Next steps

 Duchess and I went to Minnesota to deliver her to college. She had a LOT of feelings about this, as you can imagine, but the predominant feeling was excitement. 

This is Duchess sadly saying goodbye to Portland.

We stayed the night in St Paul, got into the dorm the next morning. 

Duchess is housed in The Worst Dorm on Campus (a time-honored rite of passage for unlucky freshmen across the country). She's making the best of it, though, and already relishing her new adventure. She's going to thrive, grim cinderblocks be damned.

(And I got to do a little bonus touristing - it's been 25 years since I last saw Minnesota!)

Miscellaneous updates

 It is not snowing. Just rain, and more rain, and we've all reached the end-of-Portland-winter moment when we just want to see some goddamn sun. 

Everything else continues as normal. Both kids started track, which means a lot of running and burpees and squat jumps and whatnot in the rain for now, but presumably will get slightly less tortury over time. I remain puzzled over the fact that both my children have signed up - voluntarily, multiple times - for running sports, something I never would have done and never will do because running sucks and what even is the point of doing a team sport that isn't collaborative? However, I recognize that they are not me, and also I am looking forward to seeing what events they end up doing. I hope Skipper chooses long jump for one of hers.

Duchess experienced her first-ever not-a-drill full school lockdown this week. It turned out to be a false alarm (shots fired a block away from the school during a period when students were going in and out of the school led to a lockdown until police arrived and got a handle on things), but it was pretty harrowing for the kids and staff, all of whom had to consider, while huddling in their darkened, locked classrooms for an hour, the possibility that they might be about to die. And since they were all holding their phones, all their loved ones got to spend an hour considering that possibility, too. It wasn't great. School was actually cancelled the following day, which feels both like an over-reaction and also totally appropriate. 

Duchess also has now been admitted to four colleges. She'll have all the offers/rejections by April 1, and then she'll have a month to decide, but I think she's comfortable that she'll end up in a good place even if all she gets from now on is rejections. 

So the spring is shaping up to include a lot of track meets and difficult decisions for Duchess, and please no more lockdowns. 

Summer Pt 2

Summer continues!

I got my eyelids cut open! It was another Real Surgery, with comical hat and IV and sedatives (hooray!) but it was very quick, and the recuperation is barely a thing at all - basically just getting over the sedative fog immediately after surgery and then putting antibiotic ointment on my newborn eyelid for 2 weeks. I am extremely relieved to have two eyes again, after 5 weeks of 1.5 eyes, and now I'm very antsy to get my contacts back in (which I guess has to wait until I finish the course of antibiotic ointment). My vision is so poor that glasses can't correct it fully, and wearing my glasses makes me feel very vulnerable and kind of half-asleep. Anyway, that adventure seems to be done. My rebuilt eyelid (about half of the margin of the lower lid was built out of tissue cut from the inside of my upper lid) is weird-looking and missing eyelashes, but good enough to pass casual inspection from anywhere more than a few feet away from my face. Cook thinks it's very funny that I am now a person who has had multiple plastic surgeries.

Skipper's Swedish adventure continues; it has been a big one for her. So far she has done all kinds of Swedish things (picked blueberries, gone swimming at 10pm, eaten many meals outside, been very bored at a summerhouse), and some American-person-in-Sweden things (fielding questions about America, being unable to manage Swedish "R"s, hating salt licorice).* She has met a score of Swedish cousins (half of whom I've never met) for the first time, used a credit card, put her contacts on by the light of a phone flashlight, swum with jellies, learned a bunch of solitaire games, and read Pride and Prejudice. She has eaten shrimp that were served whole, Swedish Swedish fish,**and many kanelbullar, and also experienced for the first time a wonderful food that she described as "cold hot chocolate" which was of course ... chocolate milk. This is a photo, courtesy of my mom, of Skipper and cousins swimming at 10pm, dodging jellies. 

When I was a kid, we visited Sweden sometimes, almost entirely in the summer, and I experienced it as a really Different place. The kids I met in Sweden were notably independent and creative, and everybody was outside all the time.  People had less stuff and lived in smaller spaces. Everybody spent long vacations at summerhouses, but the experience was always more or less like camping - even in the relatively palatial family summerhouse, there was one bathroom for the gajillions of people, supplemented by an outhouse, so everybody had to be thrifty with water and bathroom time. I guess my sense of (summertime) Sweden was a combination of thrift or moderated consumption balanced by an abundance of both time and light, and none of that seemed true about the United States in any season. I look forward to hearing Skipper's impressions. 

Duchess was house-sitting for nearly three weeks, and Cook and I had a strange preview of a future empty nest. On the one hand, it has been unexpectedly emotionally hard for me to have both my daughters elsewhere. I feel like my emotional center is reaching constantly for both of them. I don't know how the separation happens - I have to assume that this feeling fades as they grow older and build their own lives and we all become accustomed to being apart, but it feels like maybe it'll be harder than I guessed. 

On the other hand, it is really, really, nice to be able to decide what we want to do/eat/watch/listen to/etc without having to anticipate and/or deal with the kids. We have been eating and enjoying a lot of foods Skipper hates, like spinach and chard. Cook and I decided to go for a little hike, and we just went. We had a great walk. Nobody whined or dawdled, nobody complained about the drive or about being dragged on a hike, and nobody got cranky that we had packed only snacks and didn't get lunch until we got home. It was wonderful. (I told this story to a couple of my childfree-by-choice friends and they were very smug.) 

Duchess is working as a camp counselor, her first full-time job, and finding it very tiring. She got her first full paycheck, and marveled that she was getting so much money and also that it seemed like much less money than the work felt worth. 

*Over the last few years I have begun to recognize some ways in which my mom's Swedishness has affected my life and personality. I never thought of myself as a child of an immigrant - my dad is American, my mom speaks perfect American English, and I don't speak Swedish and am entirely a tourist when I visit Sweden. But some of my approach to the world is informed by a Swedish perspective (pragmatic, fond of pale wood), and some of my lifelong sense of not-quite-fitting is probably informed by growing up in a Swedish-inflected household, in which candy was eaten only on Saturdays, shoes were never worn in the house, and performativeness and excess were avoided.  There was always something un-American about us (though admittedly that was probably in large part due to my weird American dad's insistence that we not have a television). Anyway, it's just that I always thought I was all American, and now I see there's a little bit of something else there, too.  

