Author: Doris

I did spend the weekend at the fair.  In the hot sun and I worked a lot – from noon until 10pm.  I probably worked a half hour shift every 1.5 hours.  When I was out in the sun for 30 minutes waving a flag around, I’d easily drink a liter of water.  I got sunburned on my chest where I wore a V-neck and forgot to sunscreen. When I was out of the sun, I slept and chatted.  Below is command central “Baker”  where the boys dispatch people via walkie talkies.

A storm rolled in at 7:30 and the kids were pulled out of the field into the cars.  The grown ups were suppose to take over all the kid positions too.  I was a little wary of that, standing in the middle of a parking lot with lightening strikes happening.  So after I helped batten down the hatches, I went into the car with my carpool boys.

It used to be that whenever we’d have a little flush of money (tax return, an unexpected reimbursement, etc…), I’d tell Jeremy – OK!  We have some extra $, go spend it on something.  And Jeremy, being the careful consumer that he is, would spend a few weeks thinking of the fun thing and then by the time he’d decide what he wanted, the extra $ would have disappeared into the ether- used to pay for a broken cell phone or a new water heater.  This would not do.  So we established our little “fun funds” where money gets set aside weekly for all four of us.  Kids get their ages in dollars, we get $25 dollars a week.  

While it’s fun having, it’s also fun wanting something for a long time and knowing that you’ll get it when your “fun fund” reaches whatever amount that you are going to need.  You spend that time deciding what exactly your going to get – which model, what color, what accessories.  Jeremy waited a long time to buy his new bike, which he’s been riding all around town.  60-70 miles on the weekends in prep for a 100 mile ride/race in early September.  

This is the first time he got a flat during a ride:

A gnarly stick:

Of course, after the initial expenditure on the bike, there are other things to think about getting.  Biking is crazy with the extra accessories – seats, clothing, computers, things to ride inside in the winter, clippy shoes – I don’t even know what else.

101 degrees out this weekend.

Is it terrible that we use Edda’s fun fund on her “medical” expenses?  I’ve used it to buy her a TV.  But I think I might have used it to buy her new wheels on her wheelchair.

Jeremy changing out tires of another sort.

Boo ya!

Edda’s done with camp – which signals to me the end of summer.  We love the camp, but it was kind of a topsy-turvy summer for Edda.  Her counselor had some personal issues so her schedule was all messed up – there were lots of substitutions day to day of who was Edda’s 1:1 which made me feel at little like the uneaten dish at a potluck, but sometimes stuff like that just happens.   And it’s not really the end of summer because Vince’s boy scout troop is doing its annual thing of parking cars at the MoCo fair.  I have volunteered to spend most of my weekend (the hottest weekend of the year so far) helping to park cars.  Vince loves it, but the grownups don’t love it as much.  Each scout family has to put in 40 adult hours.  I’m going to do 20 this weekend.  Jeremy is doing 20 the during the work week.  I will complain a little right now: ARGH!  I’M SPENDING MY WEEKEND IN THE HOT SUN DIRECTING TRAFFIC AND BREATHING EXHAUST FUMES.  THE ONLY SNACKS AVAILABLE WILL BE ONES I DO NOT LIKE.  I WILL HAVE TO MAKE SMALL TALK FOR MANY HOURS.  Ok.  I’m done now.

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Jeremy uploaded some videos of the trip:

Note the tied score…

Piggyback rides:

Duck attempted to break into the hotel room.

Arcade fun:

The crazy kids went to Great Wolf Lodge which is a big indoor water adventure park in the Poconos in Pennsylvania. The highlights of this waterpark are these tall water slides, but since they were all in the water, there are no photos of those rides.  Instead, you get photos of the kids at the arcade.

Ruben is trying to decide which goodie to get from all the tickets he won:

Vince got a set of chattering teeth:

Motorcycle rides!

