Adulting – Page 5 – Mom's Guide to the Galaxy

Well, that’s not good…

When I was in high school, my father attended the curriculum night every year, meeting my teachers and getting an overview of what I would be studying that year. My last year there, I signed up for the Introduction to Poetry to class. I’ll be honest, I’ve never enjoyed analyzing poetry, but the teacher, Mr. Dan Bowden, only taught that and AP English. Mr. Bowden was a distinctive figure at my school, popping his head into our English class to ask a question, then reciting from whatever Shakespearean play we happened to be reading at the time, or stepping into the auditorium and joining the girls’ gym class for a minute or two as we attempted aerobics. After two years at the school, I knew I wanted to take a class with him before graduating.

My father, as I mentioned before, had a degree in English Language and Literature. It was still a bit of a surprise when he handed me a book of poetry the next morning with a page marked to show to Mr. Bowden. The brief poem was Lord Finchley by Hilaire Belloc, who seems to have been a fascinating character, and reads as such:

Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light
Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.

Water near the base of our new water softener, a black cylinder next to our blue water tank. And, of course, a cat - Arwen - checking on the situation.

While I am by no means wealthy, I have kept this poem in mind mainly in the last decade as I’ve navigated home improvements and repairs. And so this morning, when I walked into the garage and found water emerging from the newly installed water softener, I immediately rushed to fix it. And by fix it, I mean call the water softener company to repair it… you did just read Lord Finchley, didn’t you?

While there are some projects I’ll handle inside the house, I have a strict rule about not messing with any appliances that integrate with the utilities: water, natural gas, or electricity, and the water softener touches two of those. For now, I have a towel down in case it leaks again – it appears to be related to when it cycles, which is about once a week. The towel is dry enough that Zuko sat on it for a while.

An overdue mulching

I never got around to refreshing my mulch last year; my last mulch delivery was in May 2021 (as mentioned here). It looked great at the time, but mulch gradually decomposes (that’s kind of the point) and needs to be replaced. I had another 8 cubic yards of mulch delivered last weekend and, while I’m definitely making a dent, between my hip issues and air quality concerns (due to wildfires in Canada), I’m having to take it a little slower than last time. Admittedly, I’ve had the mulch for less than a week at this point; this is what it looked like Saturday afternoon, after filling just one bucket:

Sunday morning, I switched to using a wagon to haul mulch to a few spots in the backyard. I could tell I had made a dent on the pile when I headed in for a shower and work on Monday:

8 yards of mulch minus a chunk a couple days after delivery

I’m deliberately not cleaning up the scattered mulch that I missed while shoveling; it gives me an idea of how much progress I’ve made. Of course, so do the results, like our herb garden out front after I finished placing mulch Wednesday morning:

fresh mulch around the star-shaped herb garden

I’m mostly done with the front at this point, leaving some sizable areas in the back and along the edges of the house still to do. All in all, it’s good progress.

A new sofa was needed

Creak went the sofa, again, as I sat down on it. Clink when I leaned against it while sitting on the floor. I had found a metal piece on the floor a while back, and only recently noticed another one on the side table. Sitting down on this old sofa – and it was old, a hand-me-down from family with both a scratchy fabric and pattern that made me wonder which decade it was from – was making me nervous. I placed an order for a new sofa online and moved the old sofa, then removed the cushions.

The wooden frame for our old sofa with some detached metal support pieces. And, of course, a cat.

I don’t know a lot about furniture design, but I’m fairly sure the metal supports aren’t supposed to be curling downwards. The pieces we found on the floor were those round bits at the end, which the supports hooked into.

Pieces of the new sofa waiting to be assembled.

The new sofa required some assembly. Honestly, this was a relief, as I was concerned about getting a sofa into the house; taking the old frame out was challenging enough. The packaging was quite clever: box 1 held the base, with all of the vacuum-packed cushions, the back support pieces, and the legs tucked inside the base itself; box 2 held the essentially armrests. The legs screwed in with simple twisting, and all of the other pieces simply slid together.

The assembled new sofa featuring, of course, a cat.

The sofa was, of course, cat-tested (and approved) immediately. Actually, there was some cat testing during assembly, but I was too busy to get those photos.

Birds hidden in a field of dandelions

We’ve had a decent mix of sun and rain here recently, causing an explosive growth of grass and the plants mixed in, particularly the dandelions. This first photo shows the dandelions and clover in my lawn shortly before the most recent mowing.

