Stumbling Through Adulthood

1. Rowing. Today was the Pink Ribbon Row, a fundraiser for breast cancer. All three of my kids were in boats, Perry in a single (2nd), in a double (2nd), and Linnea and Anne-Chloe rowed together in a double. As a result of Learn to Row, people now seem to be connecting US to THEM (especially Perry) as a very fast rate. And it's only going to continue: dh and I decided to... join the boathouse and continue rowing. It's going to disrupt our routines quite a bit: 5 am wake up three times a week at least... and that's if we go to the later class. If we decide to go to the earlier one, it'll be 4 am and driving in with Perry. We'll figure it out. All this on the background of dh's employer wanting RTO in February for 3 days a week, and nobody being happy about that.

2. Physically rowing has been a bit of a mixed bag for me: I love it, to my surprise, though I am always cold on the water. They tell me we'll get good workouts eventually and I believe them, but right now? I freeze. And I'm hurting. Perry has told me what I should do to fix the issues, but I haven't been able to reliably fix the issue and the sciatic nerve in my right leg is freaking hurting. It does not hurt while I'm rowing, or on long walks, but randomly during the day, it'll hit and I'll be pretty much hobbling and limping for a few hours. Do. Not. Like. It's been over a week of this, if I don't figure out something within the next week or so I'll head to a PT.

3. Bless her little heart for not saying anything, but Linnea managed to con the LtR coaches into taking her out on the launch on Friday, so she had a fullon view of my rowing, ouch and a little bit of dh's. She made it clear to both of us after we were off the water that she would not offer feedback unless we requested it, and I just didn't have it in me. What got me? She did talk about my boat in general (she was with the coach that had my boat) and her observations made so much sense, what we were doing as a group to eff things up. That said, we may not have been perfect but the 7 of us (instead of 8) won the three short races we did against dh's boat. 🤣🤣🤣

4. Yes, 4 is more than 3. Sigh. Anyhow, with boathouse membership, we get a club tech shirt. Patti, the person in charge, offered me... an extra-small shirt. I'm standing there, shocked that anyone could ever think I could ever fit in an extra-small. Body dysmorphia is read, people. It doesn't matter that intellectually I know that people who see me now see a smaller person, the emotional part of me just screams "they are not seeing the real you" and that's my reality. This doesn't happen with people who know me, but the random interactions with medical folk, the people at the dentist office etc. The Orwell (iirc) quote (paraphrased) of how inside every fat person is a thin person trying to get out? was never something I felt. There was never a thin person inside of me. That thin person never existed. It was me, and I am fat. And I am still the same person, therefor I am fat. And that's fine, but my perceived reality of me no longer fits with the reality of the world about me and I'm often confused. Just like how when I hiked or biked fat, I hated it when people complimented me, or implied I was a good fatty, or expressed surprise that I was where I was on a trail, I get nervous when people completely innocently imply that I am not, in fact, fat. I feel almost suspicious, like they are mocking me. Yeah, I'm pretty fucked up. Oh. And I took the small shirt so I can wear it as a top layer.

OMG, it's been a while since I've written... And a result, there is so much accumulated stuff to write that I didn't want to write because, well, I needed to spend so much time at it. Let's see if starting with a simple three things will help me get at it over the next few days.

1. After a very VERY hectic end of May and early June, we went to Iceland for 10 days. The trip started out well, what with a small face-to-face with camelsamba in Reykjavik, which felt very jet-setish. I mean, Reykjavik isn't Bali or Timbuktu, but it's also not the local Starbies! After that auspicious beginning... the trip continued to be just as awesome. I think it was one of the best trips of my life. Puffins, Icelandic horsies, hiking, and Midnight Sun. I'm back and I miss Iceland. I don't understand how I can be homesick for a place that was never home. I need to get the trip report written for my mom and all my photos uploaded. I'll get there. Eventually.

