Listen to the Rain

I didn't get a chance to write yesterday because it was my father's 70th birthday, so he came into the city to see Laila. We didn't do much that's exciting, but he also didn't fill his entire visit with home improvement projects, so he got to spend the entire visit playing with Laila (other than her nap time).

I wrote last time that she was down to one nap, and that's mostly true now, but it's been an uneven transition. She generally takes a single nap around two hours long, but if she hasn't slept well the previous days she'll go back to two naps. She's also outgrown her baby sleeping sacks and now we put her in footie pajamas and under a small blanket, since she's old enough that it's not dangerous anymore. That doesn't mean that she has any expertise in using them yet, though--one of my standard tasks as her father is that when I go to bed, I always sneak into her room and check on her to make sure she's doing okay, and inevitably I have to take the blanket and tuck her back in since she's rolled out of it somehow. She's always nice and warm when I come in and check her in the morning, though, so I don't have to worry about her freezing. Even her hands are warm.

In the most important news yet, though, she's walking! :

She has a lot of opinions.

It's like one day she just decided that it was time to put everything into practice and ever since then she's been a walking champ. She still has some baby unsteadiness but she can crouch down and pick things up, stop and turn around, start walking immediately if I set her on her feet after I've picked her up...I wonder if it was a confidence issue before, or if she didn't see the utility of walking comparing to crawling? But now she has and she's walking everywhere, which means we need to keep an extra eye on her. She walked three blocks back from the park holding my hand! And then climbed the stair back up to the house at the end.

The really funny part is how she'll imitate my exercise. Our condo is laid out lengthwise like most Chicago condos, so I'll walk up and down the hallway to get steps in. Laila does it too--she'll walk up and down the hall and when we pass each other, she'll look up at me, put out a hand on my leg to steady herself, and then walk around me and keep going.

She also has much more personality, which means that she complains more. Previously it was related to food but now sometimes when she doesn't get her way--if she grabs something she shouldn't have and we take it away from her, or if she wants to play right now but we're busy with something--she sometimes gets offended and starts crying. We'd had a couple collapse on the floor in tears moments, but at least right now they never last long. It's an important developmental sign but it's still a bit disconcerting. At least right now it's easy to redirect her!

How much more will she grow and change?

There's a chill in the air and we've had to bring out the heavier coats. Right now it's 23°C and sunny outside but a couple nights ago it got down to 1°! This next week will be warmer but it's probably the last gasp of summer.

Last weekend we went out to visit my parents for dinner, since wanderluster_kp was going to be in town and then gone for months, probably until April or June. It was basically like Thanksgiving, with a turkey and mashed potatoes and pie for dessert. We learned that Laila is truly my daughter, because just like me she hates mashed potatoes. When some of her other food fell into the mashed potatoes, she whined and tried to pick it out instead of just grabbing handfuls like she does with other foods. I hated (and still hate) mashed potatoes too and my parents told me they had never heard of a baby who didn't like them. Well, now there's two. Maybe it's genetic.

The other thing we did was take a trip to the Morton Arboretum, since the year is waning and there's not going to be many good weekends left that aren't too cold and have good leaves. It looks like we went just before the peak fall colors but the weather was lovely and I got a lot of nice photos, especially of the Human + Nature exhibit that sashagee really wanted to see after missing the trolls. My favorite picture was taken by someone else for us, at the piece entitled "Basilica":



But I took quite a few more photos:

( Arboretum trip photos )

Definitely know I'm getting older when I look forward to family trips to go leaf-viewing!

Monday evening was the beginning of שמחת תורה (Simchat Torah, "Celebration of the Torah"), the day when we finish the very last part of דברים (Devarim, "Words", Eng: Deuteronomy), and roll right through into the first part of בראשית (Bereshit, "In the beginning," Eng: Genesis), in an endless circle as we've done for thousands of years. Before that, though, is the singing and dancing. Some people hold Torah scrolls and rest of us dance in rings around them, and we did that this year too with the addition of a baby! I was a little worried that Laila would be scared or irritable, what with several hundred people packed into a room and a klezmer band playing while we danced, but she loved it. She was smiling and looking around and very happy for the first five הקפות(hakafot, "encirclements") and then she got very tired, so we left and took the bus and the L back home and put a sleepy baby to bed.

