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I had a nice quiet birthday yesterday. Work was a little better than usual because I not only got a big dataset to work with, but I discovered that the originator of said data was my corporate supervisor, Zack. He's good to work with and plenty competent, so that makes my life easier. Speaking of coworkers, today was a retirement shindig for my branch chief, and some former coworkers showed up - Tom, James, and Kyle. It was really great to see them again. There are only four of us Edgesource folks left at my agency - two on my contract and two on my supervisor's - but Tom and James are both loving retirement and Kyle seems really happy at his job, so I can't get too mad. I just miss them.

For my birthday evening Jason did a reprise of the Valentine's Day meal - steak, twice-baked potatoes, and peas - with a chocolate peanut butter cream pie from Amphora Bakery for dessert. We watched some TV then I opened presents - art supplies, books, socks, Neopets cards. Even made it to bed at a decent hour!

This morning was a little strange. I swear Zenith smelled like potpourri. Jason couldn't smell it so it might have been my imagination but I also have a much more sensitive nose. Either way it's a mystery - we don't have any potpourri in the house that I know of.

And apparently Umbra told him he stank because they suddenly got into it, rabbit-kicking furiously, fur flying everywhere. We made sure to catch them both to trim claws and check for injuries, but everybody was fine. The fur was definitely Umbra's - each hair was half black and half white. I think she might be changing color, like vitiligo that's taking a while to manifest. She also has a patch above her eye that I can't tell if it's white or just thin.

I listened to a bunch of contest song recordings tonight. I think this is something I'm suited to, because I have a good ear for relative pitch. And I feel very fortunate that Director Claire is a bass - she's been a huge help getting me acclimated to the whole process. I'm probably weakest of the section leads in terms of music theory and Sweet Adelines lore, but I do all right. The other night someone played a note and Ginger said it sounded like a B-flat. Claire, looking at the music, said it was an A. I whispered to Ginger that she was off because of the time change, and she laughed so hard she couldn't sing the first note. That's the sort of thing that is, I feel, my true contribution to the chorus.

Between Rauth D&D tomorrow and Jo & Hanette visiting on Sunday, I'm sure the weekend will fly. Usually does.

Awesome Con was fun. Robbie punked out because of the war in Iran, which he thought might cause a terrorist attack? I have no idea. His reasoning began and ended with "it's in DC." But Sophia went all three days and spent the Saturday with us. We ended up skipping all the panels and just spending the whole day in the expo hall. We saw a lot of really cool stuff, talked to many lovely people, and even witnessed a procession of dozens of people cosplaying as Mandalorians and Jedi. So that was neat. I brought Princess Donut in her backpack cat carrier and realized that if you don't know the books, that looks really unhinged, especially since I wasn't doing any cosplay. Still, we got some pictures of her with assorted Carls. Sophia was dressed as Miss Frizzle from the Magic School Bus and I think she got a kick out of how many people recognized her. We even managed to run into my friend Dave, who was very pleased to have seen the Friday panel with some Classic Doctor Who peeps, but said the Saturday stuff he attended wasn't that great.

Awesome Con took the entire day - we grabbed breakfast on the way to the train station in the morning, stopped by a little Mexican place near the convention center for dinner at the end of the day, and finally got home just after 9pm.

In chorus news, folks are submitting ballad recordings so I've been listening to the basses and sending my observations to Claire and Kathy to make sure I'm doing this right. It's not too hard, actually, and it's good to be getting familiar with each individual voice, since it's going to be my section soon. Kathy's already stepped back as section lead but things will get real when she leaves the chorus after regionals. Her father, a double-amputee, is moving in with her and her husband, and his care is just going to take too much of her time. I get it. I'm sad she's leaving, but I get it.

Today has been pretty chill in general. Besides finishing up the recordings, putting away laundry, and playing WoW, Jason and I went to Austin Grill for an unexpectedly extended lunch. Bill and I used to go to the Austin Grill that was walking distance from our old apartment, but I hadn't been there in years. Awesome Con has a long list of local businesses offering deals during convention weekend for showing your badge, and Austin Grill was offering 10% off your entire bill. I was surprised to discover there's only one location left, and it's about 10 minutes from my house! So we went, and Jason agreed that the food was really tasty, but some snafus in the kitchen meant we had to wait just a ridiculous amount of time for our food - well over an hour. Both the waiter and the manager were extremely apologetic, almost uncomfortably so. It's long been established that I have a harmless "ask me for directions" face, but it's nothing compared to Jason's understanding "tell me all your problems" face. I swear the waiter shared all his work drama. This is apparently not new - Jason was pretty much his entire platoon's therapist in the Marines.

When we finally got home we unfortunately had to immediately drop everything to clean up a bunch of dog puke and poop. Wyatt got a stern reminder to keep his bedroom door open when he's home alone so Titan can let him know when he needs to go out, but we weren't mad at him. It's part of living with animals. They're all gross. It's just that dogs produce a much greater volume of gross than cats.

My birthday is this week. Jason and I are taking a little daytrip to Baltimore in a couple weeks to celebrate, so I'm thinking just dinner out somewhere on the day of. Otherwise it should be a pleasantly quiet week - chorus on Tuesday as usual but no other obligations until Rauth D&D on Saturday and a brief visit from Jo and Hanette on Sunday. Love to see it.

A miracle (that is, a cancellation) occurred and I was able to get in to see the ENT Tuesday morning. Turns out that the other doctor was incorrect - my eardrum is not ruptured, just a tad wonky from a lifetime of earaches and other irritations. So the ENT cleaned it out and called it good. Going forward, he recommends drops and/or irrigation monthly, with possibly an annual professional cleaning as well. He just begged me to never ever ever use a Q-tip.

