Entry 722: Saturday Night Olio

I put in some time watching the Olympics today. I love the Olympics. I'm not a rabid, "USA! USA! USA!"-style jingoist, but every four years, I do enjoy cosplaying as one. It's fun, and it's usually captivating competition, and although I pretty much always root for the American, I appreciate greatness whatever its nation of origin. Like, in this race from the last Olympics (officially branded the 2020 Summer Olympics, even though they took place in 2021), I was pulling hard for Rai Benjamin, but it's pretty much impossible, as a sports fan, to not be ensorcelled by Karsten Warholm's excellence down the stretch. I can't wait to see the rematch this Olympics. And don't sleep on Brazil's Alison dos Santos crashing the party and denying both Warholm and Benjamin the gold.

Track and field isn't until next week, though, so I've been watching some beach volleyball (underrated fun watch and not just because the competitors are three-fourths naked), a bit of basketball (Greece with a near upset of Canada), and swimming. The US men won gold in the 400-meter freestyle relay, but Katie Ledecky -- the female GOAT of swimming, in my opinion -- barely secured bronze in the 400-meter butterfly. Although she's arguably the best ever, it seems like she might not be the best right now. An Australian named Ariane Titmus has apparently surpassed her. That's the way sports like swimming go: Out with the old, in with new. Ledecky might be over-the-hill at the lofty age of... 27. Swimmers, especially women swimmers, often break onto the stage in their mid-teens and peak in their early twenties. I mean, Ledecky won her first Olympic Gold in 2012 at 15, which is only four years older than Lil' S1. It's absurd to think of him earning a medal, even just a bronze, at the next Olympics. Although, that's primarily because his main forms of exercise are riding a scooter back and forth on our porch while listening to a podcast and walking to the store to buy Tic Tacs.

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Speaking of Lil' S1, he went to baking camp this past week. We were worried he would be the oldest kid there, because he was right at the age limit, but there were several kids there older than him. He was, however, the only boy. S signed him up largely so that he could learn to take the Metro, as it was in a bakery right by a Metro station, but they closed the only station within walking distance of our house for a few months to do construction. So, there went that idea. Instead we had to drop him off and pick him up, and it was 40 minutes round-trip, and it started at 10 am and ended at 1 pm, so it was pretty much more of an inconvenience for us than anything else. He said they didn't even learn much either. Instead of actually letting the kids follow the recipes on their own, they had everything measured out already and just made one giant batch of whatever they were making that day. The only thing the kids did was take turns pouring the ingredients into the bowl. It's sounds pretty lame. But he seemed to like it well enough, and we got some tasty sweets out of the deal (most of which we gave away to friends and neighbors, as we're trying to eat a bit healthier as a family these days), so no harm, no foul, I suppose.

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My old friend, roommate, and graduate school classmate came to town yesterday, and I saw him in person for the first time in about 15 years. He wanted to meet S and me and another couple we know for dinner, so I suggested a place just up the street from us, because we didn't have a sitter and were planning on leaving the kids alone for a few hours. But then a friend of ours who has twins our boys pal around with sometimes invited them over for a sleepover, so we didn't have to worry about kids at all. We could have actually gone out -- like, left the neighborhood and gone to restaurant we haven't already been to a dozen times. But I had already confirmed the location with my friends and made reservations, and I hate making plans, so I especially hate doing it twice, so I just kept things as is, but I kinda regret it now, especially because my friends recently moved to Miami (I didn't know that), and we went to a Cuban restaurant. When our friends from Maine come visit, I guess we'll take them out for lobster. Well, everybody seemed to have a good time, nevertheless.

Plus, "local cuisine" is one of the most overrated aspects of culture, in general. In any major city in the US -- maybe even the world -- you can get really good, authentic food of any style or ethnicity. It's indistinguishable from anywhere else. I feel quite confident in that. If you took somebody and obscured their location, so that they couldn't tell where they were, they would not consistently rate food from one place over that of another. Indian food from restaurants in India tastes the same as Indian food from restaurants in the US. Salmon in DC tastes the same as salmon in Seattle tastes the same as salmon in Chicago.

