fox

When we bought this house and had the addition put on it a few years ago, there were two rooms we barely touched: one of the front bedrooms (we had them replaced the light fixture and had also replaced the blinds and doorknob ourselves) and the hall bath (we had them add an exhaust fan because the addition required sealing up what had been the window). That bedroom is our guest room, and that bathroom is where the prince gets his baths even when we don't have company.

( Hall bath )

( The other front bedroom )

This morning my kid was sitting in my lap and decided he'd drunk enough of his milk and said "Want to pat Mommy's hair." Put his milk down and turned to me and smoothed my hair down into my face with both hands. It's actually very soothing. :-) "Close your eyes," he said, with the right pronoun and everything - speaking more clearly every day, every hour it sometimes seems - and just stroked my head and my face and said "Mommy sleeping." When I said no, Mommy's not sleeping, he said "Mommy resting." ♥♥♥

Oh! In other news, I bought a weighted blanket and have been sleeping under it for five or six nights now, and it's quite good. It's not totally life-changing, but I think my life has been pretty easy on the continuum of difficulties, so. I haven't had trouble falling asleep when I first go to bed at night, so the fact that I fall asleep within minutes is not new; but now when I wake up in the middle of the night, I fall back asleep much more quickly than I'd been doing. Seriously: within minutes rather than lying awake for an hour or more. Worth the price of admission right there. And for a side benefit, it seems to be nicely handling the tension in my right shoulder. So I think we have a winner.

I'm working from home today, as I always do on a Wednesday, but there isn't a ton of work to do, which isn't a shocker on the day before Thanksgiving. Some time today I need to make a pie crust. And generally stay out of the way of the professionals who are Doing Things to my house that I can't or can't manage to do myself.

Some weeks or months ago, I met the mother of one of the prince's friends in the hallway at daycare and we had a pleasant one- or two-minute conversation about nothing much.

Earlier this week, I met the father of the same friend and mentioned that earlier conversation: "I was talking to your wife a few weeks ago and --"

"Well, my ex," he said.

No accusation in his voice, just a heads-up, but I reflexively said "Oh, I'm sorry" (hoping retrospectively that he heard it as "I'm sorry to have made that assumption" rather than "I'm sorry to hear your marriage didn't work out," because I don't know their lives and can't guess the ways and degrees in which this arrangement is better for whom) and then went on with what we were saying - mainly how the daily reports often have cute pictures of both of our kids, because they enjoy playing together so much.

Later that same morning I met the father of another of the prince's friends in the parking lot, and his kid was with him and pointed to me and said "That's the prince's mommy!" and the dad stopped to chat because he's apparently been hearing about my kid all the time, a thing I also heard from that same kid's mom several weeks ago when I met her at pickup time. Which I said to this dad - referring to the kid's other parent as "his mom" rather than "your wife." Safer?

This morning, a co-worker was updating me on a project we're working on and telling me about a conversation he'd had with a very senior person at another agency. He'd referred to the senior person only by title, no names, and then I pronouned the senior person as "he" and the co-worker corrected me (not judgmentally, just in that way you do) with "she."

Fifteen minutes later I was talking to my mom about an appointment she has this afternoon with a new doctor, and I interrupted myself just before pronouning to ask if the doctor is a man or a woman.

I have so much room in which to be less careless.

It's a long shot, because I think I don't have a ton of readership these days, but here is a question that has nothing to do with my kid! :-D

The question is about a fillable PDF I'm trying to put together. The fields involved in my question are these:
items A1 - A5, A6 - A10, A10 - A15, etc.: user enters a score 0 through 5 (validated).
items T1, T2, and T3: totals of items A1 - A5, A10 - A15, and A20 - A25.
items F1, F2, and F3: product of item Tx and a multiplier.
item N: total of items F1, F2, and F3.
item X: a text display with one of three outputs determined by the value of N.

Everything is working beautifully EXCEPT that I would like to have a fourth output option for X, which is *nothing* (blank) in the event that any item A is null. That is: I want the user to enter scores for all the As before X outputs any display at all. Right now it is defaulting to the output if N is zero, and nothing I've been able to come up with can convince the machine to do anything different. I can't get X to care if any A is null, and I can't get F to care if any A is null, and I can't even get T - which is actually interacting directly with A - to care if any A is null. And as long as T is defaulting to zero, then F is defaulting to zero, so N is defaulting to zero, so X is defaulting to "if N < 50" and I'm up a tree.

Any help?

