Trying to make up for lost time

This past weekend was Freedom Theatre's production of Disney's Beauty and the Beast. The kids did a tremendous job, as usual.

I am personally still recovering from volunteering so much during the Tech Weeks, another VHSL competition, and then the four days of shows. 

All the Head Techs after the show

From February 15 through 27, I was at school for hours pretty much every day. I was also doing a million errands – picking up show t-shirts, picking up Playbills, picking up dinners for 100+ kids, going to Walmart/Target and Costco/BJ's day after day buying snacks and concessions. I helped serve meals and supervised the backstage area. I price-shopped for the best prices for roses we could sell individually at the shows. I helped set up the lobby for concessions and Break-a-Leg-a-Gram sales. I also prepared 1,500 "Break-a-Leg-a-Grams" in a new format. I have no idea how many hours I gave, but it was a lot! 

And it was SO terrific to be part of it all! I had the opportunity to see the kids "in action" and get to know some of them a little better. And since I was there helping clean up after the final show, I even got to watch the "follies" where the Head Techs basically perform the play at triple speed, using as many actual lines from the script as they can, but mostly paraphrasing and zipping through it. I don't think Amy really approved of my being there, but oh well! They had a great time and I felt very lucky to see it.

I hate it so much that because of the pandemic we all missed a year and a half of school time where Amy could have been doing in-person theatre and I could have been volunteering. But I won't lament lost time, I will just do all I can to make the most of the next year+ before Amy graduates!

Sad to be back to three plates at dinner again

Yesterday we took Reed back to JMU. We went a day earlier than planned because a snow storm was coming. It wasn't really any easier than our original drop-off, knowing we probably won't see him for two months.

Getting out three dinner plates is the first painful reminder that he's away at school. 

Over the break, Reed and I went to two movies together; Reed and Tod went to one movie; Reed, Tod and I went to one movie; and all four of us went to one movie. Reed was able to spend some time with his neighborhood pals playing spikeball and hanging out. He didn't do much work...not many Woofies jobs came through. But he certainly got enough "down" time to relax after his successful first semester at college (three B's and two A's!). 

The kids got along better, though honestly they didn't see a ton of each other. Sometimes Reed's sarcastic nature is really hard for Amy and she takes it quite personally – there are also a lot of times when he's fairly rude to her (for example, not answering a question she directly asks him). We talked with Reed about trying harder to be kind to her, and he took it to heart. It wasn't perfect, but it was better.

Now that we've done this college drop-off thing a couple of times, and just thinking about the fact that this fall Amy will start her senior year of high school....it's hard! Sure, this is all what's supposed to happen, but that doesn't mean it's easy. I hope we will weather it all well. 

Meanwhile, I will look forward to having Reed home again for his spring break (less than two months to go!) and making the most of Amy's last year and a half of high school. 

Sometimes, we're a lot alike

Like I wrote not too long ago, Amy is sometimes a lot like me. Latest instance is our choice of shirts...

Mine is a Rose Apothecary sweatshirt. Rose Apothecary is the store owned by David Rose and (spoiler alert!) his husband Patrick on the TV show Schitt's Creek, which I am a recent convert for. I watched the entire show over the past few months and I just love it so much, it brings me great joy. I decided to buy some merch to celebrate the show, knowing full well that most people won't have any clue what the shirt is about, or make the connection to the show. So it's kind of a little secret code. It would be awesome if anyone out in the world connects the dots, but if they don't, that's fine too – the shirt is for me! I suppose it's similar to the way I've always liked the things that are less popular – the lesser-known bands and singers, for example. Like they belong to you more because they belong to fewer people. 

Amy also has a shirt with a similar story. She watches a lot of YouTube Minecraft gamers, and really desperately wanted the holiday merch from one of them. The shirt arrived the other day and made her so happy! And just like my Rose Apothecary shirt, very few (if any) people will see her shirt and know what it's about, but that's okay – the shirt is for her. And if anyone does recognize it, then she's made a connection. 

Amy the gift giver

We joke that Amy is spending most of her Hallmark salary buying stuff at Hallmark, which is something she gave her friend Molly a hard time for when she was doing the same thing. But she is choosing things for her friends that she knows they'll love. I'm proud to see her thinking through her friends' personalities and likes, and choosing just the right gift for each one. Now to see if she makes it anywhere close to Christmas before she delivers her gifts – she's having a hard time waiting! And this year she also seems more open to receiving gifts as well. I remember several years ago when she bought gifts for a few friends, but delivered them in secret because she didn't want the friends to feel obligated to get her a gift, or to feel bad that they hadn't gotten her anything. She is a kind soul.

