This morning I had two tasks. Take a shower and change the litter box.
I accomplished my tasks and I’m ready for bed. I feel like I scaled Mt. Everest. I had planned to write about a recent hack from Russia. That’s right, I got hacked by Russia.
But I’ll save that for next week when I have more energy.
Happy weekend! Do you have any exciting plans?
Have you been hacked? What have you done to protect your phone or computer?
We’ve had two days of rain and now have ponds in our yard.
Today we were supposed to drive to Mexico. We’d planned this trip for a couple months. My family was appalled when I told them. Our friends here said we shouldn’t go. It’s too dangerous.
Our realtor who frequents the beach resort with his family said he had just been and it’s fine. The insurance guy who I called for the Mexico car insurance said it’s “Rubbish” to say it’s not safe.
Mexico is in the news a lot lately for two dead Americans, a kidnapped mother, missing Americans and drug cartels. I was a little nervous.
But then I got sick. My daughter asked me to test for Covid because my cough that’s keeping me up at night sounded exactly like hers when she had it. The test was most definitely positive.
My son sent me a link to Medical One and told me to get a zoom call appointment with a doctor. I did and I’ve been prescribed a few things to help with my cough and Covid. The doctor told me what to look for in the next few days and to call if I’m feeling worse. She also said to get an oximeter to test the oxygen in my bloodstream and what acceptable numbers were.
So, it’s a no go on Mexico.
Have you or family members had COVID? What were your symptoms like and how long did it last?
What do you think about traveling to Mexico?
We spotted a rainbow yesterday afternoon. It looks like the pot of gold is in our backyard.
My blog is a living record of my life because I often post about what is going on in my daily life. I looked back on this date for the past three years. Last year, I wrote a post called “No more drama for the momma.” That’s a title I could have used this week!
But the story was about me worrying about my daughter who had COVID and her pug Waffles who got into a trash can and ate chicken bones.
Waffles is incorrigible and was back to the vet this week. They haven’t figured out what he ate, and hopefully this too shall pass. Literally.
In 2021, we had a snow day. I posted a video of snow flurries. I think it’s a possibility this year, too. Flagstaff and Sedona are getting tons of snow. My kids in Berkeley said they may get snow as well.
We weren’t on shutdown mode yet in February 2020. We had no idea what was about to hit us. I was writing about sports parenting.
We went to a wedding in Colorado that year the second week of February. There were people attending from all over the world. After we were back home, living in Palm Springs, I got a call that the father of the groom was on a ventilator with COVID. He was a physician who worked in a hospital and most likely got COVID at work. He survived thankfully.
I remember getting sick a week later, but didn’t think it was COVID. Who knows? That was before testing.
It wasn’t until mid March that my kids were told a mandatory stay-in-place (or shutdown) was coming. They had 24 hours to prepare. My daughter decided to drive home and the three of us all worked from home — my husband in the master bedroom, me in my son’s former room and my daughter in her room. Waffles of course ate things he shouldn’t in our backyard and ended up in the ER.
What were you doing around this date during the past three years?
What was I up to in the New Year of 2022? One of the things I like about blogging is being able to look back on what I was doing, thinking and feeling.
A year ago to the date, I was returning home from Berkeley after taking care of my son post surgery.
Imagine that!
AND my husband wasn’t answering the phone. I was worried about him. It turned out he was sick in bed with COVID. As sick as I have ever known him to be.
I took a Lyft home from the airport in Phoenix. The Lyft driver was not happy when he learned how far away I lived. I didn’t mean to be an inconvenience, you’d think drivers would want to pick up a long ride. But I think we are so far out, there’s not much of a chance for the driver to pick up any rides on the way back to Phoenix. Plus, he was going to be late picking his wife up after her work. I wondered why he accepted my ride in the first place?
In any case, I moved into our Casita and kept my husband isolated in our Master bedroom. (I heard master isn’t PC to use, but I really don’t care.)
I cooked him homemade chicken soup with onions, garlic and carrots. I carted it to the front porch and then called him to let him know food was waiting for him. This went on for several days.
When he was finally better, we went exploring and hiked the Sears-Kay Ruins. Then we went to hang out with friends who invited us over to watch football.
What were you up to a year ago? Do you find yourself doing many of the same things year after year?
This was Olive, checking out the Mulies from the bar in our living room.
My New Year started off with a phone call from my brother that our mom was found in her bed unresponsive. Within two hours she passed away after being taken by ambulance to the hospital. This was totally unexpected. She tested positive for COVID five days earlier but was asymptomatic.
I’m going through shock, denial, disbelief and grief all at once.
I wrote this story about her years ago. I sent it to children’s book publishers and actually got an offer from a small publisher. I turned down the offer because I didn’t think it was big enough! I’ve never had another offer in my life to have a book published.
Here’s the story:
A DIFFERENT KIND OF MOTHER
I have a different kind of mother. She’s not like other mothers on our street. She looks like other mothers. But it’s what she does that’s different.
She sings all the time. She sings songs by men named Wagner and Wolf. But she calls them “VAHgner” and “VOUlf.”
When my friends come over they ask “What is that?”
We listen. “La la la la la la la la laaaa.”
I shrug my shoulders and say, “That’s my mom.”
My friends laugh. Their mothers never sing unless it’s to the radio.
My mom sings all the time. She sings operas while she drives, cooks, shops, gardens, reads and cleans. I think she sings in her dreams.
My mother never buys a loaf of bread. She bakes it every week and slices it with a big knife. Sometimes she lets me punch down the dough after it rises.
