The Christmas excitement continues….Ning had her baby yesterday! They were here on the 10th and she was already 3 cm dilated – the baby not due until Jan 4th and we were like – that baby is going to come any day now! Grandma wasn’t scheduled to come until Christmas Eve, so we told them that if they needed help with Noah if the baby comes early, we would be happy to step in. The parents went to the hospital at 9 or 10 am, Noah was already in day care, so he spent the day there. And then Dara picked him up at five and brought him to our house for dinner. We had Ginny and her son here and then we invited Mike & Sofie over and it was a raucous party.
Tons of credit goes to Sofie who happily entertained Noah until 8:30 pm when it was everyone’s bedtime. Brian came by to drop off clothing and loveys, but there were tears and a hard goodbye.
Yes, we set up the tent the the master bedroom. The house is a disaster, laundry not done, paper and packages strewed all over the place, toilets all in mid-repair (I needed to replace and repair almost all the toilets in the house before Christmas, last weekend I spent hours, and hours doing this…they are almost all done and working) – and now I keep making it messier by setting up tents and trains and other things all over the house.
And Edda had (unusually) a strong seizure in the middle of the night last night. We don’t often see them, but I think they are on the uptick these days, unfortunately. And then Noah got up and had a bowl of Cheerios and blueberries.
So, as you know, I don’t wrap gifts. We only open delivery boxes. But I realized the secret santas would start on Sunday Dec 18, so the boxes needed to be opened before then. So on Friday Dec 16th, we held what I considered, the family gift opening day – 9 days before Christmas. Elka got this funny hat. My father walked away with the best present of the night, an Apple Watch. Normally, I would not have gifted this to him as I thought he wouldn’t be interested and the watch can be a little not intuitive to use, but sometime in late fall, he got really interested in Jeremy and my Garmin watches and we gave him an old one to try out and he really enjoyed it and texted us questions about it, so we decided to get him the most recent Apple watch which pairs better with his phone and is just better overall. We are all eyeing the Apple watch – but not yet for any of us, I’m patiently waiting for my Garmin watch to die, usually the battery or the charging port – though it’s still quite hardy and I get texts and it tracks my running better than the Apple watch (for now – it’s next iteration, I think, will surpass Garmin’s running capabilities). Jeremy is always deciding when to jump ship from Android over to Apple – he covets all Apple things besides the phone itself – the watch, the earbuds, the iPad. So whenever he switches over, it will be an expensive day.
Elka did not like her hat. She’s pretty good at taking it off her head and then eating the pom pom at the top.
Jeremy spent Saturday morning clearing out extra jars. He likes to keep extra around, but we were starting to get too many extra.
Saturday night, we went to Jen and James’s annual Christmas party – our first non-family, big party after Covid. We saw some old friends from the dog park there and had a good time. We walked the couple of miles there and back to play Pokemon go and spend some time with each other at night and also condense the time at the party (we can be a bit intimidated by parties) and we put on our best themed-outfits.
And because we were walking in the dark, Jeremy put on his light-up safety vest!
On Sunday, we did the secret santa gift exchange for the DC martins (I did wrap these gifts!). Vince and I made a tiramisu and as a gift for the first night of Chanukah, I let Bette have at it by letting her unabashedly licking the serving dish from which dessert came.
We all love Elka and she loves all of us very much – but I think she loves Jeremy the most. Yeah, I’m a bit jealous. I don’t think we’ve ever had a dog (or child!) who preferred one of us over the other. Elka’s not a strong preference – she doesn’t actively dislike me or anything – but if we are both sitting around, you can bet your bottom dollar that she’s nosing around for Jeremy to snuggle with.
I went to Sofie’s winter concert last night. I feel so lucky to have the chance to do these things, of course, I enjoy supporting Sofie and she was amazing (with a solo no less).
After the concert (which was the best concert ever, honestly, because it was very little talking, enough songs to be satisfying, but not too many to have it drag on..lol), I was home at and then Vince asked if we could watch some videos together and we said that they needed to be short because we needed to go to bed. Vince was like – it’s only 8:15 and we said – yeah, we need to go to bed soon. lol.
