They made it to the Renouf ranch last night. Everything is working well – power is back on, the driving was fine. They saw friends in ABQ and in Silver City. Katherine will be there for a few weeks until we meet up closer to the end of the trip.
Elka, I think, is the only one of our dogs to have been at Renouf ranch. Pip has been there before, I know, but I don’t think Ruby or Max ever saw the property. Jeremy and Elka left about noon and headed to Tucson.
Jeremy et al made it Albuquerque and he biked up the Sandia Crest.
A hike of sorts? They are having evening plans with friends and so I don’t get to talk to them at night and the time change is getting bigger, so I have no idea what really happened yesterday and/or today. But I track them on the map, they are making their way to Renouf Ranch today where they’ll spend the night and they’ll part ways.
Meanwhile, here back at home, I’m doing the last few days of camp for Edda and working, working. Giving gifts to drivers and caregivers. Cleaning out the fridge. Giving a tour of the house to the housesitter. I’m excited to start being on this trip! Edda too 🙂
Megan broke her foot last week and is stuck at home non-driving, so I invited her to spend the working day in Jeremy’s old spot while he’s traveling. She immediately connected into his extra large monitor. We spent a companionable day working on our own zoom calls and having meals together.
As we were eating dinner, I asked if she wanted ice cream (again) and the answer was (happily) yes (again). So we went to the local hangout and hung out again. (Edda looks worried, but she was not. She enjoyed her ice cream again, eagerly). Then we dropped Megan off at home.
Jeremy and company made it from Oklahoma through Texas and now they are in Albuquerque. They had lunch in Amarillo, which sounds very hot, but was only 82 degrees at 2 pm. They are enjoying the Oppenheimer audiobook and watching the scenery change as they drive through the country. They also inadvertently let the gas tank read empty on a lonely stretch of highway (you know how your car predicts how many miles are left in your gas tank? Well it read zero for about 3-5 miles. It doesn’t go negative. That is nice.). But they did find gas before running completely out. Note: this would have never had happened if I was in the car because I’m a complete freak about this.
Here’s Elka checking out a dung beetle with its ball of dung. I’m imagining Elka is jealous and would like to take it, but isn’t going to because it’s clearly the bug’s poop possession and not Elka’s.
Jeremy et al made it to Tulsa yesterday, having to had (?) have (?) pull over for a storm for about 30 minutes or so. They saw a hip friend from Jeremy’s work who lives there and who gave them a very nice, fun tour of the city. Jeremy is pretty impressed by Tulsa, apparently there are good times to have there. They look good, right?
Meanwhile, the storm came over to us and they warned us that this was the highest warning of storm – so I hunkered down, charged everything and waited for a tree to fall on my house. Then Mike suggested that we have crabs for dinner – so he came over bearing crabs with Old Bay we did that during the storm. JoJo, after a lifetime of not caring about storms, all of a sudden really was upset and wanted to be held. We tried to humor her, but then it’s really hard to hold a furry dog while trying to eat crab. The storm passed and we did fine.
The leg from Asheville to Memphis met with a little bit of a hiccup. Katherine accidentally left her phone in a Starbucks restroom and they didn’t notice for 115 miles, so there was extra driving to fetch the phone. Luckily, Katherine had let Jeremy track her whereabouts so finding the phone wasn’t a problem once they realized it was gone.
I track Jeremy on my own phone and noticed that they were hours behind schedule. They were supposed to meet Jeremy’s cousin for lunch in Nashville, but it was already 1 pm and they were still hours away from Nashville and I was wondering if they had had car trouble or gotten up late or if someone wasn’t feeling well. Anyways, they were moving on the highway, so I just let it be until they texted me what was going on when they were at a rest stop late in the afternoon. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Jeremy last night as they got in late to their Memphis hotel, but I can see now that they are up and about and ready to drive to Tulsa.
As for me, Sunday was quieter. Isabella was here to mind Edda so I was able to grocery shop by myself. It is tricky with the food here – I want to leave the fridge pretty empty when I leave, but I still need to buy food. And I’m not used to buying food for the house. Jeremy also makes very nice lunches for Edda, so I have to try and duplicate that during the week here as well. I also went over to Tom’s house to try and help him get and send text messages with Siri which we were able to do not too terribly, it’s just a lot of practice now. He does have trouble with low vision and of course, one sided paralysis. And I can see it’s tiring to be in a body like that, so to learn completely new systems can be very difficult. Tom is completely cognitively aware, I think it’ll be interesting to see how well he takes to learning how to use the technology.
