Pandemic Update

I just realized I have ALREADY SENT my LAST college care package to Rob, because I sent an Easter package to him a couple weeks ago, and he graduates college in a few weeks.

Does that seem soon? I mentioned something about his graduation recently, and someone asked if he’d done an accelerated program; but actually he did a 5-year program with co-ops and a double major, so it ought to feel rather LONGER than usual. I think (1) other people’s kids always grow up faster, and (2) I have so many children, it’s hard to keep track, and (3) the pandemic warped everything.

Speaking of which, Rob just emailed us to let us know he tested positive for Covid. He said he was sick for about three days, and that he wouldn’t have tested except a professor asked him to do so and brought him a test. I bless that professor long-distance, because I think it’s good to know When, for all of our Long Covid tracking, which apparently we will be doing for quite some time, as an estimated 5-10% of us (and that includes people who were vaccinated) cope with it for the rest of our lives. I remember when Edward was diagnosed with Crohn’s, how I lay on the bed and cried about it, in large part because this was not just Temporary, or Until He Was Done with the Treatment, but FOR HIS ENTIRE LIFE. It was going to be something he would deal with HIS ENTIRE LIFE; it would ALWAYS be a part of him and there was no escape from it.

Meanwhile, I don’t know about your school systems, but in our school system the cases have gone up EXPONENTIALLY this week. It feels as if everyone has it. Which is not super surprising, since our school system was one of the ones that decided the pandemic was over, because if the pandemic was NOT over they’d have to deal with angry parents, and no one wants that! So they abandoned all of the minimal precautions they’d taken in the first place.

A week ago, we found out that two of Elizabeth’s close friends, friends she sits next to in her classes, were both positive for Covid. (Elizabeth wears a mask, but the friends do not.) The school did not tell us, even though we know the school knows. The school was instead pressuring both of those friends to come back five days after the positive tests, telling them they “only had so many sick days,” and that THE STATE WOULD NEED TO GET INVOLVED if they didn’t return to school. This is while both friends were still actively symptomatic. Also: Edward has missed MANY WEEKS of school this year for Crohn’s-related things, as well as for a lengthy stint with pneumonia, and we have never been threatened with The State Getting Involved. One of Elizabeth’s friends came back to school on Thursday, because she thought she had to, and then missed Friday because she was still so sick. But at least the school got ONE EXTRA DAY of her breathing on her classmates!

Anyway, the school never told us that Elizabeth was the close contact of these two known cases, even though the school has a policy of notifying close contacts. They also did not tell us that another of Elizabeth’s classmates-who-sits-next-to-her-in-class-and-works-closely-with-her-on-projects had tested positive; we only know it, again, because the classmate told Elizabeth. Like, in case you are thinking, “Well, my school system seems fine!” You could ask yourself if your child’s classmates (or their parents) would tell you, if the school for some utterly baffling, and perhaps self-protecting/justifying reason, did not tell you.

Also, one of Elizabeth’s teachers was out with a positive Covid test, and then was back, telling the class that she was still testing positive but that the school said she had to come back after five days. The school did not tell us. Perhaps there was no need to tell us! But again: in case you are thinking your own school seems fine: this is another example of something I would not know unless the teacher told my child and my child told me.

Our school system DID tell us that Edward, who is immunosuppressed, was the close contact of someone who tested positive on Monday. They told us this on Thursday. Edward thinks he knows who it is, because someone who sits next to him in one class has been out since Monday; so have two other kids in that class; so has the teacher. (Edward wears a mask; the classmates and teacher do not.)

I feel as if everything is collapsing, and also that this was entirely predictable and entirely preventable. The United States, as a country, did it this way on purpose. This wasn’t something that could be dealt with on an individual basis; it was in fact one of the BEST POSSIBLE MOTIVATIONS/REASONS for having a government to guide/assist. I am so looking forward to the spin they put on this in the history books.

Books and a Giveaway: Eternal Life; Belong to Me; The Art of Magic

(image from Target.com)

Eternal Life, by Dara Horn (Target link) (Amazon link).

This is a book about a woman who is 2,000 years old and can’t die but can only regenerate. I liked it while I was reading it (though I thought it was weird how often she shuddered/snarled/panicked while talking with her family members on tricky topics such as her age—after 2,000 years, wouldn’t she be better at this?), but felt the ending was unsatisfying, in a “But…wouldn’t it make more sense if…?” sort of way. I liked it enough to be interested in trying another book by this author. (I went to make a note on my To Read list, and found I already have another book by Dara Horn on that list: The World to Come.)

 

(image from Target.com)

Belong to Me, by Marisa de los Santos (Target link) (Amazon link). I wrote about the first book in this series here. It continues to surprise me how a book that doesn’t seem like it would be my thing (chummy cool-girl narrator speaking to the reader, including telling us pretty often how tiny and beautiful she is) is VERY MUCH MY THING. It’s as if the author is TRYING to write fluffy, lightweight, silly books but keeps accidentally failing. Like, she INTENDS to write a Classic One-Dimensional Mean Girl, and accidentally writes a multi-layered sympathetic character you want to be friends with. I thought the first book had an uneven, first-novel feel to it; I thought this one was much better. My main complaint is that the author keeps trying to write characters who are exceptionally funny or exceptionally brilliant or exceptionally good at witty dialog—but then, since it is the author herself writing those characters’ jokes/thoughts/remarks, it comes off wrong, because she’s essentially praising HER OWN writing. That’s an area where I’d suggest telling rather than showing, or else showing without telling, but not doing BOTH. I ordered a used copy of this book from EBay so I’d have it later; my library doesn’t have it anymore, and I know I’m going to want to re-read.

 

Someone very dear to me has a new book coming out next month, if you would like to pre-order it and/or get on your library’s hold list!

(image from Target.com)

The Art of Magic (Target link) (Amazon link).

It’s categorized for kids 8-12, grades 4-7. I don’t normally read books in this age category anymore, but of course I did read this one, and I genuinely enjoyed it. There are a lot of books my kids liked that I could not tolerate reading to them, but this is one I would have liked reading to them.

