Wholesome vacation planning with Google Maps

I've had our trip to CDMX planned for some time, but I do check back in with our notes and my personalized Google Map from time to time. 

Most recently, I had to go back in and find a new place to stay in the middle of our trip (we're staying in 3 different locations so we can see the most without wasting too much time traveling to sites we're interested in; also, we'll get to try different restaurants when we're anchored in different neighborhoods).

Last week, sitting at my desk (the dining table), I got a charge for over $800 on my Apple Card. I didn't recognize the name but went to look in my vacation emails because the name sounded vaguely Spanish. Still nothing matched, so I did a fraud notice with the card.

A few days later, I got this email: "Good afternoon, cordial greeting we currently receive a fraud alert with the payment for this accommodation. Our machine learning system provides a real-time transaction score at the time of payment, but in some cases, as is the case here, we obtain more information about the risk level of a payment, we will cancel this payment and we will send a new link where you can process the payment again in a more secure way." It was the middle place we're staying.

I thought about it, but before they sent me the email, I asked them to cancel the reservation. I had made the reservation on May 27. The trip isn't until next spring. Why would they try to charge me 3 months post-reservation and 7-months pre-stay? There was nothing about that when I booked the room. And why not reach out before you make that charge? I just didn't feel good about it.

I was a little worried because the places seemed to fall into three categories: 1) Too expensive for us, 2) Fine but lots of complaints about nighttime noise or thin walls, 3) Perfect but only allow double occupancy.

FINALLY, though, I found a place that will work for us! Yay!

So I was looking around, moving some site-seeing, when I came upon something that just filled my ice cold heart with warmth.

It is a 360 view of the park where el Fuente de los Coyotes is. I was looking around because I think it's near a pretty church I'd like to look at.

Google blurs faces a lot, but they couldn't blur these guys' good time.

I LOVE THIS SO MUCH.

We have three young guys, friends, just chilling and enjoying the park at dusk. They seem to be sharing a joke or are teasing each other. It makes me happy to see them being kids together. The capture is from 2019 and they're probably fully adults now. Wonder what they're up to. I hope they're still friends. Does middle guy still color the top of his hair? 

Anyway, I don't know why they really captured my maternal feels, but they did. 

There are tons of people on Street View, but I don't think I've ever seen such an emotional slice of life (never mind the naked guy climbing out of a window or whatever; it's hard to enjoy that drama). 

Thanks, young men, for being cool and hanging out. I'll sit on this bench in your honor next time the jacaranda trees are in bloom!

This is the Life

This has been a week, guys. Mal probably had the stomach flu, and it SUCKED.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about, for the most part.

It's this: Sometimes, I resent my husband.

It's true! I love him, but sometimes, when he sleeps until noon on the weekends; or when he disappears to heat up his knees after having been gone all day and just having dinner with us; or some other thing he does or gets to do that I think, "I could NEVER just..." whatever... You know, stinkin' thinkin' (tm) sets in, and I can go to a pretty ugly place.

Fortunately, those times are few and far between, often suspiciously aligned with specific points in my, let's say, lunar cycle. Also, I love my husband and I want him to be happy, so that tends to mess up my pouty martyrdom, anyway.

However, today, I was overwhelmed by the reality that the stuff I do on a daily basis is totally amazing, and I'm very fortunate that I am able to do it.

Back to Mal's illness: He was actively ill on Sunday, like 5 instances of his being sick enough to warrant a full load of laundry (five different times) in 7 hours. After that, though, he was just spent. He's known his body can't handle much food, which is cool in that it has suppressed any more symptomatic barfing, but it's also meant he has basically zero energy.

Between Sunday at 1 PM and Monday night, he ate a hashbrown (bye bye) and about 1/4 of an apple. And he had a fever for much of Monday. So he slept. A lot. Tuesday, his fever was gone, but, again, he couldn't think about food. He had a bag of Minion fruit snacks (except for the 3 that were either yellow or orange) and a few more apple slices. And he slept a lot more. Tuesday night, he did ask for a Sonic vanilla shake. He drank maybe 1/4 of it that night. Then yesterday, he was pretty up and at 'em, comparatively, while my parents were here. But he's still been super low-energy, especially for himself, and I've had it pretty darned easy.