Unless it's a psychological thing, which is possible -- like street tacos taste better in Southern California than in New York, not because they are actually different, but because you are in Southern California. Then the whole thing flips if it's pizza. I bet if you took New York pizza, froze it and then gave it to people in LA, and then did the same things with LA pizza in New York, people would say the New York pizza was better, even though it's actually the LA pizza they're eating. It's the overall eating experience that they are into, and that's actually valid, so maybe I need to recant some of the paragraph above. 

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I've been kinda obsessed with the Stevie Wonder song "Part-Time Lover" of late. It's got a great tempo and catchy beat, and of course Stevie Wonder can sing the heck of out anything. It's been in steady rotation in my "Gym Mix" of late. The lyrics are kinda funny too. It's all about how the singer is cheating on his girl with his "part-time lover":

If she's with me I'll blink the lights
To let you know tonight's the night
For me and you my part-time lover

 But then at the end there's a catch:

I've got something that I must tell
Last night someone rang our doorbell
And it was not you my part-time lover
And then a man called our exchange
But didn't want to leave his name

I guess that two can play the game
Of part-time lovers
You and me, part-time lovers
But, she and he, part-time lovers

See, his lady was cheating too. Reminds of that kinda terrible "Pina Colada" song. It also got my thinking: What is the best cheating song? It's gotta be "Part-Time Lover," although I do have soft spots for the Shaggy classic "It Wasn't Me" (featuring the dulcet vocals of RikRok) and Naughty By Nature's "OPP".

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The ice makers broke in both of our refrigerators. Neither of them even lasted a year. The upstairs one stopped working a few months ago, and the downstairs one went kaput earlier this month. I'm not getting them fixed again. What's the saying for this situation? Don't throw good money at bad? I think that's it. I'll just make ice in trays. It's actually quite easy -- turns out all you have to do is freeze water. It's more than a little annoying to have to do this after paying $800 just last year so that I wouldn't have to do this, but so it goes. You can still use the ice dispenser in our upstairs fridge, it just can't make ice on its own. So, every few days I empty out the trays into the ice box and refill them. It's really only a mild inconvenience. I just wish I had done it in the first place.

Until next time...

Entry 721: Say You're Gonna Go, Joe (He Does! Whoa!)

I started this post this morning, and this is what I wrote.

Everyday I read a report from somebody supposedly in the know that Biden is going to drop out of the race, and then everyday he doesn't do it. Then there is an accompanying report about how he's hunkered down, "defiant," and mad that everybody wants him to withdraw. So, who knows what's going to happen? This is a thing we see all the time in sports. Successful athletes past their primes are almost always the last ones to acknowledge they cannot do the things they used to be able to do, and they never will be able to do those things again. Dan Marino didn't willingly retire. He was cut by the Dolphins -- a franchise he was the face of for nearly two decades -- after a 55-point playoff loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars ("The Worst NFL Farewell Game"). This is what Dems are trying to avoid with Biden now. It's nothing personal -- we get old, and we can't hack it. That's how it goes. It's not ageist because it's true, and it will happen to all us,* so we all have license to say it.

*Or it won't, which is much worse, if you think about it.

Actually, it's even worse than my sports analogy implies, because in sports sometimes an older athlete does defy the doubters. The Patriots gave up on Tom Brady, and he led the Buccaneers to a Super Bowl victory the next season. Tiger Woods had not won a major since 2008 and looked properly cooked when he somehow claimed the Green Jacket at the 2019 Masters. But these accomplishments didn't require buy-ins from the general public. Only a small number of people needed to believe in Brady and Woods for them to rise back to the top. In Biden's case, it's very different. It doesn't matter how many people in his inner circle believe he's still mentally fit and capable. If voters don't buy it -- which they don't, understandably so, given that in his public appearances, Biden mostly speaks in a raspy whisper and struggles to articulate cogent thoughts -- then he's not fit to do the job of getting reelected. It doesn't matter how much heart Biden has, or even if, behind closed doors he's still super sharp. What matters is that he presents as a frail, addled old man, and he is not capable of changing this perception. If he were, he would have done it already. His poll numbers are abysmal and only getting worse, and while this isn't a guarantee that he will lose, if he stays in the race, or that a replacement will fare any better, if he doesn't, it does mean, as best we can tell, a new candidate would give Dems a better chance.

