Paul has been taking Fridays off of work, as he usually does in the summer in an attempt to spend down his vacation days. Usually this is really nice: it gives us a day each week for family activities or couple activities or dad-and-kids activities such as going to the movies, or going to a museum or attraction, or going to the pool, or going out for breakfast or lunch, or doing something we don’t want to do but need to do such as mattress shopping, or…well, you see the issue, now that there is a pandemic and we’re not doing any of these things. Now that it’s just “he’s at home all day,” and he’s ALWAYS at home all day, there is considerably less thrill to it. It means that I have more trouble getting my Friday stuff done, because he keeps being AROUND. Then, on Mondays, he’s been saying the three-day weekend makes it harder to get back into work. He came to talk to me THREE SEPARATE TIMES this morning before I’d even had BREAKFAST. GO TO WORK.

Without lingering on it, I want to say that I am now up 30 pounds from pre-pandemic times. This gives me important information, which is this: if I diet strictly at least 6 days a week, eating in what is a weird and challenging way (keto) but is the only diet that has been sustainable long-term for me, I can keep my weight SO LOW that my doctor says I would ONLY need to lose another 20 pounds to be in the “””healthy””” range on the chart. If I stop that strict and weird way of eating, and go back to eating a normal array of foods, the weight comes right back to me. It’s good to know. I had wondered.

The pandemic has made me focus more on making sure we’re getting exercise and good nutrition, despite all the restrictions on us right now: the kids used to get exercise walking to/from school and walking to meet friends, and I used to get exercise at my job, but now we have to do exercise on purpose. Which I’m finding harder to do, somehow, as the number on the scale goes up. Diet/thinness culture sets up such a false binary: either we are Thin, which is understood to mean we must be exercising and eating “healthy”; or else we are Fat, which is understood to mean that we don’t exercise and that we buy two super-sized value meals at the fast-food drive-through and eat them secretly before going home and making and eating dinner with the family, after which we eat a half-gallon of ice cream and an entire bag of chips.

It is hard to shake off the feeling that if we’re not going to get to be thin we might as well not do any of the exercising and nutrition we have been taught to associate with thinness—even though we know, we KNOW, it is OBSERVABLY TRUE, that there are ALSO a lot of dubious/unhealthy things that can lead to thinness (smoking, diet pills, eating disorders, exercise bulimia, eating insufficient calories, diseases and illnesses, fad diets that may or may not be good for us, foods that have been made low-calorie in non-healthy/non-nutritious ways); and that some people are thin without doing the strict exercise/food we associate with thinness; and that some fat people are doing the exercise/food we associate with thinness and are nevertheless fat, because that is the delightful variation of the human body; and that the things we have been taught to associate with thinness (exercise, good nutrition) are well worth doing for ourselves, unlinked to what our bodies look like.

WHY IS IT SO HARD TO GET THIS TO SINK IN? I feel like I have to fight it so persistently, the idea that if I’m going to be 30 pounds heavier I might as well not take a walk or do the strength-training video or whatever. As if THINNESS is the only possible reward for exercise and nutrition, rather than improved health and mood and physical ability—and it’s hard to do the work without the reward. THINNESS IS NOT THE REWARD.

I have not been getting books from the library during the pandemic, not because I think it isn’t safe (they have curbside pick-up, and I have insider knowledge about our library’s quarantine policies that makes me feel pretty comfortable; it doesn’t seem at this point as if books are a likely way for the virus to spread anyway; and also I could quarantine a bag of books at home for a few days if I wanted to be SURE-sure), but because I feel sheepish about it. It feels weird to say “I don’t feel safe working there right now, so I am on extended leave, and please cover my hours for me—and oh, while you’re there in an environment I don’t consider safe enough for ME, could you get me some books?” And anyway it would probably be fine but I just don’t want to.

