pieces, now

I got an email today from the riad where J. and I stayed in Marrakech 15 months ago, offering extra nights to health care workers. 

Remember when we could travel?

...

After weeks of avoiding it, we started taking the pup to doggie daycare again. People joke about how dogs are loving having their people home, but our dog has just ramped up her protective instincts and now she is anxious all the time. She has an archnemesis, Big Floof, and she barks like her life depends on driving the enemy away when Big Floof walks by. Other floofs get varying treatment (some pass unnoticed, some also get barks), but the passing by of Big Floof is a matter not to be tolerated. Unfortunately, Big Floof's people walk Big Floof by our house about 6 times a day. 

We have to take her to doggie daycare just to give her a break from all the anxiety. 

I have now picked her up from doggie daycare one time (in the World Before, J. did drop off and pick up on his way to and from work). I also had to drop off our ballots on the way home, so I pulled through a branch of the library and then drove home on a route that I don't take all that often, but that has, it turns out, quite a few restaurants in which I have spent time. 

There is the wings place that makes our favorite hot sauce. 

There is the restaurant where I met my friend A. when she came back to town, and where V. and I met after work for a drink on the patio the time that I rode my bike there after Pilates. 

There is the restaurant where J. and I went for brunch on our last pre-pandemic baby-free date. It's hard to imagine now that we waited in a crowded line, chatting with the couple in front of us, and sat at tables barely 18 inches apart. 

There is the coffee shop where I got coffee and a stroopwafel and sat with them in the sun on the day I picked up our wedding invitations.

I felt overwhelmingly sad. 

That life will come back - the epidemiologists I follow on Twitter seem fairly confident that science will find a vaccine or a treatment that works - but those exact places may not. The coffee shop by my work is already gone, the one that made a delightful levain bread and an amazing mocha (I had to limit myself to one every week or two, because they were so rich). 

It's such a small thing, but it feels like the beginning of many changes.

...

We have a collection of fabric masks. My mom sent some, and I ordered some that ended up fitting me well and J. not so well, so we ordered some more in a different size and shape. 

I never imagined having a collection of masks, not even when I saw people wearing them in Southeast Asia. It just was never a part of my life. 

Now I have a mask with strawberries on it, and one with crabs, and another with robots. J. has one with flamingos and one with a Cuban cityscape. I even got a tiny one for W. with dinosaurs on it. He's too young to wear a mask regularly, but I got one just in case at some point he has a cough and we have to go into a building, say for medical care, to keep him from coughing on people until we get in there. 

...

Daycare reopens soon. What would you do?

We are sending W., I think, so that we can get some work done while the case counts are low here, and to support his daycare. I keep reading of how daycares are going to have to close, since their margins are already so low, and now people aren't sending their kids back.

But then I read about the health problems that Covid can cause in children, and I reconsider.

There is no right decision. 

what is missing

Covid pandemic shelter in place week 135039385, or whatever this is. I think we are in week 6 here in this house. 

Things I miss, in no particular order except that the biggest one is at the end:

1. Sunny Saturday afternoons on restaurant patios. One afternoon in February, we met a friend for pizza. We sat outside in the sunshine next to the sidewalk. That was nice. For that matter, I miss eating in restaurants in general. Even just for lunch during the work week. 
2. Stopping for coffee or a snack on a walk. Now I have to have everything with me that I might need: drinks, snacks, pup treats, diapers. No more almond croissants and hazelnut lattes on the way past the coffee shop. (The first (?) week we were doing this, when the coffee shop was still open, we stopped outside. J. went in and got a $100 gift card. "Thanks, man!" the barista said. "Do you want a free coffee or something?" But J. didn't want to touch anything. He just took the gift card, put it away, and sanitized his hands. It was a gesture, a hope. Someday, we hope, we'll be back. They will be back.)
3. Not worrying about what is on the things others have touched. I never ever before worried about the outside of a pizza box, or the plastic bag someone gave me to clean up the dog's poop when mine ran out, or the ball that our friends' 2 year old kicked into the street. This makes it much harder to give and receive those little kindnesses. 
4. Adult humans other than J. I feel very, very lucky to like my quarantine people so much, and I'm calling friends far more often, but I miss being less than 10 feet away from other adult humans.
5. Going to work. There's a reason I don't work from home full time. I like working in an office with other people.
6. Leaving the baby with someone else sometimes. Sometimes you need a break. Sometimes you need to talk to adults. Sometimes you need to get some solid work done without an exploring baby around. I miss being able to do those things. 
7. Not worrying about how close people are. I want to be able to walk right past someone working in their front yard and tell them how nice it looks, not swerve away from them into the  street like they have cooties.
8. Feeling reasonably, healthily secure when I think about the future. Just everything: jobs, houses, people, trips. 
9. Going places. The coast. The mountains. The Mitten. The dry state south of here where J.'s parents live. We have tickets to the Netherlands for the summer. What are the chances we'll make it there this summer? Low, I think. 
10. Not worrying so very much about the people I love. 

so many parentheses

It's been gloriously sunny here lately. The tulips and daffodils are up (even fading by now, some of them). The trees are blossoming everywhere you look, with riotous heavy bunches of pink petals hanging off the branches. They are all in bloom: dogwoods, magnolias, camellias, azaleas, rhododendrons, even the wisteria and lilacs are starting to show white and lavender and purple. 

It's been gloriously sunny here lately. Almost every day I take a walk in the afternoon, W. in the stroller, to soak in some sunshine and get away from my desk for a few minutes. I chat with someone on the phone, or J. and the pup come along, or sometimes I just walk to the sounds of nature - more nature than you usually get in the city. Without the sound or smell of cars, the air feels clear and clean. 

It's been gloriously sunny here lately. 

Isn't that strange?

It's not strange. It's spring. Every spring, some days are classic Gone West changeable spring days: raining one moment, sunny the next, rainbows like I've never seen anywhere else. Some days are classic Gone West bright sunny spring days, the kind that give you hope for summer. Some days are classic Gone West rainy gloomy days, the kind that remind you of winter.