Now, we are back in real-time, Biden, has in fact withdrawn, and the big question is: What comes next? Who comes next? Kamala? She's the obvious choice, and Biden endorses her, so probably. She's not the most popular kid in class, but there's no perfect candidate. Barack has already served his two terms, and Michelle hasn't shown any interest in running. So, I'm fine with Kamala. I can make a decent case for her winning, and I don't think it's just wishful thinking. She's not so far to the left that she's going to scare away moderates (the whole "Kamala's a cop" meme might actually help her on the whole), but she also can appeal, or at least be acceptable, to progressives, particularly young progressives, who like the idea of electing a woman of color to the most powerful position in the world. And, of course, there won't be any concerns that she's too old. Here's the Kamala coalition: Blue No Matter Who Democrats; centrists and moderates, even those who usually lean right, who can't stomach Trump; very lefty progressives who don't love Dems, but also don't want to see another old white man elected president. That's a coalition that could carry the day in November. It might not, but it could.

Alright, that's all I have on this topic for now. Until next time...

Entry 720: Normal/Not Normal Weekend

Well, I certainly didn't expect to be writing about an attempted political assassination this weekend, but here we are. That was... not good. I certainly understand the desire to see Trump go away, but not like that. Violence begets violence, and with the country already seemingly a tinder box, sparks are the last thing we need. We got a pretty big one last night, and it sounds like we came within a few centimeters of a full-on explosion. Early reports indicate there was only a single gunman with ambiguous political views (a registered Republican who recently donated a small amount of money to a progressive organization), and hopefully people treat it as such, and the temperature has a chance to drop. We shall see. I've certainly gone to sleep with less anxiety about the state of our union than I did last night.

In other, more personal news, we had our first "normal" weekend of the summer here at the G & G household. Immediately after school ended,* we went to the PNW, then we came back, took the kids to camp, and then flew out to FLA. When we got back, we (well, S) picked up the kids from camp, and then my brother and sister-in-law and their two kids came out to visit.** They left Friday evening, so this weekend was the first time in a month with everybody home, just us, for an extended period of time.

*Technically, we left before school ended and the kids missed the last few days, because we had a couple days canceled due to snow, and the district didn't build in any snow days during the year, for some reason, so they got tacked on at the end.

**It was a very nice visit, and it made me sad they don't live closer, so that we could see them more often. 

It was a pretty good weekend, I suppose (aside from the small sprinkling of existential dread about our democracy). Lil' S2 went to a birthday party on Saturday afternoon, and it was apparently kinda weird. It was for a kid we had never met -- never even heard Lil' S2 mention before -- and he got a paper invitation handed to him in class, old-school style. (It might have been the type of thing where this kid just invited the entire class.) Then, for some reason, it was at a Dave & Buster's about a half-hour drive from our neighborhood, even though there is a Dave & Buster's less than a mile up the street. Once I learned all that, I angled for S to take him instead of me, which she did, because she wanted to do some school work (she's taking some legal studies classes at night), so she dropped him off and then read in the car while he was at the party.

I took Lil' S1 for a long walk -- or rather, I went for a long walk and Lil' S1 joined me for the first portion of it.* We've been trying to get him to go for walks more frequently, to move more, in general, to not have such a sedentary lifestyle, and sometimes he's open to it, and sometimes he isn't. One thing we tried, which I think we will stick with, is we extended device-free time from one hour to one and a half hours, with the exception that you can use a device for that extra half-hour, if you are exercising during it. He loves listening podcasts, and hates giving up his device, so maybe this will actually work.

