Here in the USofA, it was a holiday weekend. From a Companionship and Connection standpoint, it was a standout weekend. I am trying so very hard to hold onto the warm fuzzies I have from spending time with dear friends and beloved family members, but I will be honest: I am cranky.
Content Note: What follows is some whining from a highly privileged and wildly fortunate individual who really has nothing to complain about. I don’t blame you if you don’t have time for that, so I’ll see you on the flippity flop.
My husband got Friday off, which meant that instead of going into the office and seeing patients, he went upstairs to his home office and dealt with insurance companies and pathology reports and patient calls from home. Sure, he got to sleep in and wear shorts and a T-shirt and he didn’t have to commute. Still… That’s not really a day off.
Also, the WEATHER, my god. The weather has been my absolute least favorite, unless you count “active tornado” which is worse. It has been SO HOT and SO HUMID and I HATE IT.
Friday afternoon was miserable.
Thank goodness we have a brand new air conditioner and a pool!
Except that last week, my daughter’s room was hovering around 80F (26C) at night. The HVAC guy had warned me, after the installation, that our AC had been off for a full day, so the second floor of the house would take a couple of days to get back to temperature. But… 80 degrees after four days of waiting seemed reasonable enough. Also, we had two VIPs arriving that afternoon, and a third later that evening, and I did not want them to be sweaty and uncomfortable.
Fortunately, the HVAC guy was working on Friday and came right over and very enthusiastically tested the velocity of our air output from each register and measured the temperature of the air coming out and checked all the connections and did a bunch of other things and by the end of his visit, things were cooling down.
AC accounted for, I went out to clean the pool. (Well, I didn’t clean it, I let the pool guy do it.) The previous owners thoughtfully installed an automatic pool cover, which has been wonderful. The pool stays fairly clean, the water doesn’t evaporate as much, we have fewer critters leaping to their deaths in the water. But it would not open. And it was SO HOT. Together with my husband, we coaxed it into opening about halfway, but then it refused to move any further. Listen, I know the VIPs would have been gracious about not being able to swim, I know this. And yet. Plus, my daughter was having a friend over and I much prefer having lots of outdoor options for kids to relying on a cooling-but-still-too-hot room and a bunch of tempting screens.
Fortunately, the pool service person was working Friday! He sent out his best guy, who managed to open the pool cover. But, he noted, it will not close. We’ll have to get a pool cover specialist to come address it. Can’t wait.
Saturday morning, my daughter notified us that there was something wrong with her ceiling. We trooped into her room (cooler, thank goodness) for a look. Hmm. A suspiciously leak-like circle surrounded a tiny crack in the plaster.
Yesterday, my husband was unloading the dishwasher while I was trying to write. He opened a cupboard to put something away, and the glass lid of a casserole dish leapt out at him and shattered into smithereens on the kitchen floor. It hit the counter on the way down, leaving plenty of smithereens all over that, as well. Thank goodness it didn’t land on his foot. But the poor guy had large hunks of glass ON his bare feet and said he wasn’t sure how or where to move.
Fortunately, after a three-stage cleanup, we got the glass taken care of with minimal bleeding.
Then I got my period for the second time in about twelve years (I take oral contraceptive pills to prevent that; it should not be happening.)
Then I got a notification from Costco that my contact lens order hadn’t gone through because my prescription was outdated.
Then my daughter notified us that her ceiling looked worse.
Then I discovered my cat had knocked a section of staples off my desk and batted them across the room. I don’t think he ate any of them – he doesn’t really EAT things, except food and plants – but I don’t know that he didn’t eat any of them. All the online resources I consulted said a) this is an emergency, call the vet immediately or b) this is not an emergency unless he shows XYZ symptoms, watch him carefully or c) give him food right away to help get the foreign object through his system or d) absolutely do NOT give him food because it could cause or worsen a blockage.
“I would never eat a staple.”
Of course I had nightmares all night, mainly about being pregnant and the baby not doing well. This morning, I noticed that the house felt warmer than it should be, and when I call for cooler temperatures, it doesn’t do anything right away (at all?). The ceiling crack is holding steady, but we are expecting more thunderstorms and more rain.
