Storms were forecasted to blow into DC between 6-8 pm. Tornado warnings & derechos were expected. I freaked out about the trees around the house. We gathered everyone at home and when it seemed like the worst was coming, we sat down to dinner.
In the middle of the first floor away from all the windows. Even though our beautiful table was completely done and ready to eat at. Even though the storm was essentially a no-show.
I think my bad mood is weirdly linked to Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day = complicated feelings. I’m working through all that. I’m not a super motherly mother, I did not grow up dreaming to be a mother above all else, but I’m very happy that I am a mother even though this whole mothering thing is way super complicated. Isn’t it always? Jeremy made me a bagel one-eyed-giant. I had two of them.
I also got the dining room table refinished and back into the dining room today.
And I facetimed my own mother!
This is Vince driving his friend Sam to a party on Friday night. We weren’t quite sure if on his learner’s permit he was allowed to drive non-family members. Vince declared Sam his brother and off we went.
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Jeremy’s obsession with bike riding continues, to his chagrin, to escalate. This month is bike-to-work month and he wants to win. There is a guy at the Cambridge office who, for years, has biked to work – a total of 30 miles a day. Jeremy can’t bike to work everyday, so to make the most of when he can bike to work, he does a round-about extend-o route. Friday am, he left the house at 5:30 to ride 75 miles to work, did he include Virginia in this commute to work? Maybe. Is this kosher? We spend a lot of time wondering if it’s in the spirit of the competition. Meanwhile, he’s outgrown his weekend club rides now (they stop a lot and chat and get coffee at rest stops) and I told him to go join the racing team in the area. Though, honestly, racing terrifies me. There is a lot of crashing, I think. They meet on weeknight evenings at 5:30 way outside the Beltway. I’m like – don’t these guys/gals/they have jobs? They’d have to leave work at 4pm to get way out there. And the descriptions are lovely – this is a drop ride, we go hard and fast, know your way around because if you get dropped, you’ll have to find your own way home. Look, it’s so crazy now that his socks match his jersey.
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I’m still in a pissy mood. I want to spend all day in bed watching Netflix. I try to resist, but it’s hard. Jeremy is trying to cheer me up, we went out to lunch.
Found a new bike shop in town where we looked at electric bikes and $6800 bikes. OK, maybe he looked at the bikes while played Words with Friends on my phone.
at REI looking at biking accessories.
Then we went for ice cream. Big storms are predicted for tonight. Hopefully no trees fall on us.
This has been a terrible book year for me so far. I don’t know why it is so hard for me to finish a book. I have the library app on my phone, I’m constantly checking out books and then starting them and giving up on them 10 pages in. I don’t think that it is the fault of the books. Rather, I think it is the fault of my brain. It’s flighty and perches on a branch for only a few minutes when what really needs to happen is for it to hunker down and roost for a couple of hours.
When I was in Ann Arbor and Vickey was in Chicago in the final week of March, we both independently purchased this edition of Middlemarch. I remember there were about 4 different versions of MM at the bookstore that I was at and I did spend a few minutes deciding which edition was going to allow me to finally reach the end of the story. I was buying Middlemarch because I had recommended Silas Marner to Vickey a few weeks prior and she loved it and retold me the plot because even though I vividly recalled loving it, I had forgotten the whole plot of the book except for the part about gold at the bottom of a well.
Vickey recently decided to give up on her neighborhood book club even though she loved cooking for it because they were constantly reading terrible books (well maybe not terrible books, just books that didn’t need to be book clubbed) all those books about orphans, or books about WWII or books about orphans & WWII or Wonder/A Wrinkle in Time or some random self help book. And I’ve been in a book slump, so we decided to start our own book club of two. I immediately suggested Middlemarch. She said – did you read the forward? Let’s not read Middlemarch. I think she’s right, we have to start the first month with some possibility of success. We are reading Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. We’ll see how it goes.
Adriana needed Tuesday night off, so Kitachi pinch hit for the night. Edda really loves all her caregivers and it’s always a treat when someone who isn’t a regular anymore comes by for an occasional night. We all get to catch up.
