We Did It!

A photo of Puget Sound (aka the Salish Sea) from
the deck of the Washington State Ferry Spokane.
Photo taken by Lizzy Kirkland

Our weekend at "the beach" (excuse me; it's not the beach unless the swimming pool is open, which is only in the summer so our weekend at "Grandma's Condo") was nice.

It was also one of those weekends where nothing calamitous happened but lots and lots of minor inconveniences did. Lots.

We forgot our toiletries bag (we left it in the bathroom at home), which also included our meds (except those I keep in my purse anyway, like a rescue inhaler and ibuprofen.). Now, none of us will die in a day and a half without said medications, but there was some concern over the ease of getting to sleep and digestive aids and so forth.

Ferry traffic was insane. We left the house at 12:30 hoping to make the 1:30 boat, but we were prepared to wait for the 3:15 sailing if needed (they only have one boat on the route right now, though it's a busy one). On the way down we got stuck behind someone who broke down in the ferry lane, and finally made it onto the 3:15... which left the dock at 3:35. My knee was super stiff and swollen after the car ride over there (although I drive for a living, even I don't generally drive for five hours at a time, and certainly not without getting up and moving around more than I did here). On the way back we were the sixth car on the 11:05 ferry because we were so close to boarding when the 9:35 sailed.

We stopped at a local grocery store for quick food and toothbrushes, grabbed some bottled water (the water there is really really hard and makes our skin and hair feel nasty), and went on to the condo. We checked in around 5:30 (we had planned for a couple of hours earlier, but, well, ferry traffic). Warmed up some of the food from the grocery store, sat down to watch a movie, and found that the batteries in the remote for the firestick we brought with us were kaput.

Some days (or weekends) are just like that.

So instead, we fiddled with the TV settings and availed ourselves of the DVD version of the Best Movie Ever (ting ting swish!) which lives up there. Lizzy does not remember seeing the Best Movie Ever before, but since it is also the Most Memeable Movie Ever, she enjoyed it greatly.

I always forget how hard it is to get into the high bed at Grandma's Condo, and had never done it before with a bum knee and the CPAP, so that was an adventure. Getting out was easier, though.

Saturday was fun; we met Lizzy's peninsula-side bestie in town and sent them (16 and 15, respectively) loose on Port Townsend while Abby and I did a little more sedate shopping (toy store, general store, lunch, ice-cream-and-candy store). Lizzy helped her friend with Christmas shopping and bought them both lunch, then they hung out at the park and the Marine Science Center (I think) until the friend's mom came back for pickup.

Another day, another episode of forgetting to buy batteries. The DVD for this one was Gremlins.

And back home, with the aforementioned ferry wait. A little motion sickness on Abby's part but that's not unusual, especially with a ferry in the mix.

Anyway, the point here is that Lizzy and I (and to a much lesser extent, Abby) are prone to losing our sh!t when things go wrong, no matter how minor. Since one of those things was the lack of medications to help us regulate that tendency (because we left the toiletries bag at home), the fact that we didn't lose our respective minds is a positive.

Sixteen

When I started this blog, in January of 2011, Lizzy was three. In this picture (taken February 2011), it's little Curlyhead Kiddo in a yellow top, "teaching Grandma to read." Mind you, Lizzy was reading a bit at this point; she's always been hyperlexic. 

Now she is sixteen. She still reads anything she can get her hands on (or even see from a distance), though she has little patience for many of the classics. We get a fair bit of, "Mom, come on, I know there've been books about people who feel like they don't belong published in the last fifty years. I mean, this book is older than you!" With all those teenage italics.

Or more specifically, she will be sixteen at 12:30PM, Pacific Time; she's very precise about these things. I have an alarm set on my phone for that time, with the Victory Theme from Final Fantasy VII as the alarm tone. I surprised her with it when we went to the mall on her... I think it was her tenth(?) birthday, and it has become The Way We Do It.

We've already had a small party, with a splash pad and board games and pizza and an ice cream cake and helium balloons and three of her best friends. Oh, and self-dyed hair; we can't forget that. She did that on Friday - split dye of yellow and pink, and she decided it made her look like a Trufulla Tree (which everyone needs). After the splash park, which is chlorinated, she decided she would do a second coat, as the yellow had faded somewhat. If I get any pix of that, I'll post them later.

Goes nicely with the daisy-flowered black dress, though.

So tonight is Dinner at Grandma's (we have done a family thing for birthdays every year since Abby turned one, so nearly twenty years now), and presents. And the birthday kid's favorite meal, which is pretty basic - bowtie pasta with marinara, and green beans. Usually bread of some sort and a cake or ice cream or something.

