Rob has arrived safely in Seattle, and the apartment was not a scam (aside from costing more per month for a studio/efficiency than the mortgage payment we had on our three-bedroom house, but that appears to be normal for the area). That was Wednesday night. We have not heard from him since, though he has participated in his sibling group-chat so we know from his siblings that he is alive. It is starry-eyed baffling to me that he is ACTUALLY IN SEATTLE RIGHT NOW.
Paul and I are both actively working on being cool here. We have decided that even Very Chillaxed Parents could check in after a week, so this coming Tuesday/Wednesday I will send an extremely casual email to see how things are going. I don’t want to make him feel like we’re hounding/pestering him, but I also don’t want to make him feel like we don’t care / like we forgot him. I also plan to explain that although he has grown up knowing his mother Hates The Phone, that that does not apply to her BELOVED CHILDREN, and that if he wants to talk on the phone I am ALL IN.
Instead of doing yoga videos this morning, I looked up physical-therapy knee-pain videos, and tried a few. I will keep trying the exercises for awhile to see if they help. My doctor also said a knee brace would help, but she didn’t mention any particular kind, and I searched “knee brace” and there are so so many options, from “looks like shapewear for fashionably smoothing the knee lumps” to “looks like something a hospital/AI/spacelab would install.” I am overwhelmed. Do any of you have a knee brace to recommend? My guess is that there is variety because there is a variety of needs. And without knowing why my knees hurt, it would be hard to choose/recommend a brace. If it is helpful, my doctor thinks it is osteoarthritis. I think it might also be low-tone / overly wobbly joints. My knees feel a little swoopy, a little tricksy; and all my children have been diagnosed as “low tone” and I think they get it from me (most of my joints bend farther backward than they should, as do theirs).
While I’m on the topic of asking for advice: If you have sliding glass shower doors, how do you keep them clean? I use the squeegee daily, and I scrub them periodically with a scrub-brush and various cleaning supplies, but they always look kind of cloudy/non-shining-clean to me.
School is out for summer, and the remaining kids and I are trying to decide on this summer’s project/plan. Last summer was watching musicals, and we didn’t watch anywhere near all of them, so we could continue that. But I feel like choosing a new mission. I might choose something new for myself, even if the group chooses to keep watching musicals. I am thinking I might read gossipy non-fiction about historical figures, or maybe I will read engaging travel memoirs, or maybe I will study witchcraft (more on this after I finish the book I am reading).
If you and/or your kids have read my dear friend’s new book The Art of Magic, and have not yet left a review, I hope you will do so. (It does not have to be a HIGH-QUALITY or AGONIZINGLY-WELL-THOUGHT-OUT review: apparently even “Wow!” and “Great book!” and “Loved it!” are AMPLY SUFFICIENT.) I don’t think things should work this way: it shouldn’t be “More Media Engagement/Pressure/Popularity = Better Than!!” But it seems that it IS measured that way. And so I wish to do what little I can do to assist, and one of the little things I can do is to nag people to leave reviews. And so here we are. And I thank you so much if you are willing to cooperate with this, because I know it’s a hurdle, and I pledge not to ask too many more times. (Once or twice more, and then stopping permanently, is what I have in mind. So the end is in sight.)
(image from Amazon.com)
I am so delighted to be wrong and so sorry to drag you into my generalized anxiety! I am glad to hear that he is settling in and I hope he is having exactly the kind of adventure he is looking for. <3
Once and future witches is one of my book club reads that I haven’t got to yet! Can’t wait to read it and hear what others think :)
I just read it and loved it :)
So happy to hear that the first update is about things going fine so far! I hope that he checks in with you before a week is up, but I realize that it is unlikely.
The cloudy shower door is making me think hard water, so I would advise a cleaner specifically made for resolving that. I also think there are sprays you can apply daily to prevent the buildup.
My house cleaner uses a mix of vinegar, Dawn detergent and water on our glass shower doors. We squeegee in between the cleanings, and the doors stay relatively clear.
I’ve heard that Rain-ex on the did after they have been cleaned helps keep them from clo6sing as quickly. I haven’t tried it though. I’m in Seattle if there’s ever an emergency and Rob needs assistance.
For shower doors, I squeegee after each use, and have one of those dish sponge on a stick thing that is filled with a mix of dawn, vinegar, and water, and give the doors a quick scrub down with most of my showers. Shower spray after use as well.
Using RainEx definitely also helped but I felt I had to reapply it fairly often. We had super hard water in that house which I am sure did not help matters.
Eventually, I also just stopped using that bathroom since I was the only one making all this effort and I did not want resentment to fester. That worked nicely because two of us lived in the house and there were two full bathrooms. (and I shared mine with any guests that came, so I’d know mine was clean for them!)
I use that Dawn power spray on my shower doors, the kind that’s meant for dishes, and then I use a Scour Daddy (probably any scrubby would be fine) to gently scrub it in, and rinse with water. I always tried the squeegee but it never gave good results, probably because we have very hard water here.
Proof of life is good. I hope you hear more from him soon.
What you call low tone I would call hypermobility (tomato/tomato, US/UK) and it caused me 3 knee dislocations and a fairly major surgery. Buuuut all those dislocations had happened by 28 so I think if you’ve made it this long it would take something pretty traumatic to do that. The only brace I’ve ever worn is on with a kind of circular hole in the middle for the patella, and the idea is that it stabilises the kneecap. But I would only suggest that for you for fairly extreme exercise (I wore mine skiing) because they’re not super comfortable to wear.
