April 3, 2026 by suzanne day by day

Friday Randomosity: Various Kinds of Pain Edition

It’s Friday and my mind, as per usual, is scattered. Let’s try to shuffle some of the disarray into more manageable piles. (To be clear, by “shuffle” I mean “complain a lot about inconsequential things.”)

This week has been full of headaches. Literal headaches. Are they from neck tension? Eye strain? Allergies? Too much gum chewing? Not enough water consumption? WHO KNOWS. Advil seems to help, but I need to have something in my stomach before I take Advil (so says my physician husband) and I don’t like eating first thing in the morning and that’s when they are worst. Perhaps I should ask him, how much something do I need to eat? If, like, a handful of cashews would suffice, maybe I could deal with that.
While I’m whining about aches and pains, let me tell you that my forearm pain persists. The exercises in the video I told you about here helped tremendously, but then the pain returned. I have been babying it. Trying to avoid lifting things with that hand, eschewing weight lifting of any sort, trying to sleep on my back instead of on that arm. Stretches and the exercises that helped so much originally. (I think I may have been a little aggressive with the massage aspect of the exercises yesterday; my arm is kind of throbbing today, when normally it only hurts when I lift something.) Probably I should go to my doctor… but I have been resisting that step because I feel like she won’t be able to DO anything. Offer sympathy? Recommend rest, ice, and pain medication? The very best case (realistic) scenario is that she refers me to a forearm pain specialist… but then I have to make the appointment and wait to see that doctor and do whatever tests and yada yada blah blah blah. Why yes I am aware I am being a HUGE CRABBY BABY about this.
How are you staying fit if you can’t do your normal fitness routine? My preferred workout is strength training with weights. But I simply cannot do that right now. My second preference is for walking, but I find that lately my back hurts after I come in from a walk. What is THAT about? Probably I need new shoes, but UGH. How am I supposed to participate in Elisabeth’s walking club if I’m not walking? It feels like the only option is yoga, so I guess I will see what Adriene has to offer. It’s just that I feel impatient when I try to do yoga. Impatient and also clunky and off kilter. I am realizing that those are reasons TO do yoga, not to avoid it.
I am in the process of transitioning to a new blog – with new URL and layout and everything – and that is a HUGE pain. I realize it will also be a bit of a pain for you as well, and I apologize in advance. Hopefully I’ll be able to figure out how to make this blog link automatically to the new one, once it’s all transitioned. I’m still trying to figure out how the new layout works. My free WordPress blog theme is so old that it is no longer supported, so I can’t recreate it on the new blog, which annoys me to no end. And the new blog theme doesn’t seem to work quite the same way, which is also frustrating and makes me feel very old and out of touch with technology. It’s all on WordPress, I don’t know why it doesn’t work the same way. Grump grump, crab crab.
Death has been on my mind a bit this week, so please skip this bullet if you aren’t up for THAT. I mean, we have the Passover and Easter stories, which are both as full of death as they are of hope. Also, I had a nightmare about my friend – in which I texted her old phone number because I missed her, and she responded, and then was furious at me because I hadn’t reached out to her (because I thought she was dead). In the dream, I so clearly remembered her wake, and yet I got to see her, in person, in the dream, and she was so very alive. I was so grateful that I had been wrong, and felt so guilty for having believed she was dead, and so devastated that I had her back in my life only for her to treat me with anger and coldness. When I finally woke up, I had a whole day of residual grief and guilt, on top of the renewed sense of loss that comes with having to confront that a truth you had accepted for many years is still true.
If you skipped the previous bullet, you should skip this one too. Death was with us at the Passover seder this week, too. The last time I’d been in our friends’ home, it was to honor the loss of their mother. I was grateful to see all the same faces, gathered this time in celebration instead of in mourning. But their mother’s absence was palpable. I wanted, so many times throughout the evening, to say her name, to acknowledge that she was not there. But in the concentric circles of closeness to the family, I am in one of the outer rings, and it did not feel appropriate. And yet. Isn’t one of the loneliest parts of loss the feeling that you are the only one who remembers your loved one? Wouldn’t it be a comfort to know that others are thinking of her too? The aftermath of loss is so unnecessarily complicated. I think we think that feel we are expected to move on from loss, or that we worry we will bring down the mood if we bring up a lost loved one in a celebratory space, or that we don’t want to provoke additional pain in those who are grieving by calling their loved one to mind (when, of course, our dead do not ever leave our thoughts). In the end, I did not mention her once; it never felt appropriate. And yet I wish I had had the courage to say something, even if it was the wrong thing. My current plan is to try to find the right words to say I missed her in the thank you note I will write to our host.
