Still, this was in a city and also around the time our dog had started sleeping in our bed, so I always kept an eye out for the German Shepherd on my way to work.

He was almost always there, no matter the temperature, ready to bark when anyone walked by. He took his job seriously. One time he wasn't alone; one of his humans was out doing yard work, shushed him, and we heard him call him Bruno.

As the neighborhood learned that there was a large German Shepherd behind a chainlink fence on that corner and people started anticipating being barked at, merely barking must have lost some of its novelty. Bruno started sneaking up on people and barking at them.

I know it was the end of 2019, in the last few weeks of the year, because I know it was after we'd gotten our NIPT bloodwork back and had the 20-week anatomy scan. Maybe it was some of the anxiety lifted off of us.

It was well after dark, on an after-work dog walk. As we were walking that way, we saw Bruno creeping from behind his house to the fence to scare us. Stephen and I made eye contact. I'm not sure what possessed us to do this, but we both started tiptoeing up as best we could with our own dog in tow, jumped up, and startled Bruno.

He yelped and ran back behind his house. We laughed but immediately felt bad.

For weeks after, he wouldn't bark when we walked by. Eventually he settled on a goodbye bark after we'd passed. I know he kept barking at everyone else because a friend of ours moved in a few blocks further down and also walked a dog past that fence.

Once we were doing regular daycare commutes a year later, we noticed we hadn't seen Bruno in a while. We thought there was at least one fewer car in the driveway, but we couldn't be sure.

In the time since, Stephen has sometimes seen him, briefly, in that backyard around the holidays. Maybe it was an adult child's dog, we thought.

Today we took the kid and the dog on a short walk in the drizzle. We let our dog choose the route at the four-way stop and he chose west. Walks right now are not the most meditative or the most conversational, as I'm trying to keep the kid from getting hurt. Halfway down the block, Stephen stopped and said, "Psst. Samantha." Then he nodded at Bruno's house.

And there was Bruno, behind the fence with a tennis ball in his mouth, staring at us and wagging his tail.

Has a Tomato Fest really happened if I don't blog about it?

We tried to go to the Tomato Fest's Friday night preview after daycare pickup, but the temperatures were sweltering. Stephen had had a company-wide "mental health day" and I had spent most of the day in final-round interviews. The two of us went to a late, kid-free lunch before daycare pickup; our original goal was just to zone out in a Five Points bar, as we haven't done that in years. The closest parking we could get was near the chain Mexican restaurant in what used to be MadDonna's, though, so that's where we ended up. Between that meal settling, the child vacillating between wanting to balance on every retaining wall on Woodland and not wanting to walk at all, and the dog panting in his jaunty tomato bandana and thick black husky fur, we just made the block and got back in the car.

I could feel the CC cream I'd worn for camera-readiness melting off. The kid, who adamantly did not want to walk in the blocked-off street, planted her feet firmly on the sidewalk in front of Fanny's House of Music and started shrieking between insisting that she did not want to go home — well, more accurately, "I DON' WANNA LEAVE THE FESTIBLE!"

As I told a young hairstylist last year, I can't tell people's ages anymore; people are either babies, the elderly, or roughly my age. But I do think the nearby stranger who said something like, "well, she's got some pipes," was roughly my age, give or take five years.

We came back in the morning for the parade, getting a great spot near the post office. The mom who posted up next to us on the curb worked in marketing at a large nonprofit; I know this because they were also giving away fans and she was encouraging people to get them so she didn't have to pack them up. We glanced at all the booths, grabbed the customary red balloon at East End UMC, saw a daycare friend doing the same, then made our way back to the car.

Skills

Over a decade ago, after the 2010 flood, I went through volunteer leader training with an area nonprofit that connects volunteers with other nonprofits. A volunteer leader in this case is basically a greeter and paperwork coordinator, with a little sweat mixed in. Most of the projects I picked up were around sorting perfectly good medical supplies with arbitrary expiration dates stamped on them to send to clinics in impoverished villages in the global south, but one time I "led" a tree-planting project. It ended not great. I mean, the tree planting itself went fine, but the partner organization's employee took off in his Jeep deeper into the park while I was trying to collect waivers from the minors fulfilling high school graduation requirements — you know, the whole CYA reason that they send a "volunteer leader" along on those projects. I hiked behind Mr. Jeep, finally caught up, dug some holes, helped plant some trees and signed off on the service learning and community service sheets when we were finished. Afterward, one of the college-age volunteers who had glommed onto Mr. Jeep wrote glowingly about the Jeep driver and gave me a super shitty review for "having no people skills" and not making him feel welcome enough.

The nonprofit's volunteer coordinator employee actually forwarded it to me. I balked and we ended up going to lunch, and we talked about how it went. Hopefully future tree-planting volunteer leaders had an easier time, but I didn't bother again. I stuck to sorting medical supplies with pre-med kids and nurses until I joined the Junior League. Until covid hit, I got my volunteering fix there and from coaching runners.

I hadn't thought of that incident in years until a few weeks ago.

I volunteered to "coach" my three-year-old's soccer team when nobody else did. At this age, the league does everything except stand on the sidelines during their short Saturday games, and how hard could that be?

The answer: REALLY HARD.