Perceptions

Five clay figurines in assorted colors, representing emotions.

August is hard for us.

Everyone who knows us knows this.

In fact, even people who only know us through this blog, on Facebook, or whatever know this.

Aside from the anniversary of Laston's death (on his oldest kid's 16th birthday, no less, poor Lee), there are a bunch of other August issues. There's the ramp-up to school, the not-working because I work for the schools & side gigs are tough to find this year and usually unbearable (for Seattleites) weather.

At least this year we do not (at the moment, anyway) have super extra crappy air quality from forest fires started by asshats declaring their newborn has a penis via blowing shit up in the woods.

Silver linings, I guess.

In past Augusts, my therapist has said it's perfectly okay to have hard days or even a hard month, as long as we're aware of it and not letting it consume us to the exclusion of all else. So we are doing our usual thing (though generally staying off the more contentious parts of the internet lest we let our grief and stress and basic argggghhhh consume us or hurt others), which for Lizzy (Abby is working) involves a lot of LEGO and arts & crafts and reading and video games. 

She made some little clay figurines and painted them. They are intended to be representative of emotions (a la Inside Out, but slightly different ones; she initially designed these on paper for one of her pediatric grief counseling sessions about six and a half years ago. Anger is red and orange and spiky, Fear is green and "shaking like a leaf," and so on. The one for sadness is blue and sort of a very basic figure of someone with a bulbous nose and their hands in front of their chest, as though they were wringing their hands.

“It’s that stim you do when you’re sad Mom. Where your hands get closer and closer to your face the sadder you are.”

“I think it’s upset in general, not just sadness.”

“Well… you do it a lot in August.”

Oof.

She's not wrong.

Irritation

Grumpyjenn is Grumpy.

The Grump started today because every July (the month before the anniversary of my husband's death), Facebook sends me a fresh batch of Widowed Christian Doctors Overseas Who Like My Looks and Want Me to Care for Their Poor Motherless Children and (by the way) have one picture, none with kids, are generally in a military or police uniform that should by rights be falling off their bodies from the weight of all the ribbons and awards and medals (honestly, I swear, these guys are always high ranking, and still show their awards for BSc and SSc). And they love God and Country and Dogs and Their Poor Motherless Children and they don't seem to have noticed that my profile picture is almost always a cartoon version of me.

A woman in a progress flag T-shirt, with
folded arms, an annoyed expression,
and the caption HMPH! in big purple letters

Anyway, so that set the stage for Grumpiness, which I am trying to get out of by Making a List of irritants I've seen or experienced today. 

You know, the random little things that make me want to smack people. 

Writing these out almost always makes me feel better. So here goes.

• I do not grok Star Trek fans who hate change.

• I also do not grok Star Trek fans who think NuTrek is "too woke."

• Or people who want to ban books. It reminds me of Abby's line when she was in Seussical the Musical a few years back. "Oh, Jojo, I fear you've been thinking again!" (Evidently, today I am the Sour Kangaroo, in mood if not in outlook)

• And the cognitive dissonance of "pro-life" and "pro-gun" in the same people.

• Oooo - people who call me a liberal snowflake and imply that I am afraid of everything, who also can't go to the grocery store without bringing an arsenal

• Or who are still setting off fireworks on July 23

• Or my own I-want-to-but-I-can't-get-started executive dysfunction

• Or the fact that I am allergic/sensitive to more than one of my favorite foods

• Grammarly should understand my casual writing style by now

• That the GOP thinks the electorate is massively gullible... and that sometimes they're right

See? That's helped. Possibly because I got all the sarcastic bitchiness out of the way.

Saving up Dopamine

A Bitmori cartoon of me, a fair-skinned,
green-eyed, ponytailed brunette-with-grey
person wearing a blue tee with a progress-
flag heart and exhibiting heart-shaped fireworks.

Look, anyone who has been reading my blog - any of my several blogs - knows a few things about us. I'm a widowed mom of two, one of them 20 and the other 15. The 15 (Lizzy) is AuDHD (that's autistic and ADHD for people who don't sling that particular lingo), I probably am as well, and the 20 (Abby) is almost certainly dyslexic and possibly ADHD (theater is a socially acceptable way of channeling that). 

You know that I'm fat, that I hurt my knee a few months ago and I'm in physical therapy for it, and that I loathe the hypocrisy of so-called patriots. You know that Lizzy is not a great student, although she's hyperlexic and an avid learner if she can do it her own way. You know that Abby is a bit shy unless she's bursting into song and dance or telling you about anime characters.

