Author: Doris

Jeremy’s decided to train for a 100-mile bike race in September.  He got a friend to sign up with him and he downloaded training plans from the internet.  I’m a little afraid this is a build up to something insane like biking across America – maybe the Trans Am Bike Race (?) – which is a self-supported bike race across the US.  No vans, no support teams – just you, your bike and 10,000 gas-station burritos.  Mmmmm….

Jeremy is planning on riding long on Sundays, so I find myself with Edda looking for things to do mid-day.  I’m trying to work against my natural inclination to stay at home and doze off.  It’s not so easy to go exploring with Edda, I feel often like I need a little moral support from Jeremy or Vince – so I tend not to go out with just Edda.  But I think I shouldn’t be so daunted – all our caregivers are aces about doing it – so I guess I should try. Maybe visit all the interesting ice cream shops?  This weekend, that’s what I started doing, but we didn’t make it to the ice cream shop, we just made it to lunch.

I had many requirements for this lunch.  I wanted it to be in the country so I could spend some time driving the back roads of MD, I wanted it to be not a chain, I wanted it to have easy parking and I wanted it to be kind of cute.  And not expensive.  Edda and I ended up at The Buzz in Monrovia, MD where I think we kind of crashed a first date (see above..), I looked at but didn’t read the Goldfinch.

We were going to go to a creamery right afterwards and I made it into the parking lot of the ice cream place, but all the grass and hills and cramped looking farm store looked overwhelming to me.  So we skipped the ice cream and headed back home.  Next time!! 😉

Vince came home from camp yesterday.  That care package?  He did wait until Tuesday to open it.  But by then, a small rodent had made a little hole and eaten all the cookies, pistachios, Pocky sticks and wasabi peas.  The only thing left was the Mad Libs I threw in at the last minute thinking they would ignore it.  We talked about whether the rodent ate everything while in the box (unlikely as he would be so fat, he’s be stuck in the box) or whether the rodent called all his rodent friends and asked them to help him carry all the snacks to the rodent man cave (more likely).  And the boys did play the Mad Libs…

Edda’s happy Vince is home too.

Vince came home to his new video card – made by AMD, it was released just last week and sold out on the first day.  This was our 8th grade graduation gift to Vince.

Here’s his crazy gaming setup.

We are so rarely at the same place at the same time, but we all overlapped today for a couple of hours at Laura’s house.  

And our girls!  Alice, Caroline, Violet, Molly & Edda.  May love and kindness find us all, especially on the hardest of days and remind us that we are never alone.  <3 <3 <3

I’m up to page 216 in Donna Tartt’s Goldfinch.  I’m going to triumph over this book, I know I will.  I even got a non-digital version and a bookmark.  It won the Pulitzer (so someone thought it was ah-mah-zing), but it is boring.  So boring. Well maybe not as boring as, hmmmmm, waiting in line at the DMV.  But I’m sure it’s my mood and not Donna’s fault.  Maybe it will get less boring at page 487 or page 659.  I feel like I just gotta get through one book and then I will have broken through the wall preventing me from finishing books and it’ll lead to easy reading once again.

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Three Questions by Leo Tolstoy.  Have you read that?  Jeremy likes telling the story, Jeremy also likes Leo.  I’ve tried to read Anna Karenina many times, but I’ve failed all those times.  Just tonight, Jeremy mentioned that he skimmed all the war parts in War and Peace (all you have to know, Doris, is that the troops moved somewhere).  Anyways – the three questions:

There is a little short story involving kings, hermits, assassins and gardening.

Firework fun is done!

Good night!

This weekend marks our 10-year anniversary since Edda’s Rett diagnosis.  Samuel Beckett – “I can’t go on.  I’ll go on.”  Since Edda’s diagnosis, I’ve pretty much felt that way everyday.  The first 5 years, more the first half, the second 5 years, more the latter half.  But I have days, weeks or months that swing back to the first half.  What can I say?  It sucks.  It wasn’t part of the plan.  But then again, I know now that nothing goes as you plan.  But we had a plan today, and it pretty much went as we thought it would, so you never know.

