family movie night – Page 9

Weekly recap + what we ate: Spring Break

My brother’s family was in town the last week of March for their Spring break. It had been almost two and a half years since we saw them in person- last time they were here, the baby was eight weeks old. Of course there have been many video calls since them, but seeing them in person was pretty great.

I feel so lucky that we live somewhere where there is a wealth of things to see and do, and most of it is free. One thing my brother and sister-in-law really wanted to see was the new Yayoi Kasuma exhibit at the Hirshhorn, the contemporary and modern art museum on the Mall. I had missed the last Kasuma exhibit when it was here, so I was eager to go this time, even though it meant lining up at 9:00am for tickets on a Sunday. Fortunately, my brother and his In-laws went down on the early side to get in line and my sister-in-law, my mom, and I followed with the kids at a more reasonable hour.

I will admit the only work of Kasuma I had been familiar with were pictures of her pumpkins. The current exhibit featured two of her Infinity Mirror Rooms, but first up was a pumpkin:

I was unprepared for how the pumpkin took up so much space and how looming it would feel in its dotted room. I also love how the precision of the dots contrast with the more organic curves of the pumpkin.

The Infinity Mirror Rooms were another kind of overwhelming and immersive experience. These are rooms where the walls are made of mirrors so they seem to extend without limits. There was a time limit on how long each museum patron could be in the room – 30 seconds for the first room and 60 for the second. I think there is something ironically claustrophobic about being in a room that seems to stretch for infinity. The first room featured all these stuffed protuberances that came out of the ground like a field of polka dotted cacti. It was kind of whimsical and fun.

The second room featured polka dot lanterns aglow in a dark mirrored room. This room reminded me a little of being out on Hallowe’en, and how disembodied one can feel in the dark, even when surrounded by lighted objects. (I’m sure there’s some kind of metaphor for life in that somewhere…)

After we went through the Kasuma exhibit, we also went to see the Laurie Anderson exhibit. The exhibit was a fascinating blend of sound, film, and visual images. There was one piece that featured projections of people sharpening knives, the sound almost symphonic. There was also several rooms with words and pithy thoughts scrawled, graffiti like, all over the walls and floors. Here were a few of my favorites:

I find the Hirshhorn rather overwhelming to visit, to be honest. In think contemporary art requires a lot of mental bandwidth from me, and a lot of it, while interesting, demands attention unrelentingly. At the Hirshhorn, a lot of the exhibits often have audio as well visual components and sometimes I don’t feel like I have room to process everything. And a lot of the time, I had to admit that I just don’t “get” what I’m seeing, even though I read the little placard next to the work. Sometimes I feel like I’m either overthinking contemporary art, or under thinking it. And honestly sometimes it just makes me giggle. I’m glad I live near and can visit in short bursts and take things in one exhibit at a time.

At the time of my brother’s visit, most of the museums were still open on reduced hours, so we spent one day walking around and visiting monuments since we couldn’t go to any museums. We saw the MLK memorial and the FDR memorial, those being two of the closest to the cherry blossom in the tidal basin. Of course it wasn’t officially peak bloom anymore, but there was still lots of blossoms to be seen. And lots of petals to rain down on our heads like snow.

Among all that, I had one last supertitle gig for this season, and perhaps my favorite of all the vocal recitals I worked this year. The pianist for the recital was also a composer and the second half of the program was entirely songs cycles that he had written. He introduced each song set and there was something wonderfully personal about a hearing a composer talk about the backstory of their own work.

Another fascinating thing that happened that week – I took my mom to the Mall to find an outfit for a meeting she had coming up. As we were walking to Macy’s, we saw a good wandering around the parking lot.

“Strange!” I thought. But I’d seen a lot of geese flying overhead recently so I didn’t really think much of it, though I have to admit that seeing a goose wandering in the Macy’s parking lot has a certain charm, so long as one stays out of the goose’s way. Then, as I was walking up to the door, I saw:

Why yes, that is a goose and two eggs in the planter in front of Macy’s. In my head I have a story (much like when my middle child was born) of a goose couple starting to fly off on a journey when suddenly the mama goose says, “We need to pull over now! The eggs are coming!” And she lays two eggs in the middle of a parking lot. (I, fortunately did make it to the hospital with my middle child…). Anyway, given that there were clearly two geese guarding the precious eggs, we figured it was better if we just went our merry way into Macy’s and let the geese have some family privacy. Or as much as one can have in the middle of a parking lot.

What we ate: we actually ate out more than usual because cooking dinner for twelve people seemed overwhelming.

Saturday: take out thai, picked up on our way home from the airport.

Sunday: We had dinner at a new to us restaurant with lots of outdoor seating and firepits. Though the evening was on the chilly side, the restaurant staff brought us blankets and lots of extra firewood for the firepit. Of course half our blankets were immediately commandeered by the kids to build blanket forts…. The food was pretty good and they had these fun smores kits for dessert. The fun thing about their s’mores is that in addition to the typical Hersheys chocolates they also had York Peppermint Patties and thin Reese Peanut Butter Cups. Such a brilliant idea!

Monday: ordered Vietnamese food. We needed something quick because we were having family photos taken.

Tuesday: Terriyaki Tofu and grilled Korean Beef and grilled veggies. With rice and seaweed salad on the side.

Wednesday: I had to work so I got a take out grain bowl from Beefsteak.

Thursday: Japanese take out.

Friday: Pizza and movie night at our Tennessee AirBnB (more on that next post…). Pizza Hut, which was better than I had remembered, though they were out of mushrooms, which I have never encountered before.

Weekly recap + what we ate: blossoms and blooms

Continuing to catch up on things… but here’s the latest from the last half of March – (also, the internet ether ate my original post, so I’ve had to rewrite this weeks after the fact… grrr… but yay for me for sitting down to write.)

The week started off with a COVID exposure in the five year old’s classroom. Since he was fully vaccinated and didn’t have any symptoms, he was allowed to continue to go to school. He was one of only four kids in class for half the week, which actually suited him just fine. On the evening of the first day, we were doing “Rose, buds, and thorns” and when it was his turn to tell his “Rose”, he said, “My rose is that it was very quiet at school today.” Sometimes I feel like he is a very old soul who just wants to sit in his quiet corner of the world and think deep thoughts. And play with his trucks

The week was also officially peak bloom here in the DC area. It seems to come earlier and earlier every year. I think in my head peak bloom is still an April event, but … here we were in the third week of March and the trees were a riot of white and pink puffs. Everywhere I turned, I was greeted by

On my way to work:

I was at a stop light when I snapped this picture. The sky and blossoms and everything… so much spring!

On my dinner break run:

Unseen, but behind me is a traffic and construction vehicles.

I think I make it down to see the cherry blossoms every two or three years. This year, since my mother was in town, I decided to take her down. It was the last day of official peak bloom, and also the first sunny day all week, so of course the Tidal Basin was quite crowded. But we still had a lovely walk and basked in the beauty of all the cherry trees and did a lot of people watching. My sister in law told me that the Japanese have a whole slew of words for the various stages of cherry blossoms, and one of them is “hanafubuki” which translates to flower snow storm. Walking among the trees with pedals showering down on us with every strong breeze, I certainly could see what a fittingly evocative word “hanafubuki” is.

I took some quintessential DC pictures:

As well as some cute baby in blossom pictures:

Some other things this week:

I got some disappointing news this week about work and it put me in a bit of a funk. A job that I was hoping to get didn’t come through for unexplained reasons. I know that lack of job security is always going to be part of gig work, but it still shook my confidence a little. But, I guess not summer work means that I now can plan other adventures with the kids. I’m trying to look on the bright side even while being really bummed about things.

The baby got a spot in a vaccine trial for children ages 6 months to 5 years. She is doing a Pfizer trial and will get three shots, which have a two in three chance of being a real vaccine. Of course that means that she has a one in three chance of having the placebo. She took the blood draw and the first shot without any fuss or crying and she was super excited to get a sticker and a bandaid afterwards.

There is a stage manager, now no longer with us, who was known for saying “Life is short, Opera is long.” Well, the show I was working on certainly was long – 3 hours, 30 minutes from orchestra tune to the end of bows. Add to that the fact that I’m usually up on stage an hour before we start, and I’m on my feet for about 4.5 hours straight each performance. My legs were starting to feel the strain, so I asked the company if I could have an anti-fatigue mat for my console and they said yes. I don’t know why such a small thing made me so happy, but it did. I got the kind that has some lumps and bumps so I can massage the bottom of my feet when they start to feel restless, and I feel like my legs feel less tired at the end of the night now.

We went out for fancy bagels to celebrate the ten year old’s last basketball game. And since we got there at closing time, the bagel truck was handing out free donuts. Yay free donuts! I’m not sure if the donuts made up for losing the basketball game, but it was certainly a pick me up!

