Megan came on Sunday to say goodbye to the kitty. I will not lie – I miss the kitty. Sigh. I love my life. I’m totally living the dream. I have everything my heart desires and I remind myself often of it – I am so so grateful. But I’m not blind to the fact that I could be living the dream, but in a different way. Hahaha. There is the urban, brownstone family dream, there is the very career driven dream, there is the single, millions of friends & activities dream, there is the writer dream, anyways, for sure there is a kitty dream. But I also realize there is a fine line between living the dream, and totally not living the dream. And I know that what I think is the dream, many, many people see it and say…no way, that is not living the dream (e.g. going to bed at 8:30 pm).
Jeremy’s in Chicago, the kitty is in a new house being cute, I’m home with Edda and just chillin’. I realized last night the Edda and I are in our own self-contained cocoon, not beholden to any outside schedule. We have nowhere to go, no one to see, work can happen anytime. I could black out all the curtains and just eat when I’m hungry, sleep when I’m tired and Edda too and just let the world spin on outside without us. (This is not good).
I’m enjoying all the music in my life. Singing with the church choir is back in my schedule after a summer off. I swear, I enjoy lessons just because I can hear very accomplished musicians do their thing. Like when Josh, our choir director, sings our parts – he’s louder than the entire section put together and also can travel up and down the voices going from low basses to the high soprano parts which he does in falsetto. Or when Billy, my guitar teacher, listens carefully to a song on spotify and magically picks out the guitar line and then goes on to improvise from it. Both of these sessions are in groups, but I’m sure they can hear each one of us picking out our parts. Josh often says – I hear an alto singing the melody an octave lower. That’s me – yikes.
I’ve been enjoying the new Taylor Swift album which dropped a few days ago. She’s happy which makes this album must less tortured than her last album. She wrote this album during her eras tour! omg can this lady multitask – just unbelievable.
I haven’t really been baking for a while, so I decided to make a blueberry lemon Bundt cake. It’s actually so nice to do these things and not just sit on your phone watching youtube videos. So I zested and baked.
I tried this thing where I sugared the pan instead of flouring. It’s suppose to add a crispy coating and release a bit easier, but I didn’t find it to be true. I might try it again sometime.
Delicious.
I went to Christine’s 60th birthday party and wore a scandalous (for me dress). It was fun.
So as of last night, all of Edda’s adult services have been suspended. So payments to her day program, transportation and personal supports have hit a random snafu. So everyone called me and basically said – super sorry, Edda can’t come until this is fixed. Can I say that this was completely unexpected? No, not really, I knew the start up would take time and hit roadblocks, I just didn’t know which roadblocks. So here we are, Edda is at home with us all day, so she’s bored and we a little more constrained with our day, doing more Edda-care during the workday, but we are managing. The worst thing about this entire thing is the lack of email response, the full voicemail boxes, the not knowing if everything can be reestablished in 72 hours or 6 months.
My mood, though generally good, has been slipping. Jeremy is headed out of town next week, so I get a little grumpy, but it’s just going to be me and Edda in the evening – we should be fine.
The cat is set to be rehomed on Sunday afternoon and fingers crossed that it doesn’t fall through. The cat is lovely, cute and sweet – but it also really, really wants to go outside all the time and is a yowl-er which during the day is fine, but at night, esp at 5 am can be problematic. Perhaps it was exiled out of it’s previous home based on the amount of night-time meowing – I mean, it happens at 5 am and lasts…maybe 10 minutes or so. I love cats, but my best friend is my bed and my love of sleep. (I have many friends who stay up until 11 am, midnight, etc, and I’m like – have you found the joys of going to bed at 8:30? and they look at me like I’m a crazy person, which I am). I’m a little worried that the cat will boomerang back to me in four days time. Jeremy’s been going around the house singing…but the cat came back, the very next day…
I told Jeremy that we needed to leave the house on Friday night (because I was moody and Jeremy never leaves the house unless it’s to the 1. grocery store or 2. on a business trip – really, it’s 50/50 when he leaves the house if he’s headed to buy food or go to the airport), so we headed to the art show at Main Street which was lovely, but was slated to run from 5:30-6:30, but in reality ran from 6:00-7:00. We accidentally left Edda’s wheelchair in the front of the room while she walked around and then it was trapped by lots of people and the speaker, so we couldn’t make a fast exit when it was clear that it would run long and Edda and Jeremy got hangry.
And because this was supposed to be a nighttime adventure, we went to this Filipino restaurant in town that was rated one of the top 25 restaurants in DC by the NY times. Now I am a little dubious of this list because it lists another particular restaurant that is within 0.25 miles of my house and I’ve been a few times and each time I’m like….maybe it’s really good this time and I leave and feel: meh. I feel like if you are one of 25 restaurants in DC that is listed in the NYT list and you are about 4 feet from my door, I should almost always want to go there at lunchtime. But I don’t. To be fair, the restaurant replaced my walkable pizza place that I loved and went once a week and knew the owners and workers and, well, the new place is not pizza – which I’ve declared is my favorite food on the planet.
