Listen to the Rain

Laila is four years old! Happy birthday Laila!

This year, sashagee decided to have a smaller party this year, with just family. Unfortunately, almost no one could make it--her brother and my sister had to work and her parents were out of town on vacation, so it was just my parents that came. Laila didn't care at all, though, since she'd been talking for days about wanting to go spend time with papa and nana at their house and she was overjoyed at an entire day of attention from them. While I worked (at home, since my boss had offered that I could work from home on her birthday), Laila and papa and nana disappeared into Laila's room and read books, listened to stories on her Yoto (a gift from her grandma and grandpa), and drove cars around on her roadscape rug. When dinnertime came around we asked Laila what she wanted and she said tacos, so the entire family went on a short walk to sashagee's favorite local Mexican place, placed our orders, and walked back and ate. Shortly afterwards, papa and nana had to go home, leaving Laila with more Cars cars to drive around her rug, books, and some other presents.

Laila really loved her butterfly decor:


In more general updates, I already wrote about how we're worried about Laila's speech and we're going to get her evaluated, but she's been doing better in other areas. Today sashagee heard noise and woke up to find Laila had gotten up and gone to the bathroom all by herself! She doing better in swim class, and while she still has a bit of trouble with waiting her turn and with not messing with the floating toys the teachers use for helping to teach lessons, she understands that the appropriate thing to do in class is to "take turns." Or at least, that's what she tells me when I ask her, so she remembers it. Getting her to do it is another thing. On the other hand, she stuck her head underwater on the lesson after the one where the teacher told me that she had been asking to wear goggles, so that's progress! Only once, but I took Laila to a lesson where the parents spent the entire time trying to convince their son to get into the water and he simply would not do it. Laila has never had a problem like that.

We used to keep her door locked at night so she wouldn't get up and get in trouble, but since we're trying to teach her to go to the bathroom on her own, we've stopped. She used to bust out of her room just after we put her down for bed all the time, but she doesn't do that anymore. She's transitioning into a period where she actually wants to go to sleep. I don't expect this to last but I'll enjoy it while it does.

Lately she's been really into her Yoto, which is essentially a radio-esque toy. It has a daily short podcast or music on it at base, and then you can buy cards that kids can put in with various short stories or songs on them. Laila has been listening to a lot of the Little Mermaid. I was initially very skeptical of it because we have a rule about no flashing lights and no interactive buttons for Laila's toys, but I was won over by being told that there weren't videos to accompany the stories, it was just pixelated images and no more than one per chapter--so Little Mermaid only has three pictures (one of Ariel, one of King Triton, and one of Prince Eric). The music only has the image of a radio. We have been stopping her from skipping chapter after chapter, though, in the same way we don't keep reading if she skips ahead in her books anymore. Teaching patience is very important, even though Laila is definitely not happy about having to learn it.

She's turning into a fashionista as well. After five years, sashagee started wearing her earrings again and Laila immediately decided she wanted to wear them too, so we got her some shiny stickers that we use for "earrings." A couple weeks ago while we waiting for the bus, there was a woman wearing a bear of high-heeled gogo boots, and Laila physically put her hands on my cheeks, turned my head, and she, "She [I] like her boots!" Only four and she's very concerned with cuteness.

What other ways will she grow and change?

Final image: the cupcakes that sashagee baked for Laila's birthday.

( Butterflycakes )

Work work again. Laila is handling it pretty well considering--we had thought she would be shocked and appalled that I wasn't done with all of that dumb "work" stuff and couldn't play with her all day, but she seems to have accepted it. We'll see if she accepts me going into the office tomorrow.

We spent most of Thanksgiving at my parents' house, because sashagee's parents are both having big health troubles right now. We went over there for a bit so they could see Laila, but didn't get to go as early as we wanted because we had to wait for a refill on one of Laila's medicines--she's on a Controlled Substance for her brain troubles and so they never want us to have more than a 30 days' supply at a time, which means that we sometimes end up with annoying situations like this one. I got the new supply at 6:00 p.m. at night and so we decided since we still had to eat dinner, we shouldn't head out that same night. We left in the morning, spent the day with sashagee's parents, and then went to my parents for a couple days. We've never had large Thanksgivings because I don't have a large family--for as long as I could remember, it was only four people, either us and my sister, or my parents nerdypsychlady and me, and now it's five only because Laila is there. We ate turkey and vegetables and rolls, Laila ate mostly rolls and fruit and didn't touch much of the rest of her food, and we had cherry bars with my father's homemade real vanilla ice cream for dessert. Another lovely dinner.

