Author: Doris

Jeremy was biking with a group on Christmas Eve when they were harassed by this driver. Jeremy said a number of people in his group have these continuous cameras recording while they ride just in case. Luckily no one got hurt and they got the plate and everything. Jeremy is in the yellow passing to get out of the car’s way early in the video.

We volunteered to host Christmas dinner. Jeremy and I can now host a party for 30 in no time flat. No, I take that back. For a party that starts at 5pm, we need to start at about 2pm. I even took a 20 minute nap at 3:45pm – though when the first guests rolled in, Edda and I were still in our pajamas. But we changed quickly. Did Jeremy buy this pork loin crown roast to feed everyone? Yes he did.

But before the Christmas dinner, we went to McDonald’s on Christmas Eve to celebrate my dad’s 78 birthday. I did not suggest this idea, my father came up with this one on his very own. We made it festive with the big number balloons and a red tablecloth.

Christmas gifts to the staff working Christmas Eve.

Free ice cream on the house. We supplied the candle.

Happy birthday dad! This was a ridiculous idea that turned out to be just fine festive.

Christmas morning run with my pussy hat knitted by Mary Ann. Mary Ann! My favorite pediatric oncology nurse. Thinking about you today & Ben & the kids.

Christmas breakfast with my parents. Stockings & stollen & panettone and bacon and eggs.

Gifts were opened. These bacon and eggs pajamas were the biggest hit.

I got Jeremy many, many bike parts. Many times Jeremy would send me the direct link and I would just buy it.

Then the family dinner. I didn’t get many photos, but I got a photo of the menorah.

My dad with the crown roast (Christmas is his actual birthday).

Merry Christmas from our family to yours. An update on the college quest – Vince got into Rutgers engineering last week. Very exciting, he got notified in the modern way – by text. A few more applications go out before the new year and then we are done with applying to college.

Last night, Vince came into our room and raised his arms and said – Tr*mp’s impeached! He’s gone! Thank goodness! We had to tell him impeachment doesn’t quite work that way.

I have no idea why, but this year, for whatever reason, I’m happy and not anxious going into the holidays. I marveled at this fact today and I told Jeremy – I haven’t been grinchy at all, have I? He’s like – you’ve been great! And then I asked him – I wonder why? And then he said – Do not think about it very hard. Just keep it going. I think it’s because it’s Vince’s last Christmas when he’s living here and not visiting from where his is living. I’m determined to squeeze every last bit of enjoying out of the season. I’ve been generous with gift giving (usually I get grouchy thinking of all the overspending), I did not overwork (namely I didn’t sign up for any extra shifts at the hospital even though the unit is terribly short staffed) and I’m trying to not overeat too much.

We went to Edda’s school today for our annual little cupcake holiday party. Here’s Mr. Pat, Edda’s teacher.

Edda in her classroom.

And our super-fancy Georgetown Cupcakes. I was not sad while in Edda’s room. I really wasn’t sad even afterwards which oftentimes happens. I enjoyed someone’s homemade empanadas with guacamole. I danced to Timber by Pitbull & Kesha.

I finished edging this quilt! This quilt is my quilting masterpiece. Now I just have to make a nameplate and send it to the lucky recipient.

We are continuing our tradition of not wrapping any boxes for Christmas. A waste of time and paper. lol. We just order Xmas gifts and stop opening any boxes around the first week of December. It means we don’t remember which box is for who and we also end up unwrapping some household items like trash bags on Christmas. It’s fine and kind of funny.

I needlessly worried about Jeremy’s work Christmas party. A good number of folks showed up despite the cold and the rain and I had very nice time. We had a nice charcuterie board with fancy cheeses/olives and cured meats. Jeremy wore his festive Christmas outfit. He thinks his green tie is out of style now – the fabric too thick resulting in a large knot while the fashion may be now to thinner ties.

I wore something completely out of style – a plaid Christmas dress and striped Christmas leggings. Next year, I’ll get the felted elf shoes with the curly toes.

We had no Edda-care arranged for this party, so Jeremy and I traded Edda duties and hosting duties. Vince was upstairs sleeping off a cold (he’s still sick, it’s been lingering for a while) with a 30 second appearance to make himself a ham sandwich and scope out the drink offerings.

This is our kind of party – an afternoon party, low on the drinking, high on the cookie decorating and a number of toddlers running around. After the party, we were suppose to go to another holiday party, but we were both exhausted. I don’t understand how I get tired so easily these days. It’s like I’m almost 50 or something.

On Monday, I went to hospital for a shift. When I left at 5:45 am, it was snowing lightly outside and schools were on a two hour delay. I checked with Jeremy that he could manage to get Edda on the bus and I headed to work. I shoved my purse with my phone into my work locker at 6:30 am and then proceeded to work all day until I got on the shuttle bus at 8 pm when I found out that school had been cancelled all day! I didn’t know it was a snow day until it was almost bedtime. That was weird.

