Hey, what are you getting your dad for Father’s Day this year, if applicable? I wonder if we might make a comments section to help out those of us who are still looking for a good idea. My dad likes delightful/interesting/regional food and graphic tees, sometimes kitchen tools and workshop tools. If anyone knows of an online place that ships delightful/interesting/regional food, I would be interested in hearing about it. In the past I have liked O&H Danish Bakery and Nuts.com.

And what about the father of your children, if applicable? This year the father of my children has made things easy for me by making two remarks about things he might like to have—and both things absolutely SMACK of Father’s Day: one is a four-pack of Night Shift Peach Piescraper beer, and the other is a set of extra-long tongs for the grill. If he’s very, very good this year I might also get him the new Zelda game (which would be more of a summer-vacation gift for him plus several of the kids), but otherwise I feel like I’m all set there.

I am up early and wild-eyed, because I woke up needing to pee at 3:30 a.m., and then I lay awake going over to-do lists that were not at all doable at 3:30 a.m., thinking that I MUST sleep but that it was looking like I might not be able to—and then I DID drift off!!! …just before Paul’s alarm, which he had forgotten to shut off when he woke up before it went off, went off at 4:45. So I am up for the day, and not best pleased.

This alarm-clock thing has been happening jusssst often enough to make me want to throw his alarm clock against a wall, or perhaps against him, but not QUITE often enough to make a big deal about it. Like, it’s been happening about once every two weeks, and it’s been happening like this for maybe six months now—but after decades of not being an issue, so it’s a little perplexing. This morning I did make a little bit of a big deal about it, because this week (twin high school graduation and many, many end-of-year activities/ceremonies; twin 18th birthdays with all the doubled shopping and wrapping and cake-baking and special-dinner-making; twin college-prep stuff; many other miscellaneous things such as cats having vet appointments and one of Elizabeth’s art pieces needing to be picked up an hour away and Henry mentioning that one of the lenses keeps popping out of his glasses) is about as busy for me as the busiest pre-Christmas week, and I have SO much to do, and there are so many uncertainties (will it rain, which will absolutely bork graduation plans? will I be able to find the ingredient two separate grocery stores were out of?) and I have been counting on good sleep in order to cope with all of these tasks as well as to cope unshriekingly with the freshly-tilled awareness of how uneven the workload is in these sorts of busy times, and how after 25 years I can apparently like it or lump it. And then his alarm. Well.

I have been discovering once again how getting even the lowest-priority items off the to-do list can make a marked difference in my despair levels. Yesterday I put a little air in the car tire that periodically needs a little air, and also I filled the gas tank even though it still had just over a quarter tank, and even getting those two little things accomplished was enough to make me feel like I could cope at a higher level than before with the things that were more essential to get done, such as finding a Spotify gift card.

I also used the adrenaline momentum of coming home from So!! Many!! Errands!! to make a phone call: we keep getting medical bills for Edward’s routine medication infusions that are multiple hundreds of dollars rather than our usual $20 copay; and normally the hospital Edward goes to is impressively brisk and efficient at handling all these stressful little glitches behind the scenes without us having to do anything about it (which I regularly notice and feel grateful for, because of how often I have to leap and re-leap through hoops to get things covered for other medical providers); but this time we’re starting to get letters with deadlines after which they will send it to collections, so this time I called. I got someone very nice, who could not help at all. I honestly was not sure why they were answering the phone, when they could not tell me ANYTHING or do ANYTHING about ANYTHING. But they were very NICE, and they DID “send it to code review” and assured me that in the meantime I did not have to worry about paying it. They said that in their experience, almost every situation is completely resolved by code review. My guess is that the reason this is the only thing the person on the phone knows how to do is that someone EXTREMELY COMPETENT normally keeps these issues from getting to this point; very likely that same person is in charge of code-reviewing.

Anyway it felt nice to have made that call, which has been hovering over me. Why do I put off things that MUST be done? Am I trying to maximize the amount of time I spend being unhappy and stressed about them? (Though in this particular case I feel I have an excuse, since USUALLY my procrastination is rewarded. But I mean OVERALL.)