One day we went to the local botanical gardens. Things were still very bare and wintery, but there were some lovely things to see. Like this sculpture carved from the trunk of a tree that had to be removed. I thought this was just so cool:

There were also some flowers in the garden:

Seeing these flowers reminded me of a book I’m reading right now – Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Her book is a collection of essays about what we can learn from observing how plants exist and co-exist with other plants. There is one essay, where she writes of how when she was applying to study botany, she said she wanted to know why the goldenrod and the aster were so beautiful next to each other, only to be told by a professor that wondering about such things was “not science.” Well, it turns out that there is a reason that goldenrods and asters are so appealing together – something to do with how the human eye perceives colour. I love how Wall Kimmerer’s book urges us to pay attention to beauty and how knowing why something draws our attention doesn’t make it any less breathtaking. Whenever I see purple and yellow together, I think of this book.

While cleaning out my desk, I found this list of names. When the baby was just born, she was nameless for about a month. The Husband and I are very indecisive about picking names. Well, I went back to work soon after the baby was born, and there was one chorister in our show that would ask me at every rehearsal, “Did you pick a name yet?” and the answer was always, “No, we’re still deciding.” One day, I came to rehearsal and she handed me this list.

“I had some suggestions,” she said. I was so touched.

I actually like a lot of the names on the list and one or two would have been a strong contender. I keep this list pinned to my cubicle because it reminds me of a time when someone was super nice to me when I was in the haze of having a newborn.

What we ate:
Saturday: Ordered out Peruvian chicken. And ate outside on our back patio – a sure sign of fair weather coming. I love eating outside, especially in spring, before the mosquitoes get bad in the backyard. When we eat outside, it’s almost okay that the kids eat meanderingly – running around in the backyard and coming to the table for a bite here and there.

Sunday: Leftovers. I had a matinee performance, so didn’t get home til on the later side.

Monday: Pasta and broccoli rabe from Dinner Illustrated. Not a hit. I love bitter taste profiles, but I seem to be the only one in the family.

Tuesday: Black Pepper tofu and asparagus stir fry. This recipe was pretty aggressive with the black pepper – it calls for 1 tablespoon of black peppercorns, coarsely crushed. It might have been a little much for the kids, but the adults liked it.

Wednesday: Zucchini boats. This is a pretty easy meal – ground turkey sauteed with veggies, dump in a jar of salsa and simmer then put into hollowed out zucchini halves, sprinkle with cheese, and bake. This is a good meal for make ahead because I made the filling before I left for work, and all the husband had to do was prep the zucchini, fill the boats and bake. Apparently the kids loved this one.

Thursday: Baked gnocchi. I had never tried baking gnocchi before, but I happened to have a pack in the fridge, and I saw a recipe so I decided to give it a go. This was a great kitchen sink recipe to use up veggies from the fridge. I also had a bunch of kale so I made kale pesto to throw on it as well. Really tasty, though leftovers taste better when heated up – the gnocchi sort of loses it’s soft chew when cold.

Friday: Pizza and Peanut Butter Falcon. This 2019 movie was hilarious and heartfelt and charming. It tells the story of Zach, a man with Downs Syndrome, who runs away from his group home to try to find his hero, a retired wrestler. There is so much to love about this movie – the gritty sense of place, the really lived-in performances, the hopeful and touching friendships portrayed. But I think what is also so awesome about this movie is it’s origins. The movie is made by two first time filmmakers who work at a camp for disabled people. The lead actor in the movie Zach Gottsagen has Downs Syndrome and attended this camp. Zach had studied acting for a while, and mentioned to the filmmakers that there were never lead roles for people with Downs Syndrome. So the filmmakers decided to write a movie with Zack as the lead. What strikes me about this is that I think for all the talk about needing diversity and representation in mainstream media, underrepresented people still need those who are in the majority to recognize that their stories need to be told and can appeal to wide audiences – because the people who hold the purse strings and make decisions in Hollywood, or what not, are often not from underrepresented populations. There was a spot of controversy earlier this month with the movie Seeing Red, the new Pixar film about a Chinese Canadian teenager hitting puberty. A certain critic had called the film “limiting in scope” because he felt that setting the movie very specifically in the Asian Canadian community made it unrelatable to many people. It is certainly fine for a person to not care for a movie – but to do so based on the grounds that the movie is not set in the world you come from, with the people that you see everyday… it seems kind of … insular. Anyhow, between Peanut Butter Falcon and Seeing Red, I’ve been thinking a lot about how writing stories featuring diverse people must be supported by a willingness from those who are able bodied, white, cis-gendered, male, etc. to produce and consume these stories, to see the value in what underrepresented populations have to say.

Weekly recap + what we ate: listless

This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for almost a month now… I’m feeling a little bit like finding the time and energy to finish it has been difficult mentally – see title of this post. But we are taking some time away and I’m hoping to catch up on life and get back to writing. I also have to remind myself that polished prose is great, but just the act of writing is incredibly fulfilling for me too.

The weekend kicked off with… snow!

The evening before, the ten year old had gone over to the neighbor’s house to swim in their outdoor pool, and then we woke up the next morning to snow. Just when we had thought spring had arrived and we’d be done with cold weather. The daffodils and witch hazel that had just last week exploded in a riot of yellow, were now bending under a layer of snow and ice.

The two little kids greeted the snow with delight. I hunted down the snow gear and got them into it and out we went. It wasn’t terribly fluffy or fun snow- mostly wet and a little slushy but not packing consistency. I half heartedly tried to ball together a tiny snow man, and was pretty unsuccessful. The kids seemed happy enough just to push the snow around and shovel it into stacking cups. The five year old even made a good attempt at cleaning off my car, which I was grateful for as a couple hours later, I got in the car to go to work. It was opening night!

The day after opening night was Daylight Savings. Thank goodness I got to sleep in – the folks working on the other show we are producing at the moment had a Sunday matinee and had to be at the theatre by late morning. Ouf.

I took the kids on Sunday afternoon to give the Husband some childfree time. We dropped the four year old at Mandarin class, and the class was just the right length for us to go grocery shopping then be back in time to pick him up. Then we went on a little adventure to see a very familiar room:

The room was an art installation at a local arts center which houses three floors of artists studios. During opening hours, you can often see artists working on new pieces of art – the works on display range from painting to photography to sculpture, fiber arts, ceramics… it seems every media is represented. I had heard of this place and always wanted to visit, so when I heard about the Good Night Moon Room, figured it was a good reason to visit. The kids were delighted to see so many familiar things brought to life. Afterwards we visited many of the other artists’ studios, though the little ones didn’t last too long. They didn’t have the patience for just looking and not touching. (Notably, the Fiber Arts Guild had a “touching basket” in their studio – which I thought was a great idea.) I’ll have to make plans to return sans kids, and I definitely had my eye on one or two pieces that might make a nice present for the Husband.

I’m not sure why, but the time change has hit me pretty hard this time around. Maybe it’s having gone through the intensity of tech week only to be robbed of an hour of sleep. Ironically, I had a supertitles for a vocal concert a couple days after opening, and this was one of the slides for a song by Rachmaninoff:

At any rate, it’s been kind of hard to motivate and get things done.

A while ago, I had read this snippet from the New York Times’ Little Love Story series (fourth one in the link), It’s titled “Listless, Lost, then Found”, and is a mini essay about how the author, a person of many lists, grapples with having the flu and being so laid low that they are unable to make lists. In contrast their friend says, “I’m listless! I’ve stopped making lists. I’m free!” What an interesting concept wed to a turn of phrase! I was struck by how aptly the term “listless” describes the malaise I feel after a show when I am so exhausted from getting to opening night that I can’t even pull it together to plan the days that follow. Am I listless because I have no lists to guide me, or do I have no lists to guide me because I’m listless? Unlike the author’s friend, I do not feel freedom in having no lists. (Well, maybe when I am on vacation? Though that hasn’t truly happened in a very very long time. )

Somewhat paradoxically, I find the I make better use of my time when I have less free time, than when I have more of it. Knowing that I have to be in rehearsal or onstage for nine hours a day encourages me to make plans for the rest of my time- fitting that run in on my dinner break, getting dinner prepped in the morning, playing Wordle while the toast is toasting. When I have no constraints or obligations on my time, everything, even Wordle, seems less urgent. (I have played definitely played a Wordle round at 11:30pm while sitting in the parking garage after work). Even when things are urgent – taxes!- they seem less so when I feel like I have the entire day to do them.

Well, then, I think I do need to pull out of the listless state. The literal one. Making the list is, I feel, step one for me to get moving on the urgent and important things.

At the same time – I’ve been taking the baby to some Toddler Time sessions at a local nursery school. It’s a morning of free play, crafts, stories, and outdoor play with a sandbox and bubbles at the end of the session. The teacher who organizes the session also leads an open forum for parents while the kids play in the sandbox. The school operates in a co-op model and there are lots of signs up, encouraging parents to engage with their child. This is one of my favorite signs, particularly the last point:

In other news, both older kids’ school have gone mask optional now – the ten year old since mid last week, and the four year old just at the beginning of this week. Lifting mask mandates seems appropriate for the two year anniversary of the world spinning to a stop. The lifting also seemed to happen quite quickly here. I had been hearing in the news of other states and school districts lifting mask mandates – and indeed our indoor mask mandate had been lifted for a couple week now – but the email we got from the school district was literally, “Starting tomorrow…” The 4 year old’s school at least gave us a weekend of warning.

