Weekly recap + what we ate: better late than never – April aspirations

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.

Weekly recap + what we ate + where I went

Still so many blossoms to enjoy! Spring!

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.

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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?




Berkeley/San Francisco 2024, Days 4-6: Sutro Baths, Golden Gate Park, Muir Woods, and Berkeley Botanical Gardens

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 ruins
Another 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.

Cool weather dessert succulents.
Warm weather succulents.

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?

Weekly Recap + what we ate: Re-entry.

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.

Berkeley/ San Francisco Spring Break 2024: Day 1-3

Vacation recap!

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.

Spring Break Trip Preview

In the St. Louis Airport waiting for our connection. We’ve had a lovely family and fun filled ten days.

I feel like I never post in real time, but what else to do while waiting for a flight?

Here are some previews

View over the Rockies
Golden Gate Bridge
Sutro Baths and a view of the Ocean.
Mighty Redwood Trees.
In N Out! Our Must Eat!
Climbing gym on a rainy day.
Cable Cars
Tasty food!
… and a visit to the emergency room.

If I never get around to writing recaps, at least here are the highlights!

Weekly recap + what we ate: A week of theatre

I’ve been knee deep the previous few weeks in getting ready for our Sprig Break trip, but here are some random going’s on in this neck of the woods….

Through some coincidence, a few weeks ago was quite a theatre filled week.

Saturday, I went to the opening night of the show the Opera was putting on. I had seen the dress rehearsal, but then I got an invite to the opening night party and thought it might be fun to see the show again and then go to the party. However, I didn’t have anything to wear to a semi-fancy shindig. The past couple of opening night parties that I’ve been invited to, I’ve always been working, so I’ve gone to the parties in the black clothes that I wore to run the show. Nothing fancy, but I think people understand that I was coming straight from working the show, so it was okay. But this was different because I got to go to the show and then was coming to the party, so I felt like I did have to get somewhat dressed up and it had been aaaaages since I had done that. I think last time I had to get dressed up, I had a Rent the Runway subscription and found something that way. Also last time I was six months pregnant and hadn’t told anyone at work, so there was that added layer of finding the right dress And I feel like my body is very different from back then, even when I was six months pregnant.

I ordered a bunch of dresses off Amazon – did you know that Amazon has a partnership with Rent the Runway and sell their dresses? So I ordered some. But they hadn’t arrived by Saturday morning, and I was starting to get a little nervous. Then I realized the 4 year old had been invited to a birthday party at a play space in the mall. I emailed the host, “So…. is this a drop off party?”

Side note – I think this might be a statement of the evolution of my (lack of) parenting concern. There was no way eight years ago when my oldest was 4 that I would have left her at a drop off party at a hugely public place like the mall. I think even at someone’s house, I still would have thought twice unless I knew the parents really well. But with my current third child 4 year old… drop off parties are golden to me. You want to take my child for two hours? Please and thank you!

So I dropped of the 4 year old at the party and then took myself to Macy’s where I tried on a couple of things, got discouraged and sad and then I found something that wasn’t terrible – it was flowy and light, but even though it was a fun print, it was black and grey, colours I usually avoid. I wear so much black for work, I try not to wear it in life. So I was about to get the just okay dress, when I walked by a rack and my eye was caught by a bright red dress. I love red. It’s my favorite colour to wear, so I was immediately smitten. Only when I looked more closely, the dress turned out to be a jumpsuit. And I’ve always said that I’m not a jumpsuit person. How do I even pee in it?!? And I put the jumpsuit back. Then took another lap and came back to the jumpsuit and thought, “Okay, I’ll just try it on to see.” And it turned out to look kind of cute and I loved the colour, so I put aside my fears of not being able to pee quickly when I need to and bought the jumpsuit dress and hoped that I had an appropriate bra to wear with it.

Well, when I got home, I found that all the dresses I had bought from Amazon had arrived after all, so I tried them on, and I realize that my middle region is not longer ideal for comfortably wearing cocktail attire – or maybe it still is, only I would have to redefine my idea of “comfortable” to include sucking in my stomach constantly. But I go to opening night parties in large part for the free fancy food, so sucking in my gut was not going to solve anything. So even though I thought some of the dresses stunning, I decided to send them all back and wear the red jumpsuit. I paired it with my blazer, a purple scarf around the waist to give some shape, and the one pair of heels I own, which are super comfy until you take them off and then you realize that, no, actually, they weren’t that comfortable to begin with.

Anyhow, the show was delightful, the party afterwards was lovely and I got to ride hime with my work BFF, which is always nice because when we are in production, I sometimes don’t get to see her much since we work in different (though adjacent) departments.

The next day, was a) daylights savings, b) a family trip to see the high school production of Beauty and the Beast, and c) the Oscars. Daylight saving certainly crept up on me- I got hime after midnight from the opening night party and as I was puttering around pre-bed, it hit me- “Oh nuts! I have to set the clocks forward!” Then forgot and the next morning realized at 7:45 that it was actually 8:45 and we were going to be late for agility class (me and the 4 year old) and church (the Husband and the other two kids.).

Beauty and the Beast at the local high school was the second theatre excursion for me that week. This time, the whole family went, even the little kids. When I was growing up, our high school did not do musicals, so I’m kind of new to the whole “high school musical” thing. I didn’t know what to expect, and tried to go in with no expectations. It ended up being a really great time. There was low level theatre magic, a cast of many many many enthusiastic teenagers, and some very talented ones. There were body mics and follow spots and a full orchestra in the pit. What a huge undertaking! I’ll definitely be going to more in the future. I sometimes feel that I’ve spoiled my kids by taking them to a fair bit of professional theatre and opera, and lately I’ve been thinking that we should go to different levels of theatre so that they get a sense of the full breadth of theatre and know that it doesn’t have to be Broadway to be worth seeing. Sure a high school production is not going to be as flashy or polished as a professional show, but there is, I think, just as much value in theatre as a community activity. There is something really special about how theatre can build a community of makers and and those who participate and support them as the audience.

The third show I saw in the week was the touring production of Sondheim’s Company – his musical about a perpetually s8ngle New Yorker and his married friends. I had gotten tickets a few weeks before and lined up a sitter so that the Hsuband and I could go. I had been on the fence about going but then a friend of mine texted and said, “If you have a chance to go, the sets and scene shifts are worth it.” So I got tickets.

