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Life: Family Reunion and Be More Chill
I had another busy time this past weekend, sooooo I figured I would do a write-up about it, as one does. I'm still spending more time with my sister than anyone else, but... I'll miss her when I move, too. I am making the most of my remaining time in Maryland.
I. Friday :: Biking and Relaxing
After getting maudlin about leaving my beloved bike trails, I spent a huge chunk of the past week biking. I went out Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and then again on Friday. Earlier in the week I only had time to bike for about two hours after work but Friday I have a longer chunk of time, so I decided to FINALLY follow the Anacostia River Trail farther south than the Bladensburg Waterfront Park.
As it turns out, it's a terrible place to play pokemon go. I was interested in going that way because there's supposed to be this beautiful aquatic garden there with lots of water lilies and gorgeous plants. But the bike trail goes around the BACK of the gardens through the marsh, which is quite scenic but also well removed from the roads and civilization (and pokego civilization). I didn't end up looping around to the gardens because I figure I should still have time to go THAT far on another day before I move. Instead, I went as far south on the Anacostia trail as I had time for, because I just... Want to see as much of this area as possible from my bike before I can't.
And then my sister met me at my house when I got back. She didn't want to come down in the morning for our Saturday plans so we hung out and watched Nailed It and it was a very good follow-up to my biking adventure.
II. Saturday :: Family Reunion Pool Party
Every summer my Aunt Teddy has a big pool party and invites a bunch of our family to hang out at her house and swim and eat delicious food. This year, it occurred this past Saturday.
It was the first year my mom didn't go. She's been having some health issues that made it prohibitive and this is also the first year both my sister and I had drivers licenses and access to cars so we went... By ourselves. I let my sister drive my car! She's definitely gonna be the one driving with me and my cat to Boston (because of mom's health issues) so we figured it would help for her to see how my car handles before we trade off driving ~500 miles with as little stopping as we can stand. And it went well! My car is bigger than (mom's) the one she usually drives but not by a lot; the handling feels different, but not too different. It was good.
And the pool party was excellent! I think this is the first year so many members of both our/Teddy's side of the family and her husband/Tom's side of the family could come and it was A BIG CROWD. It's also kind of... Funny... Because we no longer really have an older teenager/young twenty-something contingent in the family. Sis and I are officially in the same age bracket with the young mothers and fathers except we don't have kids, so that's always fun. I spent a ton of time playing with all my little cousins/whatever-relations-they-are in the pool and it was honestly really nice. I would literally rather die than produce spawn or be a parent but as long as they aren't mine I honestly love kids.
Food was good, company was good, we got there before noon and didn't leave until almost eight pm. We got to see lots of family we haven't in a year or several and I got to tell lots of people about my move! I got kind of maudlin about moving meaning I won't come to the party any more, because I'm not sure it'll be worthwhile to me to come down just for that (I'd come to Thanksgiving instead, which is a similar crowd from our family) but there are some people who I only see this time of year and not seeing them makes me sad.
Buuuuuut my cousin Megan lives in upstate New York which is nooooot that far from Boston, so she proposed coming up with her two sons sometimes to visit me and I'd honestly really like that. I know my cousin's kids are technically first cousins once removed but they're quite possibly the only nephews I'm going to have, so I really would like to see them and spend time with them as they grow up. My mother is the youngest of seven and so a lot of my cousins are closer to my mom's age than my age, and their kids are in my generation rather than the next one. So like. I will take this one chance to be an auntie.
We drove home, watched even more Nailed It, and called that a night.
III. Sunday :: Pokego and Be More Chill
My one other big plan for the weekend was to see Be More Chill at a theater in Virginia. We spent the earlier part of the day going to a terrible park to play pokego specifically because magnemite are there and sister wanted more magnemite, then left around five PM for dinner and the theater.
We got Mexican at a mediocre restaurant which does not understand what gluten free means (enchiladas with corn tortillas? not marked gluten free but completely absent of gluten. tacos with flour tortillas? marked gluten free) and then headed over to the theater, which is technically on the campus of a private Catholic school and finding it on their grounds was An Adventure. The theater itself is a black box theater and I was briefly nervous about the quality of the performance despite reading EXCELLENT reviews online about this company, because I've had really bad luck in the past with small theaters.
