Just regular folks.

Jeremy left Maryland on Thursday afternoon to begin our week-long adventure in the northeast. He left with Elka and our minivan to pick up Bob, Katherine and their two dogs Bunter and Wimsey. Jeremy spent the night in Kimberton with them and then on Friday headed up towards Mt Washington – the highest peak in the NE United States.

Sometimes I think Elka is bored because our house is so quiet. Without little kids, it’s very staid. It’s nice to see her so excited to go on this adventure with us.

Mt Washington is famous for having very dangerous weather and has the highest recorded wind speed (over 200 mph) not in a tornado/typhoon. It can be quite cold – even in August. So once a year, they close it to traffic and hold a bike race straight up the mountain – about 7 miles at steady grades of 16-20 %.

He is a crazy person. With all these other crazy people. He did make it to the top of the mountain without stopping – which was his main goal. It was neither cold nor windy.

Then they spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the area and walking the doggies.

They had ice cream. So they ordered pup pops for the doggies which turned out to be two scoops of regular vanilla ice cream with a couple of dog treats in them! I was surprised because usually pup pops are made without sugar which is bad for dogs and for people too! But Elka ate her two scoops without complaining.

Then Edda and I on Sunday, took a flight from DC to Manchester NH where Jeremy and company picked us up and tried to fit two more people plus luggage (wheelchair) into the van. The paddleboard had to go on top – it’s larger than I thought it would be. (Katherine said she wanted to go see lakes that dogs could swim at – hence the paddleboard). I think I dropped the fuel economy down at least 15%. So I better go paddleboarding at least once.

Even though Elka is older and bigger than the other two dogs, the smaller dogs are alpha to Elka and took her bed as their own. So Elka had to squish between two humans. haha.

The granite people came today and did such a fantastic job shaving off about 3/4 of an inch of granite in the hole and helped us slide in the stovetop. And afterwards, Jeremy connected the 220 V to it (with some texting help from our electrician who assured us that we could attach it ourselves and if we had any questions to ask him and, of course, we had questions (what does the white wire do?)). And we inaugurated it by boiling a pan of water!

So hooray for us! We installed it ourselves (kind of)- with help from the electrician, plumber and stone folks. Haha, so hardly ourselves, but as Jeremy said, we were the general contractors. And now, one fewer gas appliance. As we slowly wean ourselves off of gas (both natural and automotive) and towards electric.

And, also yes, our stove has an app. And is wifi/bluetooth enabled. wtf? really.

OMG, I’m slowly recovering from the secondary rash from my second bout of poison ivy this summer. I’m not completely itch-free, but I’m like firmly on the less itchy side of recovery. When you are in the middle of being sick or unwell, you kind of forget how good you feel when you are well. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Now, the grass needs trimming and I’m afraid of the outdoors. lol. It will have to happen.

Jeremy is beside himself. We have ants in the kitchen. I hate summer. Bugs, itchy, the grass grows, the schedule is whack, it’s hot, blah blah blah.

Jeremy spent Sunday morning on his bike. He’s in good shape, ready for his race this weekend. Fingers crossed he doesn’t get sick (so many people with Covid are running around (literally)) and his saddle sores don’t get the best of him.

After we got home from Long Island at 4 pm on Thursday, I went immediately to urgent care. This has been a terrible summer skin-wise. My 2nd bout of poison ivy was held in check during my 12 day course of steroids, but it wasn’t completely gone by the time I had tapered off about a week ago. I just assumed that it would clear slowly now that it wasn’t very bad. But instead, it seemed to take its time to go away and at the same time morph into little red dots all over my body which were like 40x itchier than the actual poison ivy itself. I was pretty miserable on the ride home from Long Island and when I headed into urgent care, the doc took one look at me and said – I’ll give you a third course of steroids, but you can’t take any more after this and you need to see a dermatologist. And whatever you do don’t scratch. And I realized he was right, all the raised, angry areas were due to my scratching. The actual itchy parts were tiny little pustules randomly all over my body. (I did momentarily think that I got bitten by bed bugs, but the itchiness was the worst closest to the poison ivy and radiated out from there all the way to my back, abdomen, groin and upper legs, nothing on my ankles or lower legs which were the only uncovered parts while I was sleeping.) He, depressingly, told me that the steroids probably wouldn’t clear it and it could last for months and it needed more targeted care. Jeremy has a dermatologist that he likes, but she schedules appointments two months out and I completely was beside myself thinking that I would be so itchy for months and months. And it’s true, the steroids do not do anything to this secondary reaction and on Friday and Saturday – Jeremy asked me, so what’s your plan today? And I said, I plan to concentrate my efforts on not scratching. And I did accomplish this – I didn’t scratch for two days even though I was out of my mind with itchiness. I took baths, Benadryl, the useless steroids, I bought all the different anti-itch creams from CVS and slathered away. I even read articles about turning my scratching hand into my healing hand and concentrating healing vibes into my hands and then rubbing it on my itchy areas instead of scratching. Gah, such woo woo crap. But whatever, I did what I could. But I think I can say finally this morning, all the raise streaks of itchiness hell are subsiding today. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still itchy, just like 40% less itchy than yesterday. OMG. My poor body, so confused and overreacting. I’m like – please chill out, I’m ok. totally ok, you don’t need to send the army of histamines willy nilly all over.