In general, we are an anxious bunch, really.

And - as with Thanksgiving - we try not to be hypocritical assholes around other national holidays.

This isn't easy, you know. I'm not feeling super patriotic in our oligarchy-that-is-headed-toward theocracy; it's not safe to be anything but a cishet white dude. I disapprove of fireworks that are illegal, super noisy boomy ones, and/or are let off by amateurs outside of the hours approved by law (and by extension, a sheriff's office that won't enforce those hours any more than it enforced mask mandates). I kind of despise the sort of folks who think it's their God-given right to BSU just for funsies, and f*ck the pets, veterans, or others who just want to feel safe in their own homes. 

Unkindness pisses me off.

You'll have to excuse my tone; my fitness apps are unhappy with the amount of sleep (very little) that I've gotten in the past two nights. And I suspect tonight as well.

But here's the thing: I don't really want to celebrate the big ol' US of A right now because a lot of folks I love are not safe here, but I do want to celebrate summer and hanging out with friendly neighbors and healthy kiddos. And as in that Thanksgiving link above, I think it's important to celebrate the small things, even if I really hate most of the big things right now.

And I like the pretty lights, if not the booms and whistles.

So here's what we did. We went to the safe-n-sane fireworks shop and got small things - ground bloom flowers, sparklers, a couple little fountains, and a bigger fountain or two. Nothing that sends flaming balls into the trees, nothing that makes us flinch away from the sound, and nothing that shakes the ground. We'll be setting those off (sparklers just before dark), with our neighbors across the street, as we have done for years. It's the sort of thing we even did at the height of the pandemic because it was outside. I'll keep a mask on me because the smoke is usually too much for the asthma.

But we are an anxious bunch, so I've also been running the sprinkler on my lawn for three days and nights straight, and the first step when we actually go out to light things is to fill up the kiddie pool with water. And...

And we have spent the day doing comfort activities - playing video games, reading, making cookies, even folding laundry, having spaghetti for dinner, etc - so as to be as calm as possible this evening because we feel safe.

So we're saving up dopamine by doing the familiar and comfortable. It helps us enjoy the peopleing and flashing lights, and even helps us tolerate the house-shaking thuds of the illegal stuff. 

And enjoying a celebration - even if I'm celebrating something a little off on a tangent - is important.

Death of a Thousand Paper Cuts

Lizzy is sick.

A photo of a curly-top toddler asleep on a
blue-striped couch and a green pillow.

It's nothing serious; she has the sniffles, a scratchy throat, a stuffy nose, fatigue, and a little bit of a headache. She has no fever and her covid test was negative.

She is, of course, absolutely wretched and miserable.

I mean, it's not the flu or covid or a bacterial infection of any sort. Those would cause a fever and/or a positive covid test. It's just a summer cold (yeah, yeah, it's not summer yet; there are three days to go).

But it's the first time she's been sick-sick since before covid started. She's had hay fever symptoms or an earache a couple of times, mild reactions to medications or vaccines, and only the Woodinville Evergreen Urgent Care knows how many injuries, the little Mad Scientist.

She's always had Really Big Problems with head colds, though, and this is no exception.

Part of the problem is that she has a number of sensory issues as an autism quirk, and evidently a stuffy nose is a really big one for her. Always has been, as noted above, even before she was diagnosed.

Like since she was a baby.

But the time I remember most clearly was when she was nearly four, at Grandma's house for the day because it's bad form to attend preschool or daycare with a head cold, and Grandma made her blueberry tea (nothing fancy; just True Blueberry from Celestial Seasonings and honey). 

You would've thought someone handed her the moon.

We generally keep it on hand, even though it isn't available at our local grocery stores on its own; it's only there in the mixed fruit teas box.

But we didn't have any today and we were out of honey (we have agave nectar but it's "just not the same"), and we didn't have any of her homemade chicken-veggie soup,  and she couldn't find any tissues, and since she couldn't sleep it all cascaded into her more-or-less devolving into that coldy toddler-that-was. Death of a thousand papercuts.

She's doing okay now that Grandma and Abby and I between us have provided the proper soup, blueberry tea (only four bags because locally they come in the multi-flavor pack only), extra blueberry herbal tea from Stash instead of Celestial Seasonings to see if it's a viable substitute (verdict is that yes! It is!), tissues, and a raspberry-filled donut.

And we're taking it easy today. We have the whole (three-day) weekend to machete the blackberry bush and plant the tomatoes and tidy up the yard.

Today is for comfort food and TV and books and tea and video games.