When I left for rehearsal last night the kid was sobbing because of all the things that had to happen before he could have his bedtime milk bottle. Poor buddy. And then it turned out his dad had misunderstood my whole Bedtime Transformation project, so he rocked him to sleep after all, and who knew whether or how that had set the project back.

So tonight’s bedtime went fine until I left the room. Poor kid cried for five minutes and wasn’t letting up so I went back in. Several minutes of hugs and patting and another try at leaving the room and trying to persuade him to lie down (because he’s old enough to understand language and concepts now, after all) - and finally he was almost asleep except that the light from the night light was in his eyes, but turning it off leaves the room too dark and makes him nervous, so I moved the extra blanket over to be a shade and finally managed to sneak out. Half an hour after the first time I tried.

And then took out the trash and recycling and unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher and did some washing up and ate ice cream for dinner and then drank. some. wine. because WOULDN’T YOU?

I might have a little more wine before I go to bed.

In other local and nonlocal news:

( Mom )

( Friends )

( Products )

( Dream non-theater )

I thought I had another thought, but I can't remember it now. Maybe it was to complain about work. Meh. Fill in your work complaints here. I'm sure we're all frustrated with our jobs in one way or another.

♥

Following the sudden death last summer of my chorus's music director, this year and next we're having guest conductors for each concert cycle while a nationwide (worldwide, for all I know) search determines who will be our next boss for real. There are four concerts per year, but I've only really done two of them. I punked out of last fall's concert after the first one or two rehearsals because my work was going bananas and I couldn't promise to be there on time reliably or indeed ever, plus I was eight months pregnant and ultimately self-care turned out to be the better way to go; and having had the baby on November 23 of course there was no chance I was going to do a Christmas concert in the second week of December. So I was back for the spring concert, which was led by a local guy who is not unknown to us and who I think a lot of people had pre-existing negative feelings about?, but from whom I learned a lot and in fact would welcome opportunities to sing for him again in the future. (Something about the British choral tradition, man. These Church of England guys have a style I seem to respond to.)

We're doing the summer concert now, led by a young guy who is very demanding and take-no-crap in a way that I think a lot of chorus members may not be liking. I admit sometimes his tone is a little bit ... hypercritical of amateurs, let's say. Nothing he says is wrong but it wouldn't kill him to be a little gentler about how he says it? Although he may be softening from one week to the next. But he's certainly the most obvious example (barring the Christmas concert leader, whom I never met) of how having these guest conductors separates the wheat from the chaff in a lot of ways? Our late lamented music director was, let me be clear, a brilliant musician and conductor whose loss is keenly felt throughout the local musical community, but he may have been a little hypocritical of amateurs, if you know what I mean, where people would get entrenched in bad habits and he wouldn't or couldn't or didn't have the heart to insist that they shape up or ship out. I don't know if this current guest leader is going to drive away people who don't like his style, and I don't know how much overlap there is between people who don't like his style and people who struggle to learn the music to a high standard or even match pitches. I am not alone in being a person who does not struggle to do either of these things. This guy's first rehearsal, I left early because I wasn't feeling well; the following week I was there but sitting over in the sick-bay area with a migraine, not singing; the following week was the first night of Passover so I missed a soprano-and-alto sectional that he wasn't leading anyway. Then last week and this week I was there, shutting up when he was giving directions and singing the right notes probably 90% of the time (and visibly watching the beat - what a concept! - and correcting myself when I sang something wrong). It's a sometimes depressingly small group of people who meet these qualifications.

So just now I got an e-mail from our operations manager asking me and two others if we'd take some small solo parts in the main work we're preparing for this concert (a world premiere commissioned by our late previous boss, incidentally). I don't precisely recognize the name of the other soprano, whom they're asking to take the sop1 part, but I'd be surprised if it isn't who I think it is and I just don't know her very well, a fine singer with a bigger and warmer voice than mine (so it makes sense to put me on sop2, which is not a mezzo part at all but just lower in the chord); and the alto is our resident countertenor, hands down the best singer in the alto section. Put another way: if the other soprano is who I think it is [eta:Oh, huh, she's got a photo linked to her e-mail address and it isn't who I thought it was at all, which just goes to show that we're none of us the only ones who can do anything, doesn't it? - and I wonder what has happened to the singer I thought we were talking about], I'm really pleased to be considered to be the third member of a group that consists of her and that particular alto. And there are only really two ways I could have got this gig: (1) by the guest conductor asking our chorus master and accompanist, who know all of us, who they'd recommend for the solo parts - not impossible, but it doesn't seem to be his style; or (2) by the guest conductor saying to our chorus master and accompanist (and possibly ops manager), based on our rehearsal comportment and evident abilities, something like "That singer and that one and that one - I don't know their names, but they're the ones I want."

