I had my annual physical recently, and I mentioned that my knees, which have always been A Bit Dicey, are hurting more now, and hurting more consistently, and starting to be less of an occasional thing and more of a constant thing. And my doctor, whom I really like and don’t want to switch away from (I very dislike when I have a Doctor-Related Complaint and the only advice is “Switch doctors!!”—as if there were a limitless supply of local doctors, and as if there were a doctor out there who would not occasionally merit complaint), seemed to be saying that that sucked and that there wasn’t really anything to be done, and that this was just how things would be from now on, except that it would probably get worse with time. She said if it seemed briefly worse, like due to extra work/activity, I could take acetaminophen/ibuprofen/naproxen for a few days at a time but not longer; she said I could try stretching before going to work; she said I could try using a knee brace. She said if I started walking differently to favor my knees, I would probably start to experience hip and back pain; I said “Oh! I AM having some hip and back pain!,” and her response was the equivalent of “Yep.” I am left feeling as if there is not much medical science can do for painful joints, and that this is just my life now. IS this how it is? Middle-aged adults get joint pain and then live with it forever?

Well. There are worse things. One of our middle-aged cats had a kidney just…fail. Like, stop working and shrivel up. Apparently that can happen. The vet was almost shruggy about it—like, well, he has two, so, there’s still one working. Meanwhile I am ready for an entire investigative miniseries on WHY DID IT DO THAT? Looking it up online was not a good idea: a kidney can fail if a cat eats something it shouldn’t have eaten, such as certain plants or household chemicals. So this might be our oblivious fault. Kidneys can also fail because mortal living things have parts that can be defective or can reach their own mortality points. So it might be his kidney’s fault, or his genes’ fault, in which case we would probably say fate rather than fault.

 

Paul, in an effort to interact with housework, has purchased a robot vacuum cleaner. Well, two: the first one was a very basic model, meant to show us whether or not this was something we wanted in our lives. The answer was “Yes, but this particular one is Too Stupid.” Paul has purchased an upgrade, the kind that won’t fall down stairs, and makes its own map and can be told which parts of the map to ignore. It is still Fairly Stupid. It is currently verrrrrrry carefully, in a thousand tiny little inch-by-inch moves, avoiding my computer chair, which it thinks is a permanent obstruction. I tried to move out of its way so it could go under my desk, but it declined to believe that the chair had moved, and just kept tracing around where it thought it was. Earlier it was obsessed, absolutely obsessed, with getting to the string of lights it has tangled with numerous times, despite us attempting to block access.

What I mostly want is for this thing to run when PAUL is home to supervise it, but when I am NOT, so that I am not driven up a wall by its endless inefficient bumbling and periodic cord tangling and “Robot trapped!” announcements when it is just between two chairs. On principle, I do very little robot interference: if it tangles, it tangles; if it stops, it stops. Paul has indicated that he considers himself to be handling the vacuuming, and I am happy to give him credit for it, as long as it affects my life the same way it would affect it if Paul were using a traditional vacuum clearer: i.e., I might be bothered by the sound, or by something bumping into my computer chair, but I would not have to follow Paul around and manage the vacuum cleaner cord for him, or prep the rooms to make things easier for him, or untangle something he’d vacuumed up by accident, or in any other way participate in the process.

Two friends recently brought over a Sunny Afternoon Sangria & Snacks Driveway Picnic, and I cannot express how perfect it was. Ever since then, I have been wanting sangria, something I have never made before.

What we used for the picnic was Opici Family White Sangria:

It was delicious, and the box is gorgeous. The only improvement I would want to make is alcohol content: it’s 7%, which is roughly the same as a wine cooler. It was perfect for a sunny afternoon, when at least one person was going to need to drive afterward—but let’s say instead I was bringing sangria to a get-together where we were all staying over and no one needed to drive. What THEN.

I still wish to use a BOX of wine. For one thing, I find boxes of wine delightful to use: the little spigot! For another thing, I enjoy the way a box of wine doesn’t keep TRACK of what anyone is consuming: the bottles don’t pile up; and there’s no issue of someone not wanting to finish off the rest of a bottle, or not knowing if they should start a new one. I know it is more typical to soak the fruits in the wine for awhile, which wouldn’t work well with the box idea—but it was even more fun to do a “choose your own fruits” set-up, where each person put whatever fruit they wanted into their glass and then added wine (via little spigot!).

So here is what I am looking for: opinions about the best (1) white (2) boxed (3) wine to use with fruit to make sangria. Also I invite any other comments about sangria, such as what are your favorite fruits to use.

I wonder if we could compare notes on a few minor purchases. And do feel free to ask about your OWN minor purchases in the comments section, for others to weigh in.

1. Body wash. I was using Love Beauty & Planet’s Argon Oil & Lavender body wash, which is more than I’d usually spend but I really liked the scent and it frequently goes on various “buy 4 get a $5 gift card” or whatever sales at Target. I used up the last of my bottle, went to re-order—and it NO LONGER EXISTS. Which I then remembered discovering when I TOOK OUT this bottle, because I re-order when I take the last one. And that explains why I also have Olay Birch Water & Lavender body wash, which is…fine. But not as birchy or as lavendery as I’d prefer. It’s more…body-wash-scented.

I would like to know what body washes you like. It’s fine to mention the ones you use without really thinking about it (I have felt this way about Ivory body wash, or any of the St. Ives or Suave ones), or the ones that feel kind of special to you (like my Love Beauty & Planet). But I am especially interested in the ones that feel a little extra special, and have a nice scent.

 

2. Ear plugs. I thought I would just Buy Some, but as soon as I put in the search term and saw the results, I thought “THIS looks like the kind of thing where an ear-plug novice thinks you would just Buy Some, but anyone who has USED ear plugs has AN OPINION.” So I request your opinion.

