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. 

Dear lord it is somehow time for school again

 I read somewhere that as you age time feels sped up because your sense of time is determined by the way you sort experience and memories, and as you age you have more established categories (which I imagine as file folders) in which to place experiences as you have them, so your brain does not have to take the time to build new categories, just drops the experiences into the established categories and moves on.* 

Point is, the last year has passed extremely quickly for me, presumably because I am so old that nothing is new to me any more. And yet, in that time I have moved out of and back into our house, started a new job, and experienced a kid going through the college application process and then leaving for college. Feels like that should have taken longer. 

We're starting a new school year, and a new phase of school for both kids. Skipper had her first day of high school yesterday, and Duchess has her first day of college next week. Skipper is tackling high school (loud, chaotic, class sizes of 30+, confusing, etc., and thus not at all Skipper's jam) with her usual grim determination. When I asked her how the day was, she said "It was okay. Only 171 more days to go!"**

Duchess, after a week and a half of the crosscountry preseason, is starting freshman orientation proper tomorrow (and meeting the rest of her fellow freshmen, including her roommate). She's having a pretty great time so far, in Duchess style, which means that she has been getting acquainted with every single person on campus, including the lady who serves pasta in the dining hall and a French guy she met in the dorm elevator. (He lives in Paris. Imagine LIVING IN PARIS and deciding to go to college IN MINNESOTA.) She has been generously communicative with us in this initial stage, and it's been fun vicariously experiencing the collegiate delight of going somewhere new and starting a new life with lots of comfortable safeguards. She's making lots of new experience categories.

*I tried to look this up to determine if this single-sentence paragraph has any actual science behind it or if I just completely made it up, and the search results I got were along the lines of "when will my toddler learn to sort objects" and so I may have made it up.

** I don't know where she got this number, or if it's accurate. 

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!)

Summer!

 We made it! We finished the school year, made the turn into summer.

Duchess graduated from 12th grade. 

Skipper graduated from 8th grade. 

Duchess is heading off to Sweden for a couple of weeks, and while she's gone Skipper will play a lot of ultimate frisbee and Cook and I will prepare to move back into our actual house. 

Also, here are some photos from Skipper's trip to Japan, courtesy of other people who took pictures of her.

what is time

Here's Duchess (and Skipper) on her first day of kindergarten.

Here's Duchess (and Skipper) today, on her last day of 12th grade. (Skipper was not yet awake enough for the sunny morning.)

I took Duchess out for mediocre pizza to celebrate at the end of the day. She has a weekend of parties and sentimental weeping over yearbook notes to come, and then graduation next week. 

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. 

Milestone

The girls finished school yesterday - they're done with 6th and 10th grade. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's been a rough year. They both navigated online school with impressive maturity, managing their own attendance and homework without us having to coach or nag them. They struggled some with homework and bad teachers, and they both were lonely a lot. I'm really proud of them. 

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.

A few things that have happened:

Skipper and a friend attended the Scandinavian midsummer festival with me. 

School ended. Duchess graduated from middle school.

We dog-sat again. (And napping happened. There are a lot of nice things about caring for a dog who is old and willing to nap a lot.)

We said goodby to Duchess, who's off at rowing camp for a month. (A MONTH OF ROWING.) I'm not sure she'll notice we're not around. 

And we went, at last, to Great Wolf Lodge, a place Skipper has been nagging us for years to visit. Because it is a hotel - with a waterpark inside it - next to a freeway, Cook and I weren't exactly eager to fulfill her dream. But this summer, we badgered the Rockstars into joining us there, and made the thing happen. And it was pretty fun. It was certainly different than our normal weekends. Here are photos of us all making silly faces. And we accidentally ate lunch on the way home in a good Mexican restaurant in Centralia. (They have a bunch of grumpy signs posted about how they DO NOT SERVE CHIPS, and then they give you a free bowl of pickled carrots to snack on instead. It's really good.)