Update May 29, 2020

Hi all! Great week here!

I’m working on cleaning out my parents’ basement so that a contractor can fix the place up. Dad will probably have to sell the house to afford memory care for mom, so we’re trying to get it into sellable condition. I started with a bookcase that’s falling apart in a corner. Not sure what happened to this one, but it looks like it’s been through the ringer. Some of the books were for young children, and I saved those for IL-17mo. The rest are going to Half Price Books. However, I found out that HPB isn’t buying books at the moment, so I had to store a bunch in my garage. Partly because the point was to get things out of dad’s basement, and partly because J-16 (who is living with my parents at the moment) “cleans” by shoving everyone else’s stuff somewhere out of his way. I suspect he’s the one who did a number on this bookcase:

In the evening on Friday, Aaron and I shared some spaghetti and watched Jurassic Park. And by “share” I mean we each had our own bowl. We didn’t Lady and the Tramp it.

Saturday was raining, so we were unable to do any yard work. I started the day out by going through the rest of Aaron’s photos of D-10, setting aside the ones that would work well for her half of their mom’s surprise scrapbook. I have recently received all of my mother-in-law’s photos from 2012 through the present, and those will take FORever to sort through, as she’s quite generous in her photo-taking.

We spent the evening of Saturday working on fixing a door in dad’s basement. It had been ripped off its hinges, and needed to be repaired with putty and rehung. (It fell off the hinges again a few days later, so we’ll wait until the contractor comes in September.) Then Aaron, IL-17mo, dad, mom, and I had Outback To-Go for dinner. Yum!

Sunday morning, I sorted through my mother-in-law’s pictures from 2012. Here’s my favorite of D:

Favorite picture of M from 2012:

The rest of Sunday was spent clearing out some more of the rocks by the side of the house. Aaron and I started Tricked, by Kevin Hearne, as we’d been listening to this series on road trips together a while ago.

Followed by watching Once Upon a Time with D-10 (M-7 is with his mom for a special pre-birthday treat).

Memorial Day morning, I went through my mother-in-laws pictures of 2013. Favorite picture of M from 2013:

Favorite picture of D from 2013:

The rest of the day went fantastic. It was raining in the morning, and I spent some time cleaning my parents’ house. We had pizza for lunch with Mom, Dad, IL-17mo, D-10, Aaron, and me. Then in the afternoon, we spent a good amount to time trimming the trees and digging out rocks. Here’s a before and after with a couple of the trees (we trimmed three of them):

I actually managed to get a picture of J-16, who looked away as soon as the picture was being taken, saying “what is this woman doing?” Yes, those words literally came out of his mouth.

Aaron helped trim the trees as well as processing the branches afterwards. Unfortunately, I didn’t think of getting an “after” shot of all the processed wood, but he did a fantastic job breaking it down into yard waste and firewood. Now we just have to fill the yard waste bucket once a week for an entire season to get rid of it all.

I paid D-10 $5 an hour to spray off rocks in the driveway and then move them to the clean rock pile. Don’t tell her I was paying J-16 $15 an hour.

After watching some Once Upon a time with Aaron and D-10, I settled down to check out the syllabus for my new class, which started Tuesday. The syllabus said I needed to get 17 hours of work done a week, which may be an exaggeration. Regardless, I guess I’ll have to start getting up at 4am instead of 5am to get everything done.

Tuesday was another good day, though it felt frustrating in the beginning. I started at 4am getting my morning work done and studying. Then a telemedicine appointment for mom, followed by a desperate search for the plug for her pacemaker monitor. That was never found, so I had to call the company and ask for a replacement. (They have sent a new one at no cost). I also had to call the social security administration, which isn’t taking calls right now, apparently. I guess I’ll have to wait until the office opens. I finished Blood Rites while on errands, and started The Golem and the Jinni. I can tell this will be a good book. After studying for a while, Aaron read to all of us, and then the kids went to bed, leaving time for me to finish up going through pictures of 2013. I decided that my scrapbooks for the kids (once their mom’s scrapbook is done) will be 12 pictures for each year of their life – making two scrapbooks for D-10 and 1.5 for M-7. IL-17mo will have only a few pages.

Wednesday was busy day. I took my dad grocery shopping and to an eye appointment. Then I spent a good amount of time cleaning out his basement. I found a bunch of mugs down there, which I plan on washing and selling on Craigslist (if anybody is willing to buy). Some of them are collectibles, but mostly they’re just a variety of mugs. I’ll show you a picture once I have them washed and ready to sell. We also managed to sell our rarely-used exercise bike on Craigslist Wednesday, and got a good amount of money for it. After studying for a while, I watched Once Upon a Time with D-10 and Aaron.

Turns out J-16 and his friend were in the neighborhood when George Floyd was killed. They saw the immediate repercussions, including a bunch of gun-toting idiots which J-16 videoed instead of high-tailing it out of there. His friend was wearing my dad’s F#$% Trump sweatshirt and had a picture taken of him and posted on instagram (or some such place that young people use these days). It had more than 5k likes by the next day. J-16 and his friend went back to the rioting neighborhood a couple of times since then, much to the disapproval of the adults in his life. So far, he seems to have survived unscathed.

Thursday was a hard day. I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to handle the developmental biology class on top of all the other stuff that I’ve got going on in my life. Getting up at 4am worked for the first couple of days, but I can only take so much lack of sleep before I totally break down. So that course is dropped, and I will start taking classes again in a couple of years when we move to Oregon and my Mother- and Sister-in-law can babysit while I study. I also had an assessment to see if I had ADHD. I have a bunch more forms to fill out, and then I’ll get the results soon. I was hoping I could get treated before attending any lectures, as I have a HUGE problem listening to lectures. We finished up the night watching Troll Hunters with M-7.

Friday has gone well so far. I slept in to make up all the sleep I’d missed this week with the class. I took D-10 to Hobby Lobby and picked up a scrapbook for IL-17mo and some more paper for M-7’s and D-10’s books. Then we went to Dairy Queen and sat in the parking lot until they opened. We got everyone but M-7 ice cream. (What kind of kid doesn’t like ice cream?!)

This week I finished listening to Blood Rites by Jim Butcher:

I am currently reading Sorcerer of the North, and listening to Wolf Hall and The Golem and the Jinni. I started listening to Tricked with Aaron while we dig rocks together. Aaron has been reading The Rise of the Evening Star to us in the evening.

I made progress in watching Jurassic Park, Troll Hunters Season 1, and Once Upon a Time Season 1.