**She claims they're different than American Swedish fish - larger and more delicious. 

Summer

 It's summer. It's a weird one. The day after school ended, Cook and Skipper went to Detroit, realizing a longtime dream of Skipper's. They watched three baseball games at Comerica Park, and of course the Tigers lost every game badly. Fortunately, Cook and Skipper were emotionally prepared for that outcome, and took it in stride. They did some other touristing - they saw the Little Caesars global headquarters, and looked across the lake to Canada. They seem to have had a very good time. They even got to attend a game with one of my excellent cousins, who schlepped up from Champaign for the occasion. He's a White Sox fan, but Cook and Skipper forgive him. While they were gone, Duchess and I ate snacks for dinner. It was delightful.

Once the dust settled from that adventure, Duchess started work (as a camp counselor at the Dungeons-and-Dragons-in-the-wilderness program she used to attend herself), and moved into her boyfriend's family house to dogsit for them while they were in France for 2 weeks. She found this much more taxing than she expected - long days of non-stop child-wrangling followed by dog-wrangling and house-keeping feels like a lot. And then a crow got stuck in the chimney at the house, and died slowly and horribly over three days (in a heatwave) while we slowly figured out a) that something was in the chimney,*b) that it was a crow, c) that it couldn't get out, d) which organizations/companies will remove a live crow from a chimney,** e) that the company that WOULD remove a live crow from a chimney couldn't come onto the property without signed permission from the homeowner, who was asleep in France at the relevant time. It was awful. And then their refrigerator died, and Duchess and Cook spent hours cleaning up the mess. The lesson here is NEVER HOUSESIT.

And then we sent Skipper to Sweden. By herself. For a MONTH. She was very clear-eyed in the planning that it would be challenging and lonely for her, but she wanted to do it. However, as the date approached, she felt increasingly terrified, and so did I. But she set her shoulders and got on that plane, and launched into the unknown. She is spending a couple of weeks couchsurfing with our generous relatives, including a long stint at the family summerhouse, and then attending a 2-week Swedish language camp in Stockholm. (I'm going to Sweden for the last week of her tenure, to see friends and family and do some touristing in Stockholm before retrieving her.) Here she is (photo courtesy of my mom) with another of my excellent cousins. 

And here is that same cousin with me and my brother at the summerhouse a long time ago.

And here she is with my mom (photo courtesy of my excellent cousin).

We miss her terribly, and it's really weird being without her. Duchess is still housesitting, and Cook and I are getting a preview of empty-nesting (except that Duchess comes over for dinner and drops off her dirty laundry, and needs our help with crows and other crises). It is clear that I need something to do with myself in the post-children-in-the-house era; I think I need to invest over the next few years in figuring out some hobbies.

* Please, for everybody's sake, CAP YOUR CHIMNEYS.

** Chimney sweeps, for example, won't remove a live bird.

I had surgery. Wear sunglasses.

 So I had my first real medical intervention last week. I went in for an eye exam a few months ago, and they identified that the weird-looking skin on the inner margin of my eyelid (right up against my eye), which I had thought vaguely was some kind of combination of blepharitis, generally crappy skin, and just becoming an old lady,* was definitely not normal. The doctor did a biopsy on the spot, and that was very unpleasant - the local anesthetic hurt so much I actually shuddered involuntarily, and it turns out that having somebody cutting right next to your wide-open eye is psychologically pretty terrible. (Foreshadowing!) The biopsy indicated basal carcinoma, which is the "good" kind of skin cancer, but its location meant that I needed relatively complicated surgery. 

On Thursday I went in for the removal, having followed the instructions to wear comfortable clothes and pack a lunch. This was Mohs surgery, which is used I guess in situations where they want to take the absolute smallest amount of tissue possible. They give you local anesthetic, cut the thing out, and cauterize the wound, and then send you back out to the waiting room to wait two hours until they get a chance to analyze the tissue and see if they got everything. If they didn't, they bring you back in, and repeat the whole process. This can be repeated multiple times, though 2-3 is the standard. I expected it would be pretty awful, but I hadn't realized how bad I would feel. A friend later identified the emotional awfulness of this sort of thing as your brain forcing your body to do something your body thinks is a terrible idea. This feels right to me - every bit of the surgery felt like danger, and my poor body wanted to run away all day. They put in numbing drops that felt like poison - bleach or something that should NOT go in your eye - and then stabbed me with about a pint's worth of lidocaine, and then they put a black plastic contact in my eye to protect it, and then they did a lot of cutting and snipping and tugging around my eye, and then they cauterized my eyelid, which makes a sizzling sound, and a terrible smell, and the whole time I practiced square breathing with all my might. And then they put an enormous bandage on my eye, and I propped my glasses over it as best I could, which meant I could see only mediocrely at best, and escorted me to the waiting room, where I sat and tried not to cry. 

Cook was planning to come get me when I was done - he had offered to come wait with me, but I thought it would be silly for him to waste the workday that way, and it's not like he could help me with anything. I think of myself as a fairly resilient person with pretty good coping skills under duress, and I figured that I could manage this. Which I guess I could have, but I realized pretty quickly that I really didn't want to try- I felt so wobbly and vulnerable and miserably uncomfortable. (This was not improved by the elderly man with whom I was alone in this room. He very much wanted to talk at me about his opinions, many of which were stupid and some of which were racist in a crappy all-lives-matter kind of way and I felt filthy just from being in the same room. When they paged me back in for the second round of nightmare surgery, I actually felt relieved to escape him.) The second round of surgery - on my already-beaten-up eye - was even worse, and when I got back to the waiting room and Cook was there, I felt the most enormous wave of relief and safety. And then they paged me again, and I shuffled off to what I assumed would be a third round of cutting, but it wasn't - the second surgery had done the trick, and I could go home.  So I went home, missing much of my lower eyelid, with antibiotics in hand, my eye bandaged shut and strict instructions to keep my head above my heart, to not do anything that raised my heart rate, to not bend over, to not lift anything, to not sleep flat. 