Only the day of the show, our sitter never showed up. She was supposed to come at 6:30pm, and we waited until 7pm. (In retrospect, I hope she is okay… I should check in with her. We’ve used her several times before, and she isn’t always prompt, but 30 minutes late is kind of a lot. The whole things is kind of discouraging; we have had terrible luck with sitters, and as much as I would love to have a date night once in a while, it has proven very difficult to find a reliable sitter. Well, next year the oldest child can legally babysit so maybe that will help solve things a little.)

Anyhow, at 7pm, it was decided that I should take the 12 year old and the Husband would stay home with the other kids. Not the evening of theatre that I had planned, but it would have to do. I had qualms about whether or not the show was appropriate for a 12 year old, but I figured she would understand it or not and we could talk about it. Or not. So we jumped in the car and raced down to the theatre, only missing the first five minutes of the show.

The show was quite well done, and my friend was right, it was technically very fluid. This production of Company does some gender switching so that the lead is now female instead of male – Bobbie instead of Bobby. Some of the gender switching worked for me and some of it didn’t quite. “Getting Married Today” was brilliantly funny. “Another Hundred People” had so much energy and momentum. “You Could Drive Personal Crazy”, in the other hand, didn’t quite work for me- it just felt like a campy musical number and none of these men seemed like they would really date Bobbie.

I think my biggest issue with this production, and maybe actually with Company in general, is that Bobbie/Bobbie is not a very interesting character. I know the show is a series of vignettes about single life, but I just couldn’t bring myself to care whether or not Bobbie found her way. And maybe this is also where I am in life right now- I remember seeing Company when I was in my 20s and the story spoke to me a lot more. But watching the perpetually and willfully single now is just not as appealing. I feel like I’ve lived through that, and it’s just a hair stressful to watch it onstage. So upshot for me: entertaining, love the music, but dramatically a little “meh”.

When I asked the 12 year old what she thought of the show, she said, “I like opera more. At least with opera there is a dramatic story.” I thought that was a hilarious observation.

Drawing class– colored pencils, (Also side note – when I was growing up in Canada, we called these pencil crayons, but in Marica they are called colored pencils and no one knows what I’m talking about when I say pencil crayons).

This flower painting is the first homework assignment and it featuresa variety of colored pencil techniques. One of my favorite techniques, which proves quite tricky is shaving pencil lead onto wet paper to create the “sparkle” at the top of the flowers, I think it would be cooler if I could distribute the shavings better rather than it clumping like it did in the picture.

The second homework assignment was apples on a branch:. I’m actually really pleased with how the leaves turned out. I think the more I do this, the better I get at drawing what things look like rather than what I think it should be, breaking visual elements down into lines and spaces rather than just drawing a “leaf”. The details of the apple could be better- the one on the right is a little too round. Still, I do love how colored pencils make it easy to blend all the different apple colors.

And then- here is the in class assignment. I didn’t finish it in class, but I thought it is fun to see the difference between the apples that are painted watercolor pencil (the apples in front) and those that are just watercolor pencil that I didn’t have a chance to paint yet (those in back). I still have to add in the background and finish the detail on the table too.

Other lovely things:

Board game night with the family. We played Ticket to Ride and for the first time, no one knocked the trains askew or stole trains to play with. it was a really lovely night. I did win, but it was pretty nerve wracking for a minute – I had to build Seattle to New York, and wasn’t sure if I was going to make it…

-We have traded our Saturday mornings on the basketball court for Saturday mornings one the soccer field as one kids’ season ends and another kid’s season begins. During the first soccer game, I challenged my 12 year old to go running with me while the 7 year old had practice. To my surprise, she said yes. Two bribes, though – a) I had to let her listen to something or her own choosing, each of us taking one AirPod, and b) a special treat, so we stopped at a coffee shop on our run. We managed about 1.5 miles together, most of it not at all fast, but hey, I got my tween to come running with me, so that’s a win either way.

– I parallel parked my car on the first try! That made me ridiculously happy. It usually takes me an embarrassingly long time wiggling back and forth to make it. okay, the space was a good size, but still!

– The 12 year old was the Mystery Reader at the 4 year old’s classroom. She did an amazing job- engaged with the kids, and told them to sit down when they got too close. The four year old’s teacher asked if the school could hire the 12 year old because she was so good with kids.

– A satisfying purchase– this three month calendar.

We have a calendar in our dining room already, but I wanted something with a more long term view. Most of the three month calendars I found on Amazon only came in quarter years and I couldn’t tell if you had to re-write each month as you move it up the chain. I finally found this one and the brilliant thing about it is that each month is movable, so at the end of the month, you just pull it from it’s current coil and put it on the coil one slot up. Plus it has lines for writing, definitely pricier than the other options, but so much more functional.

But also- much as I love the new calendar, it makes me panic a little because when I can see the year three months at a time, it reminds me that May/summer is pretty close.

–PEAK BLOOM!!!!!! Okay, this is actually a few days before peak bloom, but I had to be downtown for a meeting so I decided to go in early and go for a run by the Tidal Basin. I really wanted to make a trip to the cherry blossoms happen this year because 150 or so of the trees will be chopped down this coming year so they can repair the retaining wall for the Tidal Basin. Makes me sad, but it seems a necessary safety issue. Anyhow, it was a short visit, but still stunning:

Grateful for:

-Evening light. The mornings have been a little rough, but how I love that the sun sets later. There is natural light in our dining room for dinner, there is light for walks after dinner, there is light to go to the park after the school bus gets in.

– Along those lines, I’m grateful that the 12 year old’s basketball workout is walking distance from home. It makes it an easy excuse for an evening walks.

– also along those lines, I’m grateful yfor neighborhood parks. We live within a 15 minute walk of three parks and now that there is more daylight, they have become an impromptu gathering spot. We will often run into families we know there and it just feels like one of the first signs of spring, all these people emerging from hibernation to gather at playgrounds again,

– and one more thing (I guess all my gratitudes this week are centered around the weather/time change) I’m grateful for the back patio and being able to eat outside. We have a couple month’s window when we can eat outside before the mosquitoes get fierce, and right now is the time. I love eating outside – it just makes a meal seem more like an intentional event.

– vegetables from our neighbor. our next door neighbor works at a Farmer’s market and periodically he will just drop off a bunch of vegetables for us. Thanks to him we were able to have some pretty vegetable heavy meals.

