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My parents stay on the west coast for the summer and come back to the east coast during the winter and this year, they suggested that we meet in the middle during their transition and have a family vacation. My parents wanted to go to Arizona and visit national parks which, if we had done that, we might have run into some issues with the government shutdown, but really, we visited Tucson and Flagstaff and only one national park on the itinerary, the Grand Canyon, which was mainly open.

Baseline – it was a really nice vacation – we were all healthy, there were no real travel snafus, the airbnbs I booked were lovely and it wasn’t too hot in Tucson, nor was it too cold in Flagstaff. I planned the vacation with everyone’s needs in mind – 1. my mother’s love of plants, 2. my father’s love of naps and one fancy dinner, 3. Edda’s love of a first floor bedroom and 4. Jeremy’s love of biking – and my own need which is that I like everyone happy! Hahaha. I know – sometimes this is difficult, but I try and I think I mostly succeeded.

We flew into Phoenix and drove to Tucson and had a simple dinner from the grocery store. Sunday morning we had a Jeep tour of a private ranch which borders Saguaro National Park. Kurt was our (authentic cowboy) driver and we bumped along bumpy roads and saw lots of plants.

And some animals.

Monday, Jeremy rode around Tucson and we went to a botanical garden and saw more plants and then we went to the university to take a tour of the facility which makes mirrors for telescopes.

Tuesday, we hit the road to go to Flagstaff – we went to another botanical garden for breakfast and walked around. I loved these barrel cacti.

On the way to Flagstaff, we stopped by the main strip of Sedona where there was 1. lots of ice cream and 2. lots of crystal stores.

Wed, we drove from Flagstaff to Williams to take a train to the grand canyon. They have a little play before everyone gets on the train and my dad got thrown into cowboy jail.

They have a very impressive lift for Edda’s wheelchair.

We were serenaded on the way there. (on the way home, there was a “robbery”)

We had a bus tour of the grand canyon – a little bit like the grand canyon in ten minutes, but that’s how we roll.

I love this guy – thank you for going on this craziness with me. My love for you is deeper than the grand canyon – though I don’t think it is as old as the grand canyon.

Thursday, we drove up Snowbowl mountain to pick up Jeremy who biked up the mountain and saw the most beautiful leaf-peeping I’ve ever seen – the aspens were so brilliantly yellow!!

Thursday night, we were lucky enough to catch Andy and Rita just before they left town and eat a lovely dinner together.

Friday – we left Flagstaff and headed towards Phoenix for our flights out on Saturday. We needed to kill some time, so we stopped at a casino to have lunch. My mom loves a casino – she won $9.

In the afternoon, we had a tour of the Wrigley mansion in Phoenix (of the gum fame) and we had dinner in the mansion – this was our fancy dinner and it was lovingly fancy – it seemed like we had 18 waiters. With a sunset and everything!

The next morning, while the boys checked bags at the airport, the ladies went to yet another botanical garden – this time in Phoenix and this was very fancy. I loved it.

And now we are home! I love to travel because it reminds me so much how much I love being home.

I did not sleep well last night. We did the unfortunate thing of talking about “serious things” all the way up to and past our usually strict lights out time of 10pm. Things that we usually don’t talk about after 8 pm include: logistics and work and news. We are allowed to talk only about “fun” things which usually include: cooking, pets, things we want to buy, and weightlifting (we’ve been watching the world championships).

Jeremy has been sick since Sunday, but he recovered well enough to go into DC on Wed almost as soon as I came home from my DC trip to see some coworkers for lunch and a get-together. Poor guy, he really misses in-person work. He came home at 6:15 pm and I had dinner ready, which I’ve taken to serving in our Nambe serving wear which I’ve gotten both as gifts and thrifted. And then I said out loud into the ether that I wished I had something sweet and he said – OMG! I got us free leftover cookies from the office get together from your favorite place to get cookies. And I’m like – what’s my favorite place to get cookies?! Panera? no. Giant? no. Potbelly’s? yesssss. So I had cookies.

