News
Saturday
Saturday flew by more quickly than expected. I got a slow start to the day – getting nothing done before our weekly Skype call with my mother-in-law. After the call, I put some chicken chili ingredients in the crock pot. IL6 wanted to “make something with sugar as an ingredient.” So we made a chocolate cake. I wasn’t expecting it to turn out well, since I was letting IL6 be imprecise with the measurements. But it actually turned out really well!
I then went to the gym and had a relaxing 2.5 mile-per-hour stroll on the treadmill (so enough to get my pulse up a little, but I could still type on my phone).
After a short nap, I made a meatloaf in the instant pot. I’m still trying to figure out how to use the instant pot, so it took some troubleshooting to figure out that my problem was that I needed water to build pressure.
Then I cross-stitched and read while sitting in IL6’s room with him. Aaron and dad watched TV. IL6 and M12 watched YouTube.
I lost 1.9 pounds this week, but I gained 1 pound last week so I’m still on track at an average of one pound a week. I have 8 pounds to go to get to the weight I was when I met Aaron (my next goal). Maybe 2 months?
Sunday
Sunday, I went to church with dad in the morning. In the afternoon, M12 went to band rehearsal and D15 came back from her mom’s. In the evening, Aaron and I played LEGOs with IL6.
Really, the only interesting thing that happened had to do with the laundry. In October, I bought a bunch of 5T pants for IL6. A week or so later, all but a couple were missing. We decided there was a missing laundry basket and looked and looked for it. Finally, we bought some more 5T pants. Fastforward to Sunday. I was putting away laundry and discovered a bunch of 4T-5T socks (which had all been decommissioned months ago), as well as some 4T pants (also decommissioned months ago). I realized that somehow, without us knowing how, the missing laundry basket with all the missing 5T pants (plus some small stuff that got through at that time) got reintegrated into our laundry when D15 sorted the last gigantic pile of laundry. So now we won’t run out of pants, at least.
Monday
Monday, Aaron and I ran a bunch of errands. They had accumulated over the past two weeks while IL6 was home. We had so many, we didn’t finish them all. Then I went to the gym.
At home, I cooked bacon (IL6 had requested some the day before), washed the skillet, cooked 3 pork chops for M12’s dinners this week, washed the skillet, was about to cook some shrimp in it, but decided I was done with cooking for the day.
In the evening, I read to D15 while M12 was at Boy Scouts.
Tuesday
Tuesday was a long day. For about two months, I’ve had trouble with my eyesight, and I recently noticed it was just in my right eye. That was stressful, because I wondered if it was something like a cataract. But I was mostly thinking I would wait until my next eye exam to get it looked at unless it got significantly worse.
Then, Tuesday morning, my eye started stinging and suddenly the vision got really bad. As I was driving home, several floaters appeared. That was stressful, combined with the vision issues, so I called opthamology when I got home they had an appointment available in 20 minutes, and it takes 20 minutes to drive there, so I took it.
Then dad came out of his bedroom and veeeeerrrrry slooooooowly told me that he was going to my sister’s tonight, and could I fill his pillbox before I left? Argh! So I filled for Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning as fast as I safely could, then rushed out the door with Aaron.
There was no need to rush, because the doctor kept us waiting for an hour. When she examined my eye, she said the eyes were dry and that my right cornea had a harmless condition in which it was bumpy instead of smooth. That would make the dry eye impact the right eye more than the left eye. She told me to take tear eye drops 4-6 times a day.
She also said she saw floaters in my right eye, but it otherwise appeared healthy. She said I’m a bit young to start getting floaters, but that it was harmless if it was just the “jelly at the back of the eye.” Of course, she doesn’t know that it’s the jelly, but it sounded like a reasonable suggestion. She wanted me to come back in 4-6 weeks to check the status of my floaters.
Aaron drove me home, since I couldn’t drive with my eyes dilated. We stopped at Buffalo Wild Wings on the way home.
Another stressful thing that happened: dad let my homeless nephew J20 into the house at 2am Tuesday morning. They trashed the kitchen, ate our frozen pizza, Texas toast, 2 Tupperware containers of spaghetti, and left a brand new package of frozen fries out to thaw. (Aaron later found two heaping plates of food set out to spoil, so they didn’t eat all this, they only cooked it.) They crashed in the basement, scaring M12, who thought we were being robbed, and scaring D14 when she got up in the morning. They broke the light in the laundry room (though it was probably from the 1950’s and was on its way out, anyway). They stole 3 of D15’s chargers, including the one for her school iPad. Luckily, they left the iPad.
Then in the evening, some unrelated stuff that I shouldn’t share happened, but it was also stressful.
Wednesday
In the morning, I took M12 to a doctor’s appointment. Then I ran some errands with Aaron, made some phone calls, and wrote a letter. Aaron installed new lights in our laundry room and closet so that we had strings on our lights again.
One of the errands we ran is to run to the post office and tell them that our mailbox lock is jammed. They told us it was probably frozen, and to spray deicer in there. We sprayed a whole bottle in. No luck. We tried a hair drier, no luck. I had put our mail on hold so we’d have access to new mail, but they delivered yesterday’s anyway. So we have 3 days of mail stuck in the box.
Thursday
Thursday I went to the gym and spent a couple hours cleaning. I cooked swordfish for dinner, and took D15 to Joanne Fabric to get some yarn for her blanket for IL6.
When I opened up the oven after preheating it to 400F for 20-30 minutes, I found the well-cooked pizza that J20 and his friend left sitting, uncooked, in the oven when they were here.
Friday
Friday I took IL6 to meet his new therapist (for his fear of pooping), and we both liked her. Then I took him to speech therapy. After that, dad, Aaron, and I ran some errands and went to lunch. We got the mailbox lock ordered – it should come in next week. In the evening, I cooked salmon, then Aaron, D15, and IL6 cleaned IL6’s room.
Week’s Photos
Reading to myself
- Mahabharata
- Wrath of the Dragon King, by Brandon Mull
- The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fisher by E M Anderson
- Mr Ballen podcast
- The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth, by Thomas Morris
Reading to IL5
- Diary of a Roblox Pro: Monster Escape, by Avi Avatar
- Never a Doll Moment, by Andres Miedoso
- Hold on to Your Heads, by Andres Miedoso
D14 reading
- Neverseen, by Shannon Messenger
- Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kid
Media Completed
Ari Avatar is dared to go into an abandoned warehouse and discovers a monster. Not too clever, but IL6 liked it.
Desmond and Andres visit Desmond’s grandma’s house, where they encounter a houseful of creepy dolls.
To her surprise, Edna discovers she’s the chosen one. She has to leave retirement to save people from rampaging dragons. So cute and funny.
Desmond and Andres go to a thrift store to buy a raincoat. There, they get attacked by a headless mannequin. I’m sad to say this is the last published Desmond Cole book as of the beginning of 2025. IL6 will be so disappointed.
Hibernator's Library 