It’s almost June, but here’s what I read in March. I didn’t plan it this way, but March was a very romance heavy month.
The Marquis Who Musn’t by Courtney Milan – This is the second book in Milan’s Wedgeford Trials book that centers on a 19th century village in England with a huge Asian immigrant population. Naomi Kwan wants to take ambulance classes and learn first aid, but as a single woman, is constantly told she couldn’t. She enters into a fake engagement with the handsome new in town Liu Ji Kai in order to register for classes as an engaged woman. But Kai has other motives for being in town. Warm friendship ensues. Not my favorite Milan – her plotting is a little clunky, but I can always count on her for smart characters, fascinating and well researched historical settings, and good writing with some spot on sentiments. Sentiments like this: “Is that why she hasn’t yelled at me anymore about the ambulance class?” Her aunt simply shook her head. “Since when does my older sister yell?” Naomi felt her nose wrinkle. “Technically correct. Emotionally false.” Or this one: “Let me teach you a trick,” Mr. Liu said. “You seem to need some way to fend off questions, and this works for about everything… Go ahead. Repeat the question you just asked me.” “Who are you?” He gave her a cutting look – a sweep of his eyes from head to toe as if he were a scythe, slashing her down. “My private situation is none of your business.” She staggered back. He radiated triumph. “See? Easy enough.” “Easy for you,” She muttered. “How do you expect me to use that at home? Have you no parents?” Even in 19th century England, Milan has captured the angst I often feel as an Asian daughter.
Ten Things that Never Happened by Alexis Hall, read by Will Watt – Amnesia plots are absolutely not my thing, but this book kind of turns that trope on its head. Sam runs a bed and bath store and thinks his jerk CEO/boss Jonathan is going to fire him, endangering the jobs of all his employees, so when Sam has an accident while talking to Jonathan, he fakes amnesia to buy himself time. Of course uneasy friendship, respect, understanding, and love ensues. Along with a pretty terrific cat. I really enjoyed this book- it was laugh out loud funny in places, and beautifully touching in others. I loved the narrator- he made this book the audio equivalent of all my favorite Bdritish rom coms rolled into one, with a colourful and hilarious cast of characters.
Brazen and the Beast by Sarah MacLean – second novel in the Bareknuckle Bastards series. I really like Sarah MacLean- her novels are really well written, her heroines are smart and independent and there are always finely detailed secondary characters. This novel involves Hattie, who wants to run her father’s shipping business, and Beast who is… actually I’m a little foggy on the twists and turns of the plot points and how Hattie and Beast got involved. I think that bit was a little thin. It involves a long held grudge and a smuggling ring. Hattie and Beast were great characters. The plot was… incidental.
The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan – slight and pithy. To be honest, I don’t remember much of it, though my notes seem to indicate that I found a lot of it worth highlighting. It’s the story of a romance where each chapter is based on a letter of the alphabet.
The L section, is Latitude – “ What a strange phrase- not seeing other people. As if it’s been constructed to be a lie. We see people all the time, the question is what we do about it.” Isn’t that always the question?
S for scapegoat – “I think our top two are: not enough coffee. Too much coffee.” Also so true.
X for ..x – “Doesn’t it strike you as strange that we have a letter in the alphabet that nobody uses? It represents one-twenty-sixth of the possibility of our language, and we let it languish. If you and I really, truly wanted to change the world, we’d invent more words that started with x.”
Daring and the Duke by Sarah MacLean– this was the final book in her Bare Knuckle Bastard series. After I read Brazen and the Beast, I figured I might as well finish the series. I enjoyed it, but not as much as Brazen and the Beast. I really wanted this book to be an epic saga in the vein of Gone With The Wind or Thorn Birds. The heroine Grace is a fascinating character and I wanted to read about how she ran away from her childhood home and built her empire, but the story starts after she’s already become a powerful figure in the underworld. Ewan is fine, complicated and kind of puzzling to me, and he’s the least interesting part of Grace’s story. Also- massive overuse of the word “lush”.
The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillroy– this book was on a San Francisco reading list and since we were about to go to San Francisco, I put it on my Libby holds. Then a few days before we were going to leave for the Bay Area, I saw a copy of it in the Little Free Library in front of our piano teacher’s house. How fortuitous! Anyhow- this book was fine. It features a meet cute in an elevator in Sam Francisco, an impromptu wedding date and then dating life. It was pleasant enough but there was a certain lack of tension in the relationship- the book features two smart independent people who clearly like each other- they just have to figure out the logistics. The things that could have made the book interesting – namely, she’a Black and he’s White- gets mentioned and then dropped and never really addressed.
On my proverbial Night stand:
The Brontes: Wild Genius on the Moors- so close to finishing this one. Charlotte is getting married!!!!!
My Fair Brady- YA book set in the world of the high school musical.
Sourdough by Robin Sloan – audiobook that I picked because it was on the shorter side and I knew I could get through it before my commutes got shorter. It’s about a woman working in tech who inherits a sourdough starter and it changes her life. Makes me want to revive those starters in my fridge.
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi – middle aged female pirate, leaves her ten year old daughter at home to carry our one last, hopefully lucrative, assignment. It is proving delightful so far. I’m laughing a lot.
The view from backstage. The Emperor’s throne is waiting in storage behind the projection screen.
I opened my show! The 12 year old opened her show! The 12 year old closed her show! Yay! It’s been a very packed week.
First of all – the 12 year old’s middle school production of Annie Jr. was delightful! She played Tessie, one of the orphans. Tessie is the one who says, “Oh my goodness! oh my goodness!” The Husband noted that he could pick her out in a crowd because of the huge plaid pocket I put in her pinafore. I couldn’t go to the first performance because I was working, but I went to the second performance, which was also the closing performance. It’s so funny seeing the whole show come together after spending all that time running lines with her. There is something very mechanical about running lines and I was so impressed by how comfortable she was onstage. (In the program, the 12 year old thanked her parents from runnign lines with her!”) And the whole production – I mean obviously the production values aren’t terribly high because it’s middle school, but it had it’s own handmade charm. There was one scene with a couch, and then the couch had to move downstage for the next scene so we watched the kids move it and afterwards I asked the 12 year old why the couch wasn’t on wheels? And she said, “Well, we borrowed it from the Teacher’s Lounge.” Which I think perfectly sums up the whole thing.
In the program, the twelve year old thanked, among others, “…her parents who helped her prepare for auditions, run lines, an boost her confidence.” I thought that was really sweet of her.
And that night after she came home from getting ice cream with her cast mates, she started crying because the whole thing was over and oh how I know that feeling – I think that is one thing that makes theatre so special – that high you get from doing something ephemeral and the low you get from realizing that it’s ephemeral. And even though you know you can audition for more shows, you’ll never repeat this very exact show again with these very exact cast mates.
The night after the 12 year old had her shows, I opened my show. There was a very fancy party afterwards. I wore a dress – the other dress I bought at Macy’s in March when I bought that red jumpsuit that I wrote about last month. This dress probably isn’t quite fancy enough for an opening night party, but it is comfortable and forgiving – the smocked waist is elastic – and flowy, which I like. I wish it came in another colour, because black/white/grey isn’t my favorite color palatte. I don’t wear make-up, and have no clue what to do with my hair now that it hasn’t been cut for a year and is looking a little overgrown, so I think maybe the whole look is a little unpolished – but there are limits to what I want to do with myself and hair and make-up don’t quite make it into those boundaries right now. I did wear heels, though, so there’s that.
Bathroom photo of me in my dress.
The party had all sorts of tasty Asian inspired food, a photo booth, lots of loud music. I had fun talking to people I don’t usually get to talk to. The best thing, though was the fried pickled ginger. Who would have thought to do that? It was DELICIOUS.
fried pickled ginger. Amazing.
The opening night party was the Saturday before Mother’s Day, so it was nice that I kind of had a pass to sleep in (until 8am!) then next morning. All week, the kids had hinted that they had planned a special Mother’s Day. Not to be a grinch, but I kind of don’t love celebrating Mother’s Day. (Or my birthday, or anything where I have to be the center of attention). I don’t like surprises, so the family was going to tell me what they had planned, but then they were giving out tickets to teh White House Garden Tour for Mother’s Day Sunday, and I asked the Husband if he wanted to go. And he said, “But we’ve planned Mother’s Day!” and I reminded him that my father was in town and he could watch the kids and when would we have a chance for free childcare while we go out together again? And he said okay. So on Mother’s Day Sunday, the 11 year old made French toast (perhaps with help from her siblings – I’m not sure since I was in bed), we ate the French toast, I took the 4 year old to her agility class and then when I got home, the Husband and I took the Metro downtown.
First stop was coffee. The Husband had wanted to check out this Indonesian coffee shop for ages, but we were never in the area at the right time. It is a fifteen minute walk from the White House so it was the perfect pitstop. I had a chai and a cherry croissant. The chai was delicious- bitingly spicy and just a hint of sweetness. I asked afterwards who made the chai mix and the barista enthusiastically pointed me to the company, Soul Chai. Definitely check them out if you like your chia spicy and not sugary. I’ll be ordering some for sure.
After coffee, we proceeded to the White House. Now getting tickets to the White House Gardens tour is not exactly a rarified thing. Thousands of tickets are passed out for each weekend of garden tours, and they are free. (Honestly, I’d be annoyed if they weren’t free…) However, I was able to get tickets through work, which meant that I didn’t have to stand in line at 8:30am to get tickets. tl:dr – I found the whole experience rather… underwhelming and would not stand in line for tickets unless you were an American history/government fan.
I think calling it a “Gardens Tour” was a little bit misleading. It was more of a “Grounds Tour”. The pre-ordained path allowed people to view the gardens from a distance, but there weren’t a lot of flowers to be seen as we walked along. My take away – the White House grounds is a lot of grass and trees. Which, I supposed makes sense – grass because you need to land helicopters, and trees because it seems like planting a tree is a beloved activity for past residents of the White House to leave their mark and/or honour an occasion. And I guess if I’m being honest, while the horticultural side of the garden tour felt pallid, the historical part of the tour did feel quite momentous. Here was a tree planted by the Obamas, here are the windows to the Oval Office, here is the Rose Garden and that walk way seen so many time on the West Wing. So I suppose what the garden tour lacked for me in actual garden, it made up in weighty historical significance and that did make for some pondering.
There was a military band playing music throughout the day. They played lots of Disney tunes.
This was as close as we got to the Rose GardenThat’s the oval office there, you can see if you squint. Michelle Obama’s vegetable garden and Jill Biden’s cut flower garden.This commemorative oak planted by Herbert Hoover came from Lincoln’s birthplace. I like the juxtaposition of that with the Washington Monument in the background.
After the Gardens Tour, we decided to take in a museum. The White House is next to the Renwick, which is an American Art Museum that focuses on craft and handiwork. I’ve seen several things there, and really found it intriguing so I was eager to go again. I thought there was an Amish quilt exhibit there, but when I arrived, I found that the Amish quilt exhibit was at the American Art Museum in Gallery Place/ Chinatown, which was seven or eight blocks away. Oops. We took in the exhibits at the Renwick anyway, the best being this exhibit of nets hung from the cieling. It was visually appealing, but also relaxing experience because you had to lay down on the floor to get the full impact:
View looking up.
After we took in the other exhibits in the Renwick, we decided to go to the American Art Museum and see the Amish Quilt exhibit after all since the restaurant that we picked for dinner was in that direction anyway.
Love the effect of the black squared to create negative space on this quilt.
I thought this exhibit was stunning and though provoking. What struck me, apart from the visual aspect of the quilts, was the idea that all these quilts hung in a museum, yet they were all labelled “Artist: unidentified” – it made me ponder the tension between quilts that are quite skillfully and and artistically assembled – the patterns and colours are quite intricate – and the Amish who are a modest, attention shunning people. Highly recommend this exhibit.
I love the piecework on this quilt – it looks random, but really has a lot of structure.
This one is called Stairway to Heaven.
Such variation in colour and pattern.
I mean look at that amazing stitchwork!
More exquisite stitchwork!
After the exhibit, we went to dinner. Recently the New York Times published and article entitled “The 25 Best Restaurants in Washington, DC Right Now.” (Hilariously, the comments are full of people noting that a lot of the restaurants on the list are in the Maryland or Virginia suburb, so the title of the article is misleading. I’m surprised by the vehemence of some of the comments.) Some of the restaurants on the list I’ve been to, but many were new to me, especially those in the city since we very rarely eat out in the city. There is no where I feel my suburban mom-ness more than in a hip DC restaurant. At any rate, we decided to check out a restaurant on the list, Baan Siam, a Thai restaurant in Mount Vernon Square, near Gallery Place. This isn’t like your standard Thai restaurant – pad thai and drunken noodles are nowhere to be seen. The food is from northern Thailand. The Husband and I ordered fried pumpkin, fried spicy mushrooms (enoki mushroom – this was novel because I’d never had fried enoki mushrooms and the long thin shape made it well suited for finger food), spicy chicken in banana leaf (very spicy, but also sweet, sour, and funky in a good way), shrimp chili paste fried rice with fried pork belly, and a small cucumber salad. It was all super flavorful and tasty. And for dessert, we had mango with sticky rice, because of course.
After dinner we took the metro back home, arriving back at the house aroun 7:45pm. When we got home, things were pretty quiet, so the Husband and I snuck in the back door and collapsed on the living room couch waiting for someone to notice we were home. No one did. Everyone ended up going to bed super late- not ideal for a Sunday night, but it was all fine.