*He agreed to do two miles, but he turned back after 0.6 miles insisting that we had actually walked a mile already and that my app tracking the distance was wrong. On the way back he did "get lost," however, which added about a quarter-mile to his distance. So, he probably walked about 1.5 miles, which isn't terrible, I suppose.

The problem with walking right now, however, is that it is damn hot. This weekend it was in the low 90s, and that was a reprieve from the high 90s we got in the middle of the week. Then tomorrow we get right back to it with a high of 98, and then on Tuesday, triple digits, 101. That's when it's too hot to do anything but sit inside with the air conditioner going full blast. Thankfully, our house doesn't actually get too hot. I mean, it does, but it takes a little while to get there. We usually run the AC at night, and then by morning we can turn it off and not turn it back on until mid-afternoon. 

Also, thankfully, we renewed our pool membership for the summer. We went today for the first time this year, and it was quite refreshing. I was kinda thinking maybe we made a mistake by joining again, since we couldn't even use it for the first month it was open, but then we went today with some of our friends, and we saw a bunch of our other friends there, and it was like Oh, yeah, that's right, this is fun. It's one of those "third places" that are becoming less and less common.

They have a basketball hoop there, so my friend RT and I were playing against Lil' S2 and his buddy during break time.* The rules were that the adults could only shoot from behind the three-point arc, and combined, we were, I'm gonna say, 4-for-30. I don't know what happened. I used to be half-decent at shooting a basketball. Actually, I know exactly what happened, I got old and got arthritis in my shooting shoulder.

*Every 45 minutes they make all the kids get out of the pool and take a 15-minute break. I guess, it's pretty standard, but I don't remember that being the convention when I was a kid. Maybe it's a regional thing, or maybe it was introduced sometime after 1989, or maybe it was that way when I was a kid too, and I just don't remember. Any of those is possible.

A downside of going to the pool, however, is that I seem to be getting sunburned every time I go now, just a little bit. Like, I'll have one spot on me a few square-inches that I clearly missed with the sunscreen. I think it is also because of my arthritic shoulder. I don't have the flexibility to reach all the places on my body I used to be able to reach. S usually does my back, but I guess I'll have to have her start doing my neck and sides and shoulders as well now. I'm hesitant to do that, however, because then she's going to tell me to just where a shirt, and I don't want to where a shirt at the pool. The whole point is to feel the sun against your skin. Also, I don't like the aesthetic. One of the other dads at our pool always wears a long-sleeve swim shirt and a huge wide-brim hat, and, I dunno, it's just not the most flattering look in the world. The practicality of not having to worry about sunscreen might win out someday, but I'm not ready for that stage of my life yet.

Until next time...

Entry 719: Back From FLA

The kids were in sleep-away camp this week, so S and I went to visit S's parents near Tampa. We mainly went to help out with logistical things, as my father-in-law as been sick the past few weeks, and he and my mother-in-law are struggling to keep up with all the appointments and paperwork and all that. I did my part by "fixing" the scanner. For some reason, it wasn't connecting to anything anymore, so I had to go through and get it to reconnect. All I did was follow some instructions I got online, but I've come to find that this is actually a pretty valuable skill. It sounds easy, and it is in theory, but in practice you can accomplish a lot by following instructions you find online. For one thing, it often takes some sage discernment to know which instructions to follow. For another, you actually have to have the patience, stick-to-tiveness, and adaptability to follow the instructions and stay with them when they don't map perfectly onto your situation -- and you have to know when to bail. That's important too. There is a bit of an art to it all.

But definitely S did the majority of the heavy-lifting. She spent hours with her parents, setting up accounts, logging into portals, going over documents, archiving files, etc. At one point, S's mom was worried that her email got hacked, so S went through with her and changed her passwords to all her accounts and set up two-factor authentication, so that they could only be accessed by receiving a texted code. It's yeoman's work, especially considering S's parents are not exactly the most tech-savvy duo in the world. It's amazing how people can be so smart, and yet be so slow when it comes to modern technology. I mean, my father-in-law was a successful nuclear engineer for decades, and yet he was absolutely flummoxed by trying to reset an email password. When it was asking for his old password, he kept putting in his computer password for some reason.