The next day I had to go in for the plastic surgery to actually repair my eyelid. This was my first ever actual surgery*** - the kind where they make you take your clothes off and wear a gown (the nurse said I should probably take everything off, because "when you get really relaxed sometimes your bladder relaxes too, and it's a mess") and a comical hat for your hair, and you can't eat or drink anything after midnight the day before. I talked to a lot of medical staff, who were various combinations of extremely nice to me and extremely condescending.*** They gave me Versed, a sedative that immediately made me feel drunk, and wheeled me off to the operating room, where they shot me up with another pint of lidocaine and I spent an hour listening to 90s hip-hop and staring up at bright lights, watching them cut and tug and sew my eyelids. (Nightmare part 2 - I could not close that eye, even if I wanted to, I could only stare.) While the sedative (and the bed that actually had room for my arms, and the warmed blankets) made me feel somewhat more relaxed about this than the day before (though sadly not relaxed enough to pee myself), and it was physically less painful, it was a very emotionally draining morning. And then they took me off to recovery for a bit, and then I got to put my clothes on and go home, with the same strict instructions. I spent a lot of the afternoon napping, propped up on my bed. I'm not a napper, usually - it makes me groggy and nauseated - but I felt so tired and heavy, from some combination of exhaustion and sedative. Every time I moved my open eye, my other eye moved too, which tugged painfully on the stitches. 

I've spent the weekend in a weird useless state, napping and sitting and listening to podcasts, feeling uncomfortable and nauseated. Occasionally I get up and wander around, but moving around too much feels bad and woozy. My vision is weird, too - my right eye is struggling to figure out what its job is now, and what I'm seeing with that eye right now is like grey static on an old TV, which then underlies my left eye's view of the actual world, so that everything I look at is weirdly static-y looking, alarmingly similar to the way my vision darkens and fragments when I pass out. And it's oddly difficult to understand that for my right eye, there's no difference between closed and open. When I blink my left eye, my right eye sort of squeezes too, and it hurts. 

I have another surgery scheduled a month away to "open up the eye." (As best I can tell, the surgeon took the inner layer of my upper eyelid, flapped it down over the hole in my lower eyelid, and stitched everything up. The stitches will dissolve in a few weeks, leaving me with a fused-shut eyelid. In July, he'll more or less just cut across the flap. This seems like magic, and I'm very dubious about it - how does the cut surface figure out that it's a mucus membrane now? - but apparently surgeons have been doing it for a hundred years.)

I took off the bandage today to reveal my sad swollen shut eyelids. I have a couple of piratical patches to cover, for use in public and on work video calls, but for now, the stitches are covered by my upper eyelashes, and the eye just looks closed, like I'm constantly winking. (Cook occasionally does finger guns at me and winks back.)

This has been a really difficult experience to calibrate. On the one hand, it is a tiny bit of skin, and the prognosis is very good - the carcinoma is very unlikely to recur, and the repaired eyelid should be entirely functional (if eyelash-less). Really not a big deal at all. On the other hand, the physical, emotional and logistical impacts of it are substantial, and it all has kind of a horror movie feeling, so it feels like a big deal. I suspect it'll feel like much less of a big deal in a week or so.

Anyway, two takeaways: 

1) I really appreciate my family, especially Cook, who is taking care of all of his usual housework plus all of mine, taking care of me, and handling most of the parenting (including navigating Skipper's panic about all her end-of-year schoolwork). The kids are stepping up to pick up some of my housework and to bring me things and read to me. (Skipper is reading me an Agatha Christie book, and has taken a strong position that the British spelling of "moustache" must be pronounced "MOOstash" which makes me giggle every time.) I am really lucky to have a family that can hold me up at home, and also bring a feeling of home to me when I need it.

2) The doctor told me this kind of eyelid cancer is likely the result of childhood sun exposure. Wear sunglasses. Put sunglasses on your kids. 

*In retrospect this seems crazy - obviously irregular skin is something to worry about. But every previous time I thought something was wrong with me, it turns out to be either a) me getting old or b) me being anxious. I've never thought something was wrong with me and had it actually turn out to be something that was both wrong and actually fixable. 

**I mean, I gave birth in a hospital once, but that was a fairly high-speed event, and I was too busy to pay much attention to things like wearing a hat (or, say, shucking  off all my clothes in a room crowded with, I think, about a hundred people).

*** My surgeon has the classic surgeon's bedside manner. When I had my pre-op meeting with him, he told me brusquely that I'd probably have my eyelids sewn shut for a month and that I would never have eyelashes on my lower eyelid again. This was all news to me, and I said cautiously "I'll never have eyelashes?" and he said "Well, would you rather have eyelashes OR WOULD YOU RATHER NOT HAVE SKIN CANCER?!" And when he came to see me right before the operation, he didn't greet me at all, just walked up to me and said "You're going to have your eyelids sewn shut for a month" and I said "Hi."

Air quality

We live only in our house now. Our lives have been constrained for six months now, but looking back on those constraints, they barely seem meaningful. We went to the library to pick up books (couldn't go in or browse), we took walks with friends (couldn't get close to each other), we lay in the hammock in the yard. We biked to the grocery store to shop (wore a mask, stayed away from people). But now the west coast is on fire, and Portland is full of the ghosts of forests.  This is how it looked at 8:30 this morning out our window (except a lot yellower than the phone camera will accept). It's not fog, it's smoke.

The air quality has been terrible for nearly a week now, and the last few days it's been beyond terrible. We were not prepared for this - don't have air purifiers or the right kind of furnace filters, and only realized that we needed them after the stores were already sold out. We can stay inside with the windows shut, which is more than a lot of people can do right now, but that's all. We have headaches and sore throats and our lungs ache. I am so starved for fresh air that I dream about suffocating. There's nowhere we can go, because it's like this everywhere around us. 

It feels emotionally extra-difficult coming on top of months of quarantine - even the little things we could control before we can't control now. We can't control anything. We're just waiting inside our box for something to change. 

 

Well, we're suffocating in wildfire smoke over here. The sky has been yellow for days, air quality is bonkers bad, and it's starting to feel really suffocaty and oppressive, and probably this will have long-term health effects on our bodies. HOWEVER, we are not on fire. So - yay?