All of this is to say I have finished my To Read pile, which I’d thought would never happen. And I have been re-reading a lot of the books I’d thought many times were worth owning because they would be SOOOOO nice to have in an apocalyptic situation where we couldn’t get library books. But also I want fresh books. And what I was wondering is if you’d like to help me make a list of Books To Consider Buying. Library books are so easy: they’re free! take them on a whim! if you don’t like them, you’re out NOTHING! just stop reading them and bring them back! Books Worth Buying is a totally different thing, and can include the issue of re-readability.

Are you already feeling a little nervous? I would be, if I were you. Telling someone you think they would be wise to pay $10-30 for a book is very different than suggesting they try it from the library. But don’t be nervous! For one thing, this is low-stakes. I can check reviews/descriptions first, and if I see “lyrical prose” or “Kate White had it all: a successful career as a magazine editor, a handsome and successful husband, a beautiful home in the suburbs, and two great children….UNTIL!!!,” I already know not to buy it. And if I do take a suggestion, and it’s not to my tastes, it was still fun to try, and I have lots of people to pass the book on to, and also I know how books are: just because someone else loves it doesn’t mean I will; just because I love it doesn’t mean someone else will.

But I will start by telling you some of the books I love, and I will come back and add more as I think of more, or as books mentioned in the comments section remind me of books I should have included. If you did NOT love these books, you will know that you and I don’t happen to be compatible in this area (though definitely compatible in MANY OTHER areas!), and probably I won’t like the books you like and vice versa AND THAT IS FINE! If I list SEVERAL OF YOUR FAVORITES, then maybe you will be bolstered to recommend MANY of your own favorites! Also: it is fine to ask questions, such as “Did you like such-and-such a book, do you like such-and-such an author, do you like this kind of book, do you like that kind of book?” Everyone has their own measures for making recommendations.

Fiction:

• almost anything by Maeve Binchy; there are a couple of her books that I didn’t like, but I own all the rest and I re-read them (all the recommendation lists suggest Rosamunde Pilcher for people who like Maeve Binchy, but I don’t know why; Rosamunde Pilcher books are fine, and I’ve read a few, but to me they’re not like Maeve Binchy)

• Elizabeth Strout: both Olive Kitteridge books, both Lucy Barton books, but not Amy & Isabelle (I don’t remember why; I just remember being disappointed by it)

• pretty much NOTHING that Oprah ever chose or ever would choose for her book club (SO BLEAK)

• in fact, nothing that makes a point of being unrelentingly bleak, nothing where the book’s “importance” comes from “shining a light on a terrible, terrible plight none of us can do anything about”

• and nothing where a major plot point is the abuse and/or traumatic death of an animal or child—unless somehow the author pulls it off, and there ARE books where that happens

• long ago I loved The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife by Amy Tan; I don’t know if I still would, but those are good examples of books that SEEM like they’d be unrelentingly bleak, and yet the author pulls it off

• the Practical Magic books by Alice Hoffman (I’ve added Magic Lessons to my list)

• NO Jodi Picoult, never again, she has betrayed me too many times

• Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman. In general I like the whole Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams kind of genre, except after awhile I get weary of it, and some of it is too much quirky/jokes and not enough plot. But overall I like it.

• Fredrik Backman: A Man Called Ove and Britt-Marie Was Here but NOT the Beartown books (I’m trying to remember why; I think I found them depressing and angering, and felt they lacked the human/character charm of the other books)

• Ann Patchett: The Dutch House, Bel Canto (but it BROKE me and I wouldn’t read it again right now even though I loved it), State of Wonder

• Elizabeth Berg: the early stuff (Talk Before Sleep, Open House, What We Keep, Joy School, The Pull of the Moon), but not the later stuff (The Handmaid and the Carpenter, The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted, Dream When You’re Feeling Blue)

• SOME Anne Tyler (I have trouble remembering which titles go with which of her books, but I remember I liked A Patchwork Planet, and that there was one about a poorly-suited WWII couple that I found good but too depressing); I’ve added Redhead by the Side of the Road to my list

• despite flaws, I loved The Rook by Daniel O’Malley

• Nothing to See Here, by Kevin Wilson—a recent purchased-because-of-seeing-recommendations success