Grateful for – the Tech Week edition:
-Blue highlighter. This is sort of a weedy work hack, but – There is one entrance I cue (the green post it) that is in the middle of an orchestral interlude. I like to think I read music pretty well, but I always felt iffy about this entrance, never confident that I was cuing it in the right place. Reading a piano reduction of the orchestral part can be confusing because there are so many notes in the page and I have to figure out which notes correspond to what I’m hearing, and if I don’t count it completely accurately, I get easily lost. Most nights it was kind of a prayer and a “feeling” for where the cue was. So one day during tech, I took a blue highlighter and highlighted the notes of the melody. And suddenly, I could see what I was listening for and I could follow the music and cue the sequence perfectly. Sometimes I just have to highlight what I need and ignore the rest of the notes and I won’t get lost. I’m sure there’s a life lesson in there somewhere.
-dropping my flashlight. One of my backstage tools is my mini Maglite. It is essential for lighting the way backstage when everything is dark. I converted my light with a kit so that it is push button operated instead of twist. Anyhow, at the start of tech, it was working somewhat sporadically which was kind of annoying and I was going to order myself a new one. Then at one point, I accidentally dropped the Maglite on the floor and it started to work! Yay!
-The Husband who held down the fort – handling pick up and dinner and bedtime on his own all week. Also while dealing with a whole slew of plumbing problems at our rental house. And then he even brought all the kids to my dress rehearsal, even though it meant a late night for everyone. I think the 4 year old fell asleep in the last act, but the other two kid watched the whole thing.
-middle school drama programs. For giving my kid such a great experience. For giving her an outlet to be silly and make friends. For giving her a place to go after school. For bringing the community together to cheer these talented and enthusiastic kids on.
Looking Forward To:
-Being home in the evenings – now that my show is open, I’m looking forward to being able to pick up the kids from the school bus, make dinner, put kids to bed and zone out in front of the tv with the Husband watching Brooklyn 99 or 30 Rock or maybe we’ll get to that third season of Ted Lasso.
-Swim Season – We’ve signed up for the pool, and I’m excited to spend time at the pool and to cheer the 12 year old on at swim meets. There were a couple days last week that were blazingly hot and I thought how it feels like summer, but we’re not quite there yet.
-Dirty Meat Party – There is currently twenty pounds of meat marinating in my fridge in preparation for the grilling party that we have every time a certain colleague/friend of mine is in town working on a show. It’s probably the biggest party we throw every year and while I don’t always like having 25 people descend on my house, I do love seeing everyone having a good time. There is some rain in the forecast, which makes me a little nervous because I am ill equipped to put 25 people inside my house. But we can’t postpone it because then the meat will be over-marinated. Also – the party has always been called the Dirty Meat Party, but maybe I should reconsider because as the 7 year old ran to the school bus, he called out, “I can’t wait to eat dirty meat!!!!”
-Reading this – middle aged female pirate goes on adventures. It’s proving delightful so far. I’ve laughed out loud so many times while reading it.
I find this cover a little terrifying…
What we ate: The only dinner I made at home last week was Friday night, my day off. I made this Pearl Couscous with Creamy Feta and Chickpeas . I added some shrimp in the last 5 minutes of baking. It was very tasty, but I wish there was a way to make it a one pot meal. perhaps just cooking it all on the stovetop and not baking it?
In lieu of the other dinners that week, here is another “At Work All Day” lunchbox picture:
Lunch: broccoli quinoa salad, which I had made last week and still working through. Plum.
Dinner: marinated beans with potatoes and arugula. Avocado and a boiled egg to eat along with.
Snacks: cut up apples and hummus, protein bar (from Costco, really just a glorified candy bar), two carrots (yes, I just toss them in whole. easier that way), beef stick (actually for the drive home to snack on when I get sleepy.)
Half way through tech week! I had this idea that I would go one of those “Photo every hour” posts that Engie or Stephany do periodically- I thought it might be a a good way to capture a day of tech for me to look back on. Hah hah. Once we got into the evening rehearsal, shit gets real and I couldn’t keep up. Friday, our first tech rehearsal onstage, was particularly busy – our Production Assistant was out sick, so I had to do their job and my job. I logged 25,000 steps and climbed 34 flights of stairs that day. Part of the reason for all those stairs is that our set is three levels high. Here’s the view from the top level:
(Side note – it’s been much debated on how to refer to the levels of the set. There is a ground level, a middle level and a top level. Now if, in rehearsal, someone says, “Go to the second level,” which level would you go to? I would go to the mid level, but many people would go to the top level. We eventually just ended up calling them “mid” and “top” level.)
But I did take some pictures throughout the day, so here is a dump of pictures of that first day of tech last week, in and around the “intense, running around, and checking attendance, and listening to instructions, and relaying instructions to cast and crew, and why is everyone talking all at once? and making sure people didn’t get run over by the scenery or props, and took their cues on time and oh my god, and, how do we get thirty people onstage through that three foot wide gap? and yes, you should wear the hat now and no, now you take it off, here, just give it to me, and are people going to make their costume changes in time for their next cue? No they aren’t, they’ve just missed their entrance, and where are the dancers? and we need to give them a break, and what is that rule in our union contract? and the director wants to do things a different way, okay we’ll make that work, and we want to add fire? and this singer is now dead, can they go home or will we go back and do their scene again? and oh my goodness, we managed to tech through the whole show, thank GOD” part of the day….
Thursday was a set looks (where stage management and the director looks at the set for the first time and decide that, “Yep, this is what we were expecting.” and we make all sorts of discoveries as to how people will get onstage.) and then a Stizprobe (first time singers are with orchestra – sit and sing).
Friday was the first Piano Tech rehearsal, the first time onstage staging rehearsal for everyone. This is what was in my camera roll for that day:
6:30am – wake up – summer morning sunlight and I make the bed.
7:35am – roll out my yoga mat for 10 mins of yoga. The 4 year old helps.
8:30am – breakfast, eaten at the kitchen counter, with a book. Cottage cheese and blueberries – I’m trying to eat high protein/ high fiber breakfasts and lean away from the heavy carb breakfasts. Which is hard because bagels are tasty.
8:45a – quick 5 minutes of laundry folding before taking the kids to the school bus. Those three small folded piles all I manage to fold in five minutes.
10:30am- At work. paperwork. Make rehearsal logs for the day. Usually our production assistant does this, but they are sick this day. That’s my favorite brand of mechanical pencil – and I found that they sell it with a red barrel. Red is my favorite colour, so I ordered a whole box of them.
12:30p – lunch, sitting outside. I’m going to spend much of the day running around in the dark – Gotta grab sunlight when I can.
1:15pm – checking attendance. The rehearsal scheduling department gives me a list of people who are running late to rehearsal.
2:30pm – An hour into the first piano tech rehearsal. My music stand.
4:30pm – random picture of how we want to set this giant 30′ silk onstage – I take pictures of a lot of things because sometimes it’s easier than trying to describe to the crew how we want things to look. Sometimes I say things like, “That guillotine needs to be centered this spot on stage.” And it still isn’t clear because everyone has their own perspective and they move the thing here and there and I try to explain and then finally it goes in the right place and the crew says,. “You mean the upstage edge needs to split center?”. And I say, “Yes, thank you,” And I think to myself, “It probably would have been clearer if I had said it that way. Thank you for figuring that out.”
6:00pm – Run at dinner time. The weather was beautiful.
7:00pm – Quick picture in the bathroom of my piano tech outfit. I always wear the same thing – floral patterned top (Uniqlo) and linen joggers (Gap – patched in two places and maybe need to be replaced soon.). I like to wear bright colours during tech so I can be seen onstage. I do wear shoes, but I had just changed out of my running clothes and hadn’t put them on yet.
9:30pm – one hour left in the evening rehearsal, back at my music stand for a moment. These blue index cards are where I write who is making an entrance. If it’s just a handful of people, I will write it directly on a Post It, but when there are 30+, I write it on an index card and put it in my binder. I often only write first initial and last two letters of last name. ie. John Smith would be JSm. I had an assistant director once who called these the “airport codes” for each chorister. It’s a good feeling for me that I’ve been with these choristers so long that when I’m writing down the mass chorus group, writing their airport code takes no mental effort at all.
11:33pm – screenshot. Sometimes when I’m leaving and I realized I’ve I forgotten to log out of my timesheet, I take a screenshot of my phone so I remember what time I walked out the door. I get a lot of spam in my email.
12:10am – arrive home. I find that the lunchboxes I ordered for the kids have arrived. Yay! In the past week, one child has cracked their lunchbox and the other has lost theirs (I don’t want to be the one to open that lost lunch box when it is recovered…). I do have one extra for each child, but I like having a few spares for those times when the lunchbox doesn’t get cleaned the night before. I love these Sistema lunchboxes because they are relatively inexpensive and they can go in the dishwasher. And they are durable. We’ve had ours for about four years now. I was going to buy just one spare, but amazon also sold them in a four pack for about $12/each, so I went that route. They are getting harder to find, so I worry what will happen when Sistema stops making this size. Maybe I should order another 4 pack…
And that was a photo summary of Day 1 of tech. Day 2 of tech was Saturday, and I didn’t have to be at the theatre until 1pm, so I did a load of laundry (and hung it to dry), took the 7 year old to his morning soccer – the game was on despite the drizzly drizzly weather, and then dropped the 12 year old to her voice lesson on the way to work. On the days when I don’t have to be in until 1pm, I feel like the morning should be luxurious, but then it fills ups, especially on weekends. I spent the first part of the day at work light walking – basically we stand onstage while the lighting designer sets light levels – which is kind of tedious, but can be beautiful:
The evening was a piano dress rehearsal, first time in costume. It’s always a very long night, but we got through the whole show, which is always good.
Here is a random spot of beauty on asphalt, to break up all the work goings on, as seen on my run:
Doing Something You Love. I had a text exchange with a colleague last week. She was asking me about someone that had worked with me as a Production Assistant previously. (Side note: This really happens. Not sure how it is in other industries, but word of mouth is huge. It doesn’t matter who you list as a reference – if I know you’ve worked with someone I know, I will often have a casual conversation about you.). This former Production Assistant wanted to move on from stage management, and I replied to my colleague, “I think I knew she wanted to do something different. I’m always surprised when people don’t want to be stage managers because I genuinely like what I do a lot.” And my colleague wrote back – “Me either… I love what I do.”
Then I heard this interview with filmmaker Caitlin Cronenberg, who is the daughter of a famous filmmaker. And Cronenberg was asked about her feelings on nepotism, and she said, “You know, there are children of people doing things, and it’s because you look at your family member making art for a living and enjoying what they do. And you say, I want to love what I do. I want to make art for a living. And that’s why so many actors, so many directors and producers have children who are also in the business.
And it made me think how the 12 year old used to say that she wanted to be a stage manager, and I always thought that it was because she thought the work was interesting. But maybe, that isn’t it. Maybe she realizes that finding something you love to do – whether that is your job, or something outside of your job – that is important. And maybe she thinks, “Hey, there’s this thing that mom really loves doing… maybe I would love doing that too.” It made me think about how much my children pick up on the attitude/emotions/moods that I exude and how important it is to model that intangible quality – we all want our children to be happy, so they also need to have models of how to be happy. I hope that the 12 year old finds something that she loves doing. She doesn’t have to love it 100% of the time – I certainly don’t love my job 100% of the time; I most certainly don’t love parenting or painting or writing 100% of the time – but she has to love enough aspects of that thing that she finds periodic joy in doing it – not the results, not the end product, but in the doing.
Grateful For: -The sanitation workers who pick up our trash and recycling. The other day, I came home after dropping the kids at school and the recycling trucks were making their routes. They just finished our house, and then I saw them take my elderly neighbor’s trash and recycling cans back up her driveway for her. It was such a nice thing for them to do! The Husband, who used to work for the county’s solid waste department, says that if you have difficulties putting your trash cans at the bottom of your drive, you can have your house coded so that the sanitation workers come get your trash cans and put them back if you want – there are special colour trash bins for this. I love that. I guess taking trash cans down to the curb was one of those things I took for granted (the 12 year old does it at our house), and I’m glad that there are provisions for people for whom it is difficult.
-Child minders. There are 20 children in our show. I am so grateful for the child minders to when the children to and from stage and keep an eye on them when they are not onstage.
-my sewing machine. I spent Sunday finishing up the 12 year old’s costume for Annie. I had to hem the pinafore, so I plugged in my sewing machine that has been dormant for several months now, and it worked. My mother in law had passed this sewing machine down to me – I believe it belonged to her aunt. It isn’t fancy – pretty much just does a straight stitch – but I don’t need fancy for where I am in my sewing skills. I was able to hem the pinafore. Then I added a pocket with some scrap fabric, because I know when I work on shows we are always asking for pockets in costumes. Then I looked at everything together, and the muslin pinafore looked a little bright, so I tea dyed it. It was my first time tea dying something and the process was pretty easy. It’s hard to tell in the picture, but the pinafore is now a light brown color. Also – another skill I did for the first time, is I made a button hole! The top of the dress dipped a little low in the front, so I added a button and made a button hole. Oh – here’s another gratitude – I’m grateful for creators who post tutorials of how to do things on the internet.
Old faithful sewing machine. I say a prayer of thanks every time it manages to turn on and work. Look – it’s the beginning of a buttonhole!
before tea dying.After tea dying- she will not be wearing athletic socks. Also our house is a stye.
Looking forward to: -Opening Night for me!
-Opening Night for the 12 year old!
-Orchestra rehearsals. We start adding the Orchestra to our rehearsals this week. I often think how lucky I am that I get to listen to a full orchestra play all the time. The wall of sound, the colours of the different instruments, the bone vibrating sensation of six trumpets and six trombones playing backstage, right next to me. There is something so amazing about that degree of unamplified music -so immediate and so grand. I love it all.
-Watching Starstruck. I started the third season of this show while making lasagna last week. I loved the first two seasons of this rom com about Jessie, who unknowingly hooks up with a famous movie star Tom in Season 1 and the fall out from that. The show is hilarious and touching. I don’t usually like shows where people make a mess of their lives, but there is something I really relate to in Jessie.