On the way home, sashagee's parents very kindly took us to Mitsuwa and we stocked up on tons of Japanese food. I was most excited about the momiji manjū--basically can't get those outside of Japan--and sashagee was excited about the mitarashi dango, but we also got some Hokkaidō manjū, more furikake, some onigiri, and other treats. We did not get a lot of staples, because most of the brand of miso or rice there I can get elsewhere, but I'd have to pay blood to get momiji manjū. 🍁

We did actually participate in Glorious American Consumerism this year as well--sashagee and I both got iPads. I got one to replace my seven-year-old iPad that still works pretty well but is showing its age, and I got one for sashagee when she mentioned wanting to use my iPad for writing and me explaining that iPads aren't meant for more than one person (they have no concept of multiple accounts, for one, so everything she wrote that had backup would get populated to my phone). I got the 11-inch one, since that's what I had before, and she got a 13-inch one because that's the one my mother had and sashagee said it was a good size. And then when it came she was surprised at how huge it was (it is huge). We both got bluetooth keyboard cases for them, me to game design and her to write with. I'll report back on how well it works.

Last year most of the Jewish holidays were on weekends, so I already had them off. That's not true this year, but the bonus is that many of the High Holy Days are on Thursdays and Fridays, so in October I only have one full work week and three four-day weekends. Not bad.

Wednesday night was Erev Rosh Hashanah and Mishkan did a livestream, but since Laila was awake I missed most of it and by the time she was asleep there were only thirty minutes left, so I skipped it. The next day, though, we woke up bright and early thanks to Laila, ate breakfast and got dressed, and took the bus out to the Copernicus Center for Rosh Hashanah services. While the last time we all went, we were able to go into actual services because Laila was small enough we could hold on to her and she could enjoy the singing, that was never going to work this time. We went for the Rise and Shine service (for kids 0-4), and then went over to the "Museum of Awe" where Laila immediately ran over to Toddler Town and started trying to grab all of the stamps. She was full of energy, so we didn't stay very long, but we did say yoni-labow-5693413a and whoolia45 with their new baby! They were heading in to services with a very asleep baby, just like we had been a couple years ago, but we chattered with them a bit and then headed out to lunch at a drive-in diner that also had Korean food (I got a teriyaki chicken pita. It was delicious) before heading home.

The next day sashagee wasn't feeling well, so while we originally all planned to go to the second day picnic, it was just Laila and I who went. I packed up a lunch for her and we got on the bus to go to Welles Park. We arrived just in time for the Shema, and while she initially squirmed a bit she calmed down once the singing started. Once it ended and the rabbi started talking, though, she immediately lost all interest, so we left the main area and went over to the part of the park where the kids activities were. She really went in on the activity sand, and while she still doesn't quite know how to interact with other kids, she waited her turn until she could get close and played very nicely with them. She even took a turn at blowing the shofar! When we got back home, sashagee was asleep, and while Laila woke her up when we ate lunch, she went right back to sleep when Laila laid down for a nap. She was really wiped out, so I took Laila to the park for a bit and let her rest of the day, and when Laila went to bed so did she.

There is one other thing we did, though. We didn't get to stay long enough at Welles park for the ritual of Tashliḥ, the symbolic casting away of our sins, as it is written:

Who is a G-d like you,
who pardons sin and forgives the transgression
of the remnant of his inheritance?
You do not stay angry forever
but delight to show mercy.
You will again have compassion on us;
you will tread our sins underfoot
and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea.
-Micah 7:18-19

So we went to the lake to do it. Laila loved the actual throwing of the bread on the water, but she wasn't interested in anything else. She didn't want to run around on the grass, she didn't want to look out over the water, she didn't do anything. She did smile briefly for a picture, but that was it:



And then we went home.