2. We finally made an executive decision to skip Eclipse 2026. It's only visible in Western Iceland and Spain, and totality is going to be very short. I mean, if I can, I might do a short trip to Iceland and if the weather cooperates, great, if not oh well, but we decided (with my sister) that we'd aim for the 2027 eclipse, which we will try to see in either Egypt or Morocco. Totality in Egypt will be over 5 minutes so. I suspect, since it will be August, that my plan will be "land in Egypt, look at one pyramid, look at the Sphinx, hit the National Museum, eclipse, get the fuck out to somewhere a lot further north, like, oh, the Faroe Islands or Sweden". Heh.

3. We bought a car in early June, part of the pre-departure hectic. It's a blue Honda CRV Hybrid and I need to find it a name before it gets known as 'that stupid car'. Because right now, it beeps, tries play my music even if I haven't told it to, beeps some more, locks when you walk away from it, and basically is going to require hours of work to beat it into silent submission. It's a good car, I'm sure, or will be.

1. Cleaned out the fridge today. 🤮 I loathe that job. It needed to be done for a while, but I'd been avoiding the task. Since dh was back east this weekend I just went ahead and did it. Perry helped me by doing the annoying deed of drying the plastic stuff and putting it back in. I can never get the drawers to click in properly so over the years, I've given up trying and pass the task on to others.

2. I was supposed to go up to Vancouver to see my aunt today but... she caught norovirus and I chickened out. She should be out of isolation tomorrow, if all goes well. I figured I could keep myself safe with a mask and being very very careful for a short visit, but with a three hour or so drive (plus border wait times) the visits tend to be longer and I just didn't want to risk it. I feel terrible. Next weekend I'm in Bend -to visit my mom- and then I'll be up in Vancouver again the weekend after. I'm glad dh and I went last weekend. We had such a good visit.

3. I cannot even begin to describe the horror and dread I feel about what is happening in this country. It's almost incomprehensible how fast we're sliding down a slope that we may never be able to climb back up. At the very least, we've lost standing in the world as a partner and China and Russia must be very pleased with the situation. Elon Musk has bought himself a country, just like he bought Tesla and SpaceX, and it only cost him 200 million and whatever he paid for Twitter.

❄ Perry's coach took this a few weeks ago and posted it again today. I managed to grab it.

https://1drv.ms/v/s!Ap5tbOHbgHtsi6l9H4bVZL2xt6OCFw?e=O0Tt8P

It was a gorgeous day and I think my boyo looks pretty damn good too!

❄ Busy weekend. Didn't get half of what I wanted to get done done, but I did get a few things accomplished. Linnea is home, yay! Planning for Christmas is a mess; I really need to buckle down to it. If I can at least get a plan down in my head, I feel better, more in control, and much less stressed. But of course, the thought of thinking about it all stresses me out. Circular badness.

❄ I had a bad eating weekend. There were just too many things to eat sitting around and ate them I did. The problem is that I ate while not being hungry and -and this is the bad part- I'm not not feeling well as a result. Ah well. I'll get back on track tomorrow, I'm not horrified or feeling out of control, just... like I ate too much junk.

1. I am not going to make my goodreads reading challenge for the year! Usually I'm over and beyond, but with work, it's not happening. I just don't have time. Sigh.

2. Dh is at trains. I was supposed to go to the Post Office this morning to try to figure out what happened to my package (they claim it's on its way to its destination, but... no tracking so.). I forgot and read all morning instead. And then I made gingerbread that is still in the oven. I'll race down there as soon as that's done. Sigh. I'm an idiot. But it was nice to take some time to read. ETA. Sigh update. I just checked the gingerbread and it was inexplicably flat. And then I saw the little bowl of carefully measured out baking soda sitting on the counter. I got a series of texts while I was baking and I guess didn't quite get things right. Ah well, it's trash, I'll make more later.

3. Have to return a dress I bought at Land's End. I'm so tired of stuff not fitting and having to do returns! Bought a pair of leggings in a different color same size as a pair that fits, and it's too big as well, but unlike the dress, not unwearable. I have more underwear to toss as well, since once the package is open, you can't even donate it, even if 3/4 are still folded and wrapped. Sigh. I'm not complaining about the weight loss, but finding clothes is proving to be tricky, especially since I loathe shopping.