What We Ate: Monday: Butter chicken – I used the leftover sauce from the Butter Chicken I made a few weeks ago, but I probably should have cooked it on the stove rather than in the Instant Pot because it was very runny.
Tuesday: Not sure – Husband cooked. I took myself out for Thai food because it was the day of the final room run and I wanted to eat something special.
Wednesday: Zucchini Pesto Lasagna from Smitten Kitchen Keepers. We had a bunch of zucchini to use up. And I figured this would be good for leftovers as well. It was tasty, but very cheesy. I find lasagna is always a lot of work, and I could have the same results by just making the sauce and veggies and tossing it with noodles rather than layering and baking in a tray.
Thursday: Not sure – Husband cooked, I think…. I packed dinner, see below…
Friday: Pizza (take out) and an Avengers movie. I packed dinned, see below…
Saturday: No idea.
Sunday: leftovers/scrounge in the fridge. My brain was so fried by this point, I can’t even remember if I made the kids dinner. Oh wait. yes I did. I boiled some pasta, tossed in broccoli during the last three minutes, drained and mixed in the leftover ricotta sauce from Wednesday’s lasagna, for a cheesy, broccoli pasta. (See – I did just what I said above – mixed the lasagna sauce with cooked pasta and veggies and it was just a tasty a much less work.
Since I don’t really have an idea of what the family had for dinner for most of last week, as I was away most nights last week, I thought I’d take a picture of a typical food pack that I bring to work on any given day during tech week when I usually eat both lunch and dinner at work. This was actually from Thursday, but then I ended up going out for lunch that day and didn’t eat most of this and so just re-packed it and took it on Friday:
Lunch: Broccoli Quinoa Salad, avocado, hard boiled egg, plum
Dinner: zucchini pesto lasagna, cut up veggies and apple slices
Snacks for throughout the day: another container of veggies and apple slices, hummus, roasted chickpeas, mini pretzels, string cheese, mixed nuts. (Also at the office we have peanut m&ms, peanut butter pretzels, chocolate caramels, and gummy Nerds.).
Aside from breakfast, this all gets me through the day.
That’s it for last week. It’s been exhausting, but I am excited about the show. Also excited to be opened and to pick up around the house a little bit.
What do you love doing? And taking a poll:Which level would you call the “second level”?
Blueberries: There was an episode of Hidden Brain this week called The Curious Science of Cravings, and the guest is psychiatrist Judson Brewer who researches cravings. At the end of the episode, Brewer talks about replacing his craving for gummy worms with blueberries. It was a very a propos episode because there have been the most amazingly plump and sweet blueberries in the store lately. I’m not sure what genetically engineered magic is going on here, but they’ve been a highlight of my food life right now. I can easily eat half a pint at a time. I don’t want to get too attached, though, because I recognize that this is just a season.
Bring your Child to Work Day. I took the 7 year old to work with me on Thursday. This was exciting because it’s the first time since COVID that my work has allowed people to come into rehearsal. Well, officially. The 7 year old actually went with the Husband to work in the morning first. I thought this was pretty cool – the Husband’s work had a diesel bus come and take the kids on a ride, then they switched to an electric bus so the kids could feel the difference. For lunch, I met the Husband and the 7 year old for sushi lunch, then I took him to work with me. We didn’t have any special activities planned this year, but he watched me take a Teams call, sat with me in rehearsal, played with the set model, and helped us move props around. At one point, he even stood next to me and helped me cue performers onstage. Afterwards he said he had a good time, though whether it was from actually being at work with me, or just from not having to go to school… who knows?
Outfit of the week: We had some really chilly mornings and sunny afternoons, so it’s been about layering this week. I originally wanted to just wear my hooded sweatshirt dress, but I also wanted another layer because the dress looks kind of shapeless if worn just on its own. So I threw on this orange pullover – the pullover used to belong to the Husband, but it no longer fits, so I rescued it from the donation bin when I was looking for an oversized sweatshirt last winter. I kind of love the colour combination.
Of course it’s going to be blazing hot this week, so this might be the last I wear this outfit until the fall.
-Shopping for Annie – I might have mentioned that the 12 year old is in Annie Jr. at her school – she plays an orphan. Tessie. She gets to play an orphan with a name! And lines! A couple weeks ago she came home with the costume list of what she had to bring for her orphan costumes – basically a ragged dress, bloomer, ankle socks and flat shoes. I’m hoping to get bloomers form the costume shop at work, but the rest of it, I thought we would just go to the thrift store and see what we could get. We ended up finding a green plaid dress – something very much of the 1990s, but could probably also work for 1930s and also – it’s rayon and says Dry Clean Only, so I hope the 12 year old doesn’t make any messes on it – or maybe that would be okay for an orphan look), a cardigan, and some sensible brown shoes. I have something leftover from work that could work as a pinafore, though it’s going to require some cutting and sewing. And the dress too needs to be hemmed. Here’s the first pass with things pinned into place. I feel like as things go, “Orphan” is a pretty easy assignment for a first time theatre mom.
She opens the same week as I do – so we will both be in tech at the same time. How funny is that?
Speaking of tech – this week is the start of tech . Fortunately I have a day off before we move into the theatre, so I can do some prep for the long days. On the list: -Pick out my outfits for the week, so I don’t have to think about it in the morning when I’m going to be tired. -Grocery shopping so I have food. -Meal prep – I have some zucchini to use up, so I’m planning to make a zucchini lasagna so that the family can have one meal taken care of, and I’ll have leftovers to pack. Also prep some kale salad – that’s nice and hearty and will keep in the fridge. -Boil eggs (or rather, I make them in the InstantPot) so I have a quick, easy source of protein. -make a batch of marinated beans – again, a quick and easy source of protein. -buy some office snacks – I like to bring a sweet snack and a savory snack – usually gummy bears or twizzler or m&ms, and then popcorn or Whisps. We’ll see what strikes my fancy at Costco. -meal plan the rest of the week – I have some soups in the freezer that I can just take out for the family to eat. -pick out a nice light read, for when I need a brain break, and an audio book for the longer commutes. (I think I picked a book – see below.) – plan running clothes so I can go on runs during my dinner break. -make sure all the bills are paid. Sometimes during tech I forget. -Laundry.
Whew. It seems like a lot to try to get done in one free day. Plus get that Annie costume done. And I have another super titles gig that I have to prep the titles for. However, most likely on that one free day, I’ll go to Costco after the morning school bus run and then be exhausted for the rest of the day.
My goals for tech week – well my self-care goals for tech week: -eat well (well, I mean eat the tasty junk food but also eat just as much, if not more, healthy stuff) -sleep. Go straight to be when I get home late at night. -find time to go outside – ideally running, but even just a ten minute walk around the building on a dinner break would be great. -journal and reflect on how each day of tech went and what to do better. Tech can be a really stressful, and I always feel like I don’t have time to process all the stressors and inputs, but this time around, I do want to make sure I think about each day in a more mindful manner so that I don’t internalize the pain points in an unproductive way. -remember to hug the Husband and my children. Remember to call home when I can. Find ways to connect even though I’m tired and never home at night or on weekends.
Grateful for: -A cancelled music lesson and unexpected time with the 12 year old. On Friday, I had to take the 12 year old to her 4:00pm voice lesson. The lesson is usually on Saturday at 1pm, but her voice teacher is also in my show and we had rehearsals on Saturday, so we rescheduled it. It is a bit of a trek, and it was Friday rush hour, so I was a little anxious about being late. (side note – I’ve been trying to be less anxious about being late because lateness anxiety makes me a really bad driver and that is just dangerous. So now, I just tell myself, “The worst that can happen if you are careful is that you are late. The worst that can happen if you are not careful is that you get in a car accident.” And then I decide it’s okay to drive carefully and be a little late. Not that I’m being late in a cavalier kind of way, but in a “Just breathe” kind of way.) Anyhow, we were about half way to lessons when the voice teacher called and told me she had accidentally double booked us, and so sorry but can we re-schedule. Well, I wasn’t going to complain about not having to continue on around the beltway at 4pm on a Friday. So I impulsively got off at the next exit and the 12 year old and I went to get boba teas. And while we waited, we had some nice conversations and played War with a deck of cards a the boba tea shop and it turned out to be a really nice way to spend a newly granted 30 minutes of time.
-The local bike repair shop. There is a bike shop near work, so I took my bike in one day to see if it needed a tune up. The person working there, put it up on a rack, spun wheels, squeezed brakes, looked and squinted and prodded and then declared the bike was in great shape and I didn’t need a tune up. “You just need to remember to clean your chain,” he told me. And he suggested a cleaner to use. And I said, “How do I use that?” And he gave me a sideways glance because I’m pretty sure he was supposed to charge me if he was going to do maintenance on my bike. But then he said, “I’ll show you this one time.” And he cleaned my bike chain. And now my bike shifts much more smoothly. I did buy the cleaner and also two bike lights. My last bike lights went missing, so now I have new ones which is great because I can bike more safely in the evenings now. Since the bike was at work, a couple of evenings I went for a bike ride rather than a run on my dinner break – it’s just much more fun, zipping along, wind in my hair, than running. The terrain where I work can be a little hilly and as much as biking uphill is a pain, it was exhilarating.
-Wearing my running shoes to work. On Sunday I wore my running shoes to work because I wanted to bike home afterwards, and I hate wearing/ packing two pairs of shoes, even if it means doing something as unfashionable as wearing running shoes with a shirtdress. Anyhow – it ended up being a doozy of a rehearsal with us rehearsing in two rooms, having to move props back and forth, changing of original rehearsal plans, tracking down people… I logged over 10 000 steps in that day. At one point, I was rushing back and forth between the two rooms for the umpteenth time (side note – someone once told me that Stage Managers never run. I don’t know if I subscribe to that philosophy.), and I thought, “Hey, my feet feel pretty comfy!” And I looked down and remembered that I was wearing running shoes. I’m really glad that I made a sensible shoe choice that morning.
-Carpool and safe walking streets. Having kids in activities means getting people to places. And having a 4 year old and a 7 year old and a 12 year old means that when there is only one parent at home in the evenings, the little kids have to ride along to the big kid’s activities. Luckily, we’ve been able to find solutions for a lot of the 12 year old’s activities. Our neighbors also have kids in the same swim clinic as the 12 year old, so we alternate driving on Sunday nights. And knowing that I’m working most Sunday nights this month and next, the neighbors will be driving several weeks in a row – I’m grateful that they are happy to drive even when they drive more than we do. Also – the 12 year old can walk to her basketball workouts – it’s a 15 minute walk and now that it’s light outside in the evenings, it’s an easy walk; when it got dark at 5:30pm, I was nervous and would walk with her since even though there are lighted crosswalks, sometimes the cars drive faster than I would like. And then also grateful that the 12 year old’s school is doing Annie – I was disappointed when the 12 year old didn’t make it into the children’s chorus for my show, but I’m now realizing that logistically it is much easier for her to be in Annie because it rehearses directly after school and she can just walk home. (Being in my opera would have required a lot of really hard commuting and late nights.) I also just found out that the school has activity buses, so even if we hadn’t lived in walking distance to school, she still could have gotten home after rehearsal. So grateful that the school provides those buses for the other kids.
Looking Forward To: -Getting to the other side of Tech. There is a lot of I love about tech and being in the theatre and creating moments on stage and helping people backstage. But also there is a lot that is exhausting and this is a big big big show (for an opera) and I am really looking forward to being on the other side and knowing that it all worked out. And going to Old Ebbits for late night happy hour oysters, which we always do to celebrate at some point.
-Making plans to make plans for a date with one of my friends from my mom’s group. I had lunch with a couple women from my mom’s group, but one in particular just had a baby and I always like chatting with her, and that’s kind of hard in a group setting. I had run to the restaurant for lunch so she offered to drive me home and we agreed to get together after tech and before her maternity leave was over. So I put a reminder in my calendar for the day after final dress rehearsal: “Ask T for a date next week.” I find it kind of silly to have to plan to plan, but I don’t always know what’s going to pop up in my calendar after opening, so didn’t want to schedule it right away. But I’ve scheduled scheduling it!
-I just started this book – I got it for Mother/Daughter book club – it checked the 12 year old’s boxes for romance and theatre. Seems perhaps apt reading for me in this next week. Kind of like when I read Milddlemarch while in Rome:
What We Ate:
Monday: Tofu tacos – the Husband cooked. I don’t know what recipe he used but they were tasty. There was even cilantro lime rice to go with it.
Tuesday: Sheet pan chicken and mustard glazed cabbage, from the New York Times Cooking. I prepped this in the morning and the Husband just popped it in the oven when he got home. Some family members did not like the cabbage, but the chicken was a big hit.
Wednesday: Grilled cheese sandwiches – the Husband cooked a variety.
Thursday: Pasta salad with marinated beans. My favorite marinated beans recipe mixed with pasta, chopped peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes. I make the beans and chopped the veggies in the morning, and the Husband made the pasta and mixed everything together when he got home. Bonus – I got to eat marinated beans with avocado and eggs for breakfast one morning:
I added the avocado after I took the pictures. Sprinkled with pepper and some dill pickle sprinkle from Trader Joe’s.
Friday: Pizza (take out) and Legally Blonde. It was my turn to choose the movie, and luckily it was my one night home. Sometimes if I’m not home, they skip over me and I don’t get to choose until the list cycles through again. I wanted a classic, fun movie. Legally Blonde was definitely that – I mean I guess classic for a kid of the 90s – what a fun movie – and more thoughtful than I had remembered. There’s some good empowering messages going on here.
Saturday: I was working, the family ordered wings.
Sunday: Leftovers – whatever people could find in the fridge.
Continuing on recaps from our Spring Break trip to Berkeley and San Francisco….