In other news, we're a week into remote school. That's not great, but we're muddling through. Skipper is finding it difficult to get back into Japanese in this context, and Duchess is trying to figure out how to successfully take a dance class remotely. Skipper was assigned to write a paragraph about what she wants to be when she grows up, and I helpfully suggested a bunch of post-apocalyptic jobs like "diviner" and "food scrounger" and "dowser."* I cried in a remote staff meeting last week.** Even Cook, perfectionist workaholic of the family, is finding it hard to just Do The Work.

However, Cook and I STILL HAVE JOBS.*** And only some of our coworkers and friends have had to evacuate their homes. And we still don't know anybody who's gotten a covid diagnosis. So - yay?

I don't know. I hope you're all well, or well-ish, or whatever we can hope for in these exceedingly bleak times. Practicing your dowsing, maybe? Hang in there.

* These are all apparently not words she knows how to write in Japanese, so I don't even know what she's been learning for the last six years.

**The check-in prompt was "how are you feeling about fall" so there was no hope that we were going to get through the meeting with a less than 25% weep-rate.

***My job, btw, is to make transportation policy that supports good climate and environmental health outcomes. I am not feeling very successful. My boss, who has been fighting for climate policy in Oregon for a decade, watched the Republican legislators walk out and shut down the legislative session this year to prevent climate legislation from passing, which meant that a bipartisan wildfire prevention bill, among many other bills, died without a vote. She's very angry and sad this week. 

 

Dog #4 and actually all the dogs

I feel I should correct the record on Dog #4, who turned out to be affable and relatively low-maintenance. He arrived with the name "Rocky"* but since he was a stray, we can call him whatever we damn please, and there's nothing about this dog's personality that calls for "Rocky." (Dog #1 was an owner surrender whose owner didn't have time for him, which is ludicrous because that dog just wanted to sleep in your bed all day, and his name was "Maddy Boy," but we didn't have the heart to take away the single point of stability in his life.)  I'm pretty sure Dog #4's name should be Kevin or Jason, because he feels like a midwestern junior in college in the '90s who's the nicest guy in one of the lower-key fraternities. His soul wears khakis every day. However, the kids outvoted me, and we're calling him Teddy.

Teddy is a sweetheart. He knows no commands, and his elbow calluses suggest he's spent a lot of time sleeping on concrete, but he doesn't act like a yard dog. He loves being petted, lets you take food right out of his mouth, sleeps uncomplainingly in his crate, is easy to walk on a leash, and adorably insists on pawing all his blankets and cushions into a complicated nest. He's got a few negative points. He peed in the house once. He's un-neutered (which the girls find embarrassing and horrifying), so he actually drools and licks obsessively when he smells plants that lady dogs have peed on, and he will hump people if you let him get both paws up on any body part, but we've learned to head it off by never letting him get both paws up on any body part. (And he's got a neutering appointment in two weeks, which should temper the humping a little.) The vet thinks the sad raw skin on his back and sides is a bacterial infection secondary to a flea infestation, but he has no fleas now, and his skin is healing up nicely. A few ticks have come off him - after Dog #2 we're pretty sanguine about ticks in quantities smaller than fifty. Duchess is a pro at tick removal, and we keep them in a jar on a shelf. 

Conclusion: a week in, Dog #4 is giving Dog #1 some strong competition for Best Dog Yet. We'll see how he shakes out. 

I've learned a lot about fostering since signing up. It has been rewarding, but I don't think we'd have signed up for it if we knew then what we know now. It makes a very very (VERY) tiny dent in all the overwhelming awfulness of the world, which feels both good and wildly inadequate in the current state of things. I didn't realize that dogs come to you in a state of physical and emotional distress - even if they're not coming off of years of neglect, they are coming off of weeks or more in a stressful shelter environment and then a long trip. Even Dog #1, who had a naturally confident and even-keeled temperament, and whom I don't think had been abused or even really neglected, spent a lot of his first week with us just sleeping in his crate, doing what the dog rescue fanatics call "decompressing." You're supposed to keep your house very calm, keep the dog confined to a small area, only interact with them when they approach you, and more or less ignore them otherwise. It takes weeks (or longer, for the worse-off dogs) for them to feel safe enough to start to relax and be themselves. And then, if you're successful, they get adopted and you cry.  (I have high hopes for Teddy, whose awful-looking skin was making him a very unattractive adoption prospect straight out of the shitty under-resourced shelter he was living at - I think he'll be very adoptable once he's neutered and his fur grows back.) And then, unless you've had enough, you start all over again with another dirty, exhausted, stressed out, bug-infested, bacteria-infected, peeing-in-the-house, sad-eyed beastie whose personality and history is a total unknown.

*As far as I can tell, every pitbull who arrives at any shelter is given one of maybe six names- Rocky, Champ, Blue, Missy, Sadie, or Nala. 

Frayed around the edges, but let's talk about pets

We're fine. Not thriving, but fine. Cook and I are still employed. Kids "passed" their distance learning classes (though I'm pretty sure they learned nothing). Here they are, in a rare moment of being together and not actively crying or yelling at me or eachother.

But I'm here today to tell you about the pets. 2020 is the year of Pandemic, Social Collapse and Pet Adventures at Our House.

1) Regarding Guinea Pigs. Snufkin is dead. He got bladder stones and started peeing blood and crying in pain, and we had him euthanized. There was a whole ethical crisis around this (we COULD have gotten him expensive surgery and a lifetime of medicine with no guarantee the stones wouldn't recur, leaving me awake at night pondering the ramifications of holding a small life in my hands and whether I was euthanizing him because he's never liked us, etc.), but we did it. RIP Snufkin. (He got to eat a last meal of treats that we'd never given him before.)

And then we set about trying to replace him, because guinea pigs do not like to be alone. We went back to the guinea pig rescue fanatics and tried speed-dating Momo with a couple of potential buddies. She was okay with one of them, Fracas, so we took him home. He was really charming - much more curious and friendly than Snufkin or Momo have ever been.

But when we took him home, we realized pretty quickly that he was also peeing blood. I told the kind guinea pig fanatics that I could not do this again, and they took him back. (Turned out he had a bladder stone and an enormous kidney stone, so he's now in hospice care at the rescue.) We tried speed-dating again, but Momo, as it turns out, is too passive to manage most males, and wasn't compatible with the few females available. They don't adopt out unspayed females, and spays are non-essential procedures, so we're waiting until they have some more spayed females ready for speed-dating. Hopefully we'll get Momo a buddy sometime soon so she doesn't die of loneliness. Pro tip: Guinea pigs are terrible pets.

