We celebrated Sofi’s 11th birthday yesterday on the 7th. Jeremy cooked everything, including the requested carrot cake (we were going to buy the Whole Foods cake, but they stopped making carrot!) and the chicken pot pie. I did the lettering on the cake which I was very pleased with after following a youtube suggestion to score out the letters on the frosting with a toothpick first to help with the spacing. Clever!
I my decluttering journey, I had found this tablecloth in our linens that I had forgotten about and I marveled at its handmade beauty. I pulled it out for this occasion. It was made by Jeremy’s paternal great grandmother, probably in the early 1900s. So maybe 100 years old?
Jeremy on a work call and making pot pie filling.
Look! A party. I kind of can’t believe it. Edda and Scarlett are in on the sneaky photo lol.
We had a nice day yesterday – Sofie and Mike came over for dinner and we talked a lot about learning languages. Sofie picked French out of the middle school offerings of French, Spanish and Chinese. Mike learned German, I learned French, Jeremy learned Russian.
We are excited about the olympics. NBC promised that their peacock channel would be better this time, we were subscribed for the Tokyo ones, but it was a miserable streaming experience and I missed so many things I wanted to see – even after they were over and I wanted to watch the replay. We don’t have cable, we don’t have regular broadcast – we don’t really watch TV programming – so we just subscribed for this. My parents made profiles and when I found out who they picked – well, very funny. Jeremy and I watched a bit together yesterday, they have some preliminaries before opening ceremony and they are streaming some recent world events leading up to the Olympics – a lot of the video is from Europe, so there isn’t any English commentary, there isn’t any commentary at all, so there we were watching some World Cup event for 15K cross country skiing mass start in Europe that happened in January, Jeremy and I commentating it ourselves and not knowing any of the rules or who the favorites are and how long the race is suppose to be. Commentary like – woah! he crashed out of bounds, is he allowed to get back up and keep going or like – do you think they are faster than runners? How much faster? Well they are faster downhill for sure, but uphill? That looks like a very steep hill. High on no-true-information color, low on any sort of analysis.
I will admit to missing the old school prime-time olympic broadcasts (I suspect they still do this, but I honestly have no idea). I know they were US centric and that only the flashy sports got coverage, but I like that everyone was watching the same thing at the same time in the whole country. But I miss the ddaaa-daaa-da-da-da-da-daaa dum-dum-dum… etc. of the whole thing, but I probably am watching the whole thing wrong. I am old and not with it anymore. I get pleasure from sorting out all the expired medication in my cabinet.
A frustrating wordle day (don’t look if you haven’t done it and want to do it!). I’m in a funk. A long time ago, I learned that these funks come and go for no good reason. Everything is as funk-a-licious as it was two days ago, yet two days ago, I was A-OK. haha. Jeremy is like – you are less fun when you are in a bad mood. I’m less fun to be with myself too.
I’m goal-less and just wandering around my life. Jeremy is like – yeah, that’s why you are so good at decluttering the house. I know! I’m like a roomba, bumping and changing directions in random ways and slightly decluttering at the same time and each day, I go back to home base and rest. And that is true. OK, here’s the new goal. I’m going to make it through Middlemarch (which Vickey is 15 chapters ahead of me aiming for a mid-March finish), I’m going to finish the will and get most of Edda’s adult things done and *then* I’m going to figure out the next 10 year plan. My last 10-year plan went super well which was to do this nursing thing, I did not plan on the pandemic to cap it all off, but I made my goal of making back the money I spent on school and meeting lots of people and boy was it a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Yesterday was de-lice day for Edda. Eliana helped. I think we caught it early, but because we did, a lot of the nits are too small for my highly recommended comb. So I’m going to be handpicking for the next few days.
We celebrated Chinese New Year on Saturday with my parents. My mother ordered a large stuffed duck which was delicious. Scarlett (dog so white) probably hasn’t celebrated CNY before, so she enjoyed it immensely. Lots of meat.
I went to the hospital on Sunday. I got to put in one last shift with my work wife Rachel – she’s quitting to do local travel nursing in a few weeks. I had a very difficult patient and she helped me the entire shift with this one patient. Difficult meaning unstable/unpredictable, not difficult meaning yelling. I dislike having an unstable pt on a Sunday because it’s the weekend crew and therefore slightly a rag tag team, but since Rachel was there, we handled it together and my patient made it through my shift. And then we went out to dinner (!) at a god damn restaurant (!) spur of the moment (!) and ate an entire large fried fish (!) with sweet chili sauce. And it was fabulous and delicious. lol.
Jeremy and I were unusually happy to host Noah’s sleepover last night. We were like – it’s a party. Like a real party. I’m still getting used to the idea. Sofie and Mike came over for the dinner part. We made pizzas (pepperoni and black olives – sofie, cheese – noah, pepperoni – edda, pepperoni, olives and mushrooms – me) . Noah was a bit shy at first and there were moments during the evening when we thought we would have to return him to his parents, but he never was truly upset or agitated, so we made it through the sleepover without too much trouble.