Anyways, this Filipino place was very good and satisfying and fun to try new things on a Friday night. Though after we got home, I asked Jeremy how much it was and he was like $70? To which I was like…ah yes, this is why we don’t go out much. Delicious food for sure, but basically counter service and plastic plates and utensils. And to loop it back to Edda’s care, she’s approved (well, kind of approved, right now she’s not approved) for a budget of about $220,000 a year for her services, but the actual staff who are with Edda and take care of her at paid at $17.50/hr. I literally can not wrap my head around that, what the hell are we doing where is all that extra money going? Can you take your family out for quick eats Filipino food on a random Friday night if you are making $17.50 an hour?
I took Zeke to the vet to get his first round of shots and an exam. The bill was only $250 which was much less than the $400 I had made up in my mind. I do love this cat, but I also made it known that I was giving the cat away. And the entire vet office fell in love with this very sweet cat and I scored and found a vet tech who is between pets and is looking for a cat! omg. I had to clear it with both Megan and Christine – Megan immediately said – yes! perfect! give to the vet tech! Christine was a little more reluctant to ease the cat out of our house. She is a tenant who came to our house with a large dog and then over the years, has acquired 2 cats – so it’s crowded down there and the thought of four animals in that space sent me a little out and honestly, the reason that the cat is “mine” is because between the four animals, there is hissing, swatting and general uneasiness. Anyways, I slowly convinced Christine that she can’t adopt every cat she meets on the street. And then I texted the vet tech, who is a slow texter and we are meeting on Sunday to give the cat away. I won’t say it’s a done deal until the cat is out of my hands, but I’ve relished being a cat owner for a week and I will also be very happy to give the cat to a loving home. I canceled my amazon order of air purifiers, little broom to clean the scattered litter, the anti-allergy food, and kitty treats. Kitty is going to have a new home. Christine and Megan have also both changed his name to Rupert.
That afternoon, I volunteered at a Main Street event at a pizza place. This is Mama Peace, the mother of the famous Mattie Stepanek. She’s a board member of Main Street and hosts pizza nite every few weeks to talk about things like – stress, self care, etc. It was nice, I served pizza to my friends and helped clean up and set the tables back.
So the government shut down today, but (selfishly) no worries about me. My agency is self funded, so we have about 52 days of operating reserves. So I still go and defend the constitution. With Edda by my side, we will trudge through this swamp.
Jeremy has been taking long walks with Elka, especially in the am. For which I am grateful, I haven’t had time to take Elka to the dog park much. Since the “country club” dog park closed, the “public” dog park is actually much better in many ways, but it’s just a smidge harder to get to and more out of the way in my daily life. So…that’s that.
I have removed so many apps from my phone, that it is the most boring piece of equipment ever. My texting is basically not very social, just very logistical. I still reach for it, but I mess around with it for a bit and then…it’s so boring.
As I said, I’m interested in having a planted tank, which is a fish tank with a lot of plants and not a lot of fish, so it can sustain itself, but it looks like a lot of work and money and now this cat has inserted itself into the picture. I’m mixed on cat ownership, I like the cat, but he’s extra work. Everyone is slightly allergic, so I’m reading up on how to make the cat as unallergic as possible. First up is air filtration, we need to put new filters in our covid era HEPA filters which have been running for five years now.
I bought these batman sheets off of ebay. I love it.
The cat enjoys drinking out of the toilet. I don’t love it.
Edda got suspended from her day program, so she’s hanging out with us for the foreseeable future. She was suspended because there is a paperwork issue which is preventing our service providers from being paid. They were very apologetic, but I understand and they did give me a few days heads up. I knew this was brewing for a few weeks now, because of other issues that kept popping up and not being fixed. I will not go into what a paperwork/approval nightmare of this entire process is which started almost exactly a year ago when Edda was starting her last year of school and I spend hours navigating the adult system. I’m grateful that we have what we have because I heard that half of the kids in the school system with needs like Edda’s did not get placed anywhere for adult services. Regarding the delayed payments, it seems like it’s just a simple oversight, but I know better now than to call anything “simple”. I’m glad I’m in a relatively good headspace today and can take this all in stride and we are so lucky to have spot.
