RBOC

• All the new projects I said yes to in September and October are suddenly actually starting.
• DC1 told me the reason Coldplay is so compelling is because they never resolve their chords?  They just sort of fade out?
• DH’s company is one of the ones that helped with the run on that bank that failed.  Thankfully they did get all the money (except the FDIC insured 250K, which really needs to be increased, given inflation) out in time.  But fixing that took all of Thursday + Friday for their lead management/HR/admin people, so they didn’t make a couple job offers they’d meant to.  So DH emailed someone a congratulatory email and got back a… but I haven’t gotten an offer yet?
• Update:  looks like all deposits will be covered by the FDIC, not just those up to 250K, which is nice (and there wouldn’t have been a run and the bank wouldn’t have failed had depositors known that, but I digress).  They really do need to increase those limits though– it’s been 250K for as long as I can remember and there’s been a lot of inflation since then.
• Apparently there is additional insurance banks can buy to protect assets larger than 250K.  Maybe that should be mandatory…
• Waitlisted Grinnell.
• Accepted to Union college (the one in NY) with a 30k/year scholarship.  That means zie can actually major in computer science instead of economics (hir only other acceptance was the state flagship but not for the school of engineering).  Union also has biomedical engineering and I think DC1 has enough credits and higher-level classes that zie could double major relatively easily.
• Accepted to Macalester with a 23K/year scholarship!  I’m excited about this because Macalester is just a fantastic environment.  They’re even named the top college (or one of the top colleges) for LGBTQ+ students in the US on various lists.  (Among other things, they’re really good about all gender housing and bathrooms.)  DC1 considers hirself to currently be asexual (but may be demisexual or something else) and cisgender, so it’s not a direct issue for hir, but a place that is tops for marginalized people is generally a good place for everyone.
• Macalester has lower tuition than Union so even though the scholarship is lower, it’s not actually that different in price.  Plus Macalester is upfront about likely going up 2K/year.
• After the Union acceptance, which was the first one where DC1 could actually major in something zie wants to major in, it was like a huge ball of anxiety and stress that had been hanging over our heads just melted away.  After the Macalester acceptance, there was some actual elation.  I can definitely see DC1 being happy and cozy there.  Union I’m a little more worried about because it has a heavy frat presence and a heavy prep-school NY/NJ presence.  But a lot of people on the internet assure other worried people that there’s also a non-Greek nerd contingent that throws board-game and D&D parties instead of keggers.
• Oddly, I’ve somehow gathered a lot of information on dining hall services quality over the years.  Sodexo is fine, but not great.  That’s what Union has.  There are a lot of complaints about the food from people who prefer healthier fare, but like, it’s still fine.  More of a focus on cheap comfort food (= deep fried), but not terrible.  Marriott and Bon Appetit are both actually pretty good, especially for things like salad bars and always having healthy items that taste fine.  Macalester has Bon Appetit and people generally like the food.
• It’s weird, but my biggest worry is that skinny DC1 will just not eat if zie doesn’t like the food.  So I’m hoping for food to be good and available.  (Also will probably do nuts.com shipments if DC1 doesn’t have an allergic roommate.)
• My second biggest worry was having to find off-campus housing hirself as a teenager.  Since zie won’t be going to the flagship state school anymore, that’s not going to be a concern (they don’t even guarantee dorm housing for freshmen!).  I love elite private SLACs so much.  (UCSC apparently also does not have enough housing for freshmen, even though it’s an elite SLAC, but a public one.)
• DC1 might still prefer Union over Macalester if zie wants to double major in engineering.  There really aren’t a whole lot of small liberal arts colleges that offer engineering and are more than say, 30% female (like with LGBTQ+ students, being good for female students generally also means they’re good for everybody).
• Next weekend will be a bloodbath– all the remaining SLACs that DC1 applied to.  Then another week to hear from Vanderbilt.  (One of these schools is not like the others…)
• Going through the college results reddit, a lot of people who got waitlisted or even rejected at Grinnell got into objectively better schools (one person even got into Harvard(!)).  They really must be looking for something different than a lot of these other schools are looking for, or they’re good at yield protection.
• Macalester is sending DC1’s choice of warm socks or a puff-ball hat.  They are both adorable.  DC1 chose the socks after I promised that if zie decides to go to Macalester we would purchase hir a branded hat.  (We would have purchased the socks if zie had chosen the hat, but the reasoning is zie will wear the socks wherever zie ends up, but the hat only at cold colleges… which is all of them that are left except Vanderbilt.)
• Word on the internet is that Grinnell’s dining hall had some massive problems last year,  I don’t know what company they use.  They did just fully unionize the dining hall workers including student workers though.

