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:

On my dinner break run:

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.