the logic problem that is my life

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The Three Pianos

Whoops. My last post made it sound like moving is imminent, but the Big Day is still a few weeks out. Womp, womp. Of course, while it may seem like the moving process is dragging out indefinitely (which it is, in many ways), it feels extremely urgent and present in my life. 

For one thing, the packing seems like it will never be done in time! My husband and I spent all last weekend packing, and we cleared out a) the guest room and b) The Piece. THAT’S IT. I have been packing and packing and packing for weeks now. We have made three separate special trips to the dump to divest ourselves of trash (SO FAR). I have been to Goodwill a half dozen times. And yet, outside of a pervasive and mildly disturbing smell of cardboard, our home remains virtually unaffected. 

I am pretty sure all we need to do is remove the art from the walls and we’re good to go? Although there are a few things left in the closet.
The Piece looks so sad, divested of its treasures.
The Piece held the contents of ALL FOUR of these boxes. Plus a bunch of vases and candles that we threw away/donated. It sure holds a TON of crap I mean precious treasures!!!!

How do we have so much STUFF? 

In addition to packing, I am really struggling with all the logistics. There are so many things to schedule, from home repairs in our current house to moderate renovations in the new house. Plus, it’s the end of summer, so there are all sorts of School Is Starting Soon appointments and commitments and meetings. And Carla is done with camp but not yet in school all day. It also happens to be one of the busiest times of year for me workwise, so I have projects and meetings and deadlines. 

I like to think I am fairly well-organized, but this is stretching the limits of this particular skill set. Because I am just one person, and I can unfortunately only be in one place at a time. It seems like most of my non-packing, non-working time lately is spent with my calendar open on both my computer and my phone, trying to figure out where to squeeze in the next thing I have to do.

Here is a perfect example of the kind of logistical knot I keep finding myself in: The Three Pianos.

  • Piano #1: My husband and I possess a baby grand piano, which was a very generous hand-me-down from his parents. This is the same piano that lived in my husband’s house when he was growing up. I play the piano, so does my husband, and Carla (who has not yet taken piano lessons) likes to pick out songs on the keys. I grew up in a house with a piano and I am going to keep this piano for as long as I possibly can, even if I have to someday convert it into a bed so that it can fit into the confines of my room in the assisted living facility. So obviously this piano is coming with us to the new house. My husband and I have designated a room in our new house as The Piano Room. (It is supposed to be a formal dining room, but considering we have only ever used our current dining room for doing puzzles, we prefer dedicating a room to the piano and some cozy chairs and hosting all meals in our kitchen.) 
  • Piano #2: The sellers of our new house had a lovely upright piano. My father plays the piano and when he and my mom moved to our region, they were looking for a piano for their new house… so we arranged to buy the one from the sellers on behalf of my parents.
  • Piano #3: My husband and I are also in possession of an electric piano. It is a full size piano that has a really nice, rich sound and has keys with a realistic feel to them. (But it also has other instrument settings, so you can change it to sound like a harpsichord.)You can hook headphones into it while you play and supposedly it connects via Midi to a computer, so it has a lot of useful technology. (My husband suggested at one point that we put it in Carla’s new room, so she could play it at her leisure… which sounds awesome, honestly. However, my husband also has a full size keyboard that he uses for producing music, so it’s not like my child won’t have a technology-compatible piano should she require it, yes I realize she is VERY spoiled.) (We have too many instruments in our house, but on the plus side, our house is full of music!) For the past few years, the electric piano has been sitting unused in our basement. We are donating this piano to a local school. 

So here we have three pianos. None of the pianos currently lives in the place where it needs to end up. Part of my job is to get each piano to its new home. (Let’s say for the sake or argument and also true-to-lifeness that my husband is not available to help with any of this because he is at work.)

  • Piano #1 cannot go to the new house until the floors have been redone. We cannot move it ourselves and have to hire piano movers.
  • Piano #2 needs to go to my parents’ house, and it needs to be out of the new house before the flooring people arrive to redo the floors. But we cannot get it out of the new house until the sellers move out, which they have not done yet. (They negotiated extra time as part of our contract.) We cannot move this piano ourselves and have to hire piano movers. I have to be at the new house to give the movers access to the piano and then I have to be at my parents’ house to accept the piano. The new house is 25 minutes away from my current house; my parents’ house is 30 minutes away from the new house. One piano mover chargers more to pick up/deliver the pianos separately; one piano mover charges a flat per-piano fee so at least that makes it easy to choose but I had to make lots of calls to figure this all out.
  • Piano #3 needs to go to the local school. We can move this piano ourselves, because I can fit it in my vehicle. My husband will help me load the piano into my vehicle the night before I need to deliver it, but I cannot fit both the piano and my daughter in the vehicle at the same time. The person who can accept the piano is only available Tuesday through Thursday, but on each of those days I have to drive my daughter to an appointment.
Two of the three pianos. Looks like we’re about to host a dueling pianos event.

