Can I once again consult our collective knowledge on a question? William goes to a college in a big city. When he comes home for a visit, he walks a short distance from his college to the nearest subway station, then takes the subway to a more reasonable pick-up point, and we collect him there. This means he has to haul all of the stuff he needs for the visit. This is not yet the question, but it the question is on its way.

I would get him a large rolling suitcase, but any luggage has to be stored in his small dorm room. (My college had a storage area for luggage-type things, but his does not.) So it has to be luggage that collapses as much as possible. I bought him a 3-pack of Ikea duffels for transporting his stuff to college originally, and those worked great for that and they fold so nice and small—but they are less great for lugging long distances. He also has a duffel with a shoulder strap, and a backpack. So you can see this is not an emergency, and he can manage. But he has a birthday coming up, and there is nothing he wants, and he has complained about his luggage situation and wished he could used a wheeled suitcase like Rob does, so this would be the perfect practical problem-solving present! Every college boy’s dream!

What I would LIKE to get him is basically a duffel bag with wheels and an extending handle. And such things exist! I have seen them online! Here’s one I NEARLY bought, until I read the reviews! But—a lot of the reviews on such items are daunting. Things like “The very first time I took this out, a wheel broke and the duffel fabric ripped.” With photographic evidence.

Another option is to get him a folding luggage cart, which perhaps he could use with his folding duffel bags. But is hard for me to tell how much luggage those carts will hold. Can he pile, say, two folding Ikea duffels on one, or is that ridiculous? The little platforms look so small.

So here are the recommendations I am hoping we have in our hive mind:

1. Personal-experience recommendations for collapsing duffel bags with wheels/handles—or a fairly conclusive consensus that such things are garbage and not worth buying.

2. Personal-experience recommendations for folding luggage carts—or a fairly conclusive consensus that such things are garbage and not worth buying.

3. Any other recommendations that might address this issue.

I wrote a post a week ago, edited it last night, and this morning it was not edited, and my screen was at my list of posts instead of in the post itself as I’d left it. I used my usual methods for getting back a more recent version, and all failed. I briefly wondered if I’d DREAMED editing it, but I think it’s more likely a cat walked on the keyboard and screwed everything up.

I am agitating right now over communication with my college-aged kids. They are not as communicative as I would like (though not deeply or alarmingly uncommunicative), and I am not sure what if anything to do about that. I have a lot of friends and acquaintances with college-aged kids, and it’s a common topic. One common approach is “I pay for their phone, so they have to communicate with me as much as I tell them to,” and that is an approach I understand but it’s not an approach that works for me. For one thing, I don’t like to tie their behavior to my money, considering how near in the future I am hoping they will be paying for their own lives with their own money and I will no longer have that method of compelling them.

The approach I WISH I’d set up, and maybe it’s not too late: some of my friends/acquaintances simply informed their children that they were expected to check in once a week, if only to say they were alive and well. Like, “Here are your X-long twin sheets, here is your shower caddy, and here are the expectations for communication.” That seems very smart. Every time I think about doing it NOW, when they are already at college and have been there for some time, it doesn’t feel like it works to say it anymore. It seems like it works only when it’s part of the Heading For College process. Well, I can still do this with the three younger kids. I’ll just write the older two off. (This is one of the many ways in which I have been glad to have more than the standard two children: when I mess up with the first one, and then I mess up differently with the second one, I’m still not out of chances.)

[Edited to add: Some of the comments are making me think I should have clarified how often I am contacting them. Right now I am sending them a chatty family-newsy email (“Henry got braces”/”Elizabeth joined such-and-such a high school club”/”The twins have the same teacher you guys had for math”) approximately once every month to six weeks, plus occasional/irregular much-shorter texts/emails for very specific things such as “We just got another letter from your college forwarded from our old address–can you see if you can straighten that out?”/”What day are your exams over, so I can book a motel room?” We also all send them Snapfish pictures of the cats pretty often. We never phone them.]

Completely unrelatedly, I am looking for flannel sheets with deep pockets: Paul and I were wildly overdue for a new mattress, and finally acquired one, and all our old sheets are popping off the corners. I know they sell little things to force the corners to stay put, but in my experience those are not only a hassle but also eventually tear holes in the sheets. I just want to buy deeper sheets. I was browsing online but of course the reviews are putting me into an indecision spiral: “These are the best sheets!!”/”They don’t even feel like flannel”/”They ripped almost right away”/”I recommend these to everyone I know!!”/”They’re not actually deep-pocketed.”