But somehow it feels like the weather should mirror the tension in the world, the fear and grief that is going on in overloaded hospitals and overwhelmed cities. 

...

If it were not for the worry, if it were not for the work I'm still trying to get done with a wiggly baby around, this would be a lovely time. W. is in such a cute phase, and I'm happy to get to spend more time with him. He crawls and climbs and explores. He's learning to go down the stairs (although he will only do this for J. For me, he cries and holds out his arms). He loves bottles and cups of any sort (watch your coffee or beer). He can reach way higher than a not-even-1-year-old should be able to reach (don't leave things on the edge of the table). He pulls the leaves off my monstera and jasmine plants (I moved them to the front step. The sun burned them. Now they are on the back step). He tries desperately to get to my keyboard when I'm working. 

He is a lot of work, don't get me wrong, but in some ways this time is what I envisioned my parental leave would be: walks while he naps in the stroller, dinner out on the patio as the day cools, sitting in the porch swing with him while the world goes by (such as the world is right now, but we live on a bike route, so there are bikes and pedestrians most of the time). 

(Clearly I pictured newborns as much more tractable than they turn out to be. I imagined that he would cheerfully nap wherever we were. Not so. He was cranky wherever we went, and I felt sick with exhaustion all the time. Last summer is a blur.)

...

We talked about the five stages of grief early on in this. I still see a lot of denial and anger out in the world, and I'll probably cycle back to that, but for now I'm in acceptance. We know that diseases can jump from animals to humans. We know that we are vulnerable bodies in the world. For me, it's very helpful to think, "Why not now?"

[Baby contribution -> ';;./.-LA]

Why now? Well, why not now? 

For so many centuries, people died of infectious diseases. They still do, in so many parts of the world. The siblings of my Oma died as babies of things that antibiotics would have cured. We've been mostly liberated from that misery and grief here in the US, thanks to vaccines and medication. Now we are learning that our control is not complete. It's hard to give up control. 

When I lived in Rwanda, one of the staff who worked for my organization once came and said that he didn't feel well. I offered him some ibuprofen, and he stared at it and asked me what to do with it. I explained that he should to take two tablets three times a day - morning, midday, and before bed. It had never before occurred to me that I just medicate myself, most of the time, when I don't feel well. (Did you read that article about how average temperatures are going down, thanks to pain relievers? We just spend less time sick than people did for millennia.) 

So I'm here, hunkering down with my loves, trying to spare the world more contagion. 

Coviding

We started social distancing on a Friday sixteen days ago. I downloaded twitter just to keep up on the spread of COVID-19, and I started reading about the need for people to stay away from others. At first, it was just that: we were not meeting friends, we were shopping as little as possible. Our friends were still getting together. 

By Monday, the city was shutting down. 

J. and I are lucky to have jobs that can be done from home, mostly. We are hampered only by a baby who is in full-on explore mode. 

We joked with my parents not long ago that W. was born a toddler in a baby's body. Really it's probably more like a five year old in a baby's body: he wants to do things, and he wants to do them himself. He is more and more pleasant a baby as he can control more and more things himself. No wonder he was so angry as a tiny infant. He couldn't do anything himself, and we didn't know what he wanted. (Hint: it was not food or a diaper change. It was entertainment and movement.)

So the baby is adorable and requires constant attention. 

Every day we trade off baby-wrangling. Our goal is two hour chunks, but we manage that exactly never. An hour or so of this baby one-on-one is about all a human can manage without a break. He is busy. In that hour, he has probably crawled up the stairs and tried to fling himself down (1-10 times), attempted to knock over the dog's water bowl and cried when it was put out of his reach, gotten a gleam in his eye and gone for the space heater, opened the bottom oven drawer and crashed cookie trays together until we are all temporarily deaf, turned over the bead-wire toy thing and gotten his hand stuck underneath and cried, grabbed at the leaves on the plants in the living room and tried to pull them off, and cried to get on the couch and then tried to fling himself off (10-50 times). 

He won't eat real food unless it is puffs, teething crackers, freeze-dried fruit, or bread-like products. Today he deigned to put a bit of soup in his mouth, but only because I gave him a real, grownup metal spoon instead of the pretty silicone ones that are supposed to protect his teeth. 

Ever since W. was about 4 months old, we've been letting him come sleep in our bed after his first long sleep in his own space (currently a pack n play in our room). Many was the night that we had to bring him into bed with us by midnight, and he woke up every hour thereafter, requiring nursing or patting or repositioning to get back to sleep. Lately, though, I've noticed that he can sometimes put himself back to sleep, and I watched early this morning as he rolled himself over and fell back to sleep, back to back with his daddy. It was very, very cute. 

He is just really, really not into being a baby. Nonetheless, here we are. He is a baby, and he's fighting it all the time. 

...

I went into a drugstore the other day to pick up a few things we needed. An employee was coughing as he scanned products on the shelves, and a woman walked by me, then back past me, almost brushing against me. People! Have you not heard of distancing? I was so paranoid afterward that I came home, took off my clothes, and took a shower. I also wiped down or discarded outer wrappings for everything I'd bought. 

I've never been a germaphobe, but this pandemic is turning me into one. 

Isn't it strange that just a month ago I dropped J. and the dog off at the dog park and took W. to T@rget? I set W. in the seat of the cart without wiping it down, and we lingered in the aisles. I didn't worry about how far away other people were. 

I wonder, will we get that back? 

Now the dog park is closed, and going to T@rget seems dangerous. 

I thought I fully appreciated the full, varied grocery stores here in the US, after living in places where the options were not so great. 

Turns out I didn't appreciate them enough. 

unfinished (but I'm posting anyway)

I baked Christmas cookies on December 31. That doesn't sound like much of an accomplishment, because I was at least 6 days late on the cookies, but it was a big deal for me, because it meant that I had the energy for something superfluous, which doesn't happen much lately.