The first practice was canceled because of 100º weather, but they had a game in similar weather the following Saturday. Nothing is quite so humbling trying to keep three to four of six toddlers you just met on the field. Just thirty minutes of chaos. (At least this happened to the other team too.) My own child sank to the grass and sobbed because she wanted to play with her own soccer ball. I pulled a calf muscle sprinting after a kid. It was so hot that half the team just started spontaneously sitting out (so much for my anxiety about how to fairly rotate preschoolers). At the end the only kids on the field were the one slightly older superstar on our team and two of the kids on the other team.

When I limped back to the car with our suddenly perky toddler and two coolers, I realized the feeling in my chest was an echo of what I felt those years before about being told I have "no people skills." I have enough life experience to now realize it's more like "no-win situation." If I'd asserted myself with Mr. Jeep, my evaluation would have said the same thing. I'd have been called unfriendly and rude to the "nice" leader.

I emailed the league's director that night. He said he was coaching a same-age team this year and, according to him, they did the same thing.

The second game was easier. One of the dads was the "field coach," while I coordinated the bench. There was still crying, but always enough kids on the field. I remembered all the kids' names, even the twins.

Other things

• The same week I was laid off, we learned my dad's cancer had spread beyond the area of the pancreas, which takes the option of the Whipple procedure off the table. He's responding really well to the chemo, though. He's down 45 pounds since he was hospitalized with jaundice at the end of April, for a total of ninety pounds this year. Much as I think a smaller man's cancer would have been caught sooner, I think having the weight available to lose has probably helped him.
• Relatedly, other than at that one vertigo-inducing spot on I-40 as you're approaching Harriman from the west the drive from Nashville to Knoxville is much easier than the one from Nashville to Martin. (Not easy enough to commute daily from Fairfield Glade, though.)

(It was also the summer of this special screening, in that era where anti-vaxxers were a weird wellness subculture no one took seriously, like crystals or or essential oils, instead of an active threat to public health.)

I suppose time feels distorted because the circumstances are so different this time. This time I'm rarely alone. Stephen's not traveling to an office every day and the dog's walker still comes on weekday afternoons. The market coming out of the Great Recession for an early-career marcomm professional was much bleaker than the current market for an experienced polyglot software engineer. I've averaged three contacts a day with potential employers in the last two weeks, whereas the 2011 search yielded about one in-person interview a month and required fitting myself into a suit in the Tennessee heat. I spent a lot of time between volunteering, networking, doing anything to build the portfolio of experience I needed then.

The stakes are both higher and not, now, as well. Then, we were childless renters.

The only thing that is the same is the amount of UI the state pays out.

I took some initial phone screens while a crew spent two days demolishing 200 feet of retaining wall in our front yard. Once they were gone, and we stood in the much smaller triangle of green, I said, "I see why the original homeowner had the wall." The yard does look drastically smaller. I'm still glad it worked out the way it did; it needed to go and I probably never would have spent the money otherwise.

Now that it's gone, though, I need to start prepping for fall planting. The first year in the house we ripped out the bushes that were too close to the foundation, and now it's time to put something back in its place. Our spring planting season is so short anymore (though our winters are less mild than they used to be, too) so it has to be done in the fall. That means I need to start now: solarizing where the beds will go and calculating how much gravel to order and figuring out which drought-tolerant native shrubs to plant come October. It will be here sooner than it seems, especially with the prohibitively hot weather we're having now. The time to actually do the work will be short.

I finally traded in my old MacBook Air for some store credit today. It's the sort of thing I once would have done very quickly, and yet it took me almost a year to get around to it. I never felt like I had time. I regretted my choice to go into an Apple Store on tax-free weekend immediately. There were lines out of the Apple Store like it was the club and there was a security guard acting like a bouncer.

I'm starting to recognize more and more how stressed out I was in my last role, and allowing myself to examine more closely the things from it that I want to find again in a role and the things I am not interested in. I've been relaxed enough to work on a few projects in the bits of time I have between interviews and interview prep: templates to start a basic application in a Docker container with a PostgreSQL database, using either Python/Flask or Go/Gin. This piece came out just after I started my bootcamp and I've thought about it a lot as I've plodded along; maybe some people really like setting up a whole project every time, maybe that's their "Good Code," but I would prefer to square that away once and get to the actual problem the application is solving.

Next weekend is Tomato Fest. It'll be the fifth year I haven't run the 5K. I don't love how that feels so once it's not regularly 100º, I'll start building mileage. There's a nearby loop we've been taking family walks on to give the kid safe practice walking rather than riding in a stroller, and at the exact furthest point from the car she announced, I'M DOING THE POTTY DANCE, so she and I jogged the whole half mile back and it was fine.

I have met a lot of people I really like at workshops and retreats but I'm not unaware that it's first a business. Most successful novelists and memoirists of our time have to teach workshops and otherwise side-hustle to make ends meet. It is LuLaRoe or Avon, but for words, and everyone’s trying to build a downline. The air in a workshop can be pretty thick with the hopes and delusions of people who do not yet see this. There’s usually at least one attendee on the cusp of understanding it, trying to stack-rank themselves among the rest by publications and residencies.

I won’t continue on about this, because it’s been done far, far better, and I accepted that writing is my hobby a few years ago.

I might have a just little more time to engage in said hobby at least for a few weeks, as my one-year anniversary at work was also my last day. (This is also not something I’m going to continue on about either, other than to note that most of my team was also laid off and I’m going to miss them a lot.) I’ve already got calls lined up from generous referrals by people I’ve worked with over the last eight years. While a stretch of unemployment was not entirely expected, given some formative childhood experiences I stay ready so I don’t have to get ready. We will be okay.