1. I'm devastated at what the media and some leading Dems did to Joe Biden. And disgusted. Some of them were people that I respected. Others were people I sent money to. I will be more than happy to send money to their primary opponents next time they run. I do love that those disgusting people wanted an open primary at the Convention, and Joe Biden, in a Dark Brandon move, denied them that by endorsing her. It was brilliant.

2. I love Kamala Harris. I supported her in 2020 and was looking forward to supporting her in 2028. I've spent this past week, however, in an up-then-down sort of way. There is a lot of excitement about her candidacy, and it's infectious. But then... I honestly don't think she can win. I think that, like Clinton, she'll blow out the popular vote easy but fail in the Electoral College. I hate this. I think in 2028, after four more years of capable and stable leadership and Trump -either dead or completely mush-for-brains- out of the picture, she could win. This year? I don't think so. They're motivated by hate and they have a systemic electoral college advantage. I think we'll also lose the Senate. By not doing any partisan gerrymandering, NY may have cost us the ability to retake the House and after the Supreme Court's decision about racial gerrymandering the few districts we could have grabbed either in 24 or 26 are in jeopardy. So I'm no longer hopeful about our chances this year, and some of the polls are already scaring me (there is evidence that a) Biden significantly outpolls Harris in some swing states, b) that the most reliable voting block doesn't like her -their mistake, imo-, and c) the never-Trump vote might not follow Harris.) I'll donate and maybe even volunteer and be positive etc when out in public but this -with my two or three readers, and three maybe be an overestimate, 🤣- I'm being honest about my feelings. Ugh.

3. Work is sucking these days. I'm bored.

4. Continuing to plug away at the weight loss thing with Zeppy. That drug is a fucking miracle. I've been eating the same way for over a year now and last fall, I'd pretty much stopped losing more than a few ounces here or there. Zepbound restarted that, I suspect with some biochemical tinkering of my set point, leaving my body no longer defending a very high weight. I've lost more than I ever thought I would or could and I'm less than 10lbs from a dream goal, which might or might not happen: being able to ride Icelandic horses here, right down the road from me! If I get there, I'll be thrilled, but even if I don't, it'll be fine, I'll just have to ride them in Iceland where the weight limit they allow is higher, LOL. I feel so much more relaxed about the day-to-day ins and outs of dieting and eating and exercising. I've always hated and mistrusted the addiction framing on people being fat, for various reasons (*), and at first, I was a bit surprised at the data that show that GLP-1 drugs are effective at helping with addiction. They seem to, which is great and I've seen some commentary about how yeah, fatties are just addicts but... GLP-1 are also being shown to be effective in Parkinson's disease and in a phase 3 trial, Alzheimer's. I don't think we're "there" yet on figuring out exactly how they work and how they help people, though they clearly do. (*) Hard to be addicted to something that you need to actually survive. In addition, the arguments seem very much which came first the chicken or the egg to me. Anyhow, as more research into GLP-1 drugs come out, I hope the addiction model gets ditched wholesale, and hopefully we'll get some insight into the brain biochemistry that is very clearly involved. It always was, as many of us fatties have long suspected, just a little bit more complicated that Calories In Calories Out, which, while try, is elides the whole "how the calories are processed".

5. In light of that, I'll share this review: Trapped fat: Obesity pathogenesis as an intrinsic disorder in metabolic fuel partitioning. Normally I'd steer clear of anything with Gary Taubes's name on it (his agenda has led him down some pretty tortuous paths) but this is nevertheless interesting, though I haven't done enough of a deep dive or search on primary sources to trust it all. Still worth a read, if only to be familiar with this reframing.

6. This is in pink! My baby girl turned 21 this week! OMG, how the eff did that happen, she was just a baby two minutes ago! She's an extraordinary young person!

7. We have a few days of camping booked for late September at Crater Lake. The boat tours will have shut down by then. 😢 Why do they stop those a full 10 days before they close the campground? Still, looking forward to that. And we booked two nights (and a previous one so we can get an early start) at a campground near Mt Baker for early September. Had to book Sunday and Monday night, which was the best I could do for minimizing vacation days. We'll get up early Tuesday morning and hopefully I can get into work in time for a solid half day. Tomorrow, we have to drive Linnea to Bellingham so she can start packing hrr place up, since her old and new places don't overlap, sigh, but we'll be taking her furniture down. Anyhow, plan is to leave her the trailer and head out to go on three short hikes in the area.