Dandelions growing tall in my mix of clover and grass.

This second photo shows similar growth in a friend’s lawn, which was mostly a field of dandelions at that point.

Dandelions growing tall in a friend's yard.

If you’ve never seen a Canada goose, I should inform you that they usually stand between a foot and two feet tall. I was amused when I realized that there were three Canada geese in the nearby field where I took the next photo; I think two of them were sitting down.

Canada geese resting in the tall dandelions in a nearby area.

If you’ve never encountered a Canada goose, this is an appropriate distance – far away – as they’re not friendly and can be quite aggressive at times. I periodically see them on my walks around town, and occasionally have to alter my route because of them.

Game-fying chores

I’ve said it before, nobody likes chores. There may be a specific one you enjoy (hanging laundry on a nice day, for example), but overall, they’re something that just needs to get done. And then there’s the matter of distributing chores evenly among household members. I had looked at chore apps before and hadn’t found one that was customizable enough to suit our chore list and that seemed fun.

That all changed this week, when someone mentioned Chore Wars on a group chat. The basic premise is that each household or party member creates a profile, and the Dungeon Master sets up the “Adventures,” allocating experience points (XP), chances of finding treasure or a wandering monster, as well as setting the relevant stats (standard gaming attributes based on Dungeons & Dragons or similar games). The gold pieces accrued for each chore are between a range of numbers, also customizable. There’s even a quick start for the Adventures that will create a set of common chores pre-loaded with all of that information.

I used the quick start for our initial set of Adventures, removing the irrelevant ones (ironing?) and replacing them with house-specific items like cleaning the litter boxes, taking out the compost, and refilling the bird feeder. And, after finding one the hard way this morning, cleaning up hairballs.

Our adventure has just started, so we’re still figuring out the website and haven’t decided if we’re going to exchange gold for real life rewards. Maybe once we reach a certain number of gold pieces between us, we’ll cash that in for a nice dinner.

Will you join me in donating to support trans rights in exchange for RPGs?

I have a few things I want to post about – a fabulous movie we watched this week, a book or three I want to share – but this seems more important at the moment. Several states, including Florida, have recently passed bills targeting trans and queer people, including removing books from schools that mention LGBTQIA+ topics. Florida in particular is actively removing topics from their public universities, hampering the education students selected when they chose to pursue a degree there.

I don’t know if the politicians making these decisions honestly believe the bullshit they’re spouting, or if they’re just trying to rile up voters leading into the next (painfully long) presidential election cycle. What really matters is that they are hurting people in the process: LGBTQ youth who are unsupported by family or community as they figure out who they are in life have higher suicide rates.

Back to RPGs, or Role-Playing Games (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, Dungeons & Dragons is probably the most famous of those)… for a $5 (or more) donation, you can buy this bundle with 505 TTRPG-related items. (The TT stands for Table Top, as RPGs are traditionally played sitting around a table.) If you donate $10 or more, there’s an added supplement available to you (woot! 506 items!).

What are you waiting for? The offer is only good through the next 22 days.

A medically-oriented first quarter

I’ve had ongoing pain in one hip (and sometimes leg) for a while now, and finally made it into the Orthopedics office at the beginning of the year to address the issue. Noting that I highly recommend against dealing with pain for “a while”; I should have gone in sooner, so I won’t bother listing excuses.

After eight weekly visits for physical therapy (PT), there was some improvement, but also ongoing stiffness and pain, so my doctor sent me for an MRI. That was an interesting experience in several ways, starting with how I arrived twenty minutes early but checked in fifteen minutes late. (Someone forgot to unlock the main door.)

MRI stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and there’s a fascinating explanation on Wikipedia about how it uses magnetic fields and radio waves to map out soft tissues. I was warned that it’s noisy… a “cacophony” of sound. The office fortunately provided both ear plugs (standard) and a headset (apparently this varies); the operator was able to talk to me via the headset.

I was concerned that I would get bored; I was told walking in that I needed to try to lay still for thirty-five minutes (without a book or cat!). Instead, I found the process interesting. Before each scan, the automated system told me the expected duration, and I almost immediately noticed that the sounds for each scan, and even within some of the scans, were different, and the direction the sound came from varied. After some thumps and murs and hums, I was released back into the world to await my results.