2) Regarding The Dogs. We have had a series of foster dogs. Cook does not particularly enjoy dogs, so this has been a sacrifice for him, and they have been a lot of work, but they do provide something to think about that isn't us, which I do appreciate.

Dog #1 was a lovely, mild-mannered giant American Bulldog mix who was confident and able to self-regulate. He loved tug of war and lying in very soft places. In retrospect, we can see that he was exceptionally easy. (Pro tip: by all accounts and our anecdotal experience, American Bulldogs are excellent pets.) We had him for maybe six weeks, and then he was adopted.

Dog #2, an old boxer mix, arrived late at night, straight from a 14 hour drive in a van full of dogs from a shelter in Northern California. She also arrived infested with ticks and with a burgeoning case of pneumonia. She was quite fat (thyroid issue) and had very limited mobility. She also didn't much care for people, but defended our house and me (as her food source) with unpleasant barking, growling, and snarling. None of us much liked her, but we all felt a lot of sympathy for her because of the neglect that brought her to the situation and condition she was in. (Old dogs, apparently, make up a lot of the shelter population because nobody wants them.) We had her for a couple weeks, long enough to get her over the pneumonia and ticks (Duchess was our expert tick wrangler - life skills!). When she snapped at Skipper, we asked the dog rescue fanatics to move her to another foster home, which they did. (She subsequently was moved to another home, one free of dogs, cats, children and stairs. Not an easy dog, and I can't imagine she'll ever be adopted.)

Dog #3 is a subfoster from another foster household who went on a dog-free weeklong vacation. He's our first dog under 85 pounds, a medium-sized pitbull mix who would like to spend all his time in your lap. He's our most people-loving dog so far, coming up to people wiggling and smiling and wanting love. He also is horrible to walk, because he pulls a lot is distracted by everything, forgets there's a person at the end of the leash, and lunges hard at passing bicycles, motorcycles, squirrels, and other dogs. Also, he occasionally marks pee in the house so he has to be supervised constantly.

Dog #4 is about to arrive tonight, a few hours after Dog #3 leaves - he may be the last for us for a while. He is a medium-large middle-aged pitbull, infested with fleas and with some kind of skin condition that's probably mange, and he's unneutered, so we'll be making some vet trips (and probably cleaning up a lot of pee...).

So there we are. Maintaining at one dog and one guinea pig. I hope you and all your pets are well, and that nobody is peeing blood right now in your home.

Welp

Still at home. Kids have no school for the rest of the year at least. I don't know if I'm going to have a job after six months. Cook is furloughed for a tenth of his time. Everything is crazy. And there's still no toilet paper on the shelves half the time when I grocery shop.

Our temp dog got adopted on Monday, and we are feeling sad about it. He had been cuddling with both kids a lot (they let him on their beds, and he LOVES a soft place with people on it), and they miss him most. We told the foster people we're ready for our next dog RIGHT AWAY.







































































I administered quarantine haircuts last weekend. Verdict is still out.

Working from home is hard. Like everyone lucky enough still to be working, I'm struggling with distinguishing work from personal; it all swirls together. Cook and I did invest in some office set-up equipment (headphones!) and time, acknowledging that we're not going back to any "normal" office commute any time soon. The bedroom is now my office, with an old piece of kitchen furniture repurposed as a standing desk. Cook shares the study with the guinea pigs. The TV is now in the basement. I know my way around all the video conference software, and roll my eyes (with video off) at people who still can't manage to "raise hand" in Zoom. I attended a two-day virtual conference this week, complete with networking sessions.

We watched every single one of the Star Wars movies. (Okay, I didn't actually sit through all of them with full attention. You got me. Lots of them aren't very watchable.) Skipper and I have developed shared escapist/vegetable habits of playing Stardew Valley on the Switch and watching Parks and Recreation.

I just feel really, really tired. So tired. I just want to live in Stardew Valley and plant parsnips.

Hm.

I'm sitting in my living room taking a break from work while Skipper has a FaceTime piano lesson. Cook is on a conference call, and Duchess is rattling around somewhere. I've had three hours of conference calls today, and have two more scheduled for later. I also have a date scheduled with a friend - we're planning to complain to each other by phone while we walk in our neighborhoods, miles apart.

Our household is pretty much in full social distancing. Kirk and I both work at home full time, and often one of us is on a conference call in one room while the other is on a conference call in the next room. School is closed through the end of April. The school district is scrambling to set up distance learning, and in the meantime Duchess has no homework and Skipper is supposed to do three hours of stuff a day.

Restaurants and bars are closed, library is closed, activities are cancelled. The kids both got to hang out with friends (outside, no touching) yesterday, but I think that was probably the last time. Skipper has begun writing letters to friends. I go to the grocery store once in a while, but they're often out of things like split peas or toilet paper or flour or tofu (all apparently important staples here in Portland). We're all just... waiting. Presumably we're waiting until they can start robust testing and we can all start circulating again and find out what's left in the rubble. I've been buying gift certificates to local businesses in the hope they'll still exist in a year.  My boss has begun a conversation about how staff would like to begin cutting the budget - cut back on extras, reduce hours, reduce retirement contributions...?

There are some outcomes that seem positive. We bought a Nintendo console, to be more American and have another home entertainment option. Cook and I are scrambling to figure out cheap jury-rigged home office setups that aren't terrible ergonomically. We're getting some yardwork and baking and household chores done. (I have been attending remote plenary sessions for the conference I was planning to attend in Chicago, and it turns out listening to people talk while washing dishes is a good combination.) Duchess is planning to crop and hem a bunch of t-shirts so they look cool. I'm getting more confident with conference call tools. I think. We're trying to make the best of this, or at least not the worst.

Ha, and I thought perimenopause was crummy!