I hosted Sunday night dinner for the Martins and ordered Chinese food and bought those ice cream drumsticks. Yummy. It was very entertaining discussion, everyone has had or is going to have travel plans or opera plans or class plans. Everyone is motoring along. I also had a giant tub of cheese balls sitting on the table that Dara had bought for me and I’ve been embarrassingly making steady progress through the tub for days – I’m the only one eating it, but last night, lots of people helped me eat many cheese balls. We didn’t empty it, there are still balls in it for me to enjoy. Ohhh, I need to pack some for Edda’s lunch. Have a nice day!
So the route of the cross country trip was sort of determined by bike routes that Jeremy wanted to do. He’s a hill climber, so the stop in Ashville was for Mount Mitchell, the highest peak east of the Mississippi. The peak of his fitness was a couple of years ago during the pandemic when he was training a lot (sometime up to 15-20 hours a week), but this past bit of time, he’s been unable to train as much (which is good, in some non aerobic capacity building ways), so he’s not in tip top shape which, I think, is a little disappointing to him because he has the mindset of a competitive athlete. Anyways, he made my bar which is faster than twice as slow as the fastest climber, but this is below his own bar which usually is less than 50% as slow as the fastest climber. Anyways, it was a beautiful day (which was not assured a week ago according to the forecast – and is never assured because the hotels are booked and there is the day to do the climb and if it’s raining or snowing or smoggy or brutally hot, it is what is it and you have to decide if you will ride up the hill that day). I made Jeremy promise me that he wouldn’t do climbs in the brutal heat or endanger his health in any way. He also bought a satellite beacon to send me text messages if he’s in trouble outside of cell range.
Elka, back at the air b and b with Katherine, enjoyed a long walk and sunning on the sunny porch.
Jeremy is trying to keep Elka off the furniture, this is the compromise they struck.
They hung out at an Asheville dog park where Elka made friends and the humans made friends too. It’s a very friendly town apparently.
Back at home, Edda participated in the J-games on the yellow team! Team yellow rules, but came in 2nd out of 4.
I spent Saturday with Megan – we went to lunch at Founding Farmers, spent the afternoon working in parallel (she had her laptop) with Edda and after work wrapped up, we watched some youtube (fascinating channel about yellow jacket nest removal – easily an hour doing that) and then we had dinner and headed out to Carmen’s for ice cream.
A gorgeous night hanging out at the local hangout.
So we are starting our 25th wedding adventure extravaganza. Earlier this year, Jeremy (who has accumulated so much vacation that he is starting to lose it) lamented that we never go on vacation. I had much less vacation because I often used vacation to work a shift at the hospital (crazy, I know…), so I had encouraged him to go on a long vacation without me, but he didn’t want to do that (1. because he didn’t know what to do and 2. even though I say it is OK, in the end, I’m always slightly grumpy to be left at home doing all the home things) and so we made an effort to see what could be done about this and we came up with a 7 week travel plan with Edda (skipping the first month of school) and Elka and me working from the road part time. Even though I do work remotely from my physical office (what I often refer to as the mother ship), I’ve never picked up my laptop to go anywhere else to work because when I work, I use 2 enormous screens and a printer to do my job effectively (I work with a lot of documents). It’s hard to imagine doing my job well on a laptop screen. But we figured it out. And the office, in the past, has made it harder to move your location around, but that has been more streamlined because of the pandemic. So we figured it all out, bought new tires for our van, and our 7,000 mile adventure began yesterday.
The first leg of the trip is driving to Los Angeles and does not involve me or Edda. Edda has one last week of camp, I have less vacation, so I need to work. Jeremy is taking Elka and his mom with him for this part of the trip. We had a few hiccups before the launch date of Friday am which included a sudden case of gout (Katherine) and an abdominal abscess (Pip) which both involved trips to urgent care and medication, steroids and antibiotics respectively, but both are fine now (thank goodness!), and we made our ETA of Friday am.
The van is packed. And the trip begins.
First stop is Ashville – we tried to make it there spring of 2021? I can’t remember anymore. Or was is spring of 2022? We got covid and cancelled at the last minute. But Jeremy is there now. Pizza for dinner.
Elka settling into the air b and b for the night. She has her party pants on because over the last few weeks at home, she’s regressed a bit and started peeing on one of our living room rug which is, arguably, our most used rug in the house. Why?!? Why?!! Why do you pee where we live? The only other pee-er (Maxi) would pee if we forgot to take her out after 8 hours and she would tuck her pee in a far away room. Elka is 100% perfect except for the pee. Sigh. We all have our issues. So Party Pants are on for the duration of this trip because it certainly is a party.