I’m hoping this time can be a reset for healthier habits I’ve let lapse. For years, I had regularly scheduled group exercise and group runs and personal training. There always something on my calendar and, frequently, a gym bag tucked under my desk. During my pregnancy when I had no energy for anything other than work, I took private Pilates classes on Friday nights. I even kept them up via Zoom after a tornado destroyed the studio two weeks before lockdown. We kept up our dog-walking routine before and after baby.

Once she became mobile, all bets were off.

My first full day off, I took a midday yoga class with my favorite instructor. I’d wanted to try it for months, but it used to overlap with a daily standup. Most of the attendees were closer to my parents’ age, and they were very excited to hear I’ll be back next week.

Last night he was extra cuddly. He army crawled up the bed, then rolled on his side with his back to me. I threw an arm over him for a while, obliging the request for snuggles. That's probably how it happened.

I woke up this morning thirty minutes before my weekday alarm would go off needing to pee. While I was sitting on the toilet, I scratched an itch on my arm and felt a tick.

I saw a dot on it.

"LONE STAR TICK. LONE STAR TICK ON MY ARM," I yelled from the toilet.

Stephen got up quickly, grabbed the good tweezers I always complain about him moving, and pulled it. He is like that. When we were removing all the concrete in our backyard, back in September 2017, all the vibration from our consumer-grade jackhammer apparently caused a snake to hide out in our house. I still can't figure out how it got in. Dad found it on a trip inside to use the weird bathroom. Instead of saying, THERE'S A SNAKE IN YOUR HOUSE, he asked where we kept the grabber/reacher tool he'd seen in the den. Stephen went to find it and Dad then explained why.

Stephen grabbed the snake with the tool. Then he flung it.

I will remember as long as I have my mind that moment, standing there under that shitty carport, locking eyes with my dad while that snake sailed through the air. I think I experienced the closest thing to telepathy there is in this world. Because I was thinking, and I knew my dad was thinking the same thing: Stephen just threw the snake into the rock pile we have to put in the dumpster.

It ended up being fine.

Anyway, since I was on the toilet Stephen flushed the tick down the sink drain, and that was also fine because Lone Star ticks don't need to be saved for testing because they don't carry Lyme. They can just make you allergic to all mammal products for the rest of your life.

The internet claims this is rare but two spouses of coworkers at my last job developed an alpha gal allergy, so it's not rare enough for my liking.

I had intended to go back to bed. I pointed at the dog, who was smiling nervously, and said, "Stop bringing friends inside." But then I just sat there, uneasy. So we got up. Indy's kept a respectful distance for the rest of the day.

Can we talk about the enshittification of the internet? I spent the thirty minutes to an hour before the kid woke up attempting to see Dr Google, trying to use my usual workaround of the degraded quality of search (that is, appending " reddit" when I want anecdata), but I kept running into subreddits taken private out of protest of Reddit policies. I complained about this in a Slack and someone reported having an experience with a Lone Star tick and nothing happening afterward.

So maybe it'll be fine. If it's not, my cholesterol numbers should be amazing. In the meantime, next month I may start avoiding red meat and dairy after lunchtime to avoid having an overnight reaction — as apparently an alpha gal allergy takes weeks to show up and a reaction is on a three-to-six-hour delay.

We filled the rest of the morning with watercolor painting at the kitchen table and watching a storm out the big window in our living room.

Earlier this week, while looking up what Betsy had written about "frith," I saw her recommending Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Just the day before, Leah Reich wrote about it, so I took that as a sign and reserved it from the library. This afternoon we spent what felt like more than an hour but was probably thirty minutes at most at the downtown library, my child running around, interrupting other kids' quiet activities, and imploring us to "take your seats" while she peered out from the Kidman/Urban Puppet Stage.

We then went out to the southern suburbs so I could look at waterproof flooring and still have no idea what I want for the impending den remodel. Our child insisted on being carried by Stephen so she could nap. The store was next to a Barnes and Noble — in fact, the exact bookstore of my childhood - so once she was awake we walked around for a while.

Speaking of enshittification: instead of rows of books, they now have "book rooms" for genres, and what that really does is disguise how few books they are selling. (Except for religious books. They are selling many more of those than I remember.) More floor space was allocated for manga, children's toys, and a wide assortment of planners than actual books. I walked through the magazine section — it used to be my favorite part — and felt hollow. How will we discover things as bookstores thin out and social networks implode and recommendation engines suggest the same few things? I managed to walk out empty handed, although I am still thinking about getting an analog book journal, because Goodreads sucks and I still haven't had time to home-roll an Eleventy-compatible book logging system.

This morning I worked from a coffee shop near the daycare. I parked on the street in front of a spray of coneflowers so I didn't have to move the car if there were no space and I needed to try the one of the other coffee shops nearby. I had a backpack on - an Aer City Pack Pro I bought after lurking on r/onebag for a while - so the kiddo needed to wear her empty little pink backpack into her classroom.

I didn't end up needing to go to a second location. I lucked into my favorite table. We used to live close enough to go most days. I would know this coffee shop by the way the sound echoes in it alone.