Looking forward to:

– new suitcases. My old suitcase was probably twenty yesrs old and the wheels had fallen apart, so I ordered two new suitcases to try out. I’m still on the fence as to carry on backpack vs. rolling suitcase, but I think this next trip is a rolling suitcase trip, so we’ll go with that. The little ones wear super excited by the box that the suitcases arrived in

.

-Spring break trip to see my brother. (We might already be there, actually… details to come,)

– going back to work on a show. I miss being in rehearsal and having structure to my days…

What we ate:

Sunday: snacks and leftovers. The 12 year old had swimming and it was Oscar night, so we kind of all just fended for ourselves. Some kids might have had popcorn for dinner,

Monday: tofu broccoli stir fry

Tuesday: my notes on this day are hazy. It says leftovers.

Wednesday: Kale paneer, from Meers Sodha’s East. With homemade paneer. I always thing it is too much work to make my own paneer than when is done it, I realize it is really simple and much easier than finding it in the store.

Thursday: sheet pan chicken and potatoes. I don’t cook meat as often as the kids would like, so I decided that since I was going to leave them with a sitter this evening, I would make them a chicken dinner. Well, this was the night the sitter didn’t show up…

Friday: pizza (take out) and the first Avengers movie.

Saturday: pan fried fish and green beans – the husband cooked.

Sunday: pasta salad with marinated beans. Jenny Rosenstrach’s marinated beans are amazing, it’s a quick and flavorful protein that can be eaten alone or added to salads or grains. I used them this night as the base for a pasta salad. Quick vegan pantry meal.

Monday: Eggplsnt stir fry- the Husband cooked. It had a tasty spicy gochujang sauce.

Tuesday: chicken curry in the Instant Pot, cucumber raita on the sideWe had a friend over for dinner and this was an easy, homey make-ahead meal.

Wednesday: Chicken curry leftovers, with eggs added. Egg curry was one of our favorite new meals last year and it worked really well to add boiled eggs to Tuesday’s chicken curry.

Thursday: Leftovers since we are trying to eat down the fridge.

Friday: tacos at my brother’s house in Berkeley!

Books Read February 2024

I finished a lot more books in February than I usually do, but some of them were pretty slight, in size, not necessarily in subject.

Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know by Samira Ahmed – Mother Daughter book club read. I feel like this book was the YA version of Byatt’s Possession- a literary mystery with a twist of romance. I thought there was a lot about this book I wanted to like – the protagonist is an American/French/Indian/Muslim teenager and I love reading that kind of diversity in books, reading about her spending a summer in Paris was pure wish fulfillment for me. But ultimately, I didn’t love the angsty teenage bits. I mean the ex-boyfriend is clearly an asshole, and I got really frustrated that the main character pined for him so much.

The End We Start From by Megan Hunter– short, quick read. This book was recently made into a movie, and I read a movie review, which made the book sound interesting. The book is about a great flood that destroys the world – or maybe just London – and the main character is trying to get to safety with her infant son. The writing is very sparse and poetic, and also rather vague in details, so I kind of always felt like I didn’t quite know what was going on. Even still, a lot of what the main character thinks and feels as she watches her son grow really resonated with me. This passage:
“One day Z finally does it. I have placed him on the bed for three minutes while I put our thing away… He chooses these three minutes, from all the minutes of our life, to master his latest milestone. He flips off the bed and onto the floor, rushing his triumph under a wall of crying, a never-ending hurling of his disappointment at the universe. I am a terrible mother, I thin, nestling his unbroken body into my own. P comes, and O and they tell me no. It happens to everyone.” As someone who has had all three children fall off a bed while an infant, I totally felt this.

and this:
“Then we say the secret: there is no skill. There is only another person, smaller than you.” Oh the beautiful precious burden of caring for another being!

What You are Looking For is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama – A slight yet charming book about various people looking for direction in life. The title pretty much sums it up. The book takes place in Japan, and each chapter focusses on one person who wanders into a library. The enigmatic librarian manages to help them pick the perfect book, the book that they needed in that moment in their life. This was a quick and easy read, almost like a fable. As a library lover, I very much enjoyed this book.

Untangled by Lisa Damour – This book has the unfortunate subtitle: “Guiding Teenage Girls through the Seven transitions into Adulthood.” I found this book really useful for framing what it is like to be a teenager and also the parent of a teenager. Damour has a wonderful metaphor about how we are the side of a swimming pool and sometimes our daughters need to cling to us to keep afloat, but they will eventually let go and go back to swimming in the water. Our job is to be here when she gets tired of swimming and needs something to hold on to. I stuck so many sticky notes in this book – things to think about and things to say. I love when parenting books give me specific scripts to use. I thought this book fantastic and has a good blend of science and compassionate steps. It has helped me feel less anxious about bad behavior and actually weigh the bad behavior before I react, and really let it go sometimes. These are my takeaways: be non-judgemental – all kids do stupid stuff; they’re just trying to figure it out. Be available. Believe in your kid.

One quote: “Our daughters have a good reason to point out our limitations: they want us to be better. They will only ever have one set of parents and they are newly aware that we are far from perfect. Ever hopeful, our daughters think we’ll improve if they point out our flaws.” Wow, such an interesting framing – my kid just wants me to be a better parent. I mean we might have different ideas of what a “good” parent, is, but this is such an interesting way to think about the dynamic, especially when it is hard.

Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies by Elizabeth Winkler, read by Eunice Wong– This book was an Audie Award finalist for non-fiction and available from the library right away, so I checked it out. The book grew out of an Atlantic article that the author wrote, of the same name. I think I was expecting something a little more academic than this book turned out to be. Or maybe the scholarship aspects didn’t really come out on the audio version. As it was, the book was more of the author’s personal account of her journey exploring the question of the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays than a scholarly exploration of the topic. I felt myself wanting to know more about how we know what we know and the historical day to days. I didn’t come out feeling like I knew more about Shakespeare than before. Or maybe that is partly the point – how Shakespeare is kind of a great unknown. One thing that did stick with me was the irony that despite writing such well educated and eloquent women, Shakespeare’s daughters were, surprisingly, never educated. This is one of the things that makes people question whether or not Shakespeare wrote the plays.

Funerals are Fatal by Agatha Christie– cozy and convoluted. It had the kind of resolution that was very specific to the situation set up. I guessed before the end whom the murderer was, but not the motive. The motive bit I actually found very satisfying. Not necessarily top shelf classic Christie, but still very entertaining.

