I’ve been bad at taking photos of people I hang out with, I get lazy. But I shouldn’t be lazy, it makes me remember that that’s the whole point of life, to hang out with people. Ahhhh, home is so comfortable and easy. It’s so easy to stay at home and Netflix and chill. And it feels good. xoxo.
Ning came over to say hello and then goodbye. She’s moving to Dallas – I’ll miss them, but we are planning family trips in the future with the Scotts.
Felix is here too. He’s trying to find a job, so if you need a young person to do something or other, please let me know. He brought swedish candy – a kind of compressed marshmallow. (Sorry so serious Felix, it’s the only photo I have).
Apparently the tag line is – sweden’s most sold car. They are supposed to be car shaped, lol.
The weather outside is frightful. But our heater works and is keeping up. Edda’s school is opening 2 hours late almost this entire week. Some friends are in Hawaii this week. Lucky them! Felix (Jeremy’s nephew) arrived last night, here for an American gap-year adventure.
We had a nice, quiet weekend. We had Friday dinner with my parents, Saturday was guitar lessons and watching Bladerunner with our friends (I liked it more than I thought I would!), Sunday – I sang in church – 4 songs! – it was glorious, (sometimes I can hold the harmony, I can hear the harmony with the rest of the voices. Sometimes the alto part splits into two and I’m only one of a couple of voices and I can hear my contribution, but most of the time, I just tuck in a note that sounds OK with the rest of the notes. lol) celebrating MLK day. I do love so much music in my life, lots of singing and lots of guitar practicing, and I love the social aspect of it all, but I struggle with being OK with…never being very good at it. Is that OK? Of course it’s OK, but it’s disheartening in a kind of over-the-hill kind of way. Monday we had lunch with the pared down DC Martins.
A long time ago, almost a year ago, Vince ask – for his birthday – for us to get pajamas for Elka. So we finally did and it provided some much needed happiness on Monday. Elka is so accommodating to our whims and silliness. What a girl!
Well it got to the low 50s inside the house, and it was cold. (The bedrooms were still warm). And I was kind of grumpy – I’ve realized this recently, if I try to skimp a little on the heating/cooling and it’s too warm or cold in the house, I get moody, grouchy – work seems like a pointless burden. It pains me to think that I’ve turned into some sort of climate control princess, but I think it’s, unfortunately true. Though, I’d get hardly anyone would be happy at 52F in the house. But our nice HVAC guy came late on Thursday night and installed a new blower and it took all night for the house to rewarm itself.
I didn’t want to go out to eat every night, so we temporarily set up a dining room in our primary bedroom.
But then by Friday, we were back in business, my parents came over for Indian food.
Our heater broke two nights ago, so the house is…cold. Well half-cold. We have two heaters, one for the upstairs (geothermal) and one for the downstairs (gas). The downstairs one is 20 years old and the motor burned out. We had our guy out yesterday to diagnose the issue and fingers crossed today, they’ll have the part and get it installed. I’m grateful that our bedrooms and offices are warm. It was 19F last night and will fall to 14F tonight. The downstairs is hovering around 57-60F.
Jeremy was going to be slightly upset if we had to replace the entire system because he wants to carefully consider the replacement because he doesn’t want to replace it with another gas furnace. But we might have had to do that with the pressure of a cold snap. And then we’d have a gas furnace for another 20 years. So he’s thinking about the system he wants installed in the near future because it’s going to need to be replaced sooner rather than later. Of course, we didn’t size the geothermal to do the entire house because…it was expensive and I didn’t think we could spare the money back then, but now we all wished we’d sized it bigger. Oh well. Hindsight is a thing.
It was too cold to eat dinner in the downstairs and we were contemplating having dinner upstairs. But instead we used it as an excuse to eat out at our favorite place A&Js, it’s fun to introduce Joab to Taiwanese food which he declared is really good. I’ve been trying to dial down just a little how much I’ve been eating since Christmas, so it’s been a few weeks since we’ve ordered a lot of food and I’ve eaten to complete satiety. Jeremy was in charge of the ordering and he ordered generously. It was glorious.
Did I write about my new year’s resolution? They are very different from the usual ones. I like setting them and then I usually never refer back to them again. 1) If I’ve decided to do something, don’t insert the “gah, I don’t feel like doing this” as I’m doing it. Like sometimes (examples): my job, watering the plants I love, changing sheets, going outside, etc. I’ve already decided I’m going to do it, why make it more unpleasant for myself? 2) Enjoy the things I’m supposed to enjoy as I’m doing them! Sometimes I can get grumpy doing fun things. 3) Beauty <- I have no idea what that means, but I want it all. All the beauty.
I’m learning to crochet with megan – we are working on the same kit! I’m going dutifully in order of the kits (once-a-month, though I’m on kit 2 and just received kit 6). Megan is hopping around all the kits and doing the ones she wants to do. This was totally predictable as our personalities are different in this way as well. I’ve also lost one of the squares I’ve done and an entire ball of dark purple yarn.