I’ll write a few more little stories from our trip to Long Island. So, because I wanted to keep the trip affordable and funny, I did book this RV on airbnb and it was perfect, funny and cheap and totally fine – it has hundreds of happy reviewers on the website and I left a five-star review as well. And it was like 10 minutes from everything we wanted to see. Anyways, towards the end of the visit at the fire department (which was happy and lasted like an hour), one of the firemen asked us where we were staying. And I mentioned that we were staying in an RV in Brentwood. And then he kind of turned his head and said – oh, you are staying in the hood. And then Megan asked, what is your definition of “hood”? Clearly, we have different definitions of being in the hood. We’ve been laughing at this for days now.

Megan is also very well trained in claw prize machines. She studies youtube videos about this craft and I watched her win this teddy bear. You usually can’t win with only one try because you need the first try to gather information about the machine and the objects in the bin. And you can’t decide what you want and go for it, you have to figure out which one is possible to grab and then tailor your attempts towards that. This bear cost $15 worth of tries. I was impressed.

I took the last three days off and traveled with Megan to Hauppauge, NY in the middle of Long Island. We were there as sort of a pilgrimage for her father (who recently passed away) and see her family’s lore. We drove up on Tuesday, we stayed in an RV (airbnb) parked in someone’s driveway, toured on Wednesday, and drove home on Thursday. It was so amazingly successful, I’m happy I got invited to go.

First stop, the all-volunteer fire station where Megan’s paternal grandfather was active for many, many years. We just happened to bump into an ex-chief in the parking lot who knew all the Millers and happily gave us a exhaustive tour of all the memorabilia.

They lovingly maintain this old fire truck for parades and nice days.

We then went by the house where her dad grew up. It’s abandoned and rumored to have been bought by a dentist. We were poking around, when from across the parking lot came a dentist in full scrubs and the light on her head and she scolded us for being on the property and sure enough, it was the dentist and she softened upon learning about Megan’s connection to the house. We talked to her a bit as she was probably leaving a patient with their mouth open with Mr. Thirsty hanging.

This Carvel location featured prominently in Megan’s childhood, as they always drove by and commented on it, but never stopped for ice cream. We stopped for ice cream.

Megan’s grandfather was the superintendent of schools in the town, so we stopped by the high school and found this plaque which Megan has heard so much about, but has never seen it before. This was a great find.

Finally, we went to the library where there was a Myron Miller archives with old photos, clippings, handwritten letters and a very enthusiastic librarian who had collected and cataloged it all. It was super impressive (the little one is Megan’s father). Megan carefully went through the clippings and I took a nap in a leather chair.

Finally, in the morning before we hit the road, we (shhhh…) buried some of Megan’s dad’s ashes between the gravestone of his father and uncle. Megan had been carrying the ashes in her purse, so, you know, he kind of got to visit all the locations with us while we tooled around town.

I had such a wonderful time touring this little town and meeting various folks enthusiastic about their jobs and happy to share what history they could. We also ate at a lot of diners!

Busy Sunday! In the morning, Ning came over and we talked about gender. Hahaha. Recently, I’ve had some feelings over transgender-ness (not myself, I’m solidly she/her) that I wanted to suss out with some friends and I have done that in the past week. Nothing makes me feel older than this topic, except for maybe tiktok. OK, everything makes me feel old. Anyways, Ning, being from Thailand and about half a generation younger than me, has a unique perspective on gender as, really, lots of people change their gender all the time in Thailand and it’s considered normal and no one gives them any trouble. You don’t need to go to a doctor, you can start transitioning anytime, people admire transgender folks. It’s no big deal. So I will take this to heart and let it be. Which is really what I want to do, make it no big deal and let it be. And I will.

