Stumbling Through Adulthood

It's a beautiful, cold, and sunny day here. We went rowing this morning. It was sculling, which I've only done twice before, so that was different and started poorly but got better. I was cold and tore up the back of my right hand, but it was so nice to be out.

Dh is doing better. His neck is still a wee bit sore, but it's improving. Phew.

Making fondue for dinner tonight. It'll just be Perry, dh, and me. Tomorrow I may have MIL and SIL over for brunch. Perry may or may not be there, he might be out rowing.

My aunt JoAnn died this year in March. It was hard. I remember clearly, on April 1st thinking about how that was a month that she hadn't lived in. Same as the seasons passed. Our first holidays without her. And now, as 2026 is about to commence and a whole new year is going to start without her. I'm still not coping well with this.

I've been applying for jobs. I can't tell if I'm going to get unemployment, since they claim that I was not available to work when I filed. Well, I was, because I was on leave, but also, the stupid university changed my end date... to help me, to be fair, allowing me to keep benefits for the rest of the month. However, they didn't tell me until pretty late and by then I was only checking my uni email once a week or so. Instead of Dec 1, they officially terminated me on Dec 3, two days later. I'll be really irked if getting benefits that I never used (stayed on dh's insurance, the state doesn't cover either of the meds I'm on... well, if covers one of them, but only partially and Zeppy not at all) costs me unemployment benefits. Sigh. Anyhow. Very few jobs out there, tbh, and many are temporary. We shall see.

Dh is on call this week. It's the third year in a row he's been on call between Christmas and New Year... and since rotations are 6 months apart, he's usually on call for the 4th of July weekend as well. Which means no hiking no outtings, nothing. It's quite annoying, especially since a) everyone else on his team is out, which makes being on call even more irksome, and b) hello? it's one of two non-Indians on his team.

Christmas in Bend was... fair to good, I guess. The week started poorly with the accident, but we were able to relax, get some walks in. The weather was decent, if windy a few of the days. We were able to pull off getting Linnea's bf down for less than 24 hours, but it was important. I still cannot believe we found a ticket -this was in October- for as cheap as it was, and that everything lined up well. Saw my mom a few times, with her boyfriend or whatever we want to call him, that was nice. Ate too much. We all bought too much chocolate! Hard to believe, but there is something as too much chocolate. A lot of it is home with me now, since my sister doesn't want it. I sent a lot back up to B'ham with Linnea and Perry and dh are doing a good job with the rest.

New Alzheimer's research that is incredibly positive. In mice, of course, and only in vitro for human cells, but this is better news than anything else I've seen: Pharmacologic reversal of advanced Alzheimer’s disease in mice and identification of potential therapeutic nodes in human brain. It's peer reviewed and a reputable journal, since fingers crossed. Free access, btw, if anyone wants to read it. I did, though I want to print it out and go over it more closely.

I don't do New Year's resolutions. I used to give myself projects for each month, and that worked well (especially the eating down the freezer and pantry months...) but I haven't in a while. My goals for this year are to get STUFF out of my house. My FIL's, my MIL's first, then we can work on ours, LOL. I have some hiking goals as well, but the most important of them is to get out as often as possible and to pre-plan most of our hikes. Considering the amount of crowding on trails and the impossibility of getting campgrounds any other time than 6+ months in advance, we need to be planning early ie now.

Talking about planning, we're thinking seriously about going to Japan this spring. I'm not 100% sure I want to, myself, since crowds freak me out and I don't like seafood :) but Linnea wants to go, and she should be graduating this winter (though she'd walk at the end of spring quarter in June) so. This would be with all three kids. They do seem to have embraced the 'any vacation can be all inclusive if you go with your parents' thing, LOL.

I really want to move forward with getting my novel (self) published this year. I just don't know how to get any traction on promoting it if I do. Plus the expense, LOL, since using AI to make a cover is a big no-no. Still. I need to work on that.

Any on knitting. I started a hat, had to rip it all out and never got started again since I was lazy at figuring out how to fix the mistake that caused the previous fail! I need to get on with it!

Ah well.

ETA. Thirty years (OMG) ago. Sob.

We went on a nice hike last weekend, I'll have to write it up tomorrow.

Next week we are camping overnight, then going on a long hike in a state park in Oregon. We'll be meeting up with my sis and BIL.

And then a week after that, we'll be doing an overnight in the tent in the Methow Valley and trying to get to a nearby trailhead early enough to find parking for another hike.