We're "social distancing" here in Oregon. Today was the first day for me of working remotely. My office is encouraging everyone who can to work from home with no/limited in-person meetings, and Cook's office is reorganizing around staggered shifts and partial teleworking so they can all stay six feet away from each other all the time. (All the meeting rooms have been assigned quotas based on their size, so the smaller meeting rooms can now accommodate two people who sit pressed against the opposite walls.) I was supposed to go to a conference in Chicago next week, but it was cancelled. (And I was really looking forward to it.) Skipper's school trip to Japan in June has been cancelled. (Though our family trip to Japan is not cancelled- we're going to hope as long as possible that we can pull that off.) Skipper's baseball season and Duchess's ultimate frisbee season (long story) have been postponed. All my meetings have been cancelled or turned into video chats. THE LIBRARY SYSTEM HAS CLOSED.

All the stores are out of toilet paper, which briefly seemed very problematic when I thought this morning that we had only two rolls left in the house. Turned out we had an unopened box in the basement containing 36 rolls, so we'll make it a bit longer.

The kids are out of school as of today, through next week and the following week (which is spring break) and half the week after that (unless they extend it). All activities are cancelled. I'm not sure how that's going to go. Based on experience so far, Duchess will spend it lying in bed texting, and Skipper will read a bunch of books and periodically appear to ask questions like "What's communism?" or "What's a nuclear family?" or to startle me as she did this week when we were talking about COVID-19 and she said "Well, Mom, one death is a tragedy, and a million deaths is a statistic" and I said "ARE YOU QUOTING JOSEPH STALIN AT ME?!?!?" and she looked at me with a puzzled expression and said "Yeah!" like that's a normal person thing.

None of us know how to prepare or what to do. Skipper had a sore throat and abdominal pain this evening - do we now all stay in the house for 14 days? Are grocery stores going to run out of food as the supply chain falters? Should I have bought more canned beans today? Is it really going to snow tonight? The future, even the immediate future, feels wildly uncertain. And yet, people are still out and about, going to work and to bars like it's normal. I met a colleague at a coffee shop this morning; he was firmly in the this-is-overblown camp, and mentioned that his 75-year-old mother who has compromised lung function is really paranoid right now and makes everybody wash their hands. Sitting there, eating an almond croissant, with people socializing cheerfully all around us, I felt crazy. (And I told him his mom is right and he should wash his damn hands.)

Anyway. I bought a puzzle and the new Hilary Mantel book. We may starve to death, and/or have to wipe our butts with rags and moss, but we're not going down without reading material.

It's messy and weird in here.

I've been thinking a lot about pain over the last year. I haven't experienced very much pain, personally. I occasionally get headaches, of course, and I've had a few minor injuries that were painful (fireworks are BAD!!!!), including sports injuries that still occasionally hurt, decades later. I'm not like that lady in Scotland. But pain hasn't really been a feature in my life. When I was a kid, my family didn't really do over-the-counter medicine. We definitely had aspirin or ibuprofen or acetaminophen or something that was occasionally used for things like headaches. And band-aids, I guess? But I don't remember pain or discomfort being really a thing in our life. The sense was that discomfort is a symptom of something that might need to be treated, but the discomfort itself doesn't necessarily or even usually merit treatment. Pain felt (and still mostly feels) like a clear, direct and actionable communication from my physical body to my thinking. Your head hurts? Drink some water. Take a nap. Your stomach hurts? Drink some water. Rest. Wait and see what happens. For now, for me, this mostly works. (Except chest pain associated with anxiety. That's weird and confusing and unproductive.)

For the last few years, Duchess has had lots of experience with discomfort. She was a pretty robust kid who didn't get sick often and rarely complained of pain. Since adolescence rolled around, though, she complains of menstrual pain, knee pain (from ultimate frisbee) and now back pain (from rowing). She has had recurring episodes of dizziness and fatigue (we thought she was anemic, but she wasn't even close - turned out that MY iron levels were low, though). We've vacillated between telling her to just suck it up, and taking her to the doctor, where the diagnosis is always that they're not sure what's going on, but there's nothing seriously wrong. My paradigm isn't working here.

And then there the emotional pain. Duchess frequently talks about how her friends have "hurt" her or other friends. Usually by saying something casually or even accidentally mean. She is very, very upset and righteous when people hurt her. I find most of the the "hurt" she's describing to be far below my threshold for "hurt," even in 14-year-old-adjusted terms, and the grandiosity of it feels off to me. This makes me feel like she (and all her friends) put far too much weight on Being Hurt. My theory is that girls are socialized to feel that being hurt and feeling pain are legitimate emotional experiences for them. Being angry or annoyed or humiliated or indignant aren't okay, because they're more outward-facing, but being hurt and being a victim is.

Some of Duchess's friends are also engaging in self-harming activities like cutting or disordered eating, and I think this aligns with my theory - they're embracing Being Hurt as a way to focus and feel in control of the emotional chaos in which they live. I looked up self-harming on the crisis text line website recently, and was surprised to see on the list of self-harming activities something that Duchess actually does right in front of me, which is hitting herself in the head (with her hands). I've only seen her do this a few times, and never actually hard enough to do damage, but it is shocking every time. She does it when she's upset, and it does seem to be a way to channel her emotions, so I guess it makes sense that it falls into the same category as cutting.

Both my kids do a thing when they're upset that also seems similar, though less controlled - they move around the house in a way (fast, careless, flailing) that makes it inevitable that they'll bang into a doorframe or a table or fall down or hurt themselves physically in some other way. I think they're experiencing an imbalance - an inner storm and an outer calm. I believe that girls, especially girls like mine who are deeply invested in being Good, don't feel entitled to just let out that inner storm into the calm world. So they have to create an outer context that is acting on them that feels like it rationalizes the inner storm. They have to Be Hurt.

I recently listened to an interesting Invisibilia episode about girls and pain, exploring the phenomenon of people (mostly teenage girls, I think) with "amplified pain" who feel unexplained pain, and following a girl who was pursuing a treatment involving doing a lot of painful things to sort of retrain her nervous system not to respond so sensitively. (There was also a kerfuffle of angry responses to the episode, apparently, pointing out that dismissal of women's pain, and particularly girls' pain, is a long and bad tradition and should be vigorously challenged.) I guess what I'm coming to is mostly just an awareness of how little I understand. I can't tell Duchess how she should experience pain, or what she should do when she's experiencing it. It's real pain; she's feeling it. But what it is, how it should be labeled, where it comes from, and what it means, I have no idea. For now, we talk about it with her, and try to help her unpack what she's feeling. She's emotionally wise for an eighth-grader, so she can understand what we're getting at (when she's not in the throes of The Feelings). But none of us have any solutions.