RBOC

• I recently did a two day teach-in and boy is it exhausting to be “on” for 13 hour days two days in a row.
• A few days after the teach-in I got notified I’d been exposed to Covid from it.  Only one student and I masked at all, and even then we didn’t mask consistently (too many meals!)  Fortunately I just restocked my tests after the last Covid exposure on my last trip and now I can use up my remaining Feb 2023 tests.  (Update:  Done, all negative.  Next up:  April 2023 expirations.)
• DC1 seems in really good spirits, despite college rejections and despite low grades from the week zie got a cold and went to school (masked) anyway.  (Zie did insane stuff like put hir chemistry exam in hir bag instead of handing it in at the end of class, so there’s a bunch of zeroes, though most teachers are giving hir partial credit for the not-turning-ins.  The Cs are gradually turning to Bs and the Bs to As, so hopefully it will all be back to above 90 by the end of the semester, maybe even the end of the 6 weeks.  Update:  The government teacher is not giving any credit, so that’s remaining low and a few of the other classes never made it up to 90%.  Oddly, DC1 has a very high A in multivariable calculus and a pretty high A in Calc-Based Physics.  So the two hardest classes… but also the ones where zie didn’t forget to turn in anything and didn’t have any exams that one week.)
• A colleague who had never gotten Covid before got it at the teach-in, but she seems to be recovered now (about a week and a half later, almost exactly a week after symptoms appeared).  That’s pretty fast!  Better than the not-Covid cold we all got earlier this semester, though it sounds like she was really sick for a few days and we never really were with the cold.  (My cold just malingered.)  She does say she’s still tired and has been having trouble focusing.  She wants to sleep for like a week but doesn’t have time to.
• A second professor at the teach-in who hadn’t had Covid before got it at the teach-in and took Paxlovid and then Covid-rebounded.
• After a couple of weeks of almost nobody masking on campus, I’ve started to see a few masks again.  More coughing too.  I hope this means people who are sick have started masking while sick, but I’m not sure the people masking and the people coughing are the same people.  I’m still a bit of an oddball masking in rooms with other people, but whatever.
• After our last cold, DH developed tinnitus.  He went to the ENT who said he had wax built up against his eardrum and cleared it out and now the tinnitus is gone.  Bodies are crazy!