• nothing set in WWII, I just can’t, I have reached and then FAR EXCEEDED my capacity for books set in WWII, I read The Book Thief because I had to, and I was glad I did, but NO MORE, I BEG YOU, NO MORE WWII BOOKS, LET’S SET BOOKS IN LITERALLY ANY OTHER TIME PERIOD

• I generally like apocalyptic fiction (The Girl with All the Gifts, Station Eleven, The Stand, the Oryx and Crake trilogy, Girlfriend in a Coma), but perhaps not right this minute

• I enjoy a certain level of magic or time travel or whatever, but I like them pretty realistic/contemporary (like the Alice Hoffman Practical Magic books, or like Magic for Liars, or like The Rook or Nothing to See Here; I don’t usually like the kind where everyone has Futuristic Names and there are undefined made-up words you’re supposed to figure out from context (“hulaphone” or whatever)

• Some Stephen King in the past, but I may be done with it.

• I have liked a couple of Samantha Hunt books: The Invention of Everything Else and Mr. Splitfoot (I spent the whole book thinking she would HAVE to stick the landing—and she stuck the landing, and I started reading it again right away from the beginning as soon as I’d finished it)

• The Power, by Naomi Alderman, was the perfect book for 2016, but I don’t know if I want to feel that way right now

• Dept. of Speculation, by Jenny Offill

• Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Eyre

• This is How You Die and Machine of Death

• Sarah Waters: Affinity YES, The Little Stranger NO (I don’t like “Who even knows what really happened?? Certainly not me, the omniscient author!” endings)

• I don’t like YA fiction. I know lots and lots of adults LOVE it, for MANY good reasons; I know YA fiction varies so much that it ought to be impossible to make a sweeping statement about not liking it; I have many times WISHED I liked YA fiction because those are the kinds of plots I want to read; I have many times TRIED a YA fiction book that was highly recommended and that many people mentioned they liked even though they don’t normally like YA fiction—and I never, never, never like it. It is similar with romance novels: I WANT to like them, I WANT to read about romance, I have tried MANY authors and MANY types of niche and mainstream romance novels, and I never, never, never like them. This is one of those areas where normally I would not volunteer that I don’t like YA/romance, because why volunteer that kind of information, especially when SO MANY PEOPLE already volunteer that exact information about those EXACT particular categories? Whose life is enriched by hearing someone else declare irrelevantly that they dislike something you love? But in this case it is relevant to the question I’m asking, and so I mention it, and I go into some detail so that you will know I am not being casually/scornfully dismissive on misguided/uninformed principle, and I hope it will not lead to the natural/understandable but nevertheless futile path of “Oh but have you tried…??”

Memoir/graphic:

• Suzanne Finnamore

• 80% of Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris

• Roz Chast

• 80% of Lynda Barry

• Alison Bechdel

• NONE of the “I grew up in an APPALLING/SHOCKING/TRAUMATIC family situation, it was RELENTLESSLY GRIM!!” memoirs; no really, not even the one where the mom dies; no, not the one where their parents are manic and the kids were constantly in danger; no, I don’t want the one where they made sweet little pets of the city rats

• The Mental Load, by Emma (I have The Emotional Load on my list)

• Allie Brosh!! (I have Solutions and Other Problems on my list already, and have had it there for YEARS awaiting publication)

Update: Here’s the list that resulted from comments on this post: Books to Buy and/or Put on My Wish List

Elizabeth had her virtual scoliosis appointment this morning, and we were both very stiff and jumpy about it ahead of time (this was our first online medical appointment, and we didn’t know what to expect), and it went totally fine (though awkward) and was SO VERY MUCH BETTER than spending half the day driving to and from the big city and waiting in waiting rooms. And the doctor says she can stop wearing her brace! Which is very exciting! She is 15 years old, just under 5’9″ tall, and it is likely she is done growing. She is going to be shorter than ALL of her brothers (Rob is 6’1″, William is 6’4″, Edward is 6″ so far at 15 years old, and Henry is 5’7″ at only 13) (did you start reading this blog when I was pregnant with Henry, and now he is taller than you? isn’t everything so weird?), and she is already mad about it. She is slightly taller than me, at least. I will be shortest in my household, apparently, and at 5’8″ish I am not a short woman.

