You're Doing It Wrong

At the first match the family sitting in front of us brought in their own food.

They ate little tangerines, raisins, and trail mix.

At the half every one of them disappeared and came back with pizza, hot dogs, and hot chocolate. They also left every scrap of garbage under their seats.

I get bringing in food if you must because you want healthier choices. But I thought it was pretty funny that they used it as an appetizer until they could dig into the real stuff.

It’s like when you bring a lunch to work and it’s: carrot sticks and fruit and turkey on whole wheat. Then you eat it by 10am and go out at noon and get a meatball sandwich and chips.

I spotted a tulip out front when I got home yesterday.

Last night when we finished with the DVR but before we turned off the TV, we caught part of a documentary about the band Genesis (They’ve been around forever but were especially popular in the early 80s). This was not one of my favorite bands or even a band I cared much about and honestly, if you’d mentioned the documentary earlier I would have expressed exactly zero interest in seeing it. But we were mesmerized. The show brought together the main band members and interviewed them in the present together with lots of clips from the past. It was really well done and you could still get a whiff of bitterness among some of them. hehe.

I found a bunch of bulbs that I stuck back in a corner and missed planting last fall. Last weekend I had a few spare moments so I put them in pots thinking I might still have a change to enjoy them.

Then this. Raccoons are jerks.

I can’t seem to get ahead. It seems like every time I turn around there’s something else that’s not working right that needs my attention and is more demanding that expected.

Right now my email doesn’t work right. I’ve spent 2 days trying to troubleshoot it and getting help that tells me to do exactly what my email to support said I tried and didn’t work and then referring me to a URL for more information — the same URL that I told support I was using to try to troubleshoot the problem.

And support signs off with “let us know if there’s anything else we can do to help.” But you didn’t help yet. Now they want me to talk to the Mac geniuses — and when I follow the Mac genius instructions it tells me to talk to my webhosting.

I don’t have time to get to it today which means I probably won’t have time until next weekend. It’s a vicious cycle.

Here is Kyla Ross is our boss. My favorite NCAA gymnast is a senior now so this was my last chance to see her in person. Both teams were fantastic. It was a super fun meet. Jade Carey is supposed to join Oregon State next year. You don’t know that name now but you will know it after the Olympics — if that even happens. sigh.

Colleague went to Hawaii and asked for inventory on our snack cupboard. We have a whole other box of macadamia candies because brace face here can’t eat them. But the cookies were running low. He brought back a giant box of these fancy cookies plus a Girl Scout snack pack so snack cupboard is stocked again.

Portland Meadows is finished. According to the Internet it opened in 1946. I went there twice. Once I saw Chuck Berry and the Grateful Dead. (They played separately.) The other time I went to bet on the Kentucky Derby. As I recall, everything was on screens. There weren’t any in person horse or dog races. But it’s hard to remember.

A couple of days ago I looked out the window from the laundry room and saw something weird in the flower bed.

I ran out and saw a dirty bandana. I figured it must be from a pet that wandered through and I could deal with it later. I had this great idea that I would put it out front and maybe the person whose pet lost a bandana would see it and be grateful to have it back.

I don’t know why I care so much about this strange bandana. Why is someone’s pet in my backyard? It’s just a bandana. People who put bandanas on pets must expect to lose a few. Regardless, I wanted to do the neighborly thing.

Sorry these photos are so awful. I took them from the bus. Even though I never went there and don’t care about horse racing, I still feel bad that it’s gone. I’m not sure of the exact plans but some sort of warehouses.

This morning I looked out the window in the laundry room and the bandana was gone.

I doubt a person hunted around and came into my backyard to find a lost bandana.

But it seems weird that an animal would come by and grab it. “Oh look, my lost bandana.” We have raccoons and opossum that wander through our yard. Would they have grabbed a bandana for their secret stash? It’s a mystery.

Here’s where all that grumping about back in October is going to pay off. Look at all those sproutlets bursting through the ground. Prepare for many many flower photos in a couple of months.

Or sooner? This baby looks like it’s going to pop any day now.

This is the main groundhog radish area. They are supposed to loosen and condition the soil. I just went back to read the instructions curious how I’m supposed to handle in the spring. Well, if I read it correctly, the ideal situation is that we would have had a hard freeze and they would die. The tops would wither and the radish would get squishy and I would rototil and plant as usual.

But as you can see, this hasn’t happened and the plants are growing up a storm. If I understood the directions correctly I’m supposed to harvest that 50 bushels of daikon radish. Luckily I got that pickle queen cookbook because unless we get a hard freeze very soon, I’m making pickles.

In case you don’t know what you’re looking for, I have helpfully made a red arrow pointing at the radish.

I looked up the history of my (dental) crowns. I got my first one in the early 90s and then one in 2008 and this exciting 2012 pre-vacation emergency, and I guess 2 in 2016. I didn’t have root canals for all of them. For the 2012 root canal the doctor prescribed an opioid painkiller — I don’t know how many, 10? 12? Shows you how far we’ve come, this time they gave me a few of those super-power ibuprofens. I didn’t have huge issues with pain for any of them.

This is from Library of Congress free wpa posters.

Don’t be jealous but yet again, I am a queen because I am getting a crown. Well, I’ll get a crown if I’m lucky. My tooth disintegrated so thoroughly I don’t know what they’re going to do with it.

It started hurting around Christmas, as in after a sip of hot or cold you’d have to peel me off the ceiling. I was prepared to live with it until after the braces came off but the discomfort was making eating and drinking difficult. I had my braces tightened and then couldn’t chew on either side of my mouth for about 36 hours.

The dentist looked at the xray and said: I don’t even know what’s going on with this tooth. It’s like it’s imploding from the inside out.

She gave me a referral to the endontist who discussed a lot of scenarios and then told me they had a schedule change and could zap me immediately.

Hell yes! I said.

The minute he drilled into it, the inside part of the tooth flew off – which wasn’t unexpected. I guess my tooth rotted inside until it was like a tooth-shell? I don’t know. I’m not an oral health professional and am not one of those people who needs to know the life history of why my tooth failed.

He did his thing and patched it up and I can freely drink cold water without flinching which is the best part of this whole mess. I have to go back to the dentist for her thoughts on what next.

This is the living room of the house I grew up in circa 1980-ish. It’s hard to believe all that orange and green was a good idea. If you look at the house on Zillow they have hardwoods now.

We need to deal with our floors in our house. It makes me feel bad about myself every time I look at our dingy, horrible carpet and disintegrating flooring.

I’ve hated our carpet since the day we’ve moved in.

We’re just so bad at dealing with house projects. When Bob’s in school we don’t have time. When we have time we’d always rather be doing something else.

We talked about at least shampooing the carpet so it didn’t look like an accident scene but if we have to move all the furniture we might as well replace the floor and if we replace the floor we might as well get rid of the terrible wallpaper and paint. Now it’s a huge project.

I was determined to deal with it this summer but already the weekends are getting filled up with family or fun things. Seems like something we need to get on the calendar early if we have to hire people. I predict we will limp along with what we have a bit longer.