Let’s talk about something cheery and frivolous! After your thoughtful responses to my Easter basket conundrum, and a text from my husband that said something like “buy lots of candy and maybe one small present,” I did indeed go buy “lots of candy.” Like, waaaayyyyyyy too much candy. The small present is a book I bought on a whim. I read this book – and, in fact, much of the series – when I was a kid, so the nostalgia factor played a big part in my spur-of-the-moment purchase. I hope Carla likes it, but at the very least I will enjoy rereading it.
We are back to the dessert drawing board. I mentioned to Carla that her father had requested coconut cake or carrot cake for Easter dessert, and she said she doesn’t like either of those options. Well, neither do I. So we are trying to figure out something that sounds festive and springy and light and not terribly complicated. My vote is for this smashed raspberry cake (even though it sounds a little more complex than I was hoping for), but my husband wants to make a trifle (even though we do not have a trifle dish), and Carla wants a strawberry cake (for which I cannot find a recipe that sounds appealing).
While I was shopping for Easter candy, I wandered into the gardening aisle. Every year, I have grand plans to grow a bunch of things, despite a long history of lackluster results with getting things to grow, and this year is no exception. I bought A TON of seeds, tomato and zucchini and basil and dill and cilantro, but also a bunch of flower seeds, hollyhock and calendula and echinacea and more. I have never tried to grow flowers from seed before. We’ll see if I have any success at all. I’m still trying to revive my poor sickly palm plants. I was able to move them out to the sun porch this week, for some tropical weather. Although it is supposed to snow next week. These tumultuous weather patterns are not pleasant.
Speaking of which, Carla and I had a bit of excitement this week. We were driving home from school when my phone lit up with an emergency tornado warning alert. I thought the tornado warning was for the area around our home, so I kept driving. My husband texted that we should go to the mall or something, but that would have meant turning around, so I suggested I would drive us to his hospital and we could all wait out the tornado warning together. Well, okay, he said, but there’s a tornado warning here, too. Oh, great. I had not realized we were also driving through a tornado warning. If I have fixed any tornado knowledge in my brain, it is that being in a car during a tornado is a Bad Plan. It was at that moment that the wind picked up and rain started coming down in sheets. No one else driving around us seemed the least bit concerned – except, perhaps, for the guy on the motorcycle in front of us, who kept looking up at the sky. When lightning and thunder started out of nowhere, I turned into the nearest parking lot, grabbed Carla, and dashed into a restaurant. I was quite nervous at that point, and it was disorienting to burst into the restaurant, soaking wet, only to see staff and patrons behaving as though everything was totally normal. Carla’s school tornado drill training kicked in and she dragged me toward a table in the back of the restaurant, away from the windows and doors. While I was trying to figure out what to do – do I… order food??? – she said that we’d passed a sign for the bathrooms, which were downstairs, and she wanted us to go into the basement. Yes, good, let’s do that. There were only two other women down there. Apparently, no one seems to feel as freaked out by a tornado warning as I do???? We waited out the storm and everything was fine, but the whole experience was very weird. Tornados would occasionally swirl through my hometown in the summers, and my mother was very, very firm about always going into the basement to ride out the threat. But here, even pulling off the road seemed like an overreaction! Oh well. I would rather overreact than the alternative.
Carla, who was quite justifiably terrified by this experience, was primarily concerned for the cat. Who was at home, alone. Fortunately, we could watch him. My husband got me a pet camera for my birthday, and then he got a second one so we could check in on the cat while we were gone over spring break. (Lenny also had a cat sitter, he wasn’t alone all day every day.) So Carla was able to watch him while we were hunkered down in the restaurant basement. He spent the entire time on the kitchen table (where he is not allowed) and the kitchen island (where he is also not allowed), completely unperturbed by the thunder and lightning going on outside.