One of our other goals for visiting the Bay Area was to visit our friend R who lived in San Francisco. He used to live in DC, but moved to San Francisco five years ago or so. Even though R doesn’t have kids, he’s always really liked hanging out with ours and whenever we see him, he always suggests family friendly excursions, which I appreciate. This times, he suggested that we visit the California Academy of Sciences, an aquarium, planetarium, and natural history museum all rolled into one. We took the BART and then the bus from Berkeley there and met our friend outside the museum. There was so much to see there, but here are some highlights –
Stingray tank:
There was a great outdoor space where on one end there was a huge water table set up and a station with lots of corks and sticks and you could experiment and build a boat/raft to send down the waterways of the water table. On the other end was a play area with huge insects and sticks and structures to climb. We liked this part of the museum so much we came here twice!
There was a whole exhibit about colour in nature and all the ways that animals and plants use colour. It reminded me of the rainbow game I play with the kids, and would surely have been cheating to play it in the exhibit. I particularly liked this display on beetles, and this other case on sea life. What a beautifully vibrant colour!
Lunch – probably the best meal I’ve had in a museum – roasted brussel sprouts and tortilla soup:
The Rainforest Exhibit, steamy and warm and full of lush greenery, butterflies, and birds:
Then we wandered down into the Aquarium where there were Jellyfish –
Sea horses – so cool because I had never seen a seahorse before:
And I did play the rainbow game with the kids while at the aquarium:
That evening we headed back to Berkeley for dinner, while the Husband stayed in San Francisco to go to dinner with his friend. My brother’s family, my parents, and the kids and I ended up at this very tasty Thai restaurant called The Funky Elephant. The restaurant was teeny tiny and we ended up sitting outside, even thought the evening had gotten chilly. The restaurant rolled out some heat lamps for us, whic helped a little. The food was unlike any other Thai restaurant we’d ever been to – spicy and flavorful and not too sweet. We ordered lots of food to share and I particularly liked the crispy rice salad with tofu and the Fried Brussel sprouts. (Yes! I had fried brussel sprouts TWICE in one day! That was exciting.) And for dessert we all shared a mango sticky rice, which is one of my favorite deserts ever. Highly recommend this place if you are ever in Berkeley.
95% of the time, when I see mango and sticky rice on a menu, I will order it.
Incidentally, the Husband texted while I was at dinner and said that his friend had an extra ticket to the Bruce Springsteen concert and would it be okay if he went? Of course I said yes! I myself have never been to any kind of rock concert – and honestly, I don’t know if it’s my thing what with the noise and crowds – but I was super excited that he got a chance to go.
The next day was Friday, and my brother took the day off to hang out with us. We had planned to go hiking, but it turned out to be a rainy rainy day, so he suggested that we go to the rock climbing gym instead. Going to a climbing gym as a family had long been on my “Family Fun Wish List”, so I was excited to go. The Husband did not go with us – he wasn’t interested in climbing and wanted to have a day to himself instead. He told me afterwards that he had gone to Telegraph Road, which is one of the major streets in Berkeley, and had just walked around. I had told him that he should check out Amoeba Records. Twenty years ago, I lived in Berkeley while working one of my first stage management gigs at an outdoor Shakespeare company in Marin County. On my days off, I would spend a lot of time at Amoeba Records and also Rasputin Records. Anyhow, the Husband found the two music stores and we had this text exchange:
It’s funny in our age of streaming media to think the huge percentage of my paycheck that I poured into record stores, only to now not really have any convenient way to play those CDs.
Meanwhile, back to the climbing gym … My brother is super active and outdoorsy- he is the guy that goes on five day back country camping trips, and goes to the climbing gym at least twice a week. He had child sized climbing belts and shoes for the two little kids to wear- gear that used to belong to my niece but she had outgrown. He had actually passed the climbing gear along to his neighbor’s kids, so he called them to see if we could borrow it back. The climbing gym, Pacific Pipe in Oakland, was a huge facility. I think it’s one of the biggest in the area, and also one of the oldest. We bought day passes and rented shoes for the 12 year old and me.
We started out with some bouldering:
Then we moved on to top roping – my brother belayed. This gym had a space dedicated for kids to top rope, but it was under construction – I think they were changing up the routes – so the kids just climbed on the easier grown up walls. I was really impressed by how well the kids did and how high they went, and how even though there were many handholds, they tried really hard to follow the colour of each route, even though it wasn’t always easy. I didn’t feel like renting a climbing belt, so I just stuck to bouldering myself. It is SUCH a workout.
For lunch we went to Ikea then the kids wanted to climb some more, so we went back to the gym for another hour or so.
Around 3pm, we headed home. The two little kids and I walked down with my sister in law to pick up my niece from school.
Since it was a Friday in Lent, we wanted some tasty vegetarian food for dinner, so my brother took us to Vik’s Chaat. I had come here years ago, when it was just a restaurant in a big warehouse. Now it also has an Indian grocery story attached, which was very exciting to me and I made a note to check it out later.
We ordered lassis; the kids had mango, and I had a rose lassi. I don’t often see rose lassis on a menu, but it is one of my favorite lassi flavors so I always order it when I see it.
Dinner itself was very tasty, but somewhat of an ordeal. Vik’s is not like Indian restaurants at home where you order a bunch of dishes – basically everything come in a Thali so you get whatever your order – saag panner, dosa, samosa, along with chutney, dal, and rice. The idea being that your order is your meal. Well one child, likes to eat family style and try a bunch of different things, and also wasn’t familiar with the menu, and thought the cheese dosa would have paneer in it, but it just had American Cheese. And said child was probably hangry and tired and then had a meltdown in the restaurant and had to be taken aside to calm down. The whole thing made me realize how, even in America there are places that can be bewilderingly different from what we are used to in our own city.
After dinner, I checked out the grocery store. Because I didn’t want to bring a lot of things home with us in our suitcases, I exerted great restraint and did not buy all the dals and spices and snacks that were there. I did, however buy a 16 oz container of cardamom pods and 16 oz cloves and a bag of Assam tea because it all was about 1/2 the price as what I usually get at home, and I can’t usually find Assam tea at home. It is soon going to be iced chai season and I am really excited.
After that we headed home, the kids went to bed, I chatted a little with my brother and sister-in-law before going back to our apartment and turning in for the night. We had two more days left in our trip and they would be filled with planned and unplanned adventures.
So I had a realization this week that between April 2nd and April 25th, I will have had exactly ONE day off work. Actually for the whole month of April, I will have three days off. We work a six day week when we’re in rehearsal, so it’s not as out of the ordinary as it sounds to have only a handful of days off – and of course, some of these long weeks is self inflicted because on last week’s day off, I had to work my supertitle gig. But still. Ooof. If I ever wonder why I feel so behind this month, this is why. I find myself re-writing the same to do list week to week and never being able to cross anything off. I did make a March reflection/ April aspiration list while on the plane home from California from Spring Break- so even though April is over half way over, I thought I’d share the list – you know, just another thing that’s behind these days….
March highlights: -Spring Break trip to Berkeley and San Francisco – this was for sure the high highlight. I promise to finish the recaps, including the details on the trip to the emergency room. -Lenten Women’s Group. This group that met Tuesday nights during Lent provided so much connection and thoughtful reflection. -Going to lots of theatre, but especially the local high school production of Beauty and the Beast. -Watercolour class. I learned SO much in this class. -a really quick trip to see the cherry blossoms – literally a 15 minute run before a work meeting. I used to think going to see the cherry blossoms was something for tourists, but I’ve grown to love the magical feeling of walking among the trees in bloom, and now I feel like they are a yearly must see. -On the work front – figuring out a new sign in sheet system for performers. Something that’s needed a bit of reform for a while and I’m so relieved that we’ve started to implement the new system. There are still some things to work out, but it’s a start. -Daylight Saving and longer days and warmer weather. -Going running with the 12 year old. Once. – Dinner with a beloved colleague.
Lowlights – I’m not sure if there are any specific lowlights in March. Well, maybe the Emergency Room trip with the four year old, but even that was pretty chill once we got there. There is the daily tediousness of kids and chores and screentime struggles. I guess for me also, not having time to journal, which then makes it feel like life is slipping by unremarked upon, which always, for some reason, makes me panic a little and sends me into an existential spiral. Looking back, the are mostly the same lowlights as last month. I wonder what that says – maybe I’m stuck in a rut?
April Aspirations: – Taxes. Done by the end of the first week of April, which is early for us, but our tax guy had implemented an April 1st deadline for tax documents, which is helpful. Next year I need to do better accounting for our rental property, though. It was harder than it had to be this year. -Research options to get rid of my car. (Still – have not made any progress on this one.) -Process Amazon and Duluth Trading company returns. (The Amazon one is done. The Duluth one is complicated, so the box just sits forlornly in my bedroom.) -Submit forms for the 4 year old’s early admittance to kindergarten. -Purge the toy room. -Finalize summer camp schedules. I think I forgot to sign up the 12 year old for basketball camp. I need to check on that one. – Things that need replacing – 1) my purse/crossbody bag had a huge hole in the outside lining so needs to be replaced, 2) I need new sandals for summer, and 3) a new Yeti travel tumbler since I lost mine two months ago and it is nearing iced chai season for me, 4) maybe, for fun, new linen pants for the summer. Though I don’t find pants fun anymore. -Decide on our Asia Trip. -Mow the lawn twice. I promised that Husband that instead of hiring a yard service I would trade off mowing the lawn with him. He has now mowed twice and I have mowed not at all.
Okay, I am realizing that I’ve been blogging on and on about needing to get rid of my car and purge toys and what not for about five months now. I should make some movement on those so I can start griping about new things.
So the ironic thing is the Husband took the kids camping with friends this past weekend, and I didn’t go because I had to work. And I thought, “Great! House to myself! I’ll knock out some of those April Aspirations!” NOPE. The first night, I got home, picked up/tidied the living room, cleaned the kitchen, made baked chick peas, did a full load of laundry and then was too exhausted to even read my book. Saturday night was even worse, because for some reason I was soooooo tired, though I did manage to fold and put away that laundry that I started the night before. It’s so annoying how little life tasks got in the way of bigger life tasks.
Sunday morning, I drove up to the campground, which is only 40 minutes away, and hung out for an hour before having to head in to work. I had expected to show up in time to help the Husband break down the camp, but when I got there at 8:45am, he had already taken the whole thing down. My kids were eating breakfast out of red solo cups and barely said hello to me before running off into the woods with the other kids. Feeling pretty useless, I settled into a camp chair, wrapped in a blanket that my friend’s mom piled on me, pet the dog and just chatted with everyone until I had to go to work.
We had a weekend of really big rehearsals. The show I’m working on has a lot of people – 58 choristers, 12 supers, 10 dancers, 20 children, and 7 principal singers. That’s 107 people in the room. Well 100 on Sunday because some people were excused from that rehearsal. It is it’s own brand of organized chaos. I spent a lot of Sunday in dance rehearsals – the dancers set their choreography separately and then we merge them in with the singers. I find dance so fascinating – the process is mind boggling to me, how the choreographer says a few words, makes some slight movements, and out of it comes gorgeous feats of athleticism and movement. It’s such a different creative process and language from working with singers or actors. And how dancers remember all the steps and sequences – I am in awe.
Other fun things this week: -Carpet of blossoms at the bus stop. The Kwanzan cherry blossoms, which bloom about two weeks after the Yoshina blossoms on the Mall. I love their huge puffs of pinkness. At our school bus stop, there is a Kwanzan cherry tree and the petals are starting to shed, making a bubble gum pink carpet on the green grass. I love the colour palette they make up:
And the four year old likes throwing the petals in the air like confetti:
– The vocal recital that I did the supertitles for this week featured the world premiere of a new song cycle. I thought it a beautiful piece, and especially loved the poetry. The text is by poet Jeanne Minahan, and a lot of the poems were about new parenthood. I loved these lines from a poem called After:
They say I gave you birth, I think they may be wrong, you bore me from that place of no return, you pulled me from myself, I’ve learned.
Sometimes I feel like that – like I don’t feel like the same person I was before I had kids – that they unearthed something in me, or perhaps because of them I’ve had to find a little bit more focus in myself.
-On the day of the recital, I had a really long dinner break. The weather was gorgeous – blazingly hot and sunny, and almost summer like, only without the oppressive humidity of deep summer. So I took a walk to Georgetown and treated myself to a boba tea. There are three or four boba places in Georgetown and I’m determined to try them all. I didn’t get out on a walk every day this week, so taking a walk on my dinner break felt amazing. I passed a guy playing bagpipes on a corner:
Squint to see the bagpiper. Hearing music unexpectedly is always so lovely.
Outside the boba place was this fun mural:
The actual boba place was okay- I liked that you could get your tea black and they had lychee jelly. I ordered a black oolong tea, 30% sugar, with boba and lychee jelly. It was fine, except the tea was still warm – a good sign because that meant it was freshly brewed and not powder- but I did want a cold drink and it took a while for the tea to chill because it had been hot. The other funny thing was that the place insisted that you order via a kiosk. When I got there , there was a group of college girls there (I think they were college age – I can’t tell how old anyone is anymore). They were all speaking French so i guessed that they were exchange students or something. But they apparently couldn’t pay via credit card and were super confused and ended up going to the counter and asking the lady at the register how to pay since they only had cash. The lady at the register took their order and payment at the register. Which made me feel like, “Why do I have to use a kiosk?” I hate using kiosks. Oh well. But watching these young ladies, I was full of admiration – I had badly wanted to study abroad in college and I didn’t manage to work up the courage to do so – but what a great adventure it must be for them to be living in a foreign country and have to navigate things like kiosks at the boba place. There is so much to learn about navigating life that I now take for granted, but I know that when I was young, the world was bewildering.
Boba and Georgetown canals and sunshine. A nice evening. Also – look how bright it is at 6:30pm!!!