Laila did get to meet another Laila there, who was a month younger than her! Our Laila really wanted to give her a hug but other Laila was much more bothered by all the noise and people and didn't want to be touched. We definitely don't have a shy baby.

This was also the last weekend of the farmer's market. I got some more apples, pickles, eggs, and vegetables, ran into aaronhparker and one of his friends, got more Sfera arancini for dinner and dealt with a mixup, and then went home.

Tonight, my parents are coming over to babysit and sashagee and I are going to see Wardruna! I went with her to see KPop, so she's coming with me to see folk metal. Hopefully she likes it. Tomorrow, meowtima is back in town for the first time after moving to Pittsburgh for work, so a few people are going to Indian food together. Then Sunday we'll be resting, because we'll probably need it.

I'm writing this from my parents' house, where we're spending the night in preparation to go apple picking tomorrow! This is the third year I'll be going with sashagee and the second year with Laila. It's a regular tradition at this point!

Monday and Tuesday were Rosh Hashanah, and we went as a family to services. The real draw for Laila was going to be the petting zoo featuring a goat that Mishkan's director of programs said was going to be there, so I was surprised when we arrived to find that there were no animals! Without that, the street fair had a lot of activities that would have been great if Laila were a couple years older--making paper crafts, drawing scenes from Torah, that kind of thing--but aren't so useful to someone Laila's age, so we walked around a bit, went to a nearby combo bike repair shop + cafe called Heritage Bikes and Coffee where I got some delicious avocado toast and saw a few other people who were obviously on their way to services stop in, and then went to services ourselves. Laila loved the singing but by this point she was very tired, so we stayed for about half of the Torah service and then went home to get a sleepy baby to bed.

After she woke up from her nap, I took her to the lake to do tashliḥ, the ritual casting away of our sins, as referenced in Micah:

Who is a G-d like You,
Forgiving iniquity
And remitting transgression;
Who has not maintained His wrath forever
Against the remnant of His own people,
Because He loves graciousness!
He will take us back in love;
He will cover up our iniquities,
You will hurl all our sins
Into the depths of the sea.
-Micah 17:18-19

she was so fascinated by the waves against the walkway that she didn't even try to eat the bread when I put some in her hands! Only a tiny bit, though--babies don't have any sins they need to cast away.

On the way back, I passed by a bench with two old women sitting on it and an old man standing behind them, speaking some Eastern European language. They waved at Laila and I had Laila wave back, and in English they asked me a few questions about her. When they asked if she could walk, I said "almost" and held one of Laila's hands as she walked over to the women and immediately tried to get a hug. The woman Laila was hugging asked, "She is not afraid?" and I answered "No, she loves hugs," and then the man, who had leaned over to get a closer look at the baby, noticed my ✡️ necklace and said "Happy New Year"--it turned out that they were Russian Jews!

I've lived in Chicago for over a decade, but on the way back home, I experienced my first "Excuse me sir, are you Jewish?" Two young Chadadniks were hanging out on the corner, maybe trying to get people going too and from tashliḥ, and they asked me if I had had a chance to hear the shofar in shul that morning. As it turned out, I had not--we had to leave before it was blown--so they took me a bit away from the main street, we said the blessings, and the older one blew the shofar. A blessing indeed that on the day we couldn't say in services, Laila and I still got to hear the shofar.

Tuesday we mostly relaxed at home. Laila slept in until almost 8 a.m. after the disrupted sleep of the previous day, so we gave her a normal day.

Wednesday was Tzom Gedaliah, the fast in honor of the assassination of the last Jewish governor of Judea before the Babylonian Exile, which normally wouldn't be worth much comment since I just get up before dawn to eat and otherwise it's a normal day. It was not a normal day this time, however, since this Wednesday was Employee Appreciation Day and the AMA had rented out a local restaurant/entertainment center called Pinstripes. That meant there was fancy buffet food and drinks, none of which I could eat, and which I couldn't even take home because there's a health code rule that prevents takeout boxes from buffets. I did get to talk to one of my new coworkers who started a couple weeks ago when all the tables were full and she sat next to me in the stuffed chairs on the side of the room. We mostly talked about Laila and about my coworker's plan to go to Japan with her partner.

