We see Edda’s dentist quarterly paying out of pocket for an extra cleaning between the regular six month visits. I’ve been trying so hard to clean her teeth well. Jeremy and I both descend upon her after dinner and Jeremy holds her mouth open by putting an old toothbrush between her upper and lower jaw and hold her head steady. And then I go to town with: a mouth rinse, water pik, flossing, electric toothbrush and then a final mouth rinse. No one likes this. And yet…her teeth and gums remain…inflamed and plaque filled. I’m always disappointed at myself at the dentist. Like a little checkmark next to oral hygiene – mom=bad. Hahaha. Last night I tried talking Jeremy into taking the brushing role and maybe he’d be better at it than me and then he could do it FOREVER. And he looked at me and said – I’m not falling for that trick. HAHAHA.
I went to Main Street for lunch yesterday because I had to pick up some paintings Megan and I did a few months ago and I was looking forward to eating at the Soul-ful Cafe because I did like the offerings they had at the cafe and I hadn’t been there in a while. Unfortunately, I think the business has not thrived and the sandwiches have been downgraded and the cookies were gone. I had a lackluster chicken caesar wrap, which I usually enjoy, but I did not. I ate lunch with Kelly and a new friend Drew which was fun.
I went yesterday to the dentist and she mentioned that I had a huge canker sore on the inside of my lip and didn’t it hurt terribly? And I kind of had noticed, but not really – you know? Sometimes I can just block these things from my daily experience, but I have been feeling extra run down these past few days and even today, so probably from this cranky canker sore? ughghghgh…
I keep telling myself that I’m going to take “fun” photos, but I take only “useful” photos – like where I parked the car. Apparently, the new car will tell me exactly where I parked it, if only I download the app. But I kind of refuse to download the app because…I am old. So there we go. I LOVE the new car. But also, I completely don’t understand it. Why did it not lock all the doors when I started driving? Why when I push “driver 2” on the settings panel, it sometimes goes to the seat positioning I want, and other times, it positions the seat to accommodate Big Bird and the mirrors slant down as if I want to see turtles crawling under my front wheels? I do not know. So many things I do not know. And will continue to not know.
I’ve been trying very hard to not buy new things. I mean, I still buy lots of new things, but I try to buy old things too. Like – all of my queen size duvet covers in the house decided to self-shred a few months ago. I bought them when the children were 5 and 3 – so almost 20 years of tossing, turning, pee, vomit, dog hair, (sex!), etc. So instead of buying 5 sets of new sheets for over $150 each, I went to ebay and bought 5 covers at an average price of $35 each. Some were new, most slightly used – some had curious george printed on them. I may have bought batman sheets. I also wanted to fix Edda’s bath chair – this is a $2000 chair which has served us well, but the wheels have stopped turning because hair has gotten into them. So I tried to take them apart to fix them, but they are somehow machine pressed together and un-take-apartable. So I emailed the manufacturer and asked how to clean them. And they said – well, we recommend cleaning them often. That was their only suggestion – often. I would clean them often if I could get to the mechanism. They also offered to let me buy replacement wheels which isn’t what I wanted. I want these old wheels, but without hair.
I’m also slowly becoming the building manager at my local unitarian church where I sing in the choir. I love the choir, I kind of love the building and I enjoy the people, it’s the whole “church” thing that still gets to me. We will see how it grows on me. I got handed over the keys to the furnace rooms, the electrical rooms, the back rooms. (The previous building person is moving to the country about 2 hours away. And I also think that there needs to be some female presence on the building team, I have been wearing very nice dresses in which I had sung in to look at water heaters and electrical panels.) So they got a new $50k HVAC system installed this summer and it’s….almost perfect. Just almost. It’s like when you are at a restaurant very hungry and you see your delicious,well-balanced meal sitting on the little pick up area between the kitchen and the servers and your server is like – totally busy – but keeps walking past your burrito, falafel, steak, or eggs Benedict. The HVAC is installed, it works, you can change the fan/temperature, etc. But…the controls are circa 2018. And the contractor didn’t stay to instruct anyone on how to program it and instead left a pile of manuals. So you have to walk to each room (because each room has its own temperature control) and change them manually, the scheduling is difficult, you can’t change the temperature by yelling at Alexa. It’s so difficult that the staff hasn’t even programmed the time into each control – to which the church admin groaned and said – it doesn’t pull the time from the air? And I said….no. I suspect a fancy controller is a whole extra expense/system. Jeremy and I talked about it last night (he watches lots of construction on youtube – from DIY all the way up to insane custom installs with tight tolerances) – you need pay extra for the high end construction where the customer service is higher.