The cookies were courtesy of the two nights in a row that this baby let us sleep for 6-7 hours straight (meaning he slept for 7-8 hours). Of course, he went back to 3-4 hour stretches immediately after (peppered with 1-2 hour stretches just for fun!), but now we know it is possible. I have slept for 6 hours straight 5 times since he was born.

I was so energized by the two nights of sleep in a row that I even invited some neighbors and their kiddo over to decorate. It's like I was a real person again for a minute.

Then the baby started trying to sit up in his sleep and being very cranky all the time because who can sleep when you have skills to learn?

He's also crawling and pulling up on things, to then stand there happily, experimenting with letting go, and occasionally falling with a loud thump and screaming. This is not a baby who tolerates pain well.

I've tried to soak in every minute of this little baby phase, since even four years ago, right after I met J., I wasn't sure if this would be something I got to attempt to have. And I have spent plenty of hours staring at this little face while he slept in my arms, day or night. His sleeping face is the one thing that still looks like it did when he was tiny. By day, his face has elongated and filled out. He's no longer the little frog of a baby he was. But when he sleeps, his lips pout out just as they always have.

vision v. reality

I'm not sure what I thought having a baby would be like, beyond lots of adorable snuggles and, sure, some sleep deprivation at the beginning. I've done a lot of babysitting. I have a sister who is almost eight years younger than me. I've been around some babies, is what I'm saying.

I think I envisioned a nice cosleeper attached to the bed where the baby would sleep quietly until he needed to nurse, and then I would pull him out and sweetly let him nurse while I stayed in bed, and then put him back, where he would sleep quietly again, satisfied.

We do not, I should note, have a cosleeper attached to the bed, so I'm not sure how my vague mental image could possibly have become reality. 

We did have a bassinet that swiveled, so you could move it practically above the bed, and the side pressed down, so I could pull the baby out that way and sweetly let him nurse while I stayed in bed.

I could pull the baby out that way and sweetly let him nurse while I stayed in bed, that is, if I did not have a C-section, which I had, so I did not have the core strength to turn and lift him.

I could pull the baby out that way and sweetly let him nurse while I stayed in bed, that is, if he was any good at latching in his early days, which he was not, and I needed a light to see what he was doing and had to sit up with the nursing pillow to get him in exactly the right spot. 

I could pull the baby out that way and sweetly let him nurse while I stayed in bed, that is, if nursing was enough to keep him fed, which it was not, thanks to my biology or his latch or the massive amounts of synthetic oxytocin they gave me after the birth to keep my uterus from staying full of blood that it was not ejecting, so he had to be supplemented with a bottle after every feeding, and he hated and fought the bottle. (Still does! Still hates the bottle! Even though most of his calories come via the bottle!)

So the first three months were an endless cycle of waking up to a screaming baby (this one ramps up fast), nursing for 20-30 min to try to build my supply, giving the baby a bottle (resulting in screaming), and then attempting to get the now-wide  awake baby back to sleep. It took about an hour and a half, and then he woke up an hour and a half later.

I keep expecting it to get easier - it seems to have gotten easier for most parents with babies his age - and it has gotten easier, but it also sort of hasn't. He still doesn't sleep longer than maaaaaybe a 4-5 hour stretch at the beginning of the night, and then needs comforting at least once an hour after that, unless I pull him into bed with me and let him nurse as much as he wants the rest of the night. He naps about 45 min at a time, and only recently is that anywhere but in my arms. He knows what he needs, which is his mom or his dad, and he will scream until he gets that, day or night. 

I keep joking that I should have screened the guys I dated for how they slept as babies, because I didn't sleep through the night until I was 9 months old... and J. not until he was two years old. Who knows how long this kid will need?

But. 

But.

But.

When people meet him now, they say, "He's the happiest baby!" And it's true. When this baby is happy, he is the happiest being on the planet. He loves people. He loves new faces. He loves new places. He loves the dog. Just keep him entertained, and he's the happiest baby. 

Of course, when he's mad, he's the maddest being on the planet. You've never seen such a mad face in your entire life. It's all or nothing with this one.  

The Great Poopsplosion of 2019

J. and I got a babysitter yesterday so that we could attend a couple of functions without a cranky baby. (Totally destroying my dreams of taking a chill baby with me everywhere, this baby has been intense ever since he was born: he is either very happy or very mad, sometimes within seconds of each other, and he does not believe that sleeping is worth doing). When we came home, the baby was happily sleeping in his space in our room, which lasted about 30 min, as if he knew we were home. That was fine - I needed to nurse him anyway - but it did not bode well for the rest of the night.

After approximately three resettlings necessitating rocking his little butt to get him back to sleep, he started acting more upset around 12:45 am, and I picked him up and sniffed him. Something smelled odd. Something smelled poopy, but not like normal baby poop.

This kid started solids, off and on, meaning when we have the energy for it, this week, so I thought it might be that. It sounded like he had pooped, and it smelled bad, so off we went to the changing table. J. followed with the little egg-shaped light that we use to try to keep from turning on brighter lights that will wake the baby up. 

I took off the diaper. Yep, poopy. I sniffed it to check if it smelled like the weird poop smell. Nope. Normal baby poop smell of fermenting milk. 

And then the poopsplosion began. 

The first round sprayed poop not just onto the changing table, the cloth diapers we lay underneath him, and the clothes he'd been wearing, but onto my stomach, chest, and face, as well as the whole height of the dresser next to the changing table. I covered the area with a cloth diaper and left J. in charge as I ran to the bathroom to clean myself off. While I was there, round two was mostly contained by the diaper. 

J. got the baby into a new diaper and sleeper and handed him off to me. I wiped down the dresser and the changing table while the baby happily smiled at the ceiling from the bed in his nursery. 

When I carried a beaming, wide awake baby into the kitchen, J. was scrubbing diapers and sleepers in the sink. 