This kind of thing can feel like a glitch in the matrix:. I have a shower radio (it’s this one, if you are in the market, and it was/is expensive but I LOVE IT and have used it for years and years now with no issues), and it has five pre-set stations. This morning I clicked on the first station, and it was just finishing up playing Jessie’s Girl, and then it went to commercials. I switched to the second station: commercials. Third station: commercials. Fourth station: commercials. Fifth station: just finishing up playing Jessie’s Girl, and then went to commercials. (It is only TODAY, right now, that I learned it is Jessie’s Girl and not Jesse’s Girl.) (It seems like it should be Jesse’s Girl.)

Yesterday we talked about colonoscopies, and I don’t think there’s any denying that over the last 17 years this blog has been slowly segueing from Parenting to Aging, because today I would like to talk about knees. I am not sure how long mine have been bothering me, but I KNOW they were bothering me in 2017, because that’s when I read that the keto diet could be helpful in reducing joint pain, and decided to try it; 10-year-old Henry had been on a “Let’s go for a walk!” kick, and I was having trouble walking with him, and that seemed like something to fix.

Anyway it’s been at least six years. I keep mentioning it at my annual physicals, and my doctor keeps saying yep, arthritis, these things happen as we get older. (I made her sound dismissive there, but she’s not immediately dismissive: she does a bunch of little tests, bending me and pinching me and saying “Does this hurt? How about this?” and so forth. And then she tells me I can try turmeric, and I can try glucosamine, and I can try icing it, and I can try five-day courses of anti-inflammatories, and I can try diclofenac gel, and I can try a knee brace, and I can try stretches/exercises, and so forth.) But LAST year she said that we COULD have me get an x-ray, just to peek, and if nothing else to get a baseline—and as I was thinking that over, she said actually she didn’t think an x-ray was necessary. THIS year I was ready, and when she said we COULD, I immediately said “YES THAT SOUNDS GREAT,” and so I got knee x-rays.

Both knees hurt, but one of them hurts more than the other: I have been doing stretches and muscles-around-the-knees exercises, and with one knee I can do them, and with the other knee I sometimes can’t. And the x-rays showed it’s the sometimes-can’t knee that looks bad; the other knee looks normal. I am a little surprised it looks normal, because it DOES HURT. Well, perhaps I am compensating for the other knee, and putting extra strain on the normal knee. In any case, one knee looks bad, so I am glad we did the x-rays: firstly, so that my doctor knows I am not just complaining; secondly, so we can see how much worse it gets over time; thirdly, so that *I* know I am not just complaining / just not getting enough exercise / etc. The situation apparently looks degenerative/age-related/wear-and-tear-related, as opposed to injury-related.

The doctor said there are Next Steps we can take, depending on how things go from here (sometimes a knee situation stays where it is, and sometimes it gets gradually worse, and sometimes it gets abruptly worse). At the very end of the timeline, an end we might never reach, is knee-replacement surgery. Between here and there are things such as a referral to an orthopedic doctor who might give me injections, or who might do a smaller surgery, or who might want to try other medications/treatments. This is a fourth reason I am glad we did the x-rays: because now I feel I can ask for the NEXT thing.

This morning I am shopping for knee braces (I am supposed to wear a knee brace), and I am wondering if anyone has one they’d recommend. I am browsing and it seems like all of them have 3 or 4 stars out of 5, with legitimate complaints: they roll down; they don’t feel like they help; the elastic loosens quickly; they need to be constantly adjusted; they’re sweaty/uncomfortable; they’re bulky and make it hard to move around.

Edited to add: Also, do you have any favorite brands of glucosamine chondroitin? (I am supposed to try glucosamine chondroitin.) (I have already tried the turmeric. The doctor said to try it for two weeks, and if it didn’t do anything, I could stop. It did not do anything noticeable.)

I have had a slightly odd thing happen recently, which I will now relate. I mentioned on Facebook (more on this in a moment) that I had been referred for my first colonoscopy. You might well wonder why I would post such a thing on Facebook (this is already the moment, we are already there); and it is because, awhile back, I saw something about how one of the main reasons people die of colon cancer is that there is so much embarrassment/reluctance about colonoscopies; and that it can make an actual difference to THE WELL-BEING OF ALL HUMANKIND if people mention colonoscopies casually, the way they might mention their annual physicals or eye exams: like, it’s not embarrassing; like, why would anyone be embarrassed; like, this is a normal thing to do, your friends and family members are all doing it, it is normal and routine and not embarrassing.

