Deep talks

Last week the boys had Thursday off for Yom Kippur. As I despise making the kids lunch, we went to In N Out. Our standard order is: me - grilled cheese, iced tea; Bobby - cheeseburger with no tomato or onion, fries, neopolitan shake; Theo - double double, neopolitan shake. We order in the drive thru and then get out of the car to eat in their outdoor area. You know, covid protocols. I decided now was as good a time as any to tell the boys, “did you know the minute you’re born is the minute you start dying?”. Bobby responded, “well, thanks for putting that thought into my head…” 

Yes, he is his mother’s son. 

That same night, dad was working late and I was watching a documentary on Netflix about the remarkable gay rights activist Peter Tatchell. Bobby as usual came out of his room and crawled into bed with me in an effort to stave off bedtime. Normally I would send him right back, but he seemed quite interested in the documentary and I thought this would be a good time to have some important discussions. He watched for quite a while in silence, and at a certain point I asked him if he understood anything that was going on. He said not really, so I explained. I was shocked he forgot what gay meant - at this moment our neighbors on all three sides are gay and they have lots of friends with gay parents - but he remembered right away when I explained; I also took the opportunity to explain human rights, free speech, prejudice and religious bias, as all these things featured in the movie. He couldn’t believe in Russia you can’t speak out against the president. It’s sweet and sad to know that kids his age have no idea what a shit world this can be. I also took the opportunity to explain what a hero Tatchell is, how relentless and brave, and how his childhood of being bullied by a cruel stepfather caused him to want to spend his life standing up for oppressed people. I’m in awe of this person. Especially after seeing him make peace with his very religious, sweet mother - something I was never able to do with my mother who was also a basically good person trapped in her ideology - it was very poignant for me. I hope Bobby learned a few things. He seems to get it - he’s a very empathetic, thoughtful kid. I hope these moments have an impact on him. 

We had a long talk with both kids on 9/11 and I could tell the things we told them about our personal experiences - how it was one of the worst days of our lives, how traumatized we all were, how it changed our lives forever - was surprising to them. I think they thought of it as some distant historical event (how could they not?) that doesn’t really have any relevance today. Hopefully we disabused them of this. 

For now, life around here is surprisingly…good. Now that the stress of my event is behind me, I have my sense of calm and well being back. Having the house to myself during the day is magical, and I’m getting a lot of long delayed projects done, which feels good. I’m giddy about the upcoming wedding (sent our Save the Dates last week, so it’s officially “on”), and am starting to plan some other road trips for us. We’ve had a couple of concerts cancel - Gary Numan, Adam Ant - but also have a couple coming up that hopefully will actually happen; The Rolling Stones, X. The supplemental grant I’ve been waiting a few weeks for *might* start being disbursed by the middle of next week. There’s no guarantee I’ll actually get it - but it’s fairly likely. Then in just three more weeks the local version of that grant becomes available, so more opportunity there. I’ve also now made $300 off my Etsy store. I will spend this entire week hustling to get more listings up. I have a huge rack of clothes just waiting to be sold. Can’t wait to send them off to their new homes. 

Another successful election

We get to keep our governor, phew! Not that I was very concerned, but like all of us I’m still traumatized by 2016 and convinced unless it’s a presidential election, Democrats are asleep at the wheel. But not yesterday. BS Republican recall effort defeated. I can exhale. For now. 

School continues on sans covid infections. Los Angeles covid rates are dropping. My epidemiologist friend wrote an article that predicted we could very well nail this thing - between adult vaccines, upcoming kid vaccines, and natural immunity from this summer’s infections, it’s just possible we’ll beat this thing in the next few months. God, I hope so. To be able to go into next year running my event with confidence could be truly amazing. I’m starting to think that even if we have a surge over the winter it may not be a giant one, due to most people being immune on purpose or by accident. Can’t wait for kid vaccines to be approved. Maybe in a couple of months? 

Today I started up my Etsy store. As expected, it was a ton of work. I worked on it an entire day and only got about ten listings up. You can see why people don’t want to bother with this and just let things languish in their closets instead. There’s a big learning curve, and I still have a lot of basic setup to do. But as I was adding listings, two things sold. I was unprepared for that. So tomorrow I have to figure out how I’m going to ship these things. I want to get them out quickly so I don’t risk bad reviews. Out of one customer service nightmare and into another, huh? 

Our cabin renovation drags on. The contractor has told me it will be another month. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter - right now I have at least one thing I have to do here each weekend that would make it impossible to get out there before mid-October anyway - but again, my big fear is he’ll just drop the ball and never finish. As far as I know all that’s happened in the last month is he put some siding on. There’s still no roof, door, or windows, and the bathroom building hasn’t even been begun. Sigh. 