Her doctor, incidentally, is like a neverending stream of those cringy “When I was a doctor-in-training I said [this thing that sounded totally awkward but wasn’t at all what I meant, such as “Your breasts look beautiful”] and that’s when I learned to say [the highly preferable neutral thing, such as “Everything looks normal”].” Elizabeth and I agree he doesn’t give off actual creepy vibes, and he seems genuinely oblivious as he says things that make us wince. Today’s new hit was “Your curves look beautiful”—meaning that the two curves of her spine showed good improvement.

Our polydactyl cat is still not doing particularly well, even after two weeks (nearly halfway through a month-long prescription) of antibiotics. He is still barely eating or drinking; he is still bony and scrawny. I called the vet a week ago to ask about the subcutaneous fluids she mentioned, and she had me come in and they taught me how to do them. WARNING! The rest of this post will include some medical stuff involving needles and so forth. If you want to skip the rest of this post, this would be the moment. I will not write anything else in this post after the part about the cat’s medical treatments: you can just bail right now and you will miss nothing except feline medical stuff! Okay, I am going to proceed! I’m proceeding now with the descriptions! Last chance! Here we go!

Giving subcutaneous fluids involves making a “tent” of the cat’s stretchy skin in the shoulder area, and then putting a needle “into the tent,” and then the fluid goes from a bag down a tube and through the needle and under the skin, where it is gradually absorbed into the cat. I am so, so grateful that when the vet tech demonstrated the technique to me, she accidentally put the needle into the tent and then out through the side of the tent, so that the liquid just spilled out into his fur, because that showed me that even someone with MUCH more experience than me might do that; otherwise I might have given up by now, because I have made that same error repeatedly. Repeatedly. It makes me despair. I feel like I am NOT getting the hang of it, and there is no way to practice except by continuing to screw it up, and then working on learning how to fix it (theoretically you can just draw the needle back a bit, until it is no longer poking through the second layer of skin) (good for you, hanging in there like this, you are a real trouper).

I have watched YouTube videos and I understand the gist of what I am supposed to be doing; it’s just, now there’s nothing left except to practice, and it’s my poor cat who has to be practiced on. The videos and the vet tech and the vet all assured me that the cat doesn’t have many nerve endings in that area, and that’s why we do it there. And the vet and vet tech said the whole thing is trickier to manage correctly when the cat is dehydrated to begin with (the skin is tougher and the tent is less roomy). And he is very good and doesn’t show signs of pain, or of wanting to escape. More like depression, resignation, despair. The poor thing. It’s not enough to be sick, he also has to have incompetent medical care. Well. At least I feel as if I am gaining another life skill. Small comfort for the cat, I guess. “Wow, so happy for your journey or whatever.” Says the cat.

I am noticing a couple of different kinds of pandemic mornings:

1. Keep dozing off; trouble getting out of bed; play Candy Crush for awhile to convince myself to get up; take shower; drag self downstairs and hope breakfast has a heartening/energizing effect.

2. Wake up at 4:00 a.m. needing to pee, try and fail to get back to sleep, lie awake fretting instead; finally get up, put shoes on, go for a walk before showering because otherwise I won’t do it; come home sweaty and gross, do one of the grosser household cleaning tasks as long as I’m already feeling gross; take shower.

Actually, there is a third kind too, but it doesn’t catch my attention:

3. Feels like a normal morning; I just get up and do my usual stuff without thinking about it so much.

The past few days we have been in Mode Two. I have limited motivation/energy to get things done, so I am doing them first, because otherwise they won’t get done. Today I went for a walk (I hate sweating so much, I hate it so much, it makes me so miserable), then cleaned a toilet, then scrubbed the stupid sliding shower doors and took a shower. Now if I am done for the day until I have to cook dinner, that’s okay, I can still check things off my list.