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Today, I interviewed for a nursing job at H*ly Cr*ss. It was a surprise interview because I stopped applying for jobs in January, but somehow my resume got forwarded to a hiring manager. I went thinking I wouldn’t take it because I thought I was done with the idea of working in a hospital (working nights and weekends & Christmas or Thanksgiving), but this job is compelling in certain ways. My nursing interviews are always so long because it always involves shadowing a nurse for about three hours and then another hour for the actual interview with the hiring manager.
After the interview, I headed downtown to celebrate Bette’s 80th birthday. We had an all female party (both her daughter-in-laws and me, a niece-in-law). When I told Jeremy we were going to Blue Duck Tavern, Jeremy said – it’s right by me! and I said – it’s all girls, you aren’t invited.
A lovely lunch! I think Bette was pleased. I ordered my very own dessert which I never get to do! Coconut tapioca, carrot cake, pineapple allspice sorbet, curried cashews and saffron.
I’m still slogging through my bad mood. I did have a chance to vent to Vickey today who listened patiently to all my irrational thinking for 15 minutes long minutes without a single patronizing word at all and reassuringly told me that no, I was not a selfish unreasonable jerk (which is where this whole mood has taken me) and then gently redirected the conversation to her trip to the ER this weekend. I was like – you let me yammer on for 15 minutes about my totally made up first world problems when you had a story about the ER? She said – don’t worry! Everyone is OK. And yes, everyone is OK. Well, except for kind of Jeremy and Vince who have seen my irrational & wild thinking up close. I hope they are OK. I’ve apologized a lot. You know behavior patterns you have that you know are annoying or just poor choices and you know that you shouldn’t be doing it even as you are doing it and you can almost see yourself from above like on a home surveillance camera system and cringing at the sight of it and even though you promised yourself you wouldn’t do it again and yet, there you are, still doing it because you can’t possibly help yourself? It’s been that kind of week. And it’s only Monday.
Progress on the dining room table. Now with the stain and one polyacrylic coat. I totally said polyurethane before, but we are doing all water-based coatings so we don’t have to use all those solvents to clean up. Two more PA coats and we are good to go for brunch. It looks good. I’m surprised.
Hmmm, what happened this weekend? It’s hard to remember. Jeremy got home on Friday afternoon and we both picked up Edda from her aftercare. Sam, Vince’s friend, was over for dinner (pizza from Slice) and then we had a quiet evening. I’ve been in a bad mood the past few days I’ve been trying to shake it. I used to think that my bad moods were based on circumstances and the seventeen bad things happening around me, but I don’t believe that anymore. Now I think of a bad mood as a cloudy day – something that blows in and out in no real predictable pattern. Sometimes the cloudy day just stays for a day or two and other times it just stretches on for a long time. When I’m in a bad mood, everything seems terrible and these terrible things still exist when I’m in a good mood but I don’t care so much about them them.
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On Sat, Vince went to a girl’s birthday party. The first one since he was about 5! Interesting & exciting and no, they are just friends.
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This weekend we are taking care of finishing our dining room table. We sanded it down three weeks before Thanksgiving hoping to serve turkey on it, but we missed that deadline and now are hoping to serve Mother’s Day brunch on it. We were swamped before Thanksgiving (I think I fixed a toilet instead) and then the temperatures dipped and the stains/polyurethanes said not to apply it below 55 F. Which meant that we were stuck with it in the garage all winter.
I think we (as a couple) can be paralyzed by overthinking tasks. We needed to put a base coat on, a stain on and then the layers of polyurethane. We kept looking at youtube channels and the instructions and then debating how long to wait between coats and whether we’d have time to do it between outings and Sunday night dinner and then I said – hey, I think we just have to do this because if we don’t do it now, then this will be stuck in the garage another six months and I need the garage back because we’ve been parking on the street since November which is a pain for all the caregivers and Edda who needed the garage to get out from the rain and snow under a protected roof and blah, blah, blah… Anyways, we started to paint. Hopefully ready in a few days. I need to go to Home Depot tomorrow to buy a synthetic brush.
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Sunday night dinner!
