Amelia

I have some time to myself this Christmas Eve. Thinking of things happy and sad.

Things I'm grateful for:
-my family, their love and support
-the chance to see my parents, sister, and nephew tomorrow, to be together on Christmas
-B.'s family, how they've accepted me and made me part the family
-wonderful friends near and far
-being able to see some of them next week at New Year's!

Things I'm sad about:
-my grandmother whose has advanced Alzheimer's and is in a nursing home. We got an update today, she has been working with a therapist and her walking is better. The Alzheimer's is advanced enough that she is no longer my grandmother; she hasn't recognized anyone for years. So we are content that she is getting good care. If she is walking more steadily there is less risk of her falling and hurting herself. We're trying to make her life as pleasant as possible, even though some times it's hard to know how to do that (other than no pain, obviously). I miss her.

-we're not doing extended-family Christmas on my mom's side this year (the side with the grandmother mentioned above). Schedules just got too crazy. My parents will do a little thing next weekend, but I'll be at New Year's. I see my aunts and uncle regularly now, so that's better, but I will still miss that tradition this year. My one aunt just had her plans canceled (by a man she was interested in and kind of dating, stupid boys) so she will be alone on Christmas. :(

-I'm missing D. pretty badly tonight. Christmas always meant more to me than to him since he didn't grow up with the tradition. It's a time to share with people you love and even though we're not together I still love him and care for him. And I have years of good Christmas memories with him. I'm happy to be with B. and I'm happy to be included in new traditions--his family's--and to share my family's rituals with him. But I am still feeling the loss of my marriage, and with the holiday that loss is more acute.


It's been a time of transitions for me and the holidays are all about tradition. They bump up against each other some times. I'm sure tomorrow will be wonderful and celebratory and loving. Tonight's just a little sad.

Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate and love to all of you.

eta: I'll end on something happy. ( me and the Christmas tree! )

It's the same one as behind the cut, but here's a link to less annoyingly large Christmas tree pic!

From wavyarms

This is the loveliest advice column I've read in a while (although I am partial to Miss Conduct).

A good thing to read for the moments when we all feel unlovable.

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Stuff has been happening, but I haven't been feeling particularly chatty. My sister, nephew, and brother-in-law came to visit last weekend. It was wonderful to see them (they hadn't been up since last Oct. when we first moved into the house). Melissa and I had some good sister-conversations and we all loved chasing after and playing with the baby. We took him to Air and Space and he did a good job staying in his stroller, pointing, looking intently at the airplanes, and then waving each of them "bye bye".

This afternoon D. and I are taking a kayak trip on the Potomac to see the monuments. I'm really looking forward to it, hopefully it will be lovely. My shoulders are a little sore from the gym, trapeze, and dance class this week (I didn't do anything for a couple weeks because I was busy and then sick, so this week was a little rough), but hopefully I'll manage.

We've been gone so many weekends recently that we've been neglecting stump removal. The goal is to have all of them out by July 3rd. While I was watering plants D. got the 5th one out today!!! It was one of the worst. Major thanks also goes to durdge who has spent hours not only in general helping out, but on that stump in particular. My contribution was filling in the hole afterwards.

( a few pictures )

If we're diligent and it doesn't rain this week I think we will get the last one. Planting things will have to wait until next year.

I have also done laundry, cleaned up the kitchen, and graded exams today. And I'm planning to sort through some financial paperwork. Oh and watch Dr. Who! Yay for a Saturday at home. (And tomorrow is Adam Lambert concert 1 of 2!)

Monday durdge and I started cutting down the big, overgrown, unprunable bushes in front of the inoperable hot tub. D. was making dinner. We did 5/6 bushes. As one was falling an egg fell into my cleavage, down, and through my shirt and hit the ground. Then we realized that there was a bird's nest in the bushes. The mother bird spent the entire evening tweeting and hopping around the deck and the roof, looking for her neighborhood, her home, and her eggs. You guys, it was heartbreaking. I felt SO BAD, like the evil farmer in the rats of Nimh.

The bigger issue was the stumps. durdge worked on two of them not getting either one out. I spent another hour and a half on one Thursday and it didn't wiggle at all. D. comes home from work and gets it out in 30 minutes. It was pretty hot. It's annoying to me that I can't work as productively as the guys, I just don't have the brute strength or stamina. I collect branches, fetch water, maybe dig a little if the roots aren't too dense. Work I do in a half hour takes them 10 minutes. It's ridiculous.