Saturday we had two things scheduled but neither of them was until later in the day, so we had a nice slow morning where we all got to eat breakfast and sit around watching Kiki's Delivery Service until closer to 11, where we walked to the bus and went to Lincoln Square for Applefest. I went to it back in 2019, and then in 2020 and 2021 there was no Applefest, and in 2022 and 2023 we were out in the suburbs on both weekends, but this time we could go and a bunch of our friends were there too! The festival was twice as big as the last I was there, from Lawrence all the way down to Sunnyside on Lincoln, and the weather was beautiful but that meant it was a sunny day and I was carrying Laila for blocks up and down while we looked at the shops and got a bit of apple pie, some breakfast sandwiches--sashagee wanted a smashburger, but we were warned that it was a thirty-minute wait time so she got a breakfast sandwich too--and ate them while Laila ate her apple waffles. We got apple cookies and looked at the artisans, and chatted with our friends--Laila was obsessed with spacedragon's dyed hair and kept asking her to hold her--until 2 p.m. came and we needed to get home to rest for a bit. It was already too late for Laila's nap, but we could still go home and rest.

Around 4:30 p.m. we left again for our second event, thosesocks's housewarming, with apple pie and Laila in tow. We went out to the bus and the tracker said "no scheduled arrival times," so we had to walk all the way there--it was only a mile or so but it was a long way after all our earlier walking and while carrying Laila. When we got there, sashagee talked to thosesocks while I chased after Laila, which proved to be the theme of the evening--at one point Laila went out on the balcony and ran up and down, since it was laid out lengthwise along the entire building. She did that a couple dozen times, full of way more energy than I expected, except for some brief interludes to dip a cookie in ranch dressing and eat it and trying to steal chocolate-covered pretzels. After an hour or so, right when thosesocks was concerned about Laila being so energetic, it was time for us to go (Laila needed an early bedtime since she skipped her name), so we said our goodbyes and went home. We didn't get a slice of that apple pie but the chocolate-covered pretzels were delicious.

Sunday morning was a fast day, Tzom Gedaliah, so I woke up before anyone else to eat breakfast before the sun came up. When I was done, I opened the door so Laila could escape her room, we all got ready, and I took Laila out to Hebrew school. This time went better than the first time, where she was overwhelmed by all the people. She still wasn't very interested in the songs, but she was much more focused on the crafts. There was a craft to make a "Bug Sukkah" and that was what Laila focused all her energy on:


Sadly, it did not survive the trip home on the bus. While Laila wasn't interested in the songs, she did stay at the craft tables for much longer than many of the other kids did, who got bored and wandered off to sit with their parents and read books or something. She really loved those bugs, and we stayed through the closing songs and then left to go home...except the bus wasn't coming for 35 minutes so I walked most of the way home, carrying Laila the entire way, and then spent much of the rest of the day sitting down because she's heavy. She's a big girl now!

This coming weekend is Yom Kippur, so even more holidays ahead.

But wow, I really haven't posted much this month.

We took a trip out to visit my parents last weekend, since it had been a while since we went out to the suburbs. sashagee and Laila went first and I came out later in the day on the train. Apparently Laila yelled for "Abba! Abba!" and then as soon as I walked up to the car, dead silence. It's that kind of age for her, where she's being contrary simply because she can. As my parents said, every time they ask her if she wants to go to the park, she always says no first, and then when they ask her a little bit later it's usually, "Go park?" and her running to go put on her shoes.

It was mostly a quiet weekend, but the big thing we did was go to two farmer's markets! My parents' town has a massive farmer's market, almost as big as the one downtown in Daley Plaza that happens during the summer, and this weekend was a weekend where the craft faire was also in town. We bought some desserts and fruit (for Laila) and looked through the craft area, and sashagee got coffee from an extremely cute tiny kei-food-truck selling coffee out the back, though the horchata latte was sadly sold out. On Sunday we went to Geneva's farmer's market which is smaller in scale, but the same coffee place was there and this time they had the latte, so we took that back to papa and nana's with some croissant-based pastries for later.

I had to leave Sunday night, so right now I'm in an empty apartment waiting for everyone to get back. It's almost time to be done with work, though, and I also have some chores to do before Laila comes back to make sure we know who's house this is.

