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Jeremy is about to leave for a two day business trip and he still has the lingering effects of his cold and try as I might to be mostly cheerful (and I am – mostly cheerful), I’m a bit grumpy these days. Jeremy does not go man-cold on me, he still cooking, cleaning the kitchen, buying tires for the van, taking the dog for a walk, so my grumpiness is generally unwarranted on my part, but it’s the undercurrent of my mood.

A few months ago, someone said that I reminded them of being a capybara and I didn’t know what a capybara was (my meme game is very weak), but somehow I became enamored of this description of me. Though we asked Vince if I reminded him of a capybara and he said no, that Edda was the capybara of the family. Anyways, Elka has been playing with the skins of her stuffed animal for months now and I decided to buy her a stuffed capybara for her enjoyment and it came yesterday (our Amazon Prime day is Tuesday. I heard there is a way to download how much you have spent on Amazon into an excel spreadsheet. I shudder to think of 20 years of expenses laid out so clearly. Did I really need that fart book? or those slippers that lit up? or that cookie press that lives on in the cabinet, never used? no no and no).

Anyways, I was hopeful that Elka (as I write this, I think I’m having a hot flash – I haven’t had one in a long time, since summer of 2020… hmmm…) would not destroy it immediately. She was so happy to receive the gift and ten minutes later I found her kind of asleep curled around it on the floor – nuzzling it.

But then this is what the living room looked like an hour later. The entire thing de-stuffed. Oh well. I should try to find used stuffed animals.

On Sunday, I went to family dinner with Edda and without Jeremy which is relatively unusual. Izzy, their oldest dog (not pictured), is not doing well. She was coughing during dinner and unstable on her feet. I got to cradle her in my arms for a little bit so she could rest and sleep.

We are still trying to avoid buying a new car until after all the college bills are done. Our cars are from 2011 and 2014 and the phone magnetized to the dashboard is becoming obsolete (our phones tend to overheat giving directions when in the sun and the trip is long), so Jeremy bought a car play system which bluetooths to our phones which will be in the shade tucked in under the cigarette lighter (do we have one of these? I think so.). Of course, he has figured out how to work this thing and I have not.

I had a massage at Hiroko yesterday which was a very relaxing start to a long, not very relaxing day.

Elka is a reluctant crate-er. Ruby loved her crate. Maxi after a bit was fine with the crate. Both of our previous dogs were night-time crate trained until they were out of their puppy-hood and more trustworthy. Elka never liked the crate and as is classic for a pandemic dog, is left alone very very infrequently and therefore, the need for the crate is very infrequent and so she’s not very used to it. (Ruby, we left in a crate for entire work days (unbelievable to me now!) as we both worked out of the house. She seemed totally fine with it.) We were unable to night crate train Elka (she would cry all night. poor thing.) – she prefers to sleep in bed with us, but will sleep peacefully and happily on a dog bed next to our bed. But we worked up her crate tolerance to where she now is OK with about 2-3 hours in a crate. She doesn’t even seem too bothered by it and will even walk to the crate before I issue the command if she knows it’s a situation where she’s going to go into her crate. Her crate is extra large and made of plastic, but we need to train her to get into a smaller wire crate for a future adventure. She was having none of it yesterday. Jeremy put a large piece of chicken at the back of the crate and she tried every tactic to get the chicken except actually getting into the crate, licking it from the other side, trying to “dig” it out, looking at us pitifully. I finally got her to go in halfway by getting into the crate myself and holding some peanut butter.

I had a crab feast with Sofie and Mike yesterday. Sofie wanted Maryland crabs and had never had them before. I had to teach them how to open crabs and eat the flesh and smash the legs with a wooden mallet.

Edda, accompanied by Eliana, went to opening weekend of the Barbie movie! There was a big celebration – lots of people dressed as Barbie. A few Barbie/Ken couples. Edda got all dolled up in her pink!

Jeremy:

He’s not feeling very well this weekend. Actually, the worst was Friday when he was in bed all day. I’m not sure anymore what to do when someone is sick – do we cancel all our in-home childcare? Do we isolate from each other? It’s not COVID. He actually feels much better today and is walking around cleaning the house and doing such things like calling T-mobile. I did not isolate from him and I’m generally feeling fine. Fine enough so that I should go for a run now. Or maybe tomorrow.