Apple picking tomorrow! 🍎🍏 I'll write about that after it happens.

sashagee and I managed to get out to a destination! Her parents bought a National Parks' pass and Sunday was the last day before it expired, and since Indiana Dunes wasn't a park they had been to and gotten a sticker from during their travels over the last couple years, they asked us if we wanted to go. sashagee was feeling better and up for the challenge, so in the morning we packed up some beach gear, put Laila in a cut outfit, piled into her parents' jeep and set out for Indiana.

The trip over was a little rough. Laila refused to fall asleep until roughly the last twenty minutes of the ride, so she was very groggy and tired when we woke her up. We drove around for a further half an hour after we reached the dunes trying to find parking, finding one national park lot after another totally full and eventually had to pay a man thirty dollars to park in a private lot. Having done so, we got out, set up the baby yurt (sashagee crawled inside), applied sunscreen, and then it turned out that Laila hated sitting in the waves. She was touching the wet sand but got increasingly agitated every time a wave hit her until she started crying and sashagee picked her up.

I'm not really a sit-on-the-beach sort of person, so that was about the point where I took off hoping to find a trail of some sort. I didn't have any luck with that either--even after consulting a map and walking two miles along the roads from the National Park to the original State Park, none of the listed trails on the map actually existed, as near as I can tell. I even managed to get a phone signal and checked maps, but when I was standing across the road from a map-marked trail--next to roughly a hundred cars that wanted to get into the state park--there was nothing but unbroken forest there. Ugh.

When I finally reached the beach I did manage to find a bird-watching platform and take some nice pictures, though:


Up on the platform, sashagee texted me that people were getting ready to go, so I walked across the burning-hot beach sand back to the national park side and we left. She told me that Laila was much happier about the water when she was in sashagee's arms, but she spent most of the visit in the baby yurt except for a bit of time being fascinated by the sand and a bit of time being cooed over by some younger women playing catch just down the beach. She wasn't as angry as her lack of sleep should have made her, though, so that's good, and she got more sleep on the way home--as did I.

When we got back, sashagee's parents offered to watch Laila while we went on a date, so sashagee borrowed the car and we went to Geneva. Unfortunately, it was packed--we tried going to a restaurant called Preservation but they flatly told us there was no hope of a table--and so we walked the entire length of Third Street until we found a Asian fushion restaurant called Cravings on State Street with okay food. The "Malaysian" noodles I got weren't Malaysian in the slightest, but they were okay. sashagee was more satisficed with her bibimbap. We couldn't stay long since we had to get back to give Laila her medicine, so after we paid we went straight back to sashagee's parents' house and sat on the porch until the mosquitoes came out, then went inside, then went to bed.

The next morning we woke up late after sashagee's parents woke up Laila without us, and after Laila ate they told us about their plan to go to Atrévete bakery in Montgomery. It was apparently family day there--there were two other families with small children, one of whom was wearing the exact same clothing that Laila had worn the previous day, so we struck up a brief conversation while we waited for our pastries and cheesecake. When we got home, my parents arrived to take us to the second half of the visit, and we ate our lunch after Laila went down for a nap. I had the spinach and gruyère quiche, with half of the tomato basil flatbread--by far the superior of the two options--and a guava mango cheesecake with vanilla bean whipped cream that sashagee demanded half of immediately after taking a test bite. sashagee had a croque madam croissant and the other half of the flatbread (also her favorite), and then went up to take a nap.

