Month: February 2011

I forgot to mention that Little, our developmentally delayed frog, left this world earlier this month and went to the (non-Bisphenol-A contaminated) pond in the sky. Vince was heartbroken and didn’t want to just flush him down the toilet, so he’s in the freezer right now awaiting a spring burial.

It took me a few weeks to clean out the tank and welcome new inhabitants into the aquarium. And they have new digs – the Parthenon. We got four goldfish and there is one that you can already tell in this photo is almost about to join Little in the great big pond in the sky and his corporeal remains are now in the freezer (in the same baggie) as Little.

Maxi has been a great big thorn in my ass. She has a dominate streak that needed to be squelched and we started last week when I regained the alpha position in the household. I am not naturally an alpha, so when it became clear that I needed to be alpha or else Maxi would end up running the house, I had to change my whole personality. Just ask Vince and Jeremy, I was yelling at them for a few days to SIT! STAY! It was not very much fun for any of us. I wanted the submissive puppy, the submissive one! Not the one with a Napoleon complex, because Maxi at 40 lbs is the smallest one of us all.

Jeremy worked from home on Thursday. He comes with me on my morning run.

We take the doggies with us. They wait patiently for Sharon, the school crossing guard, who always has treats.

And we work and work and work. (And I eat cake. See blue plate under on my desk.)

I work on a two-week cycle called a biweek. Every two weeks, a computer system does its batch job and calculates how many patents I have processed and sees if I have met my quota for the biweek. My job is a monotonous mountain of paperwork, but I can not tell you how much pleasure I get from starting over with a clean slate at the beginning of each biweek.

At the start of each biweek, I give myself a pep talk and tell myself, this is the biweek where for TWO weeks, everything will run smoothly according to plan and nothing out of the ordinary will happen. This has not happened for many, many biweeks.

Edda has been sick all week. I know she will miss school tomorrow as she still is trying to shake off her fever today (day 4 of the fever). She is chipper now, but earlier in the week, she has been hovering at the 104 F fever mark, which is scary, but it is how Edda typically gets sick. We took her to the doctor and checked for ear/throat issues – I really wish Edda could tell me if her ear or throat hurt or if she has a UTI. It’s, unfortunately, always a big mystery. I want to buy my own ear light thing-y and my own strep tests so I can run them myself at home.

Edda is still running a pretty high fever today – I’m hoping it breaks tonight, but it’s been a struggle to keep her happy all day. I’m typing this in the dark, listening to Edda breathe, Ruby snore and hoping that Vince falls asleep before 8:30, which is not happening.

Six hours before she became feverish, we were at dim sum with the rolling carts! I know that this isn’t particularly exciting for those living in NYC, SF or LA, but I consider finding the rolling cart dim sum in DC to be a super exciting event! My friend, V. has been on the lookout for the carts for months now and I hadn’t been able to find any dim sum carts anywhere in the DC area. But I finally located the elusive dim sum and we ended up gorging ourselves silly.

And it was fabulous, I haven’t had it in years. It was fabulous except for the dessert, which generally is awful. Chinese people are good at preparing meat, not so good at preparing sweets. We tried this rather patriotic jello type dish. We decided it tasted like suntan lotion.

Edda became feverish last night and she still doesn’t feel well today. I’ve spent the afternoon by her side, feeding her syringe-fuls of water to keep her hydrated and watching old episodes of Gray’s Anatomy which before this week, I had never seen a single episode.

2010 was over. However, 2010 was a most-traveled year for us , distance-wise. We were in Shanghai for over a month, in Hong Kong for less than 40 days and in Egypt for 10 days. While in Shanghai and Hong Kong, we took numerous side trips. It was fun. We also climbed the famous Huang Shan (Yellow Mountains) together.

I’m beginning to understand why there are so many mommy blogs of kids who are pre-school age and not so many once the kids get older. Things that are happening in the house are complicated to explain and stretch out for days/weeks at a time and pretty much just involves us talking/arguing/discussing things that need to be addressed/done in the next 5 minutes/scheduled (or we are just yelling at Maxi, the puppy). It’s not very photogenic, nor is it really interesting to anyone else outside the family unit. Trust me, I’ve explained some of the things to friends at work and sometimes I get a shrug, sometimes I get a yawn, and sometimes I get the response, “I have no idea what you are talking about.” Hmmm…

I’m not sure where this blog is going, but I’m still trying…

We got an energy audit done on the house because we were concerned about our high heating bills. It’s sponsored by Pepco and was only $100 (and is probably going to reveal thousands of dollars of possible improvements to the house to recoup probably less than 10% of our heating bill for 3 months out of the year…)

They come and put this thing on your door, make sure all the windows are closed and suck air out of the house to see how leaky your house is. Pretty cool.

Jeremy and I also went out on a date to learn Adult, Child and Infant CPR. It was a 6 hour class taught by the Red Cross and I really had a nice time relearning CPR. I think the last time I was certified was in 1992 when I was training to be and actually passed the test to become an EMT.

We failed at actually putting together Valentines for Vince’s class. I didn’t realize when I help Vince choose the Mr. Potato(e) Head ones that each one required a whole mess of stickers on them…

They did not get done.

I told Vince to just bring a bag of lollipops. “How will they know the lollipops are from me?”, he asked. I told him that he was out of time and that he would just have to announce it to the whole class. He said OK.

Maybe next year.

Edda’s horse experience has shifted from hippotherapy to therapeutic riding simply because a certified OT is not overseeing her session anymore. Which is mainly a plus for us as the session is cheaper and seems not a lot different from before. I prefer make it even lower key by calling them Edda’s horseback riding lessons. It’s something we do for fun (or at least Edda and Jeremy do for fun, as I rarely go to the lessons).

I asked Jeremy if he remembered the name of the horse, and alas, he did not, so I might have to name this horse in the photo myself. Hmmm. It might help if I could figure out if the horse was a boy or girl.

Here’s Edda taking full advantage of the rocking motion of the horse by falling asleep sitting up. Woo hoo!