In other news, we got a few hours of thick beautiful snow yesterday afternoon. None of it stuck to the roads so it got to be pretty without being dangerous. It was like being inside a snow globe.

Saw the doc. She thinks I have a ruptured eardrum. So tomorrow morning I'm making an appointment with the ENT. Good times, good times.

In no particular order.

A few weeks ago, Wife Becca had an abnormal mammogram. A biopsy found something, and an MRI found a little bit more, and this past Monday she had a double mastectomy. It went well and she's been declared cancer-free. She's got a great support network, and is staying with a nurse friend of hers for a few weeks to recover. Sophia has been understandably stressed. It doesn't help that their car died a couple weeks ago so they had the added expense of buying another one, but I think they'll be okay - in a lot of ways, actually. Their marriage has often been troubled but over the last year or so they've really worked a lot of things out. I think they've fallen back in love, which is good to see.

My guts continue to be grumpy. The Fiber One diet did not improve things so I went back to normal food and talked to my regular doc, who decided to halve my Ozempic dose while monitoring my sugars to see if that fixes the tummy issues without screwing up the diabetes issues. It's a weekly shot, so it takes a long time for the new dosage to really kick in. So far my sugars are fine but my gut isn't much improved, but it's early days yet.

Saturday morning my left ear stopped up. I tried drops and irrigation but I'm seeing the doctor this afternoon. This happens from time to time - my ears have always been a bit troublesome. To add insult to injury (sort of), at some point in the middle of the next night I pulled something in my neck. The pain was unbelievable. I couldn't move at all. The ibuprofen has dulled it quite a bit but I'm still not 100% even today. Thanks, middle age!

I continue to be two people. I know I need to be patient because this is the first time anyone has ever changed their name after getting married, but sometimes it's just comical. My favorite in recent memory is the pharmacist: when I get a text saying that I have a prescription ready for pickup, it doesn't say which medication or even how many prescriptions are ready. So since some existing refills have not updated yet, I often ask her to check under both Rau and Weber. The most recent time she confirmed the names and then asked, "Same birthdate??" "They're both me!" I replied.

Stepmotherhood continues to be a strange adventure. Last night, the second I'd gone upstairs into the bathroom, Wyatt started yelling for me. It turned out he wanted to settle an argument with his brother regarding whether Milo had ever eaten plastic. I explained that no, because there had never been any plastic in her tank, but if there was she totally would. (Wyatt was in the process of cutting up a six-pack soda ring, which I assume is where the discussion arose, as sea turtles are known for running afoul of those.) Elliott is a sweet kid most of the time, but often he seems to be working hard at perfecting his surliness. I don't know how much is just being a teenager and how much is something external, but we never know what's going to set him off. Luckily, Jason is a paragon of patience and understanding.

Recently Jason was playing an unevenly translated video game where the snakes said neigh instead of hiss and the lizards said shh. We got a chuckle out of that.

On February 25th, Jason and I went out to dinner to celebrate our one-year Rausiversary. It's the date we became legally married, but we agreed from the beginning that it would never be our officially celebrated anniversary, but rather an annual excuse to go out to dinner. We went to Clyde's, where our meals and a generous tip exactly used up the gift card my coworkers had given me for our wedding. Then we went to Cold Stone for dessert, where Jason gets a small veterans' discount. I told him that the three reasons I married him were 1. the cats, 2. the veterans' discounts, and 3. his luck at finding really good parking spots. It's a romance for the ages.

Singing Valentine's was fun as ever. We delivered about 20 over the two days, about half and half phone and in-person. All were very well-received. I think my favorite reaction was Stove's wife Van. He'd told her to expect a package and she'd have to answer the door for it. She came out, looked at me, and said, "Wait a second, I know you!"

We need to do our taxes soon. We had been hoping to have someone do them for us since we're dealing with filing jointly for the first time plus the sale of Jason's house and all that stuff, but the guy BP recommended was going to charge $1200 and all he did was send me a 55-page document to fill out in less than two weeks. It was almost like doing my own taxes by hand. If I'm going to be paying $1200, I expect to be able to just throw my forms at somebody and let them sort it out, not fill out my own interest tables. What we'll probably do is shell out for the highest tier of TurboTax which has a live person helping you. And it's still about eight times cheaper than the CPA.

We had been meaning to get a whiteboard calendar for the kitchen for some time, not only to keep track of upcoming events but also to write down what we have for dinner each night so we know how old any leftovers are. I bought one online and it ended up being a whole lot larger than I'd expected. Luckily, it fits perfectly on the wall where we had a baker's rack, so we swapped the rack with the trash and recycle cans, which were next to the peninsula. I discovered something strange about my brain in the process: when Jason moved the cans to the opposite wall, he kept them on the same side - that is, trash on the left, recycling on the right. And for some reason that has confused the heck out of me, and I think it might be because instead of thinking in terms of left and right, I was thinking in terms of which one was closer to the door. Brains are weird. Thank goodness for label makers.

This coming weekend is Awesome Con. I hadn't wanted to go but Robbie made a huge deal about it being his birthday weekend and Sophia made a huge deal about all the exciting celebrities that will be there (Firefly and Critical Role, most notably) and between the two of them they wore us down until we bought a Saturday pass. There are a couple things on the schedule that look moderately interesting but I suspect we'll spend most of the day wandering the dealer room and artists alley. And I know that no matter what we do, we'll have a lot of fun, because we always have a lot of fun.

Welp, I need to head to the doctor shortly. Here's hoping the poor soul who has to look into my ear can get it unclogged without too much fuss. It's hard to sing when you can't hear.

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May 2024

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Birthday Broads, Floral Felines, and Aural Assessments

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