My child loves CSA pickup. She loves walking through the cramped parking lot in the heat holding her own bag, loves to tell me what to pick from the bins, loves standing in the kitchen on her learning tower while I process everything for maximum freshness until some of it goes in the compost, but hates to eat almost anything. This week's share included corn. I haven't gotten an ear of corn in a CSA share in years. I was wondering aloud to Stephen on the drive home when the last time was, as I tried to remember the best storage method. I recalled finding a fat green earworm inside a husk the last time we did. ("So, shuck it before putting it in the fridge," Stephen said.) I shrieked in a mimicry of how I did before.

"What, mama?"

I explained.

"I hope we find a worm," she said from her carseat, her voice full of wicked delight.

I know today was a chemo day for my dad because it's always the day after CSA pickup. The updates have slowed to a trickle. I'm not sure if it's because this is becoming mundane; apparently the first round went really well, the second a little tiring.

My mom had said in a group text that the oncologist had cleared visits from the grandkids between rounds "as long as nobody's sick."

I held my typing fingers. Imagine a meme of Bruce Banner turning back to Captain America. "That's my secret," he says. But finish it instead with, "we're always sick." There's at least one day a week my kid's nose is running. That was the whole impetus for my trip last month.

On a very related note, Canadian wildfires affecting air quality in the Midwest has helped tamp down my wanderlust. The sky all the way down here was hazy in the morning like a late August evening rush hour.

It's supposed to be 100º here on Friday. I can't believe we ever did group runs in this, but I know we did. TVA is trying to reassure everyone, after the power went out this winter, that we're not becoming Texas, but I'll admit being nervous.

The heat made up my mind for me: I've decided that, while I might do intervals at the race, my training focus is for now on getting back to a regular yoga practice. I did a retreat at Rockvale last fall, and it occurred to me after leaving that I knew one of the other attendees because I'd taken one of her yoga classes. I forgot about that until she, not remembering me, complimented my Hacktoberfest tee shirt while I was putting my shoes into a cubby before the restorative class that followed hers. I felt like that was my sign to do more than just do supta baddha konasana or shivasana, so I signed up for hers too.

It took a few months, and a lot of coordination, but we finally have a storm door on the back door. The dog is acting afraid of it. It replaced a heavy old security door. When that was gone and merely opening one door exposed him to the elements, he acted afraid of that too.

The retaining wall removal is scheduled a few weeks out.

That leaves the weird bathroom.

If we move forward on this second bathroom / laundry room remodel, which looks increasingly likely, I'm going to have to clear out our den, which means I'll have to empty and consolidate my freezers over the next two months. I'm mentally drafting my post to the notorious neighborhood Facebook group. So far it's something like: "I'VE GOT BEEF. No, seriously, I've got beef. And chicken wings. Come get them."

Media diet

• I've added Arnold's Pump Club to my regular podcast / newsletter rotation. I really couldn't have predicted that even a year ago. It's positive, evidence-based, and it debunks stupid health trends designed to separate the hopeful from their money.

There was a point at which they recreated the usual episode intro. It was set up so you saw it coming a mile away but, still, when one of the puppeteers leapt into place holding the big MUM letters overhead and the whole theatre yelled, “MUM!” I laughed so hard I cried. I just lost it. Stephen made eye contact with me and I laughed harder, trying to pull myself together before the din gave way again to rapt attention and the prerecorded dialogue.

This week, one of my child’s classmates became a big brother. This is a fairly frequent occurrence these days, I'm sure in no small part because siblings get preference for scarce infant childcare slots. She wanted to go to this little boy’s house to meet his brand-new sister. When I tried to explain that you can’t invite yourself to someone else’s house, much less when there is a tiny baby there, she screwed her mouth up to one side and then asked, “Can we get a new baby?”

Is there a great way to say absolutely not that doesn’t sound child-hating when you’re telling your own young child no, absolutely not?

I’m not sad about it—maybe I would have been slightly wistful about it, if covid had never been a thing, but the world has proven to me just how unstable it is and how hostile it is to mothers and children. I gave birth to a healthy kid and I am not worse for the wear. I’ve always had daycare, even as scarce as it is here. As far as I’m concerned we have won a lottery. We decided we wouldn’t play it again, especially in a post-Dobbs world, so we have taken measures to ensure we can't.

I don’t want her to have a complex about my age, so I didn’t give her the same answer I gave one of the younger fraternity alumni when he asked when we were having another: a tickled laugh, followed by, “I’m forty.”

I need to make a decision on whether to register for the neighborhood 5k soon. I don’t care about the price going up, but I need to start training tomorrow if I’m going to. I’m wildly deconditioned and I’ll need to start carving out time for PT and crosstraining and walks and intervals—all the things I haven’t made any real time for since my child started to walk. (I signed up for a restorative yoga series, at least. I had classes that were going to expire.)

I have a very fancy jogging stroller that has been barely used, but I feel like that is running on hard mode straight out of the gate. Stephen has voiced his support, whatever I decide.

I hate that training for a race in the summer potentially excludes the dog. His fur is thick like a husky’s, and heat-absorbing black, though he’s getting a little more white in his muzzle. He’s started wanting to sit down on our usual one-and-a-half mile “family walk” route at a lower temperature than in years past. I could train concurrently with family walks—every couch-to-5K program I’ve done doesn’t go further than that until the last two weeks—but I worry about him.