Grateful For: -Windows in our rehearsal hall. I’m pretty sure this has been on my list before, but it is still a wonderful thing. I’ve spent many a rehearsal process in windowless rooms, so to be able to rehearse in a room with floor to ceiling windows feels so luxurious. The other day, during a particularly tedious rehearsal, I was able to look out the window and see all the beautiful pink clouds of sunset and it was such a stunning little pick me up.
-The monitor set up that the Husband put in our guest room for when one of us has to work from home. When the Husband first set up two external monitors and a set of speakers on our little Ikea desk, i thought it was overkill. But now I fully admit, it is an awesome set up. When I had to format supertitles this week, it was amazing to be able to run the slides on one screen, edit them on another and have the original text up for comparison on a third. Plus, I can play the music via the speakers and actually give the titles a test run. It’s all so much more efficient than clicking back and forth, minimizing and maximizing screens when I need to look at one thing or another.
My set up for working on supertitles.
-Living walking distance to a Metro station. On Saturday, I biked to work, but then when I left it was dark and I still don’t have lights on my bike, so I was able to take the Metro home. It was really nice not to have to worry about how I was going to get home. Although, on my way out of the Metro, I saw a sign:
Our stop is going to be closed basically ALL SUMMER. That is going to really suck.
Looking Forward To: – Lunch with some people from my Mom’s group. Only one person could make it to the April meet up, but I think two or three can make it this time. It will be nice to catch up. -Mowing the lawn. I actually don’t mind mowing the lawn, especially since we now have an electric lawnmower and it isn’t as loud or smelly as the gas one we used to have. And it is an excuse to be outside. I don’t do much yardwork – the mosquitoes and the fear of pulling up the wrong plants keep me away. But mowing… I actually look forward to. -Just started this audiobook – picked because Richard Armitage (who was oh so dreamy in North and South) narrates it. The novel is gripping and feels appropriate reading for the time/times, but so very sad so far. I don’t know if I’ll make it all the way through right now – I think I may need a lighter audiobook to get through tech week. (I’m open to suggestions for audio books!)
-mornings off. Our rehearsal schedule is entering a period when we mostly work afternoon and evenings, so I’ll have a couple mornings off this week. Goals – take care of some of those April aspirations, run, meal prep. Of course this means that the Husband will be home almost every night on his own with the kids. I think a room full of 100 performers is much easier than 3 kids. At least when I tell the chorus what to do, they just do it and don’t argue with me.
What We Ate: I didn’t really meal plan this week because there were a lot of variables going on. I’ll need to do some prep this week and next, since I’ll be going into tech week the first week of May. (Also – how is next week the first week of MAY already?!?!?!)
Monday: Bean and parmesan soup, made in the InstantPot, with leftovers which I was able to freeze.
Tuesday: The Husband made pasta and green beans for the kids. I worked and ate leftovers.
Wednesday: The Husband and the kids went to dinner with a friend while I worked. I had leftovers again. And a massaged Kale salad with cheddar, apples, avocados, and pepitas.
Thursday: The Husband made mac and cheese from scratch for the kids. I was working this night and had a salad from the canteen at work.
Friday: I had leftovers (soup), the Husband and kids were camping and ate camp food, not sure what. .
Saturday: I had a kale salad and the leftover Mac and cheese – basically scrounge around in the salad and leftover-eating.
Sunday: The Husband brought home pizza. I had leftover pizza when I got home from work.
I read an interesting diary method once that consisted merely of recording where one went. I thought it was an interesting idea, so here is last week, with approximate travel times.
Monday: 8:50am home –> school bus (5 minutes away) 9:15pm school bus drop –> work (rehearsal studio, 15 minutes) 3:00pm work –> nearby field to catch the Eclipse (10 minute walk) 4:00pm field –> work after Eclipse (10 minutes walk) 7:00pm work –> home (17 minutes)
Tuesday: 8:50am home –> school bus (5 minutes away) 9:15am school bus –> community college campus for art class (10 minutes) 12:30pm community college campus –> work (10 minutes) 6:45pm work –> home (17 minutes) 7:15pm walk around the block, after realizing that I hadn’t walked all day. (25 minutes)
Wednesday (kids were off school this day – the Husband worked from home): 7:10am home –> piano teacher’s house for kid #1’s lessons (7 minutes away) 7:17am piano lesson –> gas station (3 minutes away – my routine of getting gas while kids are at piano lessons – that way I do it every week and it’s a fixed thing in my schedule rather than a moveable one.) 7:30am gas station –> home to pick up kid #2 for piano lesson –> back to piano teacher’s house (17 mins, we were a little late for lessons. Usually all the kids ride along, but since the Husband was working from home, I took one kid at a time) 8:17am piano teacher’s house –> home (7 minutes) 9:00am home –> voice teacher’s house with kid #1 (25 mins – she usually has lessons on the weekend, but we had to reschedule last week’s lesson) 9:30am voice teacher’s house –> walk around the block while waiting for kid #1 to finish her lesson (25 mins) 10:05am voice teacher’s house –> home (25 mins) 11:00am home –> work (15 mins, while sitting in on a work call on zoom) 6:45pm work –> home (17 mins)
Thursday: 8:50am home –> school (10 mins). Actually to parking lot on the trail leading up to school. My friend who lived by the bus stop said that there was a water main break on her street and that it might be best just to drive the kids to school that day in case the bus was late. I parked on the trail because I kind of hate being in the carpool line –> walk up the trail to school with the kids. 9:15a school –> walk back to car –> home (15 mins) 9:50a home –> work via bike (25 mins) 1:15pm work –> Mexican restaurant for lunch (12 mins, walk) 2:30pm Mexican restaurant –> back to work (12 mins, walk) 6:45pm work –> home via bike (30 mins, going home is uphill, so takes longer)
Friday: 8:50am – home –> school bus stop (5 mins) 9:20am – school bus stop –> work (15 mins) 1:00pm work –> walk around the block on my lunch break (30 mins) 7:15pm work –> home (15 mins)
Saturday (Day off of work) 9:30am home –> voice teacher’s house for kid #1’s lesson (28 mins) 10:35am voice teacher’s house –> home (30 mins, google maps took me through the city for some reason.) 11:50am home –> soccer field for kid #2’s soccer practice and game (15 mins) 12:30pm soccer field –> coffee shop – while the 7 year old had practice, I went on a sort of run with the 12 year old, bribing her to run with the prospect of a treat at the end. (25 mins) 1:10pm coffee shop –> soccer field, walked back to the soccer game (25 mins) 1:50pm soccer field –> home (15 mins) 2:15pm home –> friend’s house in Virginia for cookout (45 mins – I vacillate between thinking Virginia is too far to go to visit friends, and thinking that it’s quite close and should go more often. But the GPS took us through the city, which isn’t ever that fun, so today Virginia felt very far away.) 6:30pm friend’s house –> home (35 mins – GPS took us home via the beltway. There must have some bad traffic on the beltway earlier in the day.)
Sunday 8:50am – home –> Agility Center for kid #3’s Agility Class (15 mins) 9:15am – Agility Center –> Grocery Store (5 mins). I usually stay and do some work on my laptop during agility class, but this was the only window for picking up some groceries this day. Around here, Sunday evening produce is pretty sad, so better to go earlier. I don’t like leaving because I’m worried I’ll lose track of time or that my kid will need me. But I set an alarm for 30 mins and just went for it. 9:38am – Grocery –> Back to Agility Center (5 mins) in time to see the 4 year old do some seat drops on the trampoline. 10:00am – Agility Center –> Home (15 mins) 10:55am Home –> Ice Rink with Kids #2 and #2 for Skating Lessons. (12 mins) 11:30am Skating laps while the kids are in lessons. Not really travel related, but I was moving. 12:50pm Ice Rink –> work (25 mins) 1:20pm work –> Farmer’s Market to pick up something for lunch (yogurt drink and empanadas) and apples and carrots. (walking – 5 mins, then 10 min stroll around the market) 1:35pm Farmer’s Market –> Work (5 mins) 6:00pm Work –>Home (15 mins)
Some thoughts on the week: -I spent 8.5 hours in a car this week. That seems like a lot – that’s almost 20% of my week. And it will be more when we are at the theatre because that commute is closer to 30 mins. -it was pretty typical for a working week in that most of it was the quadrangle of home to school bus drop off to work to home. -I don’t really have a “third place”. I don’t know if I really have time for a third place. -Wednesdays are exhausting, and there was more going on this Wednesday than normal. But I think between me and the Husband who worked from home with the kids that day, he definitely had the more exhausting day. -One of the longest time in the car was taking the 12 year old to voice lessons 25-30 minutes away. Some days this is more like 35 mins. I really like this voice teacher and I think she is teaching the 12 year old good things (like how to keep time by conducting – I wish someone had taught me conducting patterns when I was starting out as a musician.), but I do wish the teacher lived closer. -The grocery run was a little atypical. I don’t tend to run errands or do shopping when I’m working. Sometimes if I’ll pick up groceries on the way home if I need to, but mostly the Husband does the grocery shopping. -getting off work at 6:45/7:00pm is annoying because it is too late to join the family for dinner or do anything after work, but is still close enough to bedtime that I’m tired when I get home. Also getting off at 7:00pm means going in around 11am or noon, and I don’t think I always make good use of that extra morning time. But maybe I should re-evaluate things and have a list of mini tasks I can do when I have that extra hour in the morning.
Anyhow – other things this week:
My watercolour homework, on the tea pot theme – I painted this sort of from a picture. I think the teacup turned out better than the teapot – the handle of the teapot is not quite right, but I think I got better by the time I did the teacup. Here’s the original sketch:
Here’s the painting – I’ve learned that a lighter hand is better with watercolours.
In class, we painted landscapes:
Last week was my last watercolour class. I’ve really enjoyed the class and the weekly assignments. There is one more class next week, but I have to be in rehearsals at that time, so I will have to miss it.
The Eclipse – I was a little “meh” about the eclipse going into the week. I guess I never really registered that it was happening so I didn’t get excited about it. But then I got to work and people were very excited – our general director did not give use the day off, but did say we should all step away from our desk to see it. So I went to the costume shop and asked if they had any shoeboxes and I used the shoe box and some tin foil and tape to make one of those viewers. And then around 3:00, a bunch of us trekked out to a park for a viewing. Our area was only in 87% totality, but it still got a little dark – there were points when I couldn’t tell if it was the eclipse that caused the world to go a little grey or if the sun just went behind some clouds. We all stood around, sharing glasses and chatting and it was a very nice break in the day. I was actually really excited that my shoebox viewer worked to show. Science!
view from the shoebox
Bare legs and just walking out the door! We had our first week of sunny and warm weather. So sunny and warm, it bordered on being summer. I’m not ready for summer, but the sunshine and clear skies is a good start. I left the house one day and looked down and realized that I was not wearing leggings under my dress, and the sensation of having my legs bare again was lovely. Plus… now that the weather had warmed up, it is “Walk out of the house without anything but your wallet and keys” weather. Just being able to walk out the door and not have to nag/wrangle kids into coats… well that just makes the mornings so much easier. This weekend I also rotated the winter coats into the closet and the raincoats onto the kids’ coat rack. Only then I realized that the kids still needed their winter coats for skating lessons and had to dig them back out.
Although… I was lulled by the warm sunny weather into leaving the house without a jacket on Sunday when we were going to the ice rink! And I tried to convince the 7 year old that he didn’t need me to skate with him, yet he insisted that I did. I was wearing a tank dress with a short sleeved shirt over it. It made for very cold skating. Let me tell you – it is a lot harder to balance while rubbing your arms for warmth.
Ants. Perhaps because of all the rain we’ve been having, there have been ants coming in and out of the house. The 4 year old has decided that the ants are her pets and she actually put food out for them in the yard. Not sure if this is problematic or not. There was one day, when she came up to me, oh so very very very excitedly , and she said with such joy, “My pets are in the dishwasher!!!” I was very confused but then I saw the ants crawling into the dishwasher, and I felt simultaneously charmed by the 4 year old’s reaction and also just… ick!
I am technologically challenged: -Wednesday, I had back to back meetings at work, both of which I could just sit in on and not participate too much. The first one I dialed in from my phone because I had just got home from the 12 year old’s voice lesson. I started the call at home, got in the car, drove to work, then finished the call sitting at my desk. The second call, I logged on to my computer, opened up Teams, clicked on my calendar, then clicked on the link in the calendar for the meeting. The window popped up, then I minimized it so I could check email while waiting for all the participants to join. Well, the meeting got started and I went to click on Teams to maximize the window… and I couldn’t find the meeting. I could heard everyone talking, but I couldn’t figure out what I did with the window where the meeting was. I clicked on Teams again and again, closed some windows, moved other windows around… and the meeting still wouldn’t appear. It was like looking for my lost keys – move things aside in hopes of finding it, but no such luck. And now they were doing introductions and I was muted and I didn’t know how I was going to unmute and introduce myself if I couldn’t find the window where the call was taking place and I started to panic and spiral. And then… just in the nick of time I realized…. the meeting was on Zoom. Not Teams. Feeling like an idiot, I clicked over to my internet browser (because my work desktop is so old that I don’t have Zoom installed), and there everyone was. I unmuted myself just in time to introduce myself.
-Then I had to hook up my computer to a large tv monitor so that we could do a zoom presentation where the speakers would zoom in to a room of people. I was trying to figure out how to adjust the volume on the tv speakers and I couldn’t figure it out. There was no button visible on the monitor and whatever I was pressing on the remote just kept muting the sound. It was a universal remote and very sleek. Almost too sleek. I think the same could be said of the monitor. Everyone wants sleek aesthetics. Heaven forbid you put a button somewhere intuitive to find and operate!
What would you do?
I eventually had to google the remote to find directions. Turns out. the horizontal button by my thumb… you can toggle that up or down to control volume. Oh. My. Gosh. I didn’t even consider that as an option. Don’t buttons just get pushed?