This morning on Life of a Doctor’s Wife, she did a post called Keto Favorites. I began to leave a comment with my own favorites. By the time I started the fifth paragraph, I was wondering if perhaps this was a “Get your own blog” type of situation. Remember a long time ago, in earlier blogging times, when a bunch of bloggers would all do a post on the same topic? Let’s pretend this is in that era, and so I am writing on THE SAME TOPIC as Suzanne, with at least some of the same headings! Those of you who ARE interested in keto foods will have TWO recommendations to look at for each category! And those of you who are not interested in keto stuff can click gratefully away, because there isn’t going to be anything else in this post.

I would like to lead off by saying that most of the following items are Startling Expenses. (I just re-read that post and am enjoying this line: “The annoying thing about my late mother-in-law is not that she’d spend $100 more on sheets while not wanting to pay 15 cents more on tomato sauce; the annoying thing is that she would think everyone who didn’t make the same set of decisions must be an idiot.”) I think it’s safe to assume most of us have participated in Restricted Eating of one kind or another and, at least for me, the thing about Restricted Eating is that at first I hear recommendations for treats that fall within those restrictions, and I add them to the shopping list, and then I find them and I think “TWO DOLLARS PER SAD SERVING????” and I absolutely HUFF OFF. And then X amount of time later, there I am trying them anyway, because I am so desperate to find a substitute for whatever it is the particular restricted-eating plan doesn’t allow. And then I get used to paying that price, and I forget it was so startling, and I go right ahead and recommend it to others for when they reach that breaking point.

Okay, let’s see—Suzanne began with YOGURT, which I had nothing to say about in the comment I was originally writing, but now I feel compelled to match. I did eat some yogurt for awhile, when I was feeling rather ill, but I can’t remember the circumstances, and it’s puzzling because normally if I were ill I would not want dairy. Maybe it was when I was going back on keto after a long absence? I’ll bet that was it. I’m sorry, this is already such a boring story, I will try to get us out of it as quickly as possible. All I remember is that it was a plain unsweetened whole-milk Greek yogurt that had very few grams of carbohydrates per serving, and I put a few mashed blackberries into it, along with some artificial sweetener, and it was nice.

Next: BREAD! My favorite keto bread (1 gram net carbohydrates per slice) requires a financial leap of faith unless you live in the small area of the country where it is sold in stores; otherwise it has to be ordered online in a 2-pack or 3-pack. Also: it involves wheat gluten, which is apparently Very Controversial! (Some people say REAL keto involves NO WHEAT PRODUCTS, but that segment has not managed to make their view universal.) Also, it is white bread, which might not be satisfying. Still: I make grilled cheese sandwiches with this bread and a lot of butter and cheese, and I have waking stress dreams that I am accidentally eating actual bread. (It is not as good as actual bread. But it is CLOSE, especially if you have not had actual bread for awhile.) It is Franz Keto bread, and I buy it on Amazon, and they also have hot dog buns and hamburger buns which makes eating hot dogs and hamburgers WAY, WAY MORE LIKE EATING HOT DOGS AND HAMBURGERS (I buy the one-pack-of-each option, because I don’t go through the buns anywhere near as quickly as I go through the bread) (I am on my THIRD 3-pack of the bread, while still on my FIRST pack each of buns). [Update: I have now tried the Keto Culture bread, which looks very much like the Franz Keto bread, enough that I assume the intent is deception, and is sold at Walmart—and it is good, indistinguishable from Franz Keto, and I can get it for $6-something per loaf.]

I have also tried the Kiss My Keto variety pack breads. These would be an option if you want heartier, less-white breads—but be forewarned that the slices are SO SMALL. Like, when I first saw the size of the slices, I felt I’d been ripped off. I did adjust, especially when I resentfully made TWO tiny sandwiches because the slices were SO TINY, and found I actually only wanted one sandwich: the bread may be tiny, but it is nice and filling.

Next Suzanne covers PIZZA and TORTILLAS. I share her feelings about keto pizzas. There are some that are even pretty okay, but you can only have such a small amount. What I do now is wait for my days off, and eat pizza then. (We have a place near us that sells pizza by the slice, which is perfect for this.) Or I’ll budget for half of a Quest Supreme pizza (I add more pepperoni and cheese). Or I make a pizza omelet. Or I make pizza on a tortilla, like she does. I don’t have any strong opinions about tortillas, and am planning to try the ones she mentions.

CEREAL! For awhile I was CRAVING cereal, and at that time I went through quite a bit of Schoolyard Snacks cereal (I apologize in advance for their website, which is OBNOXIOUS and has a very scammy vibe), especially the peanut butter flavor. I used unsweetened vanilla almond milk, and added a bit of artificial sweetener, and found it delicious once I got past the initial adjustment to it (at first it seemed kind of disappointing and sad). However, now I’ve been OFF my cereal kick, and/or willing to wait until the next day off so I can eat regular cereal.

ICE CREAM! My FAR AND AWAY favorite is the Rebel brand, if you can find it in your area. I especially appreciate that they put the number of carbs PER PINT rather than PER SERVING; I feel lovingly seen. I love most of the flavors I’ve tried (mint chip, cherry chip, triple chocolate, butter pecan, coconut almond swirl; the final two have lots of little nut pieces in them, so they’re nice and filling if you want sweet AND you’re hungry), and I keep a pint of each of my favorites in the freezer so I can pick what I’m in the mood for at the particular moment. By the way, the Coconut Almond Swirl means CHOCOLATE swirl!! They should make a bigger deal out of that! I would not have thought there’d be chocolate in it! CHOCOLATE MAKES A HUGE DIFFERENCE IN WHAT I THOUGHT THE FLAVOR WOULD BE. It has lots of little bits of almond in it, plus a CHOCOLATE swirl.

CANDY! My current favorites are: Reese’s Zero Sugar Miniatures, York Zero Sugar Peppermint Patties, and Atkins Caramel Nut Chew Bars.

