Author: Doris

Drove to Ashburn today to see Vickey & Karuna.  Karuna just came back from India with the treats she always gets us.  I love these treats because they are a sweet, but they aren’t super sweet, and they are good, but not amazingly good, so I am quite satisfied to eat only one square each day and it will last me a long time.   Vickey made a banana bread with concentrated banana juice (recipe from America’s Test Kitchen).  We went to Zoe’s Kitchen where I think I ordered the best (lamb pita!).  Yeah. Yeah.  I’m dressed like it was cold, but it wasn’t cold, it was quite warm.  We talked about both Harvey Weinstein (ewwww.) and Kazuo Ishiguro (hooray!).  Vickey and I get along quite well, but we have very different tastes in books/movies/clothing.  We are always recommending things to each other and if one of us loves it, the other is surely going to find it meh.  But we both loved Remains of the Day.  If we both love it, we know it is really, really good.  She thought that Margaret Atwood might have won the prize this year, but may have been too obvious of a choice.  Vickey lent me her fav Atwood, the Blind Assassin.  Which I might read.  Or I might never read since this year, I’ve only gone through eight books, many of which are children’s books.  The Giver, Hattie Big Sky, working on the Penderwicks, Holes, The View from Saturday.  I might never leave the 6th grade ever again.

Speaking of books: Go Ben!  Not the Nobel, but quite close!  NY Review of Books.

Vince is at his first, real babysitting gig tonight.  Someone left their three-year-old with Vince and went to go see a concert (I think kind of far away, like in DC).  I can’t quite believe it.  I mean I completely believe that Vince will do a good job (he’s so good with kids & I wouldn’t let him babysit anyone if I didn’t trust his judgement), but I can’t believe that my kid can take care of other people’s kids.  I haven’t really left Edda with him for a long time yet, but I think he’ll want to charge me for it.  ? . 

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I went to quilting class on Wed and it was the first time we brought in our sewing machines.

The trickiest part is keeping a consistent, even, scant quarter inch seam allowance.  In all the quilts I’ve made, I have not really been doing this.  I’ve kind of fudged it a bit and my quilts develop little puckers when they finally get quilted because not everything is quite square and true.   In order to make everything square and true requires a degree of anal-ness I pretty much gave up when Edda’s diagnosis just knocked me off (well, pulled me kicking and screaming) of my perfection/anal tendencies.  But I think I can re-conjure enough of my previous anal-ness to learn to make things line up (though this time, it involves way a lot of ironing, sorry! pressing.  In the quilting world, ironing and pressing are two different things).  Though not in my first attempt.  This is my test strip in class:

A perfect inch on the bottom:

But by the time I got to the top, I lost almost an eighth of an inch.  doh!  Not good. 

I’ve been grumpy.  Apologies to Vince & Jeremy – how can I be so nice to everyone else and so short with them?  Yikes.  It was a bit of a long weekend & start of the week, but things are better.  You folks get a picture of a squirrel with almonds and a pile of pickles.

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Vince spent most of the weekend with his friend Sam and Sam’s cousin V*ara.  I’m wearing this Michigan shirt in honor of V*ara who is being treated for a relapse of a type of childhood kidney cancer – she lives in Ann Arbor.

V*ara comes to DC every few weeks to see her cousins and Vince likes hanging out with her.  They went to dim sum on Sunday.

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Nat did move out of our basement this past weekend and we’ve gotten a few things passed down to us, things that they didn’t want.  #1 was this object:

Which is actually a kind of game!  Can you imagine Nat not wanting this gem?  Neither can I.

After boasting about, oh how much free time I have & therefore the house is completely picked up, I will tell you that this week, it is not true.  Jeremy’s been traveling this whole week & gone half the weekend.  It was the end of the fiscal year for me & blah, blah, blah.  So boring.  The master bedroom:  the laundry pile on the floor is *clean*.  I recently found out that some friends have outsourced their laundry.  Someone comes to their house once a week to do the laundry.  Hmmm.  I remember the days when the au pair would do the kids’ laundry.  That was amazing.  These days, I think I would prioritize lawn outsourcing over laundry outsourcing.  My question about the once a week laundry person is that I don’t think it would be possible to run that many loads through the washer/dryer in one shot to do a week’s worth of laundry in 5 hours.  Maybe they have the person just fold.  I never mind running the washer/dryer, I just mind the folding.