Ethical dilemma – at the 7 year old’s soccer game, the 4 year old threw up in the grass. Not sure what is going on – some kind of virus – the 7 year old was actually sent home from school yesterday for vomiting on his chromebook. Well, because he vomited, not just because it was his chromebook. But then the teacher sent the chrome book home for us to wipe down. I’m a little mystified by that because she had called building services to wipe down his desk – couldn’t they have also done his chrome book? I mean I don’t envy anyone having to clean up vomit, but as long as you’re there… Anyhow – back to the 4 year old and her vomit in the grass. I didn’t have the supplies to clean it up, so we gathered a bunch of leaves and mulch and covered it up. And then I told the parents coming for the next game so they wouldn’t step in it. Though I went back and forth on telling the other parents because one the one hand I was kind of embarrassed that my kid puked on the field and maybe running into icky things out in the wild is par for the course and we did heap leaves on it. But it’s VOMIT. Wait, now that I type that out, I see what a silly internal dilemma that was. OF COURSE you should tell someone if they are about to step in vomit. Wow, where’s my moral compass?
Grateful For: -My bike for being good form of exercising and commuting all in one. I love things that do more than one thing.
-My car. Because it rained on Thursday and Friday so I couldn’t bike to work. But I could still drive.
-Wifi at the Agility Center. Waiting for kids to get done with classes or activities can feel like a time suck. I’m always trying to figure out how to be productive with those 30-60 minute chunks of time while I wait. Sometimes I will go for a short run, sometimes I’ll read or journal. For those times, though, when I’m coming up on a deadline and need to get some work done, I am grateful for parent waiting rooms with wifi.
-Cozy, cuddly evening in. I’m about to start working A LOT of evening rehearsals so have been savoring the evenings at home watching Bad Batch with the kids. Whenever we can and the laundry cycle lines up, we like to all wear our matching flannel lounge pants that we had gotten in Vermont two years ago:
– Blossoms that are beautiful and oh so fragrant. One my walk during the 10 year old’s piano lesson, I walked past this bush and the smell was so sweetly floral. I’m grateful that I can enjoy smelling the flowers – literally, and, I suppose figuratively.
Looking Forward To: -Starting rehearsals. We’re at the point where there are many questions and we just have to start rehearsal to answer them.
-Voice recital this coming week for which I am doing supertitles. It’s my last voice recital for the season – well, there’s one more recital, but I can’t work that date, so for that one I’m just creating the translation slides and marking the music and then I’ll pass it along to someone else to go on the day of the concert to run the slides. (I don’t actually do the translations – the singer are supposed to provide that.) I’m looking forward to this concert – there is a world premiere song cycle and lots of Argentinian music and a bandeneon!
-Started this book as part of Mother/Daughter book club. The 12 year old really liked this book and gave it to me to read. It’s by the same author as Dial A for Aunties, which I thought was a fun, if slightly ridiculous book. This book seems a little dark. Not quite sure where it’s going.
What We Ate: I did not make it home for dinner any night this week, so we did some very strict meal planning, and I think it was a good dinner week – no desperation dinners, yet lots of pantry meals.
Monday: Butter Chicken in Instant Pot from the internet famous Butter Chicken Lady.
Tuesday: The Husband cooked – pasta, shrimp, and alfredo sauce.
Wednesday: Black Bean Chili from Smitten Kitchen’s Keepers. I thought this had a really interesting method where you roast (or broil) poblanos, garlic, and onions until charred, chop it (in a food processor) and use that as the chili base. It was pretty tasty. Vegan.
Thursday: Bahn Mi bowls (sort of this recipe, but we eat it over noodles) with tofu ground “meat”. This is in our regular rotation. It’s pretty quick and very flavorful- I made the tofu ground “meat” and chopped the vegetables ahead of time. The husband made the noodles, and sauteed the tofu to reheat for dinner.
Friday: Pizza (take out) and movie night. I was working so missed out. Apparently the Husband tried to show the kids the Batman movie with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson, but the kids deemed it too scary. Then he showed them Raising Arizona, which I don’t know that the Cohen brothers ever made a family friendly movie, so that was kind of a bust too and they ended up watching an episode of Bad Batch.
Saturday: Went to friend’s house to grill out. Our first grilling of the season! We had burgers, asparagus, salad, and potatoes salad (a very tasty version mad with dill and mustard rather than mayonaise). For dessert we brought an assortment of Hostess snack cakes – for some reason we were feeling nostalgic and went to the store and bought all the Hostess snack cakes we could find – twinkies, sno balls, ho hos, cupcakes. It was a fun exercise. Also – she had just come back from Texas with a 10 lb bag of pecans and taught me how to crack pecans together to get to the meat. A new skill for me! How cozy do the pecans look, all nestled in their shell!
Sunday: I worked so I had leftovers from the fridge when I got home. The Husband made dumplings and green beans for dinner for everyone else.
I saw this sign at my friend’s house this week, and it made me laugh, so I took a picture and sent it to my Husband, with the appropriate edits. Tell me what made you laugh this week?
Continuing our Spring Break recaps. Since my brother and sister in law had to work and my niece had school, we had several days with my parents to see the sights of San Francisco and Berkeley.
One place I really wanted to visit was the Sutro Baths. They are what are left of a public bathouses that were built on the coast of the Pacific Ocean by millionaire Adolph Sutro in the 1890s. It was a huge complex with seven swimming pools, water slides, diving boards and the like. But then the place became too expensive and eventually in the 1960s it was sold to developers who started to demolish the site. Then in 1966 there was a fire and the developers collected the insurance money and abandoned the project. The site is now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
Such splendor! Photo from the National Parks Website.
Back in the early 2000s when I worked in San Francisco, the Sutro Baths was one of my favorite places to go on a free day- I would take the bus all the way to the end of the line and walk down to the ruins of the Baths where I would spend an afternoon at the there, enjoying the brisk windy air, gazing at the ocean, and wandering among the ruins, imagining what it must have been like to come here on vacation over a century ago.
On Monday morning, we left the house around 10am and took the BART into San Francisco and I re-lived those youthful summers, once again taking the bus all the way to the end of the line. Google maps actually told us to get off a couple blocks before the ocean, but the bus driver asked, “Are you guys going to the ocean?”
“Yes!” we said.
“Don’t get off at this stop. Get off at the next stop. I don’t know why Google always tells people to get off at 44t street.”
We got off at the recommended stop – the driver even giving us directions on how to get the right bus back – and then headed towards the ocean and the Baths. I’ve always loved approaching the ocean – hearing the surf and feeling the wind even before that endless sky in front of you coalesces into the ocean. I will never not find the ocean breathtaking.
First glimpse of the Pacific Ocean.
The Sutro Baths were just as romantic as I remember, perhaps a little more graffiti on the walls than twenty years ago. It is easy to imagine that these ruins are older than they are, that these last standing remnants of walls and crumbling concrete are the product of centuries of decay a la Rome. Of course the reality is that it’s just a 1960s destruction project that had been abandoned. We wandered around the runs, walked around the paths, watched the ocean waves. We spent two hours there, then headed on foot to our next destination.
All that’s left now.Graffiti walls.See those tunnels on the right…Tunnel to another view of the ocean.Playing among the ruinsAnother view of the Golden Gate Bridge. You can see it everywhere!
Taking a page out of Elisabeth’s book, I had googled “Hidden Gems San Francisco” to find places to visit. One of the things that came up on several searches was the Queen Wilhelmina Gardens where we could find an authentic Dutch windmill. The gardens were about a mile away from the Sutro Baths, so we headed there on foot walking down the Great Highway, parallel to Ocean Beach, and some amazing clouds. We stopped at a hippie little coffee shop/surf shop called Andytown Roasters for hot chocolate (the kids), a matcha latte (me) and a mocha (the Husband). Then we went to the Safeway across the street to pick up some food for lunch.
Matcha latte.
Lunch in hand, we made our way to the Gardens and it was like stepping across the pond to the Netherlands. A huge windmill loomed and all around there were beds of tulips. Tulip season had already peaked so the flowers were a mix of poppies and tulips, but still very beautiful. We sat on a benches and ate our lunch while basking in the sunshine. After they were done eating, the 12 year old ran around the garden taking pictures and the little kids just ran around. There were large grassy areas perfect for frolicking. I thought the whole things was a little ironic because even though we were in Amsterdam last Spring Break, we didn’t see any tulips or windmills, even though it was peak tulip season. It would have required booking either a tour or a rental car to have gone to see the tulip fields. And yet here we were, a year later, in San Francisco, among tulips, under the shade of a windmill. We took pictures and sent them to my sister-in-law in Amsterdam to see if she also enjoyed the irony.
Where ARE we???
Our next stop after the garden was to a bison paddock, which was also in Golden Gate Park. I had a colleague who had spent ten years working for the opera in San Francisco and she had sent me a list of things to see while we were there and the Bison Paddock was one of those things. We wandered to the Paddock via some unpaved trails. One thing I thought was amazing were the calla lilies growing wildly along the trail, some of them taller than the four year old. I’ve always thought of calla lilies as a hot house flower, so it was very surprising to see them out in the wild.
Calla lilies in the wild.
The Husband loves bison, so the Bison Paddock in Golden Gate Park was an obvious stop for us. Bison were first brought to Golden Gate Park in 1891, and in the early days, the Golden Gate bison were part of a breeding program to grow America’s dwindling Bison population. All the bison currently in the paddock are female – apparently females are less aggressive, and they were certainly a very calm bunch. I sat on a bench and just watched them going about with life and it was very calming.
Oh give me a home…
Soon it got to be 3pm and we started heading back to Berkeley, via bus and BART. We got back around 5:00pm and spent the next ninety minutes relaxing around the house. I might even have taken a nap. We had dinner plans that evening with friends so headed in that direction around 6pm. One of the 12 year old’s friends from preschool had moved to Berkeley two years ago and we were super excited for a chance to visit her and her family and catch up. (Fun coincidence – they are renting a house that belongs to the good friend of my sister-in-law a house that I visited with her in 20013. Small world.) We met our preschool friends at a Chinese restaurant in the same plaza as the Ranch 99, which is a huge Chinese supermarket chain.
The restaurant itself was a little disappointing because we thought they would serve the dim sum menu, even though it was a weekday night, but they didn’t. They literally gave us the dim sum menu then pointed at one page of it and said that was all we could order off of that menu. Otherwise we could order from the main menu. I had been all psyched up to have my favorite dim sum dishes like chang fen and egg tarts, and my hopes were dashed. Oh well, it’s not like we starved – we ended up ordering a bunch of dumplings and shu mai as well as dumplings, Chinese broccoli, kung pao chicken, noodles… so much food!
After dinner we went to get some boba. There were something like THREE boba places in this little strip mall. THREE! At home, I only have one in a two mile radius. The one the kids went to was called Dessert Lab and was chosen because it had the best cups. Go figure. I neglected to get a pictures of these cups, but they were pretty cute. Dessert Lab also had a row of those claw machines – you know where you put in money and you get a chance to use the claw to win a prize. The 12 year old managed to win a prize, and then it caused a bit of a meltdown because the 7 year old got jealous and mad that he couldn’t figure it out and used his tokens to no avail. I had to explain to all the kids that the game is rigged and the 12 year old is not more skilled at the claw game than the 7 year old. (Okay in my googling it appears that some jurisdictions consider claw machines a form of gambling… I find that so interesting!) Everyone got some form of boba, which made it a very lovely, albeit late evening by the time everyone got their drinks and were sitting down. Nonetheless it was great to catch up and see old friends again. Before we parted ways for the evening, they invited us over to hang out later in the week.
Tuesday was our day to go to Muir Woods and see the giant Redwood trees. This was the only activity for which I got reservations advance because my brother had warned me that the Muir Woods parking lot often fills up early in the day, so best to get parking reservations in advance. (We didn’t actually pay for the park because we had a National Parks Pass – yay for using that!). The drive from Berkeley is about an hour, and we stopped at a grocery store and got sandwiches and snacks to eat for lunch while in Muir Woods.
At the park, just by the visitor’s station there was a park ranger with a little display about Redwoods. We learned some cool things about redwood trees – like Muir woods has Coastal Redwoods (vs. Sequoias at Yosemite. I didn’t realize that Sequoias are redwoods), redwood trees are conifers (which I don’t think I had realized, but they are so tall, it’s hard to tell), they grow through both seedlings and through sprouting from their base, and though there aren’t that many left, they are not protected and the ranger often sees truckloads of cut down redwood trees on the highway and it makes her sad. We then took off down the trail. The hike through the park is initially quite easy- there is a boardwalk through the forest that takes one on a two mile loop. The trees were much skinnier than I had expected, yet they were so so so so tall. An improbable feat of nature and physics.
The trail ran alongside a river and there were lots of placards to read along the way. I love a good placard. The placard at this group of trees explained how the trees grow by sprouting from the base of the original tree and can even keep growing if the original tree is damaged. It’s a little hard to make out, but you can see the stump of the original tree within the circle of growing trees:
One of my favorite places was Cathedral Grove where there are signs asking people to be quiet so visitors can savor all the sounds of the forest. It was magical – the tall tall trees reaching up up up and the sounds of the stream and the birds.
I thought this was funny – the 12 year old got a camera for Christmas and she brought it on this trip and took lots of pictures:
And then for scale – you can see how tall the tree are compared to the people on the bridge:
There are also trails that branch off the loop to Ben Johnson Trail. We took Ben Johnson Trail, hoping that it would connect to Dipsea Trail which would have a good view of the San Francisco Bay. Ben Johnson Trail was a little steeper and more challenging since the path was skinnier and there were a couple times we crossed over the river via a footbridge. Before we got to the spur to the Dipsea Trail however, I saw online that that the bridge at the end of the trail that would take us back to the parking lot was closed for salmon spawning, and there was an additional mile detour to take. Normally an mile is not a big deal, but sometimes when hiking it can take up to 40 minutes to walk a mile with the kids and since we had to be back to Berkeley by 5:00pm, we didn’t really have time for an additional mile detour. So we found a spot on the side of the trail to sit and eat our lunch and then headed back to my brother’s place. We had at one point thought about finding a park nearby, but the one park we found was near a school and when we drove there, it was dismissal time and there was no where to park. So we just skipped it and went home. For dinner, my sister in law made a really tasty frittata with eggs from her chickens! Then we had another chill evening at home.