SAUCES! Paul makes me a sauce of mayonnaise, mustard, creamy horseradish sauce, and sriracha. I use it on tons of stuff but especially with chicken and pork chops and steak. He deliberately makes it so that it’s a little different each time, which is nice. I have made it myself, but I am struggling to remember even the basic proportions. It is SOMETHING LIKE: quite a bit more mayo than you might think; about as much mustard as mayo; smallish amounts of horseradish and sriracha. Mix it all together in an empty mustard bottle. Make sure you get the CREAMY horseradish or it will keep clogging up the mustard bottle’s spout.

I also pretty frequently use Ken’s Creamy Caesar dressing as a sauce.

DRINKS! Suzanne mentions having Bubly water instead of wine. I would have gin or vodka or bourbon or tequila, all of which have zero carbohydrates, thinned out with diet Coke or diet Sunkist or diet root beer or something, I’m not picky. But I also do drink a fair number of flavored seltzers. Oh also! Speaking of Pitiful Treats, I will buy the Sparkling Ice brand of highly-flavored, artificially-sweetened sodas (they call themselves “naturally-flavored sparkling water,” and I am not sure when something ceases to be sparkling water and becomes soda, but I’d say these have crossed that line). They’re like a dollar each, which makes them feel Special.

CHIPS! Suzanne mentions not being able to find a good tortilla chip, and I have not been looking for tortilla chips, but thought I would comment on chips in general. For side-dish chips (especially alongside a grilled-cheese sandwich), I like the Quest chips, especially the Nacho flavor—but they are 4g per bag, so then I tend to eat just half a bag, which is okay, because they are so expensive. Another expensive option is the aforementioned Schoolyard Snacks, which in addition to cereal makes cheeto-like puffs, which are 2g per bag. (Again, apologies in advance for their DREADFUL site, which is so flashy and distracting and scammy-looking I can barely focus long enough to place an order; honestly, I have been there several times this week trying to order more cheese puffs, and I just can’t get past the flashing and pop-up videos and the “Are you still there?” that scrolls across the tab. I would not have originally been willing to order from them except that I did, and it all worked out fine. And don’t be swayed by their “free $10 gift card with order!!” thing: unless things have changed since my last order, the card expires at the end of the same month you placed your order, even if you ordered on, say, the 26th—but even if you ordered on the 3rd, would you really be placing another order so soon? Just pretend the gift card doesn’t exist. Anyway I wish Quest or someone would make something similar so I could buy that instead.)

Eternal Life, by Dara Horn (Target link) (Amazon link).

This is a book about a woman who is 2,000 years old and can’t die but can only regenerate. I liked it while I was reading it (though I thought it was weird how often she shuddered/snarled/panicked while talking with her family members on tricky topics such as her age—after 2,000 years, wouldn’t she be better at this?), but felt the ending was unsatisfying, in a “But…wouldn’t it make more sense if…?” sort of way. I liked it enough to be interested in trying another book by this author. (I went to make a note on my To Read list, and found I already have another book by Dara Horn on that list: The World to Come.)

 

Belong to Me, by Marisa de los Santos (Target link) (Amazon link). I wrote about the first book in this series here. It continues to surprise me how a book that doesn’t seem like it would be my thing (chummy cool-girl narrator speaking to the reader, including telling us pretty often how tiny and beautiful she is) is VERY MUCH MY THING. It’s as if the author is TRYING to write fluffy, lightweight, silly books but keeps accidentally failing. Like, she INTENDS to write a Classic One-Dimensional Mean Girl, and accidentally writes a multi-layered sympathetic character you want to be friends with. I thought the first book had an uneven, first-novel feel to it; I thought this one was much better. My main complaint is that the author keeps trying to write characters who are exceptionally funny or exceptionally brilliant or exceptionally good at witty dialog—but then, since it is the author herself writing those characters’ jokes/thoughts/remarks, it comes off wrong, because she’s essentially praising HER OWN writing. That’s an area where I’d suggest telling rather than showing, or else showing without telling, but not doing BOTH. I ordered a used copy of this book from EBay so I’d have it later; my library doesn’t have it anymore, and I know I’m going to want to re-read.

 

Someone very dear to me has a new book coming out next month, if you would like to pre-order it and/or get on your library’s hold list!

The Art of Magic (Target link) (Amazon link).

It’s categorized for kids 8-12, grades 4-7. I don’t normally read books in this age category anymore, but of course I did read this one, and I genuinely enjoyed it. There are a lot of books my kids liked that I could not tolerate reading to them, but this is one I would have liked reading to them.

I am going to do a giveaway, and I’ll pre-order so you should receive it on or near its release date. (U.S. addresses only—but if you KNOW someone in the U.S., I can send it to them with a note that it’s from you.) To enter, tell me one of your favorite books from when you were this age/grade. I loved the Anastasia Krupnik books, and also pretty much any of those books where A Girl Has a Problem (eating disorder, periods, unrequited crush, parents divorcing, unpopular, summer camp, scoliosis). I’ll pick three winners on Saturday, April 23rd.

[Update: I ordered the winners’ books from Target, to avoid using Amazon. And today, on the release date, I got a bunch of notifications that there was a “new estimated delivery update,” which would be May 17th. This is…frustrating. One of the POINTS of pre-ordering is to get it on or very near the release date, not LITERALLY TWO WEEKS LATER. I’m trying to decide whether to switch all the orders to Amazon (which delivered one of the copies I ordered from them YESTERDAY), or whether to hope Target will soon send a NEW batch of delivery-update emails and deliver the books at a reasonable time.] [Update: Target still says out of stock, so I switched to Amazon. I try to avoid them, but…they have the books, and they will ship them now, and they will do it for free. So they win.]