Black Ghosts: A Journey Into the Lives of Africans in China by Noo Saro-Wiwa, read by the author – Africans in China was not something I had ever thought about, but I found really fascinating once I started listening to this audiobook. Maybe it’s because I’m the child of immigrants, but I’ve always been interested by stories of migration and what leads a person to take the difficult step of leaving a life behind and moving to another country. Like Shakespeare Is a Woman, Black Ghosts was more memoir than a historical non-fiction book, and I did find myself sometimes wishing for more of the latter. This book follows Saro-Wiwa as she explores the various pockets of African populations in China and contemplates how they came to be, asking people why they came to China and how they have developed the relationships and ties that keep them there. Some of the book feels like it encourages negative stereotypes of both Chinese and African people, and that made me a little uncomfortable, but then I do wonder if that just speaks to a bigger issue of how the African people in China will never be able to integrate fully? Anyhow, I thought this book had some very interesting observations of both Chinese and African culture and how they intersect, or don’t. One thing that stuck with me was the observation she makes, when she talks about why someone would want to live in such a restrictive country as China, about how Chinese people have very little freedom, but the government provides them with a lot of services, whereas in Nigeria the people have a democracy, but no government services.

On my Proverbial Bedside Table:

Daring and the Duke by Sarah MacLean – I’ve been on a bit of a romance novel kick lately and Sarah MacLean writes very good ones.

Wild Genius on the Moors: Still. But ooooh… someone likes Charlotte. There might a wedding in the future.

My Brilliant Friend – I am still reading this. I know Engie’s book club has wrapped up, but I just couldn’t keep up.

Coleman Hill – on audio. A fictional recounting of the author’s family. It centers around two Black families in New Jersey who came from the south in search of better opportunities. Some of it is really sad.

Weekly recap + what we ate: Jane Eyre, Into the Fire and mild obsessions

So I spent the better part of the previous weekend before in bed. I had something, not sure what. A chest rattling cough, aches, general tiredness. At first I chalked it up to a lack of sleep, but I think I was more than that and I ended up taking to bed for most of Saturday.

The Husband will tell anyone that I am a terrible patient, I get restless and bored and can’t stay in bed. I try to get up and do things when I should be resting. I can’t just veg on the couch and binge watch something because I need to rest without my glasses on.

So in an attempt to make lying in bed less tedious, I decided to listen to cast albums of musicals which were new to me. I figured there would be music and a narrative that I could somewhat follow if I wanted and that could be a good combination of engaging /not engaging to keep me from bed tedium. I started by listened to How To Dance in Ohio – there was a recent New York Times article of recent musical cast albums of note and this was on the list. How to Dance in Ohio is a musical based on a documentary about a group of autistic young adults getting ready for a spring formal. The musical got a lot of attention for, in addition to other things, casting autistic individuals in the lead roles. It’s a poppy, heart felt musical.

Next, I put on Ride the Cyclone, a musical about a high school choir that dies in a roller coaster accident and they are given the opportunity to audition for a chance to come back to life. This one was dark, man. Very very dark.

For something completely different, I turned to the musical version of Jane Eyre, which debuted on Broadway in 2000. Jane Eyre is one of my favorite books and I’m always interested in versions of it. This is a musical in the vein of the musical of the 1990s – romantic, dark, emotional period pieces. Things that are unfashionable in a musical these days. Jane Eyre I found not as tuneful as some musicals and some dreadful liberties were taken with the story. Also – and perhaps this is just the nature of the source material – but it seems like all the good music goes to Mr. Rochester, all the tortured, soul bearing solos. And once in a while, I found myself thinking, “Well, yes, but what about Jane???”

Anyhow – slight tangent – that sent me down a rabbit hole with all the various film adaptations of Jane Eyre and watching clips of them on YouTube. I’ve seen most of the recent ones. Here’s my take:

Jane Eyre on screen: Clockwise from top: 1983, 1997, 1996, 2011, National Theatre Adaptation and 2006

– 1983 BBC miniseries with Timothy Dalton and Zelah Clarke. I think this adaptation included everything. Maybe? I saw this in high school so my memory is fuzzy. It was quite long and looked like it had all been shot on a soundstage. Timothy Dalton did ALOT of scenery chewing, I do remember that.

– 1997 TV movie with Samantha Morton and Ciaran Hinds. This version took many liberties with the book, which I guess you have to when condensing the book into a two hour movie, but still… why add needless action and out of character scenes? Some if it just didn’t feel in the spirit of the book. Not my favorite Rochester – I’ve loved Hinds in other things (the 1996 Persuasion, for example), but he was just too blustery and uncharismatic in this. Morton was fine as Jane. Honestly, I find that I love the character of Jane so much it’s hard to play her terribly – the source material is just really good. Sure one just has to be plain and mousy and passive for much of the movie, and as long as one hits the notes of ferocity in the right moments, one pretty much gets a passable version the character.

– 1996 movie with Charlotte Gainsbourg and William Hurt. I saw this in the movie theatre when it came out – I was in high school. What an odd odd pairing. William Hurt was much too old to be Rochester. I’m realizing that Rochester, while 20 years older than Jane is actually only in his later 30s, which, now that I’ve crossed into my 40s, seems much younger than it seemed to me when I first read the book as a teenager. So. William Hurt’s older and weary Rochester was perhaps a little too old and weary for me. Charlotte Gainsbourg was fine as Jane. This movie did also have the virtue of having Anna Paquin as young Jane.

-2006 mini series with Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens – Ruth Wilson is my favorite Jane. There is something slightly off kilter about her Jane, and she found the humor in the character too. I think this Jane/Rochester pairing had the best chemistry – you could really sense that these two could be happy together for the rest of their lives. I could do without all that hair on Toby Stephens, though. I thought this was a very thorough adaptation – I need to re-watch it because I remember liking it very much.

-2011 film with Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender. Wasikowska is fine as Jane – she takes the outward calm and bland approach to Jane. Fassbender is my favorite Mr. Rochester – he has, I find, the right blend of humor and hope without being too gothic or grim or melodramatic, never mind that he is probably too good looking to play the part. But does any one every really believe that Jane is plain and Rochester homely looking?

-I have to say, though, my favorite adaptation is the National Theatre’s stage version of Jane Eyre. I watched it during the pandemic when it was made available to stream for free and I think it’s brilliant, as an adaptation, as a piece of theatre, as a piece of storytelling. The whole production takes places on a series of platforms and versatile group of eight (or six? can’t remember) playing all the parts, including the dog Pilot. There is something really visceral about this adaptation that I love. We all think of Jane as this really calm and collected and internal character, but somehow onstage, she can be just as histrionic as Rochester and it works.

