I’ve been at EPIC training at the hospital the past week. EPIC is a new computer software which is going to replace our existing software. It controls everything – medications, pharmacy, transport, admission, discharge, doctor order’s, bed management, nursing assignments, recording billing charges, running codes, blood administration/blood bank, lab etc. etc. I like it better than our existing software, but it’s going to take me a while to get used to it. I struggle with our computer system, I’m not the smoothest user of it.
I’m thinking about the next block of time in my life professionally – meaning the nursing half of me. I think I want to get an NP and do palliative care. I probably should work as a hospice nurse for a bit, then go back to school and then I could be an NP. And then transition over to teaching in the classroom. That should take me 20 years. I started the first phase of nursing in the fall of 2009 and I consider it pretty much done now in the fall of 2021. That’s 12 years. If I’m lucky, I’ll get two more 10 year blocks. Fingers crossed.
Vince made Sunday night dinner last week. He decided to make tamales which sent him to a local Mexican market to get the dried corn husks. They were delicious! He had a vegetarian version and a pork version.
I helped fold them (we watched youtube videos for tips on technique). Does every culture have a meal where everyone gets together and forms an assembly line and you make/tie/fold ingredients together? It felt like a dumpling line, only not Asian.
So I ran my long run this past week in the fancy, carbon plated shoes. Here’s the difference in times:
On August 8th with my regular running shoes, I did an 8 mile run – 1 mile warm up and then 7 miles at my long run pace:
Vince dyed his hair blue yesterday and tried to dye Charlotte’s hair. It was very tempting for Vince, but we held firm. No hair on the dog is blue.
Once it dried, it did turn Vince’s hair a vibrant blue. He tried doing this mid summer, but it didn’t keep. He was in the pool everyday and it made it fade pretty quickly.
We had a nice dinner last night with Nat and Ning et al.
My parents came over for dinner last night. It was Vince’s choice for take out, A and Js and beef noodle soup. There are a few of our favorite Chinese restaurants that went to take out only at the beginning of the pandemic and have never reopened their dining rooms. Maybe it’s easier and more cost effective?
Vince finished 9 weeks of work at Camp JCC. Very proud of him, it’s not easy to manage a troop of 6 or 8 year olds. I told him an elementary school teacher might have 30! He was like, that’s exhausting. Which reminded Jeremy of one of his favorite tik toc. Props to my favorite middle school math teacher – Soojung. This doesn’t even mention covid.
I’ve been listening to the soundtrack to Bo Burnham’s INSIDE movie? comedy special? on Netflix. So many good songs, White Girl Instagram, Sexting, Welcome to the Internet, Facetime with my Mom. Vince recommended this to me, and while I was a reluctant watcher the first time, now I’m a fan. I’ll give you the Facetime with my Mom video.
This is Vince’s last week here at home. He’s ready to go back to school. Many of his friends have already left for their colleges. I’m nervous – all the regular nerves and then the extra nerves on top of the regular nerves – but not really too nervous. Does that make any sense at all? No. We asked that he not flip his schedule completely around – that we’d have dinner most nights together which is what I like most about him being at home. That 15-20 min period of time. Also, maybe the same 15-20 min period of time he comes into our room at night we all argue about which youtube video to watch together. Ah, a video blog post. We recently watch some marble olympics type thing? Watch this ridiculousness. Really, it’s fun when there are three of us and we all root for our favorite marble team.
Yesterday I attended this ceremony at work where I was awarded the Bronze Award. I was surprised about this award – for patent examiners, it’s mostly just a simple calculation of extra productivity with your quality in place maintained for 5 years. I have always liked doing a touch more production (we have to do a certain number of patents a week) than I’m required to do, not because I’m desperate for an award, but because I’m afraid I will somehow suffer a block akin to writers block or the “twisties” or I will sustain incredible pain in my hands and unable to make my production for a few days/weeks and I need that extra cushion to make up for it. (Actually, I think it’s also a holdover from my junior days where I needed my cases signed by a senior person after review and sometimes (rarely), the senior person would reject a bunch of cases in a row and I would not be able to make production for the biweek.) But this year has been hard for me to do the extra work, so after 5 years of doing the extra production, I’m pretty much doing exactly what is expected of me. Teams can also get the Bronze Award, it was nice to see the IT teams get credit for the mass telework implementation for the pandemic.
I attended the awards ceremony in my pajamas. It did lose pomp and circumstance – I did not pomp, obviously. I do really miss many things of my old life that are upended by the pandemic – even though we are tilting back to “normal”. What is “normal”? It’s really weird to be sending kids to school when headlines read “ICU full”. I mean the ICUs were full last year too and we all ordered in our groceries or ran away from people in our neighborhood. I miss the in-person ceremonies. I haven’t gone back to eating in restaurants. I think I’m not going to go to big parties or events. I didn’t think that I ate in restaurants that much and I’m not a huge party-goer, but still, I do miss them. I miss being in a crowd like on a train or at an event, I love the anonymity of it. The possibility of meeting a strange person who becomes important in your life. Is that gone? Even if I was willing to go to restaurants/parties/gatherings, there would always a slight feeling of risk, but maybe I can get used to it. Or maybe I will have to get used to it.