Elizabeth is going to prom. (So far the plan is to go with a friend group, not with a date.) She’s the first of my kids to go, and the selection of her outfit was causing me some stress: she is a busy kid with work and various clubs, and I didn’t know when we could find time to shop. But we did find a couple of times, and she found something she liked. It was missing its price tag, and I was thinking “Please not $300, please not $300…,” and then I found another one on the rack that did have its tag, and it was on clearance for $9.96. It felt like a decimal was wrong: if it had been on clearance for $99.60 I would have been delighted. But I looked through all the others on the rack, and they were all $9.96. The clerk warned us that it was not returnable, and we were both like “THAT IS FINE, AT THIS PRICE WE COULD BUY IT TO CUT UP FOR ART PROJECTS.”

I looked online for a photo, but could not find one, so I will attempt a description. What she wanted was the GIST of a dress, all one piece, but with the skirt portion divided into pants. I was afraid we would not find anything like that, but luckily she is the one who knows what’s In, and there were plenty to try on. She was hoping for black, and tried on many in black, but the one she ended up choosing is a cranberry color. It has spaghetti straps, and the bodice part is like thick lace; the lace is lined at the bust but unlined beneath, so skin shows through; the pants portion is high-waisted and solid, not lace.

[Edited to add: Okay, I took two terrible photos, but terrible is better than nothing:

Imagine this with her very short hair, which retains the remaining cranberry-esque tint of her Valentine’s Day dark pink hair-dye.

I was relieved, too, because one of her other finalist options was to wear flowy trousers with a STRAPLESS BEADED CROPPED CORSET. I was doing the when-do-I-as-a-parent-step-in math: she’s almost 17; she is not busty, which makes the look less Scandalous, more Red Carpet (like when a non-busty actress has a v-neck down to her waist); it DOES look really cool on her, especially with her extremely short hair; if the prom has a dress code I guess they can be the ones to deal with her; etc. But it was nice she found another option.

One thing she and I had to discuss afterward is whether or not it was Okay that the sales clerks (three of them, all the exact same Older Lady with Lots of Make-Up and Jewelry, Teased Hair, Long Highly-Decorated Fingernails, and Strong Regional Accents) KEPT MENTIONING Elizabeth’s size. “She’s nice and slim, she can wear anything,” one said. “Nice to see that outfit on someone who fits it!,” another said. “With her figure, she could model,” said the third. I raised the subject tentatively in the car, and Elizabeth immediately joined in, saying that she couldn’t put a finger on why it seemed Okay when it should have been Wrong, but it just WAS Okay. We agreed that a large part of it was that all three clerks seemed to be talking almost entirely from a Fashion point of view—like, pleased to have a good mannequin shape for their dresses to fit well on. Another part was something about the clerks themselves: their age, their extreme self-decor, their loud frank voices, their utterly lack of awareness that anyone could be anything less than glad to have their body remarked upon.

Next we have to shop for shoes and accessories. She wants SPARKLY, which should be fun.

Edited to add: Commenter Anna suggested we talk about our OWN prom outfits, and I think that’s a fun idea. My dress was tea-length, fit-and-flare, royal purple “satin” with a sequined bodice. I’d wanted something with at least an approximation of sleeves, and this dress had an off-the-shoulder swath of satin that fit that preference. I could not walk in heels, and all the colors of flats we tried looked meh with the purple (I should have tried strappy flat sandals, but I don’t remember that option occurring to me), and custom-dyed shoes were too expensive—but, if I am remembering this story correctly, my DAD…stopped at MARSHALLS or somewhere similar…and found PURPLE FLATS THAT EXACTLY MATCHED THE DRESS?? Did I DREAM this?

I had a sparkly rhinestone necklace with matching earrings. I pulled my hair back on one side with a big floofy purple thing, and wore purple eye shadow, purple eye liner, and purple mascara. I did not even particularly LIKE purple, but I’d tried on a bunch of dresses and none of them were right, and this one fit beautifully and was comfortable, and it only came in purple so I just went with it!

This post began with me mulling over a question I wanted to ask a friend, and I realized that “forming the question” and “thinking about my own answer” and “thinking about other people’s possible answers” was interesting/fun enough to me to want to make a whole post/discussion about it. Plus, that friend reads here, so this way I don’t have to worry about making the question both clear and succinct, but can instead go on and on, which is my preferred communication style but can come across a little…odd…if it’s, say, 50 texts, most of them clarifying/modifying earlier texts.

The situation is that a member of a friend group is going to be having a hysterectomy, a procedure I had not realized had as long/difficult a recovery time as it does; and what I wanted to ask her, essentially, was “Do you know what you are likely to find helpful/useful, so that we in your friend group can see if we can help out with that?” And I don’t mean “Can you look into the future and guess how you’ll feel and what you’ll need?,” I mean instead “Have you had relevant past experiences that showed you what things FOR YOU are the best ways for other people to help/support?”

FOR EXAMPLE. After the twins were born, a lot of people wanted to help. Here are some of the things I learned about myself AT THAT TIME (it’s been almost 17 years, so things may have changed):

• I could ONLY accept housework help or errand-running from (1) people who live in my house and (2) my own parents. (I don’t know how I’d feel about it at this point.) But I think I would do VERY WELL helping someone ELSE with housework / doing someone ELSE’S errands (my experience as an in-home elder-caregiver let me know this was My Thing), so my Giving Help feelings don’t match my Receiving Help feelings.

• I ONLY wanted family (my parents, my brother, my sister-in-law, my kids) in the hospital room; I did not want friends to visit. (I don’t know if this would be the same now or not; I will have to see how I feel the next time I am in a hospital; I feel like I might be tearily grateful to see a friend.) But I did VERY MUCH WANT family. We set up a puzzle and people were chatting and working on the puzzle and taking turns holding/admiring the babies, and it was idyllic. “Wanting company” seems like an interesting element to consider, and I can imagine that some people would want as many visitors (in the hospital or at home) as possible, and others would not really want any—but might want emails, or phone calls, or other kinds of social contact.

• You will not be surprised to learn that I did not want check-in phone calls.