I am going to do a giveaway, and I’ll pre-order so you should receive it on or near its release date. (U.S. addresses only—but if you KNOW someone in the U.S., I can send it to them with a note that it’s from you.) To enter, tell me one of your favorite books from when you were this age/grade. I loved the Anastasia Krupnik books, and also pretty much any of those books where A Girl Has a Problem (eating disorder, periods, unrequited crush, parents divorcing, unpopular, summer camp, scoliosis). I’ll pick three winners on Saturday, April 23rd.

[Update: I ordered the winners’ books from Target, to avoid using Amazon. And today, on the release date, I got a bunch of notifications that there was a “new estimated delivery update,” which would be May 17th. This is…frustrating. One of the POINTS of pre-ordering is to get it on or very near the release date, not LITERALLY TWO WEEKS LATER. I’m trying to decide whether to switch all the orders to Amazon (which delivered one of the copies I ordered from them YESTERDAY), or whether to hope Target will soon send a NEW batch of delivery-update emails and deliver the books at a reasonable time.] [Update: Target still says out of stock, so I switched to Amazon. I try to avoid them, but…they have the books, and they will ship them now, and they will do it for free. So they win.]

Prom Outfit

Elizabeth is going to prom. (So far the plan is to go with a friend group, not with a date.) She’s the first of my kids to go, and the selection of her outfit was causing me some stress: she is a busy kid with work and various clubs, and I didn’t know when we could find time to shop. But we did find a couple of times, and she found something she liked. It was missing its price tag, and I was thinking “Please not $300, please not $300…,” and then I found another one on the rack that did have its tag, and it was on clearance for $9.96. It felt like a decimal was wrong: if it had been on clearance for $99.60 I would have been delighted. But I looked through all the others on the rack, and they were all $9.96. The clerk warned us that it was not returnable, and we were both like “THAT IS FINE, AT THIS PRICE WE COULD BUY IT TO CUT UP FOR ART PROJECTS.”

I looked online for a photo, but could not find one, so I will attempt a description. What she wanted was the GIST of a dress, all one piece, but with the skirt portion divided into pants. I was afraid we would not find anything like that, but luckily she is the one who knows what’s In, and there were plenty to try on. She was hoping for black, and tried on many in black, but the one she ended up choosing is a cranberry color. It has spaghetti straps, and the bodice part is like thick lace; the lace is lined at the bust but unlined beneath, so skin shows through; the pants portion is high-waisted and solid, not lace.

[Edited to add: Okay, I took two terrible photos, but terrible is better than nothing:

Imagine this with her very short hair, which retains the remaining cranberry-esque tint of her Valentine’s Day dark pink hair-dye.

I was relieved, too, because one of her other finalist options was to wear flowy trousers with a STRAPLESS BEADED CROPPED CORSET. I was doing the when-do-I-as-a-parent-step-in math: she’s almost 17; she is not busty, which makes the look less Scandalous, more Red Carpet (like when a non-busty actress has a v-neck down to her waist); it DOES look really cool on her, especially with her extremely short hair; if the prom has a dress code I guess they can be the ones to deal with her; etc. But it was nice she found another option.

One thing she and I had to discuss afterward is whether or not it was Okay that the sales clerks (three of them, all the exact same Older Lady with Lots of Make-Up and Jewelry, Teased Hair, Long Highly-Decorated Fingernails, and Strong Regional Accents) KEPT MENTIONING Elizabeth’s size. “She’s nice and slim, she can wear anything,” one said. “Nice to see that outfit on someone who fits it!,” another said. “With her figure, she could model,” said the third. I raised the subject tentatively in the car, and Elizabeth immediately joined in, saying that she couldn’t put a finger on why it seemed Okay when it should have been Wrong, but it just WAS Okay. We agreed that a large part of it was that all three clerks seemed to be talking almost entirely from a Fashion point of view—like, pleased to have a good mannequin shape for their dresses to fit well on. Another part was something about the clerks themselves: their age, their extreme self-decor, their loud frank voices, their utterly lack of awareness that anyone could be anything less than glad to have their body remarked upon.

Next we have to shop for shoes and accessories. She wants SPARKLY, which should be fun.

Edited to add: Commenter Anna suggested we talk about our OWN prom outfits, and I think that’s a fun idea. My dress was tea-length, fit-and-flare, royal purple “satin” with a sequined bodice. I’d wanted something with at least an approximation of sleeves, and this dress had an off-the-shoulder swath of satin that fit that preference. I could not walk in heels, and all the colors of flats we tried looked meh with the purple (I should have tried strappy flat sandals, but I don’t remember that option occurring to me), and custom-dyed shoes were too expensive—but, if I am remembering this story correctly, my DAD…stopped at MARSHALLS or somewhere similar…and found PURPLE FLATS THAT EXACTLY MATCHED THE DRESS?? Did I DREAM this?

I had a sparkly rhinestone necklace with matching earrings. I pulled my hair back on one side with a big floofy purple thing, and wore purple eye shadow, purple eye liner, and purple mascara. I did not even particularly LIKE purple, but I’d tried on a bunch of dresses and none of them were right, and this one fit beautifully and was comfortable, and it only came in purple so I just went with it!

What Are the Best Ways for Other People to Help/Support You in Times of Need?

This post began with me mulling over a question I wanted to ask a friend, and I realized that “forming the question” and “thinking about my own answer” and “thinking about other people’s possible answers” was interesting/fun enough to me to want to make a whole post/discussion about it. Plus, that friend reads here, so this way I don’t have to worry about making the question both clear and succinct, but can instead go on and on, which is my preferred communication style but can come across a little…odd…if it’s, say, 50 texts, most of them clarifying/modifying earlier texts.

The situation is that a member of a friend group is going to be having a hysterectomy, a procedure I had not realized had as long/difficult a recovery time as it does; and what I wanted to ask her, essentially, was “Do you know what you are likely to find helpful/useful, so that we in your friend group can see if we can help out with that?” And I don’t mean “Can you look into the future and guess how you’ll feel and what you’ll need?,” I mean instead “Have you had relevant past experiences that showed you what things FOR YOU are the best ways for other people to help/support?”