The F and I hammered out our wedding invites. Assuming everyone brings all of their kids, we easily hit 100 people. It’ll cost me $2000 more to go over 100 people. Comfortably I’d really like about 120 for some people stuck in the “maybe” file. I have the Save the Dates addressed and ready to go, just waiting on special stamps I ordered. The F is inviting people he hasn’t seen or spoken to since we first got together six years ago. I’m slightly annoyed by this; but I also get that he needs his people, too, and these people are basically his family since he doesn’t really have any. They lean right wing and are big drinkers and partiers - in complete opposition to all of my people. Sigh. I guess I should count my blessings that I don’t have to deal with them every holiday, right? One night in my lifetime won’t kill me. 

Yesterday at school pickup I was reminded how glad I am that I have nice, polite boys. They’ve been complaining of other kids swearing at their afterschool (the afterschool program is so grossly understaffed that they only have two staff for 150 kids…yikes). And I’ve witnessed some pretty shitty, disrespectful behavior from kids towards their parents lately. The F and I thanked them for being such nice, polite boys and told them how proud we are of them. They really are nice kids. I like to pat myself on the back for all that hard work I put in when they were little not allowing certain tones of voice or attitudes or behaviors. It was rough then but boy is it paying off now. Whether they keep being nice kids into adolescence remains to be seen. 

Labor Day

And now the weekend that would have been my event is officially over. I’m very much wiping my hands of it and looking forward to the future. There was a lot of mourning of the event on Facebook - and I get it, since for most people it’s fun and a way to reconnect with friends after this pandemic - but for me it was still just such a relief that I didn’t have to run it under these circumstances. I did not miss it.

I went to Palm Springs with a close friend and a swing dancer friend and his boyfriend. It was a delightful weekend full of fine dining, pool soaks, and long talks until the wee hours. The first day I had us meet at the Integratron for a sound bath, which was lovely. They offer private sound baths which I may make into a wedding morning activity if I can swing the money. We had many philosophical discussions about lgbtqai involvement in swing dancing, de-gendering the dance, raising prices to then pay people more so they can make a career out of being musicians/dance teachers etc, dealing with problematic people, etc etc. Very helpful information I can take with me into the next event. I agree prices need to be raised but I’m not sure when or how. 

While there I came up with the idea of opening an Etsy store so I can sell off some unwanted vintage stuff. I certainly have the time to devote to photographing and measuring and listing all my crap - whether anyone will buy any of it is another thing. But I figure it doesn’t cost much and could bring in a little small income stream for me, and even better, help me clear out my impossibly overstuffed closet. Also, I have many friends in the same position, so I could potentially consign some of their stuff to help them out, too. So that will be my project going forward. 

The boys did well on their first time without mama since February of 2020. I think the F ran them ragged with activities, which is good, because that’s the part I suck at. Tomorrow they return to school for a short week. They are still testing negative. Hoorah. 

Still negative

The boys are still testing negative at school, thank goodness. Every week is a gift. I’m even newly inspired to cook dinner, now that I have days to myself. In many ways, things are so much better than last year - for the most part things are open, schools are open, I’m back to doing the shopping...while big events are mostly off limits and travel is scary, I still can’t run my event and our band still can’t play, at least we have some small semblance of normalcy. I guess it’s good to be grateful for the small things right now, even though this summer has been a huge bummer for everyone. 

In the absence of anything else to do, I’ve been having fun doing wedding stuff, which is the next event I get to plan. After months of searching for a dress I finally broke down and asked a friend for help. We were going to go next week. She asked me to check the online inventory of various stores - and I came to the conclusion that most wedding dresses are stupid and I hate them. Even the more “unique bride” shops had dresses that completely lacked any imagination, and they tended to be $1500 and up. That’s a big no. It’s just such a different story when you have two kids and are 49. Had I been twenty years younger I’m sure I would have gone for a sweet 1940’s satin dress and it would have been lovely. But none of those tiny dresses will fit me, and I also am afraid of a “mutton dressed as lamb” effect. Long story short, I came upon a delightful ethereal “boudoir dress” made in Russia for $178 and ordered it. It’s got a sort of greenish/grey tinge with grey appliqués and it’s just beautiful and perfect. And best of all if I hate it it’s only $178 so I can just toss it and start over. Today I ordered a pair of lucite 1950’s shoes from eBay to go with. I’ll also get a tulle underskirt for the dress since it’s pretty much see through. I’m trying to get all these things out of the way now when I have the mental energy so I can forget about it for a while. After all we have the great holiday trifecta coming up - Halloween - Thanksgiving - Christmas, and that’ll take a lot of my emotional labor right there.