• My number one most important need was/is FOOD. If I am WELL-FED, I can cope with almost anything else: pain, lack of sleep, clutter. If I am NOT well-fed, I will FALL APART. Also: I feel able to accept food from pretty much anyone. And this includes ALL KINDS/QUANTITIES of food (i.e., it doesn’t need to be homemade, or enough for the whole household, or adjusted to meet the needs of the entire household, or whatever).

• I also loved FUN MAIL: cards, postcards, etc. During that pregnancy, and it might have been around the time I found out I was expecting twins because I remember a certain “AHHHHHH DEFCON TWO!!!” urgency to her email, my friend Surely asked what she could do to help: scour the second-hand shops for car seats and high chairs? send giant supplemental piles of little hats and onesies and socks? WHAT??—and I said “Oh, could I have FUN MAIL??” And she sent me SO MANY cards and postcards and so forth, and did it for SO LONG after the twins were born, I was QUITE SPOILED. (She STILL sends me cards and postcards sometimes!)

• I LIKE presents but I can get SHY about them. There is a part of me that feels embarrassed when other people spend their money on me. (I do not feel this way when spending money on other people.) I did love that a friend sent me a book of Sudoku puzzles, which I worked on while nursing.

• I LOVE flowers but I can get squirmy about how expensive I know they are. (Which just ADDS to the fun when I SEND flowers.)

 

What I would like to know from you is what are some of the ways YOU like to (and/or can) receive support, and what are some of the ways YOU like to (and/or can) give support—and I am interested in the DIFFERENCES, such as in the example where I feel like I could go over and wash dishes and clean someone else’s kitchen with joy, as well as relief to be of use, but I don’t think I could let anyone except my mom come over and clean my kitchen (and actually I’d have the kids do it).

And it’s going to be different for everyone! That’s the point! It’s not like we can make a list of “Oh, THESE are the things people should offer because these things are Helpful! And THESE are the things people shouldn’t do because these things are Not Helpful!,” not at all! Because one person will DESPERATELY want/need someone to come over and do the dishes and fold a load of laundry and change the sheets, but maybe their spouse does all the cooking already so food wouldn’t be particularly helpful! And another person would actually really like their spouse to step up and take over the housework for awhile as a little Workload Appreciation Reset, but would LOVE if people would come over and keep them company for awhile, maybe bringing a box of pastries! Everyone’s situation is different; everyone’s preferences are different; everyone’s Helpful Things They Can Accept/Offer are different. And so NOTE: We do NOT want this to be one of those comments sections that makes us feel as if EVERYTHING WE COULD POSSIBLY DO IS WRONG

It seems to me that this is one of the glories of a friend group: lots of chances to mix-and-match a person’s needs with another person’s abilities/inclinations. Maybe one friend would most want food and childcare, and some of the friend group can do one of those things and some can do the other, and some can do neither—but then the next friend needs errands and housecleaning, and now a new batch of the friend group gets a chance to pitch in! Plus: ideally, everyone is comfy enough with each other to SAY what they need, which is one of the hardest parts of this normally.

I’m finding it fun to think of lots of areas of help/support to consider, and am hoping others can think of more. Would you want a gift certificate for a manicure, for when you didn’t feel like you could cope with doing it yourself but would love the little lift of pretty nails and someone else taking care of you? Would you want someone to come over with a box of ingredients, make cookies while chatting to you and telling you how beautiful you look, and then clean the kitchen and leave behind cookies and the scent of cookies and a clean kitchen? Would you want a nice houseplant, or would that be one more thing you had to take care of? Would you want someone to come and watch a movie with the kids while you took a shower and a nap without anyone interrupting you? Would you want someone to take the kids to the park for an hour and a half while you spent some time lying on the floor breathing carefully? Would you want to send a group text asking if by chance anyone was available to bring you some fast food but perfectly fine if nah? Do you like to exchange silly Snapchat-filter photos?

(My hope, by the way, is that we can avoid bringing “love languages” into this discussion, even though I realize it is nearly irresistibly applicable. I found the concept SO interesting and useful when it was described to me, and then I read the actual book and was icked out by it, and have since heard various icky things about the author, and so now I wince at the term even while sheepishly finding it useful. Like, above, talking about housecleaning: housecleaning is a way I could GIVE support, but wasn’t so much a way for me to RECEIVE support, and that’s a useful distinction for this discussion—but I hope we can make the distinction without love languages.)

A yoga update is that it turns out I can’t use “getting better at yoga”/”seeing if I like yoga” as motivation for doing yoga. It doesn’t work, and I end up hissing “Are plank, cobra, and downward dog LITERALLY THE ONLY YOGA POSES YOU KNOW??” at the video and then giving up in tears. I can only do yoga medicinally: for back pain, or for joint pain/flexibility, or for stress management. I find I WILL do yoga if I think “What issue will I work on today?,” and then choose a dose of yoga for what most ails me. The stress/anxiety ones are particularly good, I think, because not only do they feel like I am working on stress, but also they tend to be slower and stretchier and less sweaty/vigorous.

Speaking of stress management, it is a little concerning to me how stressed I am recently, considering I don’t have anything truly serious to be stressed about. This morning I lay awake at 4:30 with my brain asking me how I’d cope if something REALLY TERRIBLE yet TOTALLY ROUTINE and ABSOLUTELY EXPECTED life-wise, such as illness/accident/death, happened to me or mine. My brain then helpfully listed many of those possible happenings, with accompanying helpful little movies to let me imagine how each one might feel, until I gave up on sleep and got up for the day (and did stress-management yoga, which also felt like it did some nice things for my aging knees).

