Weekly recap + what we ate: Heat and Time Blocks

The weather has been quite hot here. Here and everywhere else on earth, I gather. Here specifically, is often high 70s/low 80s and already muggy when I get up in the morning and inches up to low 90s mid day, sometime high 90s. For ten years, before the five year old was born, I worked in the Colorado Mountains during the summer. Not only was the weather pretty mild (except for Denver, which could be scorching), the air was dry. I always joked that the reason I kept that gig was to escape the DC summers. Even so, it wasn’t until I stopped going to Colorado and started staying home in the summer that I realized just how hot and humid and stifling summers were here. And from what I gather, it’s been getting worse. This is what I’m grateful for, however:
– it’s not unbearably hot – not like the triple digits in other parts of the world. If I plan a morning outing, I can usually stand to be outside and slowly acclimate to the heat by the time it gets to be high 80s around noon.
– Air Conditioning. I’m reading about other parts of the world that are not used to such heat and where AC is not typically found in a house. I don’t need the house to be chilly, but I do appreciate how the AC can take the humidity out of the air. I like setting the thermostat at 78 when I’m home, though the Husband likes it more like 72. (Incidentally, the podcast 99% Invisible did an episode about Air Conditioning a few years ago, and it is fascinating. Among other things, it presents an argument for how AC is responsible for redrawing the electoral map as climate control allowed for a population boom in Florida.)
-Shade. It’s actually quite lovely in the shade. I think it’s the direct sunlight that makes the heat feel particularly intense. So I’m grateful for trees.
– The periodic breeze, that comes just at the right minute and cools the sweat pouring from my pores.
-The windows in my car that roll down. The AC in my car isn’t great. (The car is almost 20 years old and I’m thankful every day that it still runs as well as it does. ) But there is something so very wonderful about rolling the windows down and cranking the radio. I’m a dork and I crank the classical music station, especially when it is playing fast Baroque music. The wind in my hair and some virtuoso playing Bach is kind of a happy place for me. Which is a good place to find sometimes because actually being in my car is the place I am least happy with the heat. Something about being stuck at a stoplight with the sun beating down through the window on my left side… makes me irritable and angry. But once that light turns green, and the wind goes and the music blasts… I think I can bear it all.
– my insulated water bottle. I actually have several. I fill them with ice and water in the morning and drink cold cold water all day when I’m out and about.
-Being able to join a pool. I’m not sure we would go five times a week if the kids didn’t have swim practice, but since the ten year old has to be there almost every evening, I’ve taken advantage and take all the kids to go a cool off in the late afternoon. I will say, though, it is certainly challenging to go to the pool with two non-swimmers, and I do wish I had another adult with me so that I could swim laps during adult swim.
– Prescription Sunglasses. I was very late to the sunglasses party. I wear glasses in real life and I didn’t want to have those clip-ons, or, worse, the sunglasses that fit over your regular glasses like a huge plastic visor. Sunglasses seemed either kind of dorky, or too cool for me. So I just went without. Until two years ago, I went to get new glasses and the optometrist warned me about some minor retina damage caused by the sun. So I caved and bought sunglasses. Life changing. Why didn’t I realize sooner that it was loads better to be able to see when you drove on a hot summer day? That squinting was not the best option? That everything didn’t have to be painfully bright?

Between swim lessons and swim practice and swim meets, this week felt really busy and pool-centered. With the five year old in 9am swim lessons, by the time I drop him at school after swim lessons, it is already 10:15 and I have only a few hours before I have to do school/camp pick ups and shuttle everyone to the pool for the ten year old’s swim team practice. It kind of forces some element of time blocking into my day, though:
8:15a-9:00a – drive to camp and swim lessons
9:00a – 9:45a – swim lessons
9:45a – 10:15a – drop five year old at school
10:15a – 2:30p – that day’s activity, park, outing, or errand. Also, concurrently, lunch for the toddler, and hopefully a nap
2:30p – 3:00p – prep or make dinner
3:00p- 3:30p – make snack for kids to fuel up before the pool/ clean up kitchen (I tend to leave all the dishes until now, otherwise I feel like I’m constantly doing dishes. I know some people like to clean as they go, but I prefer to batch. Only lately there’s been an ant problem in our kitchen, so I do clean as I go more often.)
3:30p – 3:50p – pack swim bags. Yes it really does take me twenty minutes to hunt down all the swim gear for the two little kids, and make sure nothing is missing. (The ten year old is supposed to pack her swim bag before we leave for camp.)
3:50p – drive to pick up kids from day care and camp and get to the pool by 4:50p.

That 10:15a- 2:30 chunk is variable each day, but it’s where I plan for things to get done. I struggle with this chunk sometimes because after a morning driving carpool, I just want to sit and scroll my phone for a bit, but that bit invariably turns into an hour or so while the toddler yells at me for not playing blocks with her. Objectively I know that I don’t need to be spending that time on my phone, but some days I’m already wiped by 10:00am. I think I just need to be better at planning concrete projects/plans for the day, and then I can not fritter away those four hours.