I have tried my first Eggo toaster waffle, and I am not as happy as I’d expected to be. Are there other toaster waffles that are better, or is this just the inherently disappointing nature of toaster waffles? I am looking for something where I can make one single waffle without having to get out equipment / make a mess.

I read this book and I liked it:

Magic for Liars, by Sarah Gailey. It had a few parts that were self-consciously written (if you feel the need to write that your character thought to herself that if she were in a book this would be an overly meet-cute scene, my own personal opinion is that that’s a good sign that the scene needs a re-write rather than an embarrassed nod to the fact that you knew it needed the re-write); and it laboriously over-repeated the plot tensions (“something happened which I will keep referring to but won’t tell you the details of” + “for some reason I keep reminding you that it bothers me that my twin sister has magical powers and I don’t, even though that’s not hard to remember/understand”); and I thought it was super unrealistic to think that someone without magical powers could FAKE IT to people who DID have magical powers, and wished at some point it had been revealed that they all knew all along that she was faking it—but OVERALL I just really enjoyed reading it and thought it was fun and cool and different. It has magic in it, and twins, and a romance that may have started with triteness but didn’t end with it, and a magic school that is more real-world than Hogwarts, and some interesting talk about what magic can/can’t do, and some really neat ideas for spells (including hair highlights), and characters I could imagine and love. I wanted more books about this world/school, and particularly more of Mrs. Webb. And I want to read more books by this author.

My best best best Valentine’s Days have been the ones when I was single and spent the evening (either on my own or with a friend) with a pizza and a box of chocolates and some romantic movies. BEST. I was sitting here feeling sorry I couldn’t celebrate it that way and it occurred to me I absolutely could. I think next year I’m going to start that as a family thing: we can get pizza, I’ll get a big box of chocolates to share, and I’ll pick the movie(s).

My wine-and-appetizers group had a Galentine’s Day party, and I super recommend doing that if you have any inclination. A few years ago my aunt said that her life advice to me was to invest time and attention in friendships with women, and that’s another thing I super recommend if you have any inclination. I think there is a lot of emphasis on investing time and attention in romantic relationships, and I’m not saying DON’T do that, but I AM saying I am finding in many ways I get a greater return on investment from time spent with friends.

Anyway: the Galentine’s Day party. A perfect excuse for inviting a bunch of people you’d like to get to know better, if you’re feeling short of friends; or a lovely friendship-affirming party for people who are already friends. Doing it potluck is delightful, because you get to eat all kinds of things, and you know there’ll be enough to eat, and it greatly reduces stress on the hostess. Our group likes to do BYOB, but it would also work well to buy a few great honking bottles of wine in various colors (I recommend emphasizing pink and white varieties, and get at least one fizzy one) and set those out, along with wine glasses. (And/or soda/water with cups, if your group is not as winey as my group, or if it’s a new group and you don’t know how winey they are.)

In unnecessary-but-nice, I like to use this excuse to buy heart plates and heart napkins: at least two plates and two napkins per person. (It’s common for people to use one set for savory and then a second set for sweet.) And put out forks and some serving spoons, because almost for sure people will bring things that need forks and serving spoons. If I think of it, I like to make sure I have the following pantry items Just In Case: bag of tortilla chips, bag of potato chips, box of crackers, extra wine. Every so often someone will bring a dip or spread and have forgotten the chips/crackers, and it’s just nice to be able to casually whip out a bag/box.

Then, especially for a first-time Galentine’s Day party, or for a group that doesn’t all know each other well, I suggest a classroom-style valentine exchange: specify that you are talking about a return to the fun of classroom exchanges, and that the exchange will consist of literally things such as paper Wonder Woman valentines with a Dove Promise taped to them; those paper valentines that have lollipops speared through them; homemade cut-out construction paper hearts decorated with stickers; those Fun-Dip packs with one dipping stick + one flavor of powder; heart-shaped snack cakes; etc. Follow the example of our genius elementary-school teachers and have everyone just fill out the “from” field, not the “to” field, so that everyone can just walk along dropping an item into each waiting box/bag. I had on hand a bunch of heart-covered lunch bags bought on clearance a previous year, but you could ask people to bring an empty (DECORATED??) cereal box or whatever, too, labeled with their name.