Then we went to lunch with Maryam and Tom at one of my favorite restaurants, Panera. We are planning on going to Las Vegas to celebrate Tom’s 70th birthday in late September and we worked on logistics and planning of which there is a lot. Maryam loves Vegas and loves glitz and nightlife, we are a little more lukewarm about Vegas – dare I say that Jeremy and I are prudish (gasp!), but we want to do what they want to do. It’s a big party – like 25 people, we aren’t the only ones going, so I wasn’t sure how much “hanging out” we were going to do together. The main party is Saturday, but they were flying out on Wed and we might have condensed the time we spent there, but everyone seemed to want to hang out and get tattoos together (Jeremy – absolutely not), so we came home and matched their flights. We are as game as we are going to be for gambling, tattoos, piercings, little chapels, and fake Venetian canals. We were kind of excited for Edda to pull some slots, but turns out you need to be 21. So no slots for Edda.

In the evening, we went to Sunday night dinner where we talked about everything except politics which was a lot of fun and laughing, until someone was really excited to talk about politics and then like 70% of us left the table even though we ALL AGREE on politics. Literally, so tiresome and, well, tiresome and kind of exhausting.

And then Vince asked me for a photo of my college class ring. And I felt old all over again. In the last millenium!

A nice, quiet weekend. Some socializing today, but yesterday, a day of puttering around the house. I’ve been slowly working on our front entry which for 15 years has really just looked like a shipping warehouse, full of opened amazon boxes, piled mail bubble wrap and discarded shoes and turned it into a little plant sanctuary. The plants are mostly cuttings or gifts from people and I’ve found pretty pots here and there and I’m enjoying taking care of them (mostly). I’ve watched lots of plant-y youtube videos of people with 100s of plants in their house – that’s not me, but I’m having fun.

This weekend, I finished sewing up the little red curtain that I hung from our glove table that we made together in a woodworking class when we first started dating to hide an enormous blue recycling bin and white plastic trash can for all the incoming mail and trash that can fit there. You know how your house looks totally normal to you and then a friend who has never been there walks into the room and then you are a little like – yikes? That doesn’t look so great, that big pile of something-or-other? I’m not very self conscious about the house, there are people here all the time (almost everyday), I generally won’t “clean up” before company, but…still sometimes.

Jeremy worked his plywood skills and finished out the wood shelves for this wrought iron shelving and I’m hoping to paint it next weekend. I’m thinking a bold red for the iron and pale pink for the shelves. I invision plants of this shelf as well, but this will be well far away from windows, so it’ll need some grow lights installed which I’m a little bit hesitant about.

And finally, Jeremy spent the weekend moving TVs around. The TV in Edda’s bedroom was really small and very slow to load, so we got a new TV for Edda in the living room and then moved the living room TV up to Edda’s bedroom. This involved moving bookcases around and mounting hardware around. As we were moving the books around, we laughed and said who would have ever imagined that paper books wouldn’t be a thing anymore. These are mostly books from Jeremy’s college era.

Something ate this. A deer? A rabbit? Those damn rabbits. So cute, yet so hungry.

I took the morning off and went paddleboarding with Kristen at Black Hills. We tried to get out early as it was going to be hot and we had a great time. A lot of talking on the paddleboards, some paddling – I’m actually kind of nervous standing on the board, I’m much more comfortable on my knees or sitting, but I’m practicing and did not fall in not-on-purpose. We may have taken a dip in the middle of the lake on purpose. The lake was quiet, but not empty. I love doing these things on the weekdays. Great day! Poor Elka, she saw that I was packing up to go somewhere fun and she loves going on hikes with Kristen, and I would have love to have taken her, but she isn’t trained to actually go on a paddleboard. I’m hoping to work on that in the next few weeks.

Sometimes, it’s a pain to do these things, like you gotta lug your stuff out of the garage and then lug it to the body of water and then pump up the board and then get wet, but it’s actually not that bad and the reward is wonderful. Kristen actually has an electric pump for her board and I pumped my board by hand faster than the electric pump – so, I impressed myself. I also touched plants with my body and really, really scrubbed down in the shower afterwards and I’m hoping to ward off my summer streak of poison ivy (which is still bothering me and won’t be 100% cleared by the time I finish my course of steroids, but it’s much, much better than it would have been.)

I planted one of my first native on my mission to transform the lawn. Appropriately, a black eyed susan, the state flower of Maryland. I just dug a hole in the ground and plunked it down. Jeremy took one look at it and said – will a deer eat it? I said, I think not and it’s been there for like 36 hours, and no deer has nibbled it.