Hey, it’s May! Still chilly, but sunny out today for now.
It’s Mother’s Day, the second without our Mom. She never cared much about it – happy to receive the cards and flowers and so on, but if we’d forgotten or gotten them there a day late, there would have been no blowback or guilt applied.
I had a dream about her a couple of weeks ago, and she was just as frail as she had been her last year or so, and in the dream she tried to stand and fell. It was anxiety-producing and awful and another reminder that I have to build up more skills and internal resources to deal with my loved ones’ aging – and my own.
The last couple of weeks at work have been nerve-wracking, preparing test plans (and then using them) for my new product focus. Very much building the plane while flying it – even as recently as Friday, learning new and interesting facts about how things work that somehow had never come up in the weeks of meetings we’d had before. Or, more likely, had come up, but I wasn’t in a place to understand what that had meant yet. Anyway… still very busy, but passed my first big hurdle and it seemed to work out OK.
This past Wednesday, they brought some of us in for an office tour – people like me who had started after the office shut down. I got to meet three layers of my management chain, excellent, and some co-workers and see the space. The office part of the office is purely functional, and that’s fine, but the crown jewel is the place where we deliver the training we provide (or did pre-COVID, and will again). Very big fancy training room, with the ability to split in half so two classes can happen at once, and lots of backstage technology and creature comforts for the students and faculty and so on. Very cool, something we are all rightly proud of.
I’ve mentioned before, I have a dear friend who lost both her parents last year, one after the other and has had to deal with two estates, a house two hours south of the city and two extra cars in the face of overwhelming grief and all the COVID shutdowns. I’d gone down to her house twice last year to help her with stuff – this year, now that we’re vaccinated, a mutual friend suggested we go down together. So that happened last weekend.
Susan (the one with the house) had just had a birthday, Renee (the mutual friend) has a big one coming up. So there were a couple of really spectacular meals. And some shopping and exploration. Part of why we were there was just to reconnect with each other and help each other process – all three of us had lost a parent last year. So there were lots of really good discussions over coffee, or cosmos, or food or whatever.
But we did actual work too. There was some really heavy awkward bulky stuff up in the attic, and we got that down – one up in the attic, one on the floor, one on the fold-out stairs. And then we took an old particle-board kitchen cabinet/hutch thing out to the backyard and just hammered and crowbarred it into little bits, which was cathartic. We also spent some time cataloguing and bagging up clothes from both parents. Renee got some of Susan’s mom’s stuff – I got a nice leather jacket and a camelhair coat from her dad. I also co-opted all the unclaimed hats, gloves and scarves to donate to my charity.
So it was a very successful and delightful trip. The cherry on the sundae is that Renee and I talked about nothing but books for the entire two-hour drive back.
Media consumption: we did see “The Father” the night before the Oscars, it’s excellent. I was not at all surprised or displeased that Anthony Hopkins won Best Actor.
We’ve seen some other movies since then, including “Inherit the Wind”, which I’d never seen all the way through before. And last night, we watched “The Mitchells vs. the Machines”, which is a hoot.
Bookwise, I finished “Artemis” by Andy Weir, which I enjoyed a lot, and have started a history of the D’Oyly Carte company.
m/m-wise, I finished Tal Bauer’s batshit-crazy but very fun Executive Office and Executive Power series, which got more and more over-the-top as far as ‘the world falling apart’, as first the American president and then the Russian president each fall in love (for the first time) with a man. There are submarines and spaceships and weaponized biological agents and spirt journeys and explosions and … they’re insane. I enjoyed the hell out of it.
Harper Fox also dropped the last (I think) of the ‘psychic and his cop boyfriend in Cornwall’ series that I’d read most of a couple of weeks ago, so I tore through that. Wraps it up very nicely. That whole series will need a reread as it involves multiple alternate timelines and can get very confusing.
Ok I have banana bread to bake and calendars to update and a haircut to give (I got mine from an actual barber this past week for the first time in a year, but C doesn’t want to do that yet). And UMGASS’s “Cox & Box/Trial by Jury” to watch. Enjoy the sunshine!
The Toast Point Page 