We like watching this (a new find for us grown-ups):
So I don’t like wrapping gifts, I don’t like wasting paper and it takes time to wrap everything up. So I’ve had this tradition (I acknowledge that no one else really likes this tradition, but no one else is stepping up to wrap gifts either) where on a certain unknown day, we just stop opening deliveries to the house. And then we move all the boxes to the tree on gift opening day and open them all at once – not knowing whose gift is in which box. Vince usually opens all the boxes for us. One year, we got windshield wipers for Christmas. This year, I’m sure there is a toilet flushing mechanism and dog food for Christmas. Honestly, I don’t buy very many gifts for our family (usually everyone just gets one thing) so this makes opening last longer and more funny. This year, the opening day needs to be earlier this because I will need to wrap the few gifts for secret santas this year. There are only 4 that need to be wrapped, and I’m happy to do that.
Yesterday, Jeremy drove Vince to see Yushan’s lab in Delaware ostensibly to see if Vince would be interested in spending the summer working in his lab. I asked Vince how the visit went and he laughed and said that he thought that he was the excuse for two old friends to spend the afternoon together to talk about hydrogen fuel policy. lol. Jeremy said during the 90 minutes of talk about policy that maybe Vince looked like he was going to fall asleep and then he told me that I totally would have fallen asleep too.
On Friday, I asked Jeremy to run some errands with me, the first to the bank to see if we could add my name to the safety deposit box (fail. only jeremy is on it) and to see if the key I had worked (fail. $150 to drill into the box – though I rooted around and really found the key! we will try again and not spend the $150). And then we went to Lowe’s to by my Christmas toilet.
And then I spent the afternoon trying to install the toilet – I do enjoy toilet installation in a weird way – it sounds impressive, but it’s really pretty easy. There is an issue with the basement toilet install in which the subfloor is too low compared to the inlet of the toilet (I knew this)…so I had my dad and Mike eyeball the situation and we came up with an idea to work around the problem. Mike, as he was helping me make a template of the base of the toilet, admired it and said – this is a nice toilet! And I laughed because I had been texting my girlfriends earlier in the day about not finding the toilet I wanted and they came back with all these different features and styles of toilets that they had bought recently. I wanted none of these things, I wanted what Mike admired which is a nice, reliable flushing mechanism (which matched the internal flushing mechanism of the other two toilets I had replaced in the house before the pandemic). I want the Honda Accord of toilets. This is usually my metric of all the things I buy, please, I just want the Honda Accord of things – not crappy cheap, but reliable and reasonably priced and super boring – but maybe you can add a sticker on it and make it funky.
Also at Lowe’s I bought a card table for $30 because my parents were coming over to teach Sofie how to play mahjong and I don’t have a standard 4 person table. My mom walked into the house and took one look at the table in its plastic wrapping and was like – I have so many tables, why did you buy this one? I should have brought one over! I asked if hers folded (it did not) and I said it was only $30 and I need to be able to put it away and she still looked at me as if I had wasted my valuable hard earned money, but by the end of the night, I think she secretly loved it because she asked where I bought it and I said Lowe’s and then she went wide-eyed and said Lowe’s sells mahjong tables? And I laughed.
On Saturday, I took Gene to see the live simulcast of the new opera The Hours. It premiered in New York at the Met on Tuesday, and I thought Gene would be interested (opera geek.) and he was. I invited him a bit late and most of the tickets were sold out! Who knew there were so many opera geeks, but I managed to buy two not in the front row – but seated separately, which was fine. I had had a terrible night’s sleep the night before, so I did take a nap during the first act (warm, dark, with music which, to me, had no melody and was constant, a perfect storm for an afternoon nap) which refreshed me and soldiered on through the rest of the performance. Vickey encouraged me to prep by watching the award-winning movie (there was no time to read the book), which I did spend 3-4 nights watching in 15-20 minute bursts and so the nap did not hinder my enjoyment of the opera, because I understood the plot. Did I enjoy the opera? Maybe? I was very impressed, but mainly I enjoyed taking Gene out to see something I knew he would enjoy.