For the five year old, realizing that many of his classmates are still unvaccinated, we have told the teacher that we prefer he keep his mask on while indoors. When we asked him if he had a preference, he actually said that he preferred to keep it on. From what he tells me, all the kids in his class continue to wear masks inside. I wonder if it is because he has always had to wear a mask to school that he is in no hurry to remove it.

We left the choice up to the ten year old, although we told her that she needed to wear her mask indoors at school the week before my family comes to visit and while they are here. I don’t know if any of this is rational or not, to be honest.

One lovely benefit of the time change is longer days and I took advantage of the extra evening light to go on our first post dinner stroll of the year. Since I like to have dinner early, we often have from 7pm – 7:30pm to fill with some kind of activity before bed. The two littles seemed particularly delighted for the first evening constitutional of the year:

I love taking a turn around the block after dinner- the sky is painted orange and pink, the birds and crickets are out. We usually take the same path around our neighborhood, and there is a nice familiarity about it. One neighbor had a fish pond in their front yard and we always like to stop and watch the fish. And this time of year the trees are exploding with puffs of blossoms.

What we ate: (I seem to have large blanks in my memory of dinners this week.

Saturday: ?? Opening night… I’m sure it was some kind of leftovers

Sunday: Sunday leftovers.

Monday: Cornflake fried chicken and Arni’s Jrs. The chicken recipe is from Americas Test Kitchen’s Cookbook for Young Chefs and is actually baked, not fried. Arni’s Jr. are a salad from the Husband’s favorite childhood restaurant. It’s essentially iceberg lettuce, mozzarella cheese, cubed ham, cubed turkey, scallions, and radishes, all topped with blue cheese dressing. Oh, and croutons.

Tuesday: The Husband made Cincinnati Chili. I tried out a new place near work. I was excited to be able to order something with a large variety of veggies, though it was definitely on the salty side.

Wednesday: Kitchen sink yellow curry. I had some yellow curry paste and some yellow squash, eggplant, and tofu to use up.

Thursday: A special St. Patrick’s Day snack meal. Potted salmon, crackers, soda bread made from The Irish Pantry cookbook. Also roasted potatoes and cut up carrots. I had always been interested in the “potted” chapter of the cookbook – the idea of traditional methods of preserving meat with a layer of butter kind of appealed to my inner pioneer girl. I can’t say that the potted salmon was any more tasty than any other method of making salmon, and it was certainly more work than roasting salmon in the oven and then putting it in the fridge to keep it from spoiling. There is something that feels really indulgent in being able to try a preservation technique from hundreds of years ago. These high effort activities that were a necessary part of the every day kitchen of yesteryear have become a quaint kitchen experiment of today, it seems.

Friday: Pizza and March of the Penguins. I had to work and ate leftover curry.

Weekly recap + what we ate: Opening Night!

The show is open! Not without it’s share of excitement, of course. On our final dress rehearsal – the one with an audience – one of the singers called out sick and so the Assistant Director walked the role onstage while another singer sang the part from a music stand at the side of the stage. It’s not an uncommon practice when a singer goes down at the last minute during a final dress rehearsal, but it does necessitate a flurry of emails and phone calls. Oh well, as I kept reminding folks, better it happened at final dress than on opening night!

A shot of my book at the tech tables during an afternoon lighting session:

I go through a lot of Post-its and removable stickers while getting a show up. Everything I stick in my book is color coded. Like above – the orange post-its are my “Standby” cues where I warn departments of upcoming moves. In this case, those are descriptions for the follow spot operators, light cues and projection cues. The standard post-it yellow is usually notes about what is happening on stage – I don’t have to “call” it, but I need to know that it is happening. The yellow is just soft enough that I can ignore it. And then, at the very edge of the page are green stickers. And like at a traffic light, green means “Go” – that is when the move happens. In this case it’s a lighting cue, a Rail Q , and a projection cue all at the same time.

My supervisor sent me an encouraging text before a big rehearsal, expressing confidence in me, then gave me one piece of feedback. “… you may consider adding a few pleases and than you to your pages and announcements.” It was a great piece of feedback because I realized that while “Thank you” is pretty easy for me to remember, “Please” is harder for some reason. Yet if I think about it, I spend most of my job asking people to do things for the production. From sending notes to different departments, i.e. costume note: “Can singer X have a pocket in his jacket for a coin purse?” to actually calling the cues – “Standby Light Cue 35 and Rail Cue 2”. Basically my job consists of me being kind of demanding of people’s time, talents, and attention. So yeah, “Please” should be a bigger part of my everyday vocabulary, an indication of respect for said time, talents, and attention.

So I wrote myself a reminder in the notebook that I keep open next to me whenever I’m working:

(You can also see some of the other random notes I scribble – mostly times for breaks and when people are released from rehearsal – as well as some discarded stickies from cues that I got to take out of my book).

Anyhow, this is what my timelog/tracker looks like most weeks:

This is what it looked like last week:

Clearly I didn’t make time to journal or log last week. The Husband says I should just scrawl “OPERA TECH WEEK!!” across the whole spread.

Thinking back, I was only at work a little over 40 hours last week, but many of those days I was there until midnight so I found myself prioritized sleep and family time and rest last week.

Things that worked well this past tech week:
– packing healthy lunches and not having to eat out.
– related to above – packing dinner from freezer meals – some of what I pulled out of the freezer was well over a year old, maybe even two. Or more. (We still have wedding cake in our freezer and we were married in 2009… not sure what we are saving that for!) Double win of not having to spend money to go out to eat and also eating down the freezer.
– managed to spend 20 minutes of my 1 hour dinner break on a run a couple times a this week.
– sleeping as soon as I got home. I have a terrible habit during tech week of coming home and being too amped up to go to sleep right away. And then also being hungry – so I usually stay up late eating junk food. This time I made a conscious effort to go to bed as soon as I got home, letting the hunger lie until the morning. I did eat half a container of kimchi one night, but then I went straight to bed. The kids are early risers and the Husband goes to work at 6:45am, so I kind of feel like I need to be up by then, and staying up til 2am does not help help me be up by 6:45a. As lovely as it is when the ten year old decides to get the younger kids dressed and fed, I don’t really want it to be her responsibility. (I worry about her falling victim to “Oldest Daughter” syndrome.)

Things that didn’t go well:
– having patience with my kids and family when I barely get to see them.
– Keeping up with non-work items – most notably I still have to get my taxes prepared.
– Being able to focus and be productive when not at work.
– Finding time to take the kids so the Husband can get some alone time.
– the aforementioned bingeing on kimchi late at night, when really I should have just gone to bed.

I don’t think any of the above is insurmountable, but I think/ hope I can have better systems in place the next time I have a tech week so that these stress points can be less … stressful.

BUT…. Spring is coming!

I saw my first cherry tree in bloom while driving to work! I was at a stop light, so I took a quick picture. I think we are about week out from peak bloom here in the DC area, but given how bare all the other trees still look, I was caught entirely by surprise by this tree.

Later in the week, the ten year old had half day of school, so I picked her up from school and we stopped for Blizzards at Dairy Queen (Heath Bar for me, Oreo for her) then found a park to sit and enjoy our frozen treat. Surely a blizzard and a blooming cherry tree are harbingers of warmer weather!

One day, I didn’t have to be at the theatre til the afternoon, so I met up with my friend from college for a walk. We saw these purple flowers:

And someone writing whimsy on the path:

The witch hazel in the front yard has burst into yellow blooms… a very tangible manifestation of sunlight. When I walk by the bush on my way to the front door, there is the sweet spicy smell that lingers heavily. The smell of witch hazel and hyacinths mixed together definitely says spring. Here is the easterly sun streaming through the witch hazel in the morning:

And in the westerly sun in the evening:

Other exciting happenings:

While I was at work one evening, this tree branch finally decided to break away from the tree in our front yard. I usually park under that tree, so it was lucky I wasn’t home. Although truth be told, the tree had been not well for ages so parking under it probably wasn’t terribly prudent. We’re waiting for the County to come haul the debris away. But in the mean time, I couldn’t help but to admire the intricate frills and pale green beauty of the lichen and moss growing on the dead branch. Or maybe it’s fungus? Not sure.

One of the two nights I was home was a basketball practice night. After dinner, the Husband took the ten year old to basketball and I stayed home with the two little kids. I asked them what they wanted to do, and they said, “Play in the toy room!” So I brought my book and sat and read while they built things with their Magnaformers. It was such an ordinarily quiet half hour, and I was really content. I mean it was probably an extraordinarily quiet half hour, since they don’t usually play so quietly and independently. But maybe we are turning a corner…?