*Looking directly at the camera, as if to say, “What are YOU going to do about it?”*

That’s it for today, Internet. Happy holidays, to those who celebrate, and happy weekend to those who don’t.

March 30, 2026 by suzanne day by day

Plunging Into Spring Slash Summer Shemozzle; Dinners This Week; Are We Still Doing Easter Baskets

Yesterday, I forced my cranky self to go for a walk in the spring air with my husband. As we were chatting, I mentioned that I felt like my head was SWIRLING with all the to-dos I have ahead of me, and he sagely suggested that I write them down. Well. Writing them down helps, but it does not STOP the swirling.

What also helps is to squawk and flap at you. I know you are either going through something similar, or you know exactly what it feels like, or you have kind and/or wise and/or distracting words.

Because I have a fondness for alliteration, especially in post titles, I was looking for a synonym for “chaos / pandemonium / overwhelm” that began with an S, and I came across the word “shemozzle.” The word itself is a little sillier than how I feel; there’s something about the “ozzle” that makes me want to giggle. Say “shemozzle” out loud, it’s delightful. That very silliness is what makes it perfect. I may feel on the knife’s edge of a panic attack, but I’m panicking about silly inconsequential stuff when the world at large is full of so many massive, significant events, and “shemozzle” helps me remember that.

The first and most uncomfortable shemozzle / source of shemozzle / I have no real idea how to use this word: SUMMER.

I have finally gotten my ass into gear and started thinking about summer camp, and summer feels really, really close, and I have next to zero things planned, and the whole thing stresses me right out. Also, I spent – no exaggeration – SIX HOURS this weekend trying to research camps and fit them into the calendar and talk through them with Carla. Which is all to say that I acknowledge the many privileges and a blessings of a life in which a) I have six hours to devote to summer camp research and b) the wealth of options available to me is so extensive and c) summer camp is neither a necessity nor a hardship.

Summer camp, of course, is all tangled up in summer travel plans. (Shemozzle Two.) My husband and I are apparently inhabiting one of those logic puzzles: Suzanne wants to be in X place for Y days, her husband wants to be in X place for Z days, their daughter needs to be picked up from camp on Day Z, and they have to cross a river in a leaky boat with a hungry shark. How can Suzanne be two places at once without losing a limb?

Plus, summer has a bunch of Unknown Factors that could influence things like Which Camp Is Best and Will Our Travel Plans Work for People Besides Us, and I don’t know when the Factors will become Known and airline tickets continue to climb and also Carla’s birthday is in there somewhere and she’s been through nearly a school year’s worth of bar and bat mitzvahs that have conveyed the idea that Thirteen Is a Seriously Important Birthday but I’m not sure what besides “getting a phone” (no) or “elaborate party and religious ceremony” (also no) meets her expectations of what a Seriously Important Birthday might involve. [Edited to add: NOTE OF CLARITY – I am not opposed to phones for people’s children. A phone is not right for my particular child at this particular time, but there are many excellent and valid reasons for kids to have phones at age thirteen or even younger.]

Listen, I am well accustomed to the turmoil of Pell-Mell May, but it is still March, if only for another day, and I AM NOT READY FOR THIS LEVEL OF SHEMOZZLE.

Shall we turn to another, more pressing issue? Which is that this is a holiday week, and I am hosting one of the week’s holidays and yet I somehow still have to also feed my family on the non-holiday days.

Dinners for the Week of March 30-April 5

Fire Fry: My husband requested this, and if someone else is going to suggest a meal, I’m going to make it. Doesn’t hurt that fire fry is delicious.

Salmon Rice Bowls: I think I’m going to make the salmon in the air fryer, as in this recipe, rather than fussing with a skillet.

Ground Beef Tacos: It’s been a minute since we’ve had tacos around here, and I’m in the mood for a Taco Tuesday.

Sesame Ginger Stir Fry: I think I’m feeling brave enough to try making tofu again, and this recipe sounds like the perfect incentive to attempt it.

Sheet Pan Chicken Tostadas: Is this too similar to tacos? Too bad.

We’ve been invited to join family friends for a Passover Seder, so that’s another night I don’t have to think about. And then I’m hosting Easter dinner. I think I’ll make a pork loin with a warm farro and veggie salad on the side. My husband has requested a cake for dessert, and has narrowed down his cake desires to a coconut cake or a carrot cake. I have never made either, and I’m always up for a cake challenge. Do you have a preference? And, if so, do you have a favorite recipe for either?

Speaking of Easter… my kid is twelve… do I still need to do the whole Easter bunny/Easter basket thing? Just the idea of thinking about it is making me weary. Are we still hiding plastic eggs all over the house? Do we need to dye eggs? Surely we should have at least a small Easter basket, right? My husband has always insisted that Easter is not a gift-giving holiday, and yet… I’ve always striven to fill my kid’s Easter basket with as many non-candy items as I can, while still trying to make it fun and exciting.