"His poop is changing," J. said. "There are chunks of it in the sink." 

And there were. Apparently solid food can cause constipation when you start it. And apparently this baby managed to get it out by using some force. Good job, baby. 

J. cleaned the sink with kitchen cleaner twice. 

Needless to say, neither the wide-awake baby nor the wide-awake momma got much sleep for the rest of the night. Which is pretty normal for this one. I have not gotten a straight six hour stretch of sleep since he was born, not even the one time that J. sent me downstairs to sleep in the basement for six hours. I was too busy worrying about how much trouble Mr. Demanding Baby was giving J. upstairs. 

Send help. 

AMA

What nobody tells you about pregnancy cravings (see what I did there?) is that it isn't really a matter of "I really want this thing right now" so much as a matter of "I feel like I am going to throw up if I don't eat something right now and the only thing in the entire world that sounds like it won't make me want to throw up even MORE is this one particular thing." So you'd better get that particular thing, and you'd better get it now. 

The other thing nobody tells you about pregnancy cravings is that you will only want one thing for days or weeks, and then suddenly you will never want to taste it ever again. For a while, the only thing I could drink was limeade with ginger grated into it, and then one day I couldn't stand the thought of it (after J. squeezed/grated copious amounts of it), and then only thing I could drink was watered down raspberry lemonade, and then one day I couldn't stand the thought of that (leaving a full gallon in the fridge), and now all I drink is ice cold water, with an occasional club soda, splash of cranberry, when I'm out and about. There is a lot of waste in all the things I bought in bulk when they were the only thing I could eat or drink, and now the thought of them makes me sick. 

I'm supposed to be feeling better about now, but I'm not. I'm still feeling barfy every day (although not, it must be said, actually barfing, so I'm lucky that way). Maybe today was a tiny bit better, finally?

...

J. and I decided that, since I'm old, we would attempt the whole baby-making thing immediately after the wedding. It seemed like now or never. 

Three weeks later, I had a positive pregnancy test in my hand, and I raced to show J. before it finished developing. 

It was somewhat surprising. I spent about a decade reading infertility blogs, and I fully expected getting pregnant to be just as difficult as finding a partner was for me. Namely, nearly impossible. I know way too much about what can go wrong, thank you internet, and I knew that trying in your late 30s is a risky proposition.

And yet, apparently the genes of my Dutch great-grandmothers who had babies until age 46 are still running strong. Trust me, I know how lucky I am. I keep hoping that things stay as boring as they have been so far. 

The baby is a boy. We had the initial set of "you are an old mother" genetic testing done, and everything came back low risk, except for the risk of more testosterone in the house. That came back pretty much guaranteed. J. is gearing up his dad jokes.

We saw the little guy on the ultrasound screen at 8 weeks, and we heard the heartbeat quick and strong on a Doppler last week. 

So here we are, with a baby due 9 months and 3 days after the wedding. I almost wish we still lived in an era where the old ladies of the community would count the months, just for the fun of it. Alas. No one here cares. They would be excited for us regardless.

house

Oh, hey. We bought a house.

We did not set out to buy a house, other than the fact that we've been going to open houses for well over a year. But that was just for fun, right? We'd sort of decided that buying a house while planning a wedding was a little too much.

Oops.

I happened to see that there were open houses near the park where we almost always take the pup, the park with the big trees for shade or shelter from the rain, the park with wood chips so it doesn't get too muddy or dusty. It was a whim, something to do on a weekend afternoon between errands and housework.

The next morning, J. went back with the realtor, and a month later, we had a (second) house. (J. already owns one.)

It just so happens that this house has a wall of south-facing windows, and a finished basement, and a yard with beautiful trees. It just so happens that it has a fireplace, and a bright clean kitchen, and a garage for all the stuff we've been cramming into the small third bedroom here. It just so happens that it has fruit trees in the yard, and a cozy family room, and a pantry cupboard. 

So we bought a house. We're moving stuff into it a little at time, and we're never quite sure where things might be - is the dog's second food dish here or there? For that matter, is the pup herself here or there? (On hot days, we sometimes bring her over to the cooler basement there to wile the day away without constant panting.)

Because we are just that smart, we also went camping twice in the weeks before our wedding. 

I even took a day off work to drive out to the mountains - J. and the pup were already there with another friend - and hang out next to a lake. The pup learned to swim. We all got a little sunburned. It actually cooled off at night, which was a welcome break from the unrelenting heat in town. 

When the pup woke me up at 6:05 am, I walked with her the nearly 5 miles around the lake, through the woods, through the campgrounds, hrough the white trunks of trees that burned years ago and past the views of the mountain, to keep her from waking everyone else up. She bounded over logs, then raced past me to sniff something invisible, then dashed past the other way. 

I breathed in mountain air, and all was well. 

Then we got back, and we made some lists in lieu of panicking about all that we have to do before the wedding. 

delight

Life is so delightful sometimes.

I've been riding my bike to work for six or seven weeks now. Getting started was the biggest hurdle, but once I started, I remembered why I love it so. It's so lovely to walk out into the cool morning air and jump on a bike, with the breeze in your face. 

My current ride to work is 2 miles, mostly downhill, on quiet bike streets, so there aren't so many stop signs or lights. I whiz along with my lunch and my purse in bike bags. I loved it so much after a week that I went and bought a new bike. (This was, of course, before I knew that we were about to buy a house. Oops.)

At work, there is a bike room in the basement, which requires an id and a code to get in, so I don't even need a lock. I ride my new bike to work. If I'm going to need to lock up my bike somewhere, I ride my old one,which clanks and clatters and takes a lot more work.

I've been riding my bike other places, too: to the other work location, downtown to a gathering, up the hill to Pilates. I'm trying to look at riding my bike not as exercise but as one of the viable means of transportation. Fortunately, it's such a pleasant means of transportation, absent rain or extreme heat or busy roads, that I choose it more and more.

...