I got a new work computer shipped to me this week. The old one I had gave me the blue screen of death every two weeks or so (which annoyed me) and also rattled terribly (which annoyed Jeremy). Every night we went to sleep with the gentle grrp, grrp, whirrshlip of the fan in my old computer and Jeremy would bug me to turn off the laptop but I told him that if I turned it off 1) I wouldn’t get updates that push out at midnight and which those nights exactly were were generally unpredictable because we get 10,000 emails about software pushes that constantly change dates and so it was easier to leave it on all the time, 2) it would take me 20 minutes to log in in the morning because it was so old and creaky and needed a long warm up and 3) if I turned it off, I didn’t have full confidence it would turn on in the morning and so the rattling comforted me because it told me that it was still alive. This was a sticking point in the marriage. But now it is solved. Thank you, thank you for the quietness that is our bedroom and home office.
Some photos from Jeremy’s work last week featuring the biking aspect of it:
Back at Bard:
Now we are all home.
I’m getting texts from Jeremy’s business trip where he shows me that he’s participating in teamwork exercises where coworkers are picking up ziti with spaghetti. He also mentioned a task where you put an Oreo on your forehead while you are lying on the ground and then without using your hands, move it to your mouth by nudging it with your facial muscles. Jeremy didn’t participate in the Oreo challenge claiming injury as half his face is frozen from the Bell’s Palsy, but it amuses me to think of Jeremy on the floor with and Oreo on his forehead. My husband is many things, but enthusiastic team building participant is not one of them. He can be a party pooper. I’m sure that most of the day they are discussing Very Important Things that will Change The World and I’m Very Happy About That, but when I see photos of things like using pasta as tools, my first thought is – I’m doing double chores for this?
Vince’s summer contract for his job at a scout camp came in for me to review and sign. Vince did not ask at the interview how much he was going to get paid. Remember he said he’d do it even if they paid him a dollar? Well… lol, $125 is the amount he gets paid weekly – but! I keep reminding him he gets room and board. He’s going to be away from home for six weeks this summer.
I found Vince at his desk tonight. I never see him at his desk, he’s almost always in his bed.
Wed is Arietni’s night and she put Edda to bed and tucked her in snug as a bug in a rug and then she said good night to her and went home and now I’m sitting in Edda’s room blogging and waiting for her to fall asleep. Good night!!
Sunday was the 2nd day of the orienteering meet at Mt Tom in Holyoke and Vince, Edda and Jeremy drove in from Bard in the morning to meet me on top of the mountain. It was pouring rain and about 40 degrees and I was not excited about being outside (the photo does not begin to show how wet and cold it was), but Vince and I both honored our start times and went around the mountain getting ourselves totally soggy. Neither of us finished our courses (I really had to quit after about 90 minutes, I had had to wander ankle deep through two streams and my feet were soaked and I was totally lost) and about two hours after we began, we were back in the car with dry clothes and headed to Korean food.
After lunch, we split up, Jeremy took his bike (and the minivan) to Cape Cod with him on his business trip and I took the kids in the Civic back home. Six hours! I’m driving so much these days – it’s not a skill I think I possess. I like to think that I never drive. I can count fewer than 10 times I’ve ever driven Jeremy around in a car. I hope Vince is a competent driver soon so I don’t have to drive him around anymore. The first 30 minutes I was sleepy (I think it was the postprandial redirection of my blood to digestion), but afterwards I felt great the whole way home, I commanded the radio so I listened to all the teen pop music I could with Vince going – OMG mom! Really? This crappy song?
Quick aside – here’s Jeremy racing on Saturday:
Wet pile of clothes when we got to Rockville at 10pm. Then I found out Maxi bit another dog while we were away and we are out $300 for the vet bill. And then I found out that Jeremy forgot to pack critical parts of the bed rail in the car so I had to move Edda’s whole room around so that her bed was against the wall and then put the couch in front of the exposed side. Vince was helping me and asked – wait, didn’t you guys not have rails for a long time? I said, yes – those years without bed rails were years where I got up every night at 2am and got into bed with Edda and she slept with her head in my armpit. I do not want to have one of those nights. I want a full night’s sleep by myself in my own bed and then I made him lift the couch into Edda-protecting position.
I’m exploring the rock climbing gym in the neighborhood and wondering if I could learn to rock climb. I took a lesson last week (and got a two week pass) and now I’m checking out the gym. So different from the gym at the Rockville Swim Center. I’m not sure I like it better, it’s just different. They have a slack line which is exciting and a treadmill with a wood-like belt. Certainly the clientele is different. I don’t think that’s true at my other gym. I’m still using my crazy tights from Soojung’s mother.
Time to mow the grass. Crap.