Today's responsibilities have basically been making some lazy breakfast for James (deviled eggs and coffee); chatting with D at length about our pigeons; and then taking Mal to Walmart for one thing but finding a sale on Powerpuff Girls Legos, and putting those together at home. Now Mal is watching TV, James has gone to lunch at Quetzal (his office's restrooms are jacked up and as long as they're having to use porta-potties, James is working remotely... incidentally, there are 20+ mph wind gusts, which I can only imagine adds to the "fun" of using an outdoor temporary toilet), and D is asleep for the day.

I do work hard. I often do so many things in one day, it makes me tired to think about it. And I feel guilty for feeling like I don't have time to sit and hang out with Mal as much as I want to. And I feel bad that I'm often very exhausted and heading for bed about the time D is ready to chat. But even the tiring stuff that I do... it's all good stuff. It's all here at home, making it a comfortable place for my people to land.

I don't get to sleep until 11 ever, but I do not have to set an alarm and wake up to be on the road by a certain time 5 days a week (or fewer, if the facilities are messed up to the point that employees wishing to avoid pooping in a box elect to stay home). I have had a nice, albeit a little sad, break most of this week as Mal has rested and recovered; like, I've read the majority of a book. Accomplishment!

My job involves things like potential apples and birds who hold freaky mysteries and lots of flowers and photographs and the lake and watching construction and demolition and adventures to places of recreation. I get to see almost everything my kids do in real time. I am surrounded by ridiculous cats. I can do a bunch of stuff in one day to give myself some slack the next day, and no one complains. If I don't feel like doing something, I can just not do it. My job security is rock-solid.

So, yeah, some days I think it'd be nice to be able to go to sleep when I want (it happens sometimes!) and then wake up when I want (again, occasionally) and do whatever I wanted for a few hours (extremely rare), but for the most part, my life is a whole dream, and that includes the husband part.

Happy weekend, folks! <3

A thing I wrote last week...

I'm sorry that I was
Too much for you to handle.
But you wanted a bonsai;
Something you could prune,
Meticulously trimming back
Until a shape pleasing to you
Would emerge.
Instead, I am a wildflower
Spoiled by handling
But thriving in the sun and fresh air;
Blooming loud and shameless
On a hillside for all to see.

Half a Decade Down...

Five years ago, I had a secret. James and I were planning to get married, and we were doing it quietly for a few reasons. One of the biggest is that we're just nerdy enough to think announcing our nuptials on April 1 would be extremely humorous. Another is that we were not making an event out of it. I wasn't 100% confident that a specific individual from my past wouldn't try to show up and mess with things. There were several people in our lives who had definite opinions about our getting married (these were voiced out of love, I know, but were still negative). Plus, this is my third marriage. I figure most people are rightfully like, "Oh, again? Well, good for you, I guess."

Suffice it to say, I have made some pretty substantial mistakes in the past. But the idea I had as a 16-year-old, that James would probably dig me a lot if he just gave me the chance, and that we'd make a good pair, was not mistaken. It just took a while to pan out.

It's cliche to say "I love him more now than I did then," and I'm not sure that's an accurate statement. I was deep in the throes of limerence and quite smitten with James before we got married. But now, all of that is settled. I don't freak out any more. We were coming from such divergent places, there were times for each of us early on when we had our, "Ugh; this is hard. Is it worth it to go on?" moments. Before we got married, I mean. But even afterward, getting used to living with someone and building a family... you learn a lot, and not all of it is fun.

But we've worked and compromised and have been at a place of equilibrium for years now. I've never had that in any relationship before in my life. It's incredibly comforting, and secure, and very exciting.