Noah is 3, so he’s only known life with masks so he really didn’t want to take his mask off to eat (or to sleep for that matter). We tried – pizzas, apples, juice, bananas, cookies. Lots of interest in the cookie – but no unmasking. We didn’t press it very much we were focused on having a good time and having it go well.
He loved reading about trucks and trains and airplanes. Jeremy and Noah share an interest in transportation – we watched lots of videos of big airplanes carrying big cargo.
And, finally, there was sleeping in a tent in our bedroom. I thought I would be stuck in the tent for the entire night with a very squirmy toddler, but I managed to sneak out at about 10:15 pm and sleep in my own bed. Noah slept through (!) and his parents got the best night of sleep in a long time. Winning all around.
Yes, I’m playing Wordle which is very fun. I was particularly proud of today – from one misplaced “K” to perky. Fun. I like to start with yesterday’s word as my first attempt.
I have happily and steadily been making good progress on the decluttering. With Jeremy’s endorsement and encouragement, I have been making (not too many) trips to Goodwill and the dump. In the past when I’ve tried to declutter, I’ve felt the urge to consult Jeremy on every single item that isn’t completely 100% mine. And now after more than 20 years of marriage, there are very few things that are 100% mine – so it really slowed things down. But now, I kind of put things aside to go to Goodwill, usually at the bottom of the steps, so Jeremy can see them for a while and nix getting rid of them, but he hasn’t so far. And the results downstairs have been very noticeable. Jeremy said – keep going. In conjunction with the decluttering, I’ve ben deciding where things belong and trying to put things back. This is not really a skill of mine that I’ve ever worked on – the putting things back skill. It’s actually not too hard when there isn’t that much stuff to put back. The downstairs might be the most steadily neatest it has ever been since – well ever. Sometimes I walk downstairs just to admire the neatness. I was especially touched when I asked Eliana at dinner last night if she noticed that the house was neater/cleaner and she said yes! that she’d noticed it the last week or so but didn’t want to mention it because maybe it was a new year’s resolution (it wasn’t). Eliana is very neat – she always leaves the house a bunch neater than when she arrived and she has now lived with and known each other for over 10 years – so she knows our habits.
Jeremy laughed when he showed me his container collection in the cabinets above the fridge (which I do know about) and he said that it was too high for me to declutter. I just said I hadn’t gotten to it yet.
I’m having a make your own pizza party tonight. I’m very much looking forward to it. I made my own dough. I bought the requested black olives and pepperoni. 🙂
We had Sofi and Mike over for dinner last night. (We had a long discussion about masking/unmasking – sigh – we do need to see people. all of us. I think we are going to give up on the indoor masking soon.) We were mostly masked and we sat on far ends of the table. Sofi tried out the squat rack and made up her own workout routine and demonstrated. Jojo and Scarlett enjoyed their playdate together. Goofy dogs.
Also, after giving up Facebook and Instagram, not only do I play Pokemon Go, but I also enjoy watching unboxing of luxury handbags. I know of people who go to zillow, but I don’t enjoy real estate. I do not understand why I enjoy these handbag videos so much, they do not conjure up any desire to buy these bags – I’m not jealous or envious of these women. I spend no time going to the high end web sites thinking, would I like one of these handbags myself (ok, maybe only a few minutes). I’m just fascinated that so many women enjoy shopping and spending so much money like every weekend and then enjoy opening up them up on youtube. I know unboxing videos have been around since the beginning of time, but this is my first extended stint into them. Many of these women seem to be young Asian women living in Australia. And the algorithm will spit me more and more different channels to watch. They all follow the same format, almost the same verbiage, the same giddy excitement and almost always do not say how much they spent. How many handbags does one need? Apparently about 45-100, srsly. At $5K (or more) a pop, I do not know how these women fund their habit.
We had a nice, quiet weekend. Now that Jeremy’s surgery is over, we are “opening” up the house. Eliana came over on Sunday to mind Edda. We are having Noah over for a sleepover on Friday night. I’m going to walk with Sofi today. We are going to celebrate CNY with my parents on Saturday. I still think we are going to get sick, but what can I do? I wonder when I’ll go to a party where I don’t know a lot of people. That’ll be weird.
I’m trying to declutter the house. I enjoy decluttering, but Jeremy enjoys keeping stuff. It’s not too bad – we are not at hoarder level, but he has particular categories of things he likes to keep. But just the other day, he mentioned that he might be willing to let go some of the ten slightly good but mostly broken keyboards that he has. When we had that super fancy dinner for my mom’s 80th – they gave us each a beautiful box with menus and treats tucked in and I didn’t want to throw them away. But I finally cooked the treats (pasta with cheese and black pepper)and then saved one menu and threw the beautiful boxes away.
I also used Vince’s old ceramic mugs from art class to organize Edda’s oral hygiene and hair maintenance systems. As you can tell, an exciting weekend.