What We Ate:

Saturday: Dumplings and Hamilton. As reluctant as I was to subscribe to Disney+, I was very excited to finally finally be able to watch Hamilton. We’ve been listening to the soundtrack constantly for a year now (I know… we were late to the party!) Sometimes I find watching stage performances on the screen a little frustrating because inevitably I feel like I’m missing out on something when the camera often only shows part of the stage pictures, and I did feel that intermittently. But even so, there were still lots of really fun, innovative, and beautiful staging moments. At the same time, I think it’s really a testament to the Lin Manuel Miranda’s work and to how well produced the cast recording was that I didn’t feel like seeing the filmed stage version added a whole lot to the piece. Anyhow, the four year old, who can quote large chunks of it – his response: “A little good a little bad.”
“What was bad?” I asked
“You didn’t tell me that people died!”
I was a little flabbergasted at that one. I mean this is the little boy who prays every night for “God please bless Hamilton’s son Philip.” So surely he realized that people died. Oops.

Sunday: Leftovers. I scrounged a plate together of odds and end: tofu with furikake seasoning, kimchi, and a leftover rice rolled up in Nori with cucumbers and ume plum paste.

Monday: Not quite sure… I think the Husband made some kind of stir fry. I worked and packed leftovers

Tuesday: Chicken Tacos. The five year old declared that he wanted Taco Tuesday, so Husband make chicken in the crock pot the night before.

Wednesday: Brussel Sprouts Nasi Goreng – essentially fried rice with Brussel Sprouts.

Thursday: the Husband made Breakfast Sandwiches. I worked in the evening, so packed leftovers.

Friday: Pizza and Luca. Charming movie. Something about movies that are centered on friendship really make me want to cry…. Or maybe it’s just Pixar movies in general… damn they are so manipualtive!

Weekly recap + what we ate: Tech Week!

And suddenly we are into March.

Sign of the times:

For work, we have to take a COVID test every other day. Somedays I forget to do it at home, and very often I end up swabbing my nose in the car on the way to work. One day during the week, I had to get gas so I ended up swabbing while waiting to pump gas. Then I looked at the gas prices. There is something so utterly surreal to me about swabbing my nose for an at Home COVID test while pumping $3.76 gas. It was like a summary of the world at that moment: The war in Urkaine, sanctions against Russia, the trickledown effect of soaring gas prices, and taking a test kit out of a box so that I am allowed to show up for work. The sad thing is, since I took this picture, gas prices have risen to over $4.30/gallon. Which, I realize, is not the highest in the country, but I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen gas prices that high. Google tells me it was over ten years ago.

This week we moved from the rehearsal room into the theatre – it’s tech week!!! It’s always a challenging process because the hours are long, we work late and we are finally adding so many new elements – sets, lightings, costumes, wigs, make-up, orchestra – that it requires a lot of concentration and clear minded-ness to feel like I’m doing my job properly. Still, for me there is something magical about moving to the theatre. The collaborations, the hushed whispers in the dark that bring about beautiful moments onstage, the stage crew who work really hard backstage for effortless transformations to bloom onstage, the wardrobe and wig crew who can turn one character into another in less than a minute. So it’s always a tough week, but also energizing in the way that tough weeks can be. Also, after two years away from this stage, I don’t want to ever take for granted the excitement of creating something for stage.

The opera I’m working on Cosi fan tutte is full of misogyny and problematic sexist and racist attitudes. (Are there any other kind of sexist and racist attitudes?) It was premiered in 1790, so it’s portrayal of women and men and foreigners is not entirely surprising. However, Mozart’s music is sublime and it’s not an opera that requires a lot of forces, so I suppose opera companies and directors will continue to present it and they will continue to grapple with the difficulties the opera presents. I actually really love the opera, but I definitely see it with different eyes now than when I first heard it twenty years ago. When I was in college I thought the whole “Let’s play a trick on our girlfriends and see if they will stay true to us or if they will fall for other men while we pretend to be away!” was kind of funny albeit ridiculous. I don’t think it’s funny or ridiculous now… I just think it’s stupid and mean, and the aftermath almost heartbreaking.

Despite all this, there are some really thoughtful and heartfelt things being uncovered in rehearsal, and the other day, I wrote down something the director said about a simple stage gesture. She said that the gesture of offering someone your hand palm up really was a physical manifestation of how we can “choose our partner with kindness”. And that really stuck with me – this idea that we choose our actions and can choose to carry them out with kindness -beautifully encapsulated a way of going through life with purpose and with empathy. I know she was talking about the characters in the opera and the choices they were making, but I also think this idea of “choosing with kindness” can inform so many things that we do offstage, and how we treat those around us.

I’ve been thinking lately about this idea of kindness. One of the assignments when I took the Yale Happiness Course was to practice acts of kindness. Kindness was something that was scientifically proven to boost a person’s sense of well being. I will admit that kindness doesn’t always come instinctively to me and that particular assignment, deep in a pandemic, was not the easiest one. But… this past week, amidst all the craziness of getting the show onstage, I realized that I had been the recipient of a lot of acts of kindness lately. Here are some:
-my assistant brought me a cookie from the work cafeteria when I had to work during my break – the chocolate chip cookies from work are one of my favorite things. They are huge, for one, and they are also just slightly underbaked, which I loved in my cookies.
-my boss who stayed for my tech rehearsals and gave me encouraging words and helped me think through some awkward situations.
– the assistant director who wrote the show timings in my score – a somewhat tedious process that I usually do myself, but I had gotten so behind that I never managed to do it before rehearsal started.
– The ten year old got her sibling dressed and fed them breakfast twice this week so I could sleep in a little bit. (By which I mean, I slept til 7:15am)
-The Husband vacuuming out my car when he had it over the weekend – it was practically as if it had been detailed. I usually am quite ungrateful when he does this because I don’t like having the stuff in my car moved around, but this time it was actually quite wonderful as my car had become quite a mess of crumbs and crushed leaves and various unidentifiable detritus.

Pithy quote of the week –

“The problem with holding a grudge is that your hands are then too full to hold anything else.” via Seth Godin’s Blog

Made me smile:

Is there anything as joyful as a dog riding in the car with their head out the window, tongue lolling in the wind?

What We Ate: The Husband decided that this week was going to be wraps week! Having a theme certainly made meal planning easier.

Saturday: Take-out Chinese food

Sunday: Leftover from take-out

Monday: Breakfast burritos (The Husband cooked. I was at work and ate leftovers)

Tuesday: Sweet Potato tacos. I prepped the sweet potatoes so that the Husband just had to put them in the oven to roast when he got home. There was supposed to be black beans in them too (My favorite recipe from Dinner Illustrated), but the Husband forgot those. Oops.

Wednesday: Mushu veggies. I’m actually mildly proud of this meal- not because it was particularly tasty, but because I walked in the door at 5:45pm and we were eating by 6:10pm. There was a kind of zen kitchen flow going on where I just chopped and tossed things into the frying pan, but I managed to do it in the right order so everything cooked the right amount of time. I vaguely followed this recipe for the sauce and used whatever vegetables I had on hand – ended up being cabbage, carrots, green onions, snow peas, and mushrooms. I also mashed up a block of tofu and threw that in as well.

Thursday: The Husband made kung pao chicken and rice. By this point the kids were tired of eating things in wraps and asked for rice. I worked the evening and packed the leftover mushu filling for my dinner.

Friday: Pizza and movie night – the family watched Encanto. After much deliberating, we finally signed up for Disney plus. (By “we” I mean the Husband made a unilateral decision while I was at work. But sometimes I feel like if I’m not going to be home in the evenings for a week, he should get to make a couple unilateral decisions for the good of the family.) At work, I had ramen and cut up veggies for dinner.

Weekly recap + what we ate:

The week started with a holiday weekend, and I was off on Sunday, so I wanted to have some kid specific time. I took the ten year old to brunch at the place of her choosing. She had classic pancakes, eggs and bacon. I had the shrimp and grits. I’m always torn at restaurants whether to order what I know and love or what I would never make at home. I really like the breakfast scramble at this restaurant, but I also would never make shrimp and grits at home. Ordering at restaurants always fills me with indecision, and I have to remind myself that a) I can always come back and get the other thing, and b) it’s just food – whatever I order will be fine. The ten year old also had a chocolate milk shake. And I had a virgin bloody Mary – one of my favorite brunch indulgences. I have a pretty strong and immediate reaction to alcohol so I generally abstain, save for swiping a sip of The Husband’s beer once in a while, but spicy tomato juice garnished with a pickle is my catnip, so I order it without the alcohol.

In the afternoon, since the five year old didn’t have language class due to the holiday weekend, I wanted to take the kids on a hike. Only the two younger ones came, along with my mother. We went down by the C&O Canal and the weather was sunny and (relatively) warm. We didn’t actually get too far on the hike because we discovered a rocky outcropping and the kids spent an hour and a half playing among the rocks. “It’s our secret hideout!” the five year old declared, and indeed there were all these child sized crevices and ledges for them to scamper over. I was a little nervous because the rocky ledge was right over the river, but everyone was careful. While the kids played there, I saw a downy woodpecker and an eastern blue bird flitting in the trees next to our rocky hideout. Between the tap tap tap of the woodpecker and the bright blue and orange of the blue bird, I was mesmerized by these small flying animals. I’ve never been a bird watcher – indeed I only identified these two after the fact with help from my friend google – but I’ve always admired people who can identify birds and plants on sight.