But speaking of which…. Fun things I did with my mid day chunk this week:

– Took the baby to play in a river. One day was so hot yet I wanted and outdoor adventure since I hadn’t been on one in a while. So I packed a picnic lunch and took the baby to Patapsco State Park after dropping off the five year old. There is a river perfect for splashing in and plenty of shade on its banks, though you have to cross the “Swinging Bridge” to get across. As the trip was a little impulsive, I didn’t pack so well… Next time, I will plan on bringing a bathing suit for the kid(s) and Crocs for me. In my head, the baby was just going to wade into ankle deep water and throw rocks in the river while I sat nearby and read by book. That wasn’t quite how things happened… The baby went into the water a little deeper than I thought she would and managed to soak her dress and her pants. I lay the dress and pants in the sun and they were dry in half an hour. I had worn my hiking shoes and the river bottom was quite rocky so wading in after her in my bare feet was a little painful. Also next time, I will remember to download the books that I borrowed via Libby so that I will have something to read on an lazy summer afternoon. There is no wireless reception in the park, and I had been planning on reading while the toddler played in the river, having forgotten that Libby needs a wireless connection to work since I don’t have the books automatically downloaded. wump wump. Not that it’s a bad thing to be actively engaged with playing with one’s child, and it was still a lovely lazy summer afternoon.

– Lunch with a good friend who had the day off work. It actually started as “Come over and hang out while I clean,” which might not sound like the most riveting time, but in truth, I’m really happy to have friends who aren’t afraid to have me over when their house is messy because I know I don’t have to clean for them when they come over either. And then we went out for lunch, which felt so decadant. We were going to get ice cream too, but we spent so much time lingering and chatting over lunch that we ran out of time.

-Making Empanadas. Empanadas are a great food to have in our freezer for those times when I don’t know what to pack for lunch. I will often make them myself, but they do take a huge amount of work because there are so many steps: filling, dough, make, bake. I usually spread it out over a few days – so filling on one day, dough on another, make on another and bake on another. It is a lot of time, but the convenience on the other end is pretty hard to beat. This time around, the baby helped make the empanadas. She even made one all on her own, when I wasn’t looking. Guess which on it is?

Not so fun (but necessary) things I spent my chunk of time doing:
1) Zoom meeting for union negotiations. Ongoing and kind of fascinating, though the less said the better.
2) researching Primary candidates. We live in a pretty blue county, so other than the big state races, the Primaries are pretty much where we choose who gets to run our County. Fun fact – one of our friends is running for County Council and we were in his campaign photo shoot. It was still a little surprising to see campaign literature coming to our house with our (out of focus) faces. The ten year old says she also saw us on a local tv spot. Kind of fun, but also a little surreal.

This week was also the last swim meet. There are practices and Divisionals coming up still and I think, hope, after that our afternoons will be a little lazier. I’m really proud of how the ten year old is doing on swim team and I do rather enjoy my volunteer job as a timer – it puts my stage manager skills to work. All the same, I will be glad when we aren’t always rushing to be at the pool and can instead arrive at our own pace. There has been precious little of those relaxed summer evenings and, much to my alarm, summer is quickly slipping past – we have just five weeks until school starts again. We have some really fun plans for those five weeks, a little bit of travel and some adventures here at home, but I think I also need to plan some not so busy times, stretches of boredom and maybe picking up a few life skills while we wait for the corner to turn and be in back-to-school season.

What We Ate:

Monday: No cook tomato sauce with pasta – from the recipe magazine handed out at the grocery store. It called for using a food processor and I used the Vitamix instead so I’m not sure the texture was quite right. It was tasty, though.

Tuesday: Instant Pot Creamy Butter Beans and toast. Ages ago, I had bought a bag of dried butter beans (aka lima beans, but if I called them lima beans there would be resistance.) and they’ve been languishing in the cupboard every since. Then last week, I borrowed Bare Minimum Dinners by Jenna Helwig from the library and there was this really simple Butter Bean recipe and I decided that it was time I made use of that bag of beans. It was saucy and tender and delicious.

Wednesday: Chicken Empanadas for poolside.

Thursday: Sandwiches from Filippos, eaten on the lawn of a local music venue while enjoying a concert by musician Elena Moon Park, an “all-ages” musician (or family musician – her music definitely appeals to a wide age range). Her concert featured music drawn from folk traditions of different Asian countries. Hearing music from non-western traditions was so much fun. Even though the roots of the music was from another part of the world, it had an almost bluegrass type spin on it. We had such a great time!

Friday: Pizza and Iron Man 3, which was very entertaining, though I had to look up p;ot summaries later because I didn’t quite grasp all that was going on.

Hope you are staying cool, wherever you are!