I slept terribly the night before because Vince came home on Friday night. His flight came in at 9:30 and Jeremy went to pick him up and I wanted to stay up to see him, and I almost did, leaving the lights on in the bedroom letting a podcast or a youtube show run on my phone. He came bounding in close to 10:30, full of west coast alertness and and happiness and tried to have a long conversation with me about his grasp of fluid dynamics and I hugged him and shooed him away and then I couldn’t fall asleep from the excitement. It’s a bummer to me that in order to sleep well, I can’t really do anything exciting after 7:30 pm.
We tried to host Nat, Dara, Ning and Brian at the house on Saturday night, but as I walked in (late!) from the opera, I realized that they were hosting in our house. They were cooking! It was a really nice night where we chatted about being married and did the inaugural lighting of the thrift store Santa (which I didn’t find in any thrift store (I tried three) and had to buy from Etsy).
On Sunday, I made a pie, went for a run and spent time with my children. Vince showed me some of his notes from school. This looks hard. And it’s sideways, I’m sorry, I’m lazy to rotate it. Did I ever used to be able to do this? It seems impossible to me.
And then we celebrated Eric’s birthday with the chocolate silk pie I made. Happy birthday!
Vickey asked yesterday if I was feeling good going into this holiday season and I am! I have lots to do, but for the first time in a long time, I feel like I have time to do them and so I’m not completely stressed out. I had a leisurely, completely unrushed mid-week breakfast with a friend on Tuesday, I’m going to go to the opera this weekend, I’m almost done with Christmas shopping. Vince is coming home Friday night. All delicious things and I generally don’t feel like I’m running from one thing to the next. Thinking about the next thing I “have to do” while doing the thing before it. What a gift to myself. Jeremy and I fought yesterday in a very particular way in which he could watch me get completely enraged (which I rarely do – I was so mad I could have thrown something) and could understand without a doubt why I was mad and then we spent the afternoon dissipating the fight which should have put a damper on my good mood – and yet, I mostly still feel holiday cozy. This morning, to help me out and to make up for making me mad, I asked Jeremy to order two toilets (you know, for the holiday season) – I need to replace two in the house and frustratingly, of course, you can buy the $1100 one from Home Depot, but our favorite tried and true model (usually pre-pandemic $250 and a completely simple order) is out of stock. And so we spent at least 15-20 minutes looking at toilets on the Home Depot website. Jeremy looked at me while we were contemplating the difference between regular height, chair height and comfort height and whether the comfort height (ADA compliant) would not be compliant for Edda and said – I know you gave me a simple task to do to help you out, but I’m failing at it. I’m sorry. I laughed in both exasperation and affection – no toilets for me this Xmas. I’m going to limp along with replacement parts until the toilet supply chain stabilizes.