RBOC

• MIL’s post-surgery tests came back good so no radiation or chemo!  Just more follow-up tests in the future.
• After a week of college classes, DC1 brought a cold home.  Negative covid tests for everyone and it’s mostly just drippy nose and post-nasal drip.  How do I know?  Well, the rest of us also got it.
• The mysterious cold medicine we got in Europe works pretty well on drying up this stuff, but it still isn’t completely perfect.
• I don’t like it.  I enjoyed not being sick and having allergy medicine take away other sick-like symptoms.
• DC2 had it for about a day and then got better immediately.  DC1 almost never gets sick (not since preschool), but when zie does, it tends to be hardcore.  So it’s been about a week of mildly drippy nose.
• We sent the kids to school– they still mask.  We gave DC1 additional instructions about using hir hand sanitizer more.  I wish my colleagues who come into work sick would mask when they do.  I’m surprised I haven’t brought sickness home yet.  I stayed home because I could and no point in spreading anything around.
• After sleeping for 14.5 hours I felt mostly better the next day.
• My sister, who we had seen the weekend that DC1 started dripping, texted to say she has strep throat.  But none of us really have sore throats other than what might be expected with post-nasal drip.  Also no fevers.
• Covid tests also negative.  We’re doing a reasonably good job keeping up with using just expired or just about to expire tests.  Because you don’t need to test for a long time and then you use a bunch all at once.  The tests we bought in Europe don’t expire until 2024 (same FlowFlex brand), but the ones we get for free from my insurance have shorter time windows.
• We flew out someone junior who is twitter famous (mostly cute econ memes).  I wonder if being on twitter affects one’s chances for better or for worse.
• I wasn’t the only sniffly person in the room for the job talk, but I was the only sniffly person wearing a mask.  C’mon people, we can do better.
• DC1 got rejected from the CS major at the state flagship.  Zie can be an economics major at said flagship, but zie doesn’t want to be.  I was traveling when zie got the news and DH said DC1 seemed pretty bummed, but then zie bounced back the next day and told DH that zie had thought about things and wasn’t bothered much by Harvey Mudd and [the flagship] anymore because HMC might have been too much and zie doesn’t really want to go to [the flagship].  (This is true– not sour grapes– DC1 really does want to go to a small liberal arts college.  Personally I want DC1 to go someplace that has housing guaranteed for all four years and the flagship doesn’t even guarantee it for freshmen!)  Hopefully the next set of rejections will come with a set of acceptances and hopefully that won’t be for a month or two.
• I was looking at Macalester’s CS major and DC1 has already done like 4 of the required classes.  But that’s still not enough to get into the major for our state flagship.  It seems crazy that you have to be so off the walls amazing to get into some of these programs, but then you’re way overqualified for the places you’re likely to get into if you don’t quite reach the mark.  I’m hoping zie gets into a school where zie won’t run out of classes, like one of the schools that belongs to a consortium.
• On my last trip, I had several 1 on 1 30 min meetings unmasked.  The day after I got back, I got contacted that one of those meetings tested positive for Covid.   SIGH.  Usually I don’t worry too much if I’ve been exposed to someone with Covid because usually (if I even know– here we don’t get notified) I’m wearing a mask even if the Covid positive person isn’t.  I hope it was too early for me to get it too. [update: seem to have escaped, though I did have another long day of sleep]  I would not like to have it again.  Shouldn’t have bowed to peer pressure.  It’s easy for me to keep masking in groups of people, but the 1 on 1s when nobody seems sick are more difficult.

RBOC

• MIL’s surgery went well.  Now 4-6 weeks of recovery.  Hopefully the cancer is gone and additional treatment won’t be required.
• [update]  They’re thinking it’s stage 2 so there will probably be radiation.  :(
• Case Western is killing me with emails– like 2/day to not just DC1’s email account, but also my email account and the family junk mail account (which is technically DH’s junk email).  I tried to unsubscribe my email earlier, but it unsubscribed all three.  Then I tried to remove mine when we resubscribed DC1, but I’m still getting the @#$23ing emails.  Then I googled it and found out that last year they withdrew submitted (and paid!) applications from people who unsubscribed from their @#$2ing emails.  Not a good look Case Western.
• We were thinking we’d have heard from the state school major by now since DC1 applied early action, but apparently they’ve only notified a very small group of nationally recognized people who are definitely also in the honors program a month ago.  If they had said yes, then DC1 probably would have applied to fewer colleges.  If they had said no, then DC1 would probably have applied to more colleges.
• I feel so terrible that DC1 tried for the early action deadline when it’s not actually helping to get the response any earlier AND DC1 didn’t submit rec letters there because of it.  The essays were fine but not amazing too, and they would have been better with more practice, though this WAS practice for the other schools so I’m not sure what order zie should have applied.  I’m so worried that DC1 may have to go through all of this again next year because zie really doesn’t want to be an economics major and shouldn’t be an economics major so zie can’t stay at the flagship longer than a year.  Surely DC1 will get in somewhere zie applied in the major zie wants.  Ideally a SLAC where zie can also double major in music composition or something equally fun.
• Did you know that the common app limits you to applying to 20 schools?
• I have to remind myself that it’s DC1’s life.  But it’s still so stressful.  I wanted hir to stay at home another year and go to college locally if things don’t pan out, but that application deadline has passed and DC1 wants to be living in a dorm next year.  I wish zie could go to a residential high school, and there are prep schools that do take high school graduates, but it’s not the same (and they don’t have enough math and science classes).  And why pay college tuition without getting college credits?  And I dunno, new england prep students aren’t the same as the slice of the state students from our residential high school.
• DC1 added a couple additional SLACs at the end.  The Carleton essay was probably the easiest from scratch essay– DC1 does very well with straight forward questions.  This one asked what zie would do for a senior thesis and why.  DC1 decided to create a text-based independent game (and compose all the music for it).  Describing that and why was a much quicker write than dealing with Haverford’s open-ended honor code question.  Amherst never made it to the list because of its questions, just like when I applied.  Who is willing to answer those questions?  Not even the same people willing to apply to University of Chicago because at least the U of C questions have a certain absurdity to them.  Amherst questions just do not compute with our way of life.  (I find the math one this year kind of insulting– it has a strong learned astronomer vibe to it.)
• But thank goodness they’re done and we can all just put this out of our minds until responses from the colleges start coming in.
• I find the constant advice to touch grass really irritating.  Some of us are allergic to grass!

