I’m usually triskaidekaphobic, but we’ll try this tonight…
[+] I met with DDA this week by Microsoft Teams. I hate this meeting every year because it’s incredibly draining, but it’s important so that Daniel can get services. All I have left is the home visit.
[+] I had to make the decision to sit out the rest of the spring from choir because of my asthma and my drippy throat. It’s not COVID (I have tested myself and I’m consistently negative), but my breathing is screwy. It’s a pain because I miss choir and singing, but I don’t want to have coughing fits the whole time.
[+] I had to give up on my bullet journal as life got away from me in March. I ordered another one, and I’m going to probably make it a June to December one as I will have enough pages to do it. I ordered a blank journal off of Amazon tonight, and I’ll be starting to put it together when I get it and trying to get all of the month’s pages done early so that I don’t have to worry about drawing/numbering a new page daily.
[+] I had to give up on Learning to Pray by James Martin, S.J. because my heart and brain just weren’t in it. I love Fr. Jim’s books, but I’m needing something lighter these days. I just started Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree, and it’s not amazing but is keeping my attention. (I think it was a free Kindle book?)
[+] For those who enjoy Wordle and are map nerds, check out Globle.
[+] So, this happened on Monday morning. Thankfully, campus is still pretty quiet because many classes are still online and enrollment is down overall, but it was not fun having my phone explode with emergency notifications.
Saint of the Year. I did Jen Fulwiler’s Saint’s Name Generator and got St. Clotilde, who is the patron saint of adopted children, brides, disappointing children, exiles, parenthood, parents of large families, queens and widows.
I first encountered Clotilde in my Medieval Europe class in college, and the history nerd in me is happy that I got her.
Christmas. My brother and his family were up here for Christmas, so that was fun. His son Braden is cute, and they introduced us to the “Into the Spider-Verse” movie.
Mental health. I had a breakdown by myself for 5 hours on Christmas morning. I had somehow missed my meds on Christmas Eve, so that didn’t help, but I somehow hit a grief well of grief for Grandpa. I was trying to finish Mom’s socks, and it was taken a bit longer due to not being able to read the pattern because I was crying so hard. I was trying to get back to sleep when Daniel kicked off around 5, and I had to keep him silent while people slept. I had taken some Ativan, but that was doing nothing for me. It was a brutal night.
Things hit me again a few days later, and it thankfully gave me something to talk about with my therapist. We’re working through it, but there’s a lot to unpack.
New Year’s Eve. I celebrated New Year’s Eve in my jammies putting my new bullet journal together. I went against my own rules at midnight and had an inch of Prosecco, which was underwhelming. (One of the reasons I don’t drink is that I really don’t like wine or beer.) I then went on the Best Buy website and browsed for a new laptop.
Laptop is here!!!! I ordered the laptop yesterday and opted to pay the extra $6 to get it today. Well, I was downstairs last night putting Daniel’s pills in the china cabinet, and the delivery truck was in the driveway. Mom got a picture of me petting it.
[+] The coughing is mostly down, but now I’ve got some kind of stomach crud. Not winning here…
[+] Tim Foust of Home Free has a new video out for a do-wop album he is putting out. It’s worth watching, especially
[+] I haven’t touched my bullet journal since September, so I’m just restarting 2022 with a new one. There’s no way that I can fit six months into what is left of my old one. I found one I liked at Notebook Therapy, and I will probably put it together once I get my Christmas crocheting done.
Karma and lack of thanks. I saw a story referenced on Facebook about some boaters who were allegedly harassing another boat that had Pride flags on it… only for their boat to go up in flames a few minutes later. OK… that was interesting and sounds kind of like the boat of harassers was being smited for being jerks. It turns out that it did happen somewhat local to me.
Despite the boat with the Pride flags rescuing them, the boat of harassers jumped into a friend’s boat without saying “thank you”. Yeah guys… the other boat could have left you in the water to wait for a rescue instead of pulling you in, so you might want to try being grateful..
Monday was the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. I found out about it within the last decade from a reference on a site I was reading. I definitely didn’t hear about in high school, and part of the reason was the terror inflicted on the Black community by it and other similar massacres.
If you think things like Tulsa happened years ago and that we should just move on, I invite you to learn about these other massacres, the most recent one being what took place at Emmanuel AME Church in 2015 when Dylan Roof walked in and killed 9 people. There are still survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre that are still alive.
Karenpocalypse. My guilty pleasure this week has been the Karenpocalypse YouTube channel. It’s sometimes entertaining to watch people being so bleedingly ridiculous that you think you’re dreaming. It’s not fun to be the person receiving the abuse from the Karen (and I’ve been that person), but it can make for an interesting story once the trauma wears off.
Patreon rewards. My Patreon rewards from Planning with Kay arrived today, and I’m positively giddy because I get to play with awesome stickers right around the time I would have been putting this month’s calendar spread for my bullet journal together.