The incoming mail pile:

The status of the sink:

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Vince facetimed Donald to ask for help for his year-long project.  At Vince’s school, their sophomore year, they all have to do a project which they think up themselves and which takes some effort to do.  Some kids learn to play a musical instrument, some kids run a marathon, some kids do a service project.  I want Vince to do a service project – something like trying out new recipes and providing a few weeks of dinner to a homeless shelter – but my ideas always get shot down (no surprise).  He, on the other hand, is focused only on tech projects.  He wants to teach a computer to write jazz.   Something about feeding in a million examples of jazz into some sort of neural network and then having the computer spit out an original composition of jazz.  This seems difficult for a number of reasons (Vince neither knows how to code, nor jazz, nor is he going to dedicate hundreds of hours on this project (I think max 10-15 hours of sustained effort)).  I told him he needed to ask Donald or Seth to help him out on this project and if it was feasible.  Donald thought that maybe if Vince put in 40 hours worth of work, he could get an app on the iPhone which would be a simple calculator.  Vince thought a calculator was lame.  Which it is.   I told Donald we need a low effort project (low meaning 10-15 hours) which produces stunning results.  Something like oobleck (corn-starch + water = non-Newtonian fabulousness) or the electrified pickle in the chemistry realm but in the computer science realm.

Vince was bugging me to upgrade to the new OS operating system.  In doing so, my iPhone has slowed down considerably and my watch won’t update for some reason.  I have totally screwed myself – mobile phone-wise. (2 days to update the watch!  WTF?)

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Jeremy came home on Friday night from his business trip (a trip which turned out much better than he had hoped it would – these things that were arranged pre-election and seemed relevant at the time, seem much less exciting now) and on Sat, we went to XiaoYing’s house to celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival.

The children crawled all over Vince.

We grilled and picked vegetables in the back yard.

Arietni came and hung out with Edda.

We played the traditional dice game – called the Mooncake Festival Dice Game (original, huh?).  Turns out the other guests (also kind of relatives of XiaoYing) have a daughter who goes to RM and works in the morning at the library with Vince.

Arietni won one of the mooncake prizes.  I cautioned her that they look beautiful, but the can be a little underwhelming to eat.  She tried it – double yolk!  Very lucky.

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After moon festival-ing, we went again our separate ways.  Jeremy left for the night to go someplace far-ish away to do another century bike ride.  This one is technically a race (the other ones were not really races), they count three uphill efforts with chip timing, etc.  He sent me these photos this morning at the start.

Alas, Liz broke her hand on a bike ride a few weeks ago – her doc said to take it easy on the bike, so Jeremy’s going alone up those hills.  He went to dinner with them and a group of others last night and they spent every single minute talking about cycling.  Jeremy’s said – no one talked about work, kids, politics, washing machines, car troubles, pets, vacations.  No one.  One wonders if one is truly friends with these people if you only talk about biking?  I have kind of the same experience orienteering.  I’ve gone pretty steady for a whole year now, people say hello to me and I have a good time, but I think no one is my friend yet.  Well maybe one person, which honestly is enough I only need one, but it’s tenuous at best now.  I have to work on that.

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In the evening, Edda and I went to Boba’s house (Thu & Hansel) for dinner.  Thu’s mom was cooking, she and Thu’s father flew in from Florida.  They were hit pretty hard by Irma and were in a shelter for three days, but the house is fine.  But all the mango trees and papaya trees were blown down.  I’ve gotten so many florida mangos from Thu from those trees.  At the end of dinner, I got one bag of dried mangos made from the last bunch harvested.  No more.

I’m getting more used to taking Edda to parties where I don’t know many people on my own.  I consider this to be a triumph.  I can’t get Edda up and down steps on my own anymore.  And 99% of the houses out there have at least two steps to get into the house.  So I need to walk into the party, spy some strongish tallish guy to help me with Edda up the steps.  That’s kind of hard.  But the harder part may be that I can no longer quietly sneak out of the party (which I love to do – ghosting.  I love it.).  I pretty much have to stay until the natural ending of the party and then ask another strongish tallish guy to help us out of the house.

Drunken pork?  Yummy.  I did have a very nice time at the party.  And I think I got Vince another babysitting gig.

Jeremy’s still out of town.  I can do the single parent thing – but man, it’s not easy.  I woke up Vince early and he left the house in a mini-crisis all concerned about a few tests and deadlines at the end of this week.  Gave him a quick pep talk and walked him through assessing the past exams and thinking of a reasonable plan of action without totally flipping either of us out – hard to do at 6:40 am.  Then I took Edda to get both the HPV booster and her flu shot.  After I dropped her off at school and got in a quick run around the neighborhood, I sat down at work at the late hour of 11 am.  Ack, not a great week for being super productive in a steady, even way.  I always say – next week will be quieter and then it never is.  I’m always waiting for the quiet week.  Which is always next week.  Why did we get the HPV vaccine for Edda even though she will never be sexually active?  Because I’m extra pro-vaccine.  God, in the past couple of weeks, various anti-vax people have made a comeback in my life.  I guess I should be glad they don’t believe the world is flat (which is a real conversation one of my good friends has had with her siblings.  Seriously, there are people who really believe the world is flat.  It’s a conspiracy! they say (according to various youtube videos).  OMG, we are doomed in all the ways we are doomed.)

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In crafty news, I’ve been making handmade birthday cards for the loves in my life as I remember them.  Look!  Violet got my owl birthday card.  She’s turning 10.  And you get stickers too.