I wonder if I could get away with filling up an Easter basket with practical things, like these cute jeans Carla wants, or a new skort, or a duffel bag. I bet she would love a variety pack of spring-ish earrings. She’s been more interested in cooking for herself lately, and I’ve been stressing about SPORTS SNACKS, so perhaps a cookbook would be both fun and useful? Books are always a good gift compromise – if only Rosanne Perry’s newest novel had already come out! Carla loved attending Jeopardy! as an audience member over spring break; maybe she would enjoy a book of Jeopardy! games, or a book of trivia, or maybe even this inside peek at the show? Of course, I am also eyeing fun and silly things for Carla’s Easter basket, like these hand-holding socks or these fingernail markers or a stuffed ostrich. My child does NOT need any more stuffed animals, but the ostrich is adorable… and you know what is MORE ADORABLE is this stuffed Pallas cat OMG I want it so much. Carla also loves the latest fidget toys – she was eyeballing this squishy stick of butter at a friend’s house. Oh my goodness, she would get such a kick out of this tic-tac-toe wall hanging. Okay, now I am getting carried away. Let’s save it for her birthday, Suzanne.

I suppose I can at the very least buy some candy the next time I go to the grocery store. And maybe I will consider buying a bag of bunny farts. Carla does love both cotton candy and fart jokes, so it seems like a guaranteed win.

April 13, 2025 by suzanne day by day

Six for Sunday

The other day, a parenting-advice account I follow on Instagram served me a post about things parents of teenagers have to accept. You know, like, “teens will make dumb decisions” and “you and your teen will experience conflict.” Stuff like that.

One of the things was “you will be driving them all over the place.” Somehow, while agonizing over my miles-long list of concerns about parenting when my husband and I were making the wild decision to procreate, I did not consider the driving. Please chalk this up to complete obliviousness when I myself was a teen, because obviously my parents drove ME all over creation. But I do not feel prepared in any way. The Driving was not on my radar. I had no idea. No. Idea. There is so much driving.

One of my friends has two very active, involved boys. She was telling me the other day that there is one night a week when the kids have simultaneous dropoffs at separate locations. Separate pickups from those activities. Then separate dropoffs at separate locations for the next activities. And then simultaneous pickups. At separate locations. My brain is broken just thinking about it, and she is LIVING IT.

Carla has a friend who is one of five. The kids attend three separate schools. The older four are all in (different) sports. At least one of them is in multiple sports. Is the mom ever NOT in the car? I feel like I am in the car a lot and I only have the one child!

It has been hard for me to grasp the reality of the situation. I am trying to come to terms with the disheartening fact that I am simply Going To Be In The Car. From now until Carla graduates, presumably. Or until she gets a license of her own, which terrifies me beyond reason so let’s not think about that at this time.

But I guess what I want to say to anyone who might be reading this and considering having children: FACTOR IN THE DRIVING.

Obviously, I would not trade Carla for anything in the universe… and yet it would have been nice if any of the parenting or child-planning books I consulted had mentioned the driving.

Okay, that’s a whole post on its own but let’s also have some bullets.

*My irises are stalwartly peeking through the April snowfall.*

Easter Baskets: We are not celebrating Passover this year, because we are lazy and I am a terrible steward of my child’s religious heritage/education. Fortunately, I am still able to order crap from crappy places in order to participate in the completely secular aspect of the next upcoming religious holiday. My husband and I are total opposites when it comes to Easter baskets. He thinks they should contain mainly (only?) candy. I think my child has fully mastered the art of manifesting sugar in her life, and doesn’t need ~~any~~ a lot of additional sugar from us. Listen, I am not necessarily into the glorious excess that I am now accustomed to seeing on social media. (Some of it grosses me out, but at the same time, I understand the impulse.) However, I do like her to have SOMETHING in her Easter basket. This year, I am going for Practical Slash Fun. She needs a little jewelry container she can clip to her backpack, so she can safely stow her earrings and bracelets while she’s Doing Sports. She needs a new pair of sunglasses and carrying case. She has a couple of long bus rides in her near future, so I wanted to get her this bus-friendly folding puzzle. Or maybe this fun questions-and-answers card deck, to play with friends? There is a new Rosanne Parry book out, so I will definitely add that to her Easter Basket. (She adores Rosanne Parry books.) On the completely IMpractical side, no one needs emotional support pickles, but Carla would LOVE THEM. She has also been obsessed with the idea of getting our future cat a bow tie. My big problem is that none of these things fit into a plastic Easter egg, and Carla has expressly requested that we hide Easter eggs this year. Well, there’s always money. Or candy. Or a monster easter egg.