Established friend-groups can wing it more with the gifts; setting a price range would probably be a good idea. I am trying to think of some of the things our group has done. Mugs. Pretty shot glasses. Little succulents in hand-painted pots. Bracelets. Hand-made necklaces. Cans of spiked seltzer / mini bottles of booze / those cute little bottles of wine. (Cans/bottles of fancy coffee would work well too.) Pretty little jars full of pink/white/red M&Ms. Little heart-shaped boxes of chocolates. Assorted Valentine’s Day candies with “Happy Galentine’s Day!” stickers on them. Pretty notebooks. Plus, a lot of us like to buy the same kits the elementary school kids use, so there’s a scattering of paper valentines with jelly bracelets, decorative erasers/pencils, temporary tattoos, etc.

Music! I suggest estimating the approximate years the people you’re inviting were in middle school and high school, and making a playlist of popular songs from those years.

I am not getting any better at taping library book covers. I have gotten better at COVERING them, which is when you put a plastic wrapper over the dust jacket: at first I felt so clumsy and awkward doing it, but then my hands learned how, and now I just whip those suckers out one after another. But TAPING, which is what you do to protect the covers of paperbacks and the kind of hardcovers that don’t have dust jackets, is something I keep doing and keep being bad at. I feel like I shouldn’t do it anymore, when I’m so bad at it? But no one is saying anything or acting concerned. “Oh, you’ll get the hang of it,” they said four months ago when I learned how. “You just have to practice!” HOW MUCH PRACTICING UNTIL WE GIVE UP

Today I accidentally stuck the tape to the book cover without noticing the tape had picked up the index card that goes along with the book on its trip through the cataloging/taping/covering process. So I had to carefully remove the tape from the book cover, then put a new sticker on the cover to replace the one I ruined with the tape, then literally cut the index card out of the tape strip, then start all over. IS THIS THE BEST USE OF OUR PERSON-HOURS

Not to go on and on forever about such a boring and specific topic but, like, when the librarian was showing me how to do it, she showed me how to do it so there’d be NO bubbles under the tape. On my BEST taped covers, there are LOTS of bubbles. LOTS. One of my co-workers told me that she secretly uses a pin to pop a bubble if she gets one. ONE! If she gets ONE bubble! She takes out a PIN and pops it! Because it is so important to her to have NO BUBBLES! (I have not shown her any of my taping work.)

And I get SO MANY FINGERPRINTS under the tape! So many! I don’t know what other people are doing to prevent this! One of the librarians said I should just wash my hands and not use lotion right beforehand, but I DO wash my hands and DON’T use lotion right beforehand and I STILL leave fingerprints all under the tape! If I am ever accused of a crime and have vanished so they can’t get my fingerprints, all they will have to do is go to the library and pick up as many full, perfectly-preserved sets as they like!

Also, you know how hardcover books have a little canal/indent along the edge of the cover? Like, there’s the spine, and then a nice little indent to let the cover bend, and then the rest of the cover? The tape is supposed to go neatly down into that indent, and we have a little tool we use to jam it down in there. MY tape keeps getting stuck ACROSS the indent before I’ve had a chance to wrestle it into the indent. Once I DO press it down into the indent, it’s with a BUNCH of bubbles.

Pretty soon I am seriously going to have to go up to someone who ranks higher than me and tell them that I am not getting better at this and should perhaps spend my time elsewhere doing elsewhat. I feel like they’re going to think I’m just trying to get out of having to do the task, even though it should make absolute sense to all of us that some people would be better at some things than others. I’m happy to cover books! I’m happy to stamp discards! I’m happy to refill tape dispensers and put more water in the Keurig and bundle up the old newspapers and salt the walkways and collect books from the bookdrops and do any other tasks they want me to do! But THIS PARTICULAR TASK seems to me to be a BAD IDEA for me to do. If I mis-cover a book, I can take the cover off and start again; when I mis-TAPE a book, the book looks bad and fingerprinty and bubbly for the rest of its life.

Today Elizabeth, who has a tree-nut allergy that has never needed more than benadryl to fix an occasional accidental ingestion, had a reaction that led me to drive her to the ER, where the ER nurse kindly scolded me for not using the Epipen. I hadn’t wanted to make a big deal out of nothing, and on the way to the ER I was worried I’d be embarrassed for bringing her in for no reason and wasting all that time/money; but VERY quickly it became apparent that we were FAR at the other end of things and I was going to be embarrassed for not making a much bigger deal of it. “And why didn’t you use the Epipen?,” the triage nurse asked. “I’m just wondering if there was a reason,” she explained. I gaped and stammered, and the triage nurse triaged my temperament in a hot second: “Never used it before, didn’t know it was time, gotcha,” she assessed with surprising accuracy, making a note. “I was thinking the Epipen was for more of an emergency,” I said meekly. “This IS an emergency,” said the triage nurse, gesturing toward all of Elizabeth.