Otherwise I do feel like this week has been work/rehearse/eat/sleep. Aside from the exhausting day mentioned in the last post, we’ve been chugging along. I didn’t do so well in my being human goals – I did go outside for a walk on my lunch/dinner break every day, and I did pack healthy snacks and meals. However, sleep wasn’t great – I stayed up too late one night filling out the passport forms for the kids and never quite got back on track. And still trying to figure out how to leave the office on time. Journaling/planning seems like only gets done twice a week and I’m afraid that I’m forgetting a lot of details in the every day to day, which then makes the week feel like even more of a blur. Next week will be tougher, I’m sure since we move onstage.

moments this week:

This reminder as I filled out the kids’ passport applications:

Good to remember that my children should be fully occupied by being children. Even as I want them to learn to do chores or behave with maturity and common sense (which, I own, I often lack myself).

This sculpture, one of several in a yard that I walked past on my daily meal break walk. (I did manage to get outside almost every day):

And on another walk – this mini camper, one of several, hanging whimsically on a tree…

Spring flowers starting to push themselves up:

Bringing in treats for my co-workers for a special day:

Taking a walk by myself one day after doing school drop off. I had left the baby at home with my mother because she (the baby) was having a difficult morning and would not motivate to get her shoes and coat on. Since alone time is so scarce for me, after I dropped the five year old at school I took a walk by myself down the nearby trail. It had rained the night before so the creek was high and loud. I stood one the banks and soaked in the noisy swirl of water rushing by and the soggy bareness of almost spring.

The school board announcing that any further snow days this year (unlikely at this point) will be distance learning days. I kind of hate the idea. Distance learning was so so so difficult for us and I think there is much joy to to be had in the unexpected nature of a snow day. The alternative would have been to extend the school year, and/or take away some already planned non-instructional days, which they actually have already done- the school year was just extended by two days. I definitely would have preferred further extension of the school year over the switch to distance learning. Oh well, there are certainly many sides to everything.

Of course the week has been terrifying and unbelievable on the world news front. One of our singers is from Moldova and he has been quite grave even as he rehearses with boundless energy and enthusiasm.

Podcast episode of note this week: This episode of On Being with Trabian Shorters. Shorters talks about the concept of asset-framing, where you look at people through the lens of their aspirations and contributions rather than through their challenges and struggles. His work is primarily focused on empowering Black communities, but I thought it’s a pretty powerful idea, and one that should be more obvious and inuitive than it is.

” It is defining people by their aspirations and contributions, before you get to their challenges. So whatever is going on in someone’s life, you don’t ignore it, but you don’t define them by the worst moment or the worst experience or the worst potential; none of that. You have to look past their faults, to see who they really are.”

“So what we want to do — yes. So what we want to do is acknowledge the true person, the true spirit living in someone — the thing that motivates them; what gets them moving. It is not that they are poor. They don’t wake up in the morning inspired by that; their spirit isn’t moved by that. Their spirit isn’t moved by being marginalized, or all that kind of thing. There is something that they aspire to have, to create, to give to someone else. And if you start your relationship with a person by acknowledging what spirit is actually living in front of you, then you’re going to have a different relationship.”

The flip side of asset-framing, what is more common, is deficit-framing where you define people through their challenges. Shorter argues that when you define people primarily as a problem to be solved, it is a lot harder to find long lasting solutions. I thought this a pretty powerful thought regarding how we think about providing resources:

If I can define them [Black people] by their worst threat, greatest inequity, whatever, then I can attract resources. Well, this culture of denigration for dollars means that, yes, you’ll attract the resources, but you do so by writing your population into the public consciousness as inferior, as ineffective, as pathological. All these things are the only ways that people know to know us, because the way that we have been taught to survive is by dramatizing our injustices, which — I think it’s important to point out, the injustices are real. So we’re not saying ignore any of them. We’re saying that is not what defines us. That’s not what defines anyone.

I was thinking this week about this idea of asset framing on a much smaller and lower stakes scale in terms of the people I encounter every day. Sometimes people get labelled as “difficult” or “unreliable” and then they get easily written off. But perhaps if I think of what these “difficult” people are actually bringing to the room or hoping to accomplish, then it helps me find the empathy to connect with them and help them over their challenges.

What We Ate:

Saturday: Family ordered Vietnamese take-out.

Sunday: Leftovers.

Monday: The Husband made caramel fish. It was really good – I had some for my after rehearsal late night snack.

Tuesday: Black-eye peas and spinach curry, made in the InstantPot before I went to work. Husband made rice when he came home. (I took more leftover caramel fish for dinner.)

Wednesday: The Husband made fish with corn and fava beans. (I took the leftover curry from Tuesday for dinner)

Thursday: Asparagus frittata made in the morning before work. Husband made salad and cut up carrots and cucumbers.

Friday: Pizza and Stinky and Dirty. I didn’t make it home for dinner, unfortunately. But I did order my favorite Tempeh Panini from a place near work for dinner. I decided to splurge on take-out after a long hard week. Plus we were out of leftovers for me to pack for dinner.

Weekly recap + what we ate: off balance

This was my first week back at work. Prep week, where we get things ready on our end for rehearsals to start. It was a little bit of a struggle because there were some childcare issues so the Husband and I had to split our time watching the baby for the first three days. Oh my goodness, huge hugs and props to all the working parents who juggled kids at home whole working… it’s all kind of a mess, and continues to be, I know.

I did make it back into the office. My desk was pretty much as I left it 23 months ago, including the above pictured joke pad that one of my colleagues left me. The last time we worked on a show together, we would read a silly joke page after every rehearsal day, one of those things we did so we would remember to laugh at least once a day. The pictures of my kids were still pinned to my cubicle walls, though they were all two years younger, the baby only five months old when we were all sent home from work. My pencils and post-its were where I had left them in March 2020, the binder of the show I never opened sat next to the groundplans for the shows that opened but never finished their run. My hot water kettle, waiting to be filled with water and be set to work burbling hot water for my afternoon tea. It was almost like stepping back and picking things up right where we left them, only we are now all wearing masks and a new sense of fragility and gratitude.

Working in theatre is not a normal 9a-5p job, and over the past months I’ve thought a lot about how I can do better at balancing the inconsistent hours with some consistency in the things that make make me feel human and not like a worker bee. The hours can be long and odd, and there is this notion that people should make sacrifices for their art, but I think that saying art is about humanity is pointless if I’m sacrificing my own humanity to help create it.

I’ve made a list of things that I want to make sure I find time for even when things get busy.
– Sleep. I’m a huge revenge bedtime procrastinator. Lately, though, I’m finding that maybe because I’m getting older or maybe because of the rhythm and demands of pandemic life, I really feel it when I only get 4-5 hours of sleep several nights in a row. One night of 4 hours might be okay, but more than that, and I crash hard on the subsequent nights. So yeah, asleep by midnight is my goal.
– Time outside. I don’t know that I’ll be able to make the 1000 hours outside goat of 2.75 hours outside every day, but I do want to find at least 30 mins a day to be outside. Hopefully I can still walk the kids to the bus stop and school, so that’s at least 40 mins. But the days when that doesn’t work out, I can take time at lunch. Last week on my lunch break, I sat outside to eat lunch and then took a walk around the block, which I thought worked out well.
–Communication with family/ the Husband. I think the person who feels the most pressure from my awkward hours is the Husband who is at home with the kids every single night. A lot of our stress comes from the evening hours being inconsistent – some weeks I’m home two nights a week, some weeks I’m home for dinner, some not…. I want to make sure I communicate with him ahead of time the expectations for that evenings and weekends. Also we need to set time to sit down and look at the calendar so that things don’t fall through the cracks. (hello, upcoming tax season!) And then remembering to call home on my dinner breaks to check in since the Husband is often asleep when I get home from the evening rehearsals.
– Meal plan and stock up on healthy snacks. We haven’t been great about meal planning the past few weeks, and I want to be more deliberate about it – particularly meal planning dinner with the Husband so that the burden of dinner doesn’t fall completely on him. Whenever possible, prep dinner before I leave for work so that dinner is simple when he gets home. Also having healthy snacks in the office for when the hours get long.
– Exercise – even if it’s 15 minutes of yoga in the morning, I want to have a more consistent plan. I also want to see if I can get a short run (not that I do anything but short runs) in when I have long breaks between rehearsals.
–Drink water – I realized last week that because I have to wear a mask all day, I’m not drinking as much water as I normally do. So I just need to remember. Maybe I can make it some kind of automatic behavioral thing…
–Making time to journal/write/plan/read. Activities to clear my head and help me keep things in perspective. Sometimes I can lose track of the world happening outside of the rehearsal room or the theatre

So that’s the aspirational plan to stay human.