Vince told me last night that I was 15% annoying. Jeremy was 98% not annoying. I asked if I was less annoying than Maxi. He said I was for sure less annoying than Maxi because Maxi often noses into Vince’s room while he is snoozing in bed and is sniffing around trying to find a good spot to pee on the carpet and Vince is like – Max! don’t pee on the carpet please, I’m right here next to you. At least you could have the decency to pee on the carpet when I’m not in the room. I guess I’m less annoying because I usually don’t pee on his stuff. That’s good.

Last night Jeremy had a meeting downtown and he didn’t get home until 9:30pm. If I’m clever, I can be asleep when he comes home and get a full night’s sleep. But I’m often not clever and then we want to stay up late chatting and then we both don’t get enough sleep. So we are dragging a little today.

I took Vince on/off some freeway interchanges on Thursday afternoon. He was planning to drive tonight (late) to a weekend overnight scout camp about two hours away from the house, but he hasn’t been on the freeway in the 6 months or so that he’s had his driver’s license. But now he feels really sick and crappy, so he’s at school doing the some lighting work he promised to do for a show tonight and he’s headed home to sleep. It’s just as well that his first 2 hour trip in the car isn’t tonight. It’s cold and rainy and foggy and anytime I was on the road during the day today, visibility was bad and people were parked in weird places or there were police around.

We went to Edda’s aftercare today to give everyone red envelopes. I’ll do it for her school staff sometime next week. Our largest line item every year for the holidays are the gifts we give to all the folks who work with Edda everyday. She has a lot of people looking out for her. And for that we are grateful.

Jeremy’s work decided there wasn’t $ in the budget to host this year’s Christmas party (which is usually a pretty fancy dinner/downtown affair). But folks still wanted to have it & somehow we got roped into hosting it at our house – it’s happening tomorrow afternoon. From a DCer’s perspective, we live way out in the boondocks and the weather is going to be bad tomorrow, so I’m not sure how many people are going to show up. Cookies got made today:

The tree is also coming together in a sea of shedded fake pine needles. I was not motivated to put it up before tonight. I was considering getting a real tree as this is Vince’s last Christmas in the house as a child, but I didn’t quite manage to make it to a lot and tie one to the top of the van. So this fake one will have to do.

Vince helped run the Court of Honor at Scouts last night. It’s fun to watch him do this thing that he likes to do.

I had lunch today at Founding Farmers. I ate entirely too much food.

Vince is going to college! He found out on Monday night that he got into Pitt engineering. I was on my way home, sitting on the employee shuttle bus on the way to my car, when I got this text of the letter (which was incredibly hard for me to read, all squinty-eyed-old-feeling) and made out the first word Congratulations! I knew that he’d hear from Pitt around this time, but we were all expecting an email. Jeremy was sorting the mail on Monday night and came across the thick envelope and he was like – is this just marketing material? Do they still send big envelopes? Apparently they do.

I rushed home and I burst into his room and yelled – you are going to college! And he yelled back – I’m going to go to college! And we gave each other enthusiastic high fives. Everyone is excited about Pitt, we like the school, we like Pittsburgh, we like engineering. I knew Pitt had rolling admissions and I was trying to get Vince to apply earlier so that we’d find out earlier because it just feels good to know that you have a place to go in early December while you wait for the the others in April. I think there are only a few schools that he’d go to instead of Pitt and most of those applications are in already. Since I’m a nervous nellie, I was also worried that if we had heard back from Pitt negatively it would indicate that I had misjudged the whole list of schools and the earlier we heard back from Pitt, the more time we would have to adjust the school list. But after the admission note, Jeremy smiled and said – the list is fine. The list is fine. We are aiming for a 50% acceptance rate for the school list.

This weekend, before all this, I drove a van full of kids to Great Wolf Lodge in Williamsburg, VA early Saturday morning. It gave me an opportunity to see Gina, Vickey’s mom, who is my quilting teacher.

I’m constantly amazed at her talent/skill. The back of her quilt blocks are as beautiful as the front. Look how straight all the blocks are, evenly stitched and pressed open.

Mine are a bit of a mess, lol.

The boys stayed at the Lodge and I stayed with Gina. I went for a run at a local mountain biking park. Lots of switchbacks.

And then I picked up the boys on Sunday afternoon. Vince is the scout leader these days and it was not a quiet weekend for him. Lots of drama that will remain off the blog. But everyone is safe and back at home.

We went to Il Pizzico last night to celebrate my mother’s birthday. The celebration was suppose to happen the Saturday before Thanksgiving but mom was in the hospital then. It was a fun night! The most entertaining thing was that we all found out that Dad had downloaded the TicTok app – he kind of refused to tell us how he found out about it. We spent a good part of the dinner helping him make an account and username (Gonggong420) and video-ing some content. By the end of the night, he had gotten almost 450 views. Not bad. Happy birthday mom!