While she was asleep, Laila woke up, and my father and I took her down to the park near the forest. Laila really did not want to go on the swings, but she was happier trying to climb up the playground equipment and then trying to crawl off into the forest--I'd repeatedly pick her up and move her away, I'd stand between her and the forest, and she'd keep trying to get past me and move back into the trees. It only ended when I noticed she looked kind of sleepy, so I picked her up--my parents got a little riding wagon for her that she rode halfway to the park and then refused to be in--carried her home, and put her back to bed, and then took advantage of my father's offer of a beef bacon BLT with heirloom tomatoes, a variety called Cherokee purple that they had grown in their garden. The beef bacon was nice but my father was right, the real star was the tomatoes. I had it with pickles on the side and an apple for dessert, but the real dessert came later after sashagee woke up and we had an early dinner--cherry brownies baked by my father, who had thought "Black Forest cake is pretty good...I wonder if that works with brownies?" The answer is a most emphatic "Yes!"

After dinner we went back into the city to get Laila her medicine and put to bed, and sashagee followed her to bed herself. Despite some early mishaps, it was all in all a nice weekend, though I wish I had managed to find some trails to walk.

Bonus photo of Laila at the beach discovering sand:

Chicago is not a city you'd usually think of for cherryblossoms thanks to our weather--yesterday it was 10°C and rainy on the first of May--but there is a grove of them near the Museum of Science and Industry. The Park District has a dedicated website for the cherryblossom forecast that started in 2019, but that year about half the buds didn't open because it was so cold through most of the year. And, well, we all know how 2020 and 2021 went.

But this year, sashagee is starting to feel better (about which more in another post) and Laila is doing great, so I told basically everyone I knew about the cherryblossom festival on May 1st (moved from April 24th due to rain), we woke Laila up from her nap at 11:45 a.m., and drove down to MSI for the afternoon.

( Blossoms are falling )

Haven't done a generic update in a while.

Last weekend--originally it was going to be Saturday but we moved it to Sunday--we went with my parents to the orchid show at the Botanic Gardens. The last time I went was to the neon-lit night orchid exhibit in 2020, and I'm glad I saw that then because this weekend was back to normal. It was also packed--we nearly didn't make our ticket time because we arrived at the gardens early enough and then joined a long line of cars trying to get in and parked. Everyone wanted to get out into that warm, sunny, 21°C weather. There was someone directing traffic inside the orchid exhibit, which I've never seen before--it's always been popular but still sparse enough that it's easy to move around in. This time it was packed, but no so packed that we couldn't stop for papa to take some family photos:


We brought a stroller, but papa was happy to carry Laila most of the time. It's only fair--when he's over at our home he's usually working on some task and doesn't get to interact with Laila was much as nana does. This time he showed Laila all the orchids, she kept trying to grab and eat the orchids, and a good time was had by all, even with the crowding. Someone even called Laila a beautiful flower.

After we saw all the orchids and the nearby desert exhibit, we were going to go check out the Japanese Garden or the prairie area, but sashagee wasn't feeling her best--we stopped by the smoothie station but it was closed for the season, so we headed home instead and my father got more of a chance to do some dad things, installing a gate at the top of the stairs so Laila won't take a tumble and putting some paint swatches on the wall. Soon our home will be sashageeified! I was fine with just having white or off-white walls, though admittedly that was mostly based on me rarely being home. Now that I'm home all the time, and will be home more often in the future even after the end of the Plague Years, maybe some more colorful walls would be nice. And Laila will certainly like them more.

On Monday sashagee was still feeling well so we took a walk down to the Middle Eastern Grocery store! I offered to carry Laila but sashagee pushed the stroller, because she said she wanted to be the proud mom pushing a cute baby around, and we did get several people telling us how cute Laila was! We stocked up on hummus and pita and halvah and then stopped by at George's on the way home, so we could get one last ice cream there before they close for good at the end of the month. They didn't have the spicy whiskey and green tea combo that I used to get, but the strawberry and maple nut I got was delicious too.

Sadly, sashagee doesn't seem to be responding well to her medicine. She started it on Saturday, which was why we were able to do so much the last couple days. But yesterday her symptoms started up again, and while today they're better, they're still there. She probably just needs her dosage adjusted, but it's a bit disheartening that after she finally thought she found a solution she's feeling worse again. Hopefully a bit of change is all it takes and then we'll be going on family walks in the sunshine!

Been a bit since I had a general update post. Time to drink my tea and write another one.