It's been a rough few month. My job sitch has gone to hell, it's really bad and I cry at work pretty much every day. I'm bored and frustrated. And there are no jobs. Getting out hiking is saving what little sanity I appear to have left.

Oh grr.

When we moved to this place, we had buses that went to both Woodinville and Redmond. We took the bus to Redmond routinely to get to transfer to a bus that would get us to the airport on public transportation. Then they removed our every-hour bus and gave us a commuter bus, not running at all on weekends. Then they killed bus transport out here completely, as the same time the local churches started hosting homeless camps.🙄

But!

We're getting a bus! Running every 30 minutes, all day!

Whee!

But.

Then I looked at the route. It goes to DT Redmond, but nowhere near the Redmond Transit Center, where I get my bus to UW. Instead, it goes to the new Redmond Station (light rail) then does the same route as the light rail to a bit past Microsoft... WHY?! The closest it comes to where I could get from the new bus to the bus to UW is about a 15-minute walk. Alternately, I can do a three-bus rigmarole. Which would add a minimum of 30 minutes to my 1-hour front door to lab commute.

I am so angry I could spit. Basically, if you want to go to Microsoft or DT Seattle, yay for you. If you want to get to UW, get fucked. At least we can get to the airport door-to-door now.

I was so freaking excited.

I don't have access to the program to check if I got it, and I don't remember the exact sequence of amino acids I was trying to delete, but one of my results from DNA sequencing is 18 nucleotides shorter than the others, and that corresponds to 6 amino acids.

The sequence was K-T-X-X-X-W, but I don't remember what the X-X-X were, LOL.

So I have to wait until Monday to find out if my week's worth of work actually paid off.

ETA Whee! It did in fact work. Dh and I went into Seattle to Julefest at the National Nordic Museum, and since we changed buses right in front of my work, we ended up going in on the way back and I checked the results to confirm the deletion and started the overnight culture. This should have been a matter of a few minutes but 1) we stopped at the hospy cafeteria first to get dh some food and 2) I wanted to show him my cells and when I looked at them, they were unexpectedly out of room, grr. So I had to passage them and the whole stop at work for 15 minutes ended up more like a stop at work for an hour and a bit. But having done that, hopefully I can take off early on Wednesday.

I like that alliteration.

1. Mice. Call me the Grim Reaper. I've going to have to euthanize 12 -at least, possibly as many as 15- cages of mice (three singletons, 12 pairs). All of them -except one cage- are past their breeding age, and we need pups. 😭 And let me tell you. In the era of JD Vance making it clear that post-menopausal women have no societal use beyond taking care of grandkids, euthanizing a bunch of too-old-to-breed mice is kinda adding to the horror of this. I need to find a new job. One without mice or anything else than bacteria, plants, or nematodes. I need to keep this one for a while longer so. The upside is that I have a small bit of research project to do. But mice.

2. The glory and the no-so-glory, LOL. Start with the latter. I bought a pair of leggings from amazon. Size XL, which should have been on the edge of big according to numbers. Too small. I returned and ordered... a pair of XXL, which just fit, they'll work, though after wearing them for an hour, they're weird and I wish I hadn't taken off the tags. I've been consistently wearing Ls in bottoms for a while now, so the XXL both vexed me and made me laugh at myself. In other weight loss news... My weight in kg finally starts with a 6. This is a major major fucking milestone for me, and a number I never ever EVER thought I'd see again. These medications are fucking miraculous.

3. Christmas is turning into a CF. My aunt -who will be availing herself of MAID in March, so this is her last Christmas- was going to come but then decided no, she'd come down to Bend so she can see my mom over November 11th. My brother, who wants to see my aunt and my mom, decided that he didn't want to fly over the holidays either and is planning on coming down early December. Christmas falls on a Wed which means to go to Bend, I'd need to take at least 2 days, and with only having 10 days a year of vacay, using two on a pre-planned trip last April etc, I'm pretty tight on vacation if I want to be able to take off more than a few days next summer. All this is complicated by the fact that my sister has said that if we don't come down for Christmas, she's leaving my mom and taking off for a beach somewhere with her spouse. I just don't know what to do. I drew my line which is my mom spending Christmas alone, so I might just have to have her up here while my sister travels, which is of course complicated by getting her here etc. Ideally everyone would such it up and actually spend the holidays here with me. We could do a Christmas Eve dinner, have brunch and drive up to Canada to spend a few hours with my aunt. But nobody is budging. I don't know what to do. My siblings are usually more flexible than this. Also, corollary about the vacation to the beach blackmail thing. I spent the last year I had free taking care of my mom. I took no vacations for a year (my sister took three or four that year). I had wanted my mom to go to memory care right away because this was clearly not a good solution, but sister insisted that she could come live with her as soon as the remodel was done. Fast forward the remodel is done, my mom is in memory care, which was now and would have been then, the right decision for her, she's doing great. Sister is still taking vacations to far off places and I'm stuck, again having spent the year I had planned on spending doing a lot of travel unable to go anywhere. So grr. Usually I'm on the same page as my siblings but two are retired and two have a lot more vacay than I do.