Oh, also I’m trying to not watch too much youtube. I like, inexplicably, watching shopping haul videos, it’s very soothing. So I’m replacing it with actually watching movies. Turns out I can watch a lot of movies if I’m not watching youtube videos. I’m doing a Letterboxd movie challenge which gives a theme for each week and you are supposed to find a movie that fits that theme to watch. I’m enjoying that challenge, I also discovered that the library has its own video streaming app with lots of great films FOR FREE. I’m trying to lengthen my attention span, I’m upset that I can focus only on short video or short essays, I’m going towards movies and books and trying to not reach for my phone and/or the internet while I’m reading or watching. Though it’s 10,000x more stressful than watching a youtube shopping video – I mean a good movie has tension in it and the feeling like – OMG, are these people going to die?! – which is the exact opposite of a shopping haul.
A fun weekend – very social, but also chill. Friday, I drove to Tysons for lunch at Founding Farmers with a group of coworkers. It’s amazing that you can work with a bunch of people for two years and not really know what their body looks like or what mannerisms they have eating lunch. Working from home is super convenient, but you do lose lots of things.
Friday night, we went to Friday Vibes at Main Street and it was karaoke night. Megan, along with Edda, Ginny, Emelina and Joab came. Jeremy was a little under the weather, so he stayed home. It was fun, Edda clearly had a nice time. Friday nights are always a bit tiring, but vibes is always fun.
Joab loves kareoke night, he sung I Just Died in Your Arms.
Saturday night, we went out to dinner with my parents at a place that had a special on Peking duck. Delicious! I’m trying to get Edda to look at the camera. 🙂
A few months ago, I got a landscape designer to draw up plans for the backyard and the front yard. It’s a challenging ecosystem because we have shade, bad soil and lots of deer. And I wanted, as much as possible, native plants. The designer was a lot of fun to work with as she spent an afternoon at our house and then drew this design on graph paper which I really love! (I want to frame these someday). Of course, I don’t know any plants she listed so I would have never been able to plan this myself, but she thought of all the different seasons and how they’ll give different colors in spring, summer and fall and how tall they would be and how to block more traffic noise (we live really close to the freeway).
Right now, our backyard is a Japanese stiltgrass wasteland that grows knee high for years and I’ve done nothing about it. I see the invasive tree of heaven encroaching from the sides which I’m going to try to kill with herbicides this summer. Jeremy really wanted to return the back half to trees, so that’s what we are doing. I did get a landscaper to quote me to put it all the plantings in, but man it was a lot, I totally didn’t want to pay for that, so I’m going to try to do it myself. Bit by little bit. I’m a little afraid that the deer will eat all of it in the nanosecond I’m on vacation, so I don’t want to spend out a ton of money to have it be a buffet for deer. Even if the deer didn’t eat it, I also didn’t want it all to go in at once and then I’d be overwhelmed taking care of it because I don’t want to hire out the garden work (at least not right now).
Yesterday, I went out in the middle of the day – so cold and snow covered yard, and marked out the grid and then placed flags for the center six trees. I’m dreaming of spring.
I’ve been watching the deer eat our neighbors’ bushes. It’s very cold outside and I’m curious about what the deer will eat and/or not eat. They eat a lot of things.
Jeremy went to his first dog training class. Elka didn’t get to go, only one dog was allowed to go and someone volunteered their dog before he could. This adorable six month old golden retriever.
Snow days! I picked up Edda from school early on Friday because the storm was moving in and 2/3rds of Edda’s teachers were like, OK! We really want snow days, so…let’s wear our pajamas inside out, sleep with spoons under pillows and flush ice cubes down the toilet. I was going to implement these tactics, but alas, I didn’t have a chance to because they cancelled school early on Sunday afternoon. And then we rejoiced (or at least all the teachers rejoiced). Haha, Dave, my friend in Minnesota, says everyone in Minnesota is jealous because in MN, the ground is BROWN. It’s not supposed to be brown ground in MN. lol.
Edda is bored, we are hunkered down. It’s a cozy feeling. Jeremy did all the shoveling – I send him hearts. We had a long argument on Sunday morning about hanging maps on walls, but now we are A-OK.
I’m so happy I got fencing around my test tree before the snow fell because I can see where the deer go through the yard. And they did go through a lot, but totally ignored the tree. (They will eat the tender baby branches even without leaves in the winter, for sure.) They messed with the compost pile, but that is a feature not a bug. OK, I’m confident I can keep deer away from baby trees. I ordered six baby trees for the spring: white oak, witch hazel, serviceberry and redbud. I bought the smallest, cheapest ones I could find and fingers crossed that they will not all die in my care. I’ll spend more on the wire cages and the metal stakes. I’m going to try to channel both my mother and my mother-in-law, both great gardeners with completely different styles.