Yay, and also whoops

We knew with Reed coming home for 10 days for Thanksgiving break that juggling everyone's car needs would be tough. Amy feels very strongly that she should have access to a car every day so she can drive a couple friends to school, drive them all home again after rehearsals, and of course drive to work at Hallmark (fair enough). Reed had signed up for some jobs with Woofie's. Tod drives to work every day. I like to leave the house in farther than a 2-mile walking radius. So we started shopping for a fourth vehicle. 

I'll start by saying this is a terrible time to buy a car. With supply chain issues caused by the pandemic, new cars are hard to come by and sold at a premium, so used cars are in tremendous demand. I scoured the internet searching for suitable cars for Reed, and eventually went to the local Honda dealer to look at a few of them. Saw a couple of decent options for around $20K. Then the sales guy said hey this Honda Civic is above your price range, but it's a 2022 with about 2K miles on it (he said it'd been used as a loaner for people whose cars were being serviced). So it's basically a brand new car, without the $4K additional premium that's being added to the cost of new cars these days. It's a basic model (sadly...no heated seats or sun roof!) of what should be a very safe, reliable car – we are viewing it as an investment (is this a delusion? maybe!). Though it seems kind of crazy to buy a basically brand new car for a 19 year old, that's what we did. Our thought is that it will be his car for many years to come, and will allow him to have no car payment when he graduates college, and he'll have reliable transportation for quite some time. Reed was grateful and happy to have his own transportation without having to bicker with Amy for access to the Cube, but in typical Reed fashion he didn't want to be part of the search process and didn't seem particularly jazzed about the fact that he had a brand new car. He just takes things as they come. I suppose that serves him well.

On Thanksgiving, when we'd had the car for only six days, Reed decided he'd drive to Wanda's house for Thanksgiving dinner separately so he could stop by Aly's apartment to take care of her cat while she was away in Florida. In hindsight, really wish we'd gone together. On the way home, we didn't even make it out of Herndon before we saw blue flashing lights behind us, and watched as Reed got pulled over. He ran a red light (he says it only turned red as he passed underneath it). We pulled over nearby and Tod walked over near the car to be there for moral support. We all hoped he'd bet let off with a warning. No such luck. It's a $170 ticket, and it's not going to be pretty once that hits our insurance. (We will be looking for a driver improvement class to try to help defray these penalties.) I'd ridden with him in the new car a couple times before this happened and I told him he needed to temper that lead foot he seemed to have developed – I sincerely hope that this will truly be a lesson learned and Reed will drive more slowly and carefully from here on out. 

Love this kid

Amy told us she had a Christmas list....and it's a shared file on Google Drive, with links to each item and recommendations on shipping. I cannot love this more, seeing how her list-making progresses each year. Grandma Larson would be delighted with this level of organization.

What will happen to all the pictures?

In the olden days, people didn’t take a ton of pictures. Even families who were big photo takers didn’t have all that many photos compared to the number of pictures that families take now that everyone has a phone in their pocket. 

I have accumulated dozens of photo albums over the 20+ years that Tod and I have been together, and then a few years ago I started doing photo books, and there are dozens of those as well. 

What’s going to become of these when we’re gone? There are just waaaaay more than it would be reasonable to expect the kids to want to keep. So what will become of them, will anyone even look through them before they are tossed out? *Sigh* 

As older family members have passed away, it’s been so wonderful to get ahold of all their photo albums so I could scan the pictures and have them electronically. Doing that over the years has left me with a terrific digital photo trove, and carefully cataloguing the pictures makes it simple to find the photos I need.

It was supposed to be my retirement project to clean up our photo library – get rid of duplicates and the ‘bad’ pics (sure, I *take* four snaps of the same scene, but do I really need to keep them all?), and be sure all the pics are tagged appropriately. But I’ve just been too busy to even start on that yet. First there was a graduation party to plan, then getting Reed ready for college, then Tod’s Dad passing away, plus all my Dems stuff. Maybe post-election I will have time to start?? Of course then it’ll be time to get ready for Christmas. 

I was thinking about this massive photo library and what will happen to it. There are so many – 84,291 at the moment – would the kids each want to keep a copy of all those pictures? What will the technology even be by then? Will there be cheap digital cloud storage they can use? Are my tags going to still be there? Or will the AI be so advanced that it won’t matter much anymore, computers will just “know” who’s who? 

I wonder if I should stop doing photo books. They will just end up being something the kids will have to deal with after we are gone, do we want to leave them with a bunch of things they don’t want? Tod says since I enjoy doing them, I should continue making them. And after all, I won’t know what happens to them after I’m gone!

I hope that the kids will want to keep at least the digital photos to remember everything and everyone by. So many good memories.