I have to write up our wonderful quick trip up to around Mt Baker. Camped one night, some great hiking, some gorgeous views, even if the weather wasn't completely cooperative. Tomorrow.

-- Niece and nephew are coming Saturday. SeaTac was hacked a few weeks ago and the visitor pass program isn't up and running. How am I supposed to pick them up? Well, says the airport, talk to the airline. Hello? The airline? The people who've make check-in 100% automatic and don't have live human beings anywhere any longer? Ugh. I'll figure it out, but my visitor pass plan is a no-go and that sucks.

-- That debate. OMG. Harris wiped the floor with him. Ultimately it means nothing, only the votes in a handful of states matter, which really really REALLY sucks, but it was still nice to see. Biden's last chess game was his most masterful, sacrificing himself to set up his replacement. Because most of the (white men) people calling for him to step down? Wanted Newsome or Whitmer (because it's always 'a woman is fine, just not that woman' with them), certainly not Harris. We'll see. Fingers crossed.

-- After the debate, I commented that I needed to make a donation (I did), and dh said, "Yeah, we need to pay for the 90 minutes of pure entertainment."

-- I had to euthanize a mouse today. I'm upset that I didn't notice she was in distress when I checked cages this morning, she was towards the back and while the mice usually come to the front of the cage to check me out, they don't always so I didn't think much of it. Anyhow, that was no fun at all. She was very sick, and I think was in the process of dying even before I turned on the CO2. I hate hate hate doing this. HATE. I whine to dh over text and his response was "Twisp says he'll subcontract for a nominal fee." Ha. As if. One more reason to start looking for another job, though realistically I should stay at this one at least a year if I want to have a prayer in hell of finding anything else.

-- I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed by life right now.

-- Trader Joe's no longer sells any fat free milk. Neither does Costco. Safeway doesn't have any left by the afternoon, same with Target. Whole milk is always plentiful on the shelf. WTF, retailers?

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.

1. My sister visited my aunt, and says that yeah, our impressions are correct: she's slipping a lot faster than my mom did. I have to get up to visit her or figure out a better way to call, she's hard to reach on the phone and evenings really don't work. I'm incredibly sad.

2. This week is dragging. I'm doing BORING stuff at work that has to be done, and as a result, I keep on thinking we're further on in the week than we actually are. I mean, I'd have sworn it was Thursday today, only not.

3. I am so tired of this heat. It's been above 80 (mostly high 80s) for weeks not and it's nasty. When is Fall again?

1. I don't want to go to work tomorrow. Had I thought about it I might have taken the day off. Though I only have a meager amount of vacation days.

2. Talking about meager amount of vacation days... It's absolutely effing ridic that I don't accumulate -me or anyone else with 10 days of vacation a year- a day for one month worked. I mean, come on. So so little vacation.

3. I'd rather have the 5th off so I could stay up with fireworks and a non-existent party until late and not have to worry about getting up tomorrow morning.

1. Wah! I had an hour left on an audiobook and it got snatched away! I won't get it back for at least six weeks. WAH, wah, woe is me. LOL.

2. I suck at mouse handling, and I've been so far deftly avoiding doing any mouse work in the lab. The undergrad research assistant is happily dealing with all of that, I'm deeply impressed with her sang-froid. That said, I have a project that is finally starting to coalesce and I'm quite excited by it.

3. News is good on my brother-in-law, but it's still going to be a sucky few months. We'll be taking my mom the week he has surgery, it looks like dh will have to head down to Portland by himself to pick her up. I think we can give her back, so to speak, the following weekend, but I hope we can do it in Portland because the drive down and up, Saturday and Sunday would be rough. We can't keep her the additional week, because it's a steam weekend at the railway museum for Mother's Day and dh will be at train Thursday, Friday, and Saturday or Sunday, so. Anyhow, we'll all manage, but it's stressful and I really wish my sister had agreed to memory care earlier.