8. Perry is leaving for a regatta in Canada tomorrow at 5am. I should get some sleep, we have to drive him to the airport. He'll be pretty close to Niagara Falls, and he's hoping to get a group of athletes together to go visit. I hope he does, and I really want to go back there one of these years, I loved going when I was a kid.

9. Still looking for a plan to get my novel moving towards publication. I know I need an agent, but each time I look at agents/agencies, I realize my poor little book doesn't quite fit into any category. Yes, romance, but it's too long to fit their size requirements. One of these days, I'll figure out my next steps. Maybe I should find someone to put it in audiobook format, since that seems to be a good way to get traction. Anyhow.

Three things? I think there are more I need to talk about!

1. Starting with the most exciting: Linnea got into the Computer Science major!!!!!. Tbh, quite unexpected, but being a girl with learning disabilities probably helped. So yay for that, I'm so excited for her. One of the differences between her and Perry's long quest to get into the Biochem major? She has an excellent department advisor (as opposed to one who not only did not help but indeed... fibbed a bit on a few things) who helped her pick classes and supported her a lot. But yay! So relieved for her. Her boyfriend did not get in (despite good grades etc) so is looking at trying to get in for a Masters.

2. Last month on Zeppy, maintaining the lowest dose, I did not lose anything, I've been playing with the same two pounds since end of May. I'll go up in dosage this week and see if it makes a diff. But. Nothing fits. Things that fit less than a month ago are all of a sudden baggy to the point that I cannot wear them. Which yay, but I did not need to find out that two pair of leggings and three pair of jeans no longer fit on... Monday morning. I currently have one pair that fits (thanks Value Village), one pair that I can wear for two days, it has spandex or whatever in it, something I usually hate but nobody does 100% cotton in black that I have found, and I hope my yoga pants will still fit but I didn't try them on this morning, so who knows? Again, I'm not unhappy about this, it's part of the package of losing weight but not today? I tried on one of the pairs of jeans last week and I swear it fit.

3. We have park entry tickets to Rainier on Wednesday. We found a campsite for Tuesday night. Yay? Only the weather forecast has gone to sh*t and I'm not sure I really want to go. Plan was to camp, get up to catch first light at Reflection Lakes, and then do a hike up into a cirque with incredible views of the mountain on the way down. Oh, and some night photography the evening before if we weren't too tired. None of which will happen if the weather is crummy, so I don't know what to do.

4. I did book camping for late September in Crater Lake. It's not managed by Recreation.gov so the bots don't seem to book every single effing campsite as soon as they're available.

5. We went on a bike ride yesterday. First in more than a few years. It was great! Dh found out he needs new shoes, and we couldn't find his helmet, so he ordered new ones (he borrowed Perry's for yesterday). We kept it to 10 miles because of lessons learned in years past, we started out the season one year with a 40-mile ride. None of us, and that included Anne-Chloe and Perry, were happy the next day! It was good and we're planning on more rides this summer.

Another three things post. It's just that kind of week.

1. My mom is with my sister. My house feels wonderfully and strangely empty. What makes me sad? Since I won't be seeing it day in day out, I expect the next time I see her, I'll be shocked at how badly she's slipped. My sister is going to bring her back up here for a few weeks in March so they can go on vacation. Apparently the drive yesterday was awful, longer than expected because weather, semis, and multiple stops, and my mom got confused and anxious towards the end and demanded they stop so she could buy cigarettes and got angry when they wouldn't. Ugh.

2. Knitting! Figured out how to do the join with circular needles. I did have to grab the info from a webpage, cut and paste it into Word and flip left to right etc. When I was trying to do that on the fly, I'd keep on getting confused. Anyhow, the yarn I picked is pretty but otherwise kinda sucky, but it was cheap, which is what I wanted for a first project! Steel needles and Very Slippery! Having fun. The cats... well, they're trying to have fun too. We just disagree on what kind of fun should happen with yarn.