I need to post more. This is like when I was working for Suzugamine.

sashagee's grandfather fought in the war and while stationed in Japan, met a woman and they got married. They later had a falling out and divorced and she returned to Japan, leaving her daughters behind. He remarried, to a woman ~15 years his junior, and that woman was sashagee's grandmother, but it means she has several half-Japanese aunts who are much older than her other aunts. I haven't met any of them, but one of them send us a present:



( More photos )

It took some coaxing to get her into it--the first time sashagee tried, she wanted nothing to do with it--but when she was told she could keep on her pink "pretty dress" and the yukata would go on over the top, she was all in. She's definitely in a girly girl phase.

Friday morning sashagee went out to her parents, and I followed after work. And then Saturday morning, we woke up at 6:15 a.m.--well, Laila woke up at 6:15 and so we also woke up--we all ate breakfast, and then we piled into her parents' care to travel to Indiana to go visit her family. The last time we were supposed to go, I got what turned out to be COVID and stayed home while sashagee and Laila went, so I hadn't yet met most of her cousins and their children yet. She gave me a bunch of warnings that they were loud and might be overwhelming, and was I ready?

The car ride went fine. It was Laila's first long car ride as an aware being, since the last time she was seven months old and just slept the whole time, and she did okay. We stopped once at a place called Fair Oaks Farm just off the highway and let Laila run all around while we bought milkshakes (or at least, I bought a milkshake and sashagee's stepmother got ice cream), and then got back into the car and finished the drive to Muncie. We went over to sashagee's birthday grandmother's for a few minutes and then borrowed the car to visit her mother and other grandmother, which is where we spent most of the evening. sashagee's mother had broken her foot a few weeks ago and wasn't mobile at all, so Laila was a bit bouncing off the walls there, especially since sashagee's mother has two small dogs. Laila kept trying to grab their toys, climb in the cage, wandering around her small apartment, and it was only when the paper and pens came out and she could color that she finally slowed down.

When we got to sashagee's grandmother, sashagee was at first worried she wasn't home because she was so used to other people always being there, but there was nothing to worry about. Her house was very homely, laid out length-wise so you could see from the family room at one end through the kitchen to the living room at the other, and it just screamed "Grandma's house" will the jars labeled "Flour" and "Sugar" and "Tea" and the pictures of descendants framed and placed on nearly every flat surface.

At this point Laila was slowing down, so she spent a bit of time running around but started to get tired, and we spent the last half an hour watching Ponyo until we knew we had to get back to the hotel. Even with that, Laila did fall asleep on the way back, though B"H she woke up when we got back and didn't fuss while we prepped her for bed. Back at the hotel I spent an hour in the hotel's exercise room getting in all the Apple Watch exercise time that I had missed out on during a day of driving and visiting, and fell asleep not that much later.

This time Laila slept in until 8:15 a.m., and we all got ready and then went out to eat the hotel's complimentary breakfast of scrambled eggs, French toast, bagels, and coffee/tea (the tea was awful, the rest of the food was fine) and then went back to sashagee's birthday grandmother's before we split off again to go to visit her mother and other grandmother and drop off USB drives containing every picture we've taken of Laila for the last three years--both of them have Android phones and thus aren't on any of the photo albums--and then head back to the party.

The warnings were unnecessary! I didn't get interrogated and it wasn't as loud as I was warned, though apparently this was also because of the circumstances. sashagee said that one whole branch of the family was basically out sick, so there's another two dozen people who could have showed who didn't. I had some nice chats and spent some time chasing Laila around, but we only ended up being able to stay for two hours. sashagee's estranged sister was there too, but I didn't talk to her at all--she didn't talk to anyone in her family until sashagee's father tried to talk to her, which apparently didn't go well--and even ignored Laila when Laila went up to her. Well, her loss. The rest of the party was lovely!

Very different from my small family but a fun time. I'd be happy to go back again.

Well, now all of us are sick. I started feeling not that great yesterday and by evening my throat was clogged. sashagee felt bad all yesterday and doesn't feel much better today, but Laila is back home now so we have to put on our game faces. She was coughing like crazy and very upset when she came out, and she's very upset now that sashagee is sucking out all her boogers, but otherwise she's in an okay mood.