RBOC

• DH’s mom is scheduled for surgery mid-January (there are preparation appointments before then).  Her meeting with the surgeon just after Christmas was really hopeful, and he seemed very optimistic and calming about everything.  Over Christmas she seemed really energetic and like her usual self.  That is all very hopeful.
• My SIL has a lot of artistic hobbies that she starts up and somehow masters over the course of a year.  Her most recent is knitting—she went from no knitting at all to impressive-looking sweaters and cardigans.  I knitted for years as a kid and never really mastered scarves.  She’s also got an impressive yarn collection which is a reason I no longer knit (knitting gets to be an expensive and space-needing hobby)… (that and not really needing scarves in our climate).
• Her previous hobbies include water color, drawing, novel writing (she still does this and self-publishes—they are very good), calligraphy… I’m not sure what else.
• My hobbies are this blog, reading novels, and watching YouTube videos.  I guess the blog is creating.  But really I am more of a consumer.
• I’m not jealous but I am a bit in awe of people who can create.  DC1 composes and that blows my mind.  I don’t have the expertise to judge but I really enjoy hir music and it seems super impressive to me.
• I’m not sure I have much of an imagination (it seems to be mostly used up in determining probable future scenarios and how to plan for them).  And I know my fine motor skills aren’t great.  My difficulty with left and right probably doesn’t help either.  Perhaps with practice and free time I could do something but there are so many people who can do so many amazing things that I’m happy to be a consumer of art rather than a producer.
• DC1 added more schools to hir college list.  By the time this is published hopefully all applications will be in, including the music supplements.  We will see what happens!
• Also turns out DC1 has been living a secret life where zie has been creating online games with other people online.  That has been turned into several college essays and an extracurricular line.  DC1 reports that the outschool essay person said it was, “unique” but wasn’t sure if she meant that in a good “interesting/breath of fresh air” way or a less good “maybe don’t” sort of way.
• A lot of these essay questions are about how people with different viewpoints have changed the way you think about things.  DC1 has a lot of stories zie can tell, about friends and relatives with autism, blindness, amusia (“that’s interesting! I hadn’t heard of that before,” said both I and later the college essay person), as well as a trans best friend from elementary and middle school, in a state where it’s dangerous to be out.  But DC1 says that zie feels uncomfortable centering hirself as the protagonist in what are really other people’s stories.  (I was like, that sounds great!  You don’t have room for it in your Pomona essay, but you can add that as a first paragraph to your Williams essay! Question the question and demonstrate you do listen to diverse experiences but are a level beyond the question! But DC1, who is genuinely a good person, just narrowed hir eyes at me and said nothing.  Then added humor to make up the additional 50 words.)
• Macalester wants 500 words on why St. Paul/Minneapolis is such a great place to live.  I think it’s a brainwashing technique and wonder how successful it is.  Also, now I kind of want to go to St. Paul because there’s an ice cream place there that gets its ice cream from the Wisconsin-Madison dairy and has turtle sundaes.  (We don’t have turtle sundaes in the South.)  Though really, there are other places in the Midwest we could go to to get them (like, maybe, Wisconsin-Madison itself). There are also at least 17 poke-first restaurants in the MSA and many other restaurants that also have Poke on the menu.
• I’ve been having odd cravings for boba tea that aren’t sated by actually getting boba tea.  Too bad tapioca doesn’t have the same nutritional profile as gelatin!
• I think I may have the most fun at conference meals when I don’t know many of the people and I don’t think I will likely meet them again.  I think the last part is key– I like meeting new people but I have enormous social anxiety, which isn’t there if I think it’s just a one time thing.
• DC1 has gotten a lot better writing college essays since we started.  I really hate the early decision process– not that I think the outcome would have been better if zie had waited to apply to HMC regular decision, but zie still would have put hir best foot forward, instead of hir best foot from before the process started.