I also have offered to accompany a friend for Spanish lessons and am restoring my recently acquired 1920s saxophone and may start lessons with that. I may also not follow through with any of this. I’ve learned it’s ok to make plans to start projects and then not actually start them. Today I threw out rotten cucumbers and dill I bought weeks ago to make into pickles and never did. And so it goes. 

The boys’ homework officially begins next week, so school starts in earnest now. We have a four day week followed by a three day week and then it’s mid-September already. I don’t think we’re ever going to have a Big Bake this year - we’ve made it almost to Labor Day with never a triple digit day; I think the Pacific Northwest took one for the team this summer. 

How do I feel going into what would have been the final week before my event? Nothing but relief, really. Normally this is a terrible stressful time for me - and this year would have been far, far worse. Instead I’m just chilling. I’m a little sad, of course, and a little afraid for the future, as we all are. Can I recover from two years off? Will people still remember us a whole year from now? Will we have to cancel a third time? Will we all survive this and subsequent surges? How bad will it get this winter? Will next summer be the same? Nobody has any answers. For now I’m just going to bury myself in Pinterest “messy bun wedding hair” and try not to worry about it too much. 

Save the date

We had our third and hopefully not last visit to the Boulder gardens this weekend for the dual purpose of checking out our cabin build on Saturday and then viewing wedding venues Sunday. It was an exhausting weekend with good and bad things. Upon arrival at the Boulder gardens we realized that as much as we love it there, it just wouldn’t work for a wedding - there was literally no flat area for a reception at all, despite it having a very cool ceremony area. It just wouldn’t work. 

Start with the good - I am getting married on June 4th of next year, and in the place I wanted from the beginning; the bougie glamp desert compound in Yucca Valley that I emailed before we were engaged just to get rates. It’s such a relief to have this nailed down (deposit check and signed contract in the mail) so I can just focus on save the date invites and then forget about it for a while. On Sunday we got up early to see one place built on a ruin that was a nicely set up one-day venue; definitely my favorite of the cheaper one day options. Then we went to another one day place in a more suburban neighborhood - while the place itself was very nice, the fact that it wasn’t remote bothered both of us (the “Fuck Biden” flag on the house next door didn’t help...at all). I wanted to see a wacky artists’ compound that wasn’t really set up for weddings but was still a possibility, but they couldn’t meet us until too late, and we were all so cranky and tired at this point that I pushed our final venue meeting up two hours and we headed over. And of course, it was perfect. 40 acres in beautiful Yucca Valley with a gorgeous main house, various glamp sites all around for our compound, even a small lake...it’s just perfect. Of course, a full-weekend extravaganza with housing for 20 is no joke...and not cheap. I mentioned how I pay first and ask questions later, right? I also got the F to agree to my very non-traditional processional and first dance music (not surprisingly), so yay there. I’m going to have fun with this. We all need a little goddamn joy right now, dammit. 

The not-great part of the weekend was the cabin visit. I intended to ask questions about the placement of the outhouse, windows, security, etc etc...and our whole visit got sidelined by a very awkward conversation in which the contractor asked if we would be willing to float him a loan he could pay back over the next year to help him get over some business debts. Um....no? I mean even if I hadn’t just canceled my event, I would never enter into an agreement like that. Not that I think he’s a bad guy - I really don’t think he is - I just think he’s kind of a mess and his situation doing this kind of work is so precarious, I absolutely don’t believe he would pay us back, not one bit. So we spent an agonizing hour and a half in the hot sun and wind awkwardly talking about this, while I kept trying to steer him back to the practicalities of the actual build, and the kids sat in the car with the AC running. Nothing was accomplished with that visit, and I was a bit put off by some executive decisions he’d made - moving the door to the other side of the house, making what should have been small sleeping lofts into an entire 6’ high extra story that makes the once small cabin look top heavy and awkward, and using this cheap vertical wood paneling on the outside that looks like some kind of 1970s barn...ugh. Nope, nope, nope. Then all of a sudden the idea to hire a water company to come out and fill our tank and maintain it was no longer a thing - people will steal your tank, the water will develop bacteria, the company won’t come out for a small job like ours. The F and this guy tried to hash out this extremely complicated gravity system in which we could lift five gallon tanks up to the sleeping lofts and fill a tank that would attach to the now attached bathroom...um, no. In about three seconds once we got home I found a battery charged portable water heater used by dog groomers that will work just fine for our 2-4 showers per month and occasional dishwashing. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s over-complication of things, and this weekend was rife with that. Between this guy stressing me out and then the F randomly saying to me in the middle of our venue tours, “you know, this is really too far for people to drive - you should really try to find something closer, like an hour outside of LA,” to which I answered, “so what you’re saying is I should completely scrap everything I’ve been doing for the past month and throw all that work down the toilet and start from scratch so people can drive an hour less...?” I was just about done with men for a while. They can be super annoying. And yet I’m marrying one, go figure. 