Today, of course, I have been making all the calls (and you know I love phone calls) (no): To my eye doctor, to update my prescription. To Costco, whose online platform allows me to cancel my previous order, but does not allow me to update or change my prescription. To the pool cover people. To the roofing contractor who is handling our as-yet-not-started roof replacement. Do I call the vet (the cat is behaving totally normally, including eating and producing waste as usual)? Do I call my primary about the spotting? Do I call the HVAC guy?
Yes, I acknowledge that I am very lucky that THESE are my biggest problems. I am grateful to have experts to call (if they would only call me back) and grateful to have the resources to address the issues.
I AM STILL CRANKY.
Okay, deep breaths. Let’s combat the crankiness with some reflection on the absolutely wonderful parts of the weekend.
My time with the VIPs was fabulous. It is so rare for me to find people I like and like spending time with, if that makes sense? Even with people whose company I really enjoy, I often end up feeling depleted of energy at the end of our time together, which is not a reflection on them, that’s just my introverted personality. But the VIPs were the opposite. They charged my social battery instead of draining it, and I was sad to say goodnight at the end of our time together, and I hope to see them again sometime soon.
Saturday was a quintessentially perfect summer day. My whole family slept in (with a brief wake-up for me at 5:30ish to feed and play with the cat, who slept in until 6:00!) and then spent the afternoon in the pool. It was hot enough that the pool felt wonderful and breezy enough that the heat was tolerable.
Fourth of July was pretty great. My family typically spends July Fourth in the basement, feeling crotchety toward our neighbors who set off fireworks. To be clear, this is our preferred way to observe Independence Day. But I asked a friend what she was doing for the holiday and she told me, and then asked what I was doing, and when I said nothing she either took pity on me or thought I was angling for an invitation to her event, because she invited my family to join hers. We had such a nice time! She is my friend for a reason, and she and her family are lovely and welcoming and it was actually kind of nice to celebrate the holiday instead of boycott it. The day’s promised thunderstorms never materialized, and the weather was less humid than it had been. The evening ended with a fireworks show that was the perfect amount of spectacular and the perfect length. I had forgotten the special kind of buoyant unity that fireworks can inspire. And by the time we got home, our neighbors had nearly finished their own fireworks show, so we only had to endure a few pops and booms.
The extreme heat may be ebbing. Not only is today supposed to hover around 77F (25C), but the weather forecast suggests that we are taking a turn toward the high 70s/mid 80s (24/30C), which sounds a hell of a lot more pleasant than last week.
My cat continues to be The Best Cat.
Here he is, glaring at me because I am Outside and he is Inside. He disagrees with my assessment that his triple-layer coat is incompatible with our current temperatures.
Okay, as per usual, being grateful has shifted my mood toward the positive. Thank you for reading. If you have any complaints, big or small, I am happy to listen!
It seems like I have a bunch of things to write about – I have a whole list of post titles in the document above this one – but my brain is insisting on instead perseverating on some grumbles and frets. Sometimes it helps to write those out; clears some space in the garage of the mind.
Speaking of the garage, this is what my garage door currently looks like. We don’t know what happened to the garage door. What we do know is that my husband came home from work yesterday, tried to open his garage door, and it wouldn’t open. After some examination, we discovered that a pin had been pushed through a bracket (these are totally the right words) when it wasn’t supposed to be, preventing the garage door from opening properly. We pulled the pin, the garage door resumed normal function.
The only thing that happened between when my husband left for work – via a working garage door – and returned, is that Carla and a neighborhood friend did some rollerblading in the garage. Carla insists she did not touch the garage door, or anything on it. Okay, fine.
But then when I left the house, my garage door also wouldn’t open. I checked, and sure enough, the pin was pushed through the bracket. When I removed the pin, the door still wouldn’t open, so I did some jiggling and finally got it to go up enough that I could back out onto the driveway. But it wouldn’t close. The motor was working – I could see the little track that maneuvers the door moving – but the door wouldn’t budge. So I pulled the thing that you pull when your electricity is out, so I could manually close the door. And it moved just fine… for a few feet. Until ANOTHER pin, this one with a wheel on it, for maneuvering the door down the outer tracks of the housing (so many terms that are so definitely accurate), popped out and bopped me on the head.