After I worked through my Jane Eyre obsession, the next soundtrack I put on was The Scarlet Pimpernel, a 1997 Frank Wildhorn musical, based on the book about a bunch of English noblemen who, during the Reign of Terror in France, band together to save French aristocrats from the guillotine.

On repeat these days.

The musical got three different revisions on Broadway – so I feel like either it was amazing or amazingly bad. I’m in the camp of amazing. But it was also panned quite badly by the critics, so I’m probably wrong. I’ll never get to see it, so I’ll never know for sure. When I was in college, I remember watching on tv the Scarlet Pimpernel company perform the musical number Into the Fire on the Tony Awards and I was so very taken by Douglas Sills, who played the lead Sir Percy Blakeney. Into the Fire is the number where Percy persuades his friends that they must go to France and save the aristocrats, and if you ever need a hearth thumping inspirational “St. Crispin’s Day” speech type of musical number, this is it. Anyhow, the first time I saw this number on the Tony Awards broadcast, I was immediately smitten by Douglas Sills and the heartbreakingly enthusiastic optimism with which he led this ensemble. I remember thinking he was the most beautiful man on earth. You should go watch it.

There’s something about revisiting the obsessions of one’s youth and the way it can take you back. Sometimes I watch things that I loved twenty years before, and say to myself, “Wow, I can’t believe I liked that!” or, more accurately, “Wow, twenty year old me had terrible taste!” (I think Phantom of the Opera is like that – I still love all it’s schlocky melodrama, but I don’t think it’s as objectively good as I thought it was when I was younger.) And sometimes I’m like, “Wow, that still packs a punch!” Into the Fire is definitely the latter and I’ve been finding myself newly obsessed by the whole musical recently. I will admit that the soundtrack itself has a few too many “Love is miserable” type power ballads for my taste, but they are sung with heart and a certain lack of irony that is hard to find these days. And the bigger ensemble numbers are nimble and clever. It’s been fun re-discovering this piece and I’ve been listening to it on repeat and scouring the internet for YouTube for clips and articles and interviews about the production- I would say it’s been 95% of my Google searches the past week. It just has such a fascinating creation story – how it was written and re-written and re-written and how it launched Sills’ career, and how critics hated it. Every so often I get very fixated on something and go on a Google bender. I’ve even set Into the Fire as the alarm for the kids to get dressed in the morning. At 7:57, the first strains of Into the Fire plays and the two little kids – the oldest one has gone to school by then – go get dressed. And they know they have until the end of the number to emerge fully dressed from their room. It’s worked shockingly well this past week.

The other thing my recent obsession with Scarlet Pimpernel made me think about, as I dredged up pirated videos on YouTube is that I will probably never get to see this musical live. And certainly never with the dashing Douglas Sills in the lead. And that makes me a little sad, because it reminds me how ephemeral theatre and live performance is. This thing that I do for a living, what is the value if it doesn’t give people something they can bottle or hold on to or replay whenever they want? We create moments to savor, moments that you live in and then are left to remember rather than relive. Even when I watch grainy footage of musical numbers, I am very much aware that that was corner of time that I was not there for, and all I can have is this four minute shaky video clip on YouTube. And even thought that moment was captured on video, it kind of exists as a relic, not as the piece itself. It’s very different from a movie that was created, yes of moments that were filmed, but a movie is created to be frozen in time. Theatre is just not like that. Watching a video of a theatrical performance makes me very aware of how I will never get to experience that performance, that moment of theatre live. It’s a little sad, but also makes me realize how, whether I’m working backstage on a show or seeing it from out front, I am grateful to be part of that story that is being told that night and the people who are telling it. I guess this is also true of a lot of things in life…

Other things:
Watercolor homework – poppies. I feel like it’s a little unrefined and almost cartoonish. I still haven’t gotten a hold on how to blend colours seamlessly. Also part of the assignment was to paint the background first, and then paint the poppy over it, and I’m not really happy with how you can see the background through the poppies. But… the texture in the grass was done with a cool technique where you sprinkle salt on the paint while wet and as the salt dissolves in the paint, it creates cool swirls of colour. This is probably stuff that you learn to do in elementary school, but pretty cool nonetheless.

Then this week we are working on working with watercolor pencils, which is fun. Here was what we did in class, experimenting with the different ways one can use water color pencils.

Lunch Hack of the week:
One day, I asked the four year old what she wanted for lunch. And she said “Chicken!” So I stuck a Costco size package of chicken wings into the InstantPot with a bit of Cajun seasoning and made a week’s worth of chicken wings. Batch cooking has made for really easy lunch packing – a couple of chicken wings thrown into their lunch box, half an apple sliced up, cucumber slices, and two Oreos. I’m sure I’m breaking all sorts of food safety rules by having the cooked chicken sit in the fridge all week and having the kids eat it, but no one’s gotten sick yet…

Morning glory muffins.

I’ve also been on a muffin making kick lately. The biggest hits are Morning Glory muffins from the King Arthur Flour Baking Book and these chocolate muffins made with applesauce. The four year old has been wanting chocolate muffins, but most of the recipes I saw were too cake-like for me. I don’t know if these are necessarily any healthier, but the apple sauce gives it a firmer texture. The kids gobble them up. One day, I came home to find that of the 24 mini chocolate muffins and 12 morning glory muffins I made, all that was left were two mini muffins and 1 morning glory muffin with a bite taken out of it. It was so sad, I took a picture for my Husband. He told me it was too sad and not blog-worthy. So I’m sticking the picture here, just to prove him wrong:

Okay – traumatic experience of the week – My friend was showing me around her house, which they have been doing major renovations to. We walked through all the finished parts and oohed and ahhed over how great everything looked. And then she took me to her upstairs bathroom which was being gutted and renovated. It had been torn down to the studs, including the floor. It was just crossbeams and the floor beneath. Which was actually the ceiling of the kitchen below. Then her cat ran into the gutted bathroom, and my friend stepped into the bathroom to get the cat out and, stepping onto what seemed like solid floor, but was really only dry wall of the ceiling below, and her foot plunged through that drywall, the cat fell through the hole that her foot made, into the kitchen below, and then the rest of my friend plunged through the hole, only saved from falling all the way through by catching herself by the armpits on the crossbeams. OMG, I thought my friend was going to plunge to her death right in front of me. And the whole time she was saying, “Is the cat okay?” I quickly reached down and helped haul her back up and out of the bathroom and we decided that the door to the bathroom could stay shut. I always thing of houses as VERY SOLID things, but once in a while, I realize that they are actually quite vulnerable feats of engineering and craftsmanship. Like when you realize all that’s between you and the room below is couple of crossbeams and a piece of drywall.