Saturday was Laila's naming ceremony at Mishkan. There's a standard ritual for giving baby boys their Hebrew name, but no standard ritual for girls, because historically women did not have separate Hebrew names. One's Hebrew name was used to summon them for an aliyah, and that was only afforded to men--and still is, in some streams of Judaism--but nowadays we're more broadminded and so Sasha and I, as her parents, received an aliyah for parashat Vayishlach. I didn't read from the Torah because my Hebrew is awful and it would have taken forever--something else I need to work on--but I did get to hear the entire congregation say "awwwwww" as they saw me carrying Laila up to the bimah. The rabbis gave Laila a blessing and told Mishkan her Hebrew name, בינה בת ברק Binah bat Barak (meaning "Wisdom, daughter of Lightning"), and unlike the bat Mitzvah or the couple given an auf ruf (Yiddish: "Calling up"), they did not throw candy at us. But I got to save some for later!

I really like Mishkan's approach to tradition, which I can sum up as: they have female rabbis, but during the part of the prayer service where the priestly blessing (Numbers 6:24-26) is recited, they had the rabbi who's a descendant of the Kohanim priests do it.

A bunch of people came to the service--thosesocks, britshlez, my family, and sashagee's family, but after it was over everyone went home. We put Laila down for a nap and when she woke up, we drove out to the suburbs and played games with sashagee's parents, brother, and his brother's girlfriend until Laila couldn't take it anymore and was nearly an exploding kitten herself. Fortunately, since I was the car, so when Laila got fussy I was able to put a hand back and calm her down. She was angry for maybe twenty minutes and then fell asleep for the rest of the ride home.

Monday was the end of the Scum and Villainy game that thosesocks has been running for a while--what was originally supposed to be a simple three-session game or so turned into fifteen sessions, but a changing work schedule meant that there wasn't enough time left for game. Having crashed on a quarantined planet and recovered the ensouled hoverbikes we were looking for, we escaped the traps set by the things from the Dark Between the Stars and took shelter in a Precursor ruin, where we found a still-functional Precursor ship and learned at last what the Precursors looked like (spider-geese, basically). We took the ship and flew off into space, past the Hegemony ship that certainly wasn't expecting a flying Precursor artifact with possibly the last still-extant Precursor group-mind. It's all set up to be lead into a glorious new chapter of the game that...might not happen. Or it might?! I guess we'll see.

I've also beaten Shadowbringers and sashagee and I have been watching the Wheel of Time TV show, but I'm going to make separate posts about those.

Tomorrow we're going out to my parents for Thanksgiving and staying the night, and then the next day we'll be at sashagee's parents' house. On Saturday we're going to a parents' group that Mishkan is starting as well as visiting sashagee's old roommate who's currently laid up with an injury, and on Sunday we're going to the zoo! The last few days have been quiet, but we're entering the busy period of Thanksgiving week.

It's definitely harder to find time to write when there's a baby in the house!

I'm sitting in the sun nook right now, working, but it's more of a rain nook. Summer held on a long time in Chicago--even as recently as a week ago the temperatures were above 20°C--but there's been a storm raging since last night and the wind is currently howling outside. Multiple people I know posted photos of downed trees this morning. It's only raining lightly now but everything is soaked. No more eating lunch on the balcony, at least not this week.

My parents came to visit on Saturday to see Laila, but my father couldn't resist checking on a bunch of stuff around the house. He brought me some bad news, unfortunately--his advice about the master bathroom shower was not to use it. It wasn't in amazing condition when I bought the place, but now the shower door is sticking because the top hinge is bending, the grout is in bad enough condition that water might be leaking through to the floor when the shower is on, and it's in otherwise bad shape. It needs a new enclosure and new tiling and might just need to be ripped out and put back together, which would be expensive right at a time when we need to buy Laila a crib because she's outgrowing her little bassinet. Fortunately we have another full bathroom we can use in the meantime and it's not like the plumbing has any problems, I just won't be taking a shower back there for a while. And I was so excited to have two showers when I moved in.