I laid out the flowers on my quilt via random number generator.  I like it.  Now to hand sew each of the flowers to the backing.

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Vince facetiming my dad to do some Chinese studying.  The teacher this year is demanding, Vince likes her, but she has high standards.  It’s probably his hardest class.

Vince started babysitting this week.  I can’t believe that my child is taking care of other people’s children.  He worked two nights this week and fed the three-year old dinner and did the whole bath and bedtime routine.  He got paid!  So excited.

I decided to sign up for a ten-week beginning quilting class which meets Wed afternoon at the local quilt shop down the freeway a few exits.  Today was the first class.  I’m deep into my third quilt, this is a good hobby for me – I’ve tried a bunch of other ones: knitting, drawing, music.  This one suits my personality somehow – the rate at which you can make progress on a quilt, the different fabrics, the cost, the machine & tools, the usefulness of the end result.  I hope to quilt for a long time, but before I press on (ha ha <- quilt joke) I thought I should learn the basic techniques from an actual teacher.  Annette, our teacher, has been teaching this class for ten years.  I should learn a lot.

Today we learned about color selection and how to square up and cut fabric.

I’m behind!  On Saturday, Vince and I went to Sam’s house in Chevy Chase for a housewarming.

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That night, Ruth came over and we had blackened salmon.

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Monday night, we had Kate, Grafton, & Ben over for dinner – Vince was out, he was in Philly on a school trip.

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Jeremy’s in LA for the week.  I took Vince to the dentist where they now have an electronic form to sign in.  Everything looks good!  Vince got to sit in the space room, he hadn’t done that in a long, long time.

I just realized that I passed the 10 year mark on my job.   I’m grateful for my job that allows me to care/provide for my family with minimal stress.

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Edda and I took the day off last Friday and drove to Philly to the Children’s Hospital there.  When Edda was first diagnosed with Rett, we made biyearly? semiannually? trips to Rutgers to have Edda’s history taken and a physical done so that Edda would be part of a database of Rett patients to track their progress as they age.  It was an NIH funded longitudinal study. This helps researchers have a good baseline to work with if/when they start having treatments for Rett.  At first, they were incredibly helpful, the first one we went to was the first time I’d seen another Rett girl.  I remember just being incredibly overcome with the gratitude that we weren’t totally alone, but that it also sucked so bad that we were all there together at the same time with all our hearts broken.  It was held over a weekend, and they would try to fit 15-20 families in on each day.  Then we got busy and the weekend trips were long and we were all getting more used to the idea of Edda being Edda and then the funding ran out and we stopped going.  Recently, they got more funding to continue the study and I got a very nice letter that asked if some older girls could come back (because the older the girls are, the more likely they are to drop out) and if they could, it would be a great thing 1) because: science & data and 2) they would more likely get more funding later if they had better participation now.

 They opened up a bunch of new intake sites and we got to go to Philly.  So off we went, this time to CHOP in Philly. Now, I hate driving.  I hate driving long distances and I hate being late.  It all makes me anxious and unhappy.  But I did it.  And we had the two hour appointment, told them all about Edda and caught up on the (many) clinical trials and asked about (CRISPR – it’s well funded and exciting and we’ll see.) and then they suggested I go eat at Federal Donut which would take me across the UPenn campus, but seeing that it was already 1pm and we were starving, we ate at the Au Bon Pain across the street and called it a day and headed back.

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I saw the school of nursing.

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I came home and had a beer.

 

The kids had off school today for Rosh Hashanah.  They usually get Yom Kippur off too, but not this year!  With the school year starting late (after Labor Day), they had to eliminate some holidays and I guess Rosh Hashanah was the one they decided to keep.  Vince went to a sleepover at a friend’s house last night and came back home mid-morning.  Edda had Adriana’s company most of the day today, allowing me to get a full day’s work done.  Jeremy went to work.  Like he always goes to work.

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Hmmmm,  I’m trying to think of something interesting to say today and I have nothing.  I asked Vince if he was going to homecoming this year and he said no.  Jeremy’s new glasses are still not fitting his large head very well, he might have to return them.  I made some progress on my quilt after Adriana left in the afternoon.  Edda is very, very happy today.

Jeremy’s back from NYC today.  He took the train down this morning and headed into work.  We went to Home Depot tonight for life-sized angry bird catapult parts.

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Going back to Vince’s schedule – Vickey noted that Vince, as a sophomore, is taking AP US Gov and that when we were teenagers, no one took that until their senior year.  There has been some sort of grade inflation/acceleration going on in the 30 years since I’ve been in high school.  In Vince’s grade, there are *8* classes of AP US Gov.  If you estimate the total class size of about 500 and the US Gov class size as 30-35, then it seems like about half of the kids in the grade are taking this sophomore AP class.  Maybe I’m mistaken and the 8 classes are spread out among the sophomores, juniors & seniors.  Still, it’s a lot of classes.