But it was EXCELLENT. The set was minimal but the staging and lighting were delightful and the songs really are SUPER GOOD. Everyone did a fantastic job singing and the characters felt so relateable and alive. I've read various things about Be More Chill being a perfect depiction of the millenial social experience growing up and it does hit those notes really well, in depicting the characters' anxieties and insecurities about fitting in. It was just... Such a good performance, I'm so glad we went because Sunday was CLOSING NIGHT.
The A/C was also broken in the theater so it was hot as fuck, but they gave everyone free popsicles which was kind of magical so I forgive them.
IV. Monday :: Chore Day
Sis stayed until about noon; I ditched her at 10:30 to go get allergy shots and after she left, proceeded with Doing All The Chores.
I washed my bike! I ordered bike-specific brushes and degreaser and lube and finally cleaned it real well and (hopefully!) made my chain stop squeaking, so I'm glad I finally stopped being a shitty bike owner and did some proper maintenance. I also put air in the tires so my baby is SUPER READY to be ridden as much as possible before I have to move, lol.
Besides that, I washed two sets of bedding, one load of clothes, tidied up the main space of my room, and vacuumed. I feel kinda bad that my house was a mess while sister was here but it is a lot cleaner now and I feel better about it! I'm still trying to prune down my belongings and stressing about it but like, little by little. We will get there.
V. Odds And Ends
Beyond the weekend... Possibly this Friday I'm getting dinner with my cousin, Saturday is ralts community day with my sister, Sunday I might see Laurent if he's feeling better, or maybe I'll call my friends Katie and Michael if he's not. At some point I will hopefully get dinner with Mel and Rui to say goodbye to them, Samy might come down mid-August to get Oishi Sushi one last time. Indi is coming!!! And I'm supposed to have a goodbye dinner with Ciry and Psiten if we can hack timing.
I'm really excited to move to Boston!! But leaving everyone here is super bittersweet. I'm not even... Actively sad about it, I'm too busy keeping busy to be sad, but every once in a while I do feel a little maudlin. I've drifted away from a lot of my friends near here, in Virginia and in Baltimore and I know a big part of that is that they're JUST far enough away to be prohibitive to visit but THAT makes me sad. I'd love to see those people before I go but I know it's just not really going to happen. I'm almost out of days I can afford to spend seeing people and saying goodbye and goodness knows what their schedules look like. Maybe we'll see each other at cons. That's kind of how things go.
My surgery is in just over a week and I'm not nervous about it but that might be because I'm just not thinking about it. My pre-surgery appointment is this Friday, though, and after that I will Definitely Be Thinking About It. I hope recovery is fast. I expect to be ambulatory quickly but I have no idea how soon I'll feel NORMAL after surgery, you know? I hope I feel normal enough in time for friend plans.
And as a last aside... I'm starting to kind of miss twitter, or at least the idea of twitter. I feel like there are friends I'm forgetting to talk to and I feel guilty because I can't even necessarily remember who they are. I have phone numbers and discord handles for a majority of my friends and so when I'm not on twitter, it's hard to recall who's ONLY on twitter. It's like the thing where it takes you a really long time to notice when someone has disappeared from twitter: the noise of everyone who IS still there drowns out the absences.
But the other reason I left twitter is because Fire Emblem: Three Houses was coming out and I want to hear literally nothing about it at all. Don't talk to me about Three Houses, don't tell me any of your opinions on characters or plot or even the game mechanics. Fire Emblem, more than any other game fandom, makes me feel like I am Doing The Game Wrong and that makes it hard for me to play and enjoy the games. So like... I bought it, I'm a couple chapters into it. I probably won't be done with it by the time I'm "supposed" to come off hiatus but when I come back, I might resume "Saturdays only" twitter use so maybe I can continue to avoid spoilers and opinions and FE fandom as a whole.
I dunno if I'll want to talk to people about it even when I'm done. I don't play these games the way my friends do, I never care about ships and I care about the characters in direct proportion to how efficient they are at killing things (or not dying, for my healers, I fucking love my healers). I feel like... This time my experience is a little bit closer to what my friends' seems to be, what with the whole Persona Emblem mechanics of exploring the school and developing relationships there in so many different ways, but I still find the fandom really alienating. It's kind of like how I avoid the fuck out of Haikyuu fandom because I don't understand what fandom at large is interested in, but I enthusiastically want to talk about oikage and only oikage. Fire Emblem is the same way but my "oikage" is like, character stats.
I think if I knew anyone who was a Fire Emblem casual, that's who I would want to talk to. Anyone who goes really hard and is super into it is toooooo into it for me to relate to, I need fellow lazy gamers who don't do fic or art but just like strategically making lots of things dead sometimes.