The contractor has since retracted his ask for a loan and apologized for even asking and said it was wrong of him to ask (all true) which was a relief. In texts I’ve tried to move back to talk about the actual build. I definitely am losing confidence that this build will be completed, and even if it is, that it will be done the way we want. I’m just going to cross my fingers and hope that this place works out and we can one day enjoy it. 

Progress

Yesterday my galvanized sink arrived for the cabin; I’ve ordered the wood burning stove which will be ready to pick up next week, and work has begun on the place. These are pictures of the framing going up earlier this week.

In going over some information online, I discovered my 5 acre plot is oriented the opposite of what I had thought - I thought the cabin was at the top of the plot but it turns out we’re at the bottom and the 5 acres stretches above us to the north, an area I’ve never walked. The good news is the plot south of us has nothing on it, and the plot north of us is government land, so we have a good long 15 acre area to play around in. When my finances improve I may try to seek out the owner of the plot south of us to see if I can pick it up, too. 

The contractor wants to finish up in a couple of weeks. We will try to meet with him tomorrow when we’re out there looking for wedding venues. I think many of our weekends coming up will involve trips out there to check on progress and bring things out. I imagine at some point we’ll have to rent a uhaul and bring a whole truckload of furniture out there - three mattresses, a Hoosier, table and chairs, kitchen stuff. It’s odd to think of completely furnishing a place from scratch. 

The boys’ first week of school has gone smoothly. Until today, they’ve had no homework (Bobby will have an assignment this weekend). They were tested for covid yesterday and so far Bobby has come back negative. I’m just taking things one week at a time - at any moment we could be shut down entirely, have to quarantine, get sick ourselves, who knows? But for now they’ve had one week at school and it’s been ok. 

For me, I’m in that slightly feral state that always happens when the kids go back to school - in response to having to wake up early, I’m taking lots of naps, which then makes it hard to go to sleep, which then makes me want more naps. There’s not much to do so I’m spending way too much time doom scrolling and watching pointless tv. I’m still picking away at my refunds, but I haven’t heard from 300 people still. I will send a reminder email next week, but the cut off is in two weeks, so people had better get their butts in order. 

I had said I was over traveling for a while, but honestly I’m really glad to be headed back out to the desert this weekend. I need a change of scenery and a weekend spent focusing on positive things and not going down the existential rabbit hole as I have been. 

First Day (yesterday)

The first day of school yesterday went well. Cars were lined all the way down the block. I have not seen that since March 13, 2020. That was the last time all the kids were together. The transition to afterschool went well, and I was glad to see the kids hot and sweaty. It means they’d been running around playing outdoors for two hours, rather than at home watching gamer videos. 

I picked them up and we went to get traditional first day of school ice cream. Neither had any homework, so we had a chill evening. Both liked their teachers. The year ahead remains an enigma. More than ever before, this school year is going to be one day at a time.

I had a bit of a cry in the car after dropping them off. Most of it is the standard “my babies are growing up too fast”, but it’s also everything else - how sad and scary and disappointing the last month has been, how robbed we all feel (everyone, of the sense of safety, and me, of an income yet again), how these years are slipping by and we’re suffering in a pandemic instead of really living. And yet, we are living - the kids are growing like weeds, we’re having adventures, I’m building a vacation house, I’m getting married. A lot of positive, life-affirming things going on despite all this. But still...it’s a lot.

Speaking of the cabin, work did in fact begin yesterday, with photos to prove it. I feel a bit bad about tearing down the old structure, but what can you do when the wood is all rotten? Now comes the time for making real structural decisions - the F and I did an exhaustive measuring and plotting session last night that left us both with our heads swimming - and I ordered the galvanized sink I’ve had my eye on for months. It’s finally really happening. I’m excited. 

It turns out the dive bar has zero interest in hosting weddings, so that’s that. Back to the drawing board as far as venues. I hope we come back from the weekend with some sense of clarity - I’d hate to return with no deposits put down, no date, and no idea what to do next. But that’s a distinct possibility. It may all be for naught, and we may miss out on spring entirely and have to push to fall or a full year. We’ll see what we find.