Author: Doris

As we were wrapping up our vacation in Missoula, my cousin Arlinda called me and told me that her father Joseph (my dad’s oldest brother) passed away and that the service would be in LA the following week. My parents are in Portland for the summer so we started trying to figure out logistics of moving everyone to LA and moving around LA to visit people. Chris, who is spending the summer here in DC, flew with me to LA. My parents flew to LA from Portland and we all met up. I rented a car – over the span of 4 days, I drove over 400 miles, quite possibly a record for me. LA driving is not straightforward – the entire trip was exhausting, but actually great in a way. When someone dies at 90 years old after being sick for a long time, the funeral has a palpable sense of relief and we were, in some sense, happy to spend time together.

The first night, we had dinner in a San Gabriel Sheraton – here’s aunt Jane:

Uncle Robert:

most of us at dinner:

Cousins Chris and Andrea:

The next morning we drove to Malibu where we visited Carrie’s house which out of about 300 houses, hers is one of 40 left standing from the fires earlier this year.

We went to the third street promenade for lunch and then to my uncle’s Buddhist service. My cousins, his daughters are in the photo. Did anyone know Joseph was Buddhist? ummm, not really. But the ceremony was beautiful, gorgeous.

We burned lots of money and houses and cars for Joseph in the afterlife. Vince and Dani drove up from Irvine to attend the service and dinner and drove back after dinner.

The next day, I dropped my parents off at the airport and went to Westwood to pick up Chris – his parents were going to fly home to Texas and Chris and I were planning to spend a few days with Vince and Dani in Irvine.

At Irvine, I saw Vince’s lab (beautiful)

We had pho dinner with Dani’s parents and went to a dessert place so Asian…only mango desserts.

Saturday morning, I got to visit Keyla in Palos Verdes and the kids are doing so well.

And then back to Irvine to spend the afternoon at the mall with the kids and watched Superman and then had dinner with Dani’s family and then went to a sound yoga class with Dani’s mom. Then to bed and Sunday Chris and I flew home back to DC. Overall, a great trip. Got to spend time with lots of people and get to know everyone better. Loved being able to spend time with Vince and Dani and Dani’s family. Now back at home, Jeremy is leaving for California today on business. Nothing stops.

We flew back on Friday night to National from Missoula via Chicago. I don’t think I’ve ever flown into an airport on Friday night. It is a party happenin’ – people picking up friends, taking their time, music blaring – lots of Hiiiii giiiirrrlll! Interesting. Anyways, we got home very late.

Saturday we tried to pull the house together in some way, jetlagged and then starting on Sunday, we had festivities starting to say goodbye to Felix.

We went to weightlifting on Sunday morning where I practiced my lifts for my meet in two weeks. What the hell? I’m just hoping for clean lifts at any weight now. I’m not going to be able to practice very much between now and then, so it’s going to be what it is. Everyone at the gym is so excited for me, and in turn, I’m excited for myself. If a little nervous. I found a brand new singlet on ebay for 21 dollars – retail $150 baby! I’m ready. Felix came, though slightly injured and didn’t lift. I really hopes he finds a coach in Sweden, he’s a natural. Thomas (the guy in the green) is leaving for college in Florida as well. Thomas’s mom baked cookies for all of us. Yummy! This is the nicest gym ever, really.

Sunday night, we went to Sunday night dinner which was HILARIOUS. Sometimes they are and sometimes not, but I’m glad this one was. Chris was there too and it’s his last Sunday night dinner too. So here’s a good-bye photo too!

Monday morning, I dropped Edda off at her adult day program. I spent about an hour talking to them, doing some paperwork and telling them about Edda and she had a great first day! There were a number of friends from school and life that we were able to reconnect with. That was a lot of fun. It’s in a beautiful location surrounded by woods.

Then it was time to say goodbye to Felix. As I told him and his parents, I’m so proud of him. Though it was a slow start, he completely knocked it out of the park for his stay in the US. He made about $8K, way more than I thought he would and made friends and became very, very tan. He got health insurance and he got his driver’s license. All great things.

Jeremy is swamped at work, so I dropped him off at National and we shared donuts and blueberry muffins from Dunkin’ before he headed to security and I made sure he got through and we waved ferociously at each other from far away when things were cleared.

To celebrate Edda’s first day and Felix’s return home, I invited Megan over for dinner and to do a real celebration, we all went out for ice cream. Elka came too – she wouldn’t miss it. And we christened the new car with her dusty paw prints. We were going to go to Carmen’s, but it was closed to give the workers a day of rest, so we headed to ben and Jerry’s.

Hooray for ice cream!

