Category: Uncategorized

Wed night we went out to hotpot to celebrate Ginny’s birthday. This was just 1.5 miles from the house and we’d never been to this restaurant Hot Pot City. We were impressed – they had induction stoves for the hot pot, the service was lovely – we ordered on an iPad and every once in a while a robot would come over and sing happy birthday and deliver some red bean fried deliciousness.

That afternoon, I had gone to my parents’ house to help them declutter. Earlier in the week, I had asked my mother if she had any wall mirrors and she thought about it for a while and said – no, I have no wall mirrors, but I will go to IKEA and buy you a new one. And I said – absolutely not. No new mirrors. While decluttering, I found FOUR mirrors. FOUR. To which my mother looked at each one as if was a completely new item to her. Anyways, I brought three of them into my house. One I put up in the front foyer. It’s a little distorted – not the most perfect mirror, but it will do. Look at our front foyer – the table Jeremy and I made in a woodworking class that we took together when we first met. The mirror from my parents’ basement. The glass jar for the dog treats – also from my parents’ house (I’m basically shopping there now for home decor). The basket is from Alice’s estate, the pink box (holds scissors and box cutters for boxes from Amazon) from Katherine’s house. I have been watching home decorating videos – not really to find decorating inspiration in the regular way, but just to encourage me that it’s actually not that hard to hang things on a wall or move things around the house or replace lighting fixtures, etc. So I’m trying.

Today, Kristen and I took a long walk in nature with Elka. We crossed rivers and threw rocks on a frozen pond and Elka rolled in a lot of shit. Then we went to lunch at Cava Mezze which is the upscale, sit-down version of the Cava fast casual restaurant. Kristen is vegetarian and we ordered so many things and, at first, I thought that we couldn’t eat it all, but we ended up finishing the entire meal.

Jeremy is still not 100% well, but he’s on his indoor bike right now for the first time in about a week and doing an easy ride. Otherwise, everything is just chugging along. I’ve progressed from the major decluttering in the house to rearranging things – furniture, photos, etc to – OMG – decorate! I’m trying to spend zero money again, which is my favorite.

I’m trying to learn a new stitch in knitting – a kind of reversible stitch with two colors called a brioche stitch. It works well sometimes.

And works poorly other times (I have trouble with the transitions, don’t we all?). To me, this is what growing up has meant to me – when I was twenty, I would have stressed so much about those ugly stitches and worried so much about them and not wanted to go on without fixing them, but now, I just stumble through them, knowing that maybe I can figure it out later (and I did in the next few rounds), but also knowing that it can fall apart later (and it did, I messed up more stitches (no photo) after I had a few successful rows). But in the end there will be a hat and there will be many more hats to knit in which I hope to be better, but maybe not. And that will be OK too.

We have totally gone over to the dark side in which the house now feels more smart than dumb. We have many lights on timers (grow light for plant, two sets of Christmas lights, Doris’s office lights). A bunch of other lights which can be turned on/off by voice. All the TVs we can turn on and off by voice now – no need to find the remote to turn off the TV after Edda leaves for the bus or if we want to go to bed after watching Cooking Tree youtube channel. Our doorbell recognizes people and animals and packages left and packages taken.

And after year and years of downsizing our “app” subscriptions to Amazon Prime, Disney+ (Edda) and the NYTimes & WaPo, I feel like now I subscribe to a million things including: New Yorker (read very little) and Atlantic (I read a lot), two to-do list apps, two guitar learning apps, a food tracking app, fitness apps, we also subscribe to YouTube premium (this is quite more expensive than either Netflix or Hulu, but it’s our main source of entertainment for both me and Jeremy) and Spotify and I’m sure the list goes on and on.

For example a Japanese bunny jumping contest – I know people like to go out to concerts and dinners and comedy shows, but my favorite is being in bed with Jeremy and laughing over random things we find on youtube together. And then we yell into the air – “OK Google, turn of the bedroom TV and good night” and the TV goes dark and the lights go dark and then google wishes us a good night.