Sometimes the internet is beautiful. When the power went out on Saturday night, it fried the charging station (tan rectangle attached to the wall) of our stairlift. But we didn’t know that at the time, we just knew that our chair was beeping for no reason. It took a little while for us to figure out what was wrong and within a few minutes of the discovery, we found the right part on amazon (and checked out all the reviews) and had it delivered to the house in 2 days (black box on the floor). And I just had to plug it in and we were back in business. The stairlift is designed to run on battery power and I wasn’t sure how many trips up/down we could made before it ran out, but it lasted the two days and we didn’t have to carry Edda at all. I’m impressed. This is what the internet is for. And also funny animal videos. Everything else can just be deleted.
Speaking of deleting the internet, I’ve been slowly working on not picking up my phone while I’m at home. I’m at home *a lot* and I love my phone *a lot*. But with my Apple Watch, I’m able to get phone calls and text messages on my watch and not much else. So the phone sits on the kitchen table or charging somewhere else in the house. Now it’s not totally perfect. When I’m bored in the house, I do want to get on the phone and instead I do turn to my laptop and “scroll” on that – (usually reddit and looking at the forum about choosing wedding dresses – it’s the nicest, happiest forum there is – it’s very well moderated) (this behaviour is reminiscent of Doris circa 2002). But if I’m really good, I go look for a book and read it (this behavior is reminiscent of Doris circa 1988, yikes.). I like it. Jeremy mentioned that he sees my phone just sitting around doing nothing. Sometimes I’m unable to resist the siren call of the phone and I sit there doing random stuff with it for hours – Pokemon Go, shopping youtube channels, I’m looking at you. For a person who doesn’t like to go shopping, I do enjoy watching other people shop for stuff. So relaxing.
Session 2 of camp ended and we said goodbye to Maya who is headed off to Disney for a semester long internship. Edda had a great time with Maya and Edda got very tan from going to the pool most days. Her freckles are really coming out to play in the summer.
Jeremy was supposed to be home Friday night (one-night trip to Boston), but the Friday flight kept getting delayed, delayed, delayed and then cancelled at 11pm on Friday. The airport was closed and all the nearby hotels were booked. But Jeremy eventually did find a place to sleep and spent all day Saturday routing through Charlotte and ending up at BWI at about 6 pm Saturday.
We are planning a very long trip, so this past weekend would have been the last weekend he was in town, so we had arranged many Saturday social things that involved Jeremy cooking many meals, but he wasn’t here and I was getting off kilter and a little flustered. But I went alone to our social engagements (we did have Edda care most of the day on Saturday and Sunday). On Saturday, I spent the bulk of the mid-afternoon seeing my friend Tom who had a stroke about 2 years ago and I haven’t been able to see since then. He’s lost a lot of left sided function, but he’s still sharp as a tack. I, of course, wanted to say hello, but I’m also trying to help him use computers to do the things he wants to do. This involved assessing his current capabilities and then trying to figure out how to make things work for him and a (what I thought would be a quick) trip to the Apple store. I’ve never bought anything in person at the Apple store (I went with Noah, Tom’s son) and it was the strangest purchasing experience in a long time. I couldn’t just pick it up off the shelf. I had to wait “in line” for a person, but I could see no clear line and I just hung out with the iPads. Anyways, the purchasing of an iPad was the easiest thing, the harder thing is to set it up with new email addresses, detangling conflicting Apple IDs, lost passwords, mistyped passwords, getting the iPad to talk to the iPhone, etc. etc. etc. None of that is very straightforward even though I know it’s suppose to be. But we managed to get a Google home working for music and to get him started on using Siri to make phone calls.
On Saturday night, we were supposed to host a BBQ for 10 and I was going to go ahead and do it, but I was already feeling exhausted from a few hours of Apple OS management, I wasn’t sure I was up for hosting and I missed Jeremy and really wanted him at the party. I had reduced it from cooking anything to just ordering take out, but at the moment I was going to put in the order, the power went out in the house and then I cried “uncle” and canceled the party and as it just happens, everyone was free on Sunday night and we held the party then and went to Carmen’s and the park afterwards and it was the most beautiful night ever.
Jeremy is in Cambridge now. He’s sending me nostalgic photos of the T. I do get anxious before he leaves, though I do not like to admit it. And, of course, after he leaves, various things pop up that I need to handle without him around, but we are still managing OK and doing fine! We are doing fine :).
I’ve been working on this hat during some zoom meetings I need to stay awake for. Nice, huh?