And that is a theory that makes sense to me, a person who finds colonoscopies embarrassing and not at all in the same realm as eye exams—and yet who DOES want (“want”) to have one, because that is the age I am, and because I would prefer not to die of colon cancer. Plus, Edward has had MANY colonoscopies because of his Crohn’s disease, so I am at least familiarized with the process in that way, and it helps me to see/hear how casually–even ENTHUSIASTICALLY–his GI doctor treats the whole thing. His GI doctor does not seem grossed out; his GI doctor seems like he is glad to get a look behind the scenes.

Anyway, that’s why I mentioned it on Facebook: as a service to all humankind. And here is the slightly odd thing that happened: more than one person, and to be precise it was two people, separately reached out to inform me that I would not, and/or would not HAVE TO, be having a colonoscopy but instead would be doing the little kit where you take a sample and send it in to a lab. But. In my case I had said that I HAD BEEN referred for a colonoscopy. I did not say “I am doing the little kit.” (Which I have done, previous years.) And yet people were telling me I was not going to have to do what I was telling them I was going to have to do, and that I would be doing something else instead. It was odd.

Then I went in to work the next day, and my co-worker of approximately my same age was mentioning that she was going to have her first colonoscopy, and would soon be starting her prep, and I was all “WAHOO, HIGH-FIVE, COLONOSCOPY TWINS!!!”—and our mutual co-worker, who is half a dozen years older than us, informed us that she had never had a colonoscopy, and that all we really needed to do, without a family history of colon cancer, was the little sample kit where you send it off to a lab. But…my other co-worker and I have both been ACTUALLY SCHEDULED for ACTUAL COLONOSCOPIES by our ACTUAL DOCTORS. So…why is she telling us that we can instead send a sample to a lab? It was odd. I can’t think of another medical procedure where I have had this same reaction: the “Oh: you say this is going to happen, but I can tell you with confidence–though without evidence–that it will not happen” reaction.

We have a gross mystery! This reminds me of the times I have searched/scoured the kitchen for That Terrible Smell, and it has almost always been (1) the sink disposal or (2) potatoes. Except this time it is happening not in our kitchen, but in our car.

Here are the facts:

• Wednesday afternoon, Elizabeth asked me to give her a ride home from school, and I did, and nothing seemed amiss in the car. If it is helpful: the car in question is a Toyota Camry—a 4-door sedan.

• Thursday morning, I got into the car to go to work, and there was A Terrible Smell. The smell category was “spoiled milk”/”liquefied potatoes.”

• Thursday afternoon after work, I looked around a little to see if somehow something from one of my grocery store trips (Monday and Wednesday, or the previous Wednesday) had rolled into a dark corner to commit dark deeds. In the trunk, I saw a little bit of liquid down underneath the floor, in a hard-to-reach area by the spare tire. It smelled accurate. It looked like a couple of teaspoons’ worth at most. My starting theory was that a grocery item (milk carton, half-and-half, yogurt?) had leaked a little bit, and then gone very, very bad.

• Thursday afternoon/evening, I left the trunk of the car open, to air it out / dry it up.

• Friday morning, the smell was CONSIDERABLY MORE INTENSE. I thought, “Okay, it’s only a couple of teaspoons’ worth, but surely if I CLEAN THAT UP the smell will go away more quickly.” I took the carpet layer out of the trunk to get at the spill, only to see that there was A LOT MORE LIQUID THAN PREVIOUSLY OBSERVED. Like, a pint? or more? I am not good at estimating. But it took a roll and a half of store-brand paper towels to soak it all up. Paul had to take the spare tire out so that I could get at all of it.

Did you want a description of the fluid? It was translucent and yellowish/brownish. I guess kind of like pee, except it did not really look like pee, and did not smell at all like pee. It smelled like spoiled milk.

One theory is that a grocery item (gallon of milk, quart of light cream, quart of yogurt, etc.) LEAKED. But…then surely we would have noticed a gallon of milk / quart of light cream / quart of yogurt that was MISSING A PINT OR SO OF MATERIAL.