3. I knew it and now there is scientific proof!!!! Bilingual attentional control: Evidence from the Partial Repetition Cost paradigm. From the abstract, bolding mine:

These findings suggest that language experience does not affect lower-level processes, and supports the view that bilinguals exhibit enhanced attentional disengagement.

I always said that bilingualism just meant that my kids could ignore me in two languages and I was right! 🤣

1. Mixed feelings on this one: Anne-Chloe got a pretty major promotion at work, from research tech to staff scientist, she'll be the lab leader. It's... big. But... the guy who was there before was there for 30 years. Just... being the lab director. Not the PI. The director. I don't want her to get caught in the more responsibility/more money trap and not get that MD/PhD she needs to do something truly creative with her life. So. I'm very proud of her and a bit scared too.

2. OMG, my stupid bitch of a SIL. OMG. So. For the past... what, 20 plus years? If I am here over a given holiday, I will host, unless plans are specifically made to all to go dh's aunt, which we did once or twice over the past few decades. During the pandemic, I made a delivered full holiday meals to MIL and SIL. This year, we decided to invite dh's aunt specifically since her "problem child dog" has died and she's a bit more free to do stuff like haul the other four dogs up to us for the day. Apparently, after we texted her, she texted SIL to tell her she'd be there. SIL immediately got her nose bent out of joint that she hadn't gotten a specific invitation. Reader, in the past twenty years she has never gotten one, just a call or a text close to the holiday to specify time. Same as for my MIL. So. SIL got into a snit and refused to come for Thanksgiving. Fine, we said. For Christmas, dh texted with his nephew a few days before and finished off with a reminder that they were invited for Christmas. The day before Christmas we find out that again, my SIL does not feel that her invitation was sufficient, so she was not going to grace us with her presence. Fuck that shit, nobody cared and we had a great time without her. She sent us a major passive-aggressive text. New Year's dh sent her a text specifically and she came. Whatever, not after, when we asked MIL if she wanted to come over, she asked "Is everyone invited?" Fuck that shit. So where are we right now? We often invite MIL to come over for dinner, because eh, it's not a major event, we're just asking if she wants to come over and share whatever we're having, ya know? Nothing formal. The past two times we did this (early Jan and today) dh got a text back saying "Is everyone invited?" and well, NO. This is not a major meal, just having her over. Dh now does not want to invite his mother over any longer because he's feeling like now, SIL has intruded in a casual relationship between us and his mother, and his mother is making it worse, so now, we're done. Long story. But yeah, my SIL is a stupid bitch.

3. Norway section of the trip is planned. After a small cancellation of a plan a few weeks ago, which was annoying, we ended up going with a small agency who booked everything for us (according to the plan we'd already made). It cost a tiny bit but saved a lot of time and frustration (see above: cancellation). What was nice is they were able to find another Northern Lights cruise for us! We need to plan Iceland next! Volcano is back erupting in Grindavik, but unlike the two first times, this isn't a tourist excursion to the middle of nowhere, it's a town being destroyed.

1. Perry stayed home to be there for my mom and dh and I went to Julefest as the National Nordic Museum. It was fun. Been there a few times already and the space is limited, so it's the same people each year, but the nice thing is that... the space is limited. The crowds are already a bit much for me, and anything larger would really stress me out. So. Didn't buy much, we usually don't, but was able to see in person the linen summer duvet cover I want. Maybe I'll spring for it, or maybe not LOL.

2. Rosalynn Carter's death is hitting me harder than I'd ever have expected. I just can't imagine how much pain President Carter must be in, and my heart just aches for him. Or maybe I'm just too emotional these days, LOL.

3. Maybe someone can help me with the proper search terms... dh ruins sweaters in short order. For some reason, the right elbows end up with a hole, probably from the way he sits at his desk. The sweaters, aside from that, are in great shape, but... neither of us can repair them. So. I was trying to find someone who could, but either knitters taking on that type of project doesn't exist or I'm not finding the right search terms. I did find a place in LA, and one or two others but I'd expect more hits, if that makes sense. I mean... do people really toss several hundred-dollar sweaters if they get damaged? My other thought was to go to a knitting store and ask the owner, LOL.