I think we’re approaching our wagon era: the time when the kid doesn't want to be seen in the stroller and the dog can't walk as far as we'd like. I’m having a hard time finding an option that will accommodate a compactly-built eighty-pound lab mix and the tall three year old he does not want touching him. How is this not already a product? Anything that hits where the Venn diagram overlaps for old parents of only children who spoiled their dogs pre-baby should be a goldmine. Someone get their act together to come get this money.

I’ve also had my eye on this cargo bike as an option for our short daily commute or to let the dog's ears flap in the breeze a bit, but we don’t have a garage so I’d need to level out a small section of yard to put in another shed to store it. It is not lost on me that this is literal bike-shedding.

Today's 1000 Words email punched me in the gut. The guest writer was Kiese Laymon, who wrote:

I avoid people now at all costs. I’m just terrified of who we are, who I am, and I wonder how to do the work we have chosen while being terrified of people and petrified of their touch. …

I’m scared of writing well about who we have become because I don’t want to discover that this is who we have always been.

This is who we have always been.

I immediately thought of the masks I had tucked in with pull-ups in the clutch I took to TPAC, and of the surprise I felt at the three-year well visit when I saw the bottom half of the pediatrician's face in person for the first time.

When the real estate agent was in our dining room last week he said we'd gotten a lot done in four years and I had to gently correct him: no, we've been here seven years. Longer than we rented. He laughed and admitted that pretty much anything from March 2020 to about December of last year was warped into its own compressed and stretched time, which I of all people definitely understand.

We're all carrying around this trauma, some acknowledged and some not, and we're collectively trying to live like nothing happened.

Last year a friend called the last few years a slow-rolling apocalypse. I thought, at the time, she meant it in the sense of destruction of the old, pre-pandemic world. It is also a revelation, though: we are not who we thought we were. We are who we have always been. The frith has been permanently broken.

The only show I’m watching now is Platonic. Elder Millennial lawyer-turned-SAHM Rose Byrne bristles against her small life in her small house, reconnects with her old friend for hijinks and navigates going back to work. I appreciate, at least, that they’re depicting that even lawyers can’t always live well in cities on one salary anymore. They eat at a table in the kitchen. This seems like a recommendation engine generated a show just for me … so of course nobody’s recapping it. I love recaps! It’s the whole reason I subscribe to Vulture; I kept hitting the three-article limit every time I caught up on a show. But here I am, watching a show that nobody’s recapping, so if I have to fast-forward to avoid secondhand embarrassment those moments are just lost to me forever. (And there is a lot of secondhand embarrassment in this show.) The soundtrack is good; I haven’t liked one as much since Celeste and Jesse Forever.

What else? Last month a guy ran his car into the retaining wall along the perimeter of our front yard. Four weeks later, his insurance company cut us a large check we had to pick up in Goodlettsville. This week, after asking a multitude of questions, I finally mailed off the deposit to get the removal started. I never thought we’d actually get around to removing the retaining wall, which I dislike for many reasons, but it turned out it costs two grand more to fix ten linear feet of mortared, stone-stacked wall than it does to remove 150 linear feet, so I lucked out. (The driver was unharmed, though his car was totaled. He was avoiding a pedestrian walking her dog and a car that drove off. The poor pedestrian was pretty distraught but she said she was moving two weeks later so at least she doesn't have to continually walk through that intersection. All's well that ends well?)

Homeownership is a continually-dawning horror¹, moreso when you bought a sixty-year-old house that spent at least a decade as a rental.² Stephen and I have worked elbow-to-elbow for three years. Literally. This is our desk situation, each of us with a monitor on the sides of this thing and all the shit we want to keep off camera in the middle, where a normal human being would sit. It would be nice to have room for a proper standing desk, or to not have to hope that the other would be finished with their daily standup update before it’s our turn to talk.

That said, we've already had a long daycare commute before. I have been spoiled by the last year of living close enough that I could walk to pickup. Also, we refinanced at the very lowest interest rate two summers ago. So I have been telling myself I’d at least hang on until kindergarten.

The real estate agent who leased us the last apartment and helped us buy this house — how have we known him for thirteen years — came by the house on Monday and we talked through what we’d need to do if we wanted to sell in a few years. He said we probably should, but don’t have to, remodel the janky laundry/bathroom, that it would pay for itself, but other than that … we don’t need to do anything. “It shows well,” he said, “and you’ve done all the right things.”

I really needed to hear that. I felt a complementary shade of the relief I felt at the two-day pediatrician visit three years ago, when the doctor saw how exhausted and overwhelmed I was and gave me a quick pep talk. It just hits different when it's from someone who thinks about these things all the time. The real estate agent pointed out that all the work we did making space in backyard — and we did the actual work, except for removing the foot-thick the parking pad, saving what I now know would have cost easily thousands of dollars — has given us a back yard larger than most of the neighborhood’s new builds have, plus we have sixty-year-old trees.

(Also he noticed that I went to the effort of choosing permeable pavers when we redid the sidewalk. I appreciate an eye for detail.)

The thought of a remodel that would leave us without a laundry room for two months is stressful, especially in the current tech economy, but I’ve dusted off my cost-benefit analysis skills and it’s cheaper than moving as soon as my child is schoolaged.

1: Homeownership, like old age, is a privilege. Like aging, it can also really suck.