And that's what I've been up to lately, thanks for reading!
I. Friday :: Biking and Relaxing
After getting maudlin about leaving my beloved bike trails, I spent a huge chunk of the past week biking. I went out Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and then again on Friday. Earlier in the week I only had time to bike for about two hours after work but Friday I have a longer chunk of time, so I decided to FINALLY follow the Anacostia River Trail farther south than the Bladensburg Waterfront Park.
As it turns out, it's a terrible place to play pokemon go. I was interested in going that way because there's supposed to be this beautiful aquatic garden there with lots of water lilies and gorgeous plants. But the bike trail goes around the BACK of the gardens through the marsh, which is quite scenic but also well removed from the roads and civilization (and pokego civilization). I didn't end up looping around to the gardens because I figure I should still have time to go THAT far on another day before I move. Instead, I went as far south on the Anacostia trail as I had time for, because I just... Want to see as much of this area as possible from my bike before I can't.
And then my sister met me at my house when I got back. She didn't want to come down in the morning for our Saturday plans so we hung out and watched Nailed It and it was a very good follow-up to my biking adventure.
II. Saturday :: Family Reunion Pool Party
Every summer my Aunt Teddy has a big pool party and invites a bunch of our family to hang out at her house and swim and eat delicious food. This year, it occurred this past Saturday.
It was the first year my mom didn't go. She's been having some health issues that made it prohibitive and this is also the first year both my sister and I had drivers licenses and access to cars so we went... By ourselves. I let my sister drive my car! She's definitely gonna be the one driving with me and my cat to Boston (because of mom's health issues) so we figured it would help for her to see how my car handles before we trade off driving ~500 miles with as little stopping as we can stand. And it went well! My car is bigger than (mom's) the one she usually drives but not by a lot; the handling feels different, but not too different. It was good.
And the pool party was excellent! I think this is the first year so many members of both our/Teddy's side of the family and her husband/Tom's side of the family could come and it was A BIG CROWD. It's also kind of... Funny... Because we no longer really have an older teenager/young twenty-something contingent in the family. Sis and I are officially in the same age bracket with the young mothers and fathers except we don't have kids, so that's always fun. I spent a ton of time playing with all my little cousins/whatever-relations-they-are in the pool and it was honestly really nice. I would literally rather die than produce spawn or be a parent but as long as they aren't mine I honestly love kids.
Food was good, company was good, we got there before noon and didn't leave until almost eight pm. We got to see lots of family we haven't in a year or several and I got to tell lots of people about my move! I got kind of maudlin about moving meaning I won't come to the party any more, because I'm not sure it'll be worthwhile to me to come down just for that (I'd come to Thanksgiving instead, which is a similar crowd from our family) but there are some people who I only see this time of year and not seeing them makes me sad.
Buuuuuut my cousin Megan lives in upstate New York which is nooooot that far from Boston, so she proposed coming up with her two sons sometimes to visit me and I'd honestly really like that. I know my cousin's kids are technically first cousins once removed but they're quite possibly the only nephews I'm going to have, so I really would like to see them and spend time with them as they grow up. My mother is the youngest of seven and so a lot of my cousins are closer to my mom's age than my age, and their kids are in my generation rather than the next one. So like. I will take this one chance to be an auntie.
We drove home, watched even more Nailed It, and called that a night.
III. Sunday :: Pokego and Be More Chill
My one other big plan for the weekend was to see Be More Chill at a theater in Virginia. We spent the earlier part of the day going to a terrible park to play pokego specifically because magnemite are there and sister wanted more magnemite, then left around five PM for dinner and the theater.
We got Mexican at a mediocre restaurant which does not understand what gluten free means (enchiladas with corn tortillas? not marked gluten free but completely absent of gluten. tacos with flour tortillas? marked gluten free) and then headed over to the theater, which is technically on the campus of a private Catholic school and finding it on their grounds was An Adventure. The theater itself is a black box theater and I was briefly nervous about the quality of the performance despite reading EXCELLENT reviews online about this company, because I've had really bad luck in the past with small theaters.
But it was EXCELLENT. The set was minimal but the staging and lighting were delightful and the songs really are SUPER GOOD. Everyone did a fantastic job singing and the characters felt so relateable and alive. I've read various things about Be More Chill being a perfect depiction of the millenial social experience growing up and it does hit those notes really well, in depicting the characters' anxieties and insecurities about fitting in. It was just... Such a good performance, I'm so glad we went because Sunday was CLOSING NIGHT.