RBOC

• My last cycle was 16 days.  Dr. Google suggests peri-menopause.  Why can’t I be one of the people who gets longer cycles??!!
• I really need to get around to reading Jen Gunter’s book.
• OMG, I am dying with these prima donna authors.
• I’m at editor at an interdisciplinary journal with short word limits. I have these authors that are 40% over at the editing stage. I look and the paper is just stuffed with bad and unnecessary writing. Run on sentences that last 7-10 lines, repeated multiple connectors that don’t really add anything or have nuance they didn’t intend, excessive adverbs and unnecessary redundant adjectives etc. They use a $5 word with incorrect nuance when they could just use a smaller more general word—like an undergrad with a thesaurus.
• So I spent a day cutting and then gave up and told them to cut and they’re upset and have gone to the managing editor about how terrible my edits are and they refuse to do any more and they regularly get published in top journals that don’t force them to write better.
• One sentence had TWO colons in it.
• I think a lot of people in their field confuse intelligence with impenetrability (something the previous managing editor railed at and is the reason for the tight word limits for our journal).  In reality, they are making many of the same points that a (literally) certified genius economist has been making for years, but he breaks them down into simple sentences that a reasonably intelligent high schooler can understand, because he’s actually a genius and doesn’t need to pretend to be smart.  And he also has a lot of practice breaking down his complex thoughts into things normal people can understand.
• I use a lot of parentheticals in my blog writing.  I have to go through and take them out of my formal writing because I want people to follow my arguments.
• Not that I don’t care about you guys, but like, my blogging style should be different from my papers.  You all can handle my meandering because the points I’m making aren’t actually that complex.
• Several of my papers are used in various undergraduate classes.  If my writing were hard to understand, they wouldn’t be!
• Anyhow, whenever an editor goes to the trouble of line-editing for me, I’m always really grateful.  Either I just make the changes, or if the changes aren’t what I mean, I fix my writing so what I meant becomes clear.
• DH has a former colleague who is now a computer science professor at a smallish engineering school that doesn’t limit acceptances by major.  Which means CS is an insanely large major and his classes have more than 500 people in them.

RBOC

• DH’s relative has started smoking again.  Or vaping?  His wife never stopped smoking, even through brain cancer.  Addiction sucks so badly.
• DC2 has had a couple of growth spurts recently.  Now zie is on the tall side of average for 6th grade and super tall compared to 5th graders.  My kids’ growth patterns are so different from mine and my sister’s that I’m not really sure what to expect.
• I did something terrible to my back which meant a lot of exercises were not going to work.  But this time instead of giving up entirely, I was able to work with my co-Pilot person and for the first time that means I’m not going to stop and never come back to doing an exercise regimen because of an injury.  DH has had the same experience (his elbows and wrist sometimes have RSI)– changed exercises after an injury to avoid the problem spot either temporarily (two months of no pushups) or entirely (some weights things were replaced permanently with bands which are better for the elbows).
• I started drinking the collagen powder on my exercise days (sometime after my back started hurting, because why not). I’ve settled on having it in hot hibiscus tea.  It is very much like drinking Hibiscus flavored jello.  But not too sweet, which is a benefit of it not being jello.  (It’s actually less expensive than unflavored gelatin.)
• I love how small the stakes are with Christmas planning with DH’s family.  Previously either DH’s mom planned everything or she assigned someone to plan everything (including collecting information on people’s schedules, starting with school schedules and then our little family’s travel schedule since we’re the farthest away).  This year it was a lot more free-form.  We got the big things nailed down in fall and rented an AirBNB, but then when it came to the smaller details about when to get together and where to eat etc. there was a whole lot of the people who needed to tell us constraints not telling us constraints.  Finally a big group chat over two days nailed everything down.
• [Update]:  There has actually been some weird drama with planning and getting an extended family picture done that DH is going to try to get figured out.  At this point I’m trying to stay out of it.  (Mantra:  Not my family.)  It’s hard because I’m a fixer and a planner.  But… Not my family.  And this is above my pay grade.  Poor DH is unsettled though.
• [Update]:  The drama appears to have been resolved via discussion.  (That I was not involved in, yay!)
• For some reason stolen golf cart notices from the university just make me smile.  It might be because the other notices from that email tend to be about really serious things (usually assaults and rapes).  But also I think stolen golf carts are just funnier than other stolen vehicles, plus they belong to the university or to rich people and not to college students like stolen electric bicycles and scooters.
• The Try Guys recently forced me to get boba at one of the boba places in town and omg, Boba places have gotten both really nice and pretty pricey.  This is not the bubble tea from the last boba craze.
• We also have a really nice creamery in town now, which is awesome.  When we moved here there was a ben and jerry’s and a not great custard place. When those went out of business there weren’t any ice cream or gelato places in town (other than fast food, which I don’t count since the last time I had dairy queen I was pregnant and couldn’t keep it down).  Now we have a bunch of places that serve ice cream or gelato (usually as part of a candy shop), but this new place is actually better than anything we can get at the grocery store, which isn’t something I can say for the other places in town.