Photo credit Alec Hilliard Photography

We laughed a lot that day. We've laughed a lot since. We've cried some, too. But mostly, it's been a great time. We've moved 4.5 times. We've blended a family. We've had a beautiful, eye-opening, life-affirming visit to a foreign country together in the midst of a miscarriage. We've had a child in our 40s. We've purchased a home together (his first!). We've gone through lay-offs and job searches and new opportunities. Sleepless nights, days of exhaustion, moments of joy so acute it's almost painful. Tedium. Health issues. Sharing ideas. Growing closer. Navigating speed bumps. Learning each other's strengths. Filling in where the other is weaker. Being comfortable. Being home.

And it's only been five years.

Here's hoping James takes better care of himself over the next 40 years than he did the first; I am looking forward to our 50th anniversary!

It's a Magical World (or There's Treasure Everywhere, whichever title you prefer I steal)

I have smiled and laughed a lot this week. Amazing things have happened. Not win-a-new-car-and-a-trip-to-Hawaii-level stuff, but just things that remind me the there are sparkly moments to be had even in the tedium of otherwise unremarkable life.

So, in no particular order:

1) Our new dog jumped up onto my car.

2) A 9-ish-year-old girl walking into the grocery store with her dad. She was wearing a bubblegum pink poodle skirt, a bright primary-colored tie-dye shirt, and a straw cowboy hat. She felt beautiful, and she was.

3) Mal and I were in the back yard, and I heard what I thought was a breeze kicking up, but didn't feel it and didn't see any trees blowing. Mal pointed into the sky above my head and said, "Birdies!" I looked up and probably 75 small birds were flying over, low enough and populous enough that we could hear the "whoosh" of their collective wings cutting through the air.

4) There is a fishing tournament at the lake this weekend, and this morning, I got to see (and hear) the boats heading out.

5) Mal is getting super demonstrative, and several times after my having been gone for a few minutes, jumps into my arms, wraps his legs around my waist, puts his head on my shoulder, and squeezes me.

6) So. many. butterflies.

7) Spending time out in the grotto with James, Mal, and Shelby, taking only the kind of pictures Jim and Pam took at their wedding. Shelby loved it and was running around scaring me to death.

There is more, but one of the other joys of my life calls... :) I'll add more later.

Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name

There are days, and I'm having quite a few of them lately, when I am profoundly disappointed by my inability to make close friends in Austin like I did in Sherman, and like I thought I did in Las Vegas (but after I moved realized I really hadn't).

However...

There is definitely something to be said with being so very comfortable with a group of people that you know and who know you so that you don't have to explain things. Inside jokes and obscure references and all that.

For example, a few months ago, D and I were talking when Mal got upset and started wailing (remember: he doesn't have a "middle," he only has glowingly cheerful or full-tilt breakdown). I could see D blanche and start to head back to her room.

I hollered after her, "So you're just like Voldemort?"

Grinning, she said, "Yes. Exactly that."

Then more recently, I went into Mal's room to tidy up and saw some plastic change from his cash register sitting on the floor. I picked it up, opened the register, and called to James, "I'm afraid this register till is going to be our smiley face mushroom." James laughed from the other room, and my heart fluttered.

It's so centering to be able to throw things out and just have them "gotten," and then to feel gotten myself. Home is the most important place, and I'm so blessed to share my home with people I actually enjoy as people. They make up for everything else that I might feel tugging at my heart sometimes. 

So... There's a line in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, just as, in a flashback, Voldemort is about to try to off Baby Harry, that says, "He did not like it crying, he had never been able to stomach the small ones whining in the orphanage—" And that's how D is like Voldemort. Well, that's one way.

The other thing is a lot more obscure. 

First: Mal has a cash register. When we were setting it up, there was some disagreement about how to put the money in the drawer. My inclination was to put it with the big bills and big coins on the left, going down to the pennies and one dollar bills on the right. It seemed like that's how we did it when I was a cashier. James' inclination was to do it left-to-right like you'd write numbers 1, 5, 10, etc. I looked it up and, yeah, the proper way to do it is how I wanted to do it. This pretty much never happens with numbers and me, especially when James is involved.