As if all this wasn't enough already, my in-laws' dishwasher is broken, and they are having some major plumbing issues in their bungalow. The water is turned off everywhere except the master bathroom, the kitchen, and the laundry room. So, we had one shower and one toilet available for all four of us for the week. It went more smoothly than I thought it would, though. There was never a moment that I know of when somebody needed to use the bathroom but it was occupied. As I remarked to my mother-in-law about the situation, "Everything is easier when you don't have kids around." Apparently, somebody is coming today to fix the water, and the dishwasher installation crew is scheduled to come out next week, so hopefully everything gets fixed in short order.*

*Update from S: The guy did not come to fix the water today. This is in large part my in-laws own fault, however. A few weeks ago, S's sister was visiting, and she found a company to come out and fix things, but their quote was too high, so my in-laws instead went with some random handyman who a friend of a friend knows. Unsurprisingly, the random handyman is not very reliable (and who knows what type of quality his work will be, anyway). This is a very much a my-in-laws thing to do. It reminds me of when they wouldn't fix their smoke detector, ever though it had been beeping every few seconds for weeks. They have this strong immigrant mentality and don't ever want to overpay for anything, which is admirable, but it's not an overpay if it will tangibly improve your life. Plus, we are not talking about poor people here. They have plenty of money in the bank. With everything else going on in your lives is the added stress of letting this drag on for months longer than it has to worth a few hundred dollars?

And much more importantly, hopefully my father-in-law starts feeling better soon. He doesn't let on to me about it, but I can tell he is quite miserable. The problem is with his kidneys. They aren't producing enough of some substance needed (whose name I can't remember) to filter some of the toxins in your body. So, he's feeling lousy all the time. It's like he's constantly hung over. And nobody seems to know exactly what to do about it -- that's the worst part. There is some medication he can take, but it's only recently approved by the FDA. It's not a tried-and-true cure, and like all medications, its benefits must be weighed against its side effects. It could possibly adversely affect the liver, which would be really awful, as my father-in-law's liver is probably picking up some of the slack from his bum kidneys. Without a well-functioning liver it would almost certainly be even worse. So, right now he seems hesitant to go down the medication route.

That leaves diet as the only other feasible option. Apparently, there are certain foods that can make this condition better or worse, and so the idea is to eat a lot of the former and not much of the latter. This is not a great option either, though, even if it will work. As anybody who has tried to lose weight knows, changing your diet over the long-term is super difficult, and this goes many times over, when you are an 82-year-old man, who has pretty much never prepared his own food before. S's mom will surely help him with this, but she has her own way of preparing food. It's cultural and personal and deeply ingrained, and I don't know how easy it will be for her to change in this regard, either.

My father-in-law has an appointment with a nephrologist (a doctor who specializes in kidney issues, if, like me as of two weeks, you don't know what this means) next week, and then after that he is going to confer with S's cousin in India, who is a doctor, and then he will go from there. All we can do in the meantime -- or at any time, really -- is hope for the best. Right now, it's all a grim and unwanted dose of reality. Nobody wants to think that their last n years on this mortal coil will be spent feeling like shit, eating bland food, bogged down by endless healthcare logistics, being asked to make impossible decision after impossible decision about your health, while at the same time being completely dependent on others. But that's the way it is sometimes.

Philosophically, it's quite depressing if you think about it too much, and that's why I try not to think about it too much. I'm very much an optimist, and the positive spin on stuff like this is to tell yourself That's why you find joy now, wherever you can find it, while you still can. Witnessing the inevitable decline of somebody you care about isn't a reason to despair about death, it's a reason to double-down on the celebration that we exist at all. To that end, I got Queen Bee in the NYT Spelling Bee game the other day, and I feel pretty happy with myself for it. After all, it's the little things, right?

Until next time...