We had a lovely Thanksgiving hosted at our house. Jeremy made the turkey/gravy/stuffing/cranberry sauce and everyone brought everything else. My mom started off the meal with her famous egg rolls. We had 20 over, down from our usual 40, but we miscalculated the food and basically cooked twice as much as we needed to and have been having turkey leftover for days. Everything this year was delicious and perfect (except for my St. Louis gooey butter cake which did not do its proper rising) and I’ve been enjoying the leftovers very much.

We zoomed various family members all over the country (and the world).

We had two large tables with seating split between the two.

Jeremy and I did not go out to the movies, instead, we decided to take some time and go through our wire collection (I think this was Friday).

Pip enjoyed leftover turkey as well.

We went to Pike and Rose to go window shopping and shoe shopping for Bob and Katherine.

Now we are ready to go into the holiday season. Elka is a reluctant hat wear-er.

And the first lights to go up are Jeremy’s zoom office lights. LOL.

I’m always behind on paper mail, so it was only three weeks ago that I opened the mail to find an invitation to Kitachi’s wedding in Little Rock. (Kitachi was one of Edda’s caregivers who worked with us for about five years – she’s the one who helped us through the pandemic and patiently walked Edda through a year of virtual school.) My first instinct, honestly, was to not go because it would be expensive and sometimes I think these things would be too much trouble to ask Jeremy to mind Edda for the weekend or just too much trouble for myself. I told Jeremy about the invitation and he said — you should go! You’ll never be invited to a party like that again. To which I said – I wanted you to tell me that I should go and then I asked him if we could all go and he smiled and said – of course! Edda needs to go! And so we found ourselves on a flight to Little Rock on Friday afternoon.

Logistics: We’ve paid extra for the PreCheck and it’s totally worth it for Edda to not take off all her shoes and getting her up and out of her chair. It’s a relief to know that we won’t be hung up at security for 15-20 minutes. We’ve also upgraded – not in the sense that we pay for seating with extra legroom or any of the extras the airlines want (we still fly the cheapest economy seats we can get), we just upgrade to fly at convienent hours. So no early mornings or late nights for us and we try to get non-stop flights. Also, I did not book a bunk bed to save $40 and we rented a car after thinking we might Uber around town. I wasn’t sure about the Uber service in Little Rock and we have a lot of stuff with us.

We picked up Edda after school on Friday and went to DCA. Our plane was boarded on time, but there was a computer glitch and the plane needed to be rebooted. They turned the plane off and waited a couple of minutes (where Edda happily yelled Baaahahhh so everyone could hear) and turned it back on and it was fine.

We got in Friday night and slept and Saturday morning, we did a walking tour around Little Rock. We saw the Heifer International Center (we’ve been donors in the past)

We walked around the Clinton Library.

Stopped off at a fancy coffee shop where they make beautiful foam art.

We saw the high school where the Little Rock Nine desegregated it in 1957 to great outcry. I wanted to see this after seeing the high school in Topeka KS that was critical in Brown vs BOE.

Then we headed back to the hotel to get ready for the partay! Edda wore a one shouldered outfit that Kitachi picked out for her for homecoming a few years ago. Jeremy and I wore the exact same outfits we wore for Sumit’s 50th birthday party about a month ago.

We were so happy and honored to be invited to this party. It was great to celebrate with Kitachi and Keyera!

I was determined to dance at this party and I did dance and have a wonderful time. There was a lot of twerking which I was trying to build up my courage to participate, I’m sure Kitachi would have done it with me, but I felt just a bit too self conscious to do it in the end.

Keyera is trying to convince me to join in more enthusiastically.

There was also a lot of complicated line dancing, here’s Keyera’s mom trying to teach me the steps. It was so much fun! So incredibly and fabulously joyful in many ways that I’m not familiar with. Jeremy was the only white guy and he dressed in a suit and looked like a banker. lol.

We flew home on Sunday during the day. Edda spent much of the time leaning up against me and rubbing her head on my shoulder and smiling. It was a great weekend – so happy we went and so happy we could go!

Look at what I found! A brand new hanging chair. When did we buy this? I have no idea. Why did we never use it? I have no idea. The house keeps unearthing mysterious things. This is getting decluttered.

We also found a lot of sitting chairs. Five of them! All different. These I’m sentimental about, so I didn’t get rid of any of these…

Last night, we went on a quick walk around the block with Joab. I handed him my phone so he could play Pokemon with Jeremy. He went through all of my Pokeballs and I had to buy more. He also needed to borrow a coat – so here we are, both in oversized coats made for sub zero degree weather. Jeremy was laughing at us funny ducks. I said that I had to bust them out of the closet because one never knew if this was the last cold day ever (even though it was only like 40F).

Last week – Monday! – so far behind, I went to Tysons to have lunch with some of my coworkers. We don’t often meet in person – most of these people I’ve only met online. I had a very nice time, you lose a lot for not being in person. Not that I’d want to go back into the office, but I do miss having coworkers in the regular way one use to have coworkers.