I have been agitating about what we should do about Elizabeth’s upcoming scoliosis check-up. At her last appointment, back in December, the doctor had predicted he’d be telling her she was done growing and could stop wearing the brace, but then the x-rays showed she wasn’t QUITE done growing, so he said she should come back in six months, and I think the scheduler accidentally put us in July instead of in June, and anyway that’s why it’s upcoming instead of last month.

The appointment is in a big city, in a hospital, with a stressful drive. It’s the kind of appointment where we go in, walk through long hospital corridors, wait in the x-ray waiting room, have some x-rays, then walk through long hospital corridors to the doctor’s waiting room, then go into an exam room and see the doctor for less than five minutes. Lots of exposure to air and different people—and this is the doctor who once kept us waiting two hours past our appointment time. I wondered if we should just…skip the appointment and have her stop wearing the brace. Just assume she’s done growing now, seven months past the time the doctor was already pretty sure she would have stopped. How much damage could it do? Well, that’s the kind of question my mind wants to roll around in at 4:00 in the morning.

So then another option is to postpone the appointment and have her keep wearing the brace. But it isn’t as if the end is in sight here. How long would we have to postpone it? Six months? A year? A year and a half? Meanwhile she’s wearing something uncomfortable and very likely unnecessary, and maybe it’s not fitted right anymore and starts doing damage??? (More 4:00 in the morning thoughts.)

But yesterday the doctor’s office called us and asked if we wanted to do a virtual appointment, and have the x-rays done locally. Well hell yes that is what we want. But now I am in a bit of a tangle because the orders they emailed me looked wrong to me (“Ordering MD” is listed as “FIELD, FIELD,” for example), and I didn’t want to go to the x-ray place and have the orders not be right and have to go home and then back again and breathe an additional batch of medical air. But when I emailed to double-check a couple of things I was concerned about, the doctor’s office said, without addressing my concerns, that the orders were fine and we shouldn’t have any trouble. So I called the x-ray place Just To Be Extra Sure, and they said the orders were not fine and that they can’t do the x-rays based on them, and that they need the orders faxed to them from the doctor’s office. So I have sent a new secure message to the doctor’s office asking them to fax the orders directly to the x-ray place, and WE SHALL SEE. I hate this kind of thing so much. Why am I, the only unpaid and non-medically-educated person in this transaction, running back and forth as go-between? What if doctor’s offices and x-ray departments talked to each other directly, speaking the same language and getting paid for their time?

Speaking of which, I had a rare excellent experience with that very thing, right after I wrote that paragraph. Well, perhaps “excellent” is overstating it, considering I had to make two phone calls and they took in total nearly an hour. BUT! What happened was, I got a bill for the full amount of a routine physical I had 11 months ago, which seems…a little tardy, bill-wise, but also, there was no reason I could see that it wouldn’t have been covered. I called the provider, who said they had submitted the claim multiple times to the insurance, but the insurance had denied the claim; the provider said there was no reason given for the denial. So I called the insurance, who said they HAD paid the claim.

In ALL MY LIFE EXPERIENCE WITH SUCH THINGS SO FAR, I would have expected the insurance company to shrug and tell me I’d have to take it up with the provider, maybe give me a reference number I was supposed to say to them; and the provider to shrug and say I needed to talk to my insurance company, maybe give me a reference number I was supposed to say to them. INSTEAD: the person I talked to at the insurance company said, “If you want, I can give the provider a call right now and see what’s going on.” DO I WANT? DO I WANT? IS THIS HEAVEN? So I said “YES PLEASE” and then I was listening to the insurance company’s hold music (which, to be fair, slaps) for Quite Some Time, but being on hold waiting for someone else to handle a problem for you is a VERY DIFFERENT kind of being on hold than waiting to helplessly explain to yet another person what is going on. And it seems that she DID handle it?? And she’s sending me copies of the forms she’s sending the provider, so that I’ll have them too?? Just in case the provider tells me it’s NOT handled??