Then I went to church – my church is full of beautiful, service oriented people who work so hard to build community and friendships and yet…they mostly are not very handy. So they have me, fortunate? or unfortunate? They recently got a modern, energy efficient seven multi-head mini-split heat pump installed in a set of offices in late summer on the order of 50K. It’s a very good system with a very poor controller panel. (Actually, have I ever met a mini-split controller that I’ve liked? The answer is NO. I have not.) There are seven of these panels attached to the walls and they are super confusing to program and to use. I guess we didn’t specify that we wanted the fancy remote control unit wi-fi with nice user interface which I think we were expecting. When it was installed, the offices needed air conditioning and no one could figure out how to turn that on. The contractor, a somewhat slow texter, came days into hot weather to turn it on. Anyways, as we’ve been heading into colder days, they couldn’t turn on the heat! The staff could barely could make the AC stop blowing cold air. The vendor…not so responsive. I should have gone sooner – they’ve been working a week with space heaters. Anyways, I set all of them to heat and hopefully, the heat works now.

I took the Metro into work today to renew my ID card that I use to log into my computer. I didn’t want to waste the entire day, so I took the 8 am time slot which meant that I was on the metro at about 6:30 am which is early for me to be out of the house.

There are many changes at work, most of which make me melancholy, but I’m overall still very grateful that I have it and can work from home. It’s…fine. Nothing like anything happening at NIH, CDC or various other scientific government agencies. I don’t know what we’d do – as Edda is still at home with her suspension from adult services and so we keep each other company during the work day. Edda is super vocal these days – I made the mistake of calling an attny while she was in my office and mid-call she started “yelling” and what to do? It’s even weird to explain that it’s my daughter because it’s not a regular little kid or big kid sound. It’s an Edda sound.

I’m listening to this..which is not my usual jam, I half-joined a book club and this is what was suggested.

Clara Barton was a patent clerk! I did not realize that.

I was listening to Cal Newport’s podcast about phone use and how to limit it and his suggestions were 1. to get all algorithmic apps off the phone 2. to put the phone in a particular place when you are home (kitchen, charging station etc). and 3. cultivate long term dopamine hits. (Usually I don’t listen to Cal Newport because he has three kids and a wife and never mentions them in managing his time. I feel like he has a very nice wife who takes care of all these things so he can do deep work, lol). Anyways, I’m in the mood to limit phone time, so I did make my phone as boring as possible – it is sooo boring – took off news apps, reddit, youtube in the past few weeks, long ago I took off facebook, instagram. I still have the NYTimes games – and I need to not do spelling bee, because that one in particular takes too much time. In the past, I have been good at leaving my phone elsewhere in the house, so I reinstituted that. Three is the hardest one – to turn to other long term projects to relax and enjoy. But I was thinking this week in particular, I feel like I’ve made strides in both the guitar and weightlifting. Got compliments on technique on both things this week! It’s pretty terrible, the rate at which one gets dopamine hits in the real world vs phone time. OMG, I’ve been at guitar for two years – I still can’t really do barre chords. Weightlifting for about a year. I was telling Ward, my lifting coach, it took me six months just to get used to people staring at me lifting. Forget about the actual lifting technique, I really don’t like people looking at me very much – so when the entire sport is people looking at you, that takes a long time to not be embarrassed to try things while people look at you! Also, it’s hard for me to enjoy these things and not turn them into another “job” another thing “to do”. That kind of ruins things for me, I take them too seriously. Gah. Take things seriously, but not too seriously. Hahaha.

For the first time, instead of replacing my iPhone, I got the battery changed out. I have the iPhone 14 which I bought 3 years ago, almost exactly. The battery was down to 73% – they recommend replacing at anything lower than 80%. It cost about $100 and they took my phone for about four hours, which they apologized for, but I was relieved because I thought they would want to take it for two weeks. I remember getting the 14 and thinking it wasn’t much better than the 10 I had, so no reason to upgrade now to the 17 or whatever they have (though it does come in a pretty orange color that Jeremy is salivating over). The dropping off and the picking up took longer than I thought it should have, they have a weird check-in and waiting system that I don’t particularly like, but I know some business major thought really hard about it. I probably spent about 45 minutes in the store waiting. And while I was waiting, I thought of Dante’s circle of hell – which I thought I was in. The inside of the store looks good, but there are too many people, it’s like 5 degrees warmer in there than it should be from the sweaty bodies, the music is some random techno-beat non-music. There seem to be as many staff as there are customers, yet..I wait. The staff walk in/out of the back room – sometimes with items, other times with no items. This is the entry to the weird hell-scape that the internet can be sometimes.

