Stumbling Through Adulthood

1. We had a fantastic trip down to California. Trains, caves, a lot of driving, and just a general good time. I'll have to write it all up and post some links to photos and videos. The steam train chase was absolutely wonderful! The only iffy part was almost getting smashed to smithereens by a semi on the way north from Klamath Falls. Thank goodness for wide shoulders and a spouse who didn't panic, and an asshole semi driver who at least kept on doing the murderous thing he was doing rather than deciding to do something random. BTW, had this gone off differently (no shoulder, for example) it would probably have been a 10-12 people fatality crash. So.

2. We have windows. Those windows, on the outside, have tiny little rectangular holes for water to escape from, standard window construction. Those windows? Now also have bees, we think mason bees, living in them. Oooh boy. We don't disturb them, but I hope to hell they aren't honey bees. Also, I don't think those bits of frame connect to anything inside the house because OMG, we'll end up on Instagram as people who find a zillion bees living in their crawl space or some such. BTW, exactly this.. OMG.

3. Feeling very sad and very discouraged and very unhappy with parts of my life.

1. Dh and Anne-Chloe are going to Reading PA for a weekend in February, to go on a ride on a train being pulled by a steam locomotive on the main line. This is a major deal, LOL. I'm so happy Anne-Chloe was willing and able to go with him: I'd have gone, of course, and probably had a great time, but I don't really-really want to go. They should have a great time!

2. I need a new bra (or two) but I don't want to go bra shopping, sigh. But I have to. I think I'll take light rail or a bus from work to dt Seattle and then get a bus back to dt Redmond. It's stupid that I can get from the uni to dt Bellevue, but not easily the 4 miles from dt Bellevue to dt Redmond. Can't wait for the light rail to go all the way there, rather than stopping at Microsoft.

3. My shoes, after spending almost a month going back and forth over the Tampa Bay bridge were finally returned to me, 2.5 months after I mailed them out. Since it was for a warranty claim, I'm going to try to see if the gal I've been chatting with on twitter will help me out. Because at this point, it looks like I had the shoes for five months and am complaining that they're trashed, but no, they were dead within three months! I just really have no idea why, at some point, in Redmond, they covered up the "to" address and shipping the package diagonally across the country. Make that make sense, USPS!

Well, it's many bits and pieces for a Monday, LOL.

1. Still no keyboard. Expected delivery is today. One week after purchase, with "expedited delivery". I hate FedEx and really wish companies would stop using them. ETA FexEx just called. They tried again, but it's a "bad address". I was a bit nasty to the person on the line, I think my comment was "The Postal Service Manages to delivery every single day to this address, are all your drivers incompetent?" I mean, come on. Ugh.

2. Wonderful weekend in Bend. Got to visit with sis, BIL, and my mom, pretty much didn't do anything but read and hang around and chat.

3. Got tutoring in math squared away for Linnea. $$$ but it'll hopefully get her through the quarter. She only needs a C!

4. Woke up with a migraine very early this morning. Took meds, promptly puked them up. Slept off some of it, but hurting and still feeling very iffy and. well, fragile. I hate that feeling.

5. I'm not thrilled about Rishi Sunak as UK PM (not like it's any of my business, of course): he's a hard-core conservative with compromised ethics (his wife is corrupt as fuck and he has major conflicts of interest), but I'm kinda thrilled to see someone of South Asian descent as UK PM.

6. Waiting on the briefing from the DoJ on 'US National Security matter'. Please please please let it be a really bad day for Trump. I drove through eastern OR and WA yesterday and the number of Let's Go Brandon, Fuck Joe Biden, Trump is my President paraphernalia on display was sickening.

7. Drove a load of wood back with us. BIL has to take down some trees for fire safety reasons and, long story short, we ended up driving back with a load of logs in the back of the car with more to come on further trips: they can use them in the steam locomotive. We hoped to drop them off at the museum on the way home, but the wheelbarrow they left to transport the logs had a flat and it was too long to carry them all, so we'll have to go out this week. Does this type of random shit happen to everyone or just dh and me?

8. I want this rose: Moonlight in Paris.

1. Getting the Wales portion of the trip nailed down. Letting dh do most of that, since he's the one who wants to visit Heritage Railways and I don't want to be in the wrong place for the rides, LOL. We really hate trip prep.