The garage door is ASKEW, as you can see. My husband and I tried to fix it, but we made it much, much worse. At least it’s CLOSED, now. Time to call the garage door guy, probably. But it is a holiday weekend here in the US so who’s to know if garage door guys are even working right now. Plus, the last time I called a garage door guy, one of them tried to tell me I needed a brand new garage door when the other guy said my door was fixable, and then fixed it, and it has remained operable for nearly two years. Is this newest issue related to the one we dealt with back in 2023? Should I have listened to the first guy all along? No one knows. No one knows, either, why the pins were pushed in the first place. Least of all Carla.
It has been Quite A Week for stuff like that. There’s the air conditioner leak, which I am monitoring per my dad’s instructions. He thinks we just need to get a new threaded fitting for the pipe. All my fingers are crossed, of course, and perhaps I am just being hyper-aware, but it feels like our air conditioner is really struggling to keep the house cool. Is this because it is a million degrees outside? Or because the air conditioner is failing? Okay, okay – let’s not fret too intensely about the air conditioner. I want to tell you about my ATM mishap.
Picture this: It is a million degrees outside, I am picking up my child from camp and then picking up her friend so we can have a sleepover. I have a ten minute window in which I can grab some food for dinner and get some cash to tip the furniture delivery people who are due at my house first thing the next morning. Carla and I swing through the grocery store in record time and there’s only one car ahead of me at the ATM. The car takes forever. I always wonder if people behind me think I am taking forever, too. Or are there some people who save up fifty-eight transactions for a single visit to the ATM. Hard to say. When I finally pull up, the machine takes my card, takes my pin, but then there is no “withdraw cash” option. Sigh.
There is a walk-up ATM on the other side of the bank, so I park and go through the whole thing again. This time, the machine takes my card, takes my pin, and there IS a “withdraw cash” option. I click it and a screen pops up that says “validating pin.” I wait. And wait. And wait. The sun helpfully spotlights me against the building. A woman pulls up and asks if this machine has cash, because the drive-up one doesn’t. I told her it ate my card. She suggests that I see if anyone inside can help, which I reluctantly do (I don’t want to leave my card in the machine), but the bank is closed.
I try to call the bank – first the branch, which is closed to callers as well as customers, and then the customer service hotline, which has eight million prompts that I dutifully type in but can’t get it to understand – and then start pounding on the doors. I can see people inside; maybe they will take pity on me? I am not a bank robber, just a damp, flustered, middle-aged woman. Bless them: someone tries to communicate with me via mouthing and sign language (very ineffective), and then eventually a man comes into the lobby and talks to me through the doors. I explain what happened, he explains he’s not allowed to open the doors to the bank after hours, and we discuss options. I am near tears at this point. The frozen screen still says “validating pin” and my main concern is that the computer will eventually start working again and then my card, with validated pin, will be available for anyone to use. I don’t know if I look plaintive enough, or harmless enough, or annoying enough, but the man finally gets a colleague to unlock the doors for him so he can come check on the situation himself.
I am apparently switching verb tenses now. The solution turned out to be: he reset the machine from inside the building. This, he told me, could result in my card being spit back out at me – so I needed to wait until it completely reset – or it could result in my card disappearing forever into the ether. So I called customer service again to see if I could get to a human. Meanwhile, Carla was sitting in the air-conditioned car, fretting about all the other people (total: 3) who were also trying to withdraw money from this bank and were stuck in the same pointless loop we were. She was particularly worried about one elderly man in a convertible who went through the drive-up ATM twice and pulled up to the walk-up ATM also twice, only to be turned away because I was still there.
HALF AN HOUR LATER – drenched in sweat, but unwilling to leave the machine in case my card popped out – the machine reset and my card was nowhere in sight. I’d finally gotten through to a real person via the customer service hotline and was asking him to send me a new card when the banker appeared out of nowhere and asked if I had my ID. I handed it over and he returned it WITH MY CARD.