Jeremy is still pretty sick, he stayed home from work on Tuesday and Wednesday. But he managed to make it to work downtown today even though I encouraged him to stay home. I made a very good NYTimes dinner recipe – Slow Cooker White Chicken Chili – to warm his tummy when he got home.

We found a dead mouse floating in Maxi’s water bowl this afternoon. I have no idea how that mouse climbed up the slippery, outward sloping side of a stainless steel bucket and then managed to topple into about 9 inches of water. Poor thing. We threw the mouse out with (bath)water into the backyard for a natural burial. But now I know we have mice. Jeremy admitted that a little while ago he saw a flash of furry something or other cross the dining room floor. And I think I hear little scurrying feet in the attic. I’m scared of looking in the attic (the same scared I’m feeling to fill out the FAFSA form) because what if it is a large animal that has already destroyed all the insulation and is rabid and will attack me? Maybe we should get a cat. (I love cats. I’m more a cat person than a dog person, but I acknowledge that a cat just reinforces my tendencies to stay at home and wallow while a dog encourages me to go outside and meet my neighbors.) Isn’t that how people have solved this problem in the past? Can I just send the cat into the attic with a can of mace and a pith helmet? Because that is what I would like to do.

I was at the hospital yesterday. This is the amount of my sandwich I ate. Our census was low yesterday and thank goodness for that because we started out with five nurses and then right at 7 am, one of the them was not feeling well and had to go home. By 9 am, another nurse had to go to the ER and so we were down to three nurses on the floor when at full capacity we are suppose to have seven nurses. It was quite a shift. But I got to work with one of my favorite doctors and we did good things. When I work with a good hospitalist, it goes smoothly even when bad things are going down.

We are all a little sick this week. Jeremy’s home today – working from home and popping Motrin. Vince also took an ibuprofen last night. I actually took some Motrin during my shift yesterday. It wasn’t too bad for me. I think without the Motrin I’d be operating at something like 90% capacity. And I think it’s not too bad for Vince. Jeremy doesn’t feel great. I think it’s what Edda had last week.

We are slowly making plans for the house after Vince moves out next year. For example, we are planning on emptying Vince’s room, ripping out the carpet (10,000 pee stains from Maxi) and installing linoleum flooring and turning it into Jeremy’s office and a gym. (Vince asked where he was going to sleep when he comes home to visit and I said the couch was always available. And then Jeremy said no – he can sleep in the guest room. And then Vince asked if he was coming home for Thanksgiving next year and I said probably not if he was on the west coast and then it occured to all of us that if he went to Canada, he’d probably be working over Thanksgiving as their Thanksgiving is in October.) We are also going to empty the living room and buy a ping-pong table and automatic ping pong launcher and 1,000 ping pongs and start to learn to be competitive ping-pong players. Ha ha, ok maybe not ping-pong. Maybe tap dancing. Then the wood floors would be completely ruined. Mostly Jeremy and I are hoping to massively declutter the house. Before we moved into this house, we lived in a different place every year or two, so the decluttering happened automatically. Now ever single Target purchase just gets swallowed up by the house and nothing ever leaves.

I often think about the presidential candidates and wonder how they are not tired all the time. Right now, in order to operate at an optimal level, I need 8 hours of sleep at night and a 1-hour nap during the day. That is perfect. Projecting out, when I’m 70, I want to sleep 11 hours a night and then take a 2.5 hour nap during the day. Now that sounds delicious. Vince got a bunch of college applications out this week – UC Santa Cruz, Davis, Irvine, Drexel, Penn State and U. British Columbia. The Canadian schools are totally confusing to me. Jeremy said that they would not be confusing if we were Canadian. I’m not even quite sure the applications are complete. But we paid something and hit enter. For Toronto, instead of saying I want to study engineering or political science or English, I swear it asked you – do you want to live in Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Slytherin or Ravenclaw. (Well not exactly those names, but it made you choose different residential halls.) So we looked up all the residential halls and crossed out all the ones that wanted essays, crossed off the one that wanted formal dress for meals (I guess this one is for the lawyerly types) and then randomly picked from the others. For UBC as part of the application, separate from the application fee, they wanted us to put a $50 deposit down on housing which included such things as – do you stay up late? are you messy? (Vince answered – being tidy is not important to me). do you want to live with people who drink? I was like – don’t you think they want to offer admission first before asking us to be putting down the deposit for housing? What happens if you get housing and aren’t admitted? Do you think you can just move to Vancouver? Katherine asked if the $50 was refundable if he ends up not going. I said I think it just went into the disappeared money category.

Vince held a Friendsgiving on Saturday night and we skidaddled out of the house for dinner. Jeremy wanted a place to have vegetables. We went to Flower Child which is a kind of vegetarian-ish place. It opened up a few months ago near us. It was good (I thought). Jeremy said that it was fine, but he should never go there if he was hungry because he could eat all three of our meals.

Then we went to Trader Joe’s.