2. Linnea finished her bubblegum amoxy. She was, needless to say, overjoyed. Tooth healing continues to progress well, only sigh issue is that she's supposed to use the syringe thing to clean stuff out for another three weeks. Which means dh and I have to rinse out her mouth each time she eats anything. This is not going to work well while traveling. Hopefully it'll be fine.

3. We finally got the last of Auri's mats done. It was a three-person job. Me to shave, dh to attempt to position the cat, and Perry to dispense the Churo. That stuff is kitty crack, OMG.

Note: finished this Monday morning because I got distracted last night.

1. Perry still negative so we're calling that good. He's freaking out, though, because his coach is still incommunicado, which is VERY worrisome, and Perry is supposed to be intensely preparing for the world qualifiers on the 14th/15th. He's going, since the ticket is bought, but the coach handled everything for him and the two other athletes, who are in a similar freaked out. In addition, youth nationals is next weekend and the coach is supposed to be bringing several athletes. Hopefully, they've heard more. Fuck Covid.

2. OMG, yesterday. So the idea was to head to Spokane for the weekend. We decided at the last minute to take the scenic route to reach I90. This took us through Snoqualmie. David was ready for lunch (we got out late) and stopped to get Chinese takeout. We decided to go to the Railway Museum to use the restroom and to borrow a picnic table. Got there, so really, completely by chance to find.... the locomotive and two coaches derailed in front of the museum buildings. Dear god. They managed, while waiting for the crane to arrive, to get the second coach back on the rails. The crane showed up, set up -that took a while- and got the locomotive back on the rails, then lifted the first coach up off its trucks, dh got it supported underneath and they dragged the trucks out of the way to be rebuilt. Dh, you ask? Why yes. He of course stayed to help -I was fine with that- and ended up the jeans that are OMG so grubby and no change! We did get to Spokane at 1am or so. Anyhow. It was hectic, and interesting. As for why the derailment? The usual: many little bits of contributing factors leading to nobody noticing that a critical mistake had been made. Complicated, and nobody, really, is directly responsible. Not even the rose bushes that were part of the problem!

3. What a day. Oh wow. We went out to Palouse Falls, which was spectacular, then took a long scenic drive all the way to Pullman WA and the WSU campus, which is much bigger than I expected and quite imrpressive. The Palouse hills are so incredibly beautiful. There was green-green-green everywhere! We saw marmots. Marmots are cool. It was a great day.

Palouse Falls.


This does not even begin to show a glimpse of the beautiful green rolling hills. It was taken while driving (no place to safely stop on many of these roads).

Linnea's club put on a scrimmage today, against Olympia Area Rowing, a team with the best acronym in rowing!

She was in a double with Sam. They just started rowing in a double two weeks ago, though Linnea had with Perry a few times already. They placed 4th in one race, and 2nd in the other, pretty cool (there were 7 boats). YAY! She's pleased with the results, as well she should be!

My big regret: she left the house with her hair in a pony tail, and often she ends up with it braided, but her boatmate decided to put it in a bun. End result is that I was not 100% much of the time if it was actually her and Sam, because, well, Linnea doesn't do buns. So I just had to watch all the boats, LOL. I did recognize her when she was in front of her, because I could see her rowing and that's my kiddo, bun or not.

The viewing was awesome for the viewing less awesome because it was a floating down which is always iffy for me (I can get seasick on one, especially when looking through binocs!). What was really less good: idiot parents, none of whom had masks, brought their damn dogs.

So. The dogs. OMG. One was a big black dog, probably little more than a puppy. It was ill-behaved and the owners didn't keep its leash short enough. It came behind me when they got there, and run into the back of my legs, and I almost fell into the freaking late. Then the German shepherd who was 200% well behaved and did not engage either the puppy or the other dog, whose owner said, and I'm quoting "She's a female and she is dominant on leash." I've read that expression before and what it translates to, now that I've seen it IRL, is nasty, ill-behaved, and ill-controlled. It got into an on-leash tussle with the black dog -German shepherd refused to engage, owners all making distressed sounds, me thinking oh fuck I am caught on a freaking floating dock in the middle of a dog fight.