Grateful for:
-That my friend did not seriously hurt herself – or her cat – when they plunged through the ceiling.

-The lady at watercolor class who came over to me at the beginning of class and said, “I noticed that you had the expensive watercolour paper, and I was wondering if you wanted this extra pad I had of the not so expensive stuff so that you don’t have to use up all your good paper?” I was so touched! When I originally went to the art store, they only had the expensive stuff – I mean it’s not the “so expensive I don’t want to use it” kind, but it was definitely better than the “buy it in a 30 sheet pad from Michael’s” pad that the teacher had recommended we get. The lady at class had accidentally bulk ordered the basic 30-sheet pad, so she had extra. Then she said, somewhat darkly, “It’s more paper than I’ll be able to use, given my age.” Which was also kind of touching and frank.

-Apple Music. I mean I pay for it, but to have all this music at my fingertips is amazing, especially since the last time I was really into listening to music, it involved expensive purchases and lugging three binders of CDs around with me.

-That running doesn’t hurt. I don’t think I will ever like running. But it’s good for me and I do feel better afterwards, so I will try to keep running a few times a week. I only started running the year that I turned 42, so I’m pretty new at it and it’s not terribly easy for me. I get tired and hot and bored and can’t catch my breath. Lately, though, I’ve noticed that mile 2 does not feel as impossibly hard as it did two years ago. Last week, I managed to run three miles on two of my runs – I don’t usually get that far, but I got to 2.5 miles on both runs and felt like, “Okay, I think I can just do that extra half mile.” I know 3 miles is kind of paltry to a lot of serious runners, but to me, it feels like a reach goal on an average Wednesday afternoon. But it’s getting easier to go that far, and I’m grateful.

-That the two younger kids don’t have cavities. Yay! The kids had their semi-annual cleanings, and after the ordeal of all the crowns earlier this year, I went into their dentist appointment on pins and needles, wondering if, despite all that, they still had issues. Apparently they have very grooved teeth. But thankfully, there are no cavities. The 7 year old might need to see an orthodontist at some point, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Looking Forward to:

-Cherry blossoms! Peak bloom will be during spring break, so I might not be able to see them, but I’m hoping to go down to the Tidal Basin next week and get my fill.

-Having a friend over for dinner. Sometimes I think I want to throw a dinner party and invite witty people and cook all the things, but I think I actually prefer just having one or two friends over at a time. It feels more low-key and easier to connect. I think I’ll make chicken curry.

-Going back to rehearsal in April. I’m ready for someone to hand me a schedule every day and to know where I have to be and what I have to do. It’s nice to have a lighter schedule, but I think I do better with more structure in my life.

What we ate:

Saturday: Pizza and Next Goal Wins. It was my movie night and I admit that I was in no small part prompted to pick this movie because it starred the above-mentioned Michael Fassbender. In addition to that, though, it’s great family friendly sports movie about the American Samoa soccer team, which was known as the worst soccer team in the world when it lost 30-0 to Australia in a World Cup qualifier match. Fassbender is the down on his luck coach who is tasked with getting the team to score just one goal in a game. It hits all the feel good predictable notes of a family friendly sports film.

Sunday: Pasta and red sauce. Basic, simple, and filling.

Monday: Black Pepper Asparagus and Tofu, eaten with rice. I had some asparagus in our produce box to use up. I would use more black pepper next time.

Tuesday: Chicken on the Run – Peruvian chicken take-out after the 7 year old’s sewing class. He is now making a pillow.

Wednesday: Mac and cheese and kielbasa and green beans.

Thursday: pizza and fries before the show. The husband and the two little kids had eggs and toast at home. I had tickets to the dress rehearsal of the operetta that my company was producing and I took the 12 year old, and a friend and my work BFF’s 11 year old and her friend. So that was me driving carpool with 4 pre-teens in the car and it was a fascinating experience. Preteens are so full of confidence and enthusiasm and bravado, even the quiet ones, and I had the curious experience of being invisible – a fly on the wall – driving them down to the theatre, privy to all sorts of conversations. It was such a strange experience.

Friday: pizza leftover from last Saturday, and salad and Galavant. Finished the series. Soooo sad! We are all really sad that there was never a third season of Galavant, even though they did end things on a little bit of a cliffhanger, so maybe we can hope? What ever will we watch next?

Weekly Recap + what we ate: Good-bye February 2024!

Spring-ish!

Our last weekend in February was delightfully filled by a visit from my high school friend. She arrived on Saturday mid afternoon and was with us until Monday when I drove her to her hotel where she would be staying for her conference. She’s the only friend from high school that I still keep in touch with, and even though we only see each other every couple of years, we always pick up where we left off. She has children a few years older than mine, and she has such a chill approach to parenting that it’s so soothing talking to her about kids and life and how things turn out. She also used to date my brother so there are things that she just gets about me, even when she doesn’t know the details of my life ant any given moment.

Before my friend came in on Saturday, the 12 year old had a voice lesson, and since the voice lesson was closer to the airport than our house, we decided to have a little adventure in the two hours between voice lesson and my friend’s arrival. (The 12 year old had a hang out with a friend, so she didn’t come along). I remembered that the Gardens at Dumbarton Oaks are free during the winter months, and I had always wanted to visit. It was about 15 minutes from where we were, so we drove down to Georgetown, parked our car, stopped for some coffee, and walked down Wisconsin Ave to Dumbarton Oaks.

So funny story – the only reason I know that Dumbarton Oaks exists is because Igor Stravinsky wrote a chamber symphony called Dumbarton Oaks, which was commissioned by Robert and Mildred Bliss, who used to own the estate. The estate is now a research institute, library, museum, and gardens. Ever since I heard the chamber symphony in college, I’ve wanted to visit Dumbarton Oaks. So finally, twenty plus years later, we went. It’s so funny what random bits of information I know because it has a connection to music.