FOR EXAMPLE. After the twins were born, a lot of people wanted to help. Here are some of the things I learned about myself AT THAT TIME (it’s been almost 17 years, so things may have changed):

• I could ONLY accept housework help or errand-running from (1) people who live in my house and (2) my own parents. (I don’t know how I’d feel about it at this point.) But I think I would do VERY WELL helping someone ELSE with housework / doing someone ELSE’S errands (my experience as an in-home elder-caregiver let me know this was My Thing), so my Giving Help feelings don’t match my Receiving Help feelings.

• I ONLY wanted family (my parents, my brother, my sister-in-law, my kids) in the hospital room; I did not want friends to visit. (I don’t know if this would be the same now or not; I will have to see how I feel the next time I am in a hospital; I feel like I might be tearily grateful to see a friend.) But I did VERY MUCH WANT family. We set up a puzzle and people were chatting and working on the puzzle and taking turns holding/admiring the babies, and it was idyllic. “Wanting company” seems like an interesting element to consider, and I can imagine that some people would want as many visitors (in the hospital or at home) as possible, and others would not really want any—but might want emails, or phone calls, or other kinds of social contact.

• You will not be surprised to learn that I did not want check-in phone calls.

• My number one most important need was/is FOOD. If I am WELL-FED, I can cope with almost anything else: pain, lack of sleep, clutter. If I am NOT well-fed, I will FALL APART. Also: I feel able to accept food from pretty much anyone. And this includes ALL KINDS/QUANTITIES of food (i.e., it doesn’t need to be homemade, or enough for the whole household, or adjusted to meet the needs of the entire household, or whatever).

• I also loved FUN MAIL: cards, postcards, etc. During that pregnancy, and it might have been around the time I found out I was expecting twins because I remember a certain “AHHHHHH DEFCON TWO!!!” urgency to her email, my friend Surely asked what she could do to help: scour the second-hand shops for car seats and high chairs? send giant supplemental piles of little hats and onesies and socks? WHAT??—and I said “Oh, could I have FUN MAIL??” And she sent me SO MANY cards and postcards and so forth, and did it for SO LONG after the twins were born, I was QUITE SPOILED. (She STILL sends me cards and postcards sometimes!)

• I LIKE presents but I can get SHY about them. There is a part of me that feels embarrassed when other people spend their money on me. (I do not feel this way when spending money on other people.) I did love that a friend sent me a book of Sudoku puzzles, which I worked on while nursing.

• I LOVE flowers but I can get squirmy about how expensive I know they are. (Which just ADDS to the fun when I SEND flowers.)

 

What I would like to know from you is what are some of the ways YOU like to (and/or can) receive support, and what are some of the ways YOU like to (and/or can) give support—and I am interested in the DIFFERENCES, such as in the example where I feel like I could go over and wash dishes and clean someone else’s kitchen with joy, as well as relief to be of use, but I don’t think I could let anyone except my mom come over and clean my kitchen (and actually I’d have the kids do it).

And it’s going to be different for everyone! That’s the point! It’s not like we can make a list of “Oh, THESE are the things people should offer because these things are Helpful! And THESE are the things people shouldn’t do because these things are Not Helpful!,” not at all! Because one person will DESPERATELY want/need someone to come over and do the dishes and fold a load of laundry and change the sheets, but maybe their spouse does all the cooking already so food wouldn’t be particularly helpful! And another person would actually really like their spouse to step up and take over the housework for awhile as a little Workload Appreciation Reset, but would LOVE if people would come over and keep them company for awhile, maybe bringing a box of pastries! Everyone’s situation is different; everyone’s preferences are different; everyone’s Helpful Things They Can Accept/Offer are different. And so NOTE: We do NOT want this to be one of those comments sections that makes us feel as if EVERYTHING WE COULD POSSIBLY DO IS WRONG

It seems to me that this is one of the glories of a friend group: lots of chances to mix-and-match a person’s needs with another person’s abilities/inclinations. Maybe one friend would most want food and childcare, and some of the friend group can do one of those things and some can do the other, and some can do neither—but then the next friend needs errands and housecleaning, and now a new batch of the friend group gets a chance to pitch in! Plus: ideally, everyone is comfy enough with each other to SAY what they need, which is one of the hardest parts of this normally.

I’m finding it fun to think of lots of areas of help/support to consider, and am hoping others can think of more. Would you want a gift certificate for a manicure, for when you didn’t feel like you could cope with doing it yourself but would love the little lift of pretty nails and someone else taking care of you? Would you want someone to come over with a box of ingredients, make cookies while chatting to you and telling you how beautiful you look, and then clean the kitchen and leave behind cookies and the scent of cookies and a clean kitchen? Would you want a nice houseplant, or would that be one more thing you had to take care of? Would you want someone to come and watch a movie with the kids while you took a shower and a nap without anyone interrupting you? Would you want someone to take the kids to the park for an hour and a half while you spent some time lying on the floor breathing carefully? Would you want to send a group text asking if by chance anyone was available to bring you some fast food but perfectly fine if nah? Do you like to exchange silly Snapchat-filter photos?

(My hope, by the way, is that we can avoid bringing “love languages” into this discussion, even though I realize it is nearly irresistibly applicable. I found the concept SO interesting and useful when it was described to me, and then I read the actual book and was icked out by it, and have since heard various icky things about the author, and so now I wince at the term even while sheepishly finding it useful. Like, above, talking about housecleaning: housecleaning is a way I could GIVE support, but wasn’t so much a way for me to RECEIVE support, and that’s a useful distinction for this discussion—but I hope we can make the distinction without love languages.)

Keto Chicken Vegetable Soup, for When You’re Sick or for When You Just Want Soup

I have been meaning to post this Keto soup recipe, but it is the kind of recipe I make without measuring, and I knew I’d need to measure things before I could tell anyone else how to make it; and also I’d probably need to take some photos, and I don’t know how to make food look good in photos. So I kept putting it off, and then today Life of a Doctor’s Wife mentioned that she has extreme soup cravings while on keto, and so that was sufficient motivation, and I assume by now you are accustomed to the level of photojournalism you can expect around here.