This will be familiar to a bunch of you who have dealt with food allergies, but I’d only ever taken people to the emergency room for: (1) stomach pains, (2) an injured elbow from falling off a bike, and (3) a sinus infection when the pediatrician referred us just in case. So I am only familiar with the kind of emergency room visit where you check in, and then wait awhile to see the triage nurse, and then wait for hours in the waiting room, and then finally get brought back to a room, and then wait another hour or more for a doctor, and then wait another hour for an x-ray, and so forth. I was not familiar with the kind of emergency room visit where you start to check in, but as you’re talking to the person at the desk they pick up an intercom and start talking into it. And then the triage nurse comes directly out to get you. And then after only a minute or two the triage nurse takes you directly back to a room, calling out requests (calmly, so calmly) to people along the way, and by the time you reach the room, which is right by the nurse’s station rather than down the hall where you’ve been on previous occasions, you have accumulated five medical people including the actual doctor already, and someone is getting an IV set up, and they don’t leave the room for the patient to change into the hospital gown but instead help her briskly into it. I was not familiar with that kind of ER visit, but now I am.

Here was the allergic reaction Elizabeth had that made me take her to the ER even though I felt like I was making too big a deal of things (she was not having any trouble breathing): she threw up the benadryl we gave her after she accidentally ate some walnut, and she got pink splotches on her neck/shoulders that gradually started spreading down her torso. Those were two of the three things her allergy doctor said were reasons to use the Epipen and then call 911, and so you might be wondering why I didn’t use the Epipen and call 911. I can only explain it by saying that I thought the third thing on the list (trouble breathing) was the REAL one, and that the other two were more of an issue ALONG WITH the trouble breathing. I felt like if I took her to the ER with just the throwing up and the pink skin, they would say “Uh huh…but you say she’s not having any trouble breathing? So…why are you here? And you know it’s not a good idea to use an Epipen if it’s not Really Needed.” It turns out no. It turns out that when the allergist gives you really clear instructions and you don’t follow them, triage nurses say things like “This is WHY WE GIVE OUT Epipens.”

(I don’t think I’m capturing her wry tone correctly, which is a shame. She has a frank/direct manner combined with kindness and humor and unflappability and very high competence. She was assigned to us back when I brought Edward in for his sinus infection and it turned out it was much more serious than they’d initially thought; she came in with the doctor who was coming in to tell us the scary results of the CAT scan, and she stayed with us until we left for the city hospital, and she was such a reassuring presence. Anyway I love her eternally and was so happy and relieved to see her when I arrived with Elizabeth. But she is a little scary and she would like me to use the Epipen next time. And I will! I WILL! NOW I KNOW, AND I WILL!)

Anyway, everything is fine. Elizabeth got epinephrine and benadryl and pepcid and steroids, and then she had to be under observation for three hours, and then we went home with prescriptions for more medications for the next few days.

I am feeling slightly high on success. It turns out that, if you have a terrible, terrible list of perfectly ordinary tasks, and that list fills you with inexplicable dread and despondency every time you think of it, you may feel SOMEWHAT BETTER if you accomplish even one thing on the list. And furthermore: feeling somewhat better may encourage you to tackle just one more small thing the next day. (Not the SAME day. No. Not when you have already made it over the tremendous hurdle of STARTING THE LIST.) And if you can just do ONE SINGLE TASK each day, just ONE, going along MUCH slower than it seems as if Everybody Else would be able to handle it, the list will NEVERTHELESS decrease. In ONE week there will be SEVEN fewer items on the list! And when you think of the list, you will feel seven items’ less dread and despondency! Well, you will if “you” is “I”/”me.” Second-person is a dangerous tense to fool around with.

I got stuck for a couple of days even after deciding on this approach, because I felt like I wasn’t allowed to choose the easiest item on the list first. Two days later I realized that was ridiculous: it wasn’t as if by forbidding myself the easiest item I was making more progress on the harder ones. So I did the one that was easiest to make myself do, and I crossed it off, and the next day I picked another item. And then today I made myself do one of the worst/hardest ones, which involved a phone call, so now I am sitting here with Reward Coffee and a Reward Snack; and when I think about the list I get noticeably less of that sick adrenaline feeling than I did before, which is its own additional reward.

