Medium Dawn Felagund of the Fountain

I keep thinking I should post about the covid (as Bobby and I call it at home), but honestly, feel like everyone would be fatigued about hearing the particulars of one more person's lockdown. Still, I know I should, for posterity, right? As a primary document for future historians?

But something has loomed even larger out of that. My father-in-law died yesterday. Three weeks ago, he had emergency open-heart surgery and came through it fine and was doing better every time Bobby spoke with him. He was doing well on Monday night, when Bobby talked to him last.

Yesterday, he wasn't feeling well, my MIL called his doctor, and he was instructed to go to the hospital right away. My SIL came over to help, and while they were helping him to get ready, he collapsed. My MIL did chest compressions; the paramedics managed to get a weak pulse after two applications of the AED, but they lost him again in the ambulance, and they were unable to revive him a second time.

Bobby was holding an online class, and I was in my daily social hour with my students (or trying to be ... both of us on video chat at the same time on our Internet does not work well) when my phone started ringing and ringing. It was my mom. Erin was trying to reach Bobby, who was in class and not picking up. At this point, my FIL had been revived enough to have a weak pulse. My SIL was going to call the hospital and update us. Because of the covid, of course, my inlaws could not go to the hospital with the ambulance. Immediately after, we got a call from the post office that they had a box of day-old chicks just arrived for us, so we headed into Orleans to pick them up. Bobby went in, came out, and put the box alive with peeps and tiny scratching claws in my lap and said, "He's gone."

In the context of the covid, it all feels very strange and not quite real. We cannot, of course, travel. Both sets of parents are in the high-risk category, and there is little we could do there anyway to warrant taking the risk. It is not as though there will be a funeral right now. Then there is the weirdness of work: of working with students and families online so right now being in a state of semi-bereavement leave, where I've asked my kids to give me some extra time to respond but otherwise getting my major job functions done and trying to also juggle what the next ten weeks will look like as our supervisory union releases their plan based on the State's guidelines. (The governor has closed our schools for the rest of the year.) It feels like it'd be easier if we were in regular work, where I could just take a couple days of leave.

Right now, Bobby and I are trying to lean hard on good memories. We have a lot! My FIL was a funny guy! Because Bobby and I have been together since we were fourteen (well, he'd just turned fifteen), we essentially grew up together as young adults, and his parents became second parents to me and vice versa. We have been fully a part of each other's lives and families for twenty-four years now, so we have a lot of memories of vacations and holidays and just daily life with his dad.

Several years ago, the Felagund family used to make an annual trek every December to New York City for the day. It was a nice day: time for a leisurely lunch, to wander around the city, capped off with the Radio City Rockettes' show, and followed by a walk back to the bus that involved an inevitable stop for sandwiches at Pret a Manger. Then, under the pretense of The Economy^TM, the bus company stopped running this trip. This year, they started it back up again (perhaps because The Economy^TM has supposedly improved).

Dad asked if we wanted to go, and the decision was instantaneous: Of course we did! To make matters even better, the trip was on a Thursday this year--it had always been on a Monday before, the one day of the week that the Met is closed--so I indulged a fantasy of meeting heartofoshun for lunch, taking the subway to mill about the Met for a couple of hours, and returning in plenty of time to see the show.

But then we got the itinerary. ( Read more... )

Bobby and I went with my parents yesterday to Atlantic City. It is about two-and-a-half hours away, so we usually take a bus a couple of times per year for a day trip. The bus ticket costs $35, which includes a $25 casino voucher. I am not a fan of gambling; I don't find slot machines fun, and I have never won anything. (ANYTHING. Not even $20.) Bobby and I usually spend our combined $50 pretty quickly and spend the rest of the day on the beach, boardwalk, and pier. Bobby usually wins enough to pay for our lunch and the rest of our bus tickets, so we usually end up getting our trip for free.

We had beautiful weather: sunny and warm but not hot. We had our choice of three places to disembark; my parents prefer the Taj Mahal of the three available casinos (Showboat--closing at the end of the month!--and Bally's), which is at the north end of the boardwalk. We had lunch reservations at Carmine's in Tropicana at the south end of the boardwalk, so we played some of our vouchers (after waiting in an interminable line so that Bobby and I could get the vouchers put on cards, something the greeter used to do right on the bus but that now requires a slog across the casino, a long queue, and a much more drawn-out process). I broke my losing streak by winning a big $31.95 on a penny machine called Icarus while Bobby was off playing something called the Norse Warrior.

We took a taxi to the Tropicana; Carmine's was great, as always. Bobby and I were planning to make the 1.5-mile walk back up the boardwalk to Taj Mahal, and my parents decided they wanted to join us, so we started north, stopping into some of the shops along the way, and for breaks every few blocks for my dad, who is not much of a walker.