What I think Duchess might have, though, thanks to her ridiculous, masochistic sport, is evidence that if she keeps going, if she moves through pain, she gets through it, and sometimes she also gets something more - in this case, mighty thigh muscles, strong calloused hands, and an improved ability to make boats go fast. Rowing is pretty much entirely the practice of enduring physical discomfort. The coaches set out barf buckets next to the rowing machines. So Duchess experiences something nearly every day that I almost never experience - pushing her body to the point of pain/intense discomfort and having to keep going through that. (Note that I don't necessarily recommend this approach. I have a lot of qualms.)

Discomfort is usually associated with change. If we don't see it for what it is, if we avoid it (hi, Skipper!) or explain it by tying it to external circumstances that are unrelated (hi, Duchess!), we can miss the opportunity that change offers, whether it's physical, intellectual, or emotional. But not all change is good, either, and it's often hard to tell if it's the kind of discomfort that will tear you down or build you up. Basically, I have no idea what we're doing here.

It's all about me, part 586

Having my youngest child turn ten feels like a personal milestone in my life. I am officially a Parent of Old Kids. Then there's Parent of Multiple Teenagers, and then there's Parent of a College-Age Kid, and then there's Parent of Adult Children. It's a different place, here, and I like it. (Except for the part where I'm going to die.)

I like that my kids do things themselves. Skipper gets away with us doing a lot more for her than Duchess has, because she gets so ragey when asked to do things that it's just easier to not ask, but even she is stepping up to the plate more, and can of course do most things in a pinch. Duchess requires almost no transportation to anything, and while she resents that her friends all get rides everywhere,* she does like the freedom of being able to take the bus all over the city on her own schedule. Having them both be able to stay home on their own is a great blessing. Having them decide to make pancakes and then make them themselves is lovely.

And I like that they are their own people. Weird, poorly behaved, selfish people, but still.

Duchess is in Canada this week, at a rowing regatta. She's experiencing the Duchess Plateau in rowing right now, and she's struggling with it. As usual, her coachability gave her early success, and she quickly rose to the top of the group of the kids she started rowing with. Now, though, her improvement has flattened out, and some of the other kids are getting better faster than she is. With that, plus the addition of new, good rowers coming from other clubs (Duchess's club is the largest and most competitive in the area), Duchess actually got demoted to a worse boat last week. She was very, very, very upset. It's an interesting moment - I'm not sure if her enjoyment of the sport and of her friends is enough to push her through the discomfort. I thought that when you rowed, you competed at the beginning of the season, got placed in a boat, and rowed with that boat all season. That's not the case at all; you're continually competing with others to protect your place and try to displace the next person in the ranks. She's a sensitive person, and external judgement is very important to her, so this constant evaluation is hard on her, even when she's moving up or holding fast. When she's moving DOWN, it's very hard. And she's also not temperamentally inclined to voluntarily and on her own do the kind of extra work it would take to improve her outcomes. Cook and I are watching with interest - we have no idea if she'll quit and move on to other activities, or if she'll keep doing it and keep being tormented (this is definitely the worst outcome for the rest of the family, since Duchess does NOT suffer in silence), or if she'll keep doing it and develop a reasonable coping strategy. Or if she'll suddenly, magically turn into the kind of person who does extra work on her own. Or if she'll become the largest coxwain in the rowing world. Stay tuned!

I keep interviewing for jobs and not being hired for them. (I actually bought a blazer for my last interview!) I'm trying to learn how to brag more and also blather less, which are both difficult for me. I find that am a self-deprecating but also somehow self-centered windbag, which is a weird combination, and not great for convincing people to hire you.



*This makes me bonkers. Our neighbors drive the .75 miles to the local grocery store, and 1.2 miles to their kids' school. If people can't even manage walking or biking those trips on quiet streets with sidewalks, climate change seems completely unsolveable. 

Impostor/author

I struggle to accurately understand my own accomplishments in a lot of fields. Sometimes I feel like I'm amazingly good and other times I feel like I don't even deserve to be in the room where this work is being done. I am given to understand that the second part of this, impostor syndrome, is common for people who might be considered under-represented, and that women often struggle with it. I don't know why my experience of it alternates with delusions of grandeur, though.

The impostor syndrome side of this really shows up when I'm looking for work. I'm 42, and I still am clicking on entry-level jobs. My coworkers are encouraging me to apply for higher level jobs, managing projects or programs, and I am constantly surprised by this.

Last night I dreamed that a woman who was some sort of semi-famous lifestyle coach invited me to speak about my book at a lecture series. I said "sure, why not!?" and then when I arrived at the venue and was waiting in the wings, prepared to just kind of talk off the cuff,* it occurred to me that I wasn't sure I had actually written a book. I tried to remember, and the first thing I considered was that I couldn't remember getting any royalty checks. Or, you know, actually doing the work of WRITING A BOOK. And then I picked up a copy of the book, and flipped through it, and I started to realize that no, I definitely had not written this book.** I started thinking about how I was going to solve this problem, and then, fortunately, I woke up.




*This actually makes some sense. I'm usually happy to talk off the cuff in public, in spite of my anxiety and mediocre social skills. 
** It was titled "Life is Good," which definitely should have immediately tipped me off that I didn't write it.

Um, hi.

A coworker recently gave me this card. It felt apropos.



















Work is crazy right now; due to pending layoffs at a different department, we are likely to see a bunch of "bumping" through the union contract, which allows people who are laid off to bump out other people with the same job classification and less seniority. (Not bump OFF, just bump.) I am exceedingly likely to get bumped, due to having only a few months of seniority in this represented position. I'm pretty resigned to it, because my bleak worldview generally gives me a helpful perspective on this sort of thing. (I AM dreading being unemployed again, but at least I'll get unemployment benefits for a while, and we're financially okay.) However, the uncertainty and the anxiety of the people around me at work is making me anxious. I did have a big surge of anxiety before I learned more details, because I was afraid my boss was just going to show up at my desk without warning and escort me to the door, which seemed awful.* I have since been reassured that I will get at least a little advance notice, so I feel generally better about everything. I haven't even been eating very many cookies.