The gardens were quite extensive and there was lots to see, even though it was still pretty dormant. We played our “Find the Rainbow Colors” game. Though we didn’t really find blue because the sky, which is often our default blue, was pretty grey and cloudy. But there were these cool green-ish blue rocks in the pebble garden, so I took a picture of those. And I can never find indigo…

Red
orang
yellow
green
blue-ish…
purple.

The purple and yellow flowers always remind me of the passage in Braiding Sweetgrass where Robin Wall Kimmerer said she wanted to study botany to know why purple and yellow flowers always look so nice together. Turns out there is a scientific explanation for that – I can’t remember what, to be honest – but it’s always struck me, this idea of wanting to understand beauty.

We wandered the gardens until it was time to go pick up my friend. The rest of the weekend was pretty chill. I loved having a friend visit who didn’t feel the need to be a tourist, so we could hang out and not traipse all over the city. She just tagged along with us on our normal life things and we had great conversations and connections. Looking back, Sunday was a great day – it checked a lot of soul satisfying boxes:
-Connection – hanging out for 48 hours with my friend, including dinner at my favorite hot pot place.
-Exercise – we went skating together while the kids were in lessons. So not super strenuous, but we got our bodies moving for a good two hours.
-Creative – I had to finish my watercolour homework, so in the afternoon, I worked on that while my friend hung out and hemmed her pants. How wonderfully domestic does that sound?
-Outside time – We took the two little kids outside after I was done my homework and watched them while they rode their bikes around the block for an hour. Again, not as active as a hike, but still some quality sunshine and fresh air time.

I think the only box that didn’t get checked was some knocking some big household organization project off my list. But… you can’t do everything and the day overall had a nice leisurely pace. The Husband did do a lot of work in the garden, though, so maybe I can have him check off the “household task” box for us?

March is my last month at a reduced work schedule before I go back into opera mode. I feel like February wasn’t super focused. I was on an 8 hr a week contract at work so I could do some admin and stage management department duties, but I couldn’t get into a good rhythm of when to be at work. I wanted to be available for at least 30-60 mind a day to handle email and tasks, so then the questions became how to spend the other hours a week. I did take the weekends completely off, like didn’t-even-check-email-off, which was really nice. I did periodically have a sense of panic that I was shirking my job responsibilities, but then I had to remind myself that an 8 hour a week contract means I only have to work 8 hours a week. I wasn’t being paid to be constantly available, and there were certainly enough people at work that nothing depended on me alone. I ended up mostly working two three hour days – usually Wednesday and Thursday – and then splitting the other two hours between the other three days, working from home. But even though a three hour day sounds short, it breaks up the entire day in such a way that I felt like unless I was super focused – which I rarely was – I lost a lot of time in commuting and transitioning. I find transitioning between activities is when I loose the most time – it’s when I’m most likely to get distracted, start scrolling and then loose and hour or so. So then little tasks – especially little computer tasks – got dropped because the last thing I wanted to do after being on my computer for 3 hours at the office was to turn on the computer at home and pay the bills and do the kid sign ups, research how to get rid of my car, etc.

This week’s work from watercolor class:
First the homework from last week – the assignment was “sunsets”

Then the lesson was painting poppies. I didn’t love this one – I felt like it was a little un-refined. The lady who sits next to me in class makes such delicate paintings.

Anyhow, February 2024 is now past and we are onto March. I don’t always do a monthly reflection, but I did for February:
February highs:
– Starting water color classes.
-Getting back on my bike.
– Seeing the kids thrive in the activities we had signed them up for. I worried that it was going to be too much, but they truly love what they are doing – except piano, no one really loves to practice, though they say they want to learn to play…
– Hosting Super Bowl Sunday gathering with friends.
– Visit from my high school friend
– joining a women’s Lenten reading group. Having that connection, but also the daily readings, which somehow give me much to ponder even though I’m not Catholic like the others in the group.
-Making baozi. I want more cooking adventures!
-As a family, we made it to a museum, a hike and some gardens in February.
-The wonderful weather. Mostly.
-Watching Galavant with the kids. Only three more episodes to go! What should we watch next???
-The vocal recital that I did titles for. Such a beautiful program, beautifully sung.
-Lunches with the Husband. A good use of my lighter schedule.

February not so highs. (aka lows, but really, life is pretty good, so I don’t feel right calling them “lows” – they’re just life, the tedious, repetitive, papercut stresses of life. Or maybe I need a re-frame. Or more sleep.)
-Tantrums and chore cajoling. Ugh. When will this phase end? Though I ask that and my kids are all at different phases, so…. I guess never? When they move out? Also I realize chore cajoling could also refer to the pep talks I give to myself to stop scrolling and fold the laundry.
-Making little progress on some house chores, losing momentum and focus.
– The first grader and some communication issues with his teacher. Essentially he’s having accidents at school at least once or twice a month, either because his teacher wants him to finish his work first, or the teacher doesn’t realize he’s asking to go. I’m a little stumped by the whole thing. Also frustrated. Also trying to decide if it’s a problem because he doesn’t seem to mind…
-New duties at work that are surprisingly harder than I had thought they would be and not yet knowing how to make things better.
– Not finding/making time to journal and then not remembering or savoring the memories of what I’ve been doing with my days.
-Laundry. So much laundry.

Some aspirations for March:
-TAXES. This is the big one. If I do only one thing in March, it will be to assemble everything for our tax preparer. This is not an aspiration, but a MUST DO!!!!
– Figure out what to do with my car.
-Sort through summer camp sign ups. We registered for some second choice camps, but then first camp choice had slots open up, so I just have to take a minute to look at everything and sort it all out.
-Spring break adventures – getting through them.
-At work – some desk organization. I need to move desks – to the cubicle where the head of the stage management department usually sits, but I’ve been in my desk for over 15 years and I’m partial to it so this is proving psychologically difficult. Kind of like the car. Maybe I don’t need to move desks?
– Organizing a) my sewing corner, and b) the toy room.
– Lunch with my mom’s group.
-maintaining life habits – reading, yoga and exercise, journaling, writing here regularly, making 2 vegan dinners a week.
– sort out my county rec center pass, and actually using it. The County is once again giving all residents free passes to the rec centers this year. I want to get my pass so I can start using the gym and introduce some strength work to my life.
-continuing to find time for lunches with the Husband.
-Listening to more musicals. This is a fun one. I’ve been on a binge lately of those unironic big hearted musicals from the 90s – those musicals that were huge spectacles of stage and emotion. I’m currently obsessed with Frank Wildhorn and Nan Knighton’s The Scarlet Pimpernel. Up next, I think might be Titanic.
– Going to bed at a decent time. ie. before 11:30pm. Constant struggle.
-make some dentist and doctor appointments.
–maybe get a hair cut. I was realizing as I was writing in my 5 year journal that the last time I got my hair cut was this time last year. What?!?! I think I had a bit of sticker shock last time since my hairdresser had raised his prices. I’ve been with him for over ten years so I don’t know if I have it in me to find a new person. (Like my car and my desk at work….)

