November

We’re headed to the desert for the long weekend, hopefully when we’re all up on Friday as the boys have school off. I’m keeping my plans and expectations minimal for what we’re going to accomplish this weekend out there - I want to place the four posts for our hammock pit and two for the frame of an outdoor shower. It will involve borrowing a post digger from our elderly neighbor and trying to mix concrete somehow with no running water. I don’t know how it’s going to go, really. Let’s just say if we fuck it up, it kind of doesn’t matter. Thankfully our neighbor contractor returns in a month and says he’ll put us on his calendar. There is a real chance that starting in Dec or Jan we could finally see some real progress out there. Like, windows and walls and shit. It’s going to be cold AF out there, and I’m worried we’re just going to freeze. I bought us an indoor rated propane heater and a co2 alarm, but to be honest I’m very paranoid about running it. Dying of co2 poisoning is on my list of worst fears. I’m hoping we can all just get cozy in our sleeping bags and not use it. I’m still at a loss for a permanent solution to the cold out there. 

Speaking of worst fears - we survived the midterms!!! In my opinion, it was a great result. Dems winning big was, to be honest, never very realistic, so to me what we’ve gotten so far is a very powerful message; Trumpism is on its way out. Even if we end up losing both house and senate - a possibility - I kind of don’t care; if that’s what we have to live with, two years of gridlock won’t kill us; the more important message is that this was no giant red wave as Trump and his cronies hoped, many of his picks failed, and I’m positively jubilant. Fetterman was a stunning and awesome win - we woke up the kids with our yelling and celebrating. Now, we wait. My prediction? We get AZ, Reps get NV. We win GA in the Dec runoff. We lose the House but not by much. Trump announces his candidacy, DeSantis announces his, and the GOP is a hot mess for the next two years. Anyway. After two years of sheer terror anticipating this moment, preparing to watch us slide ever closer to a fascist dictatorship we may never recover from, this step back from the brink was a huge sigh of relief for me. Huge.

Next week is the boys’ teacher conferences, in which I get my first peek into how they’re doing this school year and how they’re being perceived at school. They’ve never not gotten stellar reviews from their teachers, but I’m prepared for any eventuality. Especially Theo. I’ve seen a lot less of him in normal, in-person school than I have Bobby, so I’m not sure how he’s doing. Fingers crossed he’s doing well.

We managed to skirt the walking home from school debacle this week because of two days of rain, and then today they randomly got invited to a birthday party after school at someone’s house that had me flustered - I had to go pick them up in my pyjamas with wet hair and laundry half done, take them to a random person’s house and try to be social when I was totally unprepared to do so. I ended up leaving with Bobby because the kid was a second grader so B didn’t really want to hang out and it gave me a good excuse to leave, too. So Theo stayed behind with Bobby’s watch and texted me a couple of hours later to be picked up. I’ve learned about myself that I can only socialize when I’m prepared for it - being thrown into a situation like that with no notice is pretty much my worst nightmare. So I noped my way out of there. 

Good news about our Thanksgiving trip, the road from Beatty, NV to Death Valley is finally open after three months of closures from storm damage. So we won’t have to take the long route from Beatty into the park or skip it all together. The bad news is the cool pyramid structure I booked us to sleep in is having trouble with the heating so we’ve been moved to a couple of generic tiny houses. Boo. Well, maybe if our heater works out this weekend we can just bring that. Hard to believe we’ll be on that trip in less than two weeks.