Another theory is that an entire grocery item (potato, pint of ice cream, individual container of yogurt, etc.) was left behind in the trunk, and went bad. But no such item, or any packaging/residue of such item, was discovered during the excavation and clean-up.

Another theory is that Paul’s coffee-with-cream thermos could have leaked everywhere, without him realizing it. But: (1) this is the car I drive and (2) even if he used my car, as he sometimes does, he would not have put his thermos in the trunk.

Elizabeth wondered if perhaps the trunk lid has a leak, and rainwater got in and then developed a bacteria or something and went very smelly. This is a possibility. But…would water go THAT BAD? And we don’t immediately see anything that looks like a hole in the car trunk.

I can’t find it on Twitter now, but someone started a thread for people to recommend VERY LONG books, and someone else responded by recommending The Absolute Book, by Elizabeth Knox (Target link, Amazon link). I don’t think I follow any of the people involved—not that “seeing tweets by people whose tweets you want to see” has ever been Twitter’s plan or interest, but it does make it harder to re-find the tweet I’m looking for. And as it happens, I WAS glad to have seen the tweet, and I wish I could find it again because whatever they said about this book was enough for me to request it from my library system and read it without knowing any more, and so I would like to wield that tweet at you and see if it makes YOU go read the book.

(image from Target.com)

I linked to the paperbacks because Target has only the paperback available and it bothered me to link to one paperback and one hardcover; but Amazon’s hardcover price is actually less than the paperback price right now, and now that I have finished reading the book I have ordered a copy for myself in hardcover, because this book seems too thick to be manageable in paperback. If I hadn’t been so impulsive, I would have instead bought a copy from eBay. And for you, I recommend being even less impulsive than THAT and seeing if your library system has it.

I think the very best way to read it is to go into it without knowing anything about it: that’s one reason I’m recommending LIBRARY, because then you can follow that advice at no risk at all. The tweet I can’t remember used a description that was something about it being a book that “had everything” and “didn’t even seem long” and “you’ll wish it were longer,” and that seems pretty good to me as an enticement. Also, I might be making those quotes up. Those might be things I’D say about it.

I will leave a little spacer here for those of you who would like to go get the book and read it without knowing anything about it, and then I will go on to discuss a little more about it, for those of you who aren’t going to read it otherwise, and for those of you who might be looking at it as a gift idea.

I will be giving what I would consider vague, fair-game spoilers: they will be about the TYPE of book it is, with some mention of THEMES and ELEMENTS, plus things you could get by reading the book flap. I personally was glad to have read it without receiving these vague, fair-game spoilers—but if I HAD received these vague, fair-game spoilers, I would not have considered the book spoiled. It’ll be the equivalent of, like, telling you that a book is a light funny romance, when maybe you wouldn’t have guessed that from the cover because, unlike every single other light funny romance coming out right now, maybe the book in question didn’t have a sherbet-colored cover with cartoonily-drawn characters (perhaps a glasses-wearing woman who has lost one of her high-heeled shoes is being pushed in a wheelbarrow by a tousle-haired man in a business suit!) and a whimsical, children’s-book-esque title such as Fiona McFly Gets By or whatever.

La la la. We are waiting for some of us to leave. We will not be talking about anything you can’t come back and read LATER, after you have first read the book without knowing anything about it.

La la la. Just filling some space.

La la. It’s not even going to be something you’ll want to come back and read later, I don’t think, because I’m still only going to speak about it in general terms.

La la la. Loop-de-doo.

This is the KIND of book that starts out seeming like one kind of book (a book that takes place in our familiar reality, albeit with the rage-inducing murder of a main character’s sister in the very first sentence), and then after a hundred or so pages following this main character’s life and feelings and memories and family, the book abruptly makes a shift into a book with magic and other worlds and mythical beings and so forth. Like the Narnia books, kind of, where first some kids are spending their holidays with some old uncle in some old house, and then abruptly they’re in a snowy forest and there’s a talking faun. I greatly enjoyed encountering this shift with NO PRIOR WARNING: I was amazed and enchanted. But if I’d known about the shift, it would only have made me MORE likely to read the book, so.