The other day, and I am going to breeze past this story as quickly as possible because I am still finding it don’t-think-about-it levels of stressful, I discovered accidentally that our homeowner insurance had lapsed. I told myself not to freak out, and that I would just call and get it reinstated, and please stop mentally rehearsing terrible-outcome conversations in advance. It turned out I was actually correct to freak out, for reasons that are still unclear to me, but the upshot is that instead of paying $900/year for our homeowner insurance, we have to pay $2600/year, and we are lucky that any insurance company was willing to cover us at all; our former insurance company (National General, the one who says they sent us a bill, but we did not receive it, and we were not inspired to think of it without a bill) (though YOU CAN BET that “Homeowner Insurance Day” is now a recurring holiday on my calendar) would not insure us at any price, nor would the company (Amica) we used for nearly twenty years for our old house without ever missing a payment or making a claim. (After a year of this new expensive coverage, we can call and get a new quote, and we will very likely have better choices, IF we haven’t had a claim during that time. So if you believe in magical thinking of any sort, if you could please send little protective-dome thoughts to surround my house for the next year or so, until we get more reasonable insurance. After that we can take our chances like everyone else.)

When I went downstairs to tell Paul the results of my 1.5 hours on the phone, I almost opened my remarks by saying it had been a disaster. Immediately my mind rejected the word. A DISASTER would be if our recent plumbing incident HAD flooded the entire downstairs and basement with sewage, and THEN we discovered we were not insured. THAT would have been a disaster. If THAT had happened, I would have considered “happened to think of the insurance, called and had to pay a $1700 penalty for letting it lapse but DID get covered again, and thank goodness nothing happened while it was lapsed” the DREAM FANTASY OUTCOME. If something bad happened to a parent or sibling or child, and I were given the opportunity to undo that bad thing by switching to the timeline with the LATE FEE, I would GRAB IT GRASPINGLY WITH BOTH HANDS

And in terms of household expenses, $1700 is, well, it’s not NOTHING, but certainly I think of household repairs as coming in units of thousands or tens of thousands. Refinishing hardwood floors: thousands. Repainting the exterior: thousands. Metal roof: tens of thousands. Remodel: tens of thousands. A $1700 expense can be seen as a normal sort of household expense. Sure, it is disheartening to pay it when theoretically it could have been avoided, but it could perhaps be filed with other accidents that could theoretically have been avoided: if the child hadn’t left the water running; if the leak under the sink had been discovered sooner; if we hadn’t left that back door unlocked; if we’d worked harder on ridding ourselves of the mouse issue before they chewed through those wires and started the electrical fire. And so on. Things happen, and that’s all they ever do.

My supervisor has been saying for nearly a month now that we are going to do performance evaluations soon, and it is making me unnecessarily nervous: I KNOW I am doing a good job, I KNOW this is an entry-level job that makes $9/hour and that they are lucky to have me at a time when Target is starting at $16/hour, etc., but it is still making me nervous. The worst part is the self-evaluation form I am supposed to fill out, which, first, feels like it shouldn’t be my job to evaluate myself, and second, feels like interview-question tricks all over again: let’s see, how do I answer the question about my weaknesses in a way that turns them into strengths? JUST TELL ME I’M DOING A FINE JOB AND GIVE ME A RAISE THAT DOES NOT COVER THE INCREASE IN THE COST OF LIVING, AND LET’S GET ON WITH OUR LIVES

An update on the plumbing situation is that we had someone come out, and it is the worst possible news: they are going to have to dig up huge portions of our yard, including navigating an old stone wall, and replace all the pipes. The guy who did the evaluation even DOES excavator/replacement tasks, but said it’s too big/complicated a job for him and he would have to refer us to someone else. I don’t want to talk about how much money this might cost (just the evaluation/mapping was nearly two thousand dollars), or whether we will have to temporarily relocate while it’s happening. I feel almost at peace about it: this is not an optional fix, so I don’t have to wring my hands about what we should do / whether it’s worth it. I can look pointedly at the previous homeowner for escaping without having to do this job, which definitely needed to be done at the time we bought the house; but we sold OUR old house without having to do some upcoming expensive tasks, so it’s just Homeowner Hot Potato, and we just got a particularly large hot potato.

Let’s see, this has been kind of a stressful post so far; let’s talk about books. I had one I gave up on even though I was two-thirds of the way through it, because I kept Not Wanting To Read It, and Not Enjoying It, and it had become a blockage in the book-reading pipes. It was ehT elcnuG, by nevetS yelwoR. It should have been delightful. I could see how it could be delightful. But I found it a tedious slog, and it felt “made up.” Which of course it IS, but I mean I FELT IT as I was reading, I FELT the author making it up.

I read another book where I felt the author making it up and yet I still wanted to keep reading it:

Love Walked In, by Marisa de los Santos. It felt like a First Novel; it was uneven; the names begged believability and seemed more like the author chose her favorite names; I don’t tend to like books where the narrator talks to the reader in that chummy way; I could FEEL the author trying to get herself out of plot corners she’d written herself into; there was more than one plot point where I stopped reading, looked up, and said “What. That makes NO SENSE” or “Oh, come on”—and yet I really enjoyed it, and I requested the sequel from the library system (we don’t have it at my library for some reason, even though we have the other three books in the series).

The GIST of the book is that a woman (who is CONSTANTLY described as tiny and beautiful, and her name is very unlikely, and I wanted to dislike her but I did not dislike her, though I did dislike the way she kept talking about how tiny and beautiful she was) is looking for romantic love, but instead finds parental love, and not in the usual way. (Note that you can absolutely tell this book by its cover.) I don’t know, it just felt so refreshing. And I could forgive a lot of the issues as being First Novel issues. So it’s odd I couldn’t do that with the first book I mentioned, where it’s basically the same plot (single person looking for love but instead finds untraditional parenthood) and has a similarly delightful element of accident/fantasy/fate. Well, that’s just how it went: the first one felt to me like a tiresome invented slog with tiresome invented characters, and the second one felt like a delightful read with some issues. You may find you feel exactly the other way around, if you try both.