2: The last tenant's girlfriend was a nepo baby musician who is not a household name but whose biggest hit you’ve probably heard. She still has our address on her license, which I suspected when I started getting bills addressed to her from hospitals in Ohio while she was on tour earlier this year, but it was confirmed for me when someone showed up with her wallet at my house at 7 a.m. two months ago while I was readying my kid for school alone (Stephen was out of town doing fraternity stuff). I opened the door in a tank top and shorts and an earnest looking guy in a Patagonia vest looked at the license, squinted at me, and asked her government name like a question. He didn’t know who she was, just that she’d left her wallet at the bar the night before. I let him in on who she was and said to take it to the police station, as she hasn’t lived here in eight years.

Freddie wants us to stay. I don't know if that's enough, though.

I spent some time today trying to pull my reading lists off of Goodreads. It's been a whole thing for the last year, trying to slowly disentangle myself from being The Product. Goodreads also closed off their API a few years ago and have had known exporting bugs for more than four years, per their support forums. I ran into one today: books marked "read" from the Kindle iOS app don't have an ISBN logged.

The goal is to (eventually) move all of my reading logs to this site and set up a GitHub action on this blog's repository, patterned after this one by Katy DeCorah, to automate the posting process … but I have to backfill hundreds of ISBNs in a CSV first. So much for my wild hair to start that process today.

Speaking of wild hairs, I committed to 1000 Words of Summer again. The last time I made an earnest attempt was 2019, but halfway through I had a work retreat in the Smokies. (You would think a week with limited work responsibilities and no dog responsibilities would have been an excellent time to write, but alas.) Whether any of those words make it here remains to be seen.

When we were out in Mt. Juliet last week, there was a quick prayer before the meal. Not entirely unexpected for either a gathering of members of a fraternity founded by men who went on to be ministers, or for Wilson County, to be honest. The concept was, however, foreign to my child, who kept talking the way she lives her life: in ALL CAPS.

Even if we pull a reversal of what my parents did and move her to the midwest once she's school-aged, she will still grow up in America so I should probably prepare her for living here, and that will include exposure to religious services and religious practices.

Anyway, and because of that, I'm still subscribed to the church newsletter.

I live about an hour from the small town where I grew up. I know two people from high school now live in my neighborhood, and another is a Metro councilman for a district on the other side of town, but other than one person I ran into during Pride ten years ago I haven't run into anyone from there as an adult. I have a short list of Instagram mutuals still, most of whom have scattered around the country, and that's it. The first few times the church newsletter invited seniors to participate in a cardiac health study and screening after services, my brain didn't process the cardiology resident's name, but today it did.

A quick check on the wider internet confirmed it. She is the daughter of one of my elementary school PE teachers, the one who went for her doctorate and also became a vice principal at my high school.

Third grade was my first full year of school in Tennessee. I don't remember my mom being at my school much but, in the little bit she was, she'd managed to pick up that nobody included the two Black women who taught PE when giving teachers gifts, which is how I found my shy self awkwardly standing in front of their shared office bearing Christmas gifts. I remember she started to cry. I didn't fully understand then why she became so emotional about it.

I didn't fully understand why I choked up today when I tried to tell Stephen that I'd recognized her daughter's name.

In 2020, while the baby napped in my arms, I read an article about efforts to remove Confederate statues in a town near where I grew up. For all the concern about erasing history, no one interviewed ever mentioned what almost happened to Thurgood Marshall there, something I didn't learn about until I was at least thirty. One of the subjects cited something that had happened in the time since my parents and brother had left town: that same vice principal had been pushed out of a job at the school system's central office and repeatedly rejected for openings afterward. She sued and received a $500K settlement. (They should have added at least another zero.)

In the last few years my dad told me a story that must have taken place around the time of the Christmas gifts. Over beers with a Southern Baptist neighbor, my dad was talking about something that happened at work and mentioned a coworker's name and the neighbor asked, "Is he Black?"

I could see Dad's eyebrow raising then just as it did in the retelling. He said he said yes.

"Down here we call them—"

Was he testing the waters or trying to enforce a sort of order? I don't know, and Dad didn't care. Apparently he jumped down the neighbor's throat, letting him know that he didn't, and he didn't ever want to find out his kids were hearing it, either.

And here I'd thought they had cooled to us because we weren't religious enough, not because we weren't racists.

Before I'd heard the neighbor story, I served on a board and a handful of us stayed back after an event, talking about gentrification. I felt, as they say in the church, a little convicted. I said that I wanted to live around a variety of people from different walks of life - like a bigger version of the church that had helped draw us to the neighborhood - and that any time I was in a space lacking diversity there was always a part of me suspicious that there was a malignant reason it was homogenous and everyone else hadn't told me. It sort of spilled out of me, and as I said it I didn't connect it then to where I'd grown up.

Maybe I do know why I started to cry today, even if I can't sound it out entirely, just as for so long I couldn't spell out exactly why homogeneity makes me anxious.

I started a draft of an email to the cardiologist daughter while running unit tests on today's pull request, but I felt preemptively embarrassed doing it and deleted it. As Stephen teased me, in the small-town South, "tell your mom I said hi," sounds like a threat. But it's where I need to start, isn't it, even if nothing afterward is possibly enough?

Thank you for being so kind to me. I'm sorry I didn't know then just how awful they were. I'm sorry they did that to you, and especially after you loved their kids for more than two decades. I'm sorry that sorry is not nearly enough.

I follow meal prep Instagrammers and feel nostalgia. My only guaranteed cooking time comes every other week on market day.