We went to see Finding Dory today.  (Finding Nemo was better.  The short at the beginning “piper” was incredible.)

And we were going to go to our favorite Chinese at A&J, but the line was too long.  So we ended up going to Peruvian chicken for lunch.  Edda looks particularly grumpy in this photo, but she really wasn’t grumpy.

We got some donuts at Duck Donuts.

Let’s see what the next ten years brings.

Vince and I showed up right on time at 8:30 am with forms, lunch, luggage and a good attitude to the bus meeting place.  Turns out that the bus wasn’t scheduled to arrive until 9:30 am with a departure at 10 am.  How come I forget that there is a lot of waiting around every year?  I think I’ve left early before at drop off, but today was a nice day and I was in a chatty mood so I caught up with some other parents for 1.5 hours.  We talked about a bunch of stuff – but we talked a lot about our body parts failing us and what we are going to do when we retire.  hahahahahaaaaaaa.   Is this what happens when kids go to high school?

Since there was a bunch of waiting around, it allowed Vince and I just enough time to turn our good attitude into getting annoyed at each other.  Vince, as he’d had nothing scheduled for two weeks, has been shifting his bedtime to 2 or 3 am, which is fine when he doesn’t have to get anywhere at 8 am, but I’ve been trying to pull it back to 10 pm by last night which didn’t work too well.  I like to have Vince start exhausting trips by being fully rested going into them, but I think I failed today.  Nothing makes us more annoyed at each other than one of us being underslept.  If both of us are underslept, it just turns ugly.  Being well rested allows for a calmness and serenity when faced with fraught mom/son interactions.  Anyways, he was underslept this morning and got mad at me because I reminded him to finish his cooking merit badge (something he wanted to do early last week when he was fully rested) and because I told him that unfortunately, his care package wouldn’t arrive until Friday because it wouldn’t go out in the mail until Tuesday (he hadn’t quite worked out the mail math when he insisted on making chocolate chip cookies for himself to go into the care package last night).

Anyways, we worked it out in the end.  I went back to the house to pack up the care package and wrote all over it “Don’t Open Until July 5th” (I’m sure he’s already opened it, but in the meantime, he balanced it on Sam’s head) and he agreed to do the cooking badge.

I don’t think he’s going to shower for a week.  

Vince is going to scout camp for a week starting tomorrow.  I now do nothing for packing – he does all the packing himself and he did all the laundry he needed to do to start out with clean clothes.  Note in the bottom right corner some kitchen towels and a pile of books. Maxi peed on the carpet and Vince does what he always does when a dog pees on the carpet.  He puts a towel on it with weights to absorb the pee.  It works not badly.  Look carefully and you’ll see that he used Jeremy’s old college books to weigh down the pee towel – Sartre’s Nausea is there helping to soak up doggie pee.  Nice!  I think King Lear is also in there somewhere.  I have not read any Sartre because I stopped reading books when I was 18 and it was a requirement of my college when I went to study to be an engineer (just kidding!), so here’s the main theme of Nausea from Wikipedia – life is meaningless unless a person makes personal commitments that give it meaning.  True?  Maybe.  But at least the book itself has meaning by soaking up pee from my carpet.

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We went to a Fourth of July party held by our friends, Jen and James – the Canadians.   Well, it’s also Canada Day.

Here’s their dog, Justin Trudog.  Seriously?  Seriously.

Mmmmm.  4th of July brownies.

*****

We found a bike in the neighborhood with a “FREE” sign on it.  We couldn’t resist taking it home with us.  After careful examination we found it it came from a store called “The Off Ramp” on the El Camino Real in Mountain View, CA.  Fun!