The last farmer's market of the year was last week, and we got there late so we didn't even really get anything. There weren't nearly as many Farmer's Market Dinner tag entries this year as there were last year because this year, sashagee really loved the Filipino food from Pecking Order, and since Pecking Order was there every other week, that's what we ended up getting half the time. And it's definitely a little harder to make delicious meals every day with a small baby! We've made bigger meals and eaten a lot of leftovers, but we actually go out to eat less than we did when sashagee was pregnant! Today we're slow-cooking shortribs and is making lunch. Yum.

Alright, back to work. Going to try to make my next post sooner than two weeks from now!

That time has come again!

I'm currently sitting with Laila on my lap, wrapped in a blanket and sound asleep as I write this. She's still refusing to fall asleep without direct contact with one of us--it turns out that humans needs to be taught how to make themselves fall asleep--and we haven't accomplished that yet, so one of us always needs to be up so we can hold her to let her fall asleep. The pediatrician that sashagee went to on Tuesday recommended just plopping her in the bed and letting her cry, and while it's true that we shouldn't come running every single time she makes a noise since learning to self-soothe is a vital human skill, that doesn't mean that a week-old-baby needs to be abandoned to learn that life is cruel. We'll be tired for a bit and try to gradually teach Laila that her bassinet is not a cold place where she's all alone and that mommy and daddy are right there with her. But until then, well, I slept four hours last night and sashagee is asleep right now. Hence my insomnia icon--I think it's never been more appropriate.

( Dinner )

That's it for this post--I made time for the farmer's market but it's hard to have time for much else. sashagee's family came to visit so I met her grandmother and mother finally, and they gave us a four-hour nap on Sunday which was probably the greatest gift they could have given us. Her parents are coming again this weekend, and then my parents next weekend. I have a feeling that we'll be seeing a lot more of both in the future, because this is the first grandchild for both sides and she's probably going to be spoiled rotten. There are worse fates.

As I speak, the dryer is going with the first load of laundry.

As I wrote about a month ago, we had a leak in the wall that required a hefty plumber's bill to fix. I went back and forth with the association for a while trying to wrangle payment out of them and last Friday they finally sent me an email with an image of the full repayment. So I told my parents, and since my father had offered to come fix the wall, he and my mother spent pretty much the entire weekend at our place with him doing the work. I helped where I could, but to my slight embarrassment it ended up being probably 99% my father's doing--the laundry closet is small enough that only one person can fit in there at a time, so I couldn't even really help with painting or holding anything. I mostly just passed tools to him when he needed them and held down baseboard when he was cutting them.

But the laundry room is fixed and redone and now we can do laundry again! Time to do the fluffy new towels we bought.

I spent years dithering back and forth over it, debating the pros and cons, not knowing whether I'd like it or not while my mother and my sister both got Apple Watches and said they liked them, and finally when the 6 came out, I asked for one. I've had it for a bit now and I can see why some people are fanatics for it. I'll never be one of those people who's always talking into my wrist, and I turned off the always-on display so it's only on when I raise my wrist (which seems to double the battery life so I only have to charge it every other day), but I set up the Infograph watch face to show my steps, activity rings, the phase of the moon, sunrise and sunset, the weather, and a link to my calendar. I have spoken to it once, to tell it to set a timer, which was easier than pulling out my phone--and like my phone, it only speaks Japanese.

I got the 40 mm because I have relatively small wrists for my height--I'm 6'5" / 197 cm, but I wear size S shirts--and I really like the way it looks. It looks more like a watch and less like A Device, and with the screen off most of the time it's a mysterious blank cube on my wrist. Like the Monolith.

Right now, most of what I've used it for is exercise tracking. I set up Activity to track all my exercise and closed the rings for the first time today, and I've been engaging in a competition with my mother and sister. My sister took the train back to Michigan today so she obviously didn't get a lot of exercise, but my mother--for someone who's almost 70 (tomorrow!), she moves a lot. I'll really need to work hard to beat her consistently.

I'm not sure it's possible to do so without revealing our true names and so gaining power over each other, but if anyone wants to be Activity buddies message me.

