Author: Doris

A small update on the children, OK? Edda was overjoyed to see Ms. Megan back at school as evidenced by this photo. Edda loves her teachers. Part of me feeling better is that all the forms I have to fill out on Edda’s behalf don’t feel as unbelieveable daunting. When I was feeling terrible, I couldn’t even really look at the forms and when I did start to pick them up to work on them, I would just want to crawl back into bed (which I did. often.) We started finally receiving the SSI checks for Edda that we applied for a year ago and I had to join the NASA federal credit union to set up the representative payee account (none of the big banks seem to want to manage this type of account (actually not a surprise)) and in order to join the credit union I had to join an “I LOVE SPACE”-type non profit. We do love space and space exploration. That took only two in-person visits to the bank and hours wrangling on their difficult to use website. Of course, all the websites that I need to access – SSI, credit unions, medical assistance renewal, doctor’s offices, prescription refills, etc. etc. are all clunky and difficult to use, but if I want to buy shoes that cost $900, that website is as smooth as buttah.

Edda is sporting her Purple Rain the-artist-formerly-known as Prince shirt that I bought for her at the Minneapolis airport from a dedicated Prince store where the employee who checked me out looked a lot like Prince and told me very, very seriously – wash cold, hang dry. DO NOT PUT IN THE DRYER. I looked back and him very seriously as well and said – of course, I’d never put Prince in the dryer. But alas, I have already reneged on my promise. The house is only big enough for exactly one type of laundry workflow – which is wash and then dry in the dryer. Don’t worry! Prince survived the dryer.

Here is Edda moving out of her comfort zone. As part of the end-of-school-year fun, Edda did get to do the color run. Perhaps it was not her favorite thing to do. But it was a gorgeous day and Mr. Pat is very enthusiastic, yes? And update on the Daybue medication. Both Edda’s primary insurance and secondary insurance have approved the medication, now the drug company is working to have them work together. Usually the primary insurance picks up most of the cost and the secondary picks up the (substantial) copay. We’ll see what happens and when a shipment will arrive. The drug company rep called me last week and said – you must be frustrated at why this is taking so long. And I said – not really. It’s taking exactly as long as I think it would take to get my hands on a drug that’s is like a bazillion dollars.

We’ve been talking to Vince a bit this week. He still has like 3-4 weeks of school left even though all his Maryland friends are home from school already. We have been chatting logistics of the summer and planning for the future. I asked what he was doing last night and he said – Oh! It’s fancy food night. He told us that tinned fish are in vogue right now, so it was tinned fish and cheese and mango board night. Lol. This reminds me so much of Jeremy. Tinned fish was not on Jeremy’s radar in 1995 when he was wooing me, but there was cheese and an avocado (which back then, was exotic and not to be found on the East coast) and a cutting board that he took out into the woods with us on a hike and he served me the most beautiful lunch in the dappled sunlight.

Yesterday was Elka’s gotcha day! We celebrated it by going to the dog park and giving her lots of treats like fried chicken! We are so lucky that Elka is ours and we are hers.

I feel good these days. I think I didn’t quite realize how overstretched I was during the pandemic or even the two years before that (probably when I started working the two jobs). Something I like about school is that there are yearly “breaks” in the schedule – you can see a time when you have to work hard, but you know how long you have to sustain that effort and then you get a break when everyone else gets a break too. When you are a grown up, there are no breaks when everyone takes a break too. The all togetherness of the break is important because then no one falls behind, no one needs catching up, and you get to hang out with each other because everyone is on “vacation”.

It has taken a long time to unwind myself from the last five years. I dream nightly now when I sleep which I feel is an indication of relaxing into myself.

Elka loves rolling in the grass right outside the house. And I roll with her.

I’m trying to grow out my fingernail on my pointer finger and thumb on my right hand to pluck the strings on the ukulele. I’ve never grown my fingernails out for anything, so it’s weird and kind of disgusting and when I type it feels funny. I don’t know how people manage this with all ten fingers.

I’m also trying to do some ear training with some free apps. It’s something that I’ve never spent time doing.