Elka is the boss of Jeremy. Jeremy is trying to train Elka to fetch and more importantly to come when called. And Elka knows what the command it and can do it often, but a lot of the time, she gets distracted and doesn’t want to do it. And she often tells Jeremy, I’m not going that way, let’s go this way. This is Elka telling Jeremy (after an hour long walk) – I’m not going home. To which I texted Jeremy back – I think you live outside now. In Jeremy’s professional life, no one is the boss of him. I think people are (slightly) afraid of Jeremy – I was slightly afraid of Jeremy when I first started dating him (don’t worry, it’s long gone, he is a goofball. No one should be scared of Jeremy). But Elka bosses Jeremy around like a true alpha/beta relationship.
Sometimes I eat banana fast, and other times I eat bananas slow. This wreaks havoc on our banana supply-chain management and just-in-time banana delivery system. So I made this chocolate banana bread last night and it should have cooled for an hour or so, but we needed to go to bed at 8:30 so we pulled it out of the pan piping hot.
So we store a tiny bit of ice cream in the freezer – our emergency ice cream for when Edda has seizures and bites her tongue and won’t eat anything except ice cream. This often happens when only one of us is home with Edda and then you are at a conundrum. Do I go to the store with Edda to get the ice cream – because often times you have given her a benzo and she’s high as a kite and very limp and heavy. (I know, we can instacart ice cream over – I’ve done that before). So I bought some ice cream with a stern warning, this is Edda’s ice cream and it’s for emergencies only. And so last night, I was going to put Edda to bed and then enjoy the cake and break into the ice cream – because clearly this was an ice cream emergency. But then Jeremy looked at me and said, you are going to put Edda to bed and then steal her ice cream? So then I sighed and said, OK Edda gets it too. And we all had a late night sweet.
As soon as we bought the new car, it seemed like the old car broke. We couldn’t start it and it sat, unfixed for about two weeks while Jeremy was away in Chicago and I couldn’t pay any attention to it. Jeremy tried to take it to Costco and the battery place down the street, but apparently our very regular Honda Accord has the more uncommon polarity arrangement. Anyways, he found a place and replaced the original Honda battery and it started right up.
He also spent a lot of time thinking about our cell phone plan. Should we switch? Will it be cheaper? Should he switch his entire phone ecosystem over to Apple? This took a lot of time and a lot of talking to a T-mobile associate. And in the end, we will do….nothing. Which is mostly my favorite thing to do. No, we didn’t switch over to mint or us mobile or visible or any pre-paid plan because we actually have a ton of lines and we use our phones a lot.
I sang in choir on Sunday wearing this rented outfit and I wore it again to Sunday night dinner.
Sooo…my chocolate was not completely tempered. I had my dinner party and they looked great and afterwards, not so much – a bit of bloom. Will try again.
We went downtown to the Miracle theater to watch the comedy band duo Griefcat. These are my lady friends – we were almost the first ones at the show. Lexy wanted to get there early and so we were. We met the ladies of Griefcat while attending another show – I was honestly a little nervous for this show – fingers crossed that it was fabulous and not cringy. (I love this photo of us, the empty theater, the red of the seats… popcorn in hand.)
The place did fill up and the show was FABULOUS. 10/10 recommend. I had a great time, I loved it so much. Funny and homey and sexy and musically accessible. I wish this band a lot of success.
Last night we went to Old Angler’s Inn which is such a throwback for me because it was the place to get a dinner reservation for prom back in 1994. I figured it was no longer the place to be, but I was wrong and it still is hoppin’ – lots of folks eating there on a Friday night. It’s mostly a fancy restaurant, but in the back, for whatever reason, there is a patio which serves bar food and we were there because my guitar teacher’s band was playing a gig there last night.
Jeremy, Edda and Elka came with and we ordered nachos, a pretzel and pizza. So rarely do I have a dinner like that anymore, I can just feel my digestive tract slowing down with the complete lack of fiber. (I know people are obsessed with protein, I tend to be more obsessed with fiber.) Edda and I shared a sangria. I got slightly tipsy – I wonder if Edda did too? and we had fun enjoying a lovely evening with kind of loud rock music and friends. Elka made friends everywhere – us not so much.
This is Ward, my lifting coach, also a fellow guitar class person – though he’s very very good a guitar.
We left early – like 7:30 early – we are early birds, what can I say? On the way home, this frog hitchhiked in our car! About halfway home, Jeremy yelled – there’s a frog! and I peered out onto the highway and I was like – where?! wondering how in the world he could spot a frog on the road while we were going so fast and it was dark and then he pointed to the steering wheel where it was perched. It did want to hop all over the place. I made Jeremy stop by the park with the creek on the way home to hopefully find a new home.