Vince is rocking his fluid dynamics class. Jeremy came into my office yesterday after we’d gotten this text and smiled and laughed at me and said – do you remember in 7th grade when you felt like he couldn’t do fractions and you bemoaned that he’d never learn math? Vince never was in the most advanced math class in high school and did not get 5s on any math AP exams that he took, always a little behind, always not caring very much. I totally remembered and totally believed that he didn’t understand fractions (he didn’t! I swear, we spent so much time going over the damn worksheets as if I myself were a seventh grader all over again), so I don’t really quite understand how he’s pulling this off right now because fluids involves partial differential equations which implies a good handle on, you know, fractions, but he is. Jeremy’s like – he’s doing better in fluids than either of us ever did. And for sure he is. I said, I guess this means that he can get the Navier-Stokes equation tattoo that he’s always wanted. And Jeremy said, yeah, he earned it. (vince, in no way is this condoning the Navier-Stokes tattoo on your body or any tattoo on your body). It’s finals week now, good luck Vince! Can’t wait for you to be home!!!! <3
For so many so many years, I found putting up the Christmas tree a tedious task. So often, members of my family would want the tree up, but no one wanted to help me put it up. Actually, I’m not sure Jeremy’s feeling about the tree – he’s always happy that it’s up, but I think if I decided that it didn’t need to be up and didn’t do it, he wouldn’t care. Vince was always the most excited one, but he’d never want to put it up save a few branches or ornaments here and there and then move onto more exciting video games. Edda likes the lights for sure, but seemed OK either way. Last year, Alice was dying in hospice and I put up the tree in our house because we were having a big celebration of my mother’s birthday and I wanted it to be up for that dinner. One of the last big conversations I had with Alice was about Christmas trees – she insisted that I buy a prelit, relatively expensive one that takes only 10 minutes to put together. I resisted because I’m cheap that way. And sometimes, I like to suffer in my tedium, putting one branch on my Target tree at a time while the needles fall off the branches and cascade around me. Anyways, to have the final word on my stinginess, she gifted me expensive ornaments from the particular tree company she was enamored with which were delivered to me after her death.
They are absolutely ridiculous ornaments – all glass with feathers and birds. By far, the most expensive and elaborate ornaments I have. Each packed in styrofoam carved to match its shape exactly. One would think that I might look at putting up the tree differently this year, but I still kind of dreaded it and didn’t want to do it. But I did it earlier this week, kind of grumbling the entire time, but, of course, after I had put the whole thing together, there is a satiated happiness/sadness with the whole thing. But tilting more towards happiness this season. Who knows why? I don’t know. The tree is very pretty and has seen my family through many years of Christmas. The box says it was made in 2006, but I think we bought it on Christmas eve 2007. This year, to modernize it a bit, I attached it to a smart plug and put it on a schedule! So I never have to remember to turn it on/off. Sofie came over while I was trimming the tree and she said the exact same thing her mother had said a year ago – you need to buy the prelit easy-to-put-together tree, it takes only 10 minutes!
Baking continues: I made these sugar cookie bars for Sunday night dinner. I’m a sucker for compliments, everyone loved them. I told Colleen that I’m baking because I have time because I quit my job and she said – I’m so happy you quit your job, I love dessert! hahah.
So…I quit my nursing job. My last shift was the Friday before Thanksgiving. I wasn’t quite sure it was going to be my last shift until I was doing it. I was working with my favorite charge nurse and my favorite nurse tech and it was a smooth shift and it was the shift I wanted to end on. They’ve hired a bunch of new nurses and I could tell that they’d be fully staffed soon and they wouldn’t need me and I could also tell I needed to rest. I didn’t tell anyone it was my last shift except for my charge Astra who took me off the rest of the schedule – I had committed to shifts into January, but I couldn’t bear to continue going in. Of course, I can go back anytime, but if I do go back, I don’t think I’d go back to that floor, I need to try something new. I’m not quite sure if I’ll ever be a nurse again, so we’ll see.
There are many reasons for quitting – #1 is basically that I had had enough. I’m tired and need to refocus! Edda’s childcare situation still remains spotty – at least one of has to be home everyday, so we can’t both be working out of the house at the same time and as Jeremy’s travel starts picking up, I need to have more flexibility in my schedule. I also realized that I wasn’t practicing nursing enough – it is a practice and I wasn’t working enough to really get into the groove of things. Like if I don’t give blood for 6-8 weeks and then I need to do it emergently- the protocols can change within that time period and then you just need to know that it changed. So in order to keep up with the changing protocols/equipment and processes, I felt like I needed to work half time for at least 3-4 months which I wasn’t willing to do. Also, I want to spend more time with people who are important to me! Which is what I’m doing with my goofball pals. This is a particularly unflattering photo of me, but it is what it is.
Christine, a nurse on the unit, came by with her dog Apollo (and the rest of her extended family) to take a look at the basement apartment to maybe rent? We’ll see.