\o/

So I'm looking at my bank account online this evening, because Reasons, and making sure I'm all square with various things, and I see that the most recent transaction is a payment to the gas company for an amount that is approximately five times our most recent gas bill - a bill I pretty clearly remember scheduling, though, for the amount that is actually due, to be paid next week when it is due from our joint account, so how on earth is this 5x gas bill already gone from my personal account? And just before I start to flip my lid that omg someone has managed to access my online accounts and is writing checks for random amounts to random utility companies ...

... I realize that the 5x gas bill amount in question is in fact exactly the amount of my most recent phone bill. And that "Verizon Wireless" and "Washington Gas" are adjacent on my online bill pay list of payees. And that what I did was pay my phone bill to the gas company (a) a week before the gas bill was due and (b) instead of paying it to the phone company.

So that was fun. We'll have a few months' worth of credit with the gas company, at least, and of course the phone bill is late but not disastrously so, and I went on the app and paid it immediately with my credit card, so it won't get worse and shouldn't show up on my next phone bill, and I certainly hope that won't happen again. I'd say "it's been that sort of day," but it hasn't, really - only the day I paid the bills evidently was. :-}

The bar mitzvah boy loves the basketball yarmulke (and didn't already have one) and plans to wear it at the ceremony.

\o/

How to know it's long past time for a new gripper: Your gripper leaves your shoe on a whim of its own while you are sweeping a rock, and your foot flies out from under you and you go down backwards with no chance to break your fall and your head bounces off the ice.

I'm okay. Saw stars for a couple of seconds, left the game (obviously), and my in-laws brought Himself up to the club so he could drive my car home. We stopped in the ER, where I had a CT scan that showed nothing extraordinary inside my head, which is good. Concussion, yes; worse than that, no.

Today I did not go to work. I've got muscle aches from tensing up against the inevitable impact, and my head hurts, but the dizziness is almost gone. As scary episodes go, it's been about as smooth as possible.

So I had this cold. It's not unheard of for people to have head colds in December. Especially given a series of other stressful events, to wit:

• 11/16, root canal phase 1
  
• 11/21, pre-Thanksgiving party at our house
  
• 11/24–29, family at our house for Thanksgiving
  
• 12/2, my uncle died just after midnight and we drove up to New York in the evening
  
• 12/3, we buried him in the afternoon and drove back in the evening
  
• 12/5–6, Himself's chorus had Christmas concerts
  
• 12/5, Himself's aunt died
  
• 12/7, root canal phase 2 (rescheduled from 12/3, see above)

Sunday 6th is when I first woke up feeling head cold-y, and no wonder. My own chorus Christmas concerts were the following weekend, the 12th and 13th, so that Monday 7th I went to rehearsal, but starting to fight a cold and eight hours out from root canal, I sat on the sidelines and followed along in my book rather than try to sing.

By Wednesday I felt like going to that evening's last-but-one rehearsal would be doable in the moment but a biggish setback; only those rehearsals are normally compulsory, plus I'd missed three of the permitted two rehearsals for this concert (they know and trust me, I guess, and the music isn't exactly impossible at Christmas), so I was really anxious about it; I e-mailed the People Who Make Decisions to say I felt really sad and guilty about the idea of making a choice that would cause me to miss the concert when right then I didn't actually feel that sick, but I didn't want to soldier on and then get sicker and miss not just the concert but also more stuff after that, because obvs this is an important time of year for a church-adjacent musician. Boss T said sitting and marking was okay, but if staying home Wednesday would increase my odds of actually participating on Friday, I could do that too. So I grovelled and thanked him and did stay home Wednesday.

Friday I woke up feeling like death. I took a sick day from work with the intention of resting up in preparation for rehearsal that night. And I mean after I called off, I went back to sleep until 10:00 and then went downstairs and made some tea and took some cough syrup and that wore me out so much I had to have a nap. Not at all well. I totally intended to go to rehearsal right up until about five minutes before it was time to go, when I realized I just couldn't do it. (Himself also pointed out that if standing up from the sofa made me dizzy, I was probably not safe to drive, in which event he didn't want me to go either.) Missing that rehearsal meant I certainly couldn't do the concerts, but at that point I felt sad but not anxious or guilty about it—just wanted to go back to bed.

By virtue of not leaving the house all day Friday or Saturday, I felt so much better Saturday night that I went to bed without taking NyQuil for the first time all week. I now believe this may have been my greatest mistake.

