My mother mentioned she misses my Friday Fives so back to it.
1. Work
Work is still work. Lots going on there. Always busy. I do also still love my job. Commuting from Sacramento to San Francisco is a bit long, it’s a good thing I only have to do that occasionally.
2. Home/Erik
I know I haven’t mentioned it lately, but I love my new house.
Earlier this year we made a whole bunch of changes to the back yard. It started with a swampy corner of our yard. I describe our back yard as a giant sweater with a tiny little string sticking out of it. We knew better, but we pulled the string anyway.
Early in February the corner of our yard next to the pool started flooding. There were a couple of possibilities. It could be either a crack in the pool (no bueno) or a leaky sprinkler head. Fearghus dug up the sprinkler head and the hole filled up with water by the next morning. Once we drained the water out of the hole we noticed the the sprinkler was seeping water. It turned out that the {thingy} that controlled whether water would flow to the sprinkler head was leaking. Fearghus replaced it and we could have gone on our merry way.. except that instead we stood in the back yard and started talking about what we wanted to do with it.
When we bought the house it had a fairly large garden and a playhouse in the backyard. The garden had a spigot run to it and was surrounded by a cute little two-foot-tall fence and a rock border. I wasn’t thrilled by the idea of a garden. I have a black thumb and having the cute little short fence was doing nothing to keep the dogs out of the garden area. In addition to being not entirely thrilled about gardening I was even less thrilled about trying to grow food in a place where the dogs would eat the food.. and the food would be grown where the dogs had done their business. So Fearghus and I decided we’d remove the garden.
We contemplated keeping the playhouse for Erik to play in but quickly realized that Erik wasn’t terribly interested in it.. and frankly the play house was starting to fall apart. We made the decision to get rid of it.
This meant that in addition to getting rid of the cute little two-foot-tall fence around the garden we also had to remove the stones that outlined the garden area and then eliminate the mound of dirt that made up the garden. Unbeknownst to us the garden also had a layer of black plastic and gopher wire under the whole thing. Fearghus found that out when he attempted to run a rototiller through the dirt. Getting rid of the garden also meant that we had to dig up the spigot currently running to the garden and relocate the sprinkler control unit which was mounted on the playhouse. This led to even more digging to trace the pipes back to their source and eliminating the spigot in the now-non-existent-garden meant that the back yard wouldn’t have a hose bib in it so we had to set that up too.
After a lot of digging, a bit of deconstruction and a fair bit of rock moving we knocked down the play house, cleared out the garden and I moved a whole bunch of awful red lava rock from the bed around our gazebo around to the other side of the house. Then we added a (I think) literal ton of river rocks around the gazebo and re-seeded the back yard.
A few days later Kitty told us about a big play structure that was for sale on a Facebook group. We were able to get it for $300 and ended up placing that in the location of the old garden. I sanded it and it’s still destined to get painted.
This past week while my parents were in town we finally purchased the new sprinkler control units and got all of our house sprinklers back onto automated control (just in time for the Autumn rains *facepalm*). Regardless, it’s done now. There’s still bunches of things to do.. but our back yard no longer looks like a moon-scape.
We took Erik in for an assessment at Kaiser earlier this year. He was assessed as not autistic but they did agree that he should get speech therapy. We’ve had him in weekly to visit with a therapist and he’s been making great strides. He’s still behind but he’s quickly catching up. It turns out that because he’s speech delayed he can also qualify for free preschool. We’ve had an assessment with the school district and have an IEP to review their findings next week. The gal who did the assessment said that she does believe he’ll qualify as speech delayed but she also expressed concern that he may be exhibiting ADD symptoms. We’ll see how that pans out.
3. Health
I’ve often said I have Schrödinger’s weight loss. As long as I’m looking at it (and don’t glance away even for a moment) I will lose weight.. but look away…
Here’s my weight loss graph going back to 2010 (2008 really but there’s only one date before 2010 so it’s really only good back to 2010). I’ve also added in notes to myself about what stressor it was that drew my attention away from weight loss. There are some very good reasons here.. and some impressive hills/valleys.
I am currently on a downward slope. Since late February of this year I’ve been following the #keto lifestyle. That is Low Carb, High Fat. More here. Lately I’ve been kind of a keto heretic voicing some ideas that ruffle a lot of hard-core ketoers feathers.
Whatever. I’m following the eating plan that works for me.
At this point I have lost 53.5 lbs since I started #keto (Point A on the graph)(83.5 lbs below my highest ever weight). My weight is below every other weight I have recorded in my adult life. I plan to continue to maintain hyper focus on this as long as I can.
4. SCA/Projects
Along with losing 50+ lbs I also found that my previously supportive kirtles are no longer supportive. So I’m working on a new dress. Slowly. Whatever I’m still working on it.
5.
This weekend I’m watching Liam and Arik. They’re my.. um.. sort of grand kids. (You know that status in FB “It’s complicated”? Yeah, it’s like that). They refer to me as “Tia” and to Fearghus as “Tito”.
Anyway all three boys have been having a grand time hanging out and playing together. I’m contemplating Tom Sawyering them into helping me pull weeds around the pool tomorrow. I wonder if that makes me a bad grandma?
Future:
Oct 2-9 Great Western War, Taft CA
Oct 13-15 October Crown, Rancho Seco CA
Oct 27-29 Cynaguan Fall Coronet, Oroville CA
Nov 10-12 PPF-Burgundy Fairfax CA