Doris:

I had a busy week. I went into the office on Friday to have an in-person lunch with my R&D coworkers. It’s the first time I’ve met them in person since we started working together about 4 months ago. There has been a good bit of grumbling this week with my team which has been a bit unnerving. But we forge on. There is a difference in meeting in-person (it’s more fun in person), but it took me hours to drive in/drive out and have lunch. I also am still fiendishly decluttering the house and this week I discovered a place (to the county! I’m excited about that – they are recycling old equipment) to donate used durable medical equipment. I donated some bed rails and also a gait trainer that we got secondhand from another Rett family. I still need to get rid of an old pediatric wheelchair and see if our old bath chair is worth recycling or if it is done for. Honestly, a bunch of used durable medical equipment always seems a sad to me.

Vince:

He’s doing well at his summer internship. He likes his work, his graduate student mentor and his group. He still has yet to meet his PI. He sends us various lab photos. Though the work is going well and the weekdays are full, the weekends are a bit lonesome as he hasn’t clicked with anyone enough to spend the weekends doing stuff – so he’s been exploring on his own, going to the beach or the Asian market and various things like that.

Edda:

Camp has been great. She’s been all over town and danced and sang and enjoyed being with other people. Her GI has settled down and seems OK now.

Jeremy’s been watching the Tour de France. He’s been very, very excited everyday. Sometimes he works out on his indoor bike while watching the tour and I imagine he’s dreaming that he’s in the mix with the world class athletes.

Last night, the usual suspects had dinner at Lauren’s house. She made us these wonderful pizzas in her fancy pizza oven. So yummy! We don’t often get together in person that much, so it’s a treat to spend an evening together. (no pictures of us!)

Dessert pizza! Nutella and strawberries.

Jeremy bought me this Apple Watch for mother’s day. Well, I asked for it for mother’s day (about a week before the actual day) and he said – great! I’ll get it for you and then promptly forgot to order it. And then mother’s day came and went and there was no watch and I didn’t mention it – being passive aggressive as is how I do – and I didn’t bother me for more than a minute that day, really. And then time passed and I decided that I didn’t want it anymore. And then one day a few weeks ago, Jeremy was like – I’d like to buy you an apple watch and then I said – well you were supposed to buy it for me for mother’s day. but now I’m not sure I want it anymore. This is how we normally argue – which is really not very much. So he bought it for me last week after I hemmed and hawed for a few days. But I have to say that I love it. Vince will tell you that I like to get rid of things that are addictive. My favorite line in Middlemarch is about Dorothea giving up something she loves:

Her love of riding is so great that “she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it,”

 I love not being beholden to anything. Not so entwined in anything that I *must* do that, or *must* possess that. Everything is ephemeral, everything! Lovers and money and possessions and identity and opinions should be fluid or at least not held on so tightly. So when I feel obsessed with something, I try to give it up. And I really needed to give up my phone. I had given up on social media a few years ago. But still the phone was in my hand -reddit, the NYT, Wordle, Pokemon Go, wikipedia, shopping youtube videos. Hours and hours a day. But with the watch I can leave my phone behind and just get the text messages. And music. And my to do list. But not much else. I tried it at first this weekend, leaving my phone parked in my bedroom and I walked around the house and somehow I felt like I was back in high school. A little bit bored. Wondering what to do. I went and read a book. We’ll see how long this lasts.

Jeremy and Tasha went to the C&O canal for a walk in the early am. Then they went and picked up a lot of peaches from Jeremy’s favorite peach stand. Tasha cooked us a fabulous lunch and then she borrowed our car to head down to Monticello for a tour today. We headed to Sunday night dinner – Rachel and Sarah were there and we talked about summer jobs and sororities.

I need to buy Elka some new stuffed animals. This is what is left of her two beloveds – she will carry around each of these tattered rags and then settle down to continue chewing them. They are getting smaller and smaller as I find little tufts of them scattered throughout the house.

Jeremy’s friend from high school, Tasha, is in town for a librarian conference. Jeremy has a lot of friends from high school and sees them more regularly than I see my friends from high school and I live like right next to my old high school. She arrived on Friday (the guest bedroom toilet decided to work again, fingers crossed) and on Saturday, the two of them went downtown to the African American museum and the Portrait gallery. It was hot and muggy, but the Portrait gallery has enclosed and climate controlled their central courtyard. Apparently it used to be the patent office? Tasha is an enthusiastic museum goer – so they were gone all day.