We've belonged to a CSA more years than not since 2011. That first year, I was laid off not long after the first share pickup, so I had plenty of time and a lot of incentive to cook every weird vegetable. That CSA shut down after the second year and many many emails asking us to pray for them, and we took a break from CSAs for a while.

I picked back up with another local vegetable CSA a few years later. There were a lot of sprouts, which I was okay with at first because I was trying to replicate my favorite Calypso salad. One day, they sent out an email saying another farm was starting up a meat CSA, was anyone interested?

Yes, I was. So, for a few years we picked up monthly meat shares we could customize to our liking - so, mostly beef with the occasional bacon - from a farm on Al Gore's property outside Carthage, Tennessee. The year they started a veggie CSA, I dropped the sprouts CSA and went single-source.

I was going to quit CSAs all together the year I had the baby but when you are in your third trimester and the world shuts down because of a plague, your inner prepper takes over. I not only logged on to Al Gore's internet to re-up with his farm, but I also found a chicken and egg CSA too. Everyone did home deliveries that year and I did have the time after all: my child wasn't mobile and my work schedule was flexed so I was away from the computer during the afternoon. One of my happiest memories is of that weird time that summer, narrating my every move as I cut up and froze a bumper crop of peppers to the baby who sat in her BabyBjorn bouncer, watching.

This year we're skipping the mostly-beef CSA, still doing the chicken and egg CSA but with some short breaks between three-month commitments, and I picked up a new veggie CSA. What I like about this one is it's market style - so you know your limits for each thing, and if you don't like it you don't have to take it. Previous CSAs sometimes felt like insurance for our composting service.

I don't keep up with the clock app, unless it's over coffee with a dear friend catching me up on it like it's her stories. I downloaded the app briefly in the run-up to giving birth, got sucked in for a few hours' worth of handing over my eyeballs to the algorithm, and quickly realized it was not for me. Even still, the "crunchy"/"silky" mom discourse¹ has reached me.

These labels are not for someone whose only experience raising an infant was post-lockdown but pre-vaccine. I suspect I will always be a little surprised to be seen as a mom. I think of the Hannah Gadsby quote from Nanette: "I identify as tired." Maybe I am just a salty mom.

Still, I know my farmers, and I ordered my kid a set of Montessori knives she can use from her learning tower the next time we come home from the farmer's market.

1: I find it odd that, in this era of nut-free classrooms, we are using nut butter styles to categorize moms.

Painting a closet sucks. I have fond memories of painting the living room. Sure, you have to cut in and do all the trim work, but it's not a confined space, you can use a roller and long pole for most of it, and you can have a TV on to trick yourself into thinking you aren't really working. The living room took me about the same amount of time as the closet and I got through a rewatch of most of Parks and Recreation. Today I listened to one podcast wherein the hosts disparaged having a blog versus a Substack newsletter¹. Between that and not being able to figure out why the right earphone wasn't working, I gave up and just listened to my thoughts. Unfortunately, that mostly meant a medley of Daniel Tiger songs flitted into my consciousness as I painted.

I am surprisingly angry at how long one closet took. It's in part because whoever painted the whole house CoverGirl beige also painted the closet ceiling beige, too.

Then I drove out to the Hendersonville Lowe's to pick up a storm door I ordered online yesterday. Getting things delivered from or returned to our closest store, the Dickerson Pike Lowe's, has been a nightmare and I needed to wrap up this door project, but since we don't own a truck picking a door up ourselves is a little like a river crossing puzzle. If I hadn't seen two different Lowe's storm doors at my parents' house last weekend I might have not persisted, for reasons I'll make clear now.

A little over a week ago I returned a different door with a wrong-sided hinge (this was my mistake) to the aforementioned Dickerson Pike Lowe's in a fit of frustration and rage after waiting three weeks for its correctly-hinged replacement to arrive. I received an email letting me know it was rescheduled for another three weeks out the night before the delivery date and, according to corporate customer care, someone at the store lied in their case notes about me calling them that night to schedule the return for the wrong-sided hinge door. The timestamp was conveniently about fifteen minutes before close or, as we call it in my house, when we put the preschooler to bed. I absolutely would not make a phone call at that time. I finally, finally got someone at the store on the phone, a nice guy who was trying to help me, but because everyone else kept gaming their numbers and pushing my request off, the best he could do was to pick it up three days after I was to have eight 3-year-olds, their siblings, and parents at my house. I was in full-on fuck it mode, had Stephen cram the box into our small SUV, and I cancelled the replacement order on my phone while I stood in line at returns.

My beef with the Dickerson Pike Lowe's is not really with the Dickerson Pike Lowe's. It's about Taylorization of work, and systems designed to actively discourage people from speaking to a human. It's 2023. There's the Internet. If anyone under 60 is still calling a store or calling corporate customer service, it's because there's no phone tree or chatbot that could possibly help them. I shouldn't have to say, "Speak to a human," three times through my gritted teeth to get help. Punitive metrics like time on hold used against understaffed stores just mean some frazzled part-time worker is going to lift a phone from the receiver just to put it back on hold, resetting the clock, which happened twice before I spoke to the guy who was actually trying to help me.

Today, after I scrubbed the sweat and paint spatter off myself this afternoon, I had Stephen take the car seat out of our small SUV again, then I drove up to Hendersonville and sat in curbside parking while a young associate wheeled out the door. I tried a few configurations, looking for the one that had worked for the return. The configuration that gave me the most visibility wouldn't let me do anything but put the car in park or reverse. The one I ultimately went with meant I needed to shrug my right shoulder up every time I hit a bump down Gallatin Road to keep the whole door from rattling.