Wednesday we stayed in Berkeley since my niece gets out of school early on Wednesdays. To pass the morning, we decided to go to the Berkeley Botanical Gardens. Because we had a membership at a museum with reciprocal privileges, we got to go to the Botanical Gardens for free.
(We have a membership at the Walker Museum in Minneapolis. We don’t live in Minneapolis, but the Husband was there last September to visit the Minnesota State Fair and visited the Walker while there. Turns out, a membership there would cover the cost of going to the museum with his friends, and becauase the Walker is part of NARM (North American Reciprocal Museum Association), it gives us admissions at a bunch of other museums and botanical gardens around the country. Some of the museums are even here in DC! It makes it worth keeping our Walker subscription in the future even though we don’t plan to be back any time soon.)
Anyhow, at the Botanical Gardens, my favorite things were the South African Garden which was a riot of colour, being in full bloom, the Japanese Pond, and the Succulent green houses. I thought the Arid House was cool because there was a cool room and a hot room and you could really tell how cool weather cacti were different form warm weather cacti.
There were newts in the Japanese pond, in various stages and sizes of metamorphosis, seimming through the water with their paddle like tails. The kids liked looking for newts in the murky water and jumping from rock to rock. And then, of course, the four year old missed a rick and ended up shin deep in the pond. I might have let out a panicked squawk/ shriek. At first we thought that we should just go home at that point, but then decided that, okay maybe having to walk around in wet shoes was sufficient punishment.
We played out Rainbow Game at the Bontanical Gardens too, the blooming Sough African garden making the game almost too easy – despite the grey and almost drizzly weather, there were so many colours to see around us. And I found something indigo!!! And even a passable blue.
After the Botanical Gardens, we decided to check of another of our “Must Do” items on our list and went to lunch at In-N-Out. For those who don’t know, In-N-Out is an iconic burger chain in California. Their menu is pretty much just burger, fries, soft drinks, milk shakes. There might also be a hot dog option. (My brother who is a vegetarian goes there too, and he basically gets the bun, with the special sauce, cheese, lettuce, grilled onions and tomatoes… lest you think there isn’t something for everyone. But this isn’t on the menu – there is a secret In-N-Out menu. Well, not so secret because you can just google it.)
There is no In=N-Out in Berkeley, so we drove about twenty minutes away to Alameda. When we pulled up, we saw that the drive through line was unbelievably long. It snaked out of the parking lot – there were actually In-N-Out workers walking down the drive through line taking orders. At first I was nervous that it was going to be a while, but inside, there was actually no line at all and we got our food pretty quickly. It was delicious.
Food highlight!
After lunch we headed back to Berkeley where we relaxed at my brother’s house for an hour before heading over to our pre-school friend’s place. Since the kids got out of school early, we had been invited over to hang out for the afternoon. We brought our niece with us and it was a pretty chill afternoon. The little kids and I built Duplo train tracks around the dining room and the older kids played with my friend’s VR set. I thought it was pretty hilarious watching them swipe at air with that headset on.
Around six o’clock we headed out to get on the BART to meet my brother for dinner at a dumpling restaurant, New Dumpling. My brother is a huge foodie and this unassuming tiny restaurant has a Michelin star, and its Bib Gourmand designation, given to restaurants that have excellent food at a lower price point. In addition to dumplings, they had scallion pancakes, beef noodle soup, and a variety of salads/ side dishes. It was all really tasty; I really liked their shredded potato salad – kind of like spicy salt and vinegar chips in a salad form – and the beef noodle soup. The dumpling were tasty, though I still like our hometown favorite dumpling place better.
This is the only picture I took of dumpling dinner, I guess I was too busy eating the VERY tasty food.
Bellies full of dumplings, we headed back to my brother’s place – some folks with their car, and some on BART. It was hard to believe we were over halfway through our trip! But we still had some good adventures to come.
Side note – while hanging out at my brother’s house, I was looking at old issues of the New Yorker, and came across this cartoon, which I thought was hilarious – I laughed so so so hard. I’m going to leave it right here for you – does it make you laugh?
This past week was rough. We got home from San Francisco at 9:00pm on Monday night, and the next morning the kids had school and the grown ups had work. I like a day home after vacation before going back to routine, but the plane tickets were a lot cheaper to fly on Monday, so that’s when we booked them. Of course no one was tired at 9:00pm in Washington DC, and they all went to bed super late, which made Tuesday morning torturous. Wednesday morning’s piano lesson was particularly rough. I kind of wish I had just cancelled the lesson – the kids hadn’t really practiced all week, aside from some noodling on the keyboard at my brother’s house, and no one wanted to wake up when I went to get them at 6:45am. Note for next time.
I think it took until Thursday morning for them to get back on track with waking up in the morning, but bedtime has still been much later than ideal. And me as well – I have been staying up way too late and then prying myself out of bed at the very last minute and dragging myself through the morning. I think I just need to get back into a routine. Hah. There was never much of a routine to start – just a lot of things I wanted to get done in the mornings – only pre-trip these things were trying to fit in the hours between 6:45am and 8:45am, and this past week, I’ve been sleeping in later and not getting up until 7am. Which, looking at that is only 15 minutes difference, but it feels huge.
And then, related, on the other end, I’ve been going to bed waaaaay tooo late. There has been a lot of revenge bedtime procrastination – a vicious cycle: I get up too late to do the leisurely activities I want to do, so I stay up late to do them. BUT I don’t do those things when I’m up late. WHAT have I been doing with myself the hours between 11pm and 2am? Well if I’m going to be up, I should be doing those things that will make me feel good – writing, painting, reading, yoga, clean the kitchen, etc. These are the things that will make me feel like I’m using my time well. What am I really doing? Well, lately I’ve been going down rabbit holes of musical theatre crushes from my childhood. I’m pretty sure I spent two hours one night watching videos on YouTube of Michael Ball – he shot to fame in the mid 1980s in original cast of Les Miz and Aspects of Love with his sterling voice of pathos and vibrato. (Also – Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Aspects of Love – was there ever a more cringe-y quasi-incestuous musical? It involves guy meets girl, girl meets guy’s uncle, runs off with him, then eventually guy meets uncle and girl’s teenage daughter. And it’s all very romantic. supposedly. And the music is beautiful. I’m torn as to whether I should continue to think this is a good show. It probably isn’t.)
It’s been a week of doctor’s appointments, back to work, lots of meetings, and rain. So much rain. Because of all the rain, I didn’t get outside much until towards the end of the week. Thursday, I got to go for a run – which was lovely. Cherry blossom season is pretty much over, but there are still apple blossoms and red bud trees that are exploding with flowers.
blossoms on the trail.
Saturday, inspired by Elisabeth’s Cool Blogger’s Walking Club, I decided to go for a walk, and savor it. I had been feeling too tired and busy and weather-hampered to go for a walk all week, and was starting to feel a little wilted. Then on Saturday, I came home from work to an empty house as the rest of the family had gone to church, and even though I really wanted to just go into the house and sit down, I went for a walk in my neighborhood. The sky was prepping for dusk, and there were some beautiful clouds – ever since we painted clouds in watercolour class, I’ve been obsessed with looking at clouds and thinking about how I can paint them.
At one point, I walked by a house and was enveloped by the smell of laundry detergent and clean clothes – the house clearly had the dryer going and it was venting to the outside. It’s such a serendipitous moment, to be walking along, and then suddenly be in an aroma cloud like that – it always feels special and unexpected because I can’t see smells; I can’t tell they are coming. I’m just walking along, minding my own business, and suddenly I walk into a familiar scent, immediately identifiable and comfortable and oddly intimate because I’m savoring this thing that is coming from someone else’s house, but I pause and breathe it in deeply anyhow. I also feel like that when I walk by a house around dinner time and I smell dinner wafting around me. I don’t know anything about the people in that house, but I know that someone is making dinner and it will be tasty.
This week’s art class. I really have missed going to watercolour class. I had brought my watercolour pencils on our trip, but didn’t get to work on anything aside from some sketching on the plane. This week’s assignment was “Teapots”.
Teapot on table.
I don’t love this. I think the perspective on the handle is all wrong, and the teacher had us outline the teapot with black/grey and then blend it in to give a more defined edge, but I didn’t quite manage good blending and I think it looks a little messy. And I tried to paint a curtain in the background, but it kind of just looks strange. I did like painting the woodgrain on the table, though.
Some dilmena/conundrum/things to solve: – Bloomers. The 12 year old is in her middle school production of Annie and she brought home the Costume list. As an orphan she needs a dress/rags and bloomers. I think we can find an appropriate dress at the thrift store, but bloomers? I’m trying to think if I can sew a pair – they seem easy enough. Or my other thought is to buy PJ bottoms at the thrift store, cut them off and run and elastic around the hems of each leg and sew on some lace or ruffles. I think this might actually be a fun project to do, if I can find the time.
-I badly need a haircut. I also badly need to schedule a well woman appointment. I’ve told myself I can’t schedule the former until I schedule the latter – health before vanity, and all that. This carrot is not as motivating as I want and I haven’t done either. I need a better carrot to resolve this situation.
– where to go in Asia? We are planning to visit my grandfather in Taiwan later this year and I would like to add a second location. I think right now we are trying to decide between Singapore and Malaysia. We need to decide soon so we can book tickets. Anyone been to either places?
-And the same myriad of unsettled things taking up a lot of brain space: Window treatments for the living room. The chaos that is the toy room. Should we move the 12 year old to her own room? (of course we should… just can’t wrap my brain around that plus is would mean un-chaosing the toy room). The four year old’s early enrollment forms for kindergarten? Is there a field trip coming up? Should I offer to chaperone? Is the 12 year having too much screen time? Too little screen time? WHAT TO DO WITH MY CAR????
(Side not on “unsettled”. I’ve been interviewing potential interns for work, and one of the questions I ask is how people deal in an “unsettled and rapidly changing environment”? (ie. tech week…) Only once, I accidentally said, “unsettling” rather than “unsettled” and I got a very strange look and slightly alarmed look. Because being in an “unsettling” situation is very different from being in an “unsettled” situation. I love language and all it’s nuances. )
This tickled me: I make to do lists on Post It notes and stick them on my computer, and on Saturday, I made a list of things to do to prep for the incoming stage management team. As I was looking at the Post It I realized that one of the items on my “To Do List” is “To Do List”. (I needed to print out our stage management team To Do List). There is something very circular and meta about that.
Grateful For: – Our Spring Break Trip – getting to go, getting home, and everything in between. More recaps to come.
– Our Tax guy. Big accomplishment – We finished our taxes ten days before the due date! By “we” I mean, everything was sent to our Tax Guy, he asked us for more things, we sent them, and then six hours later it was all done. I know I could do our taxes ourselves, but this is one thing I happily outsource. We do, unfortunately owe an eye-wateringly humongous sum of money to the federal government. There had been some mistake on some funds we had withdrawn to buy the van last year – we had accidentally paid state tax on it rather than federal. So luckily, the state has to give us the money back so we can give it to the federal government. It’s just the timeline of it all is going to be tricky since I don’t know when the state funds will hit.
-So on that above note – grateful for my parents who will lend us money to cover some of that eye-wateringly humongous federal tax bill. We will pay them back when the state gives us our refund. I hate asking my parents for money – it makes me feel really irresponsible – but I am glad that I can do so when I need to and they will help if they can.
-Eggs. We got home from our trip at 9:00pm and I kind of looked in the fridge in despair. We had originally thought about picking up Chipotle on the way home, but by the time we got our luggage, we were too exhausted and just wanted to get home. But… we did have eggs in the fridge still and I found some wraps, so we had scrambled eggs in wraps with some carrots that we had brought home from California. I’m sure glad Eggs can last two weeks in the fridge. Also – I need to do better at my post-trip dinner game.
Looking Forward To:
– Final Four Games. I am not a sports fan personally, but we are a sports family- two sports, only really- football and college basketball. Right now it is college basketball season- well the tail end- the championships are today (women’s) and tomorrow. Then we will turn off the Hulu live TV until the fall. (I didn’t make it home from work in time to watch the women’s game, but the rest of the family watched it – they were rooting for Iowa and Caitlin Clark, so were disappointed, but said it was a nail biter.)
-May. I have been looking at my work calendar for the next show and it’s going to be a rough rehearsal period. We have evening rehearsals at least three weeknights a week and then we rehearse on Saturday and Sunday. Normally the rehearsal schedule is structured so that we get Sunday off, but due to other people’s availability, it works best for this show if we have a weekday free day and work over the weekend. I am dreading it already, and looking forward to May when we open and I am on a performance schedule.
– Some beloved colleagues coming to town for that next show. One of my colleagues I’ve known for over twenty years. We met in DC in 2000 when we were both interviewing for the same fellowship (neither of us got the fellowship), and then we have just continued to cross paths. Continued crossing paths is one of my favorite things about my career.
-Not that I’m really looking forward, but thought I would mention – the Solar Eclipse. I had a meeting scheduled for 2:30 – 3:30p, but we’ve moved that to 4p-5p since the eclipse is most visible at 3:20pm where we are. I kind of didn’t really think through what a big deal this was going to be and don’t have glasses. Maybe I’ll bring a colander to work. Last eclipse, the 12 year old was in pre-school and another parent set up this huge viewing in the schoolyard and I remember volunteering there and having to tape the glasses to the pre-schoolers’ heads because we didn’t want them ripping the glasses off. Anyhow, not sure if I’m going to do anything tomorrow or not, but I guess I’m sort of looking forward to there being a phenomenon. I feel as if I’m missing out on something because I don’t really feel as excited as everyone around me. I hear the middle school is giving out glasses to all the kids.