The big excitement around here the past few days is that our neighbors decided to cut down the four closest poplars to their house including one that overhung our house.  These poplars have relatively weak limbs, so they come crashing down every strong storm.  We had one branch pierce our roof a few years ago and our neighbors have branches come down regularly on their roof and deck.  At first I thought it would make a huge difference in how I saw the house, but now that they are done, I can hardly remember where they were in the first place.  It still looks very woodsy around our house.

The other exciting thing (well, more worrisome than exciting) is that Ruby’s abscessed tooth is bothering her again and she has increased weakness in her hind legs.  I tried a new vet today and I think I like him.  He’s just down the block next to the ice cream shop, which is a bonus.   He thought he could pull the tooth and that Ruby would get through the surgery just fine, but I refused it and got the antibiotic and it’s already working, the swelling is going down. She has a raspy breath (which she’s had for 2-4 years) which is some weird constriction of flaps in her trachea and he said that that could be fixed by some sort of flap-stick-open surgery and I refused that.  As for the hind legs, Ruby has arthritis and so the muscles are atrophying and her range of motion is significantly reduced.  He said he’d like to check her thyroid levels, her liver and kidney enzymes and maybe depending on those levels, he’d give her Synthroid and NSAIDs for inflammation.  I refused those too.  Then he said he was trained with acupuncture and would be happy to do that.  I laughed at him.  And then I felt bad.  Then I told him that I had had acupuncture myself and that it was helpful to me and I hope I didn’t make him feel bad.  I told him this is what I wanted:  I want Ruby to be happy the rest of her days, for her to be relatively pain free, for her to sleep more and more, for her to transition from kibble, to hot dogs, to rotisserie chicken and finally to sirloin steak.  And when she refuses the sirloin steak, I will know it is time.  It hard to refuse all this stuff because I want her to know I’m doing the best for her.   Maybe I’m not, but it’s how I’d want to go.  I did also get a bunch of pain meds for her, but I’m confused.  She does not seem to be in pain as she’s still eating kibble with a rotten tooth (faster than Maxi)/going up and down stairs/pooping well.  Do I give her the meds?  Dunno.  I’m hoping I’ll know when to give them to her.

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OK, Ruben might be a little confused about America, because after the ball game last night, they stayed at a hotel in Flushing and had breakfast at a dim sum place.

Then they drove to this crazy water park place in the Poconos – The Great Wolf Lodge.  I think they are having a good time.  😉

I imagine Sweden to be this far away land of socialized medicine with lots of blonde people sitting in rooms filled with IKEA furniture and mostly in the dark and cold.  Mainly, it’s just far away with cousins that we don’t see often enough.  But Ben and Ruben came to NYC for a few days, Jeremy and Vince are on a mission to show Ruben America.  Ben speaks only English in their Swedish household, but Ruben, the little one, never speaks English at home – only Swedish.  So it’s amusing to Ben to hear Ruben switch to English to talk to Vince.  Which has to happen because Vince is giving him piggyback rides, introducing him to Pokemon Go and Vince can’t say a single word in Swedish.

They drove up this morning and headed to a museum.  In front of rocks.  (Vince had a section of geology in science last year which we both groaned about.  The thing about geology as a science is that the time scale is just too long.  You get a rock.  You put it on your desk.  Nothing will change for a very, very, very long time.  Although I did admit that my geology roommate at Caltech did get to spend a lot of time in Hawaii driving a Jeep around).

Ruben is a fan of Daft Punk.  $3.50.  A bargain in NYC!

Vince is now taller than Emy.

In front of of a famous restaurant:

In front of Columbia:

At a baseball game.