My mother broke her hip falling today. Just before she and my father were going to leave to bring Laila back into the city, too. I got an automatic "hard fall" message a few hours and when I texted make sure she was okay, my father answered that the EMT thought it was dislocated. Well, it's much worse than that--I just got another message that it will require surgery to repair. She just finished her recovery period from her hip replacement and then this happens.

Last weekend was another grandparents' weekend, so on Friday I went down to sashagee on Friday night and stayed through Saturday. We didn't do much exciting that day other than eat food with Laila--and I walked like eight miles between towns and back along the river while Laila was asleep--but that night was the fireworks!

Batavia has award-winning fireworks that have been going for decades. The fourth was on a Tuesday this year, so I didn't go out to the suburbs, but sashagee and Laila did. They went to the fireworks, everyone got all excited...and then the system failed. And the backup system failed, and no fireworks went off, and everyone went home grumpy. They rescheduled the fireworks for August 5th and we planned to head back there. My parents' house is a ten minute walk from the fireworks, and sashagee wanted some funnel cake, so we went down early to scout out a spot. From what she said about last time, there were maybe a quarter as many people as there were on the 4th, so we got our funnel cake and found a spot literally right in front of the fireworks. Before too long, sashagee told me my parents had found a parking spot right by the barricades and suggested I help them carry the chairs, so I walked down the road until I saw them and some people sitting nearby got a cute view of Laila seeing me and starting to run to me, me running to her, and then grabbing her and swinging her around in the air.

The fireworks were extra nice! No major crowds and it was easy to get home afterwards. We put Laila to bed--she was exhausted by the end--and went to bed not too much longer ourselves. The fireworks were indeed super AMERICA themed and the music didn't really blend together very well, but the actual fireworks were beautiful.

The next day after breakfast, we got into cars and drove to Morton Arboretum for the Pan-Asia Festival. It really was Pan-Asian, with the sound of an erhu greeting us as we entered and later, people performing Indian dance. The part I found most interesting, though, was the sumō. I used to go see the Fukuoka Nihon Sumō Kyōkai every year and I didn't realize there was an amateur league--with amateur competitions, since they said they were going to Tokyō later in the year to compete! We stayed and watched two bouts between the performers before sashagee said she really needed to sit down, so I bought us boba while she found a seat--brown sugar for her, taro for me--and we sat and drank it and watched the people go by. When we were done, we met my parents and Laila, glad that Laila seemed totally unphased by the giant knot on her head she had earned from falling after running too fast down a ramp, and went home. Laila took a nap, we ate dinner when she woke up, and then came back into the city.

Certain less event variety than the old posts I used to write, but Laila running excited yelling "Ababababa!" when she saw me makes up for that.

"There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man, with human flesh."
-From "Collected sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan

ב״ה‎ it was only a minor one but still.

On Monday, the day both sets of grandparents were supposed to have a dinner together with Laila and sashagee's parents would hand Laila off to my parents, my mother texted me to say that my father had woken up with numbness in his right arm and they were going to the hospital. Obviously, numbness in a 70-year-old can be a sign of all kinds of terrible things, so they did an initial evaluation where he scored only 1 out of 45 on stroke likelihood (higher being worse), but they admitted him to do more tests.

Long story short, the MRI did show a stroke, though the above-mentioned 1 out of 45 means that it only did extremely minor damage. The far two fingers on his right hand are still tingly, and he had to readjust the way he uses his right hand for delicate operations like shaving and playing the euphonium. According to him--he was just here with my mother and sister to pick up Laila and take her to the zoo--he's already adjusted to a new shaving pattern and played the euphonium just fine after a short bit of work. When he was here in the brief interactions we had, he seemed like exactly the same person I've known all my life.

It could have been so much worse, and if it had to happen I'm glad that it happened the way it did since now the doctors can keep an eye on him and do tests to prevent it from happening again. They were going to give him medicine to dissolve any clots while he was in the hospital, but they ended up deciding against it since literally every time the nurses checked on him he was up and walking around his hospital room (being sedentary is one of the biggest risk factors). He's on a blood thinner now and, as he put it, while they had him in their clutches they wanted to talk to him about his cholesterol, so when they came over they brought approximately two pounds of butter over for us. Dietary cholesterol isn't as important for blood cholesterol as people used to believe but I can understand why he's being extra cautious--he has a granddaughter he wants to see grow up.