The A/C was also broken in the theater so it was hot as fuck, but they gave everyone free popsicles which was kind of magical so I forgive them.
IV. Monday :: Chore Day
Sis stayed until about noon; I ditched her at 10:30 to go get allergy shots and after she left, proceeded with Doing All The Chores.
I washed my bike! I ordered bike-specific brushes and degreaser and lube and finally cleaned it real well and (hopefully!) made my chain stop squeaking, so I'm glad I finally stopped being a shitty bike owner and did some proper maintenance. I also put air in the tires so my baby is SUPER READY to be ridden as much as possible before I have to move, lol.
Besides that, I washed two sets of bedding, one load of clothes, tidied up the main space of my room, and vacuumed. I feel kinda bad that my house was a mess while sister was here but it is a lot cleaner now and I feel better about it! I'm still trying to prune down my belongings and stressing about it but like, little by little. We will get there.
V. Odds And Ends
Beyond the weekend... Possibly this Friday I'm getting dinner with my cousin, Saturday is ralts community day with my sister, Sunday I might see Laurent if he's feeling better, or maybe I'll call my friends Katie and Michael if he's not. At some point I will hopefully get dinner with Mel and Rui to say goodbye to them, Samy might come down mid-August to get Oishi Sushi one last time. Indi is coming!!! And I'm supposed to have a goodbye dinner with Ciry and Psiten if we can hack timing.
I'm really excited to move to Boston!! But leaving everyone here is super bittersweet. I'm not even... Actively sad about it, I'm too busy keeping busy to be sad, but every once in a while I do feel a little maudlin. I've drifted away from a lot of my friends near here, in Virginia and in Baltimore and I know a big part of that is that they're JUST far enough away to be prohibitive to visit but THAT makes me sad. I'd love to see those people before I go but I know it's just not really going to happen. I'm almost out of days I can afford to spend seeing people and saying goodbye and goodness knows what their schedules look like. Maybe we'll see each other at cons. That's kind of how things go.
My surgery is in just over a week and I'm not nervous about it but that might be because I'm just not thinking about it. My pre-surgery appointment is this Friday, though, and after that I will Definitely Be Thinking About It. I hope recovery is fast. I expect to be ambulatory quickly but I have no idea how soon I'll feel NORMAL after surgery, you know? I hope I feel normal enough in time for friend plans.
And as a last aside... I'm starting to kind of miss twitter, or at least the idea of twitter. I feel like there are friends I'm forgetting to talk to and I feel guilty because I can't even necessarily remember who they are. I have phone numbers and discord handles for a majority of my friends and so when I'm not on twitter, it's hard to recall who's ONLY on twitter. It's like the thing where it takes you a really long time to notice when someone has disappeared from twitter: the noise of everyone who IS still there drowns out the absences.
But the other reason I left twitter is because Fire Emblem: Three Houses was coming out and I want to hear literally nothing about it at all. Don't talk to me about Three Houses, don't tell me any of your opinions on characters or plot or even the game mechanics. Fire Emblem, more than any other game fandom, makes me feel like I am Doing The Game Wrong and that makes it hard for me to play and enjoy the games. So like... I bought it, I'm a couple chapters into it. I probably won't be done with it by the time I'm "supposed" to come off hiatus but when I come back, I might resume "Saturdays only" twitter use so maybe I can continue to avoid spoilers and opinions and FE fandom as a whole.
I dunno if I'll want to talk to people about it even when I'm done. I don't play these games the way my friends do, I never care about ships and I care about the characters in direct proportion to how efficient they are at killing things (or not dying, for my healers, I fucking love my healers). I feel like... This time my experience is a little bit closer to what my friends' seems to be, what with the whole Persona Emblem mechanics of exploring the school and developing relationships there in so many different ways, but I still find the fandom really alienating. It's kind of like how I avoid the fuck out of Haikyuu fandom because I don't understand what fandom at large is interested in, but I enthusiastically want to talk about oikage and only oikage. Fire Emblem is the same way but my "oikage" is like, character stats.
I think if I knew anyone who was a Fire Emblem casual, that's who I would want to talk to. Anyone who goes really hard and is super into it is toooooo into it for me to relate to, I need fellow lazy gamers who don't do fic or art but just like strategically making lots of things dead sometimes.
And that's what I've been up to lately, thanks for reading!