I long wondered what I would blog about once North left for college. After all, it’s “a chronicle of suburban lesbian family life,” according to my home page. Noah’s here, of course, but between work and his lengthy bus-to-train-to-bus commute, he’s gone for twelve hours at a stretch on weekdays, and occasionally he works on the weekends, too, as he did two weekends ago, when he needed to work on an ad to convince people not to vote for Jill Stein. (Please don’t any of you do that, especially if you live in a swing state.)
But at the end of September, I thought I was doing reasonably well coming up with topics. I blogged twice that month, which is within the range of normal for me. But then I got stuck. It’s not that we haven’t been doing things, but nothing by itself seemed worthy of a blog post, so here’s a potpourri of our recent doings. (Some of them happened in September, but we won’t be picky about the blog post title.)
- On the day before the fall equinox, the three of us went to the Bon Air Memorial Rose Garden in Arlington, to walk among the roses and zinnias and other late summer flowers. It was very pretty, Noah took a lot of pictures, and afterward we got ice cream at one of the places on the Post’s list of best ice cream in the DC metro area (though that was kind of an accident—it just happened to be nearby, and we didn’t confirm it was on the list until we got home). Noah and I both got the coconut chocolate crunch. I thought it was good, but not chocolaty enough, which was exactly what the Post said, as I learned after the fact.
- There was a street festival the first Sunday in October and we went to see Anna Grace, a preschool/drama camp/Highwood Theater compatriot of North’s perform covers of Hazel Dickens, Iris DeMent, Kris Kristofferson, and Jerry Garcia. She has a lovely voice, and I thought she did particularly good job with the Iris DeMent song, “Working on a World,” even though it’s from the perspective of an older person. Then we got lunch from the food trucks. I got vegetable dumplings and a Thai vegetable-tofu curry and I split a large cup of pumpkin cheesecake ice cream with Noah.
- We always have pizza for dinner on Fridays, alternating between takeout and homemade. The past two homemade nights I made it with pesto in a desperate effort to use up the abundant basil from our garden before it gets too cold for it to survive. The past two takeout nights Beth and I opted to go out rather than order in, once at Koma and once at Red Hound. (Noah gets home after our normal dinner time, so we brought pizza home for him both times.) This has been nice, like a built-in date night. At Red Hound, we had the whole back patio and its fairy lights to ourselves while we waited for our food.
- The kids’ schools used to have a parents’ visitation day on Columbus Day/Indigenous People’s Day/Día de la Raza. It was that day because many parents have the federal holiday off and the kids don’t. Beth and I used to take advantage of the kid-free middle of the day to go out to lunch between visiting one school and then the other. This year Beth and I had no school to visit, but she suggested we go out to lunch anyway. We ended up changing it to dinner at the Olive Lounge because I had a mammogram late that morning and because I decided I’d rather have a night off cooking dinner rather than lunch out anyway.
- In less fun news, around three weeks ago, I was taking my morning walk on a rainy day during a long stretch of rainy days, and I slipped and fell partway down a wooden staircase that leads down to a footbridge that spans Long Branch creek. I hurt the lower right quadrant of my back badly. It’s almost but not quite completely healed now, but at the beginning I had trouble bending over far enough to put on and take off my own socks, and I had to skip swimming for a week and then do a shortened version of my routine the second week. (The third week I was back to my full routine.) I also had to postpone the aforementioned mammogram until Monday because I didn’t think I could twist into the required positions. (Then to make matters worse, I tripped on another walk a few days after I hurt my back because I was looking at my phone while walking and I bloodied my left knee and shin. This was a minor injury, though, just a couple scrapes.)
- The kittens will be seven months old on Thursday. They are growing and looking more like small cats and less like the tiny fuzzballs we used to be able to hold in the palms of our hands. They are plenty mischievous, though. Willow is an expert climber, finding a path to a shelf in Noah’s closet that’s near the ceiling; Walter is focusing his explorations on the great outdoors. He is always dashing out the front door and occasionally he slips past our notice and gets to stay out on the porch until he cries to be let back in. They both enjoy the laser pointer Noah recently remembered he owned. Here’s a video Noah took of Willow pursuing the red dot. Doesn’t she have an impressive vertical leap?
- I’ve been keeping busy with book club and writing postcards to voters. We read Wind in the Willows in September and started Fathers and Children in October—we will continue that one through November. My last few batches of postcards went out to Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.
- We got off to late start decorating for Halloween because North is often the one who gets that ball rolling, but I had Noah bring everything he could find up from the basement on Saturday and then I brought up the rest and put a few things out. I’m expecting some help from North with this project, though, because they are coming home for fall break and will be home late Friday night (or in the wee hours of Saturday morning). We can’t wait to see them.