I was so very grateful. I know he broke all sorts of rules by leaving the bank, even though he took precautions to make sure that even if I was going to threaten him with a weapon, I still couldn’t access the bank. Sometimes people are so bound by rules that they are unable to exercise any sort of judgment call. How fortunate that this man was able to judge that my situation required some rule bending. I did not even get his name, but he is my hero.
The Balloons. This is just pure complaining now, but something else I despise right up there with “unable to exercise judgment calls” is people who gate-keep rules/information. I went to a local business that sells balloons to get a few for Carla’s birthday. (She still adores balloons.) I took my balloons to the register, where two young people were inflating balloons and tying on ribbon. One of the people came to take my order. “When is your event?” Tomorrow morning, I told her. She looked with dismay at the balloons I’d chosen. “Those won’t last that long,” she said, pointing to the latex balloons. I’ve had twelve years of experience with balloons, and I think they’d be fine, but whatever. I told her I would exchange them for mylar balloons. “Would you like to take the balloons with you now?” Sure, that would prevent me from making a second trip, why not? “We can’t, we have a bunch of orders we’re working on right now.” Okay, that’s fine; I had been prepared to come back anyway. I asked her what time they closed that night. “Eight.” Okay, great. I will pick up the balloons at eight. “We don’t fulfill balloon orders that late. The latest we fulfill balloon orders is seven-thirty.” Oh-kay. Seven-thirty, is fine, I will pick them up at seven-thirty. “Well, probably not seven-thirty. Maybe six-thirty, or seven.” Great, I will pick them up at seven. The other person filling balloons piped up: “We have another order to fulfill at seven.” The person who I was dealing with said, “We’re fulfilling another order at seven so I can’t do seven.” Okay, fine. Six-thirty, I do not care. “Do you want your ribbon floor length?” I had no experience with this unit of measurement, or how it could possibly be a standard length, so I said something like, I want the ribbon long because we have tall ceilings. The person filling balloons said, “We do floor length or table length.” My pleasant smile was beginning to feel more like a grimace. Floor length is fine. “What color ribbon do you want?” I started to answer and then asked what colors they haveand chose the first option she gave me.
If there are very specific parameters, TELL ME THEM. Don’t make me guess.
Update on the sleep situation. One of my top health concerns over the past couple of years has been my increasingly, enduringly terrible sleep and resulting fatigue. I did two at-home sleep studies that were inconclusive. The sleep specialist recommended an in-lab sleep study, which I finally did last week (would anyone be interested in a post about what that was like?) and got my results. Basically, I have very mild obstructive sleep apnea. So mild that usually they don’t treat it (and if it’s so mild they don’t typically treat it, is the sleep apnea what’s causing my sleep problems?). (I also have restless limbs, for which I already take copious supplements and have a prescription to use on really bad nights.) My sleep specialist said that I could try a CPAP machine if I wanted, I could get a dental appliance that is not covered by insurance, or I could – wait for it – lose weight. Sigh. Okay, the last one is free and worth doing anyway, so I guess I’ll try that first.
Possibly I am so easily annoyed right now because I have some un-displaceable worry and regret that’s just… percolating. I just heard some news about a friend that was very troubling. It didn’t come from her; it came, in fact, third hand, but you’ll have to trust me that the source is inarguably trustworthy. I suppose there is still room for some blurring of details, so I’m keeping that in mind. Anyway: I learned that she was going through something horrific some years ago and I had no idea. If I had known, I would have tried to help her. But I didn’t know, and she went through this horrific experience and she went through it alone. Because the revelation about her circumstances didn’t come from her, and because we are the type of friends who now keep in touch via text two or three times a year, and who see each other every decade or so if we happen to be in the same state at the same time, I don’t feel comfortable reaching out to her. Not that I’d even know what to say. “I’m sorry you went through that?” “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you?” I don’t know any details, just broad strokes. I have every reason to believe she is okay now, and that the horrific ordeal is in the past. But it still hurts my heart to know this thing was happening right in front of me and I was so totally oblivious.