We just came back from a week in Missoula, MT and it was a fabulous vacation. We met up with Mike and Scott from Topeka and the Tubervilles from Dallas. There were 6 adults (including Edda), 1 teen and 1 kiddo and 1 toddler. I picked Missoula out of thin air when a person I met at the yoga retreat I went to earlier in the year mentioned that her husband was from Missoula and it was a special place and it totally was. 10/10 recommend.

Mother nature also was very kind to us – traditionally there was no air conditioning in houses, but the past few years, it has gotten up into the mid-90s in August and there also has been smoke from wildfires, but we had neither and all of us from brutally hot summers got to enjoy cool mornings in the 50s climbing to the 70s-low 80s during the day and no humidity. Glorious!

Missoula is a college town, hip enough to have lots of great coffee shops and restaurants, but little enough that nothing feels crowded or rushed.

Let’s start off with the airport – newly renovated you can see the entire thing from the check-in gate. Hello bear!

We rented two houses, just down the street from each other, and they weren’t ready for a little while, so we went to a nearby playground and went on the very fast carousel.

We checked into the houses and then headed out to pizza with arcade games.

And then to ice cream at the place in town – Big Dipper. A place where a single scoop is actually two scoops.

Then next morning, Ning, Tristan and I went on a walk to find a beautifully tended neighborhood garden. We picked squash, kale and raspberries.

We went to the neighborhood splash pool which had a lazy river with floats, water slides and Edda enjoyed going around the lazy river a few times.

We had dinner twice at “home”. Jeremy cooked and we got dessert from a bakery including this very sweet sugar cookie made in the shape of montana with a heart for Missoula.

The next day, we went to a butterfly/inset museum and then to the county fair where I had my annual delicious corn dog.

These young ‘ens (Brian and Scott) rode all the rides.

And they got temporary tattoos – the three Moose-keteers!

We went down to the river during golden hour and had fun with local kids swimming and Tristan went skinny dipping.

We went “hiking” – really just walking about half a mile from the parking lot in gorgeous pine forests and over a bridge for this group photo.

Edda was a trooper – she was…mostly happy. But happiest at the water park and on this hike.

Wed afternoon – a subset of us went whitewater rafting. We were a little nervous about Noah maybe chickening out at the last minute, but he was brave and had a blast. We all had a blast – this was perhaps the highlight of the trip. We had a guide who took these photos and she was great. We tried rowing and all swam in the river at the end of the tour. Gorgeousness.

Last full day – it was rainy – we went to the library (newly renovated with amazing kid spaces) and bowling.

Arcade!

A quick stop at the bear at the University of Montana.

The last dinner together – while we were waiting for the delicious fried chicken, and we found this amazing vintage store with this perfect leather jacket for Scott – it was $500. A bit out of our budget, so you just get this photo.

And then we all lounged around on this crazy couch and then headed home! To DC, Dallas and Kansas City.

Jeremy drove the new car with me and Edda in it to the LAST day of Camp JCC drop off. The last day – meaning the last time ever. We have aged out.

Edda had a great summer (don’t let the grumpy face fool you) and a lot of it was because of her excellent summer counselor, Lily.

And many thanks to Eva who has run this camp for 40 years! We are so grateful for her enthusiasm and fortitude.

Friday night, my friend Lexi and I went downtown to see Riki Lindhome’s comedy routine called Dead Inside about her infertility journey. I had a nice time, it was funny and very NSFW and I was thrilled to go downtown on a Friday to see all the young people “hanging out”. I’ll include one of her songs. She’s like famous adjacent – this was backed by Ali Wong and Bill Hader and I found out she is married to Fred Armisen. She’s pretty much as famous as you can get without being super famous if you know what I mean? I mean, I guess someday she might get a Netflix special and I’ll get to say….I saw her in 2025!

And I left the most important thing for last! Pokemon Level 44 baby! Gotta catch them all.

So, with encouragement from my coaches Ward and Kevin, I signed up for my first olympic weightlifting competition at the end of August. I kind of can’t believe it. I had to join the USA Weightlifting organization and I signed up for the meet. For the meet, I could fill in my coaches names and the gym I’m a member – I’m repping the Central Maryland Gold Weightlifting club. Grrrr, if I can do it, you can do it. My weightlifting age is 53 and I’ll be competing in the 64 kg weight class. HAhahaahaha. This is the most ridiculous thing that I’ve done in a while. You have to kind of guess how much you are going to lift and I put 0 kg. My only goal is to lift one lift cleanly with good form. We’ll see how it goes.