This episode of the Happiness Lab about anger popped up in my feed Wednesday evening as I was making dinner. Somewhat ironically… I had had a tough ten minutes involving noodles and grocery resentment. The moment resulted in me throwing my favorite kitchen spoon in frustration and anger. And my favorite kitchen spoon broke. It was not a great moment and now my favorite kitchen spoon is irretrievably shattered. Something about the directions on the noodle being only in Japanese and then them turning into a gelatinous clump in the pot and dinner being jeopardized (of course my mind spun and catastrophized) and not being able to go to the store and choose my own noodles and n0 one coming to help me (though I don’t know rationally what anyone could have done to save the clumpy noodles)… anyhow. Not my finest moment of zen and calm, I am somewhat ashamed to say.

And you know what, it all turned out fine. I rinsed the noodles, pulled them apart by hand and they were delicious. I apologized to the Husband for yelling and looked sadly at the broken spoon. The Husband, very sweetly was already trying to find a replacement, but I’ve been trying to find a replacement for ages and have been unsuccessful. And this is actually the second time I’ve smashed a kitchen utensil in anger. So there is that.

Afterwards I was listening to that Happiness episode on anger, and something they said stood out for me – on the podcast, the therapist/expert Faith Harper said that holding in your anger is like pushing down a beach ball under water; eventually it will pop up and hit you in the face. So the trick is being able to take a step back and figure out what your anger is telling you because emotion is your body and brain trying to tell you something. I’m going to sit with that for a while. Because I think often I try to rationalize away my anger, and really the emotion can be more useful if it is accepted than if it is dismissed.

Two quotes from Harper that I really want to remember when I need to be forgiving of myself and of other people:

“You’re not responsible for your first thought. You’re responsible for your second thought and your first behavior.”

“We’re not perfect… I don’t know that we get better so much as we get better at it… Nobody has this down; we are all works in process”

Some hodge-podge bits from the week:

This lost doll at the playground, waiting for her owner. Kind of creepy, kind of whimsical:

It was the Husband’s birthday this past week. He has said he didn’t want a cake, or any celebratory dessert. But I couldn’t just let his birthday go by like that. So I made him a key lime pie. It’s one of his favorite desserts and it’s so super easy and only takes about 45 minutes to make. The ten year old made a slideshow presentation for him where she asked me and her siblings our favorite things about him and then compiled them into slides. It was so super cute and thoughtful and made me laugh.

I found myself downtown one day last week, and decided to pick up Chinese take-out from this place where we used to eat all the time when we were young urban city dwellers. The kung pao chicken is the Husband’s favorite, so much so that we ordered a tray of it for our rehearsal dinner even though we had moved into the suburbs by then. Much to our surprise, the owner himself drove the food all the way up to us in wintery rush hour traffic.

Anyhow, as I was waiting for our food to be ready, I wandered down to the used bookstore down the block. It’s the kind of place that has carts of books out front for $4/each. I found this book among the piles and it immediately took me back to my childhood:

It’s one of those books put forth by National Geographic in the 80s. We had a copy of this book when I was growing up, and I loved looking at the glossy yet raw pictures of life in the various parts of China. Even though in the book, Taiwan was included as part of China, I never felt any kind of kinship with the Asian faces in the pages; it all seemed so different and exotic. There was something odd, too, about my parents, who have always been staunchly pro-Taiwanese Independence, having a book that celebrated China.

For some reason the first line of the introduction have always stuck with me:
“When I was a child my mother warned me, as I dug a large hole in our backyard flower garden, that if I kept on digging I would end up in China.”
As a child, this idea was fascinating- digging a hole to emerge in a place so different from where I was… it seemed not like the introduction to a coffee table book, but rather the beginning of an adventure story.

And this week- the first glimpse of Spring. Is it too early? Will they make it? Stay tuned to find out….

What We Ate:

Saturday: Grilled veggies and pork chops using a bulgogi marinade. There is something really fun about grilling in 30 degree weather. I was always a charcoal grill person, until I got at gas grill and realized how much easier it was.

Sunday: Leftovers.

Monday: Chicken Katsu and Cabbage Salad from Dinner Illustrated

Tuesday: Breakfast Sandwiches

Wednesday: Orange Tofu and Sugar Snap Pea Stir Fry.

Thursday: The family had tortellini and red sauce and salad. When i got home from work I had half a pack of olives, croutons, and the leftover tofu from Wednesday. Eaten standing up in the kitchen while trying to urge the kids to get ready for bed.

Friday: Pizza and Frozen. It was the baby’s turn to pick the movie so we lined up all the animated dvds that we had and let her choose one. I think she picked Frozen because she loves snowmen.

Weekly recap + what we ate: Nor yet the thing he’d planned

It’s my last week before I start work again, so I feel like the week has been a combination of trying to tie up loose ends and trying to stop and savor unfettered time. Well, somewhat fettered to the demands of a toddler.

I’m excited/ nervous to be going back to work and excited to be working on a show again. I know I worked on opera last summer, but something about going back to my home company where I’ve been for almost fifteen years feels different. It feels like things are back on track somehow. Hopefully we’ll all remember how to function.

The weather towards the end of the week was going to be rainy, so I tried to get in some good outdoor time in early in the week.

On Sunday the two little kids and I went on another of the hikes led by a naturalists at one of our Nature Centers. It was certainly cold – mid 20s. I thought that the hike would be cancelled for the cold, but when it wasn’t, I put the kids in their warm underwear and bundled them up. (Or rather, I threw their winter gear in a bag and took that too the car. This is my latest mom hack – since the kids can’t wear their puffy coat in the car anyway, I just keep coats, hats and gloves in a large bag and take that bag back and forth to the car. Seems easier to keep track of everything that way.)

We were the only family to show up for the hike. Apparently there were originally ten families signed up, but they all dropped out one by one. I was skeptical as to how long we would make it, given the cold weather, but our hike guide brought hand warmers and kept things moving and interesting and we managed to stay out for an hour and a half. We saw lots of geese and wrens and ducks, threw rocks on the frozen lakes, explored the chimney remnants from and old house, and collected pine cones and sycamore seed balls. Afterwards, the naturalist made us hot chocolate which we enjoyed in the nature center while watching the bald eagle cam live feed from Georgia.

Monday the baby and I went for a walk along the C&O Canal. The morning light over the Potomac was beautiful, and we sat on some rocks watching the ice flow down the river, the air periodically punctured by the loud cracking of ice breaking down below. There was scant snow on the ground, but there were some really beautiful ice patterns to be seen. The baby was a little grumpy at first, but then we wandered down to the banks of the river and she got to take part in one of her favorite things – throwing rocks in the river.

I also thought this was fascinating: I stumbled over what at first seemed like a thick cord of roots, but then upon closer examination saw that it was a cable, the brown rust of it melding perfectly into the dirt. I wonder what it was from!

The ten year old had Tuesday off school. I had promised that she could go skating with her friend, but when her friend couldn’t make it, we went any way. At first I was just going to watch, but the person at the skate counter told me that kids 2 and under could skate for free, so I asked the baby if she wanted to try, and she said yes. So baby’s first skate! I realize that I should have had her in a helmet and gloves… mental note for next time. I was sure she was going to hate it, but she’s already said she wants to go again.

Tuesday afternoon and evening I also had a supertitle gig for a vocal recital. On the dinner break between the rehearsal and the performance, I met up with a friend for a walk. It also was Lunar New Year, and the Kennedy Center had a beautiful light display up to celebrate. My friend and I wandered outside to see the lanterns at such a perfect moment when the sun was starting to set, making the sky all swirly pink. The contrast between Mother Nature’s and Man’s lighting display was breathtaking.

The recital itself was lovely. There was one piece in Russian, which was an interesting challenge. Thank goodness for Google. As I was preparing the supertitle slides, I saw that the second half of the recital was a new song cycle based on the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, one of my favorite poets. The poems that the composer used were new to me, and I loved one in particular – “If Still Your Orchard Bears“. It talks about the timeless nature of regret and pain, how all people must endure it. An excerpt:

Should at that moment the full moon
Step forth upon the hill,
And memories hard to bear at noon,
By moonlight harder still,
Form in the shadow of the trees, –
Thing that you could not spare
And live or so you thought, yet these
All gone, and you still there,
A man no longer what he was
Nor yet the thing he’d planned.

I had a realization on Friday that this would be my last time on my own with a baby without childcare for a while… maybe ever? My mother comes next week to help watch her and then she might be in daycare come summer. It’s all very bittersweet, but I feel really lucky to have had this time with her. Of all the kids, I’ve spent the most time at home with this third one, thanks to the pandemic. Even though I was back at work five days after she was born, she was only six months old when the pandemic hit and we’ve been joined at the hip since, give or take seven weeks last summer and a few nights since then.

This week was particularly exhausting with her. I think it was partly that the weather was really rainy so we couldn’t spend as much time outside as possible, also partly that I had two days with two kids at home and I’ve forgotten how constant having more than one kid at home is. And also I’ve been trying to get some last minute things done before I start back at work, so I’ve had to split my attention more than usual.