Am I worried? Yes, obviously--but not a lot. I'd be much more worried if he seemed like a different person in any of our interactions but as far as I can tell he's exactly the same. But this is really the first direct indication we've gotten of his mortality, and he'll only be 71 this year. Both sets of my grandparents lived into their mid-80s so he should ("should") still have quite a ways to go. I hope he and the doctors are on top of this so he can see Laila graduate high school, the way my grandparents did for me.

If he's already feeling well enough to take Laila to the zoo today and work on our new table a couple days ago (though as he said, he's staying away from the bandsaw for another couple weeks) that's a good sign.

She was feeling bad yesterday so she reached out to my parents and asked them if they would like Laila to do an overnight stay. Then when she woke up this morning, she was feeling much better and worried about being away from Laila for so long and thought about texting my parents and telling them they didn't need to come in, but then this afternoon she started feeling bad again, so it turned out that no mistakes were made after all. She's currently resting in the bedroom playing an Otome game she downloaded on her phone.

It would be all the makings of a fun date night but sashagee isn't feeling well enough for it, so I'll probably go to services tonight. I haven't been to Friday night services in a while, and the last time I went Laila wasn't having it, and sashagee could use having her name put in for the מי שברך mi shebeirach prayer for healing.

We're supposed to get a massive storm sweeping through Chicago today, dumping up to seven inches of snow on us, but right now there's nothing. The sky is a little grey, but it's 2°C and the ground is clear. I'm heading out to the suburbs by train to meet up with sashagee and Laila, who her parents already came into the city to get, and earlier I was worried about the trip. But it's looking like I basically don't have anything at all to worry about.

Hopefully that stays true. 🪬

We spent most of this weekend at the grandparents' houses, at my parents' house on Shabbat and then at sashagee's parents' house on Saturday night and Sunday. sashagee went out with my parents around noon on Friday, and I stayed behind to finish the workday, vacuumed, did the laundry, wiped down the counters, emptied the dishwasher, and otherwise did all the pre-Shabbat cleaning, then I got on the train, went downtown, and took the express Metra out to the suburbs and arrived just in time for dinner. Pot roast. Delicious!

We didn't go anywhere or do anything particularly special while we were there except hang out with the grandparents and give them Laila time, but Laila had a lovely time! She was so excited that she had a hard time taking her naps but then didn't want to go to sleep because she would have missed out on the excitement. That meant that she spent a bunch of the visit tired, and when we finally got home on Sunday she fell asleep for an hour and then woke up and cried for two hours because she absolutely did not want to be alone. When I went into sing to her, she clung to me like I was a sinking ship and cried when I tried to hold her prone in my arms instead of letting her hug my neck. She finally consented to be put down in the crib but demanded I keep a hand on her head, and if I tried to move it away she reached up to grab it back After fifteen minutes of singing בשם השם to her she calmed down...or so I thought, because she started crying basically as soon as I closed the door. sashagee went in there after a bit and that did the trick--Laila fell into an exhausted sleep around midnight and sashagee wasn't long after her. On Monday she had a much better time.

I'm nearly done with my psychic powers mod for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and currently having to deal with more bugs. The ones that I can't solve myself are:

• I'm trying to make a teleporter power that warps space so that enemies' movements draw them toward a central point, but the function to move monsters is bugged. My current idea is to make a fake 'enemy' that will pull everything nearby toward it, but that's reliant on being able to make a summoned monster that other monsters will ignore.


• Telepathic powers work on zombies because there's a whitelist for which targets spells can affect, but no blacklist. That means when I set HUMAN as a possible target for telepathic attack, formerly-human zombies--who are tagged both HUMAN and ZOMBIE--are eligible. This is unfixable without me personally adding a blacklist function to the game.

On the other hand, I was playing last night and discovered a feral psychic in the wild, so I know that my attempt to add them to monster spawn list worked! It was a pyrokinetic who proceeded to throw fire everywhere and set the hospital I was trying to loot on fire, so that was exciting! I'm also in the boring numbers-adjusting part of the game. "Oh, I think [Ψ]Fountain of Flames does ten percent more damage than I want, and [Ψ]Stutterstep lasts too long" blah blah blah. The boring-but-necessary part of game design.