Cupcake Plans: While I’m on the topic of Easter, we might as well discuss cupcakes. My parents have invited us over for dinner and have requested that I bring dessert. Specifically, cupcakes. More specifically, cupcakes with adorable Easter décor. (My mother knows me so well.) My husband and mother enjoy carrot cake, so I’m thinking maybe these? Plus, I love the little coconut birds’ nests with Cadbury eggs. This recipe has less oil and HALF the eggs. Do you have a go-to carrot cake recipe? I cannot believe that I am about to type this (Engie – look away), but the recipe can and in fact should include raisins; my husband has expressly requested golden raisins in the carrot cake. (I cannot abide raisins in any form.) Because I am raisin-averse, and because Carla straight up refuses to eat carrot cake, I will also make a batch of lemon cupcakes with lemon-curd filling. Those are my go-to and Carla loves them, too. (By the way, all the recipes I linked to include frosting recipes, but I will probably make an extra big batch of plain old cream cheese buttercream and use it for both varieties.) To top the lemon cupcakes, I am thinking of trying this adorable chick frosting. If you are worrying that two batches of cupcakes is too much cupcake for a group of five, I plan to send a bunch of them in to my husband’s office on Monday.

Reading Incentives. I don’t know that I’ve ever needed an incentive to read; being able to snuggle up on a couch and escape into a completely different set of circumstances is reward enough. But I think Carla might need a little push. She enjoys reading when she’s doing it, but she doesn’t seek it out. This fills me with anxiety because there are so many good books she’s not reading! And I’m afraid she’s going to miss the window for feeling that they are “age appropriate.” Over the winter holidays, she got started on the Black Stallion series. She devoured the first book, leapt excitedly into the second book, and then once school resumed, she kind of tapered off. Over spring break, we of course went into nearly every bookstore we could find that sold English books, and Carla found multiple books she HAD to have. But… she hasn’t made much progress in any of them since we returned from vacation. I’ve been having fun “restocking” her bookshelves with more age-appropriate books, and there are SO MANY BOOKS I am dying for her to read… but we’ll never get to half of them if she isn’t into it, you know? In the past, my husband and I have tried various methods to spur her into reading, from adding it to her to-do list for the day, to paying her to read books. Maybe I need to give her a financial incentive again? What prompted you to read, when you were a kid? (The Pizza Hut Book It! program was definitely a bonus for me in elementary school. I love pizza. Pizza and books make for a magical combination.) If you have children, what prompted your kids to read? Carla and I have begun listening to audiobooks on our drives to school, which helps a little… but I still want her to do more reading.

Shorts Weather. Even though there is still frost on the ground, I know shorts weather is around the corner. It has me trolling through the internet, looking for shorts that won’t make me hate everyone and everything. (And pretty dresses, natch.) Shorts and I have a fraught relationship. One of the big problems is that I am self-conscious about my legs and prefer to keep them hidden. (Am I seriously considering this “magic” cellulite solution, that has so many reviews about how it makes people feel like their legs are on fire?) (I admit I am partly just curious about whether the on-fire feeling is as severe as people say. But curious enough to set my own legs on fire????) My legs are what they are, and I get too hot in summer to wear jeans or pants all the time, so I return to The Shorts Search once again. I’ve had good luck with Madewell shorts, and these have potential. As long as I’m considering denim, maybe I need a pair of these Levi’s shorts? I am always drawn to Boden’s beautiful colors and fabrics, but the description of most of their shorts includes this little kicker: “slim through waist, hip and hem” which is not the loose flowy style I prefer, so I might have to simply enjoy thinking about their shorts. I keep wanting to try Quince, and these shorts are cute. Ugh. Just thinking about shorts makes me want to avoid them altogether and stick to dresses.

Non-Shorts Signs of Spring. Despite the persistence of snow and mid-thirties temps, we do have a few signs of spring here and there. Daffodils are abundant in my neighborhood. My irises are stretching their little leafy arms up through the earth, testing to see whether they should show their faces. The lilac tree is beginning to bud. All the maples (I think?) in our neighborhood are a blur of pale red. The magnolia tree of one of my friends already bloomed; I was jealous until the frost returned and all the blooms dropped off her tree. There’s a forsythia shrub in the backyard that is producing its own sunshine. I cannot wait for flowers everywhere.

That’s all I’ve got, Internet. What are you thinking about today?