The scan results were sent to me online, followed fairly quickly by my doctor’s assessment, translating medical-ese into, well, slightly less medical-ese: “chronic degenerative changes to your labrum and hip impingement”. That’s about what it sounds like… I scheduled a follow-up appointment for today, and she clarified that it’s essentially wear and tear on my hip joint. We rolled straight into the possibility she had mentioned before scheduling the MRI: a cortisone shot.

Alas, it will be a couple weeks before I really know the impact of the shot, it takes the steroids a bit of time to do their magic to reduce the inflammation in the area. I was impressed with my doctor’s bedside manner, she talked through each part of the injection process as she approached it, from the pinch of the needle going in, to the sensations I’d feel as the different numbing agents were released into my system.

Now I wait and see.

Chores as self-care for future me

From dishes to sweeping to cleaning windows, nobody that I know really likes chores. These daily, weekly, or even intermittent tasks are things we do because they need to get done, not because we enjoy them.

I had a revelation the other night as I was preparing for bed. As I approached the end of a toilet paper roll – you know, that single sheet or two left that have you wondering whether you should finish it – I realized that I would either be changing the roll in the low light of bed time prep or no light in the middle of the night. Changing it in that moment was looking after future me.

I thought about other chores that I do and how I space them out, realizing that I frequently look out for my future self. I start most mornings by emptying the dish drainer (after feeding the cats, of course), so that I have space after breakfast when I wash dishes. I wash some dishes as I’m cooking, reducing the clutter on the counter and in the sink. Since we have a policy that the person who didn’t cook washes dishes at shared meals, this also lightens the other cook’s workload.

I still don’t really like chores, but future me always appreciates the effort when she finds only one chore to do instead of two. Or toilet paper that doesn’t need changing in the middle of the night.

Inventing Spanglish terminology

We have a strangely multilingual household, since Cassandra and I both speak English (obviously) and Spanish (at different levels) and are both using Duolingo to pick up at least tidbits of other languages. When she tells a cat to get off the counter, she usually says it in Hawaiian; I frequently say it in Spanish. If I’m trying to say something in German (which is not the language I’m currently focused on) and don’t know a word, I’m more likely to fill in with the Spanish equivalent instead of the English.

It’s probably not surprising that sometimes we invent words to fill in some of the gaps. Having spent a decent amount of time in fandom, I’ve been familiar with the term “glomp” for well over a decade, but Dictionary.com and Google Translate don’t recognize the word. Since cats are frequently glomped (carefully) in this house, knowing the Spanish equivalent seemed useful. So Cassandra invented one when she said “estoy glompeando a Zuko.” Or was it “estoy glompando a Zuko“?

After some consideration, I believe the root verb should be glompear, and it’s treated as a regular verb for conjugation: yo glompeo, tu glompeas, nosotros glompeamos, etc. But it could also be a root verb of glompar, conjugated to yo glompo, tu glompas, nosotros glompamos, etc. Which do you think is the most appropriate translation?

If you don’t like it, que-ever, don’t use it. For my part, necesito glompear un gato antes de trabajar.

Normalize discussing health with your family

Earlier this year, I reached out to my mother asking her to document any health issues she or my father had experienced over the years. I probably should have asked for that information half a lifetime ago, when I moved out on my own, but as I age, it seems more relevant to know what I might be dealing with in the future. We already knew that my maternal grandmother had Alzheimer’s and my father had multiple strokes near the end of his life, but I wanted to know if there were other things we should watch out for (or should have, in some cases).

For example, my parents both developed different shellfish allergies as they aged, with different effects; I knew that already when I reacted badly to crayfish a couple years ago. I didn’t realize that my mother has high cholesterol, though I’m sure my doctor would have liked to know that. (Those medical office intake questionnaires need to add “not that anybody’s told me” as an answer on the family history questions.)

I didn’t learn until this year that my mother had “very heavy long periods” before having a hysterectomy when I was rather young. I did point out that it would have been useful to know that before we hit puberty, or before our girls did. Then I found out she defined “long” as a week, which prompted a discussion with some female friends as to what is considered normal, since before perimenopause, when I wasn’t on birth control, my periods ran a full seven days like clockwork.

Of greater concern is the question of whether my father had memory issues as he aged, or whether he was just not listening. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to have been documented or addressed with a doctor, so I’m not sure whether it’s something I have to watch out for. Or have somebody else watch out for, since I’d likely forget in that case.