One day, the baby kept asking to paint, so I set her up with paper and paints and a paintbrush at the kitchen table and figured I could set up my computer at the other end of the table and get the bills paid. Not so much. I think it took two hours to pay the bills; usually it takes fifteen minutes.

I was listening to this episode of Death, Sex, and Money titled “A Season to Savor” where Anna Sales talks about the importance of taking time to savor things. Savoring was one of the assignments in the “Science of Well Being” course that I took online last year, but I think I had somewhat drifted from doing it intentionally. There is a line in my habit tracker for “savoring”, but lately it’s been things I’ve remembered savoring rather than things I’ve been intentionally savoring. I think I would like to plan more intentional things to savor. But anyhow, things I have savored this week:
– The ice flowing on the Potomac River.
-Baroque music. I’ve been listening to the radio in the car lately rather than just putting on a podcast. There is something about the serendipity of radio music – being delighted and surprised by what is playing. One day this week, I got in the car and turned the key in the ignition and I was greeted by the sound of a transcription for solo piano of a Bach Partita. It made me so happy. Hearing the Bach reminded me of how, there is a member of the music staff at work who would play Bach in the mornings on the piano in the rehearsal rooms. I would come in to set up for rehearsals and there he would be playing with the grace and precision that I love about baroque music. It was always the most perfect start to my days.
– The quiet moment right after I’ve struggled to get all three kids out of the house with their stuff, put them in the car, buckled them in, and shut the door. Standing outside the car with the door closed, you can’t hear anyone cry because their sibling is kicking them or scream that they don’t have their car stuffie or whine about having to go to school. With the door closed, I can take a moment to close my eyes and take a deep breath and enjoy the silence. Then I feel ready to open the driver side door and get back into the cacophony.
-A song recital. I know it was work, but Strauss wrote some really great music.
-Working a song recital. The flow of following the music and bringing up titles at the right moment.
– The baby. In all her messy, mischievous, glory. Even though she tried to down a container of powdered sugar as if it were a tankard of beer. Definitely took some moments to savor our adventures, just the two of us. This wasn’t how I thought the first two and a half years of her life were going to go, but it’s been really great, actually.

What We Ate: Another unplanned pantry meal week, but I think we actually did pretty well.

Saturday: Pizza and Paddington 2. We had double pizza and movie night this week. We had forgotten to defrost pizza dough the Friday before so the traditional pizza/movie night was… less than satisfactory. So we had a re-do. Paddington 2 was delightful.

Sunday: Leftovers – kitchen sink fried rice.

Monday: Farmhouse Barley Soup from Vegan for Everyone from America’s Test Kitchen. Only we were out of barley so I used farro instead.

Tuesday: I was working, so I picked up a sandwich at the café next to work. The Husband made dumplings and noodles for the kids since it was Lunar New Year.

Wednesday: Vegan Gnocchi Soup. This recipe to use up a package of gnocchi that has been sitting in the fridge since the last time I made this recipe.

Thursday: Sweet Potato and Black Bean tacos from Dinner Illustrated.

Friday: Pizza and Cinderella Story: Once Upon a Song.

Weekly Recap + what we ate: Realizing Challenges

My middle child turned five last weekend. What the what?!?

But… that also meant that he was eligible for his first COVID vaccine shot. Hooray! We had it done at the pediatrician’s office when he got his annual check up.

This Hamilton fan is not throwing away his shot!

He wanted a “rainbow cake”. We made him a cake from my mother in law’s recipe box and spent the week prior, sorting a Costco size tub of m&ms by colour so that we could make a rainbow on his cake. They don’t make purple m&ms which I explained to my son, and he seemed fine with it.

It’s hard to believe that this sweet, funny, thoughtful little guy is five and will be going to kindergarten this fall.

This week was another four day week for the ten year old because Monday was off. I asked her what she wanted to do and she said she wanted to go to the Rec Center and play ping pong so we did. I always get a kick out of playing ping pong at the rec center because the ten year old and I are not terribly good at it, and there are always a couple of senior citizens on the tables next to us who are really good and just killing it. While the ten year old and I are running all over the place to bat the ball, the seniors plant themselves in one place and their arms go back and forth unerringly accurate and very rarely missing a ball. There is a metronomic click to their playing that is so clean and soothing.

Mid week the temperatures were in the low 40s so I was determined to find another selfie stand and check off some more of the 1000 hours. I found the selfie stand on a hike by a pond near one of the nature centers. We took our picture then set off on one of the many surrounding trails.

The trail we took led us to a lake that was mostly frozen. The baby loved throwing sticks and rocks into the lake, though she was a little mystified as to why the rocks just bounced and didn’t go splash. The she got annoyed and tried to order me to go out on the ice and retrieve her rocks so she could try again. I refused. There was a bit of a tantrum, then I distracted her with a nice fallen tree to climb.

Towards the end of the week, we went for a walk at the Botanical Gardens. I hadn’t been there in a while, certainly not yet this winter. I feel so grateful that these gardens are here and I can see them through all seasons. I loved this sign below: “Bulbs planted/ Please stay on walk.” I’ve been reading Katherine May’s Wintering, and I’m coming to embrace the idea of things (and people) needing time to lay in wait and prepare for the next thing, undisturbed. I feel like we need signs for ourselves to tell people when they need to give us space for our bulbs to prepare for Spring.

Bizarre, though probably entirely natural thing this week: I had a moment driving home one day this week when I looked down the road and there was a patch of sky that was this dark fluid patch, swirling above the telephone lines. I was so intrigued that I drove down the road to see what it was. It was birds, hundreds and hundreds of little birds moving en masse, swooping into the air and then landing on the telephone wires. All lined up on that wire, the birds looked for all the world like a page out of some Philip Glass score – uniform stemless quarter notes. I’d never seen so many birds grouped together like that, swirling up then down, making such a chirping racket. Eventually, they seemed to collectively decide it was time to move on and the whole lot off them took off like a cloud of black dots and few down the road. Having seen Hitchcock’s The Birds, there is something terrifying to me about a large group of birds. At the same time, the part of me that finds large group choreography mesmerizing, was just awe-struck by these birds and the aerial dance they were performing.

I’ve been flirting with various “challenges” this month. The 64 Million Artists January Challenge has been fun. Though I haven’t been great about doing every day, or posting the results, I’ve bookmarked a lot of the challenges to do later when I have more time. Having a creative prompt every day was a great way to pause and think about things outside of my tunnel.

I also did a “Less Phone More Life” challenge, where for a week I was sent strategies to spend, as it says, less time on my phone. It is not lost on me that there is something ironic about a online based challenge to spend less time on your phone. In the end, I did indeed spend about 25% less time on my phone from the week before – I was at about 3.5 hrs a day on average, down from 5.75 hours a day. The two big tips that I found helpful was moving all the apps off my home screen and turning off, or rather batching, my notifications. I’ve definitely found ways to work around these phone time roadblocks, but when it’s four steps to open my text messages instead of one, I’m more conscious of what I’m doing.

Two other takeaways from my “Less Phone” challenge:
1) Even though my daily average was down 25% over the week, I didn’t feel like I spent any less time on my phone. I felt like I still used my phone a lot – I read books, had very long text conversations with my mom’s group, surfed the internet, participated in online commenting forums, researched things, payed bills, used the GPS… These things didn’t change. I think the difference, that 25% is the time that I used to spend mindlessly on the phone. those pockets of phone time that I can’t remember afterwards. Like when I just pull out the phone when I’m between tasks, or “check creep” from checking the weather. Speaking of “check creep”- since I batched my notifications, I wasn’t checking my phone every time a new message came in, and I discovered that the weather was indeed the new gateway app to mindless scrolling. I’m not sure I’m concerned about this enough to find alternative weather sources, though.
2) My other big takeaway was realizing that the way I communicated via text, I was likely creating a sense of urgency for other people to check their phones too; not only was I contributing to my own constant phone usage, but I was also part of the problem for other people . Not that I’m responsible for the behavior of others, but when I send a message via text, I think it just feels more urgent and demands a response.
Sometimes at work, this is just how we communicate because we can’t always step away to answer the phone or we’re involved in a very quiet situation and the person across the room can’t get up to ask a question. Texting among my stage management team becomes a form of dialogue. But texting doesn’t always have to have that sense of immediacy. I’m not sure what I can do to foster a more relaxed response instinct, but I realized that just responding to a notification is for me a gateway to phone use, in the same way activating a conversation creates a gateway for the message recipient. Not to foist my screen time aspirations on others, but I don’t really want to contribute to a culture where attention getting requires immediate action. So I’ve been thinking that on a large scale, phone use is not just the result of how we react to inputs; we also need to be aware of our outputs and how they might affect other people.