I am training to run the Cherry Blossom 10 miler in a few weeks – postponed from the spring. I’m in this weird space where I feel like I’m (relative to me) training hard, but really, I think I’m not getting any faster. I’m grateful that I can run what I can run and generally nothing hurts when I run, but a lot of the fun of running is seeing or feeling yourself get better. It’s hard to explain, it’s not even in the pace that one runs, it how it feels when one runs. You know when you start off running for the first time, it just feels bad. Just bad and you are like – wtf, why do people like running? this is terrible. And it is terrible. But when you start to get into shape, you start gathering a spring-y ness to your legs. And if you are lucky, you can really start feeling like the animal that you are. And if you are super lucky, you can be running in the woods on a perfect fall day and in great shape and feel like a god damn deer leaping along the trails – even if you are a mediocre runner running “slow” like me. Now this doesn’t happen on every run, not even close, but it happens often enough. (or had happen often enough.) I’m in the middle of menopausing, so I’m constantly having hot flashes and reminded that I’m no longer as elastic or as flexible as I was even three years ago. So I’m trying to get that spring-y-ness to the legs and I can’t feel it very often – no matter how much I try to coax myself into it. And this race was supposed to be a triumphant return to “normal” after defeating covid, but it’s not going to be that unfortunately. I haven’t raced in over 5 years and since then, the shoe technology has vastly changed. I hemmed and hawed over buying the new carbon plated racing shoes which essentially are shoes with a built in spring – because omg, I’m so slow and really, who am I kidding? But everyone I asked said – Doris, just buy the shoes. So I bought the shoes. And they are like trampolines. I’ve only run across the kitchen in them, but omg, literal trampolines.
I don’t know what it was about yesterday, but I had a really nice day. The main sign of it was my laughing. I was on the phone with my Vickey, who is so, so funny and has just the right sense of humor for me, and I just laughed and laughed my head off and it felt like I hadn’t done that in a year-and-a-half. Jeremy said – I could hear peals of laughter through two closed doors. I said – oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to bother you. And he said – no, it’s good, it means you are in a good mood. And then I proceeded to laugh through dinner and the rest of the evening with Jeremy and Edda. I wish I could bottle that feeling.
Before Jeremy left Philly, he got to hang out with Louisa and Leon who spent Saturday afternoon with the Martins.
Vince is here for only another two weeks. He’s putting his last week of work in this week and next week, he’s packing and thinking about the coming school year. Lots of friends have left or are leaving for their colleges. I’m going to miss him.
My crazy husband biked from Philly to DC yesterday (or more accurately, from Kimberton to Rockville). 168 miles. about 11.5 hours. With breaks to pee or consume donuts/ice cream. Some might view this as amazing, but I think both Jeremy and I acknowledge that is veers closer to the crazy than to the amazing. Before we left for Philly, we had kind of agreed that this would happen on Saturday concurrent with my drive home, but the weather was forecasted to be hot hot on Saturday, so Jeremy asked me if he could stay at his parents’ and do the ride on Sunday. I might have not been the most enthusiastic spouse at that moment, but I later apologized for my reaction and Jeremy did his part and very nicely acknowledged that he appreciated I would be home on my own this past weekend.
I came home to Vince (who managed to wake up in time for an mid-morning eye exam and purchased much needed glasses at Costco) who had thrown a party the night before (we had encouraged him), but there were so many dishes (it was a cooking party) and he had intended to clean everything but was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of kitchen clean up necessary. Vince is good at cooking and hand washing a few dishes, but he hasn’t really done a full-on post-party clean up. So as I’m unloading Edda from the van and unpacking and getting her cleaned up, I’m walking Vince through the tips for maximizing loading the dishwasher and how to soak certain things to make it easier to clean. This is ironic (really) because I do only about 10% of the dishwashing in the house. When I dishwash, I feel like I’m a tourist in a foreign country because, even after 25 years of being together, I’m not the master dishwasher, I’m definitely the secondary dishwasher. Sometimes I feel bad about not doing a lot of dishes and I’ll start doing the dishes and Jeremy will be kind of standing off to the side and say – I know you are trying to be nice, but there is this bike race I want to watch and I want to do the dishes while I watch the bike race. Then I get to step to the side and, you know, scroll through tiktok. lol. I’m kidding. kindof. We usually have a plastic bin filled to the rim with dirty dishwater in the sink. Vince asked, so what’s with this tub of water in the sink? Why is it here? And the true answer is that I have no idea what’s with this tub. I only know that it’s there because Jeremy put it there and it’s part of his system and if I move it out of the sink, it will mess his system up. And since I totally benefit from his system of dishwashing where I end up doing only 10% of the dishes, I leave it there and don’t ask too many questions.
We went to Philly on Thursday to CHOP for a follow up appointment with Edda’s neurologist there. This was an easy one – Edda’s had a great summer, no significant seizures, a great camp experience and a deep tan to show for it. We are on two seizure meds now, Trileptal and Keppra, we will slowly wean her off the Keppra and see if her seizures stay away. The last time we went to CHOP was March and it was really quiet on the neurology floor, but now, the place is bustling with families. We wrapped up the appointment with a short discussion about research and left feeling groovy.
We drove an hour to Kimberton to see Bob and Katherine in their new house. They are still getting settled, unpacking the last boxes and buying little things that they find that they need. The house is cozy and practical and very, very colorful.
We walked the campus and admired the wildflowers and said hello to folks who crossed our paths.
Said hello to some calfs, I could not coax this one to come to me away from its mother.
You can pick up raw milk everyday. I had a glass each morning.
Edda slept in the living room with the inflatable bumpers we had used during our cross country trip. She overpowered them last night and ended up on the floor underneath a chair?