On Saturday, we went to our next door neighbor’s 32nd birthday party.  There, I met a fellow Wootton alum, though she graduated in 2010 and I had to admit I graduated in 1990.  Anyways, what was interesting about her is that she’s just ditched medical school.  She’s going to grad school instead.  She said she ditched med school because they scooted her into a patient’s room, gave her 15 minutes and told her that she needed to get all the information she could about the complaint that brought the patient in.  Nothing about their personal life, nothing about extenuating circumstances, nothing about the person themselves – just focus on the illness itself almost separate from the patient.  It was not how she wanted to practice medicine.  I was shocked (but I guess not surprised) to find this out.  In nursing school, I get scooted into a patient’s room and given 15 minutes – half my grade is based on the, let’s say, postpartum assessment – fundus height, locia, episiotomy, etc and the other half is based on my conversation with the patient – did I find out she’s at risk for postpartum depression, that her family is far away, that her husband works long hours and she doesn’t have a car?  I guess I had read so many articles about doctors trying to treat patients more holistically, that I was sure they were doing the same sort of patient interactions we were.  Oh well.  Just happy I never went to med school. Anyways, if I had gone to med school, I would have never met Jeremy and this whole blog would not exist.

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I think I do not really know how to have fun.  There are various ways I have “fun” – like decluttering, going for a run, fixing toilets – Jeremy thinks that they are fun to me because I have subconsciously decided that they are a form of work and that I really just enjoy working.  This does cause me some consternation as I’d like to be able to have fun, but the latest credit card bill is revealing.  It separates Jeremy charges from my charges.  I like to charge things like: gas, groceries, gifts for other people, car registration, dental bill, A/C repair.  Jeremy likes to charge things like: ice cream, rental cars, hotel rooms, dinner at World of Beer (which, I know, I was at too, so it only counts half), coffee, movie tickets.  Speaking of fun, my boys are headed out of town again to have some fun – this time with Uncle Ben and nephew Ruben.  I’m hoping to post some photos as they will be in cell service the whole time.

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Vince made pizza from scratch for dinner tonight (including the dough).  A spinach/tomato/feta one for the grown ups.

Pepperoni with stuffed crust for the kids.

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This is Nat’s last week of working for us as a steady gig.  She’ll pinch hit every once in a while, but she’s got 6 classes going on in the fall and they scared her good and plenty at the orientation.  We’ll miss her, but I know she’s always going to be close by.  xoxo!

Deb came over for brunch today.  Deb is Edda’s OT, but we had to stop seeing her because of Edda’s new after school care schedule.  But we miss, miss, miss seeing Deb every week.  Edda was so happy to see Deb.  Nat used to take Edda to see Deb every week, but she hasn’t seen Deb in more than a year…. <3

I’m testing out these new photo filters.  Jeremy worked from home today (I did not know he was planning on doing this), but he set up his office in the “hall” on the 2nd floor.  Vince had taken Jeremy’s desk out of the study and put it in his own room to organize Magic cards on them.  Jeremy was stuck using the enormously heavy desk in the hallway.  This desk (which usually lives on its side the tall way) has been in the hallway for years, I’m trying to get it down the stairs and out of the house.  I have to hire professional movers to get it down the stairs.  I made the mistake of asking for a quote last week – during the height of moving season – woo!  too high!  gotta wait until October.

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Edda’s camp continued with “color wars” again today.  Edda’s team was green and it turns out we have very few pieces of green clothing.  We did what we could.

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Vince is home.  This time for longer than 13 hours.  xoxoxoxo!

Ruby is deaf and almost blind.  I went to an online dog age calculator which takes into account that she’s a large breed dog and it said that she was 93 years old.  She’s still going up and down stairs, still eating well, pooping well and still giving lots of wags and licks.

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I think after 10 years of watching the same 7 movies, Edda might be tiring of them.  I’m trying to introduce new ones into the mix – it isn’t an easy task. And now that I realize that she’ll hang onto a video for a decade, I don’t want to introduce any lame videos to her.  This morning – an emphatic thumbs down to Beauty and the Beast (which is a shame because it’s my favorite) and thumbs up to Cars.  Lightning McQueen, we are on to you, just a decade after you came out.

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I went to breakfast with my pal, Julide.  Her daughter goes to the same camp as Edda.  If you can’t tell, today was the color wars day.  Ingrid and her counselor were on the yellow team.

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Our evening walk – I like to brush Ruby in the common area in our neighborhood.  Jeremy thinks I’m littering.  I think I’m giving birds materials to build their nests.