My hobbies are colliding. Zeke found this plant, appeared to poop in it and left a huge dirt pile around it. And then it smelled terribly and I tried to root around to find the poop and couldn’t find it and then concluded that Elka had found it and ate it. Jeremy does not like this situation. I don’t either, but it doesn’t bother me as much for whatever reason. Anyways, I put the plant on a 12-14″ stool thinking that that would deter the cat, but no. The cat sprang up into it and started to do its business in it and I had to shoo it away. This is the most sentimental plant in the house, I have memories of this plant when I was 4 years old. So I’m hoping not to kill this plant.
On Sunday I went to the gym where I proceeded to continue to be the old lady that doesn’t lift very much, but provides good conversation. I know many of the famous-ish lifters in the weightlifting world, so I can insert myself into conversations there. And I can continue to be amazed at the practice lifting that people do. This is 110 kg snatch, that you basically yank off the ground and immediately throw over your head.
Friday morning, I awoke kind of happy/nervous because I was scheduled to go under anesthesia to get my stuck IUD out. My procedure wasn’t until 1 pm, so I got to not eat for a long time. In anticipation of this, I took the entire day off work – which was luxurious. I had been run down early in the week from the canker sore, so I was feeling extra tired and wanted to sleep on Friday morning and hopefully also sleep Friday afternoon.
After I had put Edda on the bus, I went to go out to take the compost out and found this little kitty just hanging out on our back porch. He allowed me to pick it up and carry it upstairs without struggle and I assumed it was Christine’s cat – our tenant downstairs. So I thought I’d just text her and find out and then tuck it back into her apartment. But she texted back and said – it’s not mine, but I saw it when I left for work at 5:30 in the morning. I texted all the neighbors (nope! not mine!), hung a sign outside my house and waited for the owner to find me.
Meanwhile, I did take a morning nap and then Jeremy dropped me off at 12:30 at the doctor’s office. I had asked Megan to pick me up from surgery – they don’t let you take an uber home and Megan was super helpful and just who I wanted to see slightly woozy. Jeremy couldn’t pick me up because he was on the lookout for Edda’s bus coming home and it was too hard to manage the exact timing for everything. And I was excited to show her the mystery cat because no one loves a cat more than Megan.
The IUD came out no problem, I’m very happy about that. Though I did take the cervix softening pill the night before ORALLY instead of VAGINALLY (which, in my defense – it did say by mouth on the bottle) and I apologized to the surgeon about my tight, unsoftened cervix and she said – no worries, I will meet you where you are. I got a nice mixture of fentanyl and propofol – those things are amazing when used properly, in and out of sleep so easily and quickly, unbelievable. Anyways, Megan came home and promptly fell in love with the cat. Now there were like three people who I thought were interested in keeping the cat – Christine, me and Megan – with me being the last in line – the other two are hard core cat lovers and owners.
So after the surgery, I made Megan drive me around town slightly high – to the aquarium store (where Megan told me she was not going to let me buy anything – I’m interested in setting up a planted tank), then to Trader Joe’s. While she was doing this, she was also gently trying to get me to be more proactive finding the owner of the mystery cat which took me a while to understand because I was high and in my altered state, I was already doing so much for the cat (I had a sign up at my house!). But Megan reminded me that maybe the owner was distraught looking for their beloved cat to which I was like….oh, yes. I get that. So she also drove me to our vet to see if mystery kitty was microchipped. And he was and there was an owner and a phone number. So messages were left and we waited.
And then the vet said – we found the owner! And then the owner called me and said they lived in Silver Spring and that the cat had been missing for weeks. Silver Spring is like 30 minutes by freeway from my house. We imagined the cat wandering for weeks in the wilderness of suburban Maryland. So she arranged to come pick up the cat at 3 pm. So I’m just waiting around…3 pm, then 3:15…, by 3:30 I wonder if they are going to come and finally at 4pm, I get a text asking if I could I keep the cat, their mom is allergic and doesn’t want the cat back in the house and the mom was the one who let it go outside. And so I said, I’ll keep the cat! all the time thinking that Christine or Megan would keep the cat, but it looks like those two love the cat, but don’t really want to house the cat. LOL. So the cat may be ours. At least I got the name of the cat – Ezekiel to which we are promptly going to shorten to Zeke. Welcome home Zeke. Also, Elka ate cat poop from the kitty litter. Fun times.
It’s the end of watermelon season. Like really the end. We’ve been using watermelon to keep Edda’s fiber/water intake higher to prevent constipation. But now I need to switch. I’m switching to apples with the skin on which, we will see, it takes much longer to feed Edda an apple at each sit down meal, but we are trying.
We are still getting into the rhythm of Edda’s adult programming. The day program is going well, the metro access has been fine after getting used to it’s random-ness. We got Eliana and Ginny onboarded to be paid by the state for her home personal supports. We are learning new apps and paperwork requirements and now….no one is getting paid. A glitch in the very complicated system. We are trying to figure it out.