It doesn’t even manage to look HOT

 

As I made the soup today, I weighed/measured things. But in almost every case, I first collected what I was going to put into the soup, and then I measured it—so most of these measurements are in no way exact, and will vary each time I make the soup. The measurements are for a single portion, and it’s fast and easy: I forgot to time it, but I started making it at 12:15 or 12:20, and at 12:55 I was done eating the soup and realizing I’d forgotten to time it. First I will write the recipe out in the “walking you through it” way, which I think makes it easier to learn the gist so that you could make your own modifications. And then after that I will write it out the normal way, so that you are not driven up a tree by having to paw through heaps of words to find the few you need.

In a small saucepan (mine is a 1-quart), I put 1.5 cups of water. I add ground pepper and ground crushed red pepper flakes, and I counted how many cranks of each, but that isn’t helpful because different grinders are more or less generous. But I did 15 cranks of the crushed red pepper flakes (ungenerous grinder), and 7 cranks of black pepper (medium-generous grinder). I turn the burner on and get the water/spices heating up while I handle the vegetables.

You can use whatever keto vegetables you like / have on hand. I use either one branch of celery, or else one jalapeno pepper (seeds/ribs fully removed), or sometimes I have half a pepper left over from something else, and then I’ll use that plus half a branch of celery. Today I had celery, so I used that; I diced it up and weighed it, and it weighed 3 ounces. I put that into the water along with the crumbs from the bottom of the bag of frozen broccoli. I go through a lot of frozen broccoli, and the crumbs are hard to eat but it feels wasteful to throw them away; this is the perfect moment for them. I weighed this particular bag of crumbs and it was 1.5 ounces, but it seemed like fewer crumbs than usual; I would think 2-3 ounces would be ideal. I put those into the water too. And maybe you don’t have broccoli crumbs, because you had like four bags of them in the freezer and realized this was ridiculous so you finally threw them out! So then you’d use celery AND a jalapeno, or maybe you’d put in non-crumb broccoli, or maybe you have other keto vegetables on hand so you’d use those instead. Whatever you have, like 5-6 ounces of it.

When the water/vegetables boil, I turn them down to a nice hearty simmer and let them cook for 5 minutes. (I would cook for longer if I were using broccoli florets instead of crumbs.) Meanwhile I have been turning my attention to the chicken. One of my keto staples is Perdue Short Cuts pre-cooked chicken breast strips. They’re perfect for when I just want to add a little chicken to an omelet or something, and they’re perfect for quick soup. I take out several pieces of chicken and dice it up; I weighed it this time and it was 3.5 ounces, but the soup seemed a little heavy on chicken this time, so I would think 3 ounces would be ideal.

When the timer rings, I add the chicken to the pan and turn the heat back up. I also add 1.5 tsp of chicken bouillon; I like the Herb Ox brand. And let’s be honest with ourselves: I kind of heap up the measuring spoon, so it’s probably more like 2 tsp. I also add a few shakes of salt. And I add a dollop of butter. Don’t skip the butter: once, I made some soup and it just did not seem very good, and I wondered if I was Over the soup—and then I realized I’d forgotten the butter. If you use a nice fatty chicken broth instead of water + bouillon, you can probably skip the butter—but otherwise, it’s the butter that stands in for the chicken fat that ought to be in there, and it is quite important—and even more so if you are sick and need Building Up! When I measured it, I used 1 tsp, but that didn’t seem like enough while I was eating the soup and so I added another half-tsp; and then I was remembering that when I first started making this soup, I sautéed the celery/pepper in butter before adding the water, and when I did it that way I was probably using more like a tablespoon of butter, and that was not too much butter. So in short, use butter one way or another, and don’t skimp on it. Butter and salt are two of the good things about keto, and they are what make this soup yummy rather than pitiful.

 

Keto Chicken Vegetable Soup

1.5 c. water
ground pepper
ground crushed red pepper flakes
5-6 ounces of keto vegetables (e.g. celery, jalapeno peppers, broccoli)
3 oz cooked chicken, diced
1 T. butter
1.5 tsp chicken bouillon
salt

In a one-quart saucepan, combine water, ground pepper, pepper flakes, and vegetables. Heat to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes or so. Add chicken, butter, bouillon, and salt, and return to a boil, then remove from heat and CONSUME.

Things Happen

A yoga update is that it turns out I can’t use “getting better at yoga”/”seeing if I like yoga” as motivation for doing yoga. It doesn’t work, and I end up hissing “Are plank, cobra, and downward dog LITERALLY THE ONLY YOGA POSES YOU KNOW??” at the video and then giving up in tears. I can only do yoga medicinally: for back pain, or for joint pain/flexibility, or for stress management. I find I WILL do yoga if I think “What issue will I work on today?,” and then choose a dose of yoga for what most ails me. The stress/anxiety ones are particularly good, I think, because not only do they feel like I am working on stress, but also they tend to be slower and stretchier and less sweaty/vigorous.

Speaking of stress management, it is a little concerning to me how stressed I am recently, considering I don’t have anything truly serious to be stressed about. This morning I lay awake at 4:30 with my brain asking me how I’d cope if something REALLY TERRIBLE yet TOTALLY ROUTINE and ABSOLUTELY EXPECTED life-wise, such as illness/accident/death, happened to me or mine. My brain then helpfully listed many of those possible happenings, with accompanying helpful little movies to let me imagine how each one might feel, until I gave up on sleep and got up for the day (and did stress-management yoga, which also felt like it did some nice things for my aging knees).

The other day, and I am going to breeze past this story as quickly as possible because I am still finding it don’t-think-about-it levels of stressful, I discovered accidentally that our homeowner insurance had lapsed. I told myself not to freak out, and that I would just call and get it reinstated, and please stop mentally rehearsing terrible-outcome conversations in advance. It turned out I was actually correct to freak out, for reasons that are still unclear to me, but the upshot is that instead of paying $900/year for our homeowner insurance, we have to pay $2600/year, and we are lucky that any insurance company was willing to cover us at all; our former insurance company (National General, the one who says they sent us a bill, but we did not receive it, and we were not inspired to think of it without a bill) (though YOU CAN BET that “Homeowner Insurance Day” is now a recurring holiday on my calendar) would not insure us at any price, nor would the company (Amica) we used for nearly twenty years for our old house without ever missing a payment or making a claim. (After a year of this new expensive coverage, we can call and get a new quote, and we will very likely have better choices, IF we haven’t had a claim during that time. So if you believe in magical thinking of any sort, if you could please send little protective-dome thoughts to surround my house for the next year or so, until we get more reasonable insurance. After that we can take our chances like everyone else.)