It’s like one of those logic puzzles with the complex grids you have to fill out until each option only has one right answer. I used to LOVE doing those logic puzzles when I was a kid. NOT SO MUCH ANYMORE.

This particular piano logic problem seems to be semi-resolved, at least. But where I cross off one logic problem, another pops up in its place! We’ve got windows repairs and roof repairs and school drop-off and cleaning people and final walkthroughs and another call week and haircuts and orthodontist appointments and PTA meetings and our very last block party and and and.

These are certainly not problems problems. Everything is fine, everything is good. And there will be a time after this. But right now, it is occupying ALL of my brain space.

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Father’s Day Logic Problem, Dinners This Week

Well, we have slipped seamlessly from Mayhem-May to Jumble-June. Everything is good! We are so fortunate! And yet I feel like I am constantly buzzing like a high-tension wire. Do not touch me or you will experience a shock. Either that or I will latch on to you like we are two halves of a Velcro fastener and make you listen to a litany of dumb things I am anxious about. I am not sure what to do first, and I am so overwhelmed that I am having trouble even putting together a to-do list. 

This feels near universal among my cohort, too. Everyone is dashing around in haphazard zigzags, trying to do all the things. WHAT is going on? Is every year like this and I just block the memory? Or is there something special about 2023?

One of the most pressing things on my mind (but not THE most, because everything seems very urgent right now) is Father’s Day. 

My husband requested that we go out for brunch, so I duly made a reservation. But now MY father is also in town for Father’s Day, which is wonderful; I cannot remember the last time I spent Father’s Day with him. But… I don’t know how to navigate this. Several weeks ago, I made dinner reservations for a place I think my father would like, but I haven’t asked if that’s how he wants to spend Father’s Day. 

And now it’s very possible that my father-in-law will be here for Father’s Day, too. He and my mother-in-law might be arriving on Monday, but they might be arriving on Sunday, and no one is clear on which, and I feel like I maybe could get the answer by calling my mother-in-law directly instead of relying on my husband but I don’t want to because it should not be my job to manage my husband’s parents’ plans. That’s a whole other issue that we are just going to stuff into a tiny drawer and firmly close. The more pressing issue is that now my father-in-law could be here for Father’s Day and if he is, I REALLY don’t know what to do. Maybe… spend the morning celebrating my husband, then we split up to celebrate our separate fathers? What do people DO, when they live in the same area as their family?

I feel like this shouldn’t be a big deal, and yet I simultaneously feel like I’m in the duck/birdseed/fox situation, staring at a boat and a river, and trying to figure out how to get all three across without anyone being eaten, and also I don’t know how to operate a boat. 

Okay! Briskly moving on to something I have full control over, which is food!

Dinners for the Week of June 12-June 18 (it is MID-JUNE already, people)

  • Slow Cooker BBQ Pork with Baked Potatoes: I am in the mood for something saucy that I can put on a baked potato. We haven’t had BBQ pork in a while, and it fits the bill perfectly. I literally chop up an onion, throw it into the slow cooker with a pork tenderloin, and then douse the whole thing with my favorite BBQ sauce, some shakes of sriracha, and maybe some minced garlic. It is so easy. I know some people feel that chopping an onion negates the “so easy” claim, but it’s not like the chopping has to be uniform! It’s a very rough chop, takes two minutes. After a few hours in the slow cooker, I shred the pork and then put it on top of a baked potato. 
  • Hot Honey Crispy Salmon Bowls: Instagram keeps showing me reels about hot honey salmon and I have finally cracked under the pressure. I wonder if this will be the secret code that unlocks my husband’s heretofore dormant love of salmon?
  • Basil Chickpea Curry: This sounds yummy and perfect for some of the rainy days predicted this week.

What are you doing for dinners this week? Is your June a chaotic jumble?

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Kid-Dinner Quandary and Dinners This Week

Changing gears from yesterday: let’s talk about food and the practical concerns of getting meals on the table.

One thing that has become quite the quandary is how to feed my child now that she has more after-school activities.

She’s always done activities, but they were mostly right after school or on the weekend. Now, she has practices and lessons that don’t even START until after five. These are no longer after-school activities, they are now EVENING activities and I don’t like it. (I don’t dislike it enough to remove her from the activities, apparently.) Carla is a child who absolutely NEEDS eleven to twelve of sleep a night, so my husband and I are trying really hard to make sure she is in bed with the lights out no later than 7:30 pm. But when an activity ends at 6:30… how am I supposed to squeeze nourishment into the tiny space between “traveling home from activity” to “bedtime preparations”? It seems impossible.

(Perhaps you are thinking “McDonalds”! I have zero qualms about buying my child a happy meal. I ate fast food probably twice a week as a kid before gymnastics and piano lessons. But Carla does not eat fast food. Or, if she does, it is so rarely I cannot count on it as a reliable food source. Her palate baffles me.)