Meanwhile, the scoliosis doctor’s office, which I have been hoping all this time would have faxed the orders so we could go do the x-rays after I was done spending an hour with the provider/insurance problem, turned out to have sent a message asking which of two x-ray places I was trying to use. I GAVE YOU A FAX NUMBER AND ASKED YOU TO FAX THE ORDERS. PLEASE FAX THE ORDERS TO THAT NUMBER.

It felt like the United States as a nation turned its collective mind the past few days to fall school plans. It reminded me in a much less festive way of Christmas shopping, where it feels MUCH TOO SOON to start shopping until it abruptly feels like I’ve left it MUCH TOO LATE. One day I was thinking there was no sense in fretting about school yet, because things were still changing so quickly and who even knew what things would look like by the end of summer? Then on Friday we decided our college kids were not going back to college, and that timing felt like it made sense because bills were coming in for housing and meal plans and so forth, and it makes sense that a college needs to know ahead of time how many people are going to be living there, especially as they try to socially-distance the dorms and dining halls—but it still felt too soon to be trying to make plans for our 8th grader or our 10th graders, especially when we didn’t even know yet what our options were.

But by Saturday morning I found I had made a tentative decision without trying to. And all weekend I saw a dramatic upsurge in other parents on Facebook and Twitter and blogs working on their decisions, too, collecting information/opinions from others, posting about what their schools were doing, and talking about their particular family’s circumstances and needs and how those factors affect their decisions; and I saw teachers posting about their concerns and rising stress levels; and I saw a lot of quick takes about how the estimated death rates for children going to in-person schooling (“the estimated death rates for children,” how very casually government officials are saying those kinds of words) are numbers that ignore the estimated death rates for the teachers, custodians, cafeteria staff, administrative staff, etc.; and I started to see posts asking parents to please support teachers in case of a strike.

On Sunday I said to Paul that we still needed to discuss it together, of course, and that I didn’t know how we were going to handle the various logistics of it if the school didn’t offer remote learning (I am NOT qualified to homeschool, especially not at a high school level), but that I wanted to let him know that at this point, for our particular family’s set of circumstances, I couldn’t see sending the kids back to school. And he said yes, and let’s talk more later, but that at this point he couldn’t see doing it either.

And then this morning there was a survey from our school system, which has all summer been in touch but relatively quiet about specific plans (which seemed appropriate, since it seemed so impossible to make plans when things kept changing so quickly, and I appreciate them not yanking us around), asking how much in-school time we would like for our children, among various options including none (remote learning), part-time, and full-time; asking whether we would need cafeteria/bus services; etc. It said our answers would not be set in stone, since obviously the situation continues to change daily, but that they were trying to get an idea of what the needs of the school community were. I am not even turning my mind to the not-my-problem-to-solve issue of how they can possibly expect teachers to handle the extreme conditions of remote learning while ALSO handling the work and risk of in-person learning, especially if they are anticipating a shortage of teachers; I am just going to fill out the survey and answer the questions we were asked.

There have been some improvements to life since exhaustion/fretfulness.

• The wick has been removed from Edward’s abscess, so now it can heal up, and he says it feels like it is indeed healing. He has had a shower and washed his hair, after a week of not being able to do so. (I would have washed his hair in the sink if there’d been one more delay, but he was very reluctant to have me do that, so I’m glad it didn’t come to that.)

• I called the pediatrician again, deciding I would stay on hold for no more than 15 minutes, and then I would write them a letter saying I could not get through their system and could they please call me at their convenience. But mere seconds after I worked my way through the automated options, someone picked up. It was so fast, I hadn’t even rehearsed what I was going to say, and had to go with “Oh!! Uh!! Hi!!” And now Edward has an appointment for later this week, and it’s nice to know we’ll have a doctor checking the progress of the healing, even though I am twitchy about going into yet another medical building.