When I went downstairs to tell Paul the results of my 1.5 hours on the phone, I almost opened my remarks by saying it had been a disaster. Immediately my mind rejected the word. A DISASTER would be if our recent plumbing incident HAD flooded the entire downstairs and basement with sewage, and THEN we discovered we were not insured. THAT would have been a disaster. If THAT had happened, I would have considered “happened to think of the insurance, called and had to pay a $1700 penalty for letting it lapse but DID get covered again, and thank goodness nothing happened while it was lapsed” the DREAM FANTASY OUTCOME. If something bad happened to a parent or sibling or child, and I were given the opportunity to undo that bad thing by switching to the timeline with the LATE FEE, I would GRAB IT GRASPINGLY WITH BOTH HANDS

And in terms of household expenses, $1700 is, well, it’s not NOTHING, but certainly I think of household repairs as coming in units of thousands or tens of thousands. Refinishing hardwood floors: thousands. Repainting the exterior: thousands. Metal roof: tens of thousands. Remodel: tens of thousands. A $1700 expense can be seen as a normal sort of household expense. Sure, it is disheartening to pay it when theoretically it could have been avoided, but it could perhaps be filed with other accidents that could theoretically have been avoided: if the child hadn’t left the water running; if the leak under the sink had been discovered sooner; if we hadn’t left that back door unlocked; if we’d worked harder on ridding ourselves of the mouse issue before they chewed through those wires and started the electrical fire. And so on. Things happen, and that’s all they ever do.

Performance Evaluations; Plumbing Update; Books: ehT elcnuG, Love Walked In

My supervisor has been saying for nearly a month now that we are going to do performance evaluations soon, and it is making me unnecessarily nervous: I KNOW I am doing a good job, I KNOW this is an entry-level job that makes $9/hour and that they are lucky to have me at a time when Target is starting at $16/hour, etc., but it is still making me nervous. The worst part is the self-evaluation form I am supposed to fill out, which, first, feels like it shouldn’t be my job to evaluate myself, and second, feels like interview-question tricks all over again: let’s see, how do I answer the question about my weaknesses in a way that turns them into strengths? JUST TELL ME I’M DOING A FINE JOB AND GIVE ME A RAISE THAT DOES NOT COVER THE INCREASE IN THE COST OF LIVING, AND LET’S GET ON WITH OUR LIVES

An update on the plumbing situation is that we had someone come out, and it is the worst possible news: they are going to have to dig up huge portions of our yard, including navigating an old stone wall, and replace all the pipes. The guy who did the evaluation even DOES excavator/replacement tasks, but said it’s too big/complicated a job for him and he would have to refer us to someone else. I don’t want to talk about how much money this might cost (just the evaluation/mapping was nearly two thousand dollars), or whether we will have to temporarily relocate while it’s happening. I feel almost at peace about it: this is not an optional fix, so I don’t have to wring my hands about what we should do / whether it’s worth it. I can look pointedly at the previous homeowner for escaping without having to do this job, which definitely needed to be done at the time we bought the house; but we sold OUR old house without having to do some upcoming expensive tasks, so it’s just Homeowner Hot Potato, and we just got a particularly large hot potato.

Let’s see, this has been kind of a stressful post so far; let’s talk about books. I had one I gave up on even though I was two-thirds of the way through it, because I kept Not Wanting To Read It, and Not Enjoying It, and it had become a blockage in the book-reading pipes. It was ehT elcnuG, by nevetS yelwoR. It should have been delightful. I could see how it could be delightful. But I found it a tedious slog, and it felt “made up.” Which of course it IS, but I mean I FELT IT as I was reading, I FELT the author making it up.

I read another book where I felt the author making it up and yet I still wanted to keep reading it:

(image from Amazon.com)


Love Walked In, by Marisa de los Santos. It felt like a First Novel; it was uneven; the names begged believability and seemed more like the author chose her favorite names; I don’t tend to like books where the narrator talks to the reader in that chummy way; I could FEEL the author trying to get herself out of plot corners she’d written herself into; there was more than one plot point where I stopped reading, looked up, and said “What. That makes NO SENSE” or “Oh, come on”—and yet I really enjoyed it, and I requested the sequel from the library system (we don’t have it at my library for some reason, even though we have the other three books in the series).

The GIST of the book is that a woman (who is CONSTANTLY described as tiny and beautiful, and her name is very unlikely, and I wanted to dislike her but I did not dislike her, though I did dislike the way she kept talking about how tiny and beautiful she was) is looking for romantic love, but instead finds parental love, and not in the usual way. (Note that you can absolutely tell this book by its cover.) I don’t know, it just felt so refreshing. And I could forgive a lot of the issues as being First Novel issues. So it’s odd I couldn’t do that with the first book I mentioned, where it’s basically the same plot (single person looking for love but instead finds untraditional parenthood) and has a similarly delightful element of accident/fantasy/fate. Well, that’s just how it went: the first one felt to me like a tiresome invented slog with tiresome invented characters, and the second one felt like a delightful read with some issues. You may find you feel exactly the other way around, if you try both.

Plumbing Incident

We had a Plumbing Incident recently, and by “recently” I mean “It was two months ago, and that is how long it took for me to recover sufficiently to talk about it.” Here is how it happened:

• Sometimes, now that I have decided “Be like Paul” should be my marriage-balancing motto for some decisions (i.e., making decisions for myself in the same self-prioritizing way Paul makes decisions for himself), Paul goes to bed at the time HE wants to go to bed, and I DO NOT GO TO BED AT THAT TIME. This is the first significant thing that happened in this story, and it is important to note that if I had gone to bed at the time I did not want to go to bed, as I used to do routinely, things would have been unfathomably worse—and this is one of the things that plagues me when I am reliving this mentally. Anyway: Paul went to bed; I was still up, though in my jammies/slippers so I would not have to change in the dark when I DID finally go to bed.