Another challenge I set for myself was to write one positive thing about each person in my family every day. I was realizing that some days I get mired in the things that my kids (and okay, the Husband) do that drive me nuts and want to scream, and I was forgetting to see them for the wonderful people they really are, particularly with my oldest. This column from Carolyn Hax last December hit particularly close to home – the letter writer asks for help dealing with the fact that they are finding it harder to show affection for their snarky teenager whereas their younger child is still a lot of fun. I feel this acutely some days – those days when the baby is delightful, but the ten year old is mouthy and obstinate. Okay, the baby is obstinate all the time too, but I don’t really expect her to know better so I find it less energy sapping. I’ve come to the realization that I’m a much better baby parent than big kid parent. Which is unfortunate because the big kids are the ones that are around much longer and need the most support.

Anyhow Hax’s advises the letter writer to really look for and appreciate the person their kid is becoming. “The surly stuff isn’t everything,” she write, “There’s an interesting person developing in there. The cute-caterpillar stage was always going to be temporary. Make it your mission right now to be the person who sees the first vague outlines of the butterfly, and delights in them.”

When I read the column, I realized that I was finding it really hard to see the forest my kids were for the trees that I wanted them to be. So I took an empty notebook and decided that every day I was going to write one positive sentence about each kid. It’s been a good exercise for me, especially seeing what positive things I find tread a line between my expectations and their character. Like “Helped get her sister dressed for the day.” vs. “Said something nice to a classmate who was feeling sad.” I’m realizing I need to uncouple my ideals from who my kids are or I’ll never be able to see the latter.

What We Ate – for whatever reason I didn’t meal plan this week, so it was a lot of meals from our pantry/fridge. Which wasn’t terrible, but I find it more mentally stressful than I would like.

Saturday: Hotdogs, bagged Caesar Salad. The five year old’s birthday dinner request.

Sunday: Leftovers and birthday cake.

Monday: Pork Tostadas from Mexico: The Cookbook, that the Husband borrowed from the library. The ten year old more or less cooked dinner with much supervision.

Tuesday: Green Bean and Tofu Stir Fry.

Wednesday: Tortellini (from frozen) with red sauce. One of our standard desperation dinners.

Thursday: Cheese soufflé, roasted potatoes and Irish soda bread. We weren’t really great about meal planning this week, and I thought this wasn’t bad for a “What’s in the pantry?” meal. I originally was just going to make a frittata, but then saw a recipe for soufflé in the Moosewood cookbook and thought, “Why not?” Soufflé has a certain mystique about it for me – I always think of that scene in the movie Sabrina where Audrey Hepburn fails at making a soufflé for her French cooking class. “A woman happily in love, she burns the soufflé,” a wise fellow student says to her, “A woman unhappily in love, she forgets to turn on the oven.” At any rate – it turns out it wasn’t difficult and my soufflé rose beautifully. It’s a good way to stretch six eggs to feed eight people, but I can’t say that I liked it better than a quiche or a frittata.

Friday: Pizza and Looney Tunes, Snoopy and Hello, Jack. It was the newly five year old’s turn to pick the move.

Weekly recap + what we ate: jumping

At the beginning of the week, I got into my car, only to find that the battery had died. Apparently on Friday, upon arrival home from school, and unloading from the car, someone (ahem… a child) did not fully close their door when they got out of the car. Another someone (another child) had turned off the dome light, so I had no idea that the car sat there all weekend with a door not quite closed. And a long weekend at that. So when I got into the car on Monday to go to the movie, the car wouldn’t start.

Luckily we have a spare car – an almost 20 year old vehicle that we inherited from the Husband’s parent – so I used that car for a few days. But then on Wednesday, I take the ten year old to her morning piano lesson in the spare car. I drop her, take the other two kids with me to pick up breakfast sandwiches (our Wednesday morning bribe to get the kids in the car by 7:06am), then come back to sit in front of the piano teacher’s house while the lesson finished up. The ten year old comes out, gets into the car and then …. the car doesn’t start. Cue my huge cry of disbelieving frustration. I cannot believe I have two dead batteries in two different cars in two days. I call the Husband at work and he comes and jumps the car, takes the four year old to school so I don’t have to turn the car off again, and tells me to go on a nice long drive. I have about 45 minutes before the ten year old needs to be at school, so we take a nice long drive.

Then that evening when I get home, we jump my car and I go on another nice long drive.

So jumping…

I don’t know if it’s just been hard getting back into a routine with COVID closures and snow days and what not, but this week has felt really unmoored. I was driving down the freeway on the way to the ten year old’s school and it struck me – I feel like a frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad, with scarce time to linger and catch my breath. Every day is a mad dash from one school drop off to another to a toddler activity to home for lunch to back in the car for pick up from one school than another. But really, I just want to sit on my lily pad and watch the flies go by.

I think maybe also the weather has something to do with this sense of body constantly in motion. It’s been in the mid 20s all week, which it makes it a little too cold for me to really slow down and linger outside, even though outside is where I often get my energy. At that temperature, with no snow to play in, I’ve discovered my outdoor limit with the baby is about 45 mins. I think I clocked only 9 hours outside this week. But even still, we did go on some beautiful 45 minute walks – nice pauses between lily pad jumping.

I was on the hunt for more of the County’s Selfie Stands, so I took the baby for a walk on a trail around a lake. The county website said that there was a stand on this trail, but we didn’t find it. We did, however, see lots of geese – noisy creatures in their V formations, that swooped above our heads and then landed on the frozen lake. Turns out the selfie stand was at the end of the trail, but a fallen tree in our path had discouraged us from making it all the way there. Now that I know where it is, though, we will have to return.

I actually had two failed selfie stand excursions this week. The second one was at a park, and I’m pretty sure the stand isn’t there even though the website says there is. But we did get this cool picture of a hollow tree:

Another day, I tried to take the baby to a playground, but it was too cold for her to be interested in playing on the equipment, so we went for a walk around the park. The grounds around the park is prone to flooding, and there were some beautiful ice puddles. I found the variety of shapes and lines mesmerizing. The baby was fascinated by the effects of her stick on the ice, and the cracking sounds and patterns that she could make.

Later in the week, I did finally manage to locate a selfie stand. This one was on the site of a house and garden that I hadn’t been to before. The site was once a private residence but is now part of the County Parks system. The house and gardens sit on five acres of land in a quite wealthy residential neighborhood, and it was almost like visiting someone’s private estate gardens. Right now, everything was all bare and bramble, but there were potential flowers. I’ve made a note to come back to see how these tightly close buds will open to become magnolia and azaleas come warmer weather.

Other things of note this week:

The Husband cooked dinner all week again, and I found time to practice playing the concertina. I can now play a C major scale and a G major scale. I’m realizing that the 20 button concertina is perhaps better for playing chords and accompanying oneself while singing, rather than more melodic endeavors. So I’ve decided that before March 11th, when my rental period is up, I want to be able to sing “Dear Theodosia” from Hamilton while accompanying myself on the concertina.

Speaking of Dear Theodosia… because I’m driving the oldest kid to school these days rather than catching the 8:15a bus, we have an extra 45 minutes in the morning to chill at home. The other day after breakfast we had a bit of time and the four year old asked if we could sing Dear Theodosia, so I found some music online and we sang it together. It was such a beautiful perfect little moment in the pause before the chaos of getting out the door.

A great podcast conversation I listened to this week was this Fresh Air Interview with Kal Penn – I thought he had a lot of really beautiful things to say about being a child of Indian immigrants, and being an Indian actor in Hollywood. He had a striking anecdote about trying to convince a director that he shouldn’t play a part with an Indian accent, noting that he thought it was important the other Indian kids should get to see themselves on tv as Americans and not as caricatures. The director refused, and Penn notes: “I think it’s a bit of a misnomer that racism only comes from ignorance; it can also come from a conscious maintenance of power and a desire to keep people down.” Growing up, I always felt that being blond was the ideal because that is what you see in mainstream media, and Penn’s anecdote really hit close to home.

Conversation with the four year old:
4 year old: Can you read me Green Eggs and Ham?
Me: I don’t really like Green Eggs and Ham.
4 year old: It’s not about you liking Green Eggs and Ham.

What We Ate:

Saturday: Grilled pork tenderloin with roasted asparagus, green beans and potatoes. It was the birthday of the Husband’s father, who had passed away five years ago. On his birthday we always try to have a meal that he would have liked. There is something really fun about grilling when it is 20 degrees outside.

Sunday: Leftovers and apple pie.

Monday: Parsnip Soup.

Tuesday: I can’t remember, but it involved leeks and lemons and maybe fish? The Husband had borrowed a stack of cookbooks from the library and this recipe came from a Mediterranean cookbook.

Wednesday: Sweet and Sour Pork and Broccoli

Thursday: Broccoli Pasta Bake.

Friday: pizza and Sense and Sensibility. I saw this movie in the theatre when it came out in 1995, a year that was full of wonderful Austen adaptations, and I love it so much. I’ve watched it many times, and I partly picked the movie because we’re trying to watch movies from our own DVD collection. This time through the movie, I was stuck by how beautifully framed so many of the shots were, creating such a sense of intimacy in every scene. I had never noticed before, but the scene where Elinor tells Edward that Colonel Brandon has offered him a job is shot in almost one long take, as if the tension between the two almost lovers is too fragile to break up by switching camera angles.