• I looked up his antibiotic, the one the doctor gave him three more days’ worth of but at a different dosage, and the CHANGED dosage is the normal full dosage. What he was on before was double the standard dosing. So I felt okay about just letting this one go and giving him the reduced-but-normal dosage for three days, whether or not that’s what the doctor intended. If it had been for a longer period of time, I would have forced myself to call, and I had found a phone number that looked promising as a place to start, which made me feel less flaily and more as if there was something I could do if I needed to.

• Edward’s MRI appointment is over, and it feels good just to have that no longer looming up on the calendar. It felt especially good because it looked like it was going to be THE WORST: he has to drink a bunch of special fluid before the MRI, and he drank a bunch and then barfed it up, and they said they’d take a sample image to see if they could do the MRI anyway, but if not we’d have to reschedule: they weren’t going to let him try again with more fluid. This place is about an hour and a half away and stressful to get to, and thinking of having done all the anticipation and all the worry that we should cancel and all the driving and all the coaxing Edward to drink the nasty fluid, and then have to do it all again another day—well. But then: they COULD get the images anyway! so they did the whole MRI! All the way home, Edward and I were jubilant, way more jubilant than if it had just gone normally without first the pit of potential despair. (We’re also increasingly cranky about the insistence that he drink a FULL LITER of the fluid, when it is OBVIOUS that’s not necessary. This time he drank not even half a liter, then threw most of it up, and they could still get the images.)

• We got an email from the vet, following up on her voice mail from Friday. I didn’t get a voice mail on Friday, but it’s an issue with my phone, not with the vet; Paul is working on it, having discovered because of this that he is having the same issue with his phone. Anyway, it looks like one of the cat’s kidneys has shut down for reasons unknown, and the other is larger because it’s doing the work of two and not because there’s a tumor; the active kidney is infected, but it’s important to get the right antibiotic so we’re waiting on the results of the urine culture. In the meantime she has prescribed a comically expensive cat food, and a general dewormer just in case of parasites. We’re going to try the antibiotics and the prescription food, then she’ll see him again in two weeks; if he hasn’t gained weight, we’ll decide what the next step might be. Things are still uncertain (neither the vet nor the ultrasound technician think that what they’ve found so far is enough to explain his weight loss), but I’d been thinking there was a strong chance that after Friday’s appointment we’d be making the hard choice to put the cat down, so this reprieve is welcome. And it also felt good to know the vet didn’t forget us: it was our own fault we were left hanging, not hers.

• Paul has found ways he can track both the electric meter and the water meter online, so he can SEE us, for example, pre-heating the oven or taking a shower or whatever. He has already tracked down two fixable issues.

• In doing the blog project where I update the links and photos that broke during the move from Blogspot to WordPress, I accidentally discovered another blog that was posting my posts, as-is, as if the posts were their own, with my photos and everything. I went through the reporting process, but it did not fill me with confidence (for example, it asked me to provide the URL of every single stolen post, but there were hundreds, so I just gave a sample of four or five posts plus an explanation, but then the form wouldn’t submit because the explanation was not in URL format), and also I was worried because all the stolen posts were from when my blog was on Blogspot, so I thought that might muddy the waters if the “proof” I was giving showed the posts on WordPress instead—but I learned today that that other blog HAS been deleted.

• I saw a story online about a family who has lost several members to Covid-19, and, along with having some things on my list resolve and others improve and others removed altogether, it helped reset my perspective. That isn’t something someone else can point out to me (is there anything more annoying and less effective than being reminded that you are not literally the worst-off person in the entire world?), but it’s something that can help if I tell it to myself. My whole extended family is still well; no one is sick, no one has died. (As long as I don’t start thinking “Yeah, but this streak can’t last.”)

• But new fret: it looks like we might have to make decisions soon about things such as “Do we let our college kids go back to in-person college, or….or what? Drop out? Take a year off? Would they be allowed back at the college if they did take a year off? What are the options here? Who gets to make the decision, us or them or a combination? If they DO go…can they come back home, and if so, how?” I’m trying to wait until the choice is actually upon us, since plans keep changing and a lot can happen between now and then, so we don’t even know what our choices ARE yet—but on the other hand, this is now something that will have to happen NEXT MONTH, which sounds pretty soon.