I don’t really like the gift giving part of Christmas and this year I have an opportunity to not buy very many gifts, so I’m not. It is exhilarating! But I’m part of a few white elephant/secret santa exchanges and I like to buy everything early, like the first week of December. But oftentimes, the rules change about which method of gift giving a group wants to do and, like I do every year, I’ve messed up. (What can I say – I want to not feel rushed and I like free, slow shipping.) I honestly tried to get people to agree, but they weren’t ready yet around Thanksgiving. I’m not bold? imposing? bossy? enough. So on Dec 1st, I went with last year’s rules and bought a few beautiful gifts (which was white elephant – recipient unknown) and then the rules changed (secret santa) and now my gifts are not appropriate for the name I drew. Oh well. I will save the gifts for another time.

One of my favorite parts of the holiday is the open fire part. Vince and I have a candle ritual which I’m hoping to implement when he gets home (Saturday!). I ordered all the special candles for all my spinning holiday decor and the menorah. This year, I had time to polish the menorah! Unbelievable – it polishes up nicely. I did not let these candles burn down. Just for dinner and the moments I could be around the table. The wooden one has a tendency to stop spinning and burn the fan leaves, there are already a few scorch marks from when I wasn’t paying attention. And it’s just freaky to leave this much open fire unattended.

A quiet weekend because we were supposed to drive to Philly for Kiki’s birthday party, but it was cancelled because Kiki and Bob both got Covid (both are fine now). I know other people’s weekends are filled with holiday activities, but I’m quite content to stay at home. Jeremy got a weird stomach bug after his trip to Denver – he puked on Thursday and spent a lot of Friday lying down and watching youtube videos. Elka did her doggie duty and kept him company.

I finished another knitted hat which I’m pleased about. My mom decluttered her entire yarn stash to me so now I never have to buy yarn again for the rest of my life if I go at the rate I’m going.

Jeremy spent the entire weekend working. I know this sounds dreary, but he’s excited about something and fleshing it out and he was so excited he couldn’t sleep on Saturday night (weird, I know.) I happily spent the weekend doing laundry, running a few errands, going to the dog park, testing out running with my slightly not perfect ankle, practicing guitar, learning the brioche stitch in knitting and installing our new doorbell/camera thing-y.

Busy, busy – though not really with holiday stuff (we are doing a very, very low key holiday – hardly any gifts and maybe no parties) and less busy than I thought we’d be. Jeremy was in Denver this week, back last night. We hosted our friend Lael on Tuesday night and were supposed to host her two nights but she got sick and wanted to retreat back to a hotel room (even though I wanted her to stay). We were supposed to go to Philly this weekend to see Jeremy’s parents and do a big Kiki birthday celebration, but Kiki is sick too and we cancelled. (So if you are keeping track, we had to cancel both our mothers’ birthday celebrations in the last couple of weeks due to sickness…whomp whomp…)

I’ve been going once a week to help my mom declutter her house. It’s interesting to declutter with her there are a lot of things I remember her wearing as a child that are coming out of storage bins. My mother has a weakness for clothing which is on sale and “is a good deal”, many of them new and she wants to keep. Which is fine, we are making progress and she’s doing great. We also find some hidden money, my mother likes to tuck money here ad there and then forgets about it. So we found two crisp 100 dollar bills in a purse that hasn’t been opened in 20 years. Fun!

We had a nice dinner with Xiao Ying and her family on Saturday night. Peking duck and such things. The kids are getting so big! It’s what happens when a pandemic gets in the way of seeing each other.

It was the first time we talked to Elka over the google home camera. She looked around for our disembodied faces. And then we told her to get off the couch and she got up and off the couch and disappeared into an un-camera-ed part of the house.

I twisted my ankle on Thursday night by tripping over a yoga block, so no running for me for a few days (which continues into today). So instead, I’m playing more guitar and I spent a long time drilling rocks. I need to drill holes in the side of my house (which is stone) to mount a camera front door bell. It didn’t work that well. I wore down a bit and three rechargeable batteries for the drill and only got about 1/3 of the depth that I needed. I ordered another bit. I also polished silver and got on my hands and knees and cleaned some bathroom grout. I obviously am not busy enough.

Unexpectedly, Jeremy and I were able to dash away to an early dinner date on Tuesday and go grocery shopping together. It was a lot of fun. Ginny took Edda out to dinner on their own.

Jeremy has helpfully gone through all his bike parts and paraphernalia and decluttered them. We donated all of them to the Rockville Bike Hub (they were only open on Tuesday night – hence the date and the grocery shopping as well).

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…