My calendar is getting more full! Last weekend I saw britshlez and worldbshiny at separate times, and on Sunday maptekar invited me over to her place for lomo saltado from Taste of Peru. I had never heard of lomo saltado, which is no surprise since I know very little about Peruvian food, but it was delicious--rice and beef and onions and peppers and french fries, all cooked in beer, with a green spicy sauce to put on top. We talked for hours, she introduced me to her cat Lily and showed me the portraits she had painted, and then at sunset she took me home and gave me another lomo saltado to take with it. I ate the last bit of it tonight for lunch and it was delicious! She's coming over for lunch on Friday and then we're going to The Recyclery, because owning a bike now that I'm always working from home and not taking the CTA might be a good idea.

Speaking of, yesterday I went and bought another Ventra card. My main card has almost $100 of transit value sitting on it, but it also has two monthly passes queued up that I haven't used, and passes are always used before transit value. This makes sense--if you have an unlimited ride pass, you want to use it and save the value for when you're swiping other people through--and I could get the passes refunded into value too, but they cost $105 and in a pre-Plague Year month I get far more value from them than that. Twenty days to and from work is already $90, and going places at least 3-4 days a week is another ~$50 or more. You can have multiple cards registered to the same account, so I took my old card out of my wallet and set it aside with my badge to get into work and put the new card that just has transit value in its place. Friendship ended with main card, now germ jail card is my new best friend.

My parents came over this weekend and brought a ton of desserts, and my father helped me fix several things in my place. The pipe under the sink had started leaking, and while I took it apart and swapped the nuts and washers on each side and it stopped leaking, that just meant the problem was on the other side and would definitely reoccur. My father took it apart, replaced the bad washer, and left me some spares. Together we took apart my fridge water dispenser, replaced that lever that had broken, and put it all back together and now it works, and alone he went through and replaced some of the old toggle light switches with the more popular rocker ones. I haven't seen them since March, when I helped my sister move her stuff into storage, so it was great to chat. They took off their masks when they came in, and so I followed suit--my parents are generally pretty cautious, so I'm willing to defer to their level of risk tolerance. So we even got hugs.

( Farmer's Market Dinner )

Friday is Juneteeth, and the AMA gave us the afternoon off and I took the rest of the day off. It's also the livestreamed premiere of a theatre piece that worldbshiny invited me to watch with her, and we were originally going to get takeout from Tanoshii, but she suggested that in light of the day we support a black-owned business instead. I'm all for that but we're currently running into a problem--a lot of the black-owned restaurants serve soul food, which is usually 1) treif (which I don't eat) 2) fried (which worldbshiny doesn't eat) or 3) both! There's an option that will work--several Ethiopian restaurants nearby, or maybe Vee-Vee's or Betty Lou's--we just need to find it.

And now, to watch Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil with my book group! To be honest, I had completely forgotten we even read the book until about ten minutes into the movie and I had no idea why we were scheduled to watch it. I gave the book three stars--we'll see if I like the movie better!

I went out to the suburbs yesterday to help my sister wanderluster_kp put most of her possessions in storage. She's taken a spot in a year-long veterinary oncology fellowship in Colorado, and while she's not entirely sure how all of that is going to shake out with the current plague occurring--since people in the fellowship need a certain number of hours and a lot of non-essential surgeries are being cancelled even for vets, they might need to stay on longer to get enough hours--but she thinks her current job can keep her on a bit longer if necessary. So, she's sticking with the plan as it is now.

I was a bit worried about going, because my father is 67 and my mother is 69 and most of the people with coronavirus are asymptomatic carriers. But, there really wasn't a good option here. Either I go, risk that I am infected, and risk infecting my family, or I don't go and risk that my father or sister or both will get injured while moving a bunch of heavy furniture and have to go to the hospital, where they'll probably be exposed anyway. The timing was just bad all around. My sister hired movers to help on the Michigan side, but I don't think that would have worked here--I have another friend who was supposed to move during the lockdown and her movers are suspending all operations until it's over.

But it's done now, and I'm home and listening to my wood-wick candle burn as I sit in front of the fire.

My parents sent me home with a giant amount of food, including three pounds of salmon and a bunch of frozen soup and chill from their basement freezer. They make huge meals and freeze most of it, so I got to be the beneficiary of it. Guess it's soup and bread for lunch tomorrow!