-Reading this book, gripping and sad and frustrating so far:
And listening to this – hilarious. Narrated by Simon Vance and Neil Patrick Harris. How could I not pick it up?
What We Ate – It’s kind of a been a week of sad, scrounging dinners. We didn’t really do a grocery shop til later in the week, so we kind of just cobbled together dinner. Monday: Eggs/breakfast burritos. (See above.)
Tuesday: Vegetable Barley Soup from America’s Test Kitchen’s Vegan for Everyone. It was a cold and rainy day, and this was a good recipe to warm us up and also clean out the fridge and pantry a little bit.
Wednesday: I worked this evening – I think the rest of the family had eggs. Again.
Thursday: Dinner with our friends at Comet Ping Pong. Our friends just bought a new house, so we went over to see it and say congratulations then we went ot dinner. Comet Ping Pong is always a hit with the kids because they have really good pizza and ping pong tables in the back. I also had a really fantastic lentil salad.
Friday: I ordered a(nother) lentil salad from a place near work since I had to work that evening. The rest of the family had pizza (made by the Husband) and watched Aladdin, the animated movie.
Saturday: The family had Olive Garden after church. I had leftovers and limp Olive Garden french fries from the 4 year old’s doggy bag.
Sunday: Leftover/scrounge night. Olive Garden leftovers, a pork chop the Husband found in the freezer, and lord know what other random things.
I don’t often have Spring Break off, so when I realized that I did, we decided to take a family trip. We chose to go to Berkeley for Spring Break this year because my brother lives there and while he and his family have come to visit us several times, we hadn’t been to visit him since 2017. Like Amsterdam last year, it was a family based destination, but we took advantage of being in a big city to have some fun adventures.
The flight over went quite smoothly. It was a 6:30am flight, and we left home at 4:05 am. It was hard for me to get up that early because I am a “night before” packer so I didn’t go to sleep til about 2:30am. Plus I had to get tax documents out to our tax person, and send the soccer snack sign ups before we left, so I had a few things to do the night before. My own fault for being such a procrastinator. We drove to the airport and parked at a hotel via Spot Hero. Spot Hero is a third party site that let you book parking spots at hotels near the airport, then you can just take the airport shuttle to the airport. It’s much cheaper than airport parking, and gives us the flexibility to drive ourselves to the airport. Even with leaving 15 minutes later than we wanted, having to go back to get a forgotten bag, and missing a few turns, we parked and still got to the airport at 5:15am. Good for us!!
Early morning airport. Grateful that the kids are of an age to carry/wheel their own luggage.
We flew Southwest and somehow the kids got put in a different boarding group from the adults. We were a little nervous about this, but it had been so long since we last flew that I had forgotten about Family Boarding and that we could actually board together between Group A and Group B since we had kids. Hooray! We only have two more years of Family Boarding left, and that makes me a little sad.
I sat with the two little kids and the Husband sat with the 12 year old. We had forgotten to pack earphones for the two little kids, so they shared my spare pair of earbuds. More to the point- the 7 year old forgot to bring his earphones home from school and the 4 year old was playing with her earphones the night before, and didn’t put them back in her backpack. Luckily, the Husband had an extra set of earphones in his bag, so each kid took one earbud, which was a little awkward, but they seemed fine with it and was actually kind of sweet. The kids watched movies and drank apple juice on the flights and were generally pretty chill. There was a layover in Kansas City where we found a playspace, a real bookstore (not just a magazine kiosk with best-sellers) and we ate BBQ, which might have been a little heavy for 8am, but we we were in Kansas City, so why not?
Ready for the flight. Side note: the 7 year old made that sleep mask in sewing class!Kansas City Playspace
We arrived in Oakland at 12:30pm and took the BART to my brother’s. I had pre-loaded the transit card onto my phone before my trip and it proved really convenient to be able to just tap my phone to ride transit. It did take me a couple days to find the right angle to tap to consistently get my phone to read, but once I figured it out it worked really well – I could add money while on the go and I could see how much money I was using. I had been hesitant to put payment methods on my phone up til now, but with the Clipper Card on the phone you save the $3 card fee and I could do it before I got to Oakland, so it seemed practical. I’m a little slow to technology, but having the card on my phone wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be and I think I’ll have to do the same with my DC Metro card. Maybe.
My sister-in-law met us at the BART station in Berkeley with the car so the Husband drove the luggage and the 7 year old to their house while she and I and the 12 year old and 4 year old walked – it was just a 15 minute walk to her house and the weather was beautiful. My brother has just finished a huge home renovation; they literally took down everything except one wall and one floor. Apparently they had to leave one wall and floor intact or else the project would be a “new build” and there are more stringent regulations for that. Their “new” house is gorgeous, fill of light and clean lines and cool things like heated bathroom floors and a lanai. They also converted the garage into a one bedroom apartment. They are eventually going to rent out that apartment, but it is currently empty and that’s where we stayed. It was really convenient because we had the place to ourselves to spread out and sleep, and just popped next door to their place for meals and hanging out. The two littles slept together on a futon mattress with sleeping bags. It was kind of hilarious because these were the mummy style sleeping bags and the kids loved zipping themselves in it and crawling around on the floor. We called them “blue worm” and “grey worm” throughout the visit. By the end of the week, the 7 year old could crawl into our bed while in a sleeping bag, which I think is kind of impressive.
Grey worm and blue worm!
Our first two days in Berkeley were pretty chill, family days. We picked up my niece from school on Friday then had a quiet evening at home. On the walk to my nieces’ school, I loved seeing how colourful and green all the yards were in Berkeley. It seems as if everyone is some kind of expert gardener. (Or has an expert gardener). My brother and sister-in-law also raise chickens and that was fascinating for me to see. The kids loved going to feed the chickens. It’s so interesting how much more separated garbage is in Berkeley – they have city wide composting in addition to recycling and trash pick up, so that the landfill trash is actually the smallest container. And on top of that that, a large portion of their vegetable scraps is actually saved by my brother and sister-in-law and fed to the chickens. I know there is a cliche about “crunchy-granolda” Berkeley people, but when you see it in action, it does feels pretty ordinary, but also kind of like a foreign country where you don’t know all the rules; it feels like being very intentional about actions, but I felt all week like I was throwing my trash in the wrong place.
The other funny “Berkeley” thing that happened all week centers around this silly game the kids play where they punch each other when they see a Tesla. It’s like the Punch Buggy game, only with Teslas instead of VW Beetles. Well, it’s kind of a fun game at home because we don’t see a huge number of Teslas around, but we quickly realized that in Berkeley, the game is ridiculous because there are soooo many Teslas. We upped the stakes to say that you had to say the colour of the Tesla and read it’s license plate number. And then we also went back to just playing Punch Buggy because there were so few Beetles in Berkeley – I think we saw about ten during the whole week.
Saturday, the two little kids were up around 4am, their bodies not having quite adjusted to the time zone change yet. That was a little challenging, but they are pretty good about not bothering the sleeping parent unless they have to. Later that morning, two of my cousins came over in the morning, and we had a great visit, chatting over bagels and coffee/tea. In the afternoon, my parents arrived- they had driven up from Los Angeles for the week. We went to a park, and to play basketball, and checked out the learning garden at the local middle school and then walked to the library. The weather had been kind of drizzly and kind of rainy and kind of bright and sunny, and on the way home we saw a rainbow!
Sunday was our first big San Francisco adventure. We drove to Richmond, about 15 minutes from Berkeley, and took the Ferry from Richmond to San Francisco. As the Ferry crossed the San Francisco Bay, my brother pointed out all the landmarks- the Oakland skyline, the approaching San Francisco skyline, Mount Tamalpais, Angel Island, Alcatraz, and of course the Golden Gate Bridge.
Golden Gate Bridge, Marin County is on the right.
The Ferry took about 40 minutes (and $4.00, which I consider a great deal!) and dropped us off right in front of the Ferry Building. From there we walked ten minutes to the Exploratorium, which is a huge hands on science museum. It is full of interactive exhibits where people can see science in action. Last month when I took the 7 year old to the art museum he had said, somewhat petulantly, “This is the worst museum ever! There are no screens or buttons!” Well, let me tell you, the Exploratorium more than made up for it. There were exhibits on sound and sight and perceptions, and psychological experiments, and an animation station, and also exhibits on how things worked from the atomic level to large mechanical things. I particularly liked the exhibit on dance and how it showed people (and animals) of all ages and sizes moving rhythmically even though they were never taught how to dance.
This one was about the psychology of kindness, demonstrated by whether or not people would rewind video cassettes given that no one watches them do it. . Do you remember VIDO CASSETTES???? What a blast of nostalgia.
This one was about steam.
This was a game where people had to work together to manipulate various elements.
This was in the display on reflection and visual illusions. Human Kaleidoscope.
This one was about the psychology of how what we see or think influences our actions, even if it is illogical. The water is perfectly clean. The four year old thought it was pretty cool to be able to drink from the toilet.
This San Francisco-inspired piece is made entirely of toothpicks. See if you can spot the SF landmarks? In case you can’t read the caption – it took one man 48 years to build this, and he’s still building and adding to it. This was one of my favorite displays.
Because my brother had an Exploratorium membership we got in at 10:30am, before the building opened to the general public at 12noon. This was great because while it was still pretty crowded at 10:30am, it was still pretty manageable. It was kind of overwhelming and the kids zoomed from display to display. I don’t know if they actually thought about the science behind every exhibit, but they sure had fun seeing things work. I was really fascinated by the laboratory where you could see people experimenting and coming up with new exhibits. How fun is that to make a living coming up with science experiments for a museum!
Around 12:30pm, my sister in law and my parents brought us lunch that they had picked up from various stores in the Ferry Building – empanadas, bao, dumplings, manakish. We ate at the picnic tables outside the Exploratorium then went back in for more exploration. By that time it was a complete zoo. I might have lost a child for a couple minutes. The nice thing about having an even kid to adult ratio was that each adult could be responsible for one kid – we could play man to man defense rather than zone. Even still, sometimes my kids are fast and they dart to the next flashing light and button pushing exhibit the moment I blink. Anyhow, we found him not far away, but it was kind of alarming for a while because we were in a particularly dark exhibit.
Around 2:00pm we dragged the reluctant kids out of the Exploratorium because the adults wanted to walk up to Coit Tower. Coit Tower is not as iconic as the Golden Gate Bridge, but it is still a pretty visible San Francisco landmark. To get to Coit Tower we took the Filbert Steps – a 400 some odd staircase path from Embarcadero St. It was certainly a bit of a haul to climb, but as we got higher, we could see some amazing views. Also I find the whole thing fascinating because intersecting the steps are little lanes that lead to residences. I can’t imagine living in a house where the only way to get to the house are these flights of stairs – the logistics of that! Like where do they put their trash? But also because the Filbert Steps is not open to traffic, it’s actually a quiet, almost idyllic slice of San Francisco.
View from Filbert Steps. You can see the Bay Bridge and Treasure Island. The clouds in the Bay Area were amazing all week.
We eventually made it up to Coit Tower and got tickets to climb the 13 stories to the top of the tower where there is a stunning 360 degree view of the city. (Daniel Pink has a video where he says the five things to always do in a foreign city is ride public transportation, go to a grocery store, read a local newspaper, go to McDonald’s, and see the view from the highest point. Of those things, I think the view from above is my favorite. This trip, I didn’t go to McDonald’s but we did go to In-N-Out, and I picked up the UC Berkeley newspaper, so I think I did check all these boxes.)
Coit Tower seen from the base.
View from the top of Coit Tower. You can just make out the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance.
The other special thing about Coit Tower is that the walls are lined with murals which were commissioned as part of FDR’s Public Works of Art Program in the 1930s. They are striking in that they depict scenes of ordinary life across a wide spectrum of experiences.
This is my favorite – it’s called Library. I love how the real window is incorporated into the picture.
After enjoying the view, we came back down, all 400 some steps back to Embarcadero street. Our ferry back to Richmond was at 4:30p, so on the way back to the pier, we stopped at the Ferry Building. There were all manner of food vendors there and the bustling activity was fun to see. The Husband got a coffee (charcoal latte, whatever that is – it certainly looked intriguing) from Red Bay Coffee, and I got aguas frescas from Cholita Linda for me and the two kids who were with us. (Again, man to man defense – my brother and sister-in-law were with the other kids). I had a strawberry lime agua frescas, the 12 year old had the lime and the 4 year old had the mango. We actually were looking for boba, but there were – surprisingly – no boba places in the Ferry Building. Nonetheless the aguas frescas were delicious. I think aside from boba tea, agua fresca is my favorite special drink.
Coit Tower from the top of the Filbert Steps.
When the Ferry came, we took the Ferry back to Richmond and headed back to my brother’s place in Berkeley. We had leftovers for dinner while the kids played on screens. We finally let the 12 year old have Roblox and she spent a lot of the trip playing that with her cousin. My mother had brought from Los Angeles zongzi (Taiwanese sticky rice, wrapped in bamboo) and tamales, both homemade – the zongzi by her friend, the tamales by a friend of a lady with whom she works. So we steamed the zonzi and tamales, cut up some vegetables to eat on the side, and called it dinner. (I will say, the carrots and baby tomatoes in Berkeley were amazing!) Zongzi are one of my favorite Taiwanese foods, but I can’t get them in Maryland so it’s always a treat to have them. After dinner, we went back to our apartment and went to bed since we were all still slightly jet-lagged. I think we were all asleep by 9:30pm, which never happens for me. But we were all in the same one bedroom apartment, with the 12 year old sleeping in the common area, so there was really no place for me to sit up with the lights on once the kids were all in bed. All in all, it was a nice first few days in the Bay Area.