I had a lovely Mother’s Day. It was a gorgeous day in Maryland and Jeremy went for a long bike ride in the morning. I hung out with Edda and we did some work and folded laundry. I injured my left hip flexor last week, it had been getting tight from the weightlifting (weighted reverse lunges…) I was doing and then I tried to compensate by doing more yoga and then I really hurt it doing a bird of paradise move in yoga on Monday. The worst thing about getting injured besides the actual pain of being injured is that I have to tell my coach that I’m injured – which I did like four days after being really injured. So I took an entire week off of any exercise and I started again yesterday – lifting – backing up on all the weights and testing out the flexor. It’s not bad, but it’s not perfect – as all things in life.

Jeremy came home in time for me to hang out with Lauren at Pike and Rose where I had my first acai bowl (good) and we got to sit outside for an hour or so to chat and catch up (great). Then I walked around for a while trying to soak up the deliciousness of the day and then headed home.

We had Sofie and Mike and Jojo over for Sunday night dinner – and we had my favorite cake which also happened to be Alice’s favorite cake – so that was nice and we enjoyed being with each other and missed Alice together.

Vince called in the afternoon and we blew kisses at each other.

My own mother came back from China and is now in her Portland house a few days ago and is, unfortunately covid positive and I called her and she was not feeling very well. But I also called today and she’s on the mend, feeling better.

We are having a very social weekend. I got my haircut, then we went to Austin’s Eagle Court of Honor. He’s in a different troop from Vince’s so it was at a new church and the ceremony was slightly different, so that was fun to see. This may be our last ECoH – Vince is now three years out of scouts and our relationships with the troop gets more gossamer every year.

Edda dressed up and was very happy – so happy that she started “talking” during the ceremony. I grabbed a hot dog bun from the unserved buffet table and started feeding her pea sized bread bits. The ceremony lasted one hot dog buns worth.

Jeremy loves these occasions because it’s the only time he reliably gets to eat sheet cake. We were hoping to fit a shopping trip between eating the sheet cake and our next social obligation, but the ceremony started 30 min late and the sheet cake was slightly delayed in serving. I asked Jeremy if he wanted to skip the cake to go grocery shopping, but he indicated that he wanted to stay for the cake.

We went back home so I could meet up with Megan who really wanted to see Love Again – which very much featured Celine Dion who is her favorite. I did not hear about this movie, but I was very happy to go. I really wish Hollywood would make a great romantic comedy again – I would go to all of them. Instead, they like to make Marvel movies. The movie was fine, not terrible, but the premise was really thin and didn’t really make sense. Megan apparently is very good at this claw game and we spent three dollars trying to win something, but we did not win anything. Next time.

Then we went back home where Jeremy cooked us some dinner and we invited Sofie over to play some board games. We are trying to learn how to play Ticket to Ride. We did not succeed. Also, no one wanted me to take their photo.

Here’s Jeremy at the Capitol building in St. Paul with his friend, the lobbyist. Of course, the word lobbyist comes from the act of waiting in the lobby for legislators to come out so you can talk to them and that’s what Jeremy did for most of Monday. He waited in the lobby with the lobbyist and wore Dave’s wedding tie.

Jeremy, undeterred from our initial light rail experience, keeps riding the light rail even though all the local liberal, public transit oriented people he meets and knows – all tell him they gave up riding the light rail years ago. First, no one wears a suit anymore to anything anywhere and there he is – riding the light rail with his suit. He is literally the only white guy on the train. Yesterday, someone walks by him in the train car and brushes Jeremy’s suited shoulder and says – nice suit – and continues to walk on by.

He ate dinner on his own, in his suit (I presume) and played Pokemon Go on his phone the entire time and as he got up to leave and told the waitress thank you and that the meal was delicious, she answered with a jolly – “Go catch ’em all!” Jeremy is a ridiculous middle aged man.

Jeremy manages to cuddle a puppy who looks exactly like baby Elka.

Someone called me a capybara last week. I had to look that up…they explained that capybaras have a calming presence and other animals enjoy being around them.

There was also a bear roaming the neighborhood who ate about 30 pounds of honey from a backyard beekeeper. They live caught the bear and released it into the wild.

Janet, our regular bus driver since our last bus driver retired, lost the bid for Edda’s route and her last day was on Friday. So we took a picture and bid her farewell and good luck and thanked her for taking care of the kiddos.