Good thing we bought all those tools. Various things we're using to remove the stumps:
-spade
-pick axe
-axe
-trowel (the bushes are all up against a concrete pad and have ridiculously thick root systems, you can't get a spade between them and the pad)
-clippers
-handsaw (this is mostly me as I am lame and can't use an axe or splitter effectively)

Note one important tool that's missing: a root grinder thingy. drudge and D. got 2.5/6 out so far, so it can be done. We're feeling stubborn so I think the plan is to take the rest out by hand. We'll see how it goes this week.

Saturday the plan was to remove the hot tub. hahahha, we haven't touched it yet. Instead we rented a truck, but not for the times we really wanted, we had it from 7am to 12:30pm. So we got up at 6am on Saturday. Yeeeeah.

We got 2 out of 3 loads of cut-down-bushes brush to the dump, as well as the annoying blue tarp that had been under the sand pile. I wish we had time for the final load, but it was $50/hour in overages so we had to return the truck. :p Guess we will cut up and bundle the remaining brush for recycling pickup. Not sure what we're doing with the stumps.

We also went and bought a linden tree! This was the real reason for renting the truck. Now we have two trees, a redbud in the front yard for me (purple flowers!), and a linden in the backyard for Denis (where the sandpile used to be).

Lindens are a really important tree for Denis. There are lots of lindens in Croatia; the croatian name is lipa. In the currency Croatian "cents" are lipa, and the coins have images of the tree on them. The month of June is named lipanj, because that's the month the lipa bloom. They're actually important all over eastern Europe, check out the wikipedia entry, it's pretty interesting.

Last Monday while D. was cooking dinner he also clogged the kitchen sink. It's been clogged all week, and that's annoying. We weren't home a lot in the evenings so didn't start aggressively dealing with it until Friday. Tried draino, didn't work. Rented a big motorized snake from Home Depot (that we had to return Sat. morning), didn't reach because it couldn't get around all the corners.

D. is a little obsessed with unclogging the drain. Especially since we've already spent money on it. He went back to Home Depot and bought a (smaller) snake and has been messing with it all afternoon while I napped. Drain is still clogged, although now there are some air bubbles *sigh*. My kitchen is a mess, it smells like sewer, and I am ready to call the plumber. He gets points for persistence though :) (He's watching me type this.) OMG now he says he has located the clog and wants to *cut the pipe*. This seems like a really really BAD idea. Not that he can't cut the pipe,* it's putting it back together that concerns me.


*We also bought a sawzall this weekend. To help us take apart the hot tub. Sawzall is the brand name of a small reciprocating saw, isn't it fun to say? sawzall sawzall sawzall Unfortunately now D. has a tool he could use to cut open the pipe. Really, just, no. Hopefully the sawzall will be up to disassembling the hot tub. Which we will get to tomorrow, or some time this week before my dad comes to help us rebuild, patch, something the hole in the deck where the hot tub is currently sitting. Oh and detaching the hot tub means we have to deal with the electricity because it's hardwired. And none of our circuit breakers are labeled. And because the hot tub is broken you can't tell if power is going to it or not. Yeeeah, that's going to go well.

How have I not seen any figure skating/ice dancing yet? Also, ski jumping is *insane*.

Friday D. and I went out to Russia House for a belated Valentine's Day celebration. We had a good time, would recommend. Lovely atmosphere (dark, cozy, and Russian, duh), and yummy drinks (I had a Moscow Mule, D. a Sputnik, the vodka menu is extensive). We had the wild game sausages, the rabbit was awesome, and the other two were good. My beef stroganoff was very tasty (much better than the "stroganoff" my mother used to make with canned soup) and D.'s lamb was incredible, even though his blackbread pudding and greens were a little too salty.

We had a great time. It looks like a fun place to go out for drinks. The bar area was pretty noisy, but it's 4 levels so our little dining room was quiet and intimate. We went because we had a groupon. Groupon is bringing date night back! We've gone out a few times now, it's really nice. Even if some place is overpriced (Russia house isn't, an Indian place we went to earlier was) you don't feel so bad because of the discount.