Family gathering. Having my twin brother’s family up for the long weekend was amazing. It was worth all the Facebook messenger calls, the mask-wearing, and giving up holiday gatherings for a year to have everybody under one roof and not having to worry about getting someone super sick. Braden is adorable, and he is a really happy kid. Daniel was transfixed by him, and he was a happy kid all weekend.
New school. I got an email request from the case manager for Daniel’s school stuff this year. She wanted to schedule a Zoom meeting with a bunch of people, and I thought it was just a last-minute IEP meeting. It turns out that they’re doing the program placement stuff that didn’t happen last year because of COVID. Daniel will be going to the middle school that is closer to our house, and the head of that program was at the Zoom meeting to talk about Daniel’s needs. He is planning to have a day where we can come and see the classroom and do the orientation activities that didn’t happen in September 2020.
I’m bummed to lose Daniel’s teacher and paraprofessional from this school year as they love Daniel (and also me) like their own child. They also were absolutely wonderful while Daniel was in the hospital, and I went on Zoom with them one morning to let them see that he was OK. Ms. Leanne, his paraprofessional, has been working like mad to find something to keep his attention in the last weeks of school because he is just DONE. It has meant that I’ve found cool YouTube videos through her that I’ve shared with some of you for your kiddos. She has also fussed over me and swapped hospital stories with me because she’s a fellow caretaker of a medically-fragile person.
Still, I’m actually OK with all of this because it means more people who are going to love my kid, and Mount Vernon Public Schools has been exceptional at making sure that Daniel’s needs have gotten met from Day 1. Very few districts pull off a 12-person IEP on the last day of school for a kid who showed up to register for the fall, and his IEP meetings have always been amazing.
Some levity. I was reading The Alpine Pursuit (the book before the one I’m currently reading in Mary Daheim’s books about Emma Lord, a publisher in rural Washington) and I came upon a funny quote where Emma is talking to her brother Ben, a priest in Arizona.
Ben: “Can’t those people find something better to do than murder each other?”
COVID vaccine update. Of the now 200+ people I know who have had at least one dose, one person has gone into anaphylaxis. She was at a vaccine clinic for our local health system, so they just took her across the street to the ER. It was a scary few hours for her but she’s OK now.
Does this make me afraid to get the vaccine? Not at all. You have people who are medical professionals (nurses and pharmacists) administering them, and they all know how to handle someone going anaphylactic. My pharmacist has done my flu shot for the last three years… and I have an egg allergy. The deal is that I get to occupy a chair by the pharmacy door for 20 minutes post-shot, and they know that I have absolutely no problem getting their attention if something starts happening. The current shot location at my local grocery store pharmacy is across from Starbucks, so I can get my coffee and my shot at the same time (if I get my shot at the local pharmacy).
Anniversaries. This week has brought a lot of one-year anniversaries from the day the college went to remote learning to the day I was sitting in Daniel’s IEP meeting when Governor Inslee announced that schools were shutting down for 6 weeks… and then eventually kids went on remote learning for the rest of the year. My church also shut down all in-person things, and it felt like everything life-giving was taken away from me.
A year later, I feel like I’ve gotten some of those things back, but there are still things like attending church in-person that I really miss.
Welcome to Plathville. I had seen some clips of the show on YouTube, so I decided to watch it on-demand and see what the actual show was like because all the clips online paint Kim (the mom) as a bad person. I’m on episode 2 and the jury is still out. I’ll let you know my impressions next week.
Why can’t he just go away??? As former presidents and first ladies got together to encourage people to get their COVID vaccine, the previous occupant of the White House issued a statement taking credit for the vaccine, claiming we wouldn’t get it for 5 years at best if not for him.
…
Bless his heart.
1.) Nobody but you and your merry band of bigots and freaks call it the “China virus”. In fact, calling it that is increasing violence toward Asian-Americans. Knock it off.
2.) Any president worth their time would have done *SOMETHING* toward fast-tracking a vaccine. Obama did it with H1N1. A pandemic was declared on April 24, 2009 and the first vaccines were given on October 5, 2009. I know this because Jon, Daniel, and I were among the first in our county to get them that October due to Daniel’s prematurity. If you don’t believe me, click here for the pandemic timeline from the CDC website. If Trump had been doing anything other than sitting on his butt tweeting, playing golf, and holding press conferences to boost his ego, the pandemic wouldn’t have been nearly as severe here in the US.
3.) Dolly Parton put $1 million of her own money toward the research to develop the Moderna vaccine. Trump spouted fake cures and unproven claims based on his minion’s economic interests. (Case in point: hydroxychloroquine.) Dolly did more toward “this beautiful vaccine” than Trump did.
4.) Biden and Kamala got vaccinated on live TV as did the former presidents and former first ladies when their turns came up. (Jimmy Carter even took a selfie with his vaccine card.) Trump and Melania got vaccinated secretly at the White House. Way to boost public confidence, Donnie.
