New year

 It's 2024!

Portland is in the throes of a major winter weather event - a snowstorm but with such cold temperatures and high winds that it has felt violent and stressful rather than peaceful and hushed. We're supposed to have an ice storm tomorrow to finish it up.

Our holiday was lovely; low-key and cozy. We played the Reindeer Games again (kids won). 

Duchess has gone back to college, and we're all facing the long slog of January/February but also, hey, a new year! Another trip around the sun! 

Regular Life

Fall is over! 

We hosted a Japanese high school student for three weeks, which was awkward and weird and also sometimes delightful. Our guest was a cheerful, easily-pleased 17-year-old whose English conversation skills are pretty weak, so conversations were limited to simple topics and short sentences. 

She had classes and field trips during the day on weekdays, so we were responsible for evenings and weekends. This required us to perform a better version of our life. Before she arrived, we cleaned up and organized and put away some remaining things we'd been procrastinating, and after she arrived, we had to just be better - make a salad at dinner time, plan outings on the weekend. Instead of getting a takeout pizza, we got pizza from three different places and did a taste test. Instead of lying around procrastinating chores on Saturday morning, we went bowling. Instead of doing extra chores on the three-day weekend, we went to visit some waterfalls. All of this took more time and energy and money than our normal life, but it was more of life, and that felt good. Also, I like bowling. 

It was a good fall for trees this year.

We had a lovely Thanksgiving visit from Uncle Rockstar and family. 

Skipper's school district was shut down for weeks by a teacher strike, but the timeline was uncertain the whole time, so she never knew if she would be going to school the next day. It was wearisome, but I felt very fortunate that Skipper is old enough to stay home alone and too young to have to worry about getting reference letters or learn AP content. She's back at school now, and they've taken away half of her Christmas holiday (to make up part of the 11 lost teaching days), so she feels quite resentful. 

Duchess will be home in a few weeks, and has already begun scoffing at our mild winter weather, now that she's a hardened Minnesotan. (Cook and I, who were in Minnesota during an exceptionally cold streak in January 1994 when the temperature stayed below zero for days,* just shake our heads and mutter things like "you just wait" when she talks about how she's gotten used to temperatures in the 20s.) We're looking forward to seeing here, 

*It was really cold, my friends. It was so cold that the governor closed all the public schools. (We still had class, and I remember wearing basically all my clothes for the trip across campus to attend bio lab.) It was so cold that we went out and tried to blow bubbles and they FROZE AND SHATTERED IN THE AIR. 

 It's a beautiful fall-ish day here, sunny and just cool and breezy enough to be autumnal. A friend gave me a fresh apple today. Our yard is full of the smell of fermenting grapes. (Sure, Cook made some juice, but there are still a LOT on the vines.) The girls have a month of school behind them and are settling in. 

We haven't yet figured out where all our stuff goes now in the new house configuration, so things still feel a bit unsettled here. We're also still getting used to having Duchess gone. We're glad she's out there in the world, as she should be, and she seems to be thriving (if grumpy about Midwestern humidity), but we also haven't quite shaken out into the new triangular normal. 

I've also apparently entered a stage of life where I keep being surprised by how much time has passed. Cook and I have now been married for 22 years, which means that our marriage is probably graduating from college and getting a job. We've lived in our house for 12 years. Somebody at work recently referred to a mild local political kerfuffle that happened a decade ago, and I realized that while I will never be a full-fledged Portlander,* I've logged nearly 17 years of my adulthood here. Somehow. And somehow I have friends here whom I've known for a decade or more. I recognize that this is how time actually works, but it still boggles my mind.

* This requires at least being born here yourself, and ideally having at least one parent born here as well. 

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. 

Shortest day after the longest night

 It's the solstice! It's a dark, rainy day, as per usual. I don't think we're going to get to see the Great Conjunction tonight (THANKS RAIN), but I know it's out there.

I've been tormenting my housemates with endless holiday music, starting on the 13th, and we got a tree much earlier than usual - Dec 8th. Dog #1 met Santa at the tree lot (he wasn't very impressed) and Cook carried the tree home. 

We decorated the tree; Dog #1 was not interested in participating.

Cook and I are taking some time off this week, trying to vacate properly. I love Christmas vacating because I like cozy home time - everybody together, making cookies, doing puzzles, drinking tea. That is, however, more or less the way I spend all my time (except also working) these days, so it doesn't feel very different. However, the dog is very itchy and we've been dressing him in the clothes his adopters provided, which means that every once in a while I glance over at him in his US Army sweatshirt (we gave away the football jerseys) and get the giggles, so that's a delight. And my gosh, there's a Great Conjunction going on!

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.

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.

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.

Holiday

So it begins!

We're having a delightful, if only slightly snowy, snow day - work and school were cancelled and it didn't even start to snow until the middle of the day. So we're making cookies, doing puzzles, and contemplating the holiday. Also, snowball fights and sledding, which I avoided so I could stay inside and eat cookies by myself.







































The kids have another week of school before they plunge into the Great Holiday Sloth, which they're anticipating with relish. Skipper won't be going to any day camps this year, and the two of them are planning hot cocoa and a LOT of reading. Also, tuneless singing of songs from Hamilton, as Duchess has now convinced Skipper to enter (reluctantly) her fandom.

Report

So... I should say something here, right?

Hm. Everything's fine. We're here. We're alive.

We're having a large wooden fence built between us and our crummy neighbors,* probably marking the completion of our transition into the world of smug upper-middle-class homeowners.

The kids are fine. Weird and mean, but fine.

My new baseline for work: a day in which I don't cry in front of other people at work** is a successful day! (I'm going to make a poster.) Today was a successful day.

Cook has not cried at work ever. As far as I know...

Eating Less continues, and continues to take up all my remaining energy after work and family.

Skipper had lice again. I think they're gone now.

Duchess is so excited for middle school. SO EXCITED, you guys. She's struggling to decide on which afterschool club she wants to do - Magic cards club, or Math/Engineering/Science club.

That's all. I hope you all have successful days!

*Not the gun-selling, broken-car-collecting libertarians, who have been ideal neighbors from Day One - the other ones. The ones who are outside smoking and swearing and talking about boring things ALL THE TIME. 
** Weeping softly alone in a bathroom stall doesn't count.

Back From Vacation