It is a LONG book, but it did not feel long, and I wanted there to be more of it. There are parts that are easy to race right past, because you want to get to the next part of the action—and then you realize you raced right past some of the action because it was so calmly told. There is real-life peril! There is a lot of mixed religious/mythological stuff: Odin! Purgatory! Angels! Demons! Souls! Ancient scrolls! Special swords! There are underlying themes of stolen land, stolen people, bad bargains that no one fixes because it’s been so long with things the way they are. There’s some environmental stuff, and there are some brief parts about food/nutrition that made me a little eye-roll-y. There is friendship! romance! superior species / inferior species interactions! other kinds of relationships! There’s a lil bit of sex, but it’s not explicit. There are themes about secrets, and family, and revenge, and regret. There’s MAGIC! SHAPE-SHIFTING! PORTALS TO OTHER WORLDS! I had a lot of fun reading it, and would definitely want to read it again.

I am very late to this post, really TOO late for practical purposes—but I was distracted by college-selection stuff and then I was out of town (my brother and I went on a fun quick trip to see our parents), and so it is only now I have thought to say this: If you are someone who would normally think of Mother’s Day as a special day for yourself, but your family has historically been…lacking…in celebrating that day, this is your reminder to lay in some supplies.

What I personally like to do is buy some Plausible Deniability Items. Perhaps a can of Pillsbury orange rolls from the grocery store, or a nice box of pastries from the grocery store bakery! Why, we might have those ANYWAY on a Sunday! Perhaps a box of See’s chocolates—it’s not for Mother’s Day, no, it’s just that I like to collect the pretty SPRING FLOWERS TINS they normally have around May! Maybe I buy something that’s been in my online shopping cart for a long time; the early-May timing is merely a coincidence. Anything where, if the family DOES in fact take action this year, I won’t feel silly for having made these purchases I might easily have made ANYway.

If you’re like me, you might feel silly no matter what. You might feel self-indulgent, or self-pitying, or over-reactive, or like it’s Worse Than Nothing if you have to do these things for yourself. You might think, “This is ridiculous: I don’t REALLY CARE about Mother’s Day!” Well then, isn’t it nice that you didn’t buy those items with any special day in mind, but instead just happened to buy them in early/mid-May! But what I have learned is that when Mother’s Day actually arrives, I am very glad to have a few things on hand, even if ahead of time I thought it was worse than nothing.

This year I bought the full-ounce bottle of Pacifica French Lilac perfume that LAST year I bought the .33 roller size of. (It smells like if you had a lilac bush growing right outside your open window, or I guess growing right outside your shoulder.) It was on a sale, so I might have bought it anyway.

(image from Target.com)

And I finally hit the buy button on the lilac cotton sweater I’ve allowed to linger in my Amazon cart forever, despite already owning the same sweater in green and knowing I love it; I got the green one on some $15 flash sale, so for some reason was balking at spending $25. (For sizing purposes: I wear an XL Tall in Old Navy, and I like this sweater in XXL—but I do not like FITTED clothing. I like to be INSIDE a sweater.)

(image from Amazon.com)

At the grocery store today I bought a Cadbury Caramello bar and a Cadbury Fruit & Nut bar, which I might have bought anyway, as they are some of my favorites and they were on sale. I bought the tube of Pillsbury orange-iced rolls, which I might have bought anyway, as a nice treat for any Sunday morning. I bought a pot of sprouted tulip bulbs, which I DEFINITELY would have bought anyway, ever since finding out that if I then carelessly flung those tulip bulbs (after the tulips wilted) into a carelessly shoveled hole in the ground at ABSOLUTELY THE WRONG TIME OF YEAR (spring), they would COME UP AGAIN THE NEXT YEAR, LIKE FREE BONUS RERUN TULIPS.

Also: if you normally do chores of any kind on Sunday (grocery shopping, bathroom-cleaning, laundry, changing the sheets, etc.), may I suggest you plan to do those things sometime between now and the end of the day Saturday? It is very nice, on a Sunday that is just like any other Sunday, to not have any chores to do. If you normally make dinner on Sunday, plan to make a dinner you personally like best, even if (especially if) other people don’t like it as much as you do; or, spontaneously, for no particular reason, plan to order take-out from a place you like, just on a whim because you don’t feel like cooking that particular evening.