They visited Alexander “I’m not gonna lose my shot” Hamilton. I spent most the day doing laundry and finishing paperwork/bills/working. You know when you have fun, none of life’s administrative stuff gets done. Eliana and Edda hung out together and went to lunch out.

I went to lunch with Amy this week at this place called Shouk in which everything is vegan. It was great to see Amy, we talked about running – she is the most consistent of runners that I know. I ordered the classic falafel which is what I ate most days for lunch when I was pregnant with Vince and now he is a falafel lover (no not really). It was delicious and just in time because a vegan friend of Jeremy is coming to visit this weekend and Jeremy loves to cook and can do vegetarian, gluten free, keto, all without trouble, but he has a tough time with vegan. So we have some chickpeas (my favorite plant based protein source) and we’ll see how it goes.

We have a guest bedroom in relatively heavy use rotation, but you know, no one tells you anything is wrong with the bathroom because they are your guests. But my mother-in-law kindly mentioned that the shower head didn’t work that well and the drain plug was stopped up and so I fixed it all a few weeks ago and because of the weekend poop/diarrheal fiasco which embargoed the use of the primary bedroom’s bathroom for about 2 hours on Sunday afternoon, Jeremy took a shower in the guest bedroom and later that afternoon he said – you are killin’ it, the guest bedroom has the best shower in the house now. So he asked that I replace his own showerhead with the one I got for the guest bedroom. So I did that and on a whim (I’m a bath person) I went into the guest bathroom to check it out myself yesterday and discovered that the toilet flushing mechanism has given up the ghost. I really need to replace the toilet and asked Jeremy to buy a toilet for me (did he buy one for me for Valentine’s day? Perhaps. I do enjoy a good toilet install.) I will not be able to fix it before the vegan friend comes to visit which is a slight embarrassment. Not truly a problem because there are other toilets to sit on. I just don’t want her to forget that it isn’t working and then have to call for help after, you know, going to the bathroom. Gah. My life is so boring.

I’m listening to Sigrid Nunez’s book The Friend. I’m having a tough time reading/listening these days, nothing captures my attention for very long. I’m in a summertime mood. Hot and languid and kind of apathetic in a very positive way (I’m in a good mood these days). I’m trying very hard to lower the amount of advertisements I’m subjected to, so I’ve cut a lot of podcasts and youtube channels from my regular rotation (I read very little, I listen much more). This leaves me with audiobooks which sometimes I find too long or if I’m trying to do short form, I listen to New Yorker articles which can be fun, but also depressing in way because NYer articles are always about how something is bad. The medical system is bad, plastics are bad, sex can be good but also bad, etc. etc. Anyways, there was a quote in The Friend that I found fascinating about teachers and their students and the dalliances that they might have with each other. The quote is – “the thrill of bringing an older man in a position of authority to his knees.” In the modern era, it’s always presumed that it is the teacher (male usually) abusing the power dynamic to take advantage of the student (female usually). Which is often true, I do not dispute this situation. But I have thought that the power often lies in the female student because a man with such a strong desire to put everything in jeopardy for this seduction of a student, can be in a very weak position. Again, it depends on the parties involved and the exact situation – but there is, I think, a spectrum of stories.

On another, less sexy note, we gave up on Daybue on Monday. Sunday, we had a very expansive poop experience at the house in the shower. Isabella was handling Edda on Sunday and was – as they say – a trooper. So we held the Sunday night time dose and then on Monday, we went back to the previous weeks’ dose which was 40 mL hoping to hold steady at that dose for the summer (or at least use up the medication we have left in the fridge for goodness sake!). Monday at camp, Isabella was her counselor that day and the note that came back indicated that Edda might have spent about three hours in the bathroom and had the words “aggressive” and “foaming”. She had to miss pool time and Isabella was going to not be at camp for the next two weeks and we had a new counselor Maya and I didn’t want to subject Maya to such a literal shitshow. So I stopped it (or we stopped it, Jeremy and talked at length about all these decisions). And now it’s Thursday, Edda is still on Immodium because she’s still going like 2-3 times a day and so once her gut biome re-stabilizes well ease off the immodium. We didn’t see any noticeable benefit in Edda’s symptoms during the time she was on it.