All summer, Vince has been struggling with some issues (mostly mental) at grad school and I’m so proud of him for patiently working through them and really coming into his own at school. He’s much better now, though lots of talking and getting help and then getting more settled into his groove. He’s cultivated a really nice working relationship with his professor and it’s just nice to see after many months of struggle. I hope this trajectory continues and he has a run of feel-good times.

After many months of thinking about it and trying things out, Jeremy got us a new car! Do you know some people have facial blindness where they can’t really tell one person from the next person? I have the same thing, but with cars. I will live next door to someone for an entire decade and not know what kind of car they have. I will barely know what color their car is. So to me, Jeremy got us a red car. We’ve never had a red car before! No, it’s a KIA EV6, I think. Electric car, hatchback, slung low enough to fit Edda into it. I love it! I’m scared to drive it – I will feel much better driving it after it gets its first ding. Also, we have no charger for it yet – though we do have an outlet in the garage – so Jeremy is working on that. Thank you Jeremy for looking at all the options and going through all the numbers. Because of how the market is and how the rebates work, we LEASED this car, instead of buying it outright which is our usual modus operandi. I have no idea, we’ve never leased a car before – a new adventure every day.

A few mishaps: we had a fly infestation and a person who will remain nameless found DEET spray meant for skin application and sprayed it all over our windows. This spray had some solvent in it that melted a bunch of plastic things (like windows) and also slowly melted this poor orchid plant I was trying to revive. Maybe it will live? We’ll see.

Someone else who will remain nameless ran into the garage door (with the old car) and..no…we are not replacing it because it still works…mostly.

I found a cement plug while I was cleaning out a drain of leaves and I thought it was so weird. Weird enough that I called our drain guy and he dutifully came over and explained that he plugged up and old drain and had installed a brand new drain next to it. Which I could have discovered myself…by running water through it. I felt a bit stoopid waisting everyone’s time.

Had lunch yesterday with Claudinna – it is our mission to eat at every cheap eat within 2 miles of our houses. We at a French bakery that we’ve not eaten at before. They served sandwiches on a Cro’gel – a croissant shaped like a bagel. Delicious.

We did not partake of any of the delicious looking pastries.

Literally can not make this sad crap up, I came home from lunch to Jeremy telling me that a baby deer died in our backyard. I think the deer poked its head through a small wire square in our neighbor’s fence and then couldn’t get it out and strangled. We only noticed because the neighbor whose property is behind ours – their dog was going crazy after seeing it. Poor thing. Jeremy called the city and they came within the hour and got the dead deer out of our yard.

A nice weekend – I baked two things: this no knead cheddar jalapeno bread which Jeremy really enjoyed. I also baked the strawberry pound cake swirl that I’ve baked before for Sunday night dinner. Sunday night dinner was fun. It was just us + Felix, Christopher and Gene and Bette at their apt at Riderwood. It’s fun getting to know Chris and talking about family stories. And it’s kind of cool to see Felix and Chris getting to know each other – they are, in a very convoluted way, family!

Sunday morning I went Olympic weightlifting – I was suppose to go with Felix (who is naturally talented at this), but he keeps injuring himself in predictable ways that young people do – working out too much, no rest days, and then being incredibly sore the next day, unable to squat to sit on a toilet without soreness radiating from his knee. I’m trying folks…I’m trying to tell him to pace himself, to not go to max everyday, to take rest days. It’s only by stringing weeks and months and years of steady work can you really make progress. But no one likes listening to the grown up (or to coaches). He’s missing tons of (free!) coaching sessions because he keeps messing himself up. I’m like – you are 19, no part of your body should hurt and if you do get hurt, you should be able to fix yourself in a week! But, here I am, in my 50s, nothing hurts and I had a solid session of clean and jerks and a mid session of snatches. I’m having a great time and getting stronger. But still at baby weights. Haha. I can be any one of the other lifters’ mom. They are all very kind and give nice pointers and encouragement.

I don’t really know how it’s possible, but I feel busier than ever. As I’ve aged, I really feel like I need more sleep and downtime (obvs) and my ability to transition between things has been diminishing. I probably used to be able to turn from one thing to another in quick succession, picking something up and then putting it down – there was a period of my life where I was: working full time, going to school half to full time, running and training a lot, and raising my kids. I look at that now and say…woah, how did I do that?

The big sad news is that our friend Erik Ledbetter passed away very suddenly at work about 3 weeks ago. You can read about him here. The funeral service was this weekend, so we got to see Owen and Lynn and met Erik’s mother. And, as is true of both weddings and funerals, we got to say hello to lots of friends that are in the neighborhood but we never see. (Vince and Owen became eagle scouts together). And see lots of grown up boys we’ve known since they were in 2nd grade. It was wonderful to catch up and also sad to be together for this reason. Erik followed his heart and became a park ranger about a decade ago and he loved it so much. I’m so happy he got to do that because he was so unhappy at his desk job before – did he go to Yale and Hopkins? I want to say yes.