We normally go through Archer Farms Monster trail mix at a pretty steady rate, and I’ve been continuing to order it from Target during the pandemic—but in the last few weeks it hasn’t been available for shipping. We tried a few other trail mixes, but no one liked them as much. It occurred to me that I could easily make my own Monster trail mix (I even have an empty Monster trail mix bin I could mix it in), since all the ingredients are easy to buy separately; but I felt like I wanted the guidance of knowing what the original proportions were, rather than winging it. I WAS able to buy it in a smaller, more-expensive-per-ounce bag of it, and I put it aside as a little project for another day. TODAY WAS THE DAY.

I assembled my equipment: a kitchen scale, pen and paper, the bag of trail mix, a paper towel, five little bowls. Did it bother me that two of the bowls were the same color, especially when I own two additional colors of that bowl (pink and yellow)? Yes, but I was not going to lose momentum by waiting for the dishwasher to finish. Plus, then I would have had trouble choosing which five colors of the six I should use. In some ways this was easier: the type of discontent was predestined. A person could PRETEND there were only four colors, and that this was merely a matter of the pattern repeating.

I separated out the ingredients. Left to right: peanuts, mini M&Ms, raisins, chocolate chips, peanut butter chips. (If this task appeals to you, may I recommend a job as a library page?) I had to dump the contents of one bowl back out onto the paper towel so I could tare the scale to the weight of an empty bowl (I could have used a sixth bowl for that, and could have had it in the photo and everything, now I’m bothered again about the bowl colors) (also it bothers me that I put the two darkest things in the darkest bowls, though I don’t regret using the orange bowls for the peanut-related things; but I could have at least put the raisins in green and the M&Ms in purple, well BYGONES). I weighed the five bowls and wrote down the results. I resisted the temptation to ROUND the results, even in cases where HEAVEN ITSELF cried out for rounding (e.g., 101 grams of peanuts, 99 grams of raisins, ARE THEY DELIBERATELY TAUNTING SCIENCE??). I thought back to my biology teacher, who had to tell me to stop tweaking my labs to Look Right and to instead put down THE NUMBERS I ACTUALLY GOT.

My plan was to take little pieces of paper I’d written the weights on, and tuck them into their respective bowls to make a pretty and effective visual aid. As I was stacking the empty bowls, having dumped their contents into the bin and mixed them thoroughly back together, I remembered that that was the plan.

See, I left more room on the bottom half, for tucking into the bowls. Anyway! Here are the numbers, according to this one sample bag! (I am going to order at least one more bag for a double-check; I have to order the unsalted peanuts anyway.)

• unsalted peanuts: 3.6 ounces / 101 grams
• mini M&M’s: 2.7 ounces / 77 grams
• raisins: 3.5 ounces / 99 grams
• chocolate chips (I’m pretty sure milk chocolate): 2.5 ounces / 69 grams
• peanut butter chips: 2.0 ounces / 56 grams

I am going to order the things I don’t have, or get them on my next grocery-shopping trip, and then scale the whole thing up to fit the 36-ounce bin. Also I am going to make the peanuts and raisins the EXACT SAME WEIGHT, and I’m going to make the M&M’s and chocolate chips match each other, too, and I’m going to ROUND TO MY HEART’S CONTENT. If I’m doing this math right, with my adjustments it would be something like:

• unsalted peanuts: 9.25 ounces / 260 grams
• mini M&M’s: 6.5 ounces / 175 grams
• raisins: 9.25 ounces / 260 grams
• chocolate chips: 6.5 ounces / 175 grams
• peanut butter chips: 5 ounces / 140 grams

That comes to 36.5 ounces. But actually, I might want to scale the whole thing down even smaller, like to 30 ounces, because I need room in the bin to shake it all together to mix it, anyway. And also I want to remember to compare the price of making my own versus buying it already made. Well, those will be problems for another day.

[Figuring Out the Proportion of Ingredients in Archer Farms Monster Trail Mix: DO-OVER!]