What else? Not much. It's raining. The girls have been spending their clothing allowances. To my disappointment, Skipper did NOT purchase this furry thing.

























* Cook suggested I bring a boombox to work, cued up to play some kind of triumphant song, and just press "play" when I was escorted to the door, so I could leave in a blaze of glory. I found some comfort in this idea, but I'm still much happier with a quiet advance notice. I'm really more of a sneak-out-under-the-radar kind of a person.

Momentum and inertia

Summer is rapidly approaching. The kids have reached the point in the school year where everything is pointing toward end-of-year performances/tests/celebrations/field trips. The weather is leaning hard toward shorts. The trees are leafing out. Cook is mowing the lawn right now.

I find myself even more than usually lazy. I literally lay in the hammock yesterday and did nothing but lie there and grow my ennui. It was pretty nice, but I do recognize that weeds need pulling and dishes need washing and dinner needs cooking, and it's probably not a great marital-maintenance plan to just let Cook do all of it. Last weekend I forced Skipper to accompany me to the library and grocery store, and she objected strenuously. I said she needed to leave the house and do something other than loaf, and she said "WHY!? What's the POINT? Why can't I just read books and do word searches?" and I didn't really have a great argument for that. So maybe she's just persuaded me to give in to the sloth.

It just seems like there's so much schlepping; a classic middle-class middle-aged person's complaint - orthodontist appointments, dentist appointments, eye doctor appointments, regular doctor appointments, vet appointments, roller skating lessons, grocery shopping, hardware store trips, bike repair appointments, car repair appointments. Plus, you know, work and housework and the normal slog of shepherding everybody through the day. It feels like A Lot, even while it also feels like a great stroke of luck to be able to have this particular bag of A Lot.

We're all doing the same old things. Skipper is walking herself home from school every day and latchkeying it. She likes that a lot. She instant-messages us when she gets home to tell us she's home, and then she just reads for hours. The third day she did it, I was at a meeting when she normally arrives home, and didn't look at my phone till a little later when I was alarmed to find no message. I got a text pretty much right away from Father Blond, saying that Skipper was at his house and that she was "Wet. Unhappy." Turned out Skipper had run home in the rain (she had no raincoat, due to poor planning) and couldn't find her key in her backpack, so she left her backpack on the back steps and walked to the Blonds' house. She knows she's not allowed to cross the major street between our house and theirs except at a controlled intersection, but she got disoriented and walked much further out of her way than she needed to to get to a light. She walked 16 blocks in the rain, terrified that she was going to get arrested (she actually saw a school friend of hers and hid behind a corner until the friend's family was out of sight because she was afraid that they would call the police if they knew she was unescorted), and arrived at the Blond house weeping and soaking wet. She was upset, scared, embarrassed and uncomfortable. After I retrieved her, I pointed out that she had in fact just demonstrated her coping skills by solving the problem in a fairly sensible way, and she made a bunch of good decisions. I felt a lot more confident about the whole thing after that episode. I'm not sure that she shares my confidence; as always, she was pretty focused on the stressful and humiliating elements of the experience. I did reassure her that the police are NOT going to arrest her for walking alone in the rain.

That's pretty much the news.

First day!

First day of third grade. Skipper has been very stressed for a week or so, and expressing it through rage and meanness, lashing out like a cornered weasel at every perceived threat. So we were all pretty relieved to arrive at today, when we could pack the weasel off to school.

Said weasel had a pretty good day and feels cautiously optimistic* about the year. Duchess, who has her first day of school tomorrow, feels exceedingly optimistic.**


*This is as optimistic as said weasel ever gets.
**This is her normal state.

Summer, part two

I still haven't really settled into summer. (We're coming up on a streak of camping trips three weekends in a row, so that will be hectic.) I keep starting my bike ride home from work, and realizing I don't know what route to take, because I haven't thought through who needs to be picked up from where. The thing is, nobody needs to be picked up, because the kids are already home. Nothing needs to be picked up, because I can just send the kids to get groceries or pick up library books if needed. Bliss. Also, nobody has homework to throw tantrums about!

The kids haven't really worked out how this is going to go, either. They swim in the morning and then they bicker and read and are bored.*

Skipper is, as I mentioned, very angry that I have signed her up for some activities (frisbee, choir, and some dancing) - I secured her grudging agreement when I signed her up, but now that the activities are getting closer, she's getting very upset about it. I don't think she's ever going to be comfortable being bad at things. This weekend, I finally just handed it all over to her, because it's time for her to own her discomfort.  She needs to take responsibility for her choice to try or not try things (and she frequently does want to try, deep in her terrified little heart). It can't be me or Cook. I told her I'd withdraw her from any or all the activities she's registered for, no questions asked. She said she needs to think about it. (She least wants to do ultimate frisbee, but she's very seduced by the new cleats we got her, so she's waffling on that. Gear is really compelling.)

This wasn't a principled parenting decision, made calmly according to all available information. I'm just tired of doing the work for her, and I doubt that it's the best way forward anyway. I'm just giving up on the emotional effort, basically. It scares me, though. I am afraid that she will cramp herself into the smallest possible life; she is actively afraid of taking up space, of being seen and heard and acting in the world. There's nothing wrong with a small life,** but I would like it to be an informed choice instead of an entirely fear-based choice. However, I don't get to choose for my fierce little fear-monkey, so it's up to the siren song of the cleats.

I will note, though, that her swimming skills, and her confidence in them, have improved enormously already after a few weeks of swim practice, so at least she'll be a fear-monkey who can swim.



*They get really bored. Cook and I are 100% unsympathetic.
** I have a small life, and I really like it. It's definitely somewhat fear-based, but there were choices involved, and I know I turned away from the wider world. (I was just listening to a podcast interview with Denis McDonough, and I realized that I would really like to be White House Chief of Staff.  If any of you become President, please keep me in mind for the job.)

Just a note

I was looking at the coverage of the marches today, and I got curious and went to the Fox News home page:

At first I thought it said nothing about the marches, and then I saw the little item on the bottom lefthand corner.

Here's the NY Times:

No wonder it feels like we're living in different worlds, when your standard media coverage (not EVEN your facebook feed) looks so different.

Anyway, Skipper and I are off to the Portland march. Don't look for us in the Fox news coverage; we won't be there.