DRASTIC TONE AND SUBJECT CHANGE. Even though it required turning on my oven, I did some medicinal baking yesterday. I made my favorite summer treat, a purple plum torte. Typically, I make it in a nine-inch pan but this time I made it in a six-inch pan and it was so good. Because it’s taller, the cake had to cook a little longer for the middle to set, and the edges caramelized into a delicious cookie-like crust, and the plums settled in the middle into a gorgeous jam. A plus, would make again.
Comeuppance. Do you remember, lo these many weeks ago, when I was complaining about the neighbors’ kids being outside late at night playing basketball? Well, we had a friend sleep over on a weeknight and due to manyfactors, including my ATM experience, everything took place much later than I planned. The kids got in the pool at… nine. It was dark, which was not ideal, and resulted in some spooked screeching. But a night swim is a novelty and it was the only time they had to swim and I knew they weren’t going to sleep anyway. I shushed them anytime they spoke above normal conversation volume, and they ended up playing a very nice quiet game until about eleven.
The next day, Carla ran into one of her dog friends and its human companion, and she ended up mentioning that she’d been swimming the previous night. The human said, “Oh yes, I heard.”
GULP. I am a noisy inconsiderate neighbor too, it seems.
Don’t worry. I got my comeuppance. My next-door neighbors – not the basketball family – hosted a party the night before Independence Day and released three hours’ worth of massive fireworks into the night, terrifying the cat and stressing my child out with fears of fire. They stopped at about eleven. The next day, we had spent fireworks cartridges all over our driveway, backyard, and even the top of my car. I picked them all up without complaint.
Are we seriously doing this? Last week, when it was still June, I went to Michael’s to buy birthday candles and what did I see? Halloween décor. Why. Just. Why???????? (Also, I really want the tall ghost with the jack-o-lantern candy dish.)
Introvert vs. extrovert. Carla rejected the idea of day camp this summer. I did sign her up for a bunch of short camps – short in terms of duration (2-3 hours) as well as length (weeklong) – but for a lot of the summer so far, she’s been at home with me. This has been exactly as difficult as I imagined it would be. She’s bored. She’s lonely. She’s unwilling to do the things I want her to do in order to make me feel like she’s Doing Things instead of sitting in front of a screen all day. The weather has been too rainy to spend much time outside or in the pool. The kids in the neighborhood have all been at camp. And because I refuse to let her sit in front of a screen all day, she has been by my side pretty much all day long.
This should be fun! It’s a gift, in fact, to spend unstructured time with my kid. We’ve played a bunch of board games, we had a girls’ day during which we went shopping and went out to lunch, we’ve run errands together, we’ve taken the kitten to the vet. We’ve also done a lot of screen time (which I am only now realizing is a loophole in my No Screens Until You’ve Done X Ruling), watching cat videos, having Modern Family and Brooklyn 99 marathons, watching movies.
I have also arranged playdates and mini golf and invited neighbors over to swim and made dates to go visit our old neighbors.
And yet there are so many hours to fill and so many of them seem to be filled with Carla – and the kitten – needing my attention. Which, again, is precious, and also I would just like some time alone for the love. My battery drains very quickly when I don’t get time to myself, even when those people are my beloved child, and I am at my limit. (Yes, I have tried waking up early but the cat is always already awake and ready to eat and then play, and then the playing wakes Carla up, and there’s never any time alone.)
Poor Carla, born an only child to introverted parents, is a social creature who LOVES people and loves chaos and excitement and busyness. I know she is bored and lonely, and I’m trying to secure additional time with her friends, and I’m trying to remind myself that I am the grownup here, and this is my responsibility as her parent as well as a person who loves her. I am also trying to remind myself that being bored is GOOD for kids. Although I think the reason it’s good for kids is that it supposedly inspires them to be creative, while my child is creatively velcroing herself to my side. I am trying to remind myself that she won’t always want to spend time with me, and that, in fact, any moment now she could decide she never wants to speak to me again, and I should treasure this time. I am TRYING; this summer is TRYING as well, but in a different way.
Okay. Now that I’ve whined all over the internet, I’m going on a hunt for outdoor throw pillows with my husband and child. At a store, not, like, in the yard, in case that wasn’t clear.
What complaints and frets are cluttering up your mental garage?