Somehow each time I’m at a party with a belly dancer, I think to myself – wow, I can’t believe I’m at a party with a belly dancer and then I also think – I don’t think this is going to happen ever again. And then they keep happening! I think this is my third belly dancing party in like the last 2-3 years.

We went to a casino to celebrate our friend’s Tom’s birthday – it’s the same friend we went to Vegas last year to celebrate. Anyways, this time was local and it was a steak lunch and a belly dancer.

Sometimes at a party, I believe I have a role to perform and it reveals itself to me as the party goes on. Sometimes, I’m suppose to meet someone, sometimes I’m supposed to arrange the chairs, sometimes I’m suppose to keep the conversation going. This time, it apparently was to get all the women up to dance with the belly dancer, especially Tom’s wife, Maryam. Fun.

Jeremy is home and I’m delighted. Sometimes his trips can feel like that last a long time and sometimes not so much. This one passed by rather quickly.

Last night, I had choir rehearsal and it was so much fun. We have an excellent choir director, super accomplished and he is so ambitious for us. We are kind of always on the edge of our capabilities – almost about to fall apart, but yet miraculously, usually able to pull it together. He’s been at the church for three years? Maybe this is his fourth year and the choir has grown and now we have enough people and experience to tackle more challenging choral music. Lots of times, the alto part splits into two parts. I always take the lower part and I try to find the harmony, sometimes it works, other times, not so much. These things always take so much time, to make friends, to feel like you are part of something bigger than yourself. To learn to sing in a group!

This is always what I want for myself, to be at the edge of my capabilities and explore the unknown, but also be close enough to the familiar to not feel adrift or lost.

Ginny helped me out so much this week…she made space for me to get some errands done (like HVAC appointments and choir) for which I’m very appreciative.

I did manage to take Edda out of the house once during the week. We went to the dog park with Elka. It was such a gorgeous fall day yesterday, it was to be taken advantage of. Elka – long suffering dog when Jeremy is out of town. She doesn’t get the long, leisurely walks that she gets with Jeremy in the house.

Megan came on Sunday to say goodbye to the kitty. I will not lie – I miss the kitty. Sigh. I love my life. I’m totally living the dream. I have everything my heart desires and I remind myself often of it – I am so so grateful. But I’m not blind to the fact that I could be living the dream, but in a different way. Hahaha. There is the urban, brownstone family dream, there is the very career driven dream, there is the single, millions of friends & activities dream, there is the writer dream, anyways, for sure there is a kitty dream. But I also realize there is a fine line between living the dream, and totally not living the dream. And I know that what I think is the dream, many, many people see it and say…no way, that is not living the dream (e.g. going to bed at 8:30 pm).

Jeremy’s in Chicago, the kitty is in a new house being cute, I’m home with Edda and just chillin’. I realized last night the Edda and I are in our own self-contained cocoon, not beholden to any outside schedule. We have nowhere to go, no one to see, work can happen anytime. I could black out all the curtains and just eat when I’m hungry, sleep when I’m tired and Edda too and just let the world spin on outside without us. (This is not good).

I’m enjoying all the music in my life. Singing with the church choir is back in my schedule after a summer off. I swear, I enjoy lessons just because I can hear very accomplished musicians do their thing. Like when Josh, our choir director, sings our parts – he’s louder than the entire section put together and also can travel up and down the voices going from low basses to the high soprano parts which he does in falsetto. Or when Billy, my guitar teacher, listens carefully to a song on spotify and magically picks out the guitar line and then goes on to improvise from it. Both of these sessions are in groups, but I’m sure they can hear each one of us picking out our parts. Josh often says – I hear an alto singing the melody an octave lower. That’s me – yikes.