There are definitely exercises that will help with hyper-mobility at this point, when you’ve not done any more damage. My knee ligaments ended up being like old elastic bands with no elastic left, at which point I had to have them all replaced with bits of my hamstring. Not so fun! But if you Google ‘strength exercises for hypermobile knees’ you’d get lots. Quite a lot you can do while sitting down watching TV which is my kind of exercise…
In terms of Rob, would a kind of weekly fixed call work? Like you just tell him ‘ok I’m going to give you a call every Sunday evening at about 7pm, no worries if you’re busy’? I FaceTime my mum with the kids most Saturdays while we eat brunch, and it is nice to have a weekly check-in.
I still call my dad every Sunday! I have since I went to college 30 (gulp) years ago. A weekly call sounds like a great idea!
When her knee is acting up, my dancer daughter wears a Velcro knee brace most of the day to stabilize things – search Amazon for Techware pro knee brace support. It’s pretty stiff so not the most comfortable for all day/night wear, but it really helps with the pain so there’s a comfort trade off there. If you have good benefits (ugh America), physical therapy is amazing and is for everyone at any stage of pain or injury. They can isolate the exercises a bit but I think the work is broadly the same – strengthening the muscles around the wobbly/naturally hyperextended joint, so quads, hamstrings, calves, etc. Good luck!
I’m starting subliminal messages with my now-14 year old: when I noticed he got a kick out of Bo Burnham’s music I purchased the song “Facetime with my Mom Tonight” and I occasionally put it in the play rotation when we’re all in the car.
Here is my suggestion re: knee pain. See if your doctor will refer you to physical therapy. I have had numerous incidents where I had pain and my doctor kind of shrugged and suggested arthritis or getting older but sigh I will refer you to PT and see what they say and it has turned out to be “weak” something and the physical therapist lays out a plan and it works so amazingly well and I get released from physical therapy with a whole set of strengthening exercises I can do on my own.
Just in case you need another data point. As a young adult, I was Rob myself (including the math degrees). I made three huge moves (Canada to the UK, Canada to Iowa, Iowa to Texas) entirely solo. I was extremely independent but I STILL was thrilled when my parents checked in with me, despite never daring to actually request it. Just putting that out there.
I would also see if you have benefits for physical therapy and they would also be able to recommend a good brace for you. You could always start out with a simple elastic support brace or ace bandage and then go to a heavy brace if you need more
Thank you for sharing the good news about Rob! I hope he can find a job soon, and given what you said about his major (computer science?) that seems likely in Seattle. As this point the city is mostly computers.
Back when you first mentioned your friend’s book, I suggested that my local library should purchase it, and they accepted my suggestion, so yay. I have had suggestions rejected in the past, and I take that way too personally, so this is a win for everyone.
So glad to here that Rob is there. I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear from you often; particularly now since (I assume) he doesn’t already have friends there.
I also throwing out the “do you have hard water?” I think I’ve read somewhere that hard water can actually “etch” the glass.
My husband is a physical therapist. I think he would urge you to be seen by a PT. At his clinic they do free screens. I wonder if a place near you would do that. They might be able to give you some quick advice or suggest a knee brace, or exercises that will help it get better. I would worry about doing the wrong thing and making it worse.
I say this while acknowledging that it is VERY easy for us to get advice, because Coach lives here. We do sometimes feel like the shoemaker’s kids, because to us Coach is often of the ‘rub-some-dirt-in-it’ mindset.
Good luck and I hope you hear from Rob soon. That is nerve wracking.
On the shower thing: People have mentioned “hard water”, which just means water with lots of calcium carbonate (= chalk). Calcium is easily dissolved my citric acid. I’m not from the US, so no idea if it’s the same there, but I can buy citric acid as a powder in the grocery store as it’s used for baking, apparently (I don’t bake, myself) and then I just dissolve some powder in water which I heat up in my electric kettle. This has the great side effect of cleaning my kettle. Once it’s cooled down, I either just use a sponge to clean my shower door with this citric acid water, or I put it into a spray bottle, spray the door and tiled walls with it and let it sit a while before washing it off with “clean” water.
I absolutely love citric acid for this since it’s completely non-smelly (contrary to vinegar, for example), cheap, doesn’t affect my skin in any way and is harmless to the environment.
Magic Erasers will take care of your glass shower door. They even make a kind specifically for bathroom surfaces, which is good, but the regular magic eraser works great too.
Study witchcraft. You will not regret it. So many ways to go with it….history, travel, food, environmentalism, and yeah, spells and circles and holidays…you can start tomorrow with the summer solstice.
Shower doors: I use a flat razor blade and am very careful near the rubber seal. I feel certain that this is probably terrible for some reason. BUT.
I was so discouraged, thinking my shower doors were permanently “water etched” and then I tried the razor… And the result was great, though the process was tedious. Now I can’t stop using razor blades to clean them because the clear is just so…CLEAN… LIKE NEW. It feels worth the time and risk.
Bought The Art of Magic, read it, reviewed it. I await further swistle instructions. :)
Thank you!!
For contact with Rob: we play Nintendo with our far away daughter. We each have a Switch, and an online account, and we each have Mariokart. So every Sunday night we put her on speaker phone and play a few rounds of Mariokart. It gives us something to do and focus on, and the conversation just flows in and out. A few times, something has come up that made us all put down the controllers and really talk it all out, so it can be flexible that way too.