• I went into the kitchen. The specific reason for this is lost to the fog of history. Most likely I was going to set up the coffee maker for the next morning, or wash dishes that had been left to soak, or maybe I was just turning out lights or getting a snack. The point is, I went into the kitchen, thank goodness. Perhaps I have mentioned we have a half-bath in the kitchen? It seems like very poor placement, but this house is 200 years old and has been through multiple remodels including ADDING ANY BATHROOMS AT ALL, so we extend mercy for awkward design. One thing about this half-bath is it sometimes BURBLES alarmingly: the toilet will suddenly make loud glupping sounds. We have lived here for over three years and this happens regularly without incident, and we have become accustomed to it. As I went into the kitchen, I heard it burbling/glupping. No big deal.

• Except—weirdly, the kitchen sink was ALSO burbling/glupping. This had never happened before. I was intrigued, and concerned, though not yet ANYWHERE NEAR as concerned as I should have been. This part plays out in my memory as if in a movie: there is Swistle, in the kitchen, in her jammies/slippers late at night, hearing the sounds! She tilts her head to one side: “Huh!,” she thinks! Movie-viewers clap hands over mouths, knowing the horror part of the movie must surely be imminent.

• Burbling/glupping CONTINUED, which is, again, NOT typical. I looked at the kitchen sink, which did not enlighten me. So I went to look at the half-bath toilet. AS I LOOKED AT IT, the clear water in the bowl was replaced by a surge of NOT-AT-ALL-CLEAR WATER COMING UP FROM THE DEPTHS OF PRESUMABLY HELL. The hell-water in the bowl CONTINUED TO RISE and then BEGAN TO OVERFLOW THE BOWL. This is all as I was standing there in my jammies and slippers, past my usual bedtime.

• My one and only idea was to use the toilet plunger. I did that for, I don’t know, 10 seconds? before it was just abundantly clear that that it was doing NOTHING, and that plunger-related issues were not involved in whatever was happening. I took the bath towel we use as a hand towel in that bathroom, and I threw it on the floor to help sop things up. I grabbed another bath towel we keep downstairs and threw it on the floor too.

• This is when I went up to get Paul, as well as more towels. I don’t know about YOUR wedding vows, but mine included an absolute unconditional rider about plumbing emergencies. But also: at that point I would have awakened ANY HOUSEHOLD ADULT. Paul was completely asleep, and none of us would have wanted to be awakened the way I awakened him: “Paul. PAUL. I am so sorry to wake you, but the downstairs toilet is backing up all over the floor.” He startled and yelped and floundered and soon was standing in the third bathroom saying “I don’t know what to do,” just as I had recently been. Meanwhile I had gathered huge armloads of bath towels and was throwing them onto the bathroom floor, like a little Dutch girl plugging the dam.

• I wondered aloud if “turning off the water” would help at all, which, sort of, I guess, and Paul did switch off the water—but when I made that suggestion, I remembered that when I’d gone up to get Paul, I’d heard a child in the shower upstairs. I went racing back upstairs and told that child there was a weird plumbing emergency and that they should stop the shower even if they were coated in soap and shampoo. This turned out to be the key: it was the water from that shower that was (1) failing to drain and (2) therefore backing up in the downstairs toilet. So at the VERY LEAST, water STOPPED coming up out of the toilet. And I got more towels while I was upstairs, and put them on the bathroom floor to keep the tides from getting out of the bathroom / to the kitchen.

• This is around the time I suggested Paul CALL AN EMERGENCY PLUMBER. Have I mentioned this was on a Saturday night at around 10:30/11:00? It was. He called our usual plumber, a 24-hour number, but our usual plumber said they don’t do this kind of plumbing, and gave us another number. Paul called that number. They said all their emergency technicians were already booked throughout the night, and they could not send anyone out until the next day sometime. This is when I truly gave in to despair.

• We decided there was nothing more to do and that we should go to bed and leave things as they were: water off, toilet filled to the brim with the unthinkable, towels covering the floor and soaking up the damage. We got several bottles of water from emergency storage and put them in the bathrooms/kitchen for drinking and hand-washing; we put bottles of hand sanitizer by every sink. We went to bed. Paul went immediately to sleep. I lay awake—appalled, horrified, despairing, wide-eyed in the dark, sick to my core.

• Eventually I realized I could not leave the situation as it was: sewage sinking at that moment into the trim along the edges of the wall, perhaps infiltrating itself in some way into the floor tiles, HELD in fact against the wall/trim/floor as if by some sort of monstrous towel-poultice. I got up. I evaluated the towels and decided I would not try to save them from this particular disaster, would not subject either me or my washing machine to these miseries. I put on disposable gloves. I got two giant heavy-duty trash bags, putting one inside the other. I gathered up all the disgusting towels and put them into the doubled bag; with hindsight, I should have used at least two sets of doubled bags, because the resulting bag of sodden towels was so heavy I could only DRAG it, with significant effort, to its destination, which was OUT INTO THE FROZEN NIGHT.

• I got a roll of paper towels and the bottle of Clorox Clean-Up bleachy spray. I mentally kissed my pajamas goodbye. I sprayed THE LIVING HELL out of that bathroom floor and everything six inches up from it. I cleaned it with the paper towels, put the used paper towels into another trash bag; sprayed THE LIVING HELL right back out of everything again, cleaned it with paper towels again; A THIRD TIME, I sprayed living hell etc. cleaned with paper towels etc. The inside of my nose was filled with the scents of sewage and bleach. I felt coated in both. The entire downstairs REEKED of both.

• Keep in mind that THE WATER WAS OFF AND WE COULD NOT TURN IT ON without overflowing the toilet which was still filled to the utmost brim with hell-water. I could not wash my hands in any sort of normal way. I took off and threw away the gloves, then took one of the gallons of bottled water and used it to wash my hands as best I could, alternating wash/rinses with doses of hand sanitizer. This was dismal. It was DISMAL. I did not feel remotely clean. Meanwhile, bleach stains had appeared on my pajamas, including my “Nevertheless she persisted” Elizabeth Warren shirt, and it is hard to imagine anything more appropriate/dismal.

