day. I used to think that rain didn’t affect my mood, but I don’t really think that anymore. I was also really tired. But I helped Megan pack her apartment for a few hours. My shoulder ached which added to my grumpiness. I came home mid-afternoon and took a deep nap for about an hour.
We have a bird feeder in the front yard which is entertaining us throughout the day with our various avian friend (both of our offices face the front yard). Yesterday we set up a squirrel feeding station where the squirrel has to jump and suction cup him/her/themselves to the ear of corn while it swings around. Based on the Amazon review, the placement is critical for maximum squirrel antics. Will keep you posted.
Argh. I had a hard shift yesterday, but I’ve had a bunch of good shifts in a row, so I was owed a subpar one. I’m off two weeks now, I’m hoping my shoulder gets better. I need to lay off lifting patients for a bit.
Jeremy had a virtual, indoor bike race on Sunday that turned out subpar as well. Jeremy has been taking training and biking very seriously for a few months now and I was surprised at how disappointed he was in his results. Honestly, I’ve never seen him so competitive, driven and singularly focused. He’s going to be fully vaccinated by the end of this week and he’s going to try to rejoin some of the biking groups around the area for training, etc. He tells me that they are regrouping with the caveat – if you are vaccinated, you are welcome to join in on the group rides. Jeremy has been great this whole pandemic, helping me and the family through it all – patiently listening to all my woes and tears and has offered nothing but encouragement, but he has been the most socially isolated, holed away in his home office and home gym and it’s time to bring it back. We had take out on Sunday after his ride.
One of my big goals this year was to pull together wills/estate planning for Jeremy and me. I wanted things in place when Edda turns 18 next year. I feel my mortality so strongly lately, with Vince a legal adult and me fast approaching 50. Also, in a weird coincidence (or not depending on how you look at it), many of my personal contemporaries are staring down their own mortality through a more concrete and less philosophical lens – cancer, stroke, heart attacks are making their rounds through my circle of friends. If I am lucky enough to make it to old age, I will have to watch many of my love loves leave me. And if I’m unlucky and I don’t make it old age, my love loves will have to watch me leave them. Anyways, back to wills/estates. We are in this weird transitional place where Vince is an adult and Edda needs care her whole life. Vince has said many times in the past – it’s ok, I’ll take care of Edda, she’ll live with me. And of course, my heart goes a pitter patter when I hear this, but I do not want to place this burden on Vince. He has his own life and maybe his wife (or he himself) will want to live on a rocky mountain top studying slow growing moss and its implication for limb regeneration. What can you do then? You can’t float a wheelchair up a rocky mountain outpost. It’s also a weird time because even though Vince is legally a grown up, he still needs help setting up bank accounts, understanding interest payments on credit cards, how to make a doctor’s appointment and fill the subsequent prescription, how to rent a storage space and what’s the deal with taxes? Not very much help, but still, there is a first time for everything. I’ve made peace with a future with me gone and Edda living in a group home or something. Of course, I want Edda to live with me and Jeremy for a long time. Of course, if we can’t manage Edda, I want Edda to live at “home” with caring love loves. But if she can’t have that, I’m mostly OK with Edda living in a group home/nursing home place. Even though I know how bad these places can be in 10,000 ways. I see it everyday at the hospital. Even if everyone in these places are trying trying, I know how hard those nurses/techs are stretched because they are not staffed that well because I know I’m often not staffed that well and then I can’t properly get to all my patients. I’ve been in a weird mood where I call my friends and say – you don’t have to take care of Edda, but please visit the place and make sure she is clean and fed. Make sure you try to find the best place and help Vince, he’s going to need help finding the best place. Gah! OK. So we are trying to look at the estate for the next 10 years for Edda and Vince to transition into grown ups. It’s not only the special needs trust establishment, but also I think we are going to start paying folks for help with care management and trust management. All these things I did not know about three months ago.
I was walking down the street for a quick Maxi poop walk when I passed a neighbor who was working in her garden. She asked how I was and I said – fine. and then she laughed and said – well, that doesn’t sound like a very enthusiastic fine! And I laughed too and said – I am really fine, we are all fine, I just wish the pandemic was over. And then we did a quick catch up which included her telling me some other neighbor had caught covid a couple weeks ago and, while not needing to go to the hospital, did have a doozy of disease course. ugh. She teaches at a local, hoity-toity private high school and she tells me that the masks do work – that she’s had about 5-10 kids test positive this year (weekly testing at said hoity-toity private school) and they were all diagnosed them asymptomatically (though days later, a bunch of them felt sicker) and none of the other kids in the class got sick. I asked – so those positive kids, do they know how they got covid? Yeah, pretty much, she replied. The private schools have moved to 100% in person way faster than the public schools, they’ve been in session at least 50% of the time since September, but she said – there is always at least one kid in each class who decided to stay virtual which, I imagine, is somehow extra frustrating.
God damn it, the deer found my bird feeder. They empty it out pretty fast. I gotta hang it up high, but I’m short, so that’s an issue. I did make a video of me trying to shoo the deer away – essentially yelling to a large mammal – get off my lawn, but I’m going to spare you that video.
I am a bad mail opener, so I open about a month’s worth of mail at once and this month I found the annual report/brochure of my hospital which showcases my quilting teacher’s mask! Gina made about 200 masks at the beginning of the pandemic and I gave them out to all the nurses at the hospital. Since I was floating everyday, I gave them out on all different units random different days. So I have no idea who the lady wearing Gina’s mask is!