I’ve been enjoying the new Taylor Swift album which dropped a few days ago. She’s happy which makes this album must less tortured than her last album. She wrote this album during her eras tour! omg can this lady multitask – just unbelievable.

I haven’t really been baking for a while, so I decided to make a blueberry lemon Bundt cake. It’s actually so nice to do these things and not just sit on your phone watching youtube videos. So I zested and baked.

I tried this thing where I sugared the pan instead of flouring. It’s suppose to add a crispy coating and release a bit easier, but I didn’t find it to be true. I might try it again sometime.

Delicious.

I went to Christine’s 60th birthday party and wore a scandalous (for me dress). It was fun.

So as of last night, all of Edda’s adult services have been suspended. So payments to her day program, transportation and personal supports have hit a random snafu. So everyone called me and basically said – super sorry, Edda can’t come until this is fixed. Can I say that this was completely unexpected? No, not really, I knew the start up would take time and hit roadblocks, I just didn’t know which roadblocks. So here we are, Edda is at home with us all day, so she’s bored and we a little more constrained with our day, doing more Edda-care during the workday, but we are managing. The worst thing about this entire thing is the lack of email response, the full voicemail boxes, the not knowing if everything can be reestablished in 72 hours or 6 months.

My mood, though generally good, has been slipping. Jeremy is headed out of town next week, so I get a little grumpy, but it’s just going to be me and Edda in the evening – we should be fine.

The cat is set to be rehomed on Sunday afternoon and fingers crossed that it doesn’t fall through. The cat is lovely, cute and sweet – but it also really, really wants to go outside all the time and is a yowl-er which during the day is fine, but at night, esp at 5 am can be problematic. Perhaps it was exiled out of it’s previous home based on the amount of night-time meowing – I mean, it happens at 5 am and lasts…maybe 10 minutes or so. I love cats, but my best friend is my bed and my love of sleep. (I have many friends who stay up until 11 am, midnight, etc, and I’m like – have you found the joys of going to bed at 8:30? and they look at me like I’m a crazy person, which I am). I’m a little worried that the cat will boomerang back to me in four days time. Jeremy’s been going around the house singing…but the cat came back, the very next day…

I told Jeremy that we needed to leave the house on Friday night (because I was moody and Jeremy never leaves the house unless it’s to the 1. grocery store or 2. on a business trip – really, it’s 50/50 when he leaves the house if he’s headed to buy food or go to the airport), so we headed to the art show at Main Street which was lovely, but was slated to run from 5:30-6:30, but in reality ran from 6:00-7:00. We accidentally left Edda’s wheelchair in the front of the room while she walked around and then it was trapped by lots of people and the speaker, so we couldn’t make a fast exit when it was clear that it would run long and Edda and Jeremy got hangry.

And because this was supposed to be a nighttime adventure, we went to this Filipino restaurant in town that was rated one of the top 25 restaurants in DC by the NY times. Now I am a little dubious of this list because it lists another particular restaurant that is within 0.25 miles of my house and I’ve been a few times and each time I’m like….maybe it’s really good this time and I leave and feel: meh. I feel like if you are one of 25 restaurants in DC that is listed in the NYT list and you are about 4 feet from my door, I should almost always want to go there at lunchtime. But I don’t. To be fair, the restaurant replaced my walkable pizza place that I loved and went once a week and knew the owners and workers and, well, the new place is not pizza – which I’ve declared is my favorite food on the planet.

Anyways, this Filipino place was very good and satisfying and fun to try new things on a Friday night. Though after we got home, I asked Jeremy how much it was and he was like $70? To which I was like…ah yes, this is why we don’t go out much. Delicious food for sure, but basically counter service and plastic plates and utensils. And to loop it back to Edda’s care, she’s approved (well, kind of approved, right now she’s not approved) for a budget of about $220,000 a year for her services, but the actual staff who are with Edda and take care of her at paid at $17.50/hr. I literally can not wrap my head around that, what the hell are we doing where is all that extra money going? Can you take your family out for quick eats Filipino food on a random Friday night if you are making $17.50 an hour?

Pork belly!