• I went to bed, feeling absolutely unclean and appalled and horrified and despairing and sick to my very core etc. I felt filthy and reeking; my throat/nose felt burned by bleach but I was glad for it, because bleach-burn felt better than sewage-reek. I lay awake for quite awhile. I felt, ACUTELY, what a thin membrane separates us from absolute primitive savagery. We are all one single modern-day-plumbing emergency away from dying of typhoid, it seemed to me at that time.

• In the morning I woke up, feeling about the same. We discussed with the children how no one should use water or flush toilets. We brought up more gallons of the bottled water I’d purchased in November 2016, or perhaps it was the additional bottled water I’d purchased in January 2021. Who can say. Sure was good to have it, though. I spent the entire morning feeling sick/despairing, unable to concentrate on anything else, noticing the thin membrane, etc.

• At around 11:00 a.m., and remember this was a Sunday so this is not going to be inexpensive, not that that was even in my TOP FIVE concerns, the plumber called to say he was on his way. Actually it was a plumbing technician, because the plumber was still not available. He arrived near noon, and I have never been as glad to see anyone in my entire life, and I truly mean that. I am worried you will think that is hyperbole, but I was not as glad to see my own children at birth as I was to see this plumbing technician. Oh, actually, now that I’ve given it some thought: when Elizabeth was about 8 years old, I lost her in a store, and I lost her for so long, I had reached the point of thinking in a leaden way, “This is how it actually seriously happens for some people: they do what I am doing now, looking for their child and feeling increasingly panicky but also as if they are being a little silly to be so panicky, but then it turns out their child actually really was taken, because that sometimes DOES ACTUALLY HAPPEN FOR REAL, and they never see their child again, and that is their Real Actual Life”—and then I saw her, and I was gladder to see her than I was to see the plumbing technician, but that is the only example I can think of where I was gladder. The plumbing technician spent half an hour in our midst, and there were some loud hammering sounds, followed by some loud/vibrating drilling sounds, and afterward he said there had been some “light roots” in the line, and he removed the light roots; and then he flushed the horror toilet and the horror-toilet contents went down successfully and the water level in that toilet returned to normal; and then he instructed us to try flushing the upstairs toilet, which was by this time ALSO a horror toilet, and we did, and it worked; and then he charged us the incredible bargain price of $500 and said he was only a technician but Jacques the plumber would call us on Monday to set up a more extensive evaluation, and we did not start a new religion in his honor but absolutely would have if asked.

• I cleaned all the toilets, two horror and one relatively normal, weeping with an intense combination of gratitude and resentment and regret for all my life choices: that I would be in this house with these plumbing issues, that I would be in a marriage where I would be in sole charge of horror-toilet-cleaning. I took the sheets off the bed. I started a load of laundry on Extra Hot water, including the sheets and my pajamas from the night before. Then I took a shower that was so long, with water so hot, I probably did lasting permanent damage to my skin. I put new sheets on the bed.

• Jacques the plumber did not call. This has been our experience with plumbers/electricians/landscapers/etc. They are very in-demand. They are hard to get. They do not call.

• I continued to lie awake, not EVERY night but it was a fairly common theme on the nights when I WAS awake, thinking about what had happened. Again and again in my mind I saw the way I’d stood in my pajamas and watched the revolting water surging up into the toilet’s clear water in a horrifying cloud, and then overflowing into our house. Again and again, I thought about how if I had gone to bed at the same time as Paul, that horrifying-cloud water would have kept coming out of the toilet until the child’s upstairs shower was over. By the time we would have discovered it in the morning, who knows how far the damage would have gone. The kitchen. The hardwood floors. The downstairs furniture. The sunporch. Dripping down into the basement. The bottom inches of all the doors/walls. Electrical issues. Who knows how much of the downstairs would have needed to be torn out. Who knows how long we would have had to stay in a hotel while it was repaired/replaced. Who knows what our homeowner’s insurance would have said/done. And all because of “light roots”??? LIGHT ROOTS could do that??? HOW AND WHY???? I told the children not to shower after our bedtime. I bought a water sensor and put it in the downstairs bathroom; I considered buying maybe fifty more and just putting them EVERYwhere.

• Two nights ago I told Paul how I had been feeling/thinking. I told him that the short version of my thoughts was that this could NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. I paused, making sure he was listening, and then repeated it: this could NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. I did not care what the plumber charged. I did not care if the plumber suggested coming out annually with some sort of ridiculous expensive unnecessary scheme; I did not care if the plan involved pouring something down all the drains every day/week. I did not care if it involved expensively digging up the entire front yard. I did not care if the cost of this affected our children’s student-loan situation. This could NEVER. HAPPEN. AGAIN.

• Yesterday morning Paul called the plumber. He got an appointment for a full overview next Friday—and the only reason it’s that far away is that that’s a day Paul could arrange to be home from work. Last night while I was making dinner I said to Paul that what I wanted him to tell to the plumber is that this could NEVER. HAPPEN. AGAIN, and Paul said that he’d already explained. He said when he talked to the plumber, he said “My wife says if this ever happens again, she is leaving the house and never coming back,” and the plumber, who up until that point in the call had been laid-back and cheerful, changed tone completely and said “…UH oh.” I hope the plumber keeps that in mind.

Wedding Gift Update; Wedding Gifts for an Elopement

For the wedding present, I chose Girl Scout cookies. I liked a LOT of the suggestions in the comments, and had a wonderful time reading all the stories and considering all the options. In the end I chose Girl Scout cookies because they seemed light and fun and quirky, which also describes my cousin and her husband and their wedding; and because it felt Just Right for the relationship I have with this cousin; and also because I just WANTED TO and the idea made me feel happy. The cookies are on their way to them, and I feel bouncy and excited for them to arrive. I had planned to buy them some window prisms as well, but it felt like the combination reduced the gift rather than adding to it, for reasons I couldn’t put a finger on; and it didn’t matter much so I just didn’t buy the window prisms. I highly enjoy these sorts of low-pressure gift-giving occasions, where I feel free to follow whims.