Sunday morning I was feeling enough better that I went to my side job singing for the Catholics. Singing was okay; as usually happens around Christmas and Easter, my high notes were fine and only in the lower parts of my register that are sort of similar to my speaking voice I had a little strain. That afternoon, my speaking voice was feeling a little hoarse. Totally normal in the circumstances and for the time of year. I concluded that the cold had left my head and settled in my chest, as my colds do, for its Lauren Bacall phase.

Monday morning I woke up and couldn't speak. Himself told me it was my turn in the shower, and I opened my mouth to say "Okay" and nothing happend. Tried to say "mm-hmm" and nothing happened. I had to give him a thumbs-up. The steam in the shower helped a little bit, so that by the time I reached work I was able to vocalize a little, but wow. (I brought in my travel humidifier, which runs on bottled water and is now misting up my cubicle.) I assumed this was the same thing that always happens to me, only more so, and went to the Catholics again in the evening for the rehearsal for our Lessons and Carols service, speaking raspily but figuring I'd be able to sing, and when my cue came in the first carol—nothing.

Dudes.

A few bars later I was able to get in, and I could sing most of the rehearsal, but not super well. I tried not to overdo it, as well, of course. But the thing was that nothing hurt. I didn't have any physical cues telling me what was too much or what wasn't. All I could tell was whether I was able to make a sound or not. When I could, I did. When I couldn't, not so much.

Yeah so. Tuesday morning was a lot like Monday morning, which was pretty much the final blow to my confidence that I'd be right as rain by Thursday. And that's when shit started to get real.

This is not the same kind of hoarseness I routinely have in my speaking voice when I've been doing a lot of singing; it is something new and, hey, less painful, but in all other ways worse. Having a cold is not a disaster. Having laryngitis is not a disaster, though for a singer it is an inconvenience. Having laryngitis at one of your two busiest times does approach the disastrous, though.

A co-worker asked if I needed antibiotics, but I said (or mimed), what's infected? I don't think abx could possibly help in any way. My larynx is so swollen I can't use it; I want a shot of cortisone. She said "Okay, do you know of an ENT in the area who treats a lot of singers?" And I said "Huh, I don't know about that, but I do have an ENT that I've been seeing for years about my sinuses. I shall call him." And I did, and he squeezed me in yesterday afternoon, and after having threaded a scope up my nose and down my throat (a very strange sensation; in other news, my gag reflex still works) to confirm I don't have nodes or hemorrhages or anything going on in there, he confirmed that my larynx is covered with post-nasal drainage. Of which I believed I had none, because normally I can tell when that's going on in a variety of ways, one of which is that it makes my throat sore, and I haven't had any pain at all. (The other ways are other usual ways. Ick.) No, he said, there's a lot of it down there, and it's irritating your vocal cords and gumming them up as well. (So basically, as I said to a different co-worker this morning, slightly blow up a long balloon and then encase it in jello. Now try to strum it. It's not going to vibrate the way it would if you strummed it while it was empty and in the air, after all.)

Noted. But he agreed with me when I said listen, 49 weeks out of the year this is the kind of thing that isn't dangerous or anything and the best treatment is waiting it out. The week before Easter and the two weeks around Christmas are different for me—not being able to sing will cost me hundreds and hundreds of dollars, for one thing, and for another thing there are people relying on my being there and singing. There is not a substitute available right now; they all have their own gigs. (Some of them are already substituting in my choir. I am a substitute on two occasions.) If there's a way to fix this quickly, I need it. I have no idea if they can shoot cortisone into a human larynx, but if they can, I'll take it. Or if that scope has a vacuum attachment that can suction the mucus out of there, I promise to hold still. Whatever. Obviously none of the solutions is that drastic. He gave me half a course of prednisone.

I'm a dose and a half into the six-day regimen, and it's like a whole different head cold. I'm also doing other things, because I don't have time to scientifically work out which things are working and which aren't—I have to hit this with everything I've got. Neti pot twice a day, which I'd been doing since the weekend anyway. Mucinex, which I'd been doing since the weekend and am now doing even more. Humidifier in my face pretty much all the time, ditto. Seriously ramping up the hydration, which is probably a good lifestyle change anyway if I can sustain it. Last night I took NyQuil again, solely on the strength of the fact that this issue didn't arise until I'd stopped before. And this morning waiting for the shower I remembered that all the crud got into my larynx by draining down my throat, so I turned over and lay face down until it was my turn. (I stopped taking ibuprofen, which I had been using in an effort to leverage its anti-inflammatory effects. It didn't seem to be doing anything.) The improvement could be down to any one or combination of these things, but I'm giving mad props to the Rx as it's the newest kid on the block and the timing seems right.