Dh is at trains today, so I was alone. It's sad how many regattas and scrimmages he has had to miss over the years because of trains. For some reason, even though he doesn't go all that often, there seems to be a larger overlap on "his train days" and "regatta" than random Saturdays should dictate.

No post yesterday, which means I messed on my post-every-day-in-October thing. Oh well, I'll live, but I'm annoyed with myself.

Yesterday was... ok, but disappointing. We got up at 4am to get Linnea to the bus for the regatta to Portland, headed home for showers and breakfast, and then down to Portland. Weather was iffy but we found a place to watch her launch... and her boat launched. Got across the Willamette and was... directed back to the dock by officials. All the other boats slowly came back as well. A band of storms was coming through, and they wanted -with good reason- everyone off the water. At first it was a delay, and we hung around with dh's aunt, checking the radar to see if this was going to let up. Then there was a big lightening and thunderclap. That means a mandatory 30 minute delay, and they called the race shortly after. Of course that also meant that the weather cleared up right after and was quite nice for the rest of the afternoon. It turns out, there was more to it, since an EF0 tornado touched down in Portland a bit later... So eh. Majorly disappointing, of course, and that's it for Linnea's rowing season.

Kinda reminds me about how Perry's last race of the head season was cancelled last year as well for weather.

In majorly annoying Linnea appears to have lost her rowing tool bag. I hope someone picked it up but she couldn't find it and there are at least $50 of tools in there. Worse than the tools though, is the bag itself: it was a bag from a box of art pencils, and it fit the tools perfectly. I can replace the tools, but not the bag, grrr.

And in another complication for the week, the railway museum director where dh is on the board, volunteers on trains, and does much of the high level IT support called while we were waiting ofr Linnea's boat to launch. Their main server system drive crashed. Which means... tonight will be a diagnose the server and fix it or buy a new one night.

Anyhow, after the cancelled race, dh, his aunt, and I went to the Oregon Rail Heritage Center to check out their steam locomotives (again...) and then to a very late lunch/early dinner with his aunt. I ate too much (my weigh-in this week will no doubt reflect that...) but it was delicious and we had a nice time talking with her and making plans for Thanksgiving.

Got home late, uh, had dh drop me off a bit away from the house so I could finish up my steps for the day. I can't let Perry get toooooo far ahead!

So that was Sunday.

Because we are kind parents, I made Linnea's lunch for her last night and dh drove her to bus stop this morning! Of course, we'll be accused to being awful for some minor infraction later, but hopefully we've built up some teenager good will. And I do expect thanks for dealing with the trash bag full of wet items that Linnea left on the floor....

Ah well.

OK. Onto the day. I must walk. Plan my day in the lab tomorrow. Shop. And see what I can do to make dh's day easier, since his life just got more complicated.

ETA Well. Tools were located. I don't know if she knew where they were, but I found them in the bottom of the trash bag of wet items she asked dh to ask me to deal with. So YAY on that, I have to say.

Over a decade ago, when my brother was living with us, before Perry was born... ok, fine. In the late 90s, my brother saw a small article in our local rag. It was about the Northwest Railway Museum. We'd been there many a time, and dh, ever a train fan, loved the place. The article? Was a call for volunteers. Come learn to drive the train. Hello, says dh, you mean I could volunteer to do that?

And away he went. He was on a fast track to engineer, that spouse of mine. AC and I went to visit quite a few times, as he spent weekend days on train crew.

AC loved the place too. Perry was born, and we continued to go and... well, all three of the kids spent many hours on the train, or at the museum, or just hanging out.

A few years ago, when AC needed volunteer hours for school, she started volunteering out there. At first, she just did decorating for Santa train, then she started helping out at the cookie bakes for Santa train big time, earning herself a second-in-command position, and learning to bake on a coal fired stove, which I think it pretty cool.

She's 15, and can't officially be on train crew until she's 16, but they they only give the Rules Test once a year, so she took it today.

And passed. She can start training to be grounds person (helps with switching) and car attendant as soon as she turns 16, and she's planning on it!

Today she leaned to couple and uncouple cars. OK. And a few others things she said she'd tell me about later.

I wonder if I still have the hat somewhere?

Edit: this was written last night, but the photos didn't finish uploading until this morning.

We had an awesome day today!

( Cutting for length and photos... )