However, James still likes it the other way better, even knowing it's not the way a standard cash register would be set up. Consequently, almost any time he's alone with Mal playing in Mal's room, he will rearrange the money in the drawer. Then I have to re-rearrange it correctly when I notice this.

Second: Go WAY back in time to high school. I often peppered my notes with smiley faces (actually, I still do this). My smiley faces are just two vertical lines for eyes and a half-circle for a smile. Like this...

Well, one of my friends like to do this thing. He'd add three lines to my smiley face, thusly...

Then turn it upside down and, voila:

MUSHROOM!

Don't ask me why, because I don't have an answer, unless it's that I was a hormonally-charged teenage girl, but his defacing my smileys made me inordinately angry. It just miffed me to bits, and I would blanche and get really hot and bothered and seriously, if I want to do it, I can mentally go back there and kind of feel the dark cloud gathering above my head. 

Thank God I'm so mature now, though, right?

But my point is this: James knows my stories. I think he knows all of them. I get so sad sometimes (again, lately I've been pretty maudlin), wishing we could have been together all of this time -- especially on days like today when I decide that the bb cream I'm using actually accentuates my pores and wrinkles and I wish James had had years to look at my face back when my freckles were still flat on my face and my skin was all one consistent color.

However, we must have gotten something right, because I think we managed to tell each other everything and catch up on twenty years before we had Mal. That's a good thing, because we barely finish sentences anymore, much less whole trains of thought. 

There's not really a point to this post; just wanted to remind myself now and in the future that I have good teammates on this journey. I'm so glad.

A Super Tuesday

Our apartments are being upgraded, meaning we're getting new granite countertops in the kitchen, new flooring in all of the "wet" rooms, a new light fixture in the kitchen, new backsplash, and they're trimming out the mirrors in our bathrooms. Because having a mirror with trim is vastly superior to having a trimless mirror?

I think the assumption is that these "non-invasive" upgrades will be done in an empty apartment. They set things to right when they leave, but there are those of us who are home. All day. So I've seriously had anxiety about this since I heard about it a month or so after we moved in. I was grateful to hear that they'll wait to paint until we leave!

We were told that the work would be done between 9 and 6, so by 8:15 yesterday morning, I was ready. I had all of the stuff off of the counters, and James had moved his "liquor store" from under the sink into his office.

Mal and I had been up since 5, so by 9:02, I started to feel like they were late. We were told we'd be first on the list because I mentioned to the property manager that it's taken us more than a year to get on a relative nap schedule.

We spent quite a bit of time on the patio as yesterday was extremely warm. I heard the call of the Mexican Scrub Jay for the first time in a while. Looked around, and there it was, taking in the scenery.

When I realized I was getting stir crazy waiting for the workmen to come start tearing up our kitchen, I looked up polling places and realized we could walk "next door" to vote at a community center.

Mal and I went downstairs, got his tricycle, and headed out. He walked part of the way, then rode up the hill, across the grass, and through the parking area of an office building to get to the community center. We went inside and there were five booths with only one in use and no lines! I realized that I had to have photo ID (why even issue voter registration cards, then, really?) and while I was getting that, Mal decided to run back outside because the fun automatic doors take so long to close (it *is* a senior center, too, so...).

I pulled him in and realized he had a giant half-dried boogey on his cheek, so I ran him toward the bathroom to get a tissue, and on the way out from that, I slammed my elbow into a metal partition and cracked it open. *sigh* But I had my ID, my reasonably clean kid, and now there were four people waiting to check in.

Fortunately, the process didn't take long, but because I was choosing to participate in the Republican primary (as an anti-Drumpf), this guy pulls out a stamp and marks my voter registration card "Republican." DUDE! There's a reason I don't put an affiliation on there! I don't want one! But I changed it when I got home, anyway. Blacked out his dumb red label and wrote "Libertarian."

Oh, while I was getting stuff together to check in, this guy, of whom I did not take a picture, but who resembled this --

-- Except younger and with an afro, walked out of the building yelling "Trump it!" as he exited. He went outside to smoke a cigarette, then went somewhere, and came back to vote carrying... a baguette. This is barely Austin, but that was a sort of Austin mountain folk thing to have happened.