My neck is angry with me tonight, but the to-do list I've been holding in my head is a little shorter, so as long as this ibuprofen kicks in I'm going to call it a win.

1: I'm not necessarily anti-Substack. I follow almost fifty newsletters hosted there. I just don't believe a POSSE approach is "quaint."

When Stephen took his next job at a digital agency near downtown, we made the move. At the time it was affordable, though we weren't yet brave enough to buy, which we still kick ourselves about sometimes. A friend tipped us off to some condos that had been pulled off the market and were being rented out (this was late 2009, early 2010 after all). We lived there for six years in 600 square feet before buying this house.

When we bought this house, it was on a bus line. Stephen had season tickets to see the Preds and regularly stayed out late with friends. I had a full after-work wellness routine: two different types of yoga classes, acupuncture, running with a group three times a week, personal training, all of which I hurried back into town from work in Brentwood for. I had an eyebrow lady and a specific massage therapist I tried to see quarterly, both in Berry Hill. I recognized myself in the "self-care coven" bit in this Jami Attenberg Curbed piece, even after getting a dog and taking a job five miles from home.

Friends were already moving away when they announced our bus route was going to be eliminated, then I learned I was pregnant, and covid came the next year. My forties don't look much like my thirties, and I feel an intense need to have a better sense of what fifty will look like. I recognize myself in that part of the Attenberg piece too.

My hair reeks of wood smoke right now. Today we drove out to the other side of Mt. Juliet to a cookout with a bunch of Stephen's fraternity brothers as part of an informal alumni weekend of activities. I followed my preschooler around the backyard, into the house, making sure her shoes didn't touch the guy's couch and that her pull-up didn't leak on it either. Most of that involved passing a smoking Big Green Egg frequently. Three of the guys live in the same subdivision; wives and kids came and went.

A school-aged girl in pajamas and a pink helmet rode by on a pink four wheeler. We usually only see babies in strollers go by our house.

The house across the street from the cookout was for sale, but it had no backyard. It is still wild to me that our 70-year-old modest ranch is valued nearly the same as those twice-as-large, all-brick new construction homes.

Today was a cool, overcast day, but there were no trees there and every year a hotter summer shows up.

Things are good here for us in Nashville. We still know people here and have dear friends here. I love our daycare. We have a great dentist and pediatrician and other vital service providers, most of whom probably wouldn't appreciate being called any kind of "coven," here. (We also have a few who very much would appreciate it.) When I realized, last month while letting the dog in, that the ash tree in our backyard was lost to emerald ash borer, I could call a college friend's husband and get it taken care of. But I also didn't move here to live surrounded by million-dollar HPRs that flew up overnight, with Teslas parked out front. I believe in public schools, and not just if you lottery into the right magnet for fifth grade or your parents can pick you up from the high school that aligns with your interests at 3 p.m. Many of the people who are moving here are seeking a political climate that doesn't currently exist in Davidson County, but if enough of them keep coming it will.

The preschooler was starting to toddle around the backyard like someone overserved her, so we decided to go home. She was mad about it.

"I don't want to leave Daddy's friend's house, I want to STAY," she yelled. I understood.

It was a long drive back. She passed out almost instantly in the carseat so I made it longer, taking Lebanon Road instead of the interstate, and Briley Parkway instead of going through downtown, and further down Gallatin Road than necessary. We passed the graphic designer's brother-in-law's house at a four-way stop a block from the house where she still lives. Last fall we walked the then-toddler down that street in her unicorn costume for trick-or-treating.

There is something precious about having that kind of long knowledge of a place and its people. We are running out of time to do it again.

She was very excited about stopping at the Crossville Buc-ees, even though all we ever do there is hurry into the bathroom. I had her stand in front of me while I peed and I changed her pull-up. We each picked a milk from the cooler and hit the road again.

I talked to her about why I did things as I drove. I noticed this week that when she got a "driver cart" at the grocery store that she turns a steering wheel like an old pro. It always surprises me how close she's paying attention.

There's almost always some accident or traffic on the descent to the Clinch River bridge so we talked about mountains, and how it's easier to go too fast going down hill.

As we got closer we talked about my dad.

"His tummy hurts," she said. "They're taking care of him. He's going to get a medicine and then we can't see him for a while."

My dad has pancreatic cancer. Six months of chemo is supposed to start tomorrow. A rearrangement of the GI tract called a Whipple procedure in there somewhere, if things go well. So I drove three hours there and three hours back the same day to let my parents soak up snuggles and her tiny, sassy voice before … well, before. I lied about feeling good about the impending plumbing repair or the removal of our retaining wall, things I'd usually be seeking his advice about.

Both of his parents didn't take care of themselves and still lived to their mid-eighties, as did most of their parents and grandparents. We didn't address that subject directly. Instead we talked about the genealogy stuff we've learned in just the past few years, skirting around that so many of those ancestors were long-lived, for so far back.

In his last visit to Nashville in January, he said he'd recently weighed the most he ever had, and he wanted to change that. I offered to be an accountability partner. One of my own goals was to make a point to get enough sleep; I was revenge bedtime procrastinating a lot, which I knew he understood because he did it a lot in his thirties and forties. I'd text at 7 a.m. Then I caught a daycare