We had a Plumbing Incident recently, and by “recently” I mean “It was two months ago, and that is how long it took for me to recover sufficiently to talk about it.” Here is how it happened:

• Sometimes, now that I have decided “Be like Paul” should be my marriage-balancing motto for some decisions (i.e., making decisions for myself in the same self-prioritizing way Paul makes decisions for himself), Paul goes to bed at the time HE wants to go to bed, and I DO NOT GO TO BED AT THAT TIME. This is the first significant thing that happened in this story, and it is important to note that if I had gone to bed at the time I did not want to go to bed, as I used to do routinely, things would have been unfathomably worse—and this is one of the things that plagues me when I am reliving this mentally. Anyway: Paul went to bed; I was still up, though in my jammies/slippers so I would not have to change in the dark when I DID finally go to bed.

• I went into the kitchen. The specific reason for this is lost to the fog of history. Most likely I was going to set up the coffee maker for the next morning, or wash dishes that had been left to soak, or maybe I was just turning out lights or getting a snack. The point is, I went into the kitchen, thank goodness. Perhaps I have mentioned we have a half-bath in the kitchen? It seems like very poor placement, but this house is 200 years old and has been through multiple remodels including ADDING ANY BATHROOMS AT ALL, so we extend mercy for awkward design. One thing about this half-bath is it sometimes BURBLES alarmingly: the toilet will suddenly make loud glupping sounds. We have lived here for over three years and this happens regularly without incident, and we have become accustomed to it. As I went into the kitchen, I heard it burbling/glupping. No big deal.

• Except—weirdly, the kitchen sink was ALSO burbling/glupping. This had never happened before. I was intrigued, and concerned, though not yet ANYWHERE NEAR as concerned as I should have been. This part plays out in my memory as if in a movie: there is Swistle, in the kitchen, in her jammies/slippers late at night, hearing the sounds! She tilts her head to one side: “Huh!,” she thinks! Movie-viewers clap hands over mouths, knowing the horror part of the movie must surely be imminent.

• Burbling/glupping CONTINUED, which is, again, NOT typical. I looked at the kitchen sink, which did not enlighten me. So I went to look at the half-bath toilet. AS I LOOKED AT IT, the clear water in the bowl was replaced by a surge of NOT-AT-ALL-CLEAR WATER COMING UP FROM THE DEPTHS OF PRESUMABLY HELL. The hell-water in the bowl CONTINUED TO RISE and then BEGAN TO OVERFLOW THE BOWL. This is all as I was standing there in my jammies and slippers, past my usual bedtime.

• My one and only idea was to use the toilet plunger. I did that for, I don’t know, 10 seconds? before it was just abundantly clear that that it was doing NOTHING, and that plunger-related issues were not involved in whatever was happening. I took the bath towel we use as a hand towel in that bathroom, and I threw it on the floor to help sop things up. I grabbed another bath towel we keep downstairs and threw it on the floor too.

• This is when I went up to get Paul, as well as more towels. I don’t know about YOUR wedding vows, but mine included an absolute unconditional rider about plumbing emergencies. But also: at that point I would have awakened ANY HOUSEHOLD ADULT. Paul was completely asleep, and none of us would have wanted to be awakened the way I awakened him: “Paul. PAUL. I am so sorry to wake you, but the downstairs toilet is backing up all over the floor.” He startled and yelped and floundered and soon was standing in the third bathroom saying “I don’t know what to do,” just as I had recently been. Meanwhile I had gathered huge armloads of bath towels and was throwing them onto the bathroom floor, like a little Dutch girl plugging the dam.

• I wondered aloud if “turning off the water” would help at all, which, sort of, I guess, and Paul did switch off the water—but when I made that suggestion, I remembered that when I’d gone up to get Paul, I’d heard a child in the shower upstairs. I went racing back upstairs and told that child there was a weird plumbing emergency and that they should stop the shower even if they were coated in soap and shampoo. This turned out to be the key: it was the water from that shower that was (1) failing to drain and (2) therefore backing up in the downstairs toilet. So at the VERY LEAST, water STOPPED coming up out of the toilet. And I got more towels while I was upstairs, and put them on the bathroom floor to keep the tides from getting out of the bathroom / to the kitchen.

• This is around the time I suggested Paul CALL AN EMERGENCY PLUMBER. Have I mentioned this was on a Saturday night at around 10:30/11:00? It was. He called our usual plumber, a 24-hour number, but our usual plumber said they don’t do this kind of plumbing, and gave us another number. Paul called that number. They said all their emergency technicians were already booked throughout the night, and they could not send anyone out until the next day sometime. This is when I truly gave in to despair.

• We decided there was nothing more to do and that we should go to bed and leave things as they were: water off, toilet filled to the brim with the unthinkable, towels covering the floor and soaking up the damage. We got several bottles of water from emergency storage and put them in the bathrooms/kitchen for drinking and hand-washing; we put bottles of hand sanitizer by every sink. We went to bed. Paul went immediately to sleep. I lay awake—appalled, horrified, despairing, wide-eyed in the dark, sick to my core.

• Eventually I realized I could not leave the situation as it was: sewage sinking at that moment into the trim along the edges of the wall, perhaps infiltrating itself in some way into the floor tiles, HELD in fact against the wall/trim/floor as if by some sort of monstrous towel-poultice. I got up. I evaluated the towels and decided I would not try to save them from this particular disaster, would not subject either me or my washing machine to these miseries. I put on disposable gloves. I got two giant heavy-duty trash bags, putting one inside the other. I gathered up all the disgusting towels and put them into the doubled bag; with hindsight, I should have used at least two sets of doubled bags, because the resulting bag of sodden towels was so heavy I could only DRAG it, with significant effort, to its destination, which was OUT INTO THE FROZEN NIGHT.

• I got a roll of paper towels and the bottle of Clorox Clean-Up bleachy spray. I mentally kissed my pajamas goodbye. I sprayed THE LIVING HELL out of that bathroom floor and everything six inches up from it. I cleaned it with the paper towels, put the used paper towels into another trash bag; sprayed THE LIVING HELL right back out of everything again, cleaned it with paper towels again; A THIRD TIME, I sprayed living hell etc. cleaned with paper towels etc. The inside of my nose was filled with the scents of sewage and bleach. I felt coated in both. The entire downstairs REEKED of both.

