Author: Doris

I have been having trouble focusing on my Sunday long runs recently.  What should be a straightforward long run at a pace I’ve done a million times on a million weekends (7 miles @ 9 min)  has become a – not quite a struggle – but a bickering within myself in which the side that always argues to stop because I’m hot and tired has been winning.  I’ve been stopping a lot for really no good reason (you know when you are at work and working on something and being productive, and then you find yourself searching for the latest sale at Nordstrom or go looking for youtube vidoes on corgis or Trump’s latest tweets?  Same thing.  Why, why did you stop working?  Who knows. One just wanted to stop working.) and then I get mad at myself for stopping and then it turns into a thing where I’m like – omg, I can’t even do this long run, how am I ever going to (*insert ambitious project idea here*).  Paul suggested that I go run with a group and then that’ll help with the not stopping, but honestly, I like the time I spend running alone.  It can be complicated adding another person to the mix.    I get hung up on the pacing!  What happens if they are too fast? or too slow?   With some hesitation, I showed up to a (what was advertised as) a low-key long run group this morning and asked what the general workout was as various thin, youngish, fast-looking people started to gather around me.   The workout was 12 miles starting at 8:15 working down to 7:30 pace.  Hmmmm.  I can not do that.  Even though I did, in the end, find someone to run with, I’m not sure this particular running group is the right one for me.  Maybe.  Maybe the person I found to run with will run with me on our own.  She is a faster runner than me & older than me and told me I should focus on dropping my 5 mile pace to 7:30.  I told her I thought I’d need to up my mileage to at least 35-40 miles a week for that to happen, and she was like – you can do that.  sigh.

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Edda and I spent the mid-day together working on the next quilt.

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Vince came into the room at about noon and we FaceTimed my parents.  We also had a long discussion about the coming school year.  Vince wants an extension on curfew.  He doesn’t really have a true curfew, he has an electronic curfew of 9:30 and he can stay up as late as he wants without his phone/computer.  I’m hesitant to extend it because if we extend it to 10, it really would be relying on him to enforce it because by 10, I want to be asleep myself.  Last year, at 9:30, we collected his electronics and brought them to charge in our room.   If we extended the time, I see a few problems: I also don’t want to encourage last minute homework efforts at 10 pm.  Also, I really enjoyed collecting his computers at 9:30 because then he’d come into our room for 10-15 min and tell us about his day, things he found funny or things he’s worried about.  This is our time for private parent/son discussion and considerations.  This is not always possible at dinner (our other discussion time) because Edda’s there and usually a caregiver is there too – there is a lot of talking at dinner, but not necessarily a place for more heartfelt discussions.  I think this would disappear with the 10 pm electronic curfew.

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Sunday night dinner!

Hamburgers!

Donald!

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A trip to G-street fabric today.

Dreaming of the next quilt I’m going to make.  I’m looking only for the unloved, marked down fabrics.  The ones that are a gaudy color or odd pattern and then trying to make a beautiful quilt out of the misfits.  But I still couldn’t quite manage to figure out what exactly I’d do with  this print of delivery men.

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Jeremy is home!  And took over control of the cooking again.  Thank goodness.

“Jeremy went whale watching on his work trip,” I told Vickey.  “They went in kayaks and the whales almost ran into them.”  “What kind of whales were they?” she asked, “Orcas? Humpbacks?” “I dunno,” I replied, “but I’ll ask Jeremy.”

“So love, what kind of whales were they?  Vickey wants to know.  Orcas? Humpbacks?”, I asked Jeremy in the 15-minute window we had to talk that day in between teleconferences, meetings, meals, etc.  “I have no idea, they were whales and they were really close to us,” he replied.  “Well, go find out what kind of whales they were because Vickey wants to know.”

Jeremy never told me what kind of whales these were, but he sent these pictures.  Vickey took one look at them and said, “Oh my God, these photos are amazing.  I want to go whale watching in a kayak.”  And she decided that they were humpbacks.

The video shows how close they really were.

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My boys are coming back to me as we speak (type).  Vince is coming in at ten tonight.  I’m picking up Jeremy tomorrow at the airport.  This week has been quiet and peaceful.  Edda had camp in the afternoons and that ended today.  Only one more week of summer with nothing scheduled for either kid (though Vince has a stack of summer packets he hasn’t yet looked at).  I had enough Edda-care before and after camp to allow me to work a full week, get some exercise, and clean/declutter the house a bit.  I cooked a nice dinner each night, I even had some vegetables.  I spent this evening working on my next quilt.  This one I’m stalling out on because it’s going to require a lot of hand sewing, but I got it going again.

This is a photo of Jeremy networking.  In Monterey, networking involves going out kayaking in the ocean and looking for whales.  This is a mediocre photo – the whale watching we reportedly amazing.

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When I have a lot of childcare for Edda, I feel like I’m missing out on parenting her.  Edda’s parenting is still very physical – dressing her, feeding her, showering her, brushing her teeth, braiding her hair, smoothing lotion onto dry spots on her skin.  When I outsource this, I feel like my mothering connection with her loosens and starts pull away from me.