Ten days ago, we went camping out at B.'s parents' place, up in the mountains. On Saturday, we all put on shorts and sandals and meandered a mile or two up the creek, wading through the water, climbing over fallen trees. The pups ran ahead, and then had to be helped down off high logs when they dared not jump down the other side. 

The sun was bright, and the trees made everything all dappled and lovely, and it was so delightful to wade through the ice-cold water that J. and B. and I took a creek walk the other direction the next day, dragging a tired pup with us.

Too bad it turned out she was getting sick. Poor little lady. (A few antibiotics and she's fine now.)

happenings

Things that happened:

1. The dog got puppy mouth warts and we couldn't take her to play with other dogs for a month. She lives to play with other dogs - there is nothing she loves more, except maybe sleeping on a human bed with a human - and has more energy than can be dealt with at home, so things were difficult. We ended up doing things like wandering around parks in the dark after everyone else was gone, throwing a light-up ball. (Too bad she doesn't like balls that much.) We also tried standing at opposite ends of the house, calling her back and forth in exchange for handfuls of her meal. It kind of worked, but it was exhausting.
2. A pebble caught my windshield as I got on the highway, and by the time I got to work, there was a 12-16 inch crack across the driver's side. I need to get it replaced, but no time, people. No time.
3. A tree fell on J.'s car while he and the pup were hiking with a friend. The car turns out to be totaled, so he doesn't have a car right now. This means that we have to decide whether to get a new Subie or have him drive what was previously my car to work and buy something small and fuel-efficient to drive only in town (see #7, below). I'm not-very-secretly angling for a little scooter in addition to whatever else we get, and J. does not seem as anti-scooter as he was before. 
4. The water line to the ice maker on the fridge sprang a leak and leaked down between the wall and the wood floor, causing water damage that required tearing out flooring and drywall and all the lower cabinets and counters, and the insulation down in the crawl space, and then a weekend of fans and dehumidifiers that sounded like an airplane was landing in the kitchen. The pup despised it, to the point where we had to carry her past it, cringing, and she would run away when we tried to lure her back inside the house. The mitigation is done, but the repairs have not yet begun, so currently there is a table set up next to the sink on the plywood floor that currently constitutes the kitchen. Also, the fridge is in the dining room and the cabinets are outside. 
5. J. and I made a bid on a house that needed a lot of work, like $100K of work, and then the seller tried to get us into a bidding war, and we backed out.
6. I'm on my last week at my current job (today was my second to last commute) and of course it decided to snow. It snows once or twice a year, and this turned out to be the week. Fortunately, it didn't get down to 32 degrees on my commute home until I was just about to my exit. The side streets are slippery, but the highway was fine. I made it home in only 56 minutes, which may be a record, because everyone else stayed home or ditched work early.
7. A week from now, my commute home will be 2 miles instead of 52. That makes up for a lot. I can walk, even, or take the bus. That, my friends, is good news. I feel like I finally get to have Gone West back. I've missed it, these years of spending my days in State City. 

This life is a bit of a comedy of problems right now, but you can either laugh or cry. We are doing a lot of laughing in these parts. 

backdrop

On Monday, our second full day in El Nido, we took a tricycle to Las Cabanas beach, a few miles down the road. Whenever we asked anyone what to do, this is what they suggested. "Oh, go to Las Cabanas. It's the best beach." So off we went. 

It really is a lovely beach. The thing about Palawan beaches, and the reason we chose Palawan over all the other islands in the Philippines, is that it has beautiful sandy beaches, but then it also has all these little rocky islands and outcroppings out in the water. There's no here-to-eternity-of-water view until you get out past the smaller islands. 

We walked all the way down the beach to the end, and then we walked back, and on the way we asked about the zipline. The zipline ran from above the beach across to a small island. The tide was low, so we could have walked across the wet, slimy rock to the small island, but where's the fun in that?

Someone walked us up the steep hill to the zipline, and then we sailed out over the water toward the other island.

Unfortunately, there was a headwind, and no matter how aerodynamic I tried to make myself, I drifted to a halt most of the way over and had to be rescued by the guys running the zipline.

We had lunch on the beach, and settled into beach chairs. I read a book, and then I took a picture of the top of the book and the ocean behind it. I laughed at the picture, telling J. that I couldn't post it on social media, because I accidentally took a picture of a page on which a girl fended off advances by saying, "I'm engaged. To be married," and people might take it the wrong way.

We moved to open sand and laid on the beach for the rest of the afternoon, until we had to go do our fluo night dive. 

The next night, after a day of cruising the islands with a bunch of Russian 20-somethings, we took a tricycle back to Las Cabanas beach to catch the sunset. We found a little bench facing the setting sun, with a bench table in front of it. We ordered a ginger soup and some other food I've forgotten. I'd taken off my motion sickness patch, and apparently taking it off after a day on the water resulted in rebound nausea (I really wasn't made for boats). 

And after dinner, J. proposed. 

This was surprisingly surprising to me. I know that proposals are a thing these days, but I never felt like I needed one. I expected just to do what my parents said they did - have a conversation and decide that it was time. 

Spoiler: I said yes. 

We hadn't talked about rings, or wedding dates, or anything in other than general terms, and so J. did not have a ring. He tried to get an O-ring for the top of a scuba tank from the dive shop, but the person he asked seemed very skeptical, so he was ringless when the right sort of moment presented itself.

A few minutes later, he went to the bathroom and came back with a piece of toilet paper twisted into a ring, and I put it on and took selfies and he was embarrassed not to have had any kind of ring, but I loved the toilet paper ring. I loved the surprise. I loved the quiet moment between the two of us. I loved it all.

A day or two later, we did scrounge some O-rings from the dive shop, and we both wore those on our right hands until we got back to Gone West, by which time they had stretched out enough that they would not stay on our fingers (even my middle finger), and we ordered silicone rings online, in blue, which we are both wearing on our right hands while we wait for the jeweler to finish the rings she designed for us, which we will also wear on our right hands until our wedding day in August. 