Saturday I went out to Reston with ellen_fremedon and then to the curling open house, which seemed to be a great success! When I got home D. had cleaned the house! And not just the regular cleaning, but some of the annoying cleaning that I keep avoiding. It led to exchanges like this:

D: have you ever noticed that spot [that is annoying to vacuum] was really dusty?
me: yes, I notice it several times a day and it annoys me (but apparently not enough to drag the vacuum up there)
D: oh, I just noticed it.
me: thank you very much for cleaning it.
D: did you dust area X?
me: yes, when I see things are dusty I often dust.
D: I thought it was funny that there wasn't any dust there when the other room was so dusty.
me: I do stuff! Including a lot of cleaning that you don't notice. :) Thanks for doing all that dusting and cleaning the floor! clean house yay!
D: clean house yay!
*hugs*

Sunday we went to the YMCA, worked out together (!), and then joined! The only annoying thing is that the Y doesn't have a squat rack. How can this be?! Squats and deadlifts are my favorite things ever. I guess I can make do with the smith machine and dumbbells, but it's just not the same. I'll get over it, just whining a little. Am exciting to try to exercise regularly again. We've also done some cooking this week: chicken/chickpea/cardamom thing, roasted cauliflower (omg so good), cucumber salad, bean soup, spinach, quinoa, salmon. Nothing fancy, but more than we usually cook. I'm hoping we can keep it up.

Gym, cooking, and housecleaning. Our life is so exciting.

Ug, I am angry and disappointed at the MA election. Small bright spot: It finally motivated me to fill out my MD voter registration. Will mail it tomorrow.

D. and I finally saw Up for the first time. I was crying enough after the first 10 minutes that D. paused the movie. (Sometimes I get emotional at movies, but I rarely *sob*. Just one more way that I'm becoming my mother.) After that we really loved it. Behind the curve I know, but the joke about the dead squirrel struck me as the funniest thing ever (in that moment).

Oh White Collar! How I adore you! So much silly (and pretty, and charming and man-emotion)!
Maybe in the next episode there can be a really cold room where you die by freezing to death and they will have to snuggle naked together for warmth. You know they'd go there.

Amelia finds it interesting that she can be totally cool with seeing D.'s porn on his computer, but when he goes on her laptop unexpectedly to look up the order of Fringe season 2 episodes on wikipedia so he can watch some of them and clear up some space on the dvr (finally, omg, now what about Dollhouse?), and he sees her porn she gets all weird. /runonsentenceofdoom huh. who, knew?

Had a great time at the Renaissance Festival with denis77, axiom_of_stripe, ellen_fremedon, and uschickens.

I had never been to one before, even though we've lived here for five years. It was really lovely. Three of us got there around noon? We shopped, threw some axes, and ate some fried things. ellen_fremedon spent some time choosing a fantastic new hat that is very her. Then uschickens joined us. We listened to the Rogues perform (awesome). There was more shopping (earrings! necklaces! herby things!), and three of us spent a lot of time trying on costumes (guess which three). After waiting patiently for a while D. and C. went off to listen to some more music. There were more food breaks. We tried on tiaras (again mostly three of us did this although we all admired the dragon items). We saw a jousting tournament (awesome! one guy was unhorsed), and three of us took an elephant ride! It was a fantastic day. Great friends, incredible people-watching (codpiece with sparkly man-thong?), fun activities, a good Sunday afternoon.

Pictures here

Denis is here! He arrived last night after taking a 4-hour later flight that resulted in his bags being stuck in Munich and a $250 euro travel voucher that is helping us destress after the Orbitz fiasco. We also had an anticlimatic initial attempt to pick him up at the airport, but it all worked out.

Thursday Slavica and I spent a ridiculous amount of time on public transportation. (So you're supposed to buy bus and tram tickets, but most people do so on their cellphones, so you don't see a lot of people using the punch things.) When I asked her about this she said "they check rarely" so because I'm not sure exactly where to buy a paper ticket (not with the driver) I'm riding public transportation illegally (like Denis did when he was a teenager). This makes me somewhat nervous, but apparently not enough to go buy tickets.

Anyway the time spent was good because we went and saw my SIL at work at the bakery and she gave us lots of tasty baked goods and then we went swimming at the lake. Amazing how good swimming and lying on the beach (in the shade on chairs!) is for your soul. We also actually swam across the little man-made lake and back which was more cardio exercise than I've had in a while. It's been really hot here. (The heat has been in the front page of the papers, I think it's been around 37 degrees C. which is in the high 90s). So the air was hot and dry and the water was cool and wet and that worked out just fine.

Of course Denis came and last night it cooled right down and today is cloudy and breezy and some temperature where you could wear jeans out and not die. The only bad thing about Denis being here is that I don't sleep half as well with the snoring (and he sleeps better when someone isn't waking him up multiple times a night telling him to stop snoring). But it is so nice to see him again!