RBOMoney

• Both of the cars we own are no longer in production (Honda Clarity and Honda Insight).  The Insight is really just a fancy Honda Civic Hybrid and they’re bringing back the Honda Civic Hybrid, so I don’t think it’s really so much of a change.  (They’ve done this before.)  I LOVE my Insight.  The Clarity is a bit big for me, but DH likes it.  Who knows what the car landscape will look like the next time we buy cars.
• DH dropped the lid of our le Creuset on the tile floor and it cracked all the way through, both the ceramic *and* the metal!  Hard core.  We can’t get a new lid, but if we ship the entire thing back at our expense, they will ship us a new one at their expense.
• My uni doesn’t have faculty brat scholarships (I have heard there’s a small one but like 1k or less and I can’t find any evidence of it online), but they do pay most of tuition for national merit fellows.
• DC1 got rejected from Harvey Mudd.  :(
• We’re hoping that the straight rejection (not deferral) from HMC doesn’t portend other things from other colleges that DC1 is interested in.  After all, they’re a weird little school that accepts very few people and gets a lot of applicants who are probably completely interchangeable with DC1.  That will be less the case at many of the schools on DC1’s list.
• I am a tiny bit relieved because I did always feel like Mudders got a lot of breadth but no depth and they just take too many classes.  But also disappointed on hir behalf.  And have an underlying concern that if zie ends up at like Vanderbilt that zie will be unable to feed hirself and will end up stunting hir growth.  (I grew an inch in college because the food was good but the food at our boarding high school was literally prison grade.  I cannot go to jail ever.)
• Grinnell has become surprisingly difficult to get into and surprisingly good for computer science.  (But, perhaps unsurprisingly in the current political climate, has been having racist incidents on campus…)
• We’re also concerned that DC1 won’t get into the computer science program at the state school zie has applied to (and been accepted to the university for but not the college).  DC1 is aware of that possibility and says zie would rather spend a year there taking gen eds and then transfer elsewhere rather than going to a different state school and majoring in CS.  Deadlines have passed so no take-backs at this point.
• Would DC1 be more attractive to colleges if zie had skipped fewer grades?  I do not know.
• DC1 is rapidly maturing this year.  But I don’t know that it’s the age so much as it is the short time before leaving the house.
• All the pages about gap years are like, don’t do a gap year if you didn’t get into your school of choice.  It’s better to do a year of academics and then transfer.  But DC1’s academics and test scores are good.  Zie can do school.  It’s the other parts of the application that are weak.  So I don’t know.