I’ve been busy trying to get Edda settled into her day program which is supposed to start on August 11th – though still slightly unclear. I’m also trying to switch Eliana and Ginny over to the new system which will pay them less than they were being paid by the youth programs. I will spare you the saga and total weird vibes we’ve gone through with the onboarding which feels…like a big weird scam. At each point in the process, I’m like, is this a scam? It sure feels like a scam. And we proceed. And as they will be paid less than they were just 4 weeks ago, we will supplement their pay to bring it up to what I consider a fair-ish wage and covering the onboarding fees. Both Eliana and Ginny are stepping through the process without complaint – if you can believe it, it’s already been like over $150 of fees per person to onboard onto this new company and we haven’t yet finished with it all – maybe 50% done.

I’m also busy looking into joining a bunch of parent-led organizations for housing for adult special needs kids. The most compelling is called the Neighborhood of Maryland which is a model in which there are 19 houses that you buy (only 1 house, probably about 1-1.5 million dollars each (!)) and then there is a neighborhood enrichment center for the kids to go to during the day. I like the energy of the folks running the program, I’m not quite sure it’s right for Edda, but I’m going to help out to see what it’s about.

Jeremy’s been so busy at work which is a good thing, but I just see him squirreling away at work stuff all day – which makes him in a good mood and then I’m in a good mood.

He’s also been hard at work trying to buy us a new car. We’ve been talking a lot about cars – this is what we have now – a 2014 Honda Accord hybrid and we are borrowing my parents’ 2010 Honda CRV for the summer while they are on the west coast. Having two cars shows just just how rarely we use the 2nd car. We probably drive the 2nd car once every 10 days.

But, the 2014 Honda Accord drives me crazy in a few ways: it doesn’t fit Edda’s wheelchair very well, you have to kind of tetris it into the trunk and it make a high pitched whine when you accelerate that I can hear and Jeremy can not hear. And, of course, it’s not a modern car with Apple play and all the computer integration and cameras, etc which we really enjoy when renting a car. It barely knows about Bluetooth. My parents car from 2010 is even worse – without a backup camera, you have to twist your entire body to see out the back window and even then, you don’t know if there is a short toddler like 2 feet behind your back bumper (important to us, because there is an errant toddler in our neighborhood who is known to elope and wander the ‘hood by herself with no fear).

Our general philosophy has been to buy new cars and drive them into the ground, but this can not happen anymore. We drive so infrequently and for such short distances that we no longer can “use up” a car. We are essentially, car-wise, little old ladies that only use the car to drive to church on Sundays. Then we have to shift our thinking because I want all the modern conveniences and safety features of a new car and I do want to try to keep up with new technologies and not be afraid of trying new things. Is the 2014 Honda Accord “used up”? The answer is clearly no. But do we want a new car? The answer is “yes”. We probably have to switch our mindset from a “mileage” age to just a straight “age” age.

Compounding our car desires, we want to buy an electric car that is 1) not a Tesla, 2) Edda can get into and out of easily and 3) has trunk space for her wheelchair. This is not an easy combination. Jeremy has been going to car dealerships and measuring the distance from the ground to the seat in various models. What we really want is a station wagon, but literally no one in America makes a station wagon anymore. Everyone loves the SUV or small SUV form factor which is too tall for Edda to get in without installing a chair lift.

Anyways, I think we are going to buy a Kia (!). And Jeremy is looking over the financing from a few dealerships to see which one has the “best deal” which is incredibly difficult because they leave out key fees and clear documentation and just focus on the monthly payment – so one can’t figure out immediately which one is “better”. gah. drives me crazy that it’s so hard. After months of being sort of unhappy about getting a new car, I’m quietly excited. It’s so expensive, it also took me time to really wrap my head around how much cars cost these days which is….a lot.

I made snickerdoodles last night. I was fixated on a stick of cinnamon sugar butter that Felix purchased a few weeks ago that was occupying space in my refrigerator. Did you know you could buy a stick of butter with cinnamon and sugar mixed in already? I did not. But I needed to get it out of my fridge and into some cookies. These are AMAZING. perfect. They even look like store bought cookies with the little wrinkles in them. Snickerdoodles by Sally’s Baking Addiction. I told Felix to bring them to work today, otherwise, I’d eat them alllllll.