Determined to sing on Thursday. And Sunday. And next Thursday. And next Friday. And next Sunday. And the following Friday. And the following Sunday. ... After that, I can go hoarse again. I don't mind. (Which is good, because I probably will.)

We can has cabinets! All our kitchen cabinets are in. Next week the tile is coming for the bathroom floors and also the countertop people are coming to measure and do the things countertop people do. The bathroom vanities won't be here for four weeks, but everything else should be in place by then. Fingers crossed the whole operation will be done by Labor Day. It's been a long year and I want my stuff back from storage.

Also, I had my annual review today and it was entirely positive. Got my raise, effective August 1. Huzzah.

The knot in my shoulder is flaring up extremely unpleasantly. Himself had a knead at it a bit ago and it seemed to help; I'll ask him to do it again before we go to bed, because seriously, the shoulder is so kinked up that my elbow is cramped and the fingers of that hand are tingly.

It's been a good weekend, but even the relaxing has seemed kind of like work.

Yesterday I woke up with a shrieking headache, which I put down to dehydration - I'd had a few drinks at a friend's birthday party the night before, but not actually enough even to feel any sort of buzz, and yet. But it was warm and crowded, so maybe I'd sweated a little more than usual, and also before getting a lift home with a friend I'd gone down to the White House to take rainbow-lit selfies because YAY SCOTUS SHIT YEAH EQUAL MARRIAGE AM I RIGHT?! So: dehydration is my ruling. (Plus, when I get a hangover it usually makes my stomach feel pretty sour too, and this was head only.) I was supposed to take Himself to the dealership so he wouldn't be stranded while his car was getting regular maintenance, but he went without me and we agreed I'd follow and pick him up - only by the time I was out of the shower he said they'd finished already and he'd only had to wait about an hour. After that we did the week's (meal planning and) grocery shopping, had a nap, and went to some friends' for dinner and bridge, because we are madly suburban and domestic. I didn't play a lot of hands, but in one case I opened two hearts (because I had eight points and six hearts to the ace-jack) and my partner jumped directly to six hearts, holy carp, but after losing the opening trick (in which my opponent led the ace of diamonds and neither of us was void), I took the rest and made the slam. Damn right. (My dad would have been so pleased. :-D) I also played brilliant defense on another hand and was responsible for setting the contract. So although I was always the weakest player in my family and it's been ages since I've played, I didn't totally suck. Gladness.

Today I went and bought bagels, dropped off a thing at the UPS store, got a pedicure, and then came home and dusted everything in the living room. We think they're done with the drywall and the sanding of the drywall mud, which has left a fine coat of grit on every. single. thing. in the house, so getting a whole room dust-free was (a) filthy and (b) really satisfying. Plus it's good to know that the progress is still progressing. The tradesmen--plumber, electrician, HVAC guy--took a bit longer with their work than the general contractor had expected them to, so he was kind of chomping at the bit to get his building crew back in here and get the drywall up and the rest of the work moving again, and sure enough they've been fast. Soon they will slap a coat of paint on the kitchen walls and hang up the wall cabinets, because we mysteriously had to take delivery of the cabinets way before anyone was ready for them, and getting the wall ones up will clear up some space to store the under-counter cabinets out of the way so the floor guy can come lay the floors down. And then we will have floors. We're guessing about six more weeks? Which on the one hand seems like a lot of time to finish up the remaining things, but on the other hand, it's already been six months, so we can handle six weeks. But we'll be so glad to be finished; even apart from the fact that everything we own is covered in sand, it's been pretty emotionally and psychically disruptive to be living in sort of two and a half rooms with two-thirds of our stuff in storage for this long. We both want to be able to spread out just a bit and exhale and get some decorations up and so on.

After dinner tonight while I did the washing up (because he cooks), Himself went to the hardware store to get some borax, which we will mix with peanut butter and dab on paper towels and leave around the kitchen in the hope of reducing the population of ants we can't seem to get rid of by keeping it clean or putting out those hexagonal bait traps. Ugh. They're not hurting anyone, I admit, but they're gross and I want them to go away. It's just a matter of time before they come crawling out of my cereal box; I want to get them under control before that happens. (The kitchen is going to be demolished and turned into an office. I am determined the new kitchen will not have ants. I don't know how confident I can be about this.)