Author: Doris

From our house to yours!

I stood in a long line today at the party rental place.  Thirty? Thirty-five people are coming to the house tomorrow for Thanksgiving.  Fewer than it has been before, but still enough for a par-tay.  We needed tables, chairs and extra plates. I started talking to this person in front of me who, because of the context of the conversation that we had, thought I was a grandma.  She asked how many grandchildren I had.  Hahaha.  I’m so old.

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Vince had a half day today.  We picked him up and went to Five Guys which was filled with teenagers from his high school.  We stepped back a bit to observe Vince in his school-but-not-school environment.  Like at the Peach Pit in Beverly Hills 90210.

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We had hot pot dinner at mom and dad’s house.

Donald and Vince found Donald’s penny hockey board that Donald made in high school.  Donald said he carried that board around all the time in high school and he and his pals would play all the time.

Maxi stole a plate of chicken off the kitchen counter.  Dad asked for a set of drills and a snowblower for his birthday.  The snowblower may come with a certain teenager to push the snowblower when it actually snows.

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Two turkeys are defrosted and in the fridge.  Jeremy pre-carved them.  All the dark meat together, all the white meat together and wings in another tray.  We’ll see how this approach goes.  Jeremy likes making the turkey differently every year.  This is not the year of the beer can turkey.

The house is getting rearranged.

Some things get their yearly cleaning or maintenance.  Like this wooden table we bought in downtown Palo Alto when we were first married and were stupidly confident that we were done buying and more IKEA furniture.  The coffee tabled got a layer of oil, you can almost hear the pores in the wood sighing with relief against the dry weather.

Went to my last class of community health.  Interesting guest speakers on readmission rates and Medicare reimbursements and requirements for hospitals to maintain their tax exempt status.  It was interesting, I swear!

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Donald working away.

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This evening we went to A&Js.

Donald’s in town for the week!  So excited!  Though he has to work a bunch.  He came over today and took over Jeremy’s standing desk.  I have photos of headless Donald.

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The next exciting thing is that we celebrated Mom’s 75th birthday.  Donald enjoyed driving the minivan downtown, he doesn’t often get to drive such a performance vehicle.

We went to Blue Duck Tavern which has long been on my list of restaurants to try, but one needs to find the right occasion to celebrate.  It was a wonderful, special evening.  We had a little alcove all to ourselves, the service was prompt and fun and the food was excellent.  The children were up late, (Edda laughing during the dessert course).  Donald picked us a nice bottle of wine, which we did finish, light drinkers us all.

Happy birthday mom!

Thu hosted Friendsgiving on Sat night.  It was a potluck and I wanted to bring fruit salad (easy, right?), and it would have been a good addition, but I couldn’t pull it together enough to do that.  It’s been a long weekend here at the Lee-Martin household, I did not manage to accomplish very much.  So I got dried fruits – dates, figs and mangos.  And a bag of Pirate Booty which I did eat while hiding downstairs with the 17 kids watching the LEGO ninjago movie on the largest home screen thing I’ve ever seen.  The LEGO ninjas were as tall as I am – I know, not very.  (I did this anti-social behaviour for only 10 minutes.  Though I was very social with the kids.  Learned a lot about ninjagos.  )

Thu is a friend I met through Ruby so there were a bunch of doggie friends at this party, so it was bittersweet seeing them again and talking about our dogs.  I got to pet Boba – who was upstairs in his crate…but I couldn’t leave without saying hello.

Thu – an English major and teacher – like to read poetry at her parties.  Here’s what she read.

Kindness 

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

-Naomi Shihab Nye

I played pinball against my mom today – Game of Thrones themed.

Well leave it to the RM protest and related altercation to lead to the change in MCPS policy. MCPS superintendent says protesters can face disciplinary action. Read about it here.

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For my last day at community health clinical, I visited the Montgomery County Correctional Facility with my clinical group.   This is a maximum security jail with people who have committed crimes including rape and murder.  It was a five hour tour and when I first got there, I wasn’t that excited about it because I didn’t think we would see much.  But we got to see everything:  the medical facility, the kitchen, the women’s cells, the men’s cells where they held inmates who were suffering from acute mental illness, the pharmacy, the gym, the GED classes where inmates were learning math, the library which is a branch of the Montgomery County library, the segregation area (solitary).  We got to talk to nurses, correctional officers, staff that focus on gang activity, staff that run the retraining and work assistance programs.  This is a well run facility where the medical care is a priority and all inmates get community level care which means they get the same treatment (probably better) inside as the would on the outside.  So HIV meds, hypertensive meds, dental care, mental health care, pain meds all all provided.  (Though not yet the Hep C cure which runs $1000 a day for 6 (?) weeks).  The tour guide (the medical director) was hoping for us to get a chance to speak with some inmates, but we didn’t have time to do that. Access to abortion is provided (though the cost is paid by the inmate).  TB testing, STD testing, it all goes on and on.  It really was incredibly fascinating and eye-opening.  Apparently this is a model facility, they host tours all the time in groups up to 60, including groups from overseas.  The people who work there, work there for a long time – apparently it’s a great place to work.  It was very clean, very quiet, very orderly.   Dare I say – hopeful?

