Author: Doris

This came in my sewing kit. I have no idea what it is for… Ideas?

  

  

Well, These are the pants that I bought in Singapore back in December at the Island Shop while Katherine and Bob were buying all those cool outfits for Doris. They had quickly become my most favorite non jean pant … until that fateful day where I didn’t wear velcro ankle and went out biking. I clean ripped a chunk of my pants out when it got caught in the chain.

So tonight, I “sewed” them up. It wasn’t a pretty job. I think the last time I sewed was in home economics in 8th grade. Ha! Not too shabby. And I reinforced the hem with a bunch of loops. hopefully it’ll hold. I think I probably shoudl have used green thread, but ah… whatever. Only took me 20 minutes!

  

We are heading back to Washington DC tomorrow afternoon after office hours. There are several things in our mind: going to the bank; dining with a friend from PA with breast cancer and a good friend recently lost her husband; playing mahjong; planting two pots of celebration flowers from Aiken; cleaning up the yard & attending the block party on Saturday.

Will be back to Aiken on Sunday with some winter clothing.

Wednesday is a tough day for me. It’s 2 therapy appointments for Edda and I have to time the eating and the napping just right to pull it off.

For a few weeks now, Edda has been pretty miserable at her physical therapy appointment. In order to make the 12:45 pm appointment, we have to eat lunch at school and then drive straight to the therapy center.

Diane, her therapist, and I discussed moving the standing appointment, but since Diane is one of the few PTs on the island, she was totally booked and changing the schedule would mean switiching a bunch of people around which seemed like a lot of trouble.

So this week, I did something different. I just told Edda many times throughout this morning that today was Wednesday and that right after school, we were going to see Diane and have PT. I told this to her at least 4 times. And you know what? She had a fantastic session! I had never really told her where she was going before and maybe it just freaked her out that we weren’t heading home after school. Or else maybe I just got lucky, who knows.

Vince: Superman, again.
Edda: Cute interpretation of tomato or strawberry.

I went to Vince’s school to tell them about Halloween, the holiday is getting more popular here, but mainly it’s just celebrated in the American neighborhoods (the opposite of Chinatown in the US) which is decidedly not where we live. The Chinese teacher was particularly interested in it, but it was pretty much impossible for me to explain (in Chinese) pagan holidays and All Saints Day, so I left it at children getting free candy. Also, how to explain “trick or treat”? Did I really want to say that if you don’t have treats, your house gets TPed or egged – it puts Americans in a weird light. But who knows, in Singapore, it perfectly fine to give sparklers and small firecrackers to a 4 year old.

Anyhow, I made the teachers go to different rooms in the school and then the kids and I went trick or treating. The love of getting free candy apparently crosses cultural boundaries without too much trouble.

To going balls out crazy and buying a digital SLR… Tell me I’m crazy Doris. Tell me I don’t need to do this… I’m just pissed sometimes that my P&S photos come out all blurry when the AF misses… sigh.

Nikon D200
Nikon 17-35mm F2.8

Halloween begins in our house with baking.

I tried to find orange sprinkles to make my sugar cookies into sparkly orange pumpkins – but it wasn’t at the local market – so orange glazed with rainbow sprinkles will have to do.

Oh, also, our 4.5 year old computer which we use as a TV/DVD and internet portal for the kids seemed to have reached the end of its rope today. I couldn’t get it to boot up, no matter how much I tried. Vince was OK with it, but Edda, she looked at me with sad eyes and whined for her videos for most of the afternoon.

Jeremy’s eyes were all aglow with the possibility of purchasing both a new computer and gasp, maybe a TV and DVD player. But a few minutes of computer genius and dumb luck (unplug everything and then plug everything back in) and the old clunker sputtered back to life.

We all woke up feeling a little bit like Ruby’s stuffed animal:

I was really sure that this entry was going to be Grumpiness: Part 3, but luckily, the weekend has ended cheerfully.

Jeremy even attempted the potato and paint craft again with Vincent to prove that the cheerful Jeremy was back. No one ended up frustrated and we had a bunch of decorated trick or treat bags in the end.

Wow, what a grumpy day – it seemed nice enough when we started, but it pretty much went downhill from breakfast. Jeremy didn’t get enough sleep (not because of Edda, just because he was preoccupied with work stuff), then Vince refused to eat breakfast, then Edda hated being at the dog park. Then the afternoon started, the gymnastics class went OK, but the ride home was a sea of grumpiness and tired complaints and then the afternoon went downhill with a failed paint and potato art project and a 2 hour stew that was started at 6 pm. Then Edda refused to go to sleep until 10:00 pm which means no alone time for me and Jeremy because we are totally beat. Goodnight! I’m going to bed.