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Welp, it's been a busy past few weekends, hence my relative silence here. Bobby and I have been spending most of our time outside, getting ready for planting season. Everything was crunched into April and the first few weeks of May (versus beginning in March) since we were under a blanket of snow for just about all of March. And last year, what with Bobby taking his Outdoor Emergency Care class for ski patrol and me physically unable to do much beyond moan and groan, we slacked off on things like weeding, so we have extra to do this year, since one thing weeds do very well is make more weeds and survive conditions that kills just about everything else living. (The latter attested by the number of plants we lost this winter: both blueberries, a holly bush, both rose trees, and the arborvitae, of course. We also have broadleaf evergreen shrub that is trying hard to live with some modest success after all the foliage on it dying this winter. But the dandelions are doing great! :)

Anyway, Mother's Day is the traditional planting day in central Maryland for tender plants, so true to tradition, we started to put our plants into the ground a week ago, which means that this week has been a lot of weeding, planting, fertilizing, mulching; weeding, planting, fertilizing, mulching; and so on. But everything is now in the ground and doing great.

I wish I could say the same for our bees. ( Bee-Talk Cut for Those Who Prefer to Avoid Bee-Talk :) )

We've also been busy socially, seeing friends on the weekend (sometimes accidentally! We went out for Indian on Friday, and I usually email our friends Tristan and Don to see if they want to meet us over there, but we decided to go so late that I didn't this time. But when we arrived, who had arrived only just shortly before us? So we got permission to combine our tables.) Last night, we hosted dinner for our parents as a belated Mother's Day dinner. We had a green salad, teriyaki chicken (asparagus quesadilla for me!), Bobby's incredible "island rice," grilled asparagus seasoned with that ubiquitous Maryland seasoning of Old Bay, and tres leche cake for dessert, topped with fresh strawberries and mango. Bobby made piña coladas and got the moms pretty soused. I was supposed to make strawberry ice cream, but every place we checked this weekend was sold out of local strawberries (Bobby had bought his for the cake earlier in the week), so I had to do vanilla instead.

We are dogsitting for our friend Dawn this weekend, so in addition to our two big dogs, we have her big black dog Duffy. And my inlaws, of course, brought their Great Pyrenees Bella, so the house was overrun with dogs. Big dogs.

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About six months ago, Bobby and I decided we wanted to visit my sister and sister-in-law in England for the holidays. We haven't been able to make that happen in the eight-or-so years that Sharon has been here. So Tuesday night, we made the onerous overnight flight to London, then the short flight north to Newcastle. (Including a layover in Heathrow in which I fell soundly asleep in a chair and woke up after having drooled all down the front of my shirt.) We usually like to do a little excursion with Sharon and Kirsty during our visits to England, and this time, we decided to go to Lille, France, to visit the Christmas market there. (Lille is the third largest city in France and located in the north of the country, near the Belgian border.) So Thursday morning, having arrived in Newcastle the previous afternoon, we went back south by train, to London, and then onto Eurostar for our first trip to the Continent.

( Onward for Pictures and Details ... )

Yesterday was our annual Halloween party, much scaled back from prior years due to a number of reasons, not least of which was that Bobby and I didn't get ourselves organized till mid-month. There was only family in attendance, but we had a good time and served a good meal (always one of the major reasons why Bobby and I host parties!) We had potato-leek soup for the first course; barbecue chicken (with barbecue sauce made during Tropical Storm Irene last year), potatoes and green apples smothered in cheddar cheese, and spinach salads for the second course; and an assortment of desserts brought by the family for the final course. Dad made cookies and a delicious pumpkin cheesecake; my mother-in-law brought a "dirt cake." And, of course, we had hot buttered rum! Despite my abstaining from alcohol this week, I did have one cup. :^|

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Bobby just got off the phone with my parents. During the conversation, my dad informed him that he'd been offered by his workplace ...

tickets to this past Sunday's playoff game
in the Skybox
on the 50-yard line.

And he turned them down.

He said to Bobby, "That wouldn't have interested you, would it?"

#*$#@&*$%!!!!!

No. No, Dad, no, that wouldn't have interested us at all!!!!

>:^(

Sorry, for the excessive exclamation points and general symbology but, as I just told Bobby, barring the chance that I become a famous author or one of us does something really awesome that makes us rich and famous, that might well have been the coolest game we would have ever attended.

Bobby and I celebrated Yule on the solstice. Last year, we started a new tradition of making each other a gift for Yule; this year, Bobby painted a landscape for me, and I wrote him a collection of poems related to the green man. I'll post them both later.

Christmas Eve, we drove up to El Rodeo for lunch, then Bobby made cookies while I prepared the various components of the German chocolate ice cream pie that I make every year for Christmas. Christmas is my parents' holiday, so we were going to their house. Bobby and I always have pizza for supper on Christmas Eve; this goes back to my childhood, when my dad always made a pizza, if not for supper, then later in the night. Bobby and I have continued observing that through the entirety of our marriage. We wrapped gifts, which is a bit more of an endeavor since, last year, we decided to do away with wrapping paper and now wrap our gifts in cloth that has to be stitched closed with yarn. It takes a bit more time at the wrapping stage than using paper, but it saves a lot of time in cleanup and, of course, quite a bit of waste. We always watch a holiday movie on Christmas Eve; this year's was A Christmas Story, but I fell asleep before the end due to the rum-spiked eggnog!

( More--with Pictures!--below the Cut )