Well hello!
Yes, it's been a while. Not surprising. It's often been awhile, but this time I have a way better excuse anyways. Wanna hear? My 2025 has been a country song except we never had a dog to die or a truck to run off.
Ok, first some background. You may have heard that Andrew was working for Blue Origin of Katy Perry being dunked on by Wendy's fame. It's why we live down in Seattle, in fact. Well, they finally launched New Glenn, the non-celebrity space tourist rocket that actually intends to do something useful. It had been through a lot of shifted scheduled and setbacks so the buildup was intense. Seeing it get launched was exciting!!! Andrew went to a large auditorium at the campus and everyone was celebrating and toasting and it was a big, exciting trip. The sentiment was high!
Then... in February Corporate thought instead of bonuses for all the extra hard work and crunch time, they'd go ahead and layoff a bunch of people instead!
Wahooo! Secretly plotting for a while and then manifesting with a late Wednesday notice to stay home and log in to a mandatory town hall meeting at 7 a.m.m the next day. So... yeah. that was both a bummer and . After a fifteen-minute fluff speech that didn't once say "hey sorry our bad," they logged off and emailed people who no longer had jobs. Which turned out to be like 2/3 of Andrew's department.
Andrew was one of those folks. After five years and change. Because we planned for this kind of thing and there was a decent severance, we weren't totally boned, but still a bit of a bummer!
That they did it the day before Valentine's Day was just a stinker. Especially because we had Valentine's Day plans to switch to.
But there was no time to mourn that day. It was the day before Valentine's and we'd signed up for the Homeschool Association's Valentine's Skate! Which was a blast! It was so fun.
And also at the end, I fell and (spoiler alert) fractured my shoulder!
You'd think that would've been a bigger bummer at the time, but it actually didn't dawn on me that I'd seriously injured myself for a while. I knew it hurt to move, but everything hurts when you're forty, even when you don't go side-planting into ice.
Also, as somebody with chronic pain and wonky interoception, I am not always a good judge of what pain is serious and what's just the general background noise.
(See, for instance, coming into the hospital fully dilated because surely contractions hurt more than whatever had me grunting on the floor every few minutes for several hours. Obvi!)
I mean, heck I bonked my shin against the weirdly dangerous bedframe the other day and - in the moment - that hurt a helluva lot more. Though I was able to move my leg, which might have been a hint with the not being as able to move my arm part.
I carried on for a while, not wanting to interrupt the big group pictures and Valentine's exchange. When it wasn't improving by the evening, I borrowed a sling from Andrew. Being a cyclist, he has two. Just one of those things.
Man that was a musty old sling. And I ended up wearing it and its sister for nearly two months!
The next day I went to urgent care, and was told it was probably a sprain. I decided to check with an orthopedist, cuz rotator cuff tears are a thing and Andrew is still in PT for a SLAP tear from last year.
It was not a sprain.
Turns out it's a small fracture in the "greater turberosity" (top of the humerus) and was only picked up about six weeks later on an MRI that my much smarter orthopedist ordered because she thought there was a shadow on the Xray. MRI also noted a great number of scary sounding defects that my ortho shrugged at and said were not a thing (mostly regular wear and tear rotator cuff I guess but there may or may not be a "subtle" labral tear).
Of course, after six weeks of keeping it in a sling, I also developed a frozen shoulder, so despite a fair bit of healing, I still have pain and almost no range of motion. And I'll have PT when appointment open up. They are booked out two months at a time seems like so it's mostly on a cancellation list.
I got one in there but managed to miss about half of it going to the wrong location. Since I'm not comfortable driving right now it involved my entire family coming along for the ride!
Oh and then to top it all off, my mom got a biopsy on her tongue last month that came back cancerous and we got to wait roughly four days or five millions years to hear back on what stage she was in (early - just gotta slice it off soon) she was in. I'm still breathing relief here.
So, there: excuse! It's been hard to type much the last few months. But I'm rallying at least this much
Still: February 13th is a day that will live in infamy. Andrew calls Blue's layoffs the Valentine's Day Massacre. But it could apply more broadly to the whole day. Allan did have fun skating, but I'm pretty sure she blames Valenskate for all the inconveniences in her life at this point.
There was a lot more she had to do for herself fairly quickly.
Like her hair, which in my opinion led to a wonderful outcome:
Which she loves as long as it is in full bedhead mode. She does not like it when it's neat. But it's flipping adorable and she looks so chic and I love it.
It came about because suddenly I couldn't do her lil Wednesday Addams pigtail braids anymore. We did a month of her brushing her hair and me helping her get it in a bun before she was over it.
Which is awesome. Because I love Allan's hair no matter the length, but brushing her hair was a nightmare. She's super sensitive and it got super tangly. And I'm not really great with a lot of screaming. Call it a sensory issue of mine.
Anyways, I was midway through a blogpost when I broke myself, so let me just give you a blast to the near past. For a spell.
Flashback
Child: I'm mad at witches for making people hate black cats
Me: "Witches" were just women people who didn't fit in with a certain social program and got accused of bad things as scapegoats before being tortured and killed to maintain the status quo.
Child: I'm mad at people hunting witches and making it hard for cats.
Me: Also killing women.
Child: I'm mad at men!
Me: Legit
It's winter! Finally, after a good month and a half of sheer agony that there was no snow and would never be snow again and the Pacific Northwest was just the worst... February did its February thing and... existed on the Island of Cathaven!
Animal Crossing has come to our household. It's a bit weird. Or a lot weird. But it is addicting in its mellow inoffensiveness and super chill guitar background music. Allan is making the island beautiful using Andrew's superior skill in targeted resource gathering. I have a house after a good long time of not playing enough to graduate from a tent. It's good times.
Oh yeah, it also snowed here in real life.
Not a ton. But enough to shut the public-school doors for a couple of days, due to all the melt-refreeze cycles that snow tends to take hereabouts. Allan was indignant about the entire experience, so I gave her a couple of days of "late start" homeschooling where she got extra morning time hunched over her phone and I got to pace the kitchen island reading unmolested. It was peaceful!
My Kindle is darned cute and I love it to bits.
Knock on wood the end of the contract turns into a conversion and we don't have to move to Los Angeles!
Happy May y'all! May the rest of the 2025 be a little chiller and more blog-conducive!
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