It turns out that when you wear a silicone ring on your right hand and don't post an engagement announcement on the f@cebooks, no one knows that you are getting married unless you tell them about it. We may drop some more hints as time goes by. It's fun to have a little secret, although here I am blabbing it to the 8 or 9 people who read my blog. You're in the know, now.

And if we are friends on the f@cebooks, you can go see the photo of the book with the words, "I'm engaged," in front of a beautiful beach in the Philippines. 

beautiful misery

We decided that it would be smarter not to schedule dives for the day we arrived in El Nido, because jet lag is a jerk.

So we scheduled four of them for the next day. (I said smartER, not smart.)

I had a grand idea a few days before we left on our trip, and I had my doctor call in a prescription for the motion sickness patch. This thing had some downsides - it didn't completely get rid of my motion sickness, you can't drink on it, and it makes you sleepy, to start - but it worked pretty well the first couple of days.

So we hopped into the water and dove, three dives. And then we went back to the dive shop, where I took the night diving class, and we went back out and dove again.

I'm not going to lie, I was exhausted. I was jet lagged and dopey from the patch and, actually, diving at night is a little scary. It's really, really dark down under water.

Fortunately, we had the next day to zipline from one island to another and lay on the beach.

That night we went diving again, again in the dark, but this time with fluorescent lighting. I'm not sure that I would have done this dive if I'd known what a fluo dive meant. I thought it meant phosphorescence, but no. 

What it meant was that we wore amber lenses over our masks, and we held blue lights, and the only thing we could see at any given moment was the living thing at which we were directly shining the blue lights, which then started fluorescing, and it was extremely claustrophobic, and I don't even get claustrophobic. It was the most claustrophobic I've ever been. 

During our safety stop at 15 feet, near the end of the dive, the dive master suddenly grabbed me and pulled me toward the surface, and on the way up he grabbed J. and pulled him up, too, and it turns out that we were surrounded by tiny, lovely, blue-fluorescing jellyfish that would hurt if they touched you, and a bigger one had been right where I was going but I didn't see it.

This was kind of the story of the rest of our dives: So many pretty, dangerous jellyfish. One of our dive masters got stung (by a little one, thank goodness). I got massively motion sick, because I managed to put the second motion sickness patch on wrong so it wasn't in full contact with my skin, and then when I moved it, I managed to get some of it in my eye, so my eye dilated way too much (a known side effect) and things were blurry up close. Two people got separated from the group on one dive, and I mistakenly followed the instructor when he went to look for them instead of staying with J., who was my buddy. The instructor and I got back to J. and the group, but we had to surface early to find the missing pair. (They'd gotten lost taking photos.) We had a strong current on one dive. The whole boat got so motion sick in the large swell that I had to stand at the front staring forward while other people lay in agony inside the boat. I got a little panicky about my breathing, even though I've loved diving since the first time I went under water. 

I make it sound miserable, and sometimes it was, because diving can be, with the wetsuits and the ocean swell, but then I would look out at the gorgeous green water with the gorgeous green rocks standing up out of it, and I wanted to stay forever. 

off to the Philippines

We flew out on Thanksgiving Day, to Tokyo and then Manila and then, the next morning, to El Nido, Palawan. The flight to El Nido passed over blue, blue water, with green islands scattered about, and we descended among craggy rocks rising out of the sea.

We approached the runway over that kind of blue-green that makes up dreams of tropical islands, and all of a sudden there was a jolt to the side and we were going up, up, up over the island instead of landing. 

I mean, I try to be all cool about flying. Mostly I am. Mostly I can handle turbulence and engine sound changes and rising and falling and the occasional armrest-clinging landing. I know that flying is safer than driving. But there's still a tiny part of me that has read too much about plane crashes and doesn't quite trust the science of being in the air in a metal tube.

The pilot came on and said, in his American accent ("Was that an American voice?" I asked J. when the pilot started talking in Manila) that there was a strong cross-wind and we would make a second attempt at landing. J. continued playing sudoku. I pressed my face to the window. 

We made a high circle over a ridge and a bay and a few islands, and then back down toward the bay that contained the airport. This time everything was smooth, and we landed with barely a bump.

Among the many things that I did not know about the Philippines is that it would be the first place since Liberia where I did not need so much as a thin extra layer at night. We walked out of the plane into tropical humidity, and it was glorious. 

There are no taxis or buses at El Nido airport. (This is what happens when you do little to no research before getting on a plane.)

It was fine, though, because there were tricycles, the little 100cc motorbikes with a car built over them so they have a wheel and a seat on the side. We stuffed our big scuba gear bags onto the back and J. and I squeezed into the little seat, taking turns leaning forward and back so that our broad American shoulders would fit. 

We rode through the jungle - I smiled widely the whole way, because it reminded me of Liberia - and then, after dropping our stuff off at the hotel too early to check in - we walked along the sand of the bay, looking out at the perfect ocean with the rocky islands jutting up.  

pre-Thanksgivinging

I like Thanksgiving a lot. It might be my favorite holiday. No presents to buy, no decorating to do, just lots of delicious food. This year, though, J. and I are getting on a plane on Thanksgiving morning to go scuba diving in the Philippines. 

I've known that we would miss Thanksgiving for many months, ever since January when I got all excited about scuba diving and started looking at the best dive spots in the world and then checking kayak for flights costs to those spots. Fiji was $1000, which seemed pretty good. But Manila was $630 if we left on Thanksgiving Day, so we bought flights without stopping to think about it. 

I'm excited about this trip. I have a whole new regulator/dive computer/octopus set, thanks to J. thinking ahead on my birthday and a quick trip to my favorite dive shop. (My own! My very own regulator and dive computer!) We have eight dives scheduled, including my first two night dives. (I also bought a dive light at the dive shop.) The island looks stunning. 

I also started feeling a little sad about not getting to have Thanksgiving dinner. Wherefore the pies?