There have been requests for an update on the New-House Feelings. I was just talking about this with Paul the other day. It came up because we went grocery shopping (he has started coming with me, which is…odd, and more on that another time, perhaps), and they had the $4.99 bunches of tulips for the first time this season, and I did buy some, but I commented that I didn’t feel the same DESPERATE NEED for fresh tulips/daffodils as I did last year, and that the winter didn’t seem so never-ending, either: it already felt like we could be thinking ahead to spring. We agreed that part of this could be attributed to the atypically mild winter, with far fewer snowstorms than last year (and only dealing with ONE snowy driveway per storm instead of TWO—at this point last year we still owned two houses), but then Paul added, with a little hesitation: “And also…you’re more used to the house now.” And I do think that’s so. That is: I know I’m more used to the house, and I do think that contributes to feeling less of a dire need of bulb flowers and warmth and spring.

We’ve had a full year in the new house now, and that really helps. We know what winter is like here; we know what to expect in the spring. We’re getting used to which vents to open/close for heat and a/c, and we’re getting used to which are the best windows to open on nice days. Things aren’t so OVERWHELMING all the time. We have a nice view out our windows, and I am appreciating it in seasonal ways. I knew where to put the Christmas decorations this time. We know what the ice-maker sounds like, and we can tell who’s awake based on where we hear the footsteps above, and we know what it sounds like when snow falls off part of the metal roof and lands hard on another part of the metal roof (it sounds like we are all about to die).

However, I still have hung up virtually zero wall stuff. I put up two calendars, one poster, and two arts, and they are all in places that already had a nail. There are no further nails, so I stopped. My New Year’s resolution was to keep going, but I have not yet done so.

Nor have I bought furniture for this house, with the exception of an inexpensive folding bookcase for my personal sunporch room. The furniture from our old house does not work well at all in the new living room, and other rooms have insufficient furniture, and yet have I bought anything or even started researching? I have not. I am too overwhelmed. I tell myself it does not matter, but I do feel a little embarrassed when people come over and see our old ripped-up furniture still crammed awkwardly into the new smaller living room, and another smaller room with, like, one recliner, two bookshelves, and several assorted chairs just sort of up against a wall along with a filing cabinet. It feels like when other people move, they get settled in a lot faster.

Well. There really is no rush. There is no moral imperative to have all the right furniture, especially when there are two children in college. And one day perhaps I will just START WORKING ON IT. That is what happened in the old house, though it happened…sooner. But! But but! In the old house, that was our FIRST house after living in an apartment! So that was different: we needed a bunch of house stuff, so we went out and acquired it. This time, it’s more like I have all this furniture and all these wall hangings that worked in the OLD house but look weird in the NEW house, and I just don’t know how I want to approach that problem yet. It’s not like when we moved into the old house and spent the first night sitting in partial darkness because our previous apartments all had ceiling lights so we owned only two small bedside lamps, but our house had ceiling lights only in the kitchen and bathroom and hall and we didn’t fully realize that until the sun went down, and so then the very next day I went out and bought four lamps. It’s not like that this time. We can make do just fine with what we have, so I’m lacking the motivation I need to GET GOING.

And also, I am not good at choosing furniture and have made many mistakes in the past, so now I hate furniture decisions and find them stressful. I so so so so so so so so so so so so wish the previous owners hadn’t gotten rid of ALL the furnishings before trying to sell the house. I probably would have bought a LOT of whatever furniture they’d had. Like, maybe all of it. I’m so grateful they did leave the curtains.

One thing I think about with mixed enjoyment and stress is what to do with some of our weird little kind-of bedrooms, the ones that are BETWEEN other bedrooms so you’d have to go through someone ELSE’S bedroom to get to yours, and so we’re not using them as bedrooms. We initially set one up as a music/art room and the other as a Legos/games room, and neither is being used much, so we need to rethink. Right now they feel like inaccessible luxury: EXTRA ROOMS, how decadent! but…we can’t figure out any good way to use them!

Possibly sometime I will take some photos of various parts of the house and show you the weird spaces I am working with. Right now when I think of doing that, I do that thing where you slump into a chair and feel as if a task is so inexplicably insurmountable, you don’t know what’s wrong with you. (That’s again if “you” is “I”/”me.”)