Yesterday, I went out to lunch with aaronhparker, who's taking a trip to Japan in April and wanted some suggestions of where to go. Unfortunately, his group's itinerary isn't set in stone beyond being in Japan yet, so I really could only provide the most general advice. I told him that if he had to go three places, he should go to Tōkyō, Kyōto, and (of course) Hiroshima, especially talking up Miyajima. I mentioned Kiyomizu-dera and Arashiyama in Kyōto, too, and when he talked about hiking I told him about Matsumoto. We only met for a bit over lunch because we both had meetings to go back to and I feel like I didn't provide much actionable advice, but I did suggest that we meet up again when he has a better idea of exactly where he'll be. I should be have more advice then.

Alright, back to this unknown physician project. At least I can tell right away that "Dr. Sages Webmaster" and "Dr. Northwest Hospital" are not real people.

Back at the office now after a week off (and working from home yesterday). It's honestly been very rough, since sashagee hurt her back on Monday and couldn't do much looking after Laila, or really much anything, at all, so she spent most of the week icing and heating her back and taking naps while I did the work of the home, cleaning up after Laila, taking her to the park during the sudden burst of warm weather--it had been below freezing but climbed back up to 12° during the day--until she was feeling better. On Wednesday my parents came over in the morning and we all went to the zoo on probably one of the last good weather days this year to go. Laila was more interested than the last time she went because the weather was warmer and so the animals were active, but she really got into watching the seals. One of them came right up to the glass and they were nose to nose for a bit, but the seal sadly swam away before my father could get a picture.

Thursday we woke up and took the train out for two days at the grandparents' houses, Thursday at sashagee's parents and Friday at mine. I'm used to a standard turkey dinner at my parents' house, so Thanksgiving dinner was exotic--veggie lasagna and...well, that's mostly it. They also made ham (which I don't eat) and scalloped potatoes (which I don't care for), but fortunately lunch was the real star of the day. Whereas dinner was a bit simple, lunch had a vegetable platter, a cheese platter, smoked salmon, olives and an olive tapenade, grapes, and some pork product I don't recognize. A lot of it was left over from lunch, so I took olive tapenade and veggies with my lasagna and filled out my dinner with that. The best part for Laila other than seeing her family, though, was when bubble wrap was taped to the floor:

Friday we went to my parents' house for a more traditional Thanksgiving dinner with turkey, mashed potatoes, pie, stuffing, and all the stuff I've eaten every year for literally forty years. Hey, if it works, why change it?

Saturday after Shabbat ended we met worldbshiny for frozen custard at Lickity Split, since it is the most wonderful time of the year--maple custard season. I got maple custard with crushed waffle cones and butterscotch and held Laila on my lap while worldbshiny and sashagee chatted, and this outing revealed that the time of us being able to just blithely bring Laila along to friends' events is slowly but inexorably marching toward its end--Laila used to be fine just hanging out on our laps, but now that's boring. When I was done with my custard Laila lost all the patience her little baby body could hold and started demanding to be let down, so I didn't really get to participate in most of the conversation because I was holding Laila's hands while she was marching around. I didn't mind because Laila is the cutest baby in the world, but also it would have been nice to talk to worldbshiny more!

Going back to the office this week made me understand why so many parents are happy that the school year starts up again. I loved spending all that time with Laila but by necessity, all my time was time spent with Laila. Later in the week when sashagee was feeling a little better I could redirect Laila if I had to do some dishes or clean a bit, but otherwise if I wanted to even go to the bathroom I had to put Laila in her crib because otherwise she'd wander off and get into things. This is, of course, why modern life for parents is so exhausting and alienating, because there's never a dull moment when there's a curious baby who wants to get into anything. sashagee spent some time volunteering at a hospital in Ghana and told me that the women in the nearby villages had rotating care systems, where all the children would be watched by one person while the others worked or did chores and they'd switch off who looked after the children. The only thing similar we have is that both sets of grandparents live nearby, and they're generously willing to drive into the city to watch Laila when we ask. But it's no substitute for a community, and we have a society that's specifically built around destroying social bonds.

We still had Thanksgiving together with both families, though, so some traditions survive.