So I managed to talk J. into having a pie and game night last night. He also wanted mashed potatoes, so we made those. And corn pudding and burgers and brats. Because what says Thanksgiving like burgers and brats? 

We invited people over, and we did the cooking and baking, and we ate the delicious things. And now we have leftovers until we get on the plane. I just had a veggie burger with a side of mashed potatoes and corn pudding. 

I'd call that winning Thanksgiving.

nerves

My neck has been hurting for a year. Sometimes a little better, sometimes a little worse. It’s mostly uncomfortable to sit, slightly less uncomfortable to stand or lie down. 

I blamed it on the bed and the pillow, but I changed both of those (the pillow multiple times). I blamed it on climbing, but I got belay glasses so that I don’t have to look up when my climbing partner is up on the wall. I blamed it on the drive, but I thought this bigger car would be better for my body than the little one was, not worse.

I went on vacation and nothing changed. I went to the chiropractor and nothing changed. I got massages every month and nothing changed.

Last week I was climbing with a group of women, and one of them, who practices Chinese medicine, mentioned that she does both Chinese medicine and physical therapy for her back.

A lightbulb went off. 

There are professionals covered by insurance whose job it is to make pain like this go away. 

I had my first PT appointment this morning. I dutifully wrote down all the things about my wrist surgeries and my ulnar nerve problems and my shoulder catching. 

The PT moved my arm and had me move my head and measured all sorts of things. At one point, she had me sit straight, hands on my lap, and she ran her fingers down my arms.

“Can you feel one more than the other?” she asked.

“I think your right hand is actually colder than the left,” I said. 

She switched her hands. 

Nope. I just can’t feel what’s happening to my right arm as much as I can what’s happening to my left.

So that’s weird. 

It turns out that those same nerves - the median and ulnar nerves - that have long bugged me in my hand have now decided to bug me in my neck. I’ve cricked them up somehow. Nerve problems seem to be my thing.

Now I have a bunch of exercises and things to do. And my $100 pillow just arrived (ordered before the appointment). I’m hoping there is hope on the horizon.

But also, I’m still going climbing tonight. 

totality

I will admit that I was a little anxious about whether we were going to find a place to watch the eclipse. This is because the entirety of our plan was "drive into the zone, preferable somewhere remote."

Only we don't live somewhere remote, and the stories of the projected traffic struck fear into the heart of a person who commutes 2+ hours a day. The idea of more time in the car, stuck in traffic, made me feel slightly ill. I tried to talk the rest of the team into leaving earlier or making a more concrete plan, but everyone else thought it would be fine.

Sunday afternoon, we packed up the Subaru with tents and all the camping gear, and off we set.

Just inside the national forest, we stopped at a ranger station, where they gave us a map with the non-reservable sites highlighted, and then we just guessed. We picked a campground and drove.

When we drove into the campground we'd chosen, there were empty spots. There was even, upon inspection, a big, quiet spot down a little trail next to the creek, with two tables and space for multiple tents. We couldn't even hear our nearest neighbors. 

The guys took the tiny hatchet that I gave J. for his birthday and used it to hack at a fallen tree to break off pieces for firewood, and then JT took the hatchet from them and crouched down, holding it in both hands, and chipped away until she broke off a piece. 

In the morning, we lounged about making breakfast. There were eggs on the stove.

Jeff put on the eclipse glasses just to see how they worked, and suddenly said, "It's already happening!" 

We turned off the eggs, scrambled around for chairs and the rest of the eclipse glasses, and looked up.

There was a bite out of the sun. 

We all sat for the next forty five minutes, looking up, enthralled. 

When the sun disappeared through the glasses, we all tentatively took them off, and then we couldn't help ourselves. We whooped and shouted. We laughed. 

"The world is divided into two kinds of people," JT said, after the light had returned. "People who have seen totality, and people who haven't."

"Totality or bust."

We're already planning for Mexico in 2024.

what happened when we went camping:

What happened when we went camping: 

(Not all camping. Just this particular camping.) 

We forgot the dog. It's not our dog, but J. was supposed to dog sit for some neighbors and the days got mixed up. We were already out of network and 90 minutes out of town in crazy Friday afternoon traffic when he saw the text asking if they could drop the dog off Saturday morning. He sent a response on the wifi at the ranger station, but we didn’t know until later whether they would be able to find someone else.

We forgot the rain fly for the tent. The weekend before, a tree dripped sap on it camping out at B.’s parents’ house, so we left it out to clean it, and there it stayed, uncleaned, during a busy week and while we packed everything for this weekend. I thought of it soon after we left the ranger station, and J. and E. and I speculated on whether this would mean sleeping in the car or curled up on the floor of E. and B.’s tent. 

Fortunately, when we got to the camp site, we found that B. had packed a 9’x9’ tarp that E. picked up once on sale at rei, and when tied just so over the tent, it blocked all the rain and gave a beautiful view of the lake. It was more exposed to wind, but the wind didn’t get that bad in the trees. 

We forgot to fill the car up with gas. This we also remembered around the ranger station, having passed many, many gas stations between Gone West and the depths of the woods. We were headed two hours up into the mountains, with the nearest gas station 30 miles away on dirt roads. It was risky.

We planned to drive back out through State City so we could stop at the nearest gas station (adding an hour to the drive), but when we hit the intersection on the way home, the car said we had 70 miles of gas left, and the sign said we had 47 miles to the first town on the direct route back to Gone West, so we chanced it and headed straight toward home. B. and E. followed us in case we ran out of gas.

It turns out that when a Subaru says 70 miles of gas left after driving 30 miles of dirt road, it still has many miles of lovely paved road left in it, especially when that lovely paved road is mostly downhill. The gauge still said it had 70 miles to go after the 47 mile drive. 