Grateful For:
-Sunny, warm weather. There have been some rainy days too, but the weather has been really mild. The hyacinths have come up along our front walk, and when I walk to the front door, their sweet peppery smell reminds me that it is early spring.

-Impulsive playdates and kids who can run free at the park without being watched. The kids had a half day of school on Friday, so I texted the mom of two of the 7 year old’s friends (they’re twins), and asked if they wanted to meet up at a park. They did and she invited two other kids from her bus stop to meet us there. We ended up spending two hours at the park. The kids ran around and did I don’t know what and I got to chat with the other moms. I don’t always find it easy to talk to other parents, but that wasn’t the case this time. We chatted about all sorts of things, and not just our kids, which is always nice.

-My friend at our bus stop who invited me to the Lenten Women’s Group. I think it’s always awkward to invite someone to something new, but especially something that is based in religion. So I’m glad my friend had the courage to ask me to join. It was nice to get out of the house and talk to other moms about their spiritual background and how they try to incorporate it into their lives. I kind of feel like a fraud since I wouldn’t call myself religious – Lent wasn’t a thing when I was growing up. But religion is important to the Husband and two of the three kids are Catholic, so I do want to understand how it makes up the fabric of our life and support that. I also really like thinking about the group readings. The book looks at Lent through the lens of the Seven Deadly Sins. We’ve covered gluttony and lust so far. The readings have made me really think about what it means to have enough and what to do with my energy rather constantly accumulating/wanting more.

-That I don’t have to be in tech. I stopped by the theatre a couple days last week since the show that we’re currently producing, but which I’m not working on, is in tech. I love my job. I love making the magic of theatre and music happen. But once in a while, it’s nice to just sit and watch tech happen and not have the pressure of having to be the one to make it all happen. I find it also good to sit and watch tech from the house sometimes, just to remind myself what it’s like out front. When I’m in tech, I have a headset on and I’m communicating with all the other stage managers and I’m talking to the crew, so I usually know what’s going on. Sometimes, I forget, though, that the people out front don’t necessarily have the same voices in their ear as I do and might not know what is happening backstage. So what to me backstage might seem like a frantic scramble to get, say, a prop ready to come out onstage while the singer onstage waits for it, is, to the people sitting in the house, sometimes… nothing happening. Watching the process without a headset is always a good reminder to make sure that the people without headsets know what is going on. Anyhow, as much as I love my job, I’m grateful that sometimes I don’t have to be part of that stress. (and also jealous because the show is super cute and fun.)

Looking Forward To:
-We booked a trip to Maine/Acadia for this summer. We got a National Parks Pass and I very much want to make sure we use it this year. We’ve had passes the past couple years (including a free one given to all 4th graders when the 12 year old was in 4th grade – it’s a great program!), but I don’t think I use it to it’s full capacity. We go to Great Falls and Shenandoah regularly because those are all close, but I’ve always felt like I want to do more. So this year we are going to Acadia. I’m looking forward to sunsets and hikes and lobster. (I don’t think we’ll be doing sunrise at Cadillac Mountain because of where our airbnb is located, but I think it would have been a hard sell for the kids. Another time…)

-Theatre trips! I have tickets to a couple shows coming up! Yay. The Husband and I are going to see Company, and the dress rehearsal/ Opening night for the next opera (which I’m not working on, so I’ll get to see it! Yay!). And then the local high school is putting on Beauty and the Beast and I think that will be fun to see too. I feel like it’s good to see the professional shows and the high school ones – for a sense of perspective.

-I have a contract for my summer gig and I am SO EXCITED! It’s an opera I worked on six year ago, an opera written in 2017 about the Christmas Eve truce of 1914 during World War I. The opera is just. so. beautiful – in my top 5 opera jobs ever. And it’s very rare one gets to do a contemporary opera more than once, so I’m super thrilled.

-Listening to this audiobook:

I saw this audiobook recommended on the site Five Books, and I really enjoyed Alexis Hall’s book Boyfriend Material, so I thought I’d give this one a try. I’m very much loving it – it’s an amnesia romance novel where the amnesia victim doesn’t really have amnesia. How’s that for flipping a trope on it’s head? Amnesia romances usually aren’t my thing, but this one’s pretty great. And the audiobook is pitch perfect; it’s like an audio version of my favorite British rom com in the vein of Notting Hill or Four Weddings and a Funeral. Fluffy and and warm and hilarious. I’ve laughed out loud so many times.

What We Ate:
Saturday: Chicken Ginger Scallion soup from Deb Perelmans’ Smitten Kitchen Keepers cookbook. This was a super easy soup, and I even make it with frozen chicken, just cooking it a bit longer. Nice pantry type meal. Everyone loved it. We didn’t watch a movie because my friend was visiting, but we did watch and episode of the new season of Bad Batch.

Sunday: We went out to Hot Pot with my friend. Our favorite place with a conveyor belt and a robot that delivers the food for you.

Monday: Chickpeas braised in tomatoes. This was leftover from the week before. I added some water and it was more of a soup than stew, but still tasty. We had it with bread. Vegan.

Tuesday: Beet burgers and tater tots. The beet burgers were this recipe from Post Punk Kitchen. We had beets to use up, so I tried this recipe. The burgers were really tasty, and pretty easy to assemble, though grating the beets did take a while and then because my food processor is small and only does 1.5 cups at a time chopping all the ingredients together took a couple of batches. If you had a bigger capacity food processor then these would be much faster to whip up. I highly recommend this as a veggie burger. The burgers also heat up really well, so I had them for lunches the rest of the week. vegan.

Wednesday: Take out Vietnamese – buns and noodle bowls. We had an afterschool playdate with a friend and her father brought dinner over afterwards. Tasty.

Thursday: Pork and tofu stir fry with udon noodles. The Husband cooked.

Friday: Pizza and Galavant.