• Keep in mind that THE WATER WAS OFF AND WE COULD NOT TURN IT ON without overflowing the toilet which was still filled to the utmost brim with hell-water. I could not wash my hands in any sort of normal way. I took off and threw away the gloves, then took one of the gallons of bottled water and used it to wash my hands as best I could, alternating wash/rinses with doses of hand sanitizer. This was dismal. It was DISMAL. I did not feel remotely clean. Meanwhile, bleach stains had appeared on my pajamas, including my “Nevertheless she persisted” Elizabeth Warren shirt, and it is hard to imagine anything more appropriate/dismal.

• I went to bed, feeling absolutely unclean and appalled and horrified and despairing and sick to my very core etc. I felt filthy and reeking; my throat/nose felt burned by bleach but I was glad for it, because bleach-burn felt better than sewage-reek. I lay awake for quite awhile. I felt, ACUTELY, what a thin membrane separates us from absolute primitive savagery. We are all one single modern-day-plumbing emergency away from dying of typhoid, it seemed to me at that time.

• In the morning I woke up, feeling about the same. We discussed with the children how no one should use water or flush toilets. We brought up more gallons of the bottled water I’d purchased in November 2016, or perhaps it was the additional bottled water I’d purchased in January 2021. Who can say. Sure was good to have it, though. I spent the entire morning feeling sick/despairing, unable to concentrate on anything else, noticing the thin membrane, etc.

• At around 11:00 a.m., and remember this was a Sunday so this is not going to be inexpensive, not that that was even in my TOP FIVE concerns, the plumber called to say he was on his way. Actually it was a plumbing technician, because the plumber was still not available. He arrived near noon, and I have never been as glad to see anyone in my entire life, and I truly mean that. I am worried you will think that is hyperbole, but I was not as glad to see my own children at birth as I was to see this plumbing technician. Oh, actually, now that I’ve given it some thought: when Elizabeth was about 8 years old, I lost her in a store, and I lost her for so long, I had reached the point of thinking in a leaden way, “This is how it actually seriously happens for some people: they do what I am doing now, looking for their child and feeling increasingly panicky but also as if they are being a little silly to be so panicky, but then it turns out their child actually really was taken, because that sometimes DOES ACTUALLY HAPPEN FOR REAL, and they never see their child again, and that is their Real Actual Life”—and then I saw her, and I was gladder to see her than I was to see the plumbing technician, but that is the only example I can think of where I was gladder. The plumbing technician spent half an hour in our midst, and there were some loud hammering sounds, followed by some loud/vibrating drilling sounds, and afterward he said there had been some “light roots” in the line, and he removed the light roots; and then he flushed the horror toilet and the horror-toilet contents went down successfully and the water level in that toilet returned to normal; and then he instructed us to try flushing the upstairs toilet, which was by this time ALSO a horror toilet, and we did, and it worked; and then he charged us the incredible bargain price of $500 and said he was only a technician but Jacques the plumber would call us on Monday to set up a more extensive evaluation, and we did not start a new religion in his honor but absolutely would have if asked.

• I cleaned all the toilets, two horror and one relatively normal, weeping with an intense combination of gratitude and resentment and regret for all my life choices: that I would be in this house with these plumbing issues, that I would be in a marriage where I would be in sole charge of horror-toilet-cleaning. I took the sheets off the bed. I started a load of laundry on Extra Hot water, including the sheets and my pajamas from the night before. Then I took a shower that was so long, with water so hot, I probably did lasting permanent damage to my skin. I put new sheets on the bed.

• Jacques the plumber did not call. This has been our experience with plumbers/electricians/landscapers/etc. They are very in-demand. They are hard to get. They do not call.

• I continued to lie awake, not EVERY night but it was a fairly common theme on the nights when I WAS awake, thinking about what had happened. Again and again in my mind I saw the way I’d stood in my pajamas and watched the revolting water surging up into the toilet’s clear water in a horrifying cloud, and then overflowing into our house. Again and again, I thought about how if I had gone to bed at the same time as Paul, that horrifying-cloud water would have kept coming out of the toilet until the child’s upstairs shower was over. By the time we would have discovered it in the morning, who knows how far the damage would have gone. The kitchen. The hardwood floors. The downstairs furniture. The sunporch. Dripping down into the basement. The bottom inches of all the doors/walls. Electrical issues. Who knows how much of the downstairs would have needed to be torn out. Who knows how long we would have had to stay in a hotel while it was repaired/replaced. Who knows what our homeowner’s insurance would have said/done. And all because of “light roots”??? LIGHT ROOTS could do that??? HOW AND WHY???? I told the children not to shower after our bedtime. I bought a water sensor and put it in the downstairs bathroom; I considered buying maybe fifty more and just putting them EVERYwhere.

• Two nights ago I told Paul how I had been feeling/thinking. I told him that the short version of my thoughts was that this could NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. I paused, making sure he was listening, and then repeated it: this could NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. I did not care what the plumber charged. I did not care if the plumber suggested coming out annually with some sort of ridiculous expensive unnecessary scheme; I did not care if the plan involved pouring something down all the drains every day/week. I did not care if it involved expensively digging up the entire front yard. I did not care if the cost of this affected our children’s student-loan situation. This could NEVER. HAPPEN. AGAIN.

• Yesterday morning Paul called the plumber. He got an appointment for a full overview next Friday—and the only reason it’s that far away is that that’s a day Paul could arrange to be home from work. Last night while I was making dinner I said to Paul that what I wanted him to tell to the plumber is that this could NEVER. HAPPEN. AGAIN, and Paul said that he’d already explained. He said when he talked to the plumber, he said “My wife says if this ever happens again, she is leaving the house and never coming back,” and the plumber, who up until that point in the call had been laid-back and cheerful, changed tone completely and said “…UH oh.” I hope the plumber keeps that in mind.