5.) Any president who was following the science would have instituted a mask mandate nationwide, especially as the virus spreads through the air. Joe appeared in public masked-up the whole time except for the debates. Trump refused to mask up and gave COVID to those prepping him for the first debate and those who were working at the venue.
Interesting… Caitlin of Ask a Mortician talks about how they keep Lenin’s corpse perpetually young on display. I remember one of my seminary professor telling us about seeing Lenin’s body in Moscow, so this is fascinating to me.
Saint for 2021. As I have for most of the last decade, I clicked on Jennifer Fulwiler’s Saint’s Name Generator to get my saint for next year. (Last year was St. Issac Jogues.) The saint chosen for me was…
St. Rose of Lima Feast:August 23 Patronage: Against Vanity; Embroiderers; Florists; Gardeners; Needle Workers; People Ridiculed for Their Piety
Given that my word for 2020 was “build” and I ended up building a lot of web things for my parish and for my job, I am a bit nervous to see why “comfort” was chosen for me.
Daniel update. We’ve been home from Seattle Children’s for over two weeks now, and kiddo is eating like a horse. His formula for his tube feeds got changed to a lower calorie formulation, and we are hoping that it is less constipating for him. He has been sleeping in until 8:30 or 9 this week, which is making his mama happy.
Bullet journal. I may or may not have glued the spare pages of my second bullet journal for 2020 together before writing “adios 2020!” on the last page.
Beast of the Year.Kelly, our Quick Takes hostess with the mostest, has introduced the Beast of the Year generator so you can pick your beast of the year as she does. I got…
Sasquatch
I think it’s fitting, given that I live in the Pacific Northwest.
First day of “school”. Daniel’s teacher and a paraprofessional stopped by yesterday to drop off a box of school supplies for him and to make sure I knew how to log into his Chromebook (which was provided by the school). The first day of Zoom class was today. I was unnerved about the possibility of Daniel having a meltdown because he isn’t a fan of Zoom, but he put up with AN HOUR. We still have kinks to work out as far as getting one-on-one to work, but it was impressive for the first day.
Be kind. I just want to remind people that it’s unnecessarily catty and rude to make comments about how teachers don’t want to teach in person because they’re lazy, you aren’t going to vote for the next mill levy because schools aren’t open this fall, and to spread misinformation about how it doesn’t affect kids (it does… BADLY) or that it has a 99% survival rate. Teachers and school districts are facing some really difficult choices, and a lot of my teacher friends are in tears over having to make the decision to protect themselves and their families by doing distance education.
Regarding the statement about the survival rate, there are 56.6 million school kids in the USA (source), and 1% of that is 566,000. That is a lot of dead kids. Even if you want to use Betsy DeVos’s misguided number of 99.99% of kids being OK, that’s still 5,600 kids dying. That is far too many.
Saturday chores. I’ve been meaning to write a post about this, but this week got away from me. Basically, I use Saturday as my day to reset for the week. I wash my sheets/remake my bed, sort pillboxes for Daniel and myself, put together my weekly spread in my bullet journal, and now it’s my weekly grocery shopping day. It makes for a really busy day, but it means that I get clean sheets at least once a week, I vaguely have an idea of my schedule for the week, and I don’t have to think too much in the morning when I’m medicating Daniel and myself. Sorting pillboxes on Saturday also means that I have some advance notice that I need to get certain medications refilled.
New phone. My phone has had black lines obscuring at least some portion of my screen since March, but I had been putting off getting it looked at because of quarantine. I just memorized whatever part of the keyboard or app that the black lines were covering and sucked it up. Well, the black lines all of a sudden jumped from covering 10-20% of my screen to 90% of my screen, so I had to go hang with the nice people at my carrier’s store. They couldn’t help me on Monday because I wasn’t an account manager on my cell phone account (because I’m on my parent’s account), so I had to go home, get added, and come back on Tuesday. The person who helped me on Tuesday ended up replacing my phone with a newer one (I went from a Samsung Galaxy 7 to a Samsung A51), and it is SO nice to actually be able to use my whole screen!
An amusing Facebook page. The Bangor Maine Police Department’s Facebook page was recommended to me as light reading. The reason? Officer Tim Cotton, who writes it, has a wicked sense of humor and manages to make the most mundane events sound amusing.
He also has a lovely send-off phrase: “Keep your hands to yourself, leave other people’s things alone, and be kind to one another.”
Flu shots. This season’s flu shot is now stocked by local pharmacies, so everyone in my household but Daniel got theirs last week. Because my body never likes to miss an opportunity to have a fibromyalgia flare, I got hit with a sore arm and THEN sore joints the next day. It was freaking lovely. Still, health officials are advising people to get their flu shots this year to lower the odds of getting hit with influenza and taking up hospital beds in the midst of a pandemic.
Also, the “stomach flu” is not a type of influenza–it’s a gastrointestinal virus. Influenza is a RESPIRATORY virus.