When I take my lunch to school, my sandwich sits crooked and looks like it’s ready to fall. My mother packs me carrot sticks, a hard boiled egg, an orange and an apple. There’s too much food and not one chip or pretzel like the other kids get. I like to order hot lunch.
My mother thinks hunting through the woods for mushrooms is fun. She took classes to learn about mushrooms so she knows which are good to eat and which ones are poisonous. I hate it when she asks my friends to go picking with her. But they love to go tramping through the dense green forest, climbing over fallen logs covered with moss. She points out the faerie rings where the mushrooms grow.
My mother grows vegetables in her garden, she won’t buy them at the store. But does she grow peas and carrots like the other mothers on our street? No. She’s proud of her eggplant, asparagus, spaghetti squash and rhubarb.
When my friends come over to play, my mother asks them to weed the garden.
“Nobody wants to weed. We want to play,” I tell her.
Then I turn around and the kids are lined up on both sides of her, pulling weeds as she tells them about the vitamins in vegetables.
My mother doesn’t read ordinary books by popular authors. She likes to read e.e. cummings with letters scattered over the page. I don’t know what the poems say. But my mother gathers up the letters and makes sense out of them.
Digging for clams up to her elbows in mud is how my mother catches dinner. She knows about razor clams that we dig in the surf and butter clams, littlenecks and cockles we find in the gritty gravel. She calls the ones we break with our shovels “clums.”
She picks oysters off the beach, shucks the top shell of and eats them raw right then and there. She eats the roe out of sea urchins and said, “It tastes like caviar!”
She’s the friendliest person on the street. She bakes wild blackberry pies for elderly neighbors and talks tomatoes with anyone who will listen.
She invites the neighborhood kids in, even if I don’t want her to. She doesn’t care when kids build a fort in our backyard or makes tents in the living room with old sheets. She lets us draw chalk pictures on the driveway and dig for China in the backyard.
At night when she tucks me in, I listen to her sing a lullaby with her beautiful voice.
When she kisses me good night, I love that my mother is a different kind of mother.
It’s official. We left California for Arizona two years ago! I can’t believe how quickly our years flew by — and in some respects how long it has seemed.
Here’s what I thought about moving two years ago today:

Friday was moving day. Our movers arrived at 9 a.m. and we thought it would be a couple hours and we’d hit the road. No, we were wrong. By 5 p.m. the movers realized their truck was full and we still had a bunch of stuff in the garage like bikes, a wheelbarrow and my daughter’s desk. Plus the STORAGE UNIT where we’ve been squirreling away boxes and stuff for months.
Yikes! The movers had to rent a U-Haul and we gave them the keys to our storage unit. Of course there weren’t any U-Hauls in town and they had to drive to San Diego or some place to find a U-Haul. They said they’d come back to our California house the next morning and pick up the rest of our stuff in the garage when our housekeeper and dear friend Delia would be cleaning.
We drove to Arizona and our new home, minus our furniture that night. We thankfully packed suitcases and bedding. Our fellow swim team parents and close friends drove one of our cars packed to the hilt, plus their car complete with all the stuff from our freezer and fridge. Now, those are true friends who volunteer to drive an 8-hour round trip to make our move easier!
I have driving anxiety and panic attacks driving on freeways. I couldn’t face the four-hour drive on Interstate 10. Our daughter promised to fly down from SFO and drive one car and help us unpack. Then California went into lockdown. Our daughter didn’t feel good about flying. So our friends volunteered to help us out and meanwhile our daughter’s supposed flight was cancelled. It all worked out in the end.
We got to our Arizona home at 10:30 p.m. We unpacked our suitcases, settled into bed around midnight exhausted beyond comprehension. Thank goodness we bought the furniture in the casita from the sellers. Otherwise, we’d have been on the floor. We never saw our friends who drove our car for us. They not only drove our car, but they filled our fridge with all our condiments, frozen foods and perishables — before heading back to California.
The next day, the moving van and U-haul arrived at 2 p.m. We worked throughout the weekend to get the kitchen in order and our closet organized. Kitty is stressed and hiding under the bed in the casita, where we’ve been living.
I don’t recommend moving after living in one house for 28 years. It’s an unusually hard task, mentally and physically. But, when we’re more settled the sunsets will make it all worthwhile.
What’s the longest you’ve lived in one place? How did you handle packing and going through years of stuff when you moved? Did you think of moving during the COVID shutdowns? A lot of people did move.
It’s a busy week or two. We returned from a trip to Mexico. I wrote about that HERE.
My son and his girlfriend are visiting from the Bay Area. We are gong to visit Taliesin West later today. It will be a first for all of us. That’s the winter home of Frank Lloyd Wright. We’ll be going on a self-guided tour. A coincidence is that a friend of mine from playgroup days in Palm Springs is a director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. What a small world! I found out from a friend in Palm Springs that our mutual friend had moved to Arizona a month or two before us. I wrote about coincidences recently HERE.
Next week, I fly to Seattle to visit my 90-year-old mom. I meant to visit for her birthday last March, but we were in the throws of Omicron. Both my daughter and husband got it. What weird days those were. I was taking care of my daughter — without being near her. We would wave at each other through her apartment window. I’d go to the laundromat and grocery store for her and leave things on her front steps.
When my husband had COVID, I moved into our Casita. It has a kitchen, so I cooked him chicken soup with lots of garlic and onions. I’d leave it outside the front door and text him. I was close if he needed me, but I wasn’t in physical contact.
I now have an aversion to flying. We have taken trips by car, which I’m comfortable with, but I haven’t wanted to get on an airplane. I can’t stand the wait at the airport, the crowds, being on the plane. COVID ruined flying for me.
Did COVID change your feelings about flying, too? Or did it affect you in other ways? Did you or your family get it?