Today, I tempered chocolate. That’s something I’ve not done before, but now I know what to do.
We are having friends over for dinner – one who is a vegan, so I made a vegan dessert. My tempered chocolate turned out perfect. Though these little pecan balls should be completely covered in chocolate because they fall apart at the slightest touch.
Jeremy is in Chicago for a work retreat with his coworkers. I really love the work that Jeremy does and I know he takes a measured, complicated approach to very long standing transportation fuel problems which is not easily captured in a sound bite or a quick quote. He loves convoluted ideas and I’m grateful that he thinks carefully about different approaches and what will appeal to all interested parties to solving problems. (When this is applied to household problems, I can get frustrated because I’m the one to suggest simple solutions and act quickly, but now that we’ve worked many years together, the mix of the two approaches often yields good results.).
They all had to take a Covid test, per the meeting organizers. Which I think is crazy. I love them, but they are crazy. Jeremy had just gotten his covid shot the day before and was a little woozy from it, and he was like – gosh I hope I’m negative.
I had given Jeremy York peppermint patties and reese’s PB cups for his birthday and he brought them to the meeting to donate as snacks. I’m glad that I contributed the least healthy snacks in the snack safe space.
Who knew the Chicago office had this great view! It is also within four Pokemon gyms where Jeremy is kicking pokemon out of all day. I can’t wait for him to get home.
I spent the day yesterday at the Main Street Golf Tournament fundraiser volunteering. I was assigned hole 17 North and was responsible for running a putting contest. Which I did admirably with absolutely only putt putt golf experience. I chatted in a particular way one does at a golfing fundraiser. Golf happened from 10 am to 3:30 pm. The weather was beautiful – not too hot, not too cold. Just a touch windy. I don’t think I could ever be a golfer. It’s just so….boring. Hahaha. It’s also so…expensive and I like to be cheap. I had other one other volunteer hanging out with me during the day – one for the morning shift and one for the afternoon shift and I learned a lot about Main Street. I got paired with a woman who is great friends with Jillian and I also got paired with Jillian’s future daughter-in-law. I learned a lot!
Here I am arriving at the party at 9:15 am and Jessica and Evan are here to meet the volunteers and golfers.
It’s been about a month since Edda started her day program. Overall, very happy that we are in the program which now has a waiting list as they need to hire more staff. We are also adjusting to using Metro Access as the transportation. It’s fine, but very random. You don’t get the same driver each time, you don’t get the same time each time – they run late often. But they’ve never not picked up and it helps us out a lot to not drive back and forth to the program.
The program is also shorter than we are used to for her regular school year. For school, we got her on the bus at 7 and she came home from her after care program at 6:30. Now, she’s on the bus at 8-8:30 am and can be home anywhere from 2:15-3:20 pm. Ginny, who used to pick Edda up at 6 pm from her aftercare program and then bring her home for dinner and showering, now comes at about 4 pm to give Edda a shower and leaves at 6 pm.
This means after years of having unpredictably from 1 to sometimes 4 extra people at dinner each night (rotating au pairs, caregivers, and for the last half year, Felix), it often is just the three of us quietly rehashing the day. We are very quiet people without….other people.
We had a nice weekend – started out on Friday afternoon with our first Friday Vibes since summer started. It was really nice to see everyone and everyone was excited to see us back, but it was a little sad because a Main Street member passed away suddenly the day before and everyone was reeling from that. Edda was happy to be back at Main Street – enjoying the pasta dinner.
I spent some time putting nails on some friends. I think I did a pretty good job overall.
Saturday morning, I got up early and ran. For the past few years, I’ve been exercising in the early afternoon which allowed me to not just get up and exercise, I like the slow getting up, but then the day would progress and I’d kind of always mini-procrastinate the workout.
Jeremy is doing some off-leash training with Elka which goes great until it doesn’t go great. Jeremy’s working on fetching a ball and coming when called. For many days, Elka was the model of perfection, following every command, ignoring loping deer and bringing balls back. And then the disaster day where she totally ignored the ball and wandered into the woods not paying any attention to anyone.
Sunday was Jeremy’s birthday (57) and I baked him these molasses cookies – his favorite.
He wanted to go on a 100 mile bike ride for his birthday – so he did. I had Edda for the day and we attempted to go to church so I could sing in the choir, but about 15 minutes into the pre-service rehearsal, Edda had a seizure and we headed home for some rest and recuperation. Which I needed because I had my flu/covid shot on saturday and needed sunday to basically sleep. zzzz.