A few of you mentioned that you would never have thought to give a wedding present for an elopement and asked if that was weird/wrong, and I have puzzled over that for several days now, wondering which of us is the weird one, and I’ve decided it’s Neither of Us, Really, but specifically it’s Not Me. They still got MARRIED! That’s a HUGE DEAL and a MAJOR LIFE EVENT and something to celebrate! If I don’t send a gift, and it’s because they eloped rather than having a wedding for me to attend, that seems like it oddly prioritizes The Wedding Event over The Marriage, when I am pretty sure we’ve all agreed it’s the other way around.

I wonder if “elopement = no gift” comes from the more general ruling on whether a person is OBLIGATED to get a wedding gift: I know that if you go to someone’s wedding, etiquette absolutely insists that you bring a gift; and that if you are not invited to the wedding and/or do not attend, etiquette does NOT insist that you send a gift. Perhaps that morphed into an idea of no wedding = no gift. Except…an elopement is still a wedding! So then we’re back to the wedding gift being an item the couple receives not because they got married but because they threw an expensive party. Which doesn’t seem right.

It may also come from a difference of feeling about gift-giving in general: if it’s about what ETIQUETTE demands, then I agree: no obligation to send a gift for an elopement. But my motivation wasn’t etiquette, or obligation: it was that I was excited about the significant life event, and I wanted to celebrate it with a gift. Sending a gift is a way to say you’re happy for someone, and/or at a minimum (such as in a situation where you don’t think they should have married this person) that you acknowledge the significance of what has happened. This is one reason that, although of course I want very much to get them something they WANT and LIKE and WILL USE/ENJOY, I don’t WORRY so much about that aspect: PART of the point of the gift is to add to their possessions, but another HUGE part of the gift is to give them…well, “positive feedback” doesn’t feel quite right, but in another way it’s EXACTLY RIGHT. The gift gives them positive feedback. It says “Yay!” and “Your friends/family rejoice with you!” and “I have seen your news and agree it is cool/good/significant!” It is like clicking “like” and “care” and “wow” and “love” all at the same time on someone’s Facebook post, but more expensively!

Wedding Present Talk

I found out this morning that one of my cousins eloped with her fiancé, which was very fun news to see on Facebook first thing in the morning—tons of “WHAT???? CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!” comments.

Now I wish to buy her a wedding present, but (1) they do not seem to have a registry and (2) they are in their 30s, and they already own a house. So I do not think they need a toaster.

I am worried you will say I should just send money. I don’t want to hear that I should just send money, EVEN IF IT IS TRUE. I wish to purchase a gift, and send it with a gift receipt, or else not care that they can’t return it and will have to regift it.

I’m not at all stressed about accidentally sending something they don’t want / can’t use. That feels like an utterly normal and not-stressful and manageable thing to have happen; and, if it happens with my gift, I trust them to count the thought, and then either return the gift if possible, or find a new home for it if not.

So I am looking for wedding-gift ideas, but more than that I find I am looking for wedding-gift TALK. I just feel like THINKING ABOUT and TALKING ABOUT wedding gifts. It’s been awhile since I’ve had a chance to do that: there was a big flutter of weddings a decade or two ago, but I’m not quite into the era of friends’ kids getting married. I was discussing it with a co-worker who IS in that era, and she says everyone now is registering for things like “champagne on the airplane to and from our honeymoon – $50,” “couples massage – $200,” and boy, that does not appeal to me even a tiny bit.

Here are some of the things I’d enjoy discussing, if you too would enjoy it:

• Favorite wedding gifts you’ve RECEIVED, especially something you didn’t think to ask for
• Favorite wedding gifts you’ve GIVEN
• Favorite wedding gifts you’ve HEARD ABOUT
• I see nothing wrong with also discussing LEAST favorite / funniest gifts
• What YOU would give a cousin in her 30s who owns a house, as long as the answer isn’t “money”
• Really any thoughts at all about wedding gifts, just feel free to say whatever
• Except “money,” I mean it, I’m not sending money

One of my favorite received wedding gifts was a box of assorted Christmas ornaments—from, as it happens, a cousin (a different cousin). They were the kind sold individually rather than the kind sold in sets, and it was a somewhat surprising gift and she didn’t explain it or anything. Every year when I hang them on the tree I think of her.

A wedding gift I used to like to give, often along with something from the registry, was several sets of address labels (holiday set! heart-decorated set! etc.!), but that works better when the couple didn’t already live together and/or when a name-change is involved. It also worked better a decade or two ago, when people paid more bills by mail.

One of the most unfortunate wedding gifts we received was a framed embroidery, quite large, obviously very time-consuming, with the wrong wedding date on it, and also my name spelled wrong.

One gift I am considering is a pair of heated throw blankets. It seems cozy. But this is the wrong time of year for that.

I could send a care package full of treats and other things that keep well / can be used up. They seem like the kind of couple who would do fun face-treatment masks together while drinking spiked hot cocoa, and I could make a care package for that, plus cookies and window prisms and just whatever looked fun/good.

I could send a two sets of really nice towels. Kind of boring, but in a wedding-registry type of way, and I like the “get the REALLY GOOD version of something normal” type of gift idea.

I could send alcohol, which I’d consider a risky gift except that they often post photos of themselves at a friendly-looking bar, with friends. But shipping alcohol tends to be so much more expensive than just buying it at the store, and it’s complicated because someone has to be home to receive the package, so eh.

I could send them a big assortment of See’s candies. That feels celebratory. I could do one custom box, which would allow me to choose a heart-shaped box, and then fill in with miscellaneous other things: peanut brittle, sour candy, etc.

Or flowers! Celebratory! Weddingish! I don’t care that they don’t last long, and that might be a plus in this case!

I could get them matching/coordinating Comfys. They definitely seem like that kind of couple.

My sister-in-law recently sent Edward a 24-pack of assorted craft sodas, which was such a fun gift it made me want to immediately buy it for someone else, so perhaps this is my moment.

Oooo, or another thing that made me feel that way was when a dear friend ordered me multiple packages of Girl Scout cookies as a surprise!! THAT would be a fun wedding gift!! A WHOLE BUNCH OF GIRL SCOUT COOKIES!! Oh that seems like a really fun idea!!