After the bus pickup, Jeremy and I flew to Minnesota. I know, most people when they arrange for a weekend away might fly to the Caribbean or a mountain lodge or whatever, but we do not do what most people do. Jeremy has business at the MN state capitol this next week, so we piggybacked on to his business trip to get his flight covered. I was eager to spend time with Dave, our friend from grad school. Jeremy actually did not feel well on this flight, he caught Edda’s cold – she’s had one all week. Not covid – no fever. But we flew and this is the trip that I felt like everything is almost back to pre-pandemic. I could hear sniffling/coughing all around the plane. Jeremy masked (and I did too) for the flight.

We are enthusiastic public transport riders and I’m not easily rattled and I’ve ridden both Boston (regularly) and NYC subways (touristy) way into the night by my-young-ish-self without any issue, but somehow on the light rail in the middle of the day on a Friday in Minneapolis, I felt vulnerable in a way I haven’t before on public transit. I don’t mind the random person sleeping on the chairs or an unshowered person shuffling around with the radio blaring, but when a very strong man walked onto the rail car right in front of me wielding a baseball bat (after he had rattled the bat against the rail car as it went past him on the platform), I thought that if that man decided to swing that bat very hard, it would be difficult for me to move my head out of the way of the arc of impact. I’m not sure what the answer is, but this light rail seemed particularly unrideable and there are a lot of people that need help and somehow we are failing to help each other out. The light rail is so beautiful – new, clean, took us exactly where we wanted to go in a timely manner and I would take it all the time over Ubering, driving or whatever-ing, but I also enjoy not looking at baseball bats that might be swung at my head.

Dave finished work early on Friday afternoon and headed to meet us at our hotel and we went on an outing to Minnehaha Falls which involved 1) ice cream 2) beer and 3) pouring rain. It was predicted to rain all weekend, which was a bummer for being a tourist. So after that, we headed to Dave’s house – well Dave’s mother’s house, where we saw the new basement renovation and Dave’s office and had a long talk with Dave’s mother, Linda, and ate take out burgers stuffed with cheese (apparently a Minnesota thing) called the Juicy Nookie Burger from The Nook where you bite into the burger and the cheese squirts out all over your shirt.

We went to bed early – at our hotel which was a converted convent which was a bit spooky, but also nice. On Saturday – it was still raining and me, Jeremy, Dave and Linda went to Key’s breakfast place, where we ate an enormous delicious breakfast and then Linda went home and we went to the American Swedish Institute because Jeremy had forgotten a tie and thought he could buy one at the gift shop, but no one sells any ties anymore and we paid to tour the house because Dave is 25% swedish and he’d never been. As we were paying for the tickets to the house, Jeremy and I both had to admit (me obviously and Jeremy less so) that Dave was the only Swede in the group and the kind lady said – we let everyone into the house – even the Norwegians and Dave piped up and said – well, I left out that I’m 50% Norwegian and we had a laugh.

And then we dropped Jeremy off at the hotel because he was still sick and wanted to rest. Dave and I went to a flour mill museum (which was fun, we were still trying to find a gift shop tie for Jeremy – no luck) in which we saw the ruins of a flour mill which had had a flour dust explosion. We walked along a pedestrian bridge where we discussed the falls in the middle of town. Then we went to TJ Maxx (to find a tie – no luck again) and a grocery store to find Diet Coke. Dave is very funny and I had a lot of fun laughing at random things Dave said – the same way we did in graduate school almost 30 years ago now.

Then we went back to Dave’s house where his mom had been hanging out and we chatted all afternoon laughing/telling stories and finding Dave’s old ties. Then Linda and I decided that we were friends and gave each other our phone numbers to text each other – thereby bypassing Dave completely if we want to talk to each other. We picked Jeremy up from the hotel – Jeremy picked out one of Dave’s ties which he wore to his sister’s (middle sister – he has three) wedding. We were going to go to a fancy restaurant for dinner because Dave got a $200 gift card for shoveling someone’s driveway (in Minnesota – that is no small task) and because – you know, for a romantic getaway, shouldn’t there be a fancy dinner with Dave (who was there on both our first and second dates (he reminded us)), but we were delinquent and did not reserve the table fast enough and they were booked until 9:15 pm whis is when we all wanted to be asleep. So we had the local take out pizza, a salad that we made and a small bundt cake. And that was fun too. I slept well and late – like until 8am EST.

We left Edda in the care of Ginny who spent Saturday with Edda and her family in a local park/swimming area where they ordered good food and ate well and enjoyed the great outdoors.

Seni, Ginny’s son, took care of Elka. They seem to really like each other, no?

Playing Pandemic again. This time we are winning against the pandemic.