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I have not been able to read reliably for a few months now.  I mean, I can read, but everything I touch, I must put down after 15 pages.  I have book ADD. These are the books I’ve had to put down (according to my library app (which is the only way I can go through so many books without blowing my budget and without leaving my house)):

The Good Partner – Peter Robinson
The Crossover – Kwame Alexander
The Odd Woman and the City – Vivian Gornick
Brooklyn – Colm Tobin
The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
Boy, Snow, Bird – Helen Oyeyemi
The Book of Speculation – Erika Swyler
Delicious Foods – James Hannaham
Gottland – Mariusz Sczygiel
Above the East China Sea – Sarah Bird
The Homemade Kitchen – Alan Chernila
The Black Cauldron – Llyod Alexander
The Fox was Ever the Hunter – Herta Muller
Tuck Everlasting – Natalie Babbitt
The Sense of Ending – Julian Barnes
All I Love and Know – Judith Frank
Dr. Mutter’s Marvels – Cristin Aptowicz
The Orphan Master’s Son – Adam Johnson
The Finest Hours – Michael Tougias
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Particular Children – Ransom Riggs
Mr. Mercedes – Stephen King
Did You Ever Have a Family – Bill Clegg
Trapped – Marc Aronson
Lila – Marilynne Robinson
My Sunshine Away – M. O. Walsh
Olive Kitteridge – Elizabeth Strout
What Comes Next and How to Like It – Abigail Thomas
My Sister’s Keeper – Jodi Picoult
Moon Over Manifest – Clare Vanderpool

Yipes.  That took longer than I thought to type out.  I’m hoping this list clears out the bad mojo and I can find a book that I like soon.

We went to Soojung’s house today to check out Alice’s SleepSafe bed.  There are a lot of options for the bed – we’d probably get the bed a little lower than theirs, so we don’t have to lift Edda into the bed, she can just walk over and sit down on the mattress.  We were debating whether we would get a single railing like they have, or you can order a double railing where it goes up one higher so if Edda pulls herself to a stand on the mattress, she still wouldn’t fall out.  But I guess if she fell in the bed after she stood up, that would be unsatisfactory as well.  I’m not sure insurance would even cover the bed, we’ll have to see.

We also went to check out their fancy pressure-cooker rice cooker.  It makes brown rice in about 30 min as opposed to a regular rice cooker that takes a couple of hours.  Vince loved it so much he volunteered to chip in some of his birthday money to obtain it.  This particular one even sings to you when it’s done cooking the rice.  Jeremy’s interested in this type of brown rice called “gaba rice” which is brown rice which is germinated to make it have a better flavor and texture than regular brown rice.  I’d love to switch us to brown rice, but we may have to get the singing rice cooker to make that a reality.

We were all entertained by their electric fly swatter.  You can hear the bugs getting zapped.

We had a fruit that I’d never seen before – a Korean melon.

You see Edda in her chair?  She’s asleep, ha!

We went out last night with Lael and Rachel – two of Jeremy’s coworkers.    I don’t know either of these women very well (though I know them better now), but somehow Jeremy feels a bit self-conscious asking young, single women out for dinner on a Wed night without including me on the invite list.  It was one of the most fun date nights we’ve had in a while.  It was a kind of a true date because often our dates are grocery shopping, (but I know, it’s not really a true date because we had two other people there) – rare for us.  First happy hour at a bar, then dinner at another restaurant and finally dessert at a third.  The night was beautiful.  We didn’t talk about work – which is amazing because I was outnumbered 3-1 – clean energy policy did not make an appearance at the table.  We talked about – quilts, moving to NYC, fast casual restaurants (CAVA), marriage (whether one, at particular moments, will inevitably regret ever getting married to one’s particular partner), chocolate chip cookies, hoppy beers, vacations, pit bulls, Etsy stores, government-issued credit cards, Beyonce concerts and cats.  We hung around their neighborhood – Columbia Heights, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood with the only Target in DC.  I haven’t felt so hip in a long time.  Here we are riding the bus home.  Bus riding is not really hip.  Although Jeremy is trying to make it hip.  Also, because summer camp is the source of all lice and I’m getting email about lice, the only thing I can think about when I look at the photo is the lice jumping from one head to another.  And also that I have a huge wrinkle on the inside of my eye, when did that happen? – the exact opposite of crow’s feet.