Here’s my version, not ironed.
After more than a year of working at home, Jeremy finally ordered himself a proper office chair. We’d been hoping to find discounted expensive office chairs from some place because everyone is giving up their offices and probably needed to liquidate their office furniture, but we failed at this task. Jeremy’s tush has been hurting for various reasons (probably from the biking, not from the office sitting) so he needed a nice chair. As for me, I’m still sitting on and old wooden dining room chair that has no matching friends anywhere in the house.
Apparently for office chairs on rugs, you are suppose to replace the factory wheels with rollerblading wheels? I’m slowly wrapping my head around the fact that Jeremy will always be working from home. That I will never really regularly have the house to myself.
Finally, after almost 11 years, I bought Maxi a new collar. The old one was nasty. Cows. We got cows. Look how grey my Max is. When did she become a senior dog? She’ll be 11 this year.
This is the week where vaccine appointments are all over the place. Last week, it was all booked all the time. Now you can walk in anytime and get your arm jabbed. Almost everyone I know has gotten vaccinated. The few people I know who are holdouts are either surprisingly surprising or completely unsurprising.
Edda woke up yesterday with a bloody nose! I was dawdling and already running a little late for morning prep for the bus at 7:10 am. But I managed to squeeze a shower into the morning schedule and clean her up and catch the bus. I’m super impressed with myself. Though I think it makes me realize that I can hit the snooze button a couple of times before I really have to get up.
Jeremy got his second Pfizer shot yesterday. The first shot, he drove 100 miles for (one way) to the underutilized Salisbury mass vax site, the second shot he drove about three miles to our closest CVS. Now just Vince on 5/7 for his 2nd moderna. Jeremy’s trying to figure out how the vaccine is messing with his recovery from biking training. He has this “body battery” on his Garmin watch and claims he can see that in the middle of the night last night, his body went to work making antibodies. Usually at night, he recovers steadily throughout but last night, a couple of hours in, his body stopped recovering and reached some plateau and just stayed there. Does this make any sense? I find it a little amusing that for the second half of life, Jeremy and I have switched tendencies in certain areas. Jeremy has become more and more data driven and loves tracking things and putting things on spreadsheets whereas I’ve become more feeling based and less and less interested in data. I think the most important things can’t be measured. But I think we were the opposite way when we first met. Also I used to be the quiet one and Jeremy the verbose, but we’ve also switched positions on that. I spend a lot of time talking, Jeremy spends more time thinking.
And he made himself a celebratory dinner – peruvian chicken on a weekday night. Delicious.
I’m starting on the next quilt. I think this is the one. I’m pretty casual about my quilting. I love my quilts, but I have many “mistakes” in them where the corners don’t quite match up. I almost never rip the seams and resew, I usually just deal with the crooked-ness. For this one, I’m going to try to up my precision game. I’m going to try starching my fabrics so they don’t stretch and relax in weird ways when I press them flat resulting in not perfectly square squares and I also bought a little grippy liner for my quilting rulers so they don’t slide ever so slightly out of alignment when I’m cutting the fabric. Let’s see if the corners match up better. Gina, my quilting teacher, says when I’m pointing out missed points or corners on a pinwheel or whatever, that it’s the mark of loving homemade. Lol. Gina’s quilts always have matched corners.
I went for a walk with Alice and Jojo on Saturday.
Jeremy is upping his baked ziti game. He’s ordered many, many different types of pans from amazon just to find the perfect size for many different types of situations – the three of us, the three of us + one Edda caregiver, the right size to give away, the right size for a party. Glass? Metal? Deep? Shallow? I don’t quite understand what is going on, but I love the ziti, so I don’t complain.
Edda had her worst seizure in a month on Saturday afternoon. She is fine. She fell asleep afterwards in her chair which she does not often do.
On our almost daily lunchtime walks, Sofi and I made a point to stop by that house. You know that house – you probably have one in your neighborhood. It’s the house where the garden just explodes from all sides with color and defies all the deer, rabbits and bugs to become a little, tiny botanical eden tucked between boring green lawns with their Home Depot azaleas and deer eaten hostas. Little rock paths wander through the front lawn to a hidden-ish koi pond, which Sofi has taken to lean over every day to count the fish (I get kind of nervous because we hadn’t explicitly asked to see the fish, so Maxi and I say firmly on the sidewalk). We met the owner of the house yesterday – Jeanie. She showed us where she keeps the fish food so we can feed the fish whenever we stop by. Then Sofi asked – is the rumor true? are there three ponds in your backyard? And then we were offered a tour of the backyard, private garden with the rumored three ponds. This is only part of the garden. There are glorious porches, a thatched hut, little statues tucked here and there and swinging benches. A true labor of love. I asked how much time it takes – she says, we’ll I’ve been here 20 years. And I laughed, we’ve been in our house since 2008 and our backyard is a big weed pile. She said she spends a couple hours a day working in her garden – when the weather is nice.
Look! I’m inside someone’s home without a mask (well, my mask is still hanging from my neck). Unbelievable. A visit brought to you by Pfizer and incredibly talented scientists, manufacturing engineers, the folks who work the manufacturing lines, supply chain managers, pharmacists and nurses. Forever grateful. Megan is moving in a few weeks and needed some help decluttering and packing. I love decluttering and was happy to provide a few hours assistance and my minivan to make trips to Goodwill. I also love cats – which she has three! I’m not sure they like me as you can see them warily eyeing me in this photo. Granted, I look ridiculous.