RBOC

• While I was gone both DC2 and DH made muffins without recipes.  After seeing the results, I realized that DH was emulating Keith from the Try Guys– he made cinnamon mini-muffins with raisin bran on top.  DC2 is definitely the Zach.  Hir muffins had 3 kinds of tea and… peppermint marshmallows(!).  They were … interesting.  I am impressed that they both made reasonable muffins without even looking at a base recipe.  But DC2 is really the only person eating hir muffins, though zie brought one to school and one of the friends zie gave a piece to asked for a second piece.
• Houseflies are nature’s cat toys.
• I had been unable to do many reverse flies (this is an exercise thing) and then all of a sudden it was no problem to do them!  Growth!  I’m getting stronger!
• The weird thing is that some exercises that were trivial when I started (arm circles, wall reach) are now more difficult.  Not hard, but like, I can tell they’re exercises whereas I couldn’t before.  Are my arms heavier?  Are there muscles resisting that didn’t have the strength to resist before?  These are warm-up exercises so it’s not that I’m doing them after more intense workouts.
• I gained 4 pounds traveling.  I ate a LOT of really good fish tacos.
• Taskmaster is just SO GOOD.
• Christmas seems to have started later this year– last year it seemed really early, I guess.  I was a little surprised by Thanksgiving because it didn’t get not hot until like a week before.  In-laws haven’t updated their kids’ wishlists yet.  I hope they do by Thanksgiving so we can shop on the couch after eating turkey.
• This year my sister is going to her boyfriends’ extended family celebration, so we are doing a tiny only-us thanksgiving (with traditional food– last year we did Brazilian take-out) and then going to visit them that Saturday.
• My in-laws are planning on doing Christmas pictures with a professional photographer on Christmas Eve (the two youngest grandkids weren’t in the last picture).  Orders are:  Grey or Red only. I don’t own anything red (#Spring) and I wore my two grey outfits in the last two professional photos and I’m pretty sure neither of them currently fit (#PandemicWeightGainNeverLeft).  I have a lot of black dresses that fit though… So I either need to buy some grey clothing or ask if black is ok.  I hate shopping.
• Update: I do have this one dress that I call the frumpy teaching dress that’s grey and white (Posh (not sponsored) makes a face mask that exactly matches it!).  Completely forgot about it.  Presumably there will be children in front of me (there are 8 children) so it won’t be so obvious.  Though I guess DC1 is taller than I am so might be behind me!  One day I will be the shortest person in these pictures(!)  That’s what happens when you marry into a tall family.
• It’s amazing how green part of your lawn can get when there’s a water leak.
• I recently visited a place I lived for two years as a child and one thing that really stuck out– the crows sound the same there as they did when I was a kid (caw caw caw) but they sound different than crows elsewhere.  Birds really do have regional accents.  Though out here it’s all grackles and buzzards.  I’ve always felt a fondness for crows and seagulls that I don’t have for other birds.  Though I have a really good robin imitation and I do appreciate viewing hummingbirds and cardinals and I dunno, peacocks (though I don’t really like to hear peacocks).
• I found out I did not give Covid to the one guy at the summer conference who couldn’t go home if he got it who I sat next to at dinner (outdoors) the day before I knew.  Masks + ventilation rock.

RBOC

• As I dig into old drafts for post ideas, I wonder, am I running out of ideas?
• I guess a lot of my brain cycles are taken up with incipient fascism and there’s only so much I can talk about that without everyone getting depressed.  Plus my kids are older and their business is their business to a much greater extent.  Nobody wants to discuss teens or even pre-teens like they want to discuss toddlers.
• I will say that my kids are really really neat.  Watching them grow up into their own people is so amazing.  It’s crazy that DC1 will be off to college in a year and we think zie is going to be ok on hir own.
• That said, I am a little concerned about DC1 being able to actually feed hirself.  Everything else, no problem.  Choosing food and getting it eaten before low blood sugar sets in, maybe not as confident.  (This is something zie inherited from me, but I didn’t realize until I was married and DH pointed it out because his mom has the same problem if she doesn’t eat.  At least DC1 grew up knowing.)  Like I’ve said before, a college with full dining hall service would be ideal.
• DC2 grew a full inch last month.  Now 4’9″.  Soon I will be the shortest person in the house except for the cat.
• Maybe I’ve said all the things I had to say.  Like, I had 30-odd years to think up the things that got detailed long posts on the blog back when we started and now I’ve already written about them and don’t need to write about them again.  So that leaves little twitter-sized snippets.  But I don’t have twitter, so they end up on these RBOC.
• I have been having a lot of headaches recently.  I am not a fan.  I don’t know if it’s pressure or menopause or not enough stretching my upper-back/neck after doing various exercises with dumbells (lateral lifts are hard!).  Or maybe I’m just not sleeping correctly.  Stretches, massages, hot baths, and just heat in general seem to help (also OTC painkillers, though sometimes it takes two kinds).  Also it not being overcast helps.
• I’m definitely getting to the age where I can talk about my aches and pains ad infinitum.  I try not to in polite company though!
• Exercise continues to be happening.  I think I feel more nimble and stronger?  It’s not as obvious as with DH who has been doing it for a year now.