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And boo-ya, I made a real dinner.  With, like, vegetables and everything.

Saturday was the last day of the fair. They celebrated by silly-stringing Charlie (Mr. G). Vince got a chance to lead the parking operation by himself for about 5 or 6 hours that day, mostly in the afternoon.   It’s a big deal, he had probably 20 scouts and 20 adults reporting to him, all the shifts and positions to coordinate, including Jeremy (who he sent out repeatedly into “Death Valley” – the hardest job, hustling out in the hot parking lot waving each car into a spot with a team of 3? 4?  I dunno.  I never go to Death Valley.  I think there might be some gender discrimination there).  When he got home, we gathered in sleeping Edda’s room and did a post-mortem on his first management role.  Keep in mind, the boys had been together for over a week from 8:30 am – 10:30 pm and the night before, Vince had stayed at the fair until midnight riding the rides after their parking job was done.  And these are his closest friends.  Everyone was exhausted.  Vince acknowledged that there were some bruised egos – some of his friends were mad because they got passed over for leading the operation and thought they had more experience or higher elected position in the troop than Vince. Vince tried to un-bruise them. Other folks lost tempers and yelled at younger scouts and Vince had to make sure apologies were extended and accepted.  He also explained to us – and this is the craziest thing I can’t believe he knows how to do – his delegation strategy.  He told us he had four assistants and he said that he gave them each important chunks of the work so that they felt like they had enough responsibility to give a good contribution and not feel marginalized and in that way they could all feel like they were working towards the same goal. Is Vince a natural manager?  It might be true.  Though absolutely no one ever ever says in high school, I want to grow up and be a manager.

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Sunday was clean up and a pool party.  We had a chance to talk to Kate.

And Deborah.

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Jeremy is off to Monterey, CA for the week.  Lucky guy, I’d feel jealous except I know that he’s stressed about work that needs to get done this week while he’s at his conference.  And he has to network, which isn’t so easy for him.

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I worked most of the day today, but I did step outside to look at the eclipse.  I wore my solar energy shirt – “If only there was an infinite power source that was free to use all day every day…”

I didn’t have glasses, so I just looked at the shadows on the ground.  Actually the plan was to go outside my front door, see if anyone was outside with glasses or other solar viewing contraptions and ask to borrow/look through them for a moment.  However, this plan didn’t work as the only people I could see out peering at the sky were the ones I’m not entirely on good terms with.  Hmmm.  I did not ask, I let it be.

And I ate all the ripe tomatos off of my other neighbor’s vines (they told me I could, they are on vacation).

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Vince is gone this week too, he’s in Chincoteague with friends and here is his viewing photo.

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At the exact moment of the peak eclipse, my quilt I sent out to get quilted got delivered.  I like it!  Now I just have to think of a name and sew a gift label on the back.  This is Edda’s quilt.

Just us girls this afternoon, we are spotty on Edda-care this week, so I picked her up from afternoon camp.

Jeremy made fun of my cooking this week even before I started.  He knows I won’t buy anything except fruit and bread this week and every night I’ll go fridge/freezer/pantry diving to whittle down our supplies.  Then when Jeremy comes home, he’ll sigh in exasperation and need to stock everything up again.  Jeremy likes to have things in reserve, I like just in time inventory.  If we ever ran a manufacturing company, we’d kill each other with supply chain management issues.

Jeremy went to Cambridge for work on Thurs.  Quick trip, up in the early morning, back in the house by midnight.  He took a few photos for me while passing by the MIT T-station.  Speaking of MIT, they are closing down my dorm, Senior House.  It had the lowest graduation rate of all the dorms and was well known for illicit drug use (not that I ever did any, I have yet to smoke either a joint or a cigarette.  I’m square like that) and now that my own age has shifted from college-aged to administration-aged, I’m more sympathetic to the middle aged adult point of view.    It had always had the unfortunate slogan Sport Death which was kind of OK when I went there, but is totally not OK now.  Did I ever own a Sport Death shirt?  I don’t think I did.  (There was another shirt which I did own, The SPAMIT shirt which was not referring to the tinned meat). I was not in with the illicit drug crowd and I think you had to be in order to get the shirt.  Despite its reputation for misfits, I am not (and was not then) a misfit and I still loved it there.  I moved there my junior year after two years at Next House (which was the most Asian of dorms; people left their shoes outside their doors and everyone had a rice cooker).  People let you do your own thing at Senior House.  Which I did!  My junior year was my favorite year.  Gone now are the courtyard tire swing and the BBQ pit for Steer Roast.

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Vince has been gone all week at the fair.  I wake him up in the morning, then he usually goes off in a carpool, though sometimes I drive him and he’s away until 10:30 pm.  I see him only for a moment each day.  So when Jeremy was in Cambridge on Thursday, Edda and I went to Habit Burger.  We are making it a habit.

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Today, Jeremy worked 10 hours at the fair after doing a long bike ride.

I told you I got myself a corn dog a couple of days ago.  Jeremy got himself a turkey leg.