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I’m a little stuck with Vince.  One of my disciplinary actions kicked in last night.  He got an “E” on an English quiz, so he lost his computer access for the evening.  Each evening we go through assignments, due dates,  test dates, how to spread out the work, how to study.  So this English test, it was on “The House on Mango Street” and he didn’t mention it to me nor did he study for it.  I was miffed.  But he told me that it’s a “pop quiz” and that there is no way to study for it. And there are only 5 questions and so if you get 2 or 3 wrong, you are sunk.   He got the test back today and I looked over it and I can see how you can’t study for it.  I can also see how he answered the way that he answered.  What do I do?  These English tests are tricky.  They were tricky for me when I was in high school.  I read a ton (usually fantasy or science fiction), so it wasn’t like I couldn’t read – it was just hard for me to understand what the hell they were asking.  My SAT scores were too skewed.  Unfortunately, it was only after I started reading the NYTimes and the New Yorker after I met Jeremy that all those questions looked exactly like what I was reading.  Jeremy also notes that it might just be time – I spent a lot more reading after the SATs than before the SAT.

I tried to make up for the lack of computer time by buying stuff at the grocery store that I thought he’d like like this Sriracha mango yogurt.  He did laugh when he saw it, and tried and and declared it disgusting.

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And to end the post – a beautiful picture of the outdoors.

Some kids at RM (Vince’s high school) organized student walkout to protest the election.  It was to start today at 10 am. Vince mentioned it last night as we were eating dinner.  I asked him if he wanted to participate, he wasn’t sure he agreed with the theme of the protest which was “Trump is not my president” and also because he thought a lot of people were doing it just to get out of school.  A few of his friends did participate, I left it up to him to decide though Jeremy and I both thought it wasn’t an effective use of time and/or effort.  There have been a smattering of high school walkouts here in Montgomery County over the past week.  Honestly, I thought RM was a bit slow in their response – it’s already a week post-election, there are already new things to protest about. The kids did notify the principal – I believe the principal remained neutral on the whole thing, but did alert the police who ended up providing security for the whole march from the school through town center and up the county courthouse steps.  Unfortunately, an RM student sporting a “Make America Great Again” hat was punched and kicked during the walkout- which doesn’t really help promote the “Love trumps hate” theme that the walkout-ers were probably aiming for.  You can read about it and see video here. (Vince ended up deciding not to go on the walkout…)

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This afternoon, I took Edda to see her orthotist.  She’s the person that measures Edda for her back brace and her feet braces.  I just wanted to make sure Edda’s brace still fit OK for the next 6 months until the surgery.  According to Leah, it still looks good so we left it be.  We talked a bit about how Edda’s back got worse over the past 6 months and she said that the upper part of the “S” curve is hardest to control because you really want to press against the shoulder and the brace can only go up to the armpit.  Really what Edda needs is that old fashioned back brace that goes all the way up to encircle the neck.  They don’t make them anymore because they found that no one was compliant with them.

Edda is so happy these days.  Sometimes, as we are falling asleep, we can hear her giggling over the monitor for a few moments before she falls back asleep.  Even though Edda was laughing after the brace appointment, I had to sit down on the chairs in the lobby for a moment to regather myself.  Sometimes, 4 pm comes around and I think, I’m totally wiped out, but there is still a ton of the day left to deal with.

We rearranged Edda’s surgery date at Children’s, which took at least 20 minutes of serious discussion this morning.  Jeremy expressed dismay when I told him I had scheduled it on my graduation from nursing school – he said to me – you may not want to go, but I want to go.  And there are various school, camp, after care situations that I didn’t really consider when I made the appointment (which I did when Jeremy was traveling).  It seems like these surgeries are scheduled for Fridays, and the perfect day would have (of course) been the last day of school, but Fridays around that date are already booked.  So the new date is May 26th.  We also had to plan around some work travel dates for Jeremy in mid-May and mid-June which sound OK now to me, but almost always inevitably leads to me giving Jeremy the stink eye when I’m knee deep in the time that he’s away from the house because of some unexpected burden/stress/event, most of which, I acknowledge, ends up being NBD, but in the moment, I’m overwhelmed.  The surgery is now scheduled so Edda’ll have it on Friday, the following week, we’ll be camping out at Children’s and then the following following week, she should be home and Jeremy’ll be traveling to California for 4-6 days.  Keeping my fingers crossed that everything goes smoothly.  I’m sorry, Jeremy, for my future behavior – it’ll be fine.  My Rett mom friend, Soojung, who does Alice’s surgeries at Hopkins wondered why the surgery was on a Friday.  I immediately knew what she was concerned about.  You do the surgery on Friday and then you head straight into the weekend with a more skeleton nursing crew and doctors on call who look like children themselves because they just got out of medical school.

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The house is going to be vacuumed tomorrow.  I looked at all the golden hair around the house and felt sad.  When I mentioned this to Vince when he got home, he ran to get a little baggie and stuffed it with a bit of Ruby hair and said that we needed to keep in case one day we’d be able to clone her.  DNA is very important in cloning he told me.   I never thought about cloning, but it makes me smile to think about it.  Maybe someday, though the Ruby hair sample is throughly mixed with Maxi hair – we’d get some crazy blend of Ruby/Maxi.

We are trying various 2-person holds to brush Edda’s teeth.  This is a pretty good one.  Edda sits on the couch, I sit on the backrest of the couch and hold Edda’s arms down with my legs and then I steady her head with my hands.  Then Jeremy goes on offensive with the electric toothbrush.

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Vince and I spent yesterday evening arguing with each other.  I tried to redeem myself this morning by giving him a ride to school and a ride back home.

The ride to school is tricky because it always seems that Vince wants to leave at exactly the same time that Edda’s bus pulls in front of the house.  Then you have to wait 5 minutes for Edda’s bus to load her up and then leave.

Now time for pickup.  good night!