And then, to top off the weekend, B. stepped in a hole that turned out to be a rusting culvert and it gouged a 2-3 inch long gash in his leg, about half an inch deep. I tried to wash it out, and someone who works as a medical assistant in an orthopedist's office (and, more importantly, is a mom of teenagers) came from a neighboring campsite came to look at it, and the consensus was that we needed a real doctor, not butterfly bandages and tap water. 

The nearest urgent care was 2.5 hours away in State City, and it was closed. The nearest emergency room was 2 hours away.

Math problem: if you leave your campsite at 6 pm to drive to an emergency room 2 hours away, and it takes 3.5 hours to be seen and cleaned and stitched at the emergency room and you still need to fill up on gas and snacks because no one has eaten dinner, and it takes 2 hours to drive back, what time will you get back to your campsite?

The answer is 2:12 am. 

Meanwhile, sitting in the waiting room in a little country hospital, we read about what happened in Charlottesville. 

There are actual Nazis marching unashamed in our streets, making KKK and Nazi salutes, and the president of this country can’t bring himself to denounce them. He says there are “two sides.”

Let’s be clear: what happened in Charlottesville is not the fault of people who oppose Nazis and the KKK. There are not two equally justified sides. There is one side that espouses hatred, and that is one side that opposes hatred based on race, gender, or religion. 

Pick your side.

stories

When I first started commuting to State City every day, people kept saying, "Oh, are you going to listen to audiobooks?" And of course I was not going to listen to audiobooks, because I am a visual person, people, a visual person, and I read books, not listen to them. 

I listened to music, and then when I found that gave me too much time to think about how other people on the road were driving, I switched to NPR, and then there was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad election, and I couldn't listen to NPR anymore because the news made me furious (so many awful things being done to so many people), and I went back to music.

One day, on a drive back from Central Ski Town that devolved into a blizzard up on the mountain, J. put on an audiobook. I was driving, wearing my glasses, and the starbursts I saw through the glasses whenever a car passed driving the other way nearly blinded me through the driving snow. 

But in the background was this story playing through the speakers. I got caught up in the story as I drove, and it let my kinesthetic brain focus on the road while my auditory brain listened to the words.*

The book was so good.

I promptly listened to all the books J. owned on aud!ble, and when I ran out of those, I had him buy some more, and when I ran out of those, I downloaded the library app and started borrowing audiobooks from them. I tried podcasts somewhere in between, but they didn't draw me into a story in the same way.

Turns out stories are exactly what I needed to take my mind off the hour of commuting in the morning and evening. Don't get me wrong, I still have a little bit of brain left over to notice how inefficient it is when everyone drives in the two left lanes and the right lane sits empty, but I don't have the brain space to get so frustrated by it. My stress level has decreased dramatically. I almost don't mind the commute.

I guess it helps that I finally got a car with bluet00th that will start right up with the audiobook when I get in the car. Without bluet00th, this would be impossible. I'd be in my old ways of propping the phone up on the speedometer and trying to turn it up loud enough to be heard over the road noise when I needed to listen to something on my phone. Or headphones, I guess. That's awkward while driving.

(Side note: now that I have a car with a push button start, I am flummoxed by other people's cars. What is this key of which you speak? I reach automatically to push the button and turn the car off, and there is no button. How does this even work? 20 years of muscle memory, gone in just a few months.)

* I took an adult learning class once, and they taught us that if you are, like me, primarily a visual learner, second a kinesthetic learner, and least an auditory learner, you probably need to do something kinesthetic while listening, in order to process the information. 

lasik, part 2

At the surgeon's office the morning after my lasik, I still had my dark mask on. I could see through it, but it scared me a little that I would hurt my eyes if I left them open, so I would look at the world and then close my eyes again.

Then I went into the exam room and they told me to take my mask off, and then they turned on the lights. 

So much for protecting my eyes. 

When I went back out into the waiting room, J. told me that the woman who had surgery right before me the day before and the appointment right before me that morning had a problem with the flap. Her person left her there so that they could fix the flap.

Me? I was fine. Not even an itch in my eyes. 

It was a beautiful sunny day, and I walked out into the sunshine without sunglasses. I wasn't supposed to spend much time looking at screens, so I didn't go to work. Instead, I walked to the tea place. I wore sunglasses out of an abundance of caution, but my eyes didn't hurt.

I was supposed to sleep in the dark mask for a week so that I did not accidentally rub my eye or stab myself in the eye during the night (a legitimate concern, since I stabbed myself in the eye with my finger while turning over just this week), and that worked for a few days, but as time went on, I found myself ripping it off sometime during the night. In the morning, it would be under the pillow, or on the floor next to the bed. I was, apparently, getting less cautious about my eyes.

I was also supposed to wait at least a week before climbing (chalk dust is everywhere). I made it six days, but it was cool. I just took tears with me and used them when someone above me knocked chalk dust down into my eyes, instead of rubbing my eyes and dislodging the flap.

Two weeks after surgery, back at the surgeon's office, after reading the 20/10 line, I asked her if the flap was ok. (I was a little paranoid about the flap.)

"You wouldn't be seeing 20/10 if there was a problem with the flap," she said dryly. 

What we've discovered, J. and I, by comparing our experiences, is that lasik seems to exacerbate whatever sensitivities your eyes have. J. is still, 10 years later, more bothered by light than I am. I am a little more light sensitive than before, but my real issue is air blowing at my eyes. This has always bothered me, but now I can't stand the air blowing through the vents in my car or standing by my coworker's desk when the little space heater is on.

I now wear sunglasses in the car, even in the dark rain clouds, to block the blowing air (the vents are off and closed and pointed down but some gets through), and I wear layers in my office so that I don't have to turn on the space heater.

It's worth it. It's so worth it. 

I can SEE.

The strangest thing, after 21 years of taking my contacts every night, is going to sleep without taking my vision out of my eyes. I am still using tears at night, and allergy eye drops, so I'm using that ritual to convince my eyes that it really is okay not to take anything out of my eyes before I sleep. It's weird, though. It's really weird. 

It's also the best money I've ever spent.