As I’m typing this, the scouts are parking the final cars of the year.  They are closing shop.  Tomorrow is clean up and a pool party.  Vince is tired but, I think, quite pleased with his work.  This is the third year he’s done the Ironman challenge.

The final flag lowering.

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I facetimed Donald today right before he went out on a ride.  What’s with those glasses?

Donald caught me while I was making a run to the liquor store at 10:30 am on a Saturday.  When I showed him my loot, he asked if I was planning on partying like a 23 year old.  I am.  I am indeed.  With a margarita in a bag.

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Edda and I spent the day trying out new videos.  Edda’s videos are so old now – Finding Nemo, Madagascar, Totoro.  We really need to get some new ones into the rotation.  We tried Moana today.  I had heard great, great reviews about it, so I was optimistic – at least for me to enjoy it.

But it wasn’t as enjoyable as I thought it would be.  First of all, I was trying to nap at the same time.  Second, Edda tried sit on my head and then whack me every 5 min to complain that it was a new movie and she did not like it.  Not one bit.  And I thought Maui was annoying and what’s the deal with the intellectually disabled chicken?  After the movie, I read some articles about HeiHei, the short-end-of-the-stick sidekick and how awesome he is as metaphor for difficulties in life but I just really didn’t get it.  Oh well.

Maxi is claiming our old, discarded mattress.  It’s a hand-me-down IKEA mattress from Seth and Christine.  I think they slept on it for 10 years before they gave it to us.  We slept on it for another eight years?  It was time to let it go.  Jeremy had been asking for a new mattress for a least a year now, but I couldn’t decide which mattress to get until I visited Lael in NYC.  She had bought a Nest mattress after going to Manhattan and trying out all the mattress-in-a-box companies that had showrooms there and she even planned a route for me to retrace her mattress pilgrimage.  I tried out her mattress in her apartment and declared it good enough.  My early birthday gift arrived yesterday, compressed and vacuum sealed in a box.  We used the chair lift to get it up the stairs.  Ahhh, sleeping is my most favorite hobby.

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Jeremy took us ladies out for Chinese food tonight.  We haven’t taken Edda to A & J’s in a while…

Please send all your love and good thoughts to Molly, Edda’s Rett sister.  She’s back in the hospital fighting a systemic infection following her spinal fusion.   xoxo.

Guess who just joined this f*ed-up country of ours?  Eliana!  We are lucky, lucky to have you.  <3

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I indulged in my one fair-food item today – a corn dog.  I could tell from the first bite it was not very good, I watched them take the corn dog from the pile and pierce toothpick holes into the corn crust and refry it in an attempt to bring it back to first-time fried goodness.  I probably should have thrown it away and gone to another vendor (or waited until it was super busy to get a true, first fried corn dog) since I get only one fair-food item a year, but I had walked all the way out of the fair proper and to the boy scout seating area and only had 10 minutes before my next traffic flagging shift, so I ate it. And the mustard was a little runny.  Strange.  I hope it doesn’t make me sick tonight.

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I worked 6 hours at the fair this afternoon, 30 minutes at a flagging station, 30 minutes chilling out on our folding lawn chairs in the shade.  I am not accustomed to being bossed around by my son.  “Mom, could you please work the exit lane in 10 minutes?  Don’t worry, I can explain it to you.”  Huh?  And then 10 minutes later, there is a group yell – “All adults who have been given assignments, leave now to go to your spot.”

Vince, though reluctant to run for any formal position of power, is apparently showing some leadership talent in this boy-led parking endeavor.   Who knows where he got it from.  I think neither Jeremy nor I have this particular thing that Vince has.  He’s even tempered, outgoing, helpful and doesn’t seem to be nervous about making a decision.  He can keep everyone in good spirits when communication breaks down or when there is a crisis of some sort.  Parking cars does not sound like a complicated, logistical, and contentious operation, but there is a lot going that I as an adult volunteer don’t even understand.  There are 5-6 kid stations and 4-5 adult stations that have to constantly be staffed in 30 minute shifts.  The kid positions are ranked by experience, the little kids get the easier & safer jobs, the older kids get the more dangerous job of directing cars into spaces.  Kids working directly with drivers end up getting yelled at a bunch.  Vince & company estimate it 1/70th of cars will yell at you. As the lot fills, and it can do that quickly at certain hours of the day, the kids have to decide how to backfill in empty spots to keep the line going quickly enough so that it doesn’t back onto the main roads just outside the fair.  They have to decide how many parking teams need to be deployed and keep track of who is in what position (using the whiteboard and magnetized names) and how long they’ve been working.  There is also a regular water delivery to each station that happens mid-every-shift (hence the driving of the golf cart) and equipment (lights, walkie-talkies) to maintain.

I hear of Vince’s leader-ing only second hand from other parties who are closer to the action, so I made some effort today to spy on my son in action.  Honestly, I saw him mainly laughing at youtube videos, making faces on Snapchat and throwing trash at other scouts.  Though certainly, he did confidently tell me what to do and when.  I’ll try to spy some more tomorrow – my last shift!  Woo hoo.