Megan is hitting it out of the park with Edda photos. Here they are on a school trip last Thursday. Edda spends a lot of time out in the community for school and they are finding good places to roam around. Unfortunately, Edda had three seizures at aftercare last week which was very unusual for her. I hope this isn’t the start of a spate of seizures for her. She did bite her tongue during one of them and spent the weekend very happy in general, but also being unable to eat. We tried a lot of ice cream.

On Saturday, I had my guitar lesson and my guitar teacher got a new guitar for himself and here he is demo-ing it to us. He talks about guitars like Jeremy talks about bikes. There is always another guitar/bike to get for different reasons. We spent the afternoon with Tom B at Buffalo Wild Wings and had wings and tots.

Sunday, I went for a long run and then puttered around the afternoon (they dryer is broken again) and went to Sunday night dinner where Edda took a nap on Eric’s shoulder.

Jeremy has been in Minneapolis this week (Tue-Thurs). He did meet up with our friend Dave for dinner. His travel for work is certainly picking up, he’s trying to keep them short, but I think he might have 2 or 3 more trips before the end of the year. He did a huge food prep on Sunday before he left, so I didn’t have to cook all week, I just reheated things like – apple sauced chicken, beef and barley soup and I didn’t even get to the pulled pork sandwiches. He’s not done this before for me, so usually, I go through the week with scrambled eggs and cheese on toast – so I felt very well taken care of. And he also had time to prep all of Edda’s lunches and because I wasn’t “cooking” dinner, I felt like I had time to do the other things he does daily like cutting fruit for Edda’s lunch and so I didn’t have to alert school and/or aftercare that they needed to order breakfast and snack for her because I just couldn’t manage.

Just this week, I’m feeling like I’m on “top” of things. I’ve felt so behind on things, it’s been hard to feel like I’m making any forward progress. I feel like I have a handle on our money stuff, the paperwork stuff (the bump on my head/trip to the ER cost me just over $700 out of pocket…yikes.), kid stuff. I’m trying to enjoy that feeling, but the flip side of that is that I perform best when I am just ever so slightly behind schedule. Hundreds of items have left the house in my efforts to declutter, so I’m feeling good about that. As I’ve gotten rid of the “easy” stuff, it gets easier to get rid of the “harder” stuff. I haven’t yet gotten to the “hardest” stuff and I’m not sure I’ll ever need to.

We’ve been slowly changing our house to smart light bulbs which, honestly, I never thought I would do, but they are convenient in certain ways. I have them turn on/off automatically (my office), I have them start dim in the morning and get progressively brighter (my bedroom), I turn them on/off by voice (Edda’s room). But now we’ve reached some tipping point. One of Edda’s room lamps is always slightly pink and another one turns off in the mid-day for no reason. The two bedroom lights that flank our bed, should be in sync, but I often find one on and the other off in the middle of the day, but in not the same way. So now, the light bulbs are too smart for us and have decided to drive us slightly bonkers. lol.

Wow, I woke up in a great mood this morning. I’ve been moping for a long time, but maybe it’s just the light? Maybe I need the morning light? I feel miraculously brighter and lighter today. I used to think my mood is not so tied with the seasons/weather, but I think this is not the case. I think I’m tied to the earth, as it should be.

Elka had a wonderful time at the dog park on Saturday morning. There is a good crew early in the am on Saturday (Sasha, I’m looking at you..) and Elka gets very, very dirty. Girl wants to go to the park everyday, but it’s not happening.

Jeremy went bike riding on Saturday. I made a pie on Saturday, took Edda to get her covid booster. Long run for me on Sunday at the canal – a beautiful day. I ran 9 miles, I’m somewhat bummed that I’m so much slower than I have been in the recent past, but mostly I’m grateful that I can move my body in this particular way on a beautiful fall morning. Peers left and right are abandoning running for various reasons and I know I’m very, very lucky. And Jeremy put our new vanity plates on our new-to-us car. Our old nickname given to us by our friend Dave circa 1995.

One Art – Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

We are – fixing slightly broken xboxes. I think we’ve never had one in the house before (right Vince?).

Getting CBD gummies for a good night’s sleep.

Finding knives during decluttering that we have no idea their provenance.

Edda school, for a long time, tried to get her exposure to “job skills”, but somehow I always thought this was a little strange. Edda is going to live her best life and be “a lady of leisure” when she graduates from high school and I mentioned that to her team and somehow they ran with it and now instead of going to a warehouse to shred paper (or maybe in addition) or to sell balloons to classmates, they are going out to eat. Silver diner yesterday and tacos today. This is the life I want for Edda, to do fun things with her friends and see new places.

Halloween passed quietly. No one dressed up and no one bought any candy here at the house. Jeremy had meetings in DC, but got to come back mid afternoon which was nice. Now I have the opposite problem from before pandemic, when he’s at the office, the house seems too quiet. School had festivities for Edda, of course, bless them. We are at the quiet end of the street, so not many trick or treaters even at the height of when we were enthusiastic, but we had two groups knock on our pitch black porch and I had to tell them, sorry! No candy! and they said – oh, doesn’t matter, Happy Halloween.

I went to see my friend Tom and his wife Maryam after dinner. Usually, I’m trying to teach him something about his iPad or to do crossword puzzles or something to help him use technology after his stroke, but this time, we just sat back and enjoyed each other’s company and told stories about when we were young and beautiful.