I only voted for Presidential nominee and three Texas propositions. I don't know or care enough about the other positions. So we were finished quickly and headed outside. Mal had fun playing with the bike racks, then hopping around on the stones between the sidewalk and the mailbox.

He got kind of snacky, so we sat on the bench and he ate a bag of dried apples.

He likes them. They're just really crunchy.

After we'd been there about half an hour, eating, jumping, trying not to mess with the "vote here" sign, even though we *really* wanted to, greeting all of the people coming to vote (90% elderly), we decided to head back because the suspense was killing me about the kitchen demo.

As we left, we passed the "no electioneering" border sign and I realized we'd violated voting day rules! We'd loitered within the boundaries for a good half hour, maybe more. Oops. We didn't encourage anyone to vote or not vote in any way, though, so hopefully they'll grant us leniency if it ever comes up.

When we passed the office, Mal wanted to go in. He looked around and I was trying to shoo him out the back door, but he wanted to go where the bottled water has been when we've had tenant events. They didn't have any in the fridge, but they had some snacks out, so we got Cheez-Its and a Cutie, walked down the hill, and found a nice bike rack in the shade. Mal played, I sat on the sidewalk, and eventually he asked me to peel the orange, which he ate.

It was such a gorgeous day, and I love love love that I get to spend so much time with my kids. (Even though one of them is on an opposite sleep schedule from me; at least that one *has* a sleep schedule!) The other day, I told James that it's actually a good sign that sometimes I get bored out of my skull with the mundane tasks of being a stay-home mom. It means that I'm around enough to take it for granted. I never feel like I just haven't had enough time before I have to move on to the next thing. I'm really grateful for that.

We got back around 11, just as the workers were getting here. By the time we got upstairs, they'd already pulled the tile half-backsplash off and were removing the countertops. They were very respectful of our space, so the demo was pretty anticlimactic. No sledgehammers. No loud noises. But it was over in under ten minutes.

The rest of the stuff took until 6 o'clock, but that's with giant gaps as they're renovating three apartments on this end of the building at the same time.

Mal wanted to watch some of it, and we also spent a lot of time outside. We got to see a roadrunner nosing around (do they have noses?) in the back yard. I've never seen one this far back in the complex, so that was a treat.

Did you know that roadrunners have an exposed swath of skin behind their eyes? It's blue-to-red. I didn't know that until I took the pictures and wondered, "What the heck?"

Interesting, right? At one point, the roadrunner called out, and I tried to get it on video but couldn't. He did it a second time, then disappeared into the bushes, and called out a third time. So now I know what a roadrunner sounds like!

Mal took a bath around 2:30 and ended up going to sleep around 3. We spent a lot of time in my room, playing on the bed and just trying to stay out of the way of the kitchen crew. Sadly, when Mal was getting out of the tub, he slipped and hit what I thought was his forehead on the side of the tub.

Yikes! Today it's pinkish purple, but the swelling is gone. Sweet little kid.

He slept for three hours, and I made him get up at 6. Now that he's napping better (yesterday, he slept two hours before he woke up for a nurse and back to sleep; today, he woke up after just a little under an hour but is back to sleep), usually 2.5 - 3 hours per day, he's sleeping less at night. He becomes inconsolable at night, so we're having to put him to bed around 8:30, even though I wouldn't care if he stayed up much later. But, no. Instead, he's waking up around 5. Last night, I ended up just going to sleep with him so I could get my 8 hours (interrupted) as I'd only had 6ish hours of sleep the two nights before that. I need like 10. It's amazing what the body can do when it has no choice.

As much as I was dreading the apartment upgrades, yesterday was actually a great day. It was made even better by the fact that James had a meeting downtown and got to come home about 2.5 hours earlier than usual! We got Dominos because it was on sale and I wasn't able to get into the kitchen in any meaningful way until 6.

So, regardless of the election outcomes, Mal and I had a Super Tuesday. I hope you did, too.