Options I have explored so far, with varying but mostly discouraging results:

  1. I made a big pile of sun butter and jelly sandwiches that I could freeze and defrost whenever we needed a quick meal. Carla ate one and pronounced it was terrible. Another night, she ate a few bites of a sandwich and refused to eat anymore. And then we lost power for many days and the rest of the sandwiches perished.
  2. Lunchables, accompanied by fruit.
  3. Snack dinner: some combination of pepperoni, cheese, crackers, olives, roasted chickpeas, sugar snap peas, and fruit. This is, I think, the most successful option. But it’s also challenging, because Carla prefers the same things over and over but then grows tired of them and then we are SCREWED.
  4. Bagel with cream cheese, accompanied by some combination of pepperoni, sugar snap peas, cheese, and fruit.

I have also been trying to bulk up Carla’s after-school snacking game. So on a day she has an activity at 5:00, I give her the usual banana right after I pick her up from school and then make her a yogurt and fruit smoothie to eat on the drive to the activity. Hopefully this is providing her with some extra protein and fat and vitamins, in case it’s a night where she only eats a Lunchable.

Over the summer, we were able to eat dinner as a family a lot more frequently than we ever have. But family dinners have gone right out the window since school started, what with Carla’s earlier bedtime and my husband’s work schedule. So that’s a bummer. But I am prioritizing my child’s sleep over everything else right now and I feel good about that. Carla is so busy and learning so much, I really want her to be well-rested so that she can get the most out of everything she’s doing.

The other Kid Activity-Related Issue that’s derailing my meal plans is that I am so flustered by what Carla is going to eat that I keep throwing up my hands and scrapping my own adult dinner plans in favor of Panera or takeout or prepared foods from the grocery store. Which are all fine options, but tend to be less healthy and more expensive than the food I’ve already planned to make. It’s just that I am TIRED by the time Carla is in bed. I am still doing my own thing during the day — a day in which I never seem to have enough hours — but on top of that, I feel like remembering which outfit she needs for that day’s activity or washing outfits for the next day’s activity or making sure we are stocked up on banana and frozen mangoes or rushing to pick her up from school or rushing to get her into her soccer uniform or rushing to get her to swimming on time is taking a lot out of me. And sure, it’s nice that she can come home after school to play for a while before ballet, but then I am driving to and from school and then to and from ballet when it would be much easier to go directly from school to the activity. The chunks of time between school and activity are too short to do anything of substance. I am constantly watching the clock or gathering necessary equipment or preparing snacks or driving or waiting in traffic or urging Carla to don her appropriate gear or prodding her to eat eat eat or brush your teeth or get your jammies on. It’s nonstop until she’s asleep, is what I’m saying. (HOW do you people with multiple children NOT COLLAPSE FROM EXHAUSTION?) This is what it is like to be Mariah Carey’s personal assistant, right? THEN, if I wait until 7:30 to start making dinner, well, we won’t be eating until 8:30 or 9:00 and that’s… later than I like to eat. More relevant is that I am TIRED. I don’t want to be chopping and sauteeing at 7:30. I want dinner to be ready to go. I can accomplish this, of course; it just means more meal prepping on shopping day, which I can totally do if I grit my teeth and just do it.

If you are a parent, you have my fist bump of empathy. If you are a parent of multiple children with (or honestly without) activities, you have my abiding awe and respect. If you’ve figured out the Kid Activity/Dinnertime solution, please let me know.

In the meantime, here’s what I’m planning to make and eat this week:

Dinners for the Week of October 15-21

 Note: I loved this the last time I made it, and, once again, I will make the peanut dressing from Damn Delicious for my husband and the teriyaki dressing from Le Crème de la Crumb for me.

Note: This is an old standby. It’s super easy to make, so my plan is to marinate the salmon and chop/wash the broccoli in advance and then make this on one of the late activity nights – I can shove everything in the oven and let it broil while my husband is reading to Carla.

Note: I plan to make this on another late activity night. It’s a slow cooker option – and, honestly, I need to expand the number of meals I can make in the slow cooker. This way, dinner will be ready to eat as soon as Carla is in bed.

Note: To make this easy, I need to make the yogurt sauce in advance and chop the bell peppers in advance. I can do it.

  • Pizza

Note: I haven’t decided yet if we’ll have traditional pizza or if we’ll do a taco pizza. I am leaning toward the latter, especially considering we are skipping taco night this week. But I will make a game time grocery store time decision on this one.

Note: I’ll probably save this for the weekend, because it’s a new recipe and because it seems somehow “special.” Probably because of the novelty. Also, I like to shop for fish on Saturdays. There is no reason, it’s just how I am.

  • Out

 

 

What’s on your menu for this week, Internet?