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.

I spent so much time setting up and applying and preparing for Edda to get Social Security benefits that now that she’s had it for about half a year now and we are just figuring out how to spend her benefits. So I asked Jeremy, who does our grocery shopping, to portion out a third of the groceries for Edda to buy with her money. And he did for the first time this week.

Jeremy drove to a college cross county meet to gather with some old teammates and cheer on the Haverford team. Coach is retiring after a long, long time (49 seasons).

And he requested that there be no parties, no speeches, no awards, no nothing, so the best that these folks could do is to show up at a meet and say hello and cheer everyone on.

Jeremy came home, and I went to a witchy paddle at Black Hills park. I went with Kristen and her sisters, but bumped into an old nursing friend Wendy and we chatted happily as the sun set. There were about 50 witches?

Ahhh, this was fun.

We went to CHOP on Thursday for a regular neuro check-up. That place is hopping again – sometimes we go and the waiting room is empty and this time we went and it’s just bursting with kids. We had a nice longish talk with Eric about Daybue and the genetic trials that are going on now. Interesting discussion. The appointment went long and late, we didn’t have lunch until about 1 pm and then headed to Camp Hill to spend the afternoon/night with Jeremy’s parents.

We had a nice walk together and went out to dinner and the next day, I helped weed the garden a bit. We saw Kiranavali for lunch in King of Prussia and then headed back home where my parents were taking care of Elka and we had takeout Thai dinner with them.

I’m madly decluttering the house. I found the Buy Nothing group on Facebook and I’m posting 4-5 things on there daily and people come and pick up my old stuff off of my porch and take it to their house. I found the long hidden Halloween decor bin deep in the closet and I posted the stuff today to give away. There are some people on the list that pick up waaaayyy too many things. They have that siren call of free things, which I completely understand. I like my things and often I like things free. But I try to give to a new person each time. Look at this cute ceramic halloween house I’m giving away.

I’ve been melancholy this week – I think mostly because the days are getting shorter and my mood goes along with it. And there are lots of worldly sad things going on, but there are also many personal sadnesses that have piled up this week. We are all fine, but not everyone I know is fine. So hugs to them all. I was especially down Friday afternoon and tucked into bed trying to coax the blue thoughts from my head and kind of dreading the weekend which was going to be very quiet.

But then I remembered that I should head to the woods during these times of sadness. So I went on a long walk on Saturday afternoon with Elka in the woods which always reminds me about how the world is such a big, beautiful place and that there are still many things to explore and see. With love to you all.

Jeremy got a new phone this week. There was some talk about him abandoning Android for Apple, but in the end, he did not. He ended up purchasing the new Google phone. I do use all Apple products and I enjoy them, but I can be mad at them because they do some things that I don’t appreciate – one of which is that it’s hard to send texts to Jeremy on his Android phone for some reason and the reason is that Apple sucks sometimes.

Anyways, it has a nice new camera which takes these amazing night photos. It, apparently, can also combine a series of group photos into one so that everyone ends up smiling. It’ll meet it’s challenge with Edda who does smile a lot, but not often for the camera on command.

It’s been a nice “normal” week at home – whatever that means. It means that the schedule ran as normal. Actually, not quite normal. Jeremy was in DC on Monday and Wednesday – so I made dinner on both those nights which is unusual for me. Jeremy feeds me so well – as soon as he’s out of the house, I devolve into frozen pizza and dumplings. Oh well. What can I do. Other than that, I feel like we are both run down a bit, dragging. It could be just the change in the seasons and in the light.

I did put back the dryer back together after the part arrived on Monday. I vacuumed a bunch of lint from the inside of the dryer which was very satistfying.

You see the break in the heating element? This failed about 2 years ago according to amazon when I bought the exact same heating element. $20 and we are back in business. After I put the heating element in the and then completely reassembled the dryer and then ran a load, I noticed that the dryer is squealing a tiny bit. It’s completely telling me…I’m an old appliance…please treat me well….sqqqqeeeeee. I’m not going to take the whole thing apart again to find the source of the squealing. I should have doused the whole thing in WD40.

I like the house to be neater/more organized on Sunday night than it had been on Friday night, but I was completely unsuccessful. Mostly because the dryer broke on the first load of the weekend chore of usually 5-6 loads and I spent part of Saturday disassembling the dryer to get to the heating coil to see if that was the problem and it was, so I ordered a part and it will be here on Monday. Meanwhile, laundry is scattered all over the 2nd floor in various degrees of dampness and dirtiness along with the carcass of the dryer awaiting the spare part.

I went to see Tom on Saturday. We caught up on the kids’s activites and tried to mess with his iPad and google home to try to get them to make/answer phone calls via voice – which it can do.

Saturday night, I got together with the Usual Suspects. It’s so hard to get together and it seemed like it might fall apart at the last minute, but everyone managed to get rides for their kids and we talked for three hours.

Sunday, Megan and I went to see the Taylor Swift concert movie! Alas, no photos. It was a lot of fun, I knew almost all the songs. Bless Megan who is not a Swiftie and was kind enough to sit through three hours of a concert. I did long to go to the actual concert, but it was too expensive and I didn’t have a close 13-16 year old girl who would have been head over heels to go with me. I would have gone if it had been like that. This was an excellent substitute. Taylor – I can only marvel at her – she’s not be best singer nor is she the best performer, but it was a joy to hear and see the concert.