Closer

The grant I thought had disappeared, reappeared with its own website and opens for applications next week, hurrah! I also got a notification about a city of LA grant that’s starting next week - it’s very small, only $5000, and done by lottery so not everyone who applies and is eligible will get it - but you best believe I’ll be applying. As the pandemic winds down all this free money will disappear, so I’m going to take advantage of every opportunity I can. Right now my full time job is applying for grants and selling my old stuff on Etsy. Both have turned out to be quite lucrative.

I finally got through to the school principal about having Bobby evaluated for “intellectual ability” and had a frustrating week of back and forth trying to print forms that won’t print, then having to get Bobby to remember to get a paper copy from his teacher (he remembered) then getting him to remember to turn it in (he forgot). Time is running out. I don’t know how, in the vast red-taped bureaucracy that is LAUSD, we can actually get this evaluation done in time for me to apply to schools before the cut off. Also? He may turn out to not actually have any intellectual ability, after all this. I am still utterly clueless as far as what schools to actually apply to. I’m pretty much leaning towards the local school, Luther Burbank, if only for ease of dropping two kids at two different schools for two years. But again this is a big decision and I don’t want to just rush through it without sitting down to consider all the options. It’s weird for me because middle school was not a transition time for me - after shuttling to various elementary schools, when we finally settled in NY I got a scholarship to a small performing arts school that included all grades, so I was there from 5th-8th grade and then opted for a public high school because I was sick of being the poor kid, also because by then my desire to be a child actor had waned so there was really no reason to stay there. So “middle school” being 6th-8th grade only, with no other grades at that school, is not something I personally experienced. 

I have taken a two week break from exercise. I know this isn’t good for me and is not sustainable, so I’ll start back up maybe tomorrow or Monday. Last week I was told to stay off my foot after the skin cancer surgery; this week I threw out my back really bad and could barely walk on Monday and have been slowly regaining mobility since. I guess this is my life now…? Pretty much constant aches and pains, always the same and/or different - my frozen shoulder still persists more than a year and a half later; I have pretty much non-stop skin cancer episodes now, and I tweak my back or neck every few weeks; right now I have a weird knot on my palm that hurts every time I touch anything, which is all of the time. On Monday I visited my 97-year-old friend in the hospital as she needs a heart procedure; she admonished me, as many of the old time dancers before her had, to “never get old”. Too late, apparently! I like to think of myself as healthy and pure - no smoking or drugs or alcohol ever in my life, vegetarian diet since I was 14, exercise (somewhat) regularly, never more than a pound or two “overweight”, surely I’m in better shape than most people my age? I like to think I’ll live a long life and remain relatively healthy, but sometimes I wonder. I often laugh that my F who still smokes all day, eats mostly fast food, and lived a wild life when he was younger, will probably end up outliving me. Who knows? 

After a prolonged process, we finally got a hold of the F’s birth certificate (the original disappeared in the storage unit he stopped paying when we first met, along with all his other belongings). It arrived yesterday, and I was so overjoyed! It means he can get his first passport and finally leave the country, which he’s never done (except to Mexico back in the days when you didn’t need a passport). We need this for our honeymoon trip to Fiji in July which is already bought and paid for. Thinking about him having a passport - and I want to get the boys’ theirs soon, too - makes me think about in a few years’ time starting to take the family on exotic world trips every year. It will be expensive AF so I don’t know when or if I’ll ever be able to afford something like that, but boy would that be the fulfillment of a life dream. I miss going on tours to far-flung places; that’s a part of my pre-children life I’d really like to revisit. And with the F’s natural curiosity and wonder at the world, I can see him losing his mind at some of these places. He doesn’t know what he’s been missing all this time. I think the best trips for us could include: Nile River tour with all the hot spots (I’ve been to Egypt but only one day for the pyramids), Galápagos Islands, Machu Picchu, Costa Rica, Vietnam and Cambodia (my favorite trip), Greek islands, Iceland, Morocco. Now I just need to find tours that aren’t full of Trump supporters. Ha. 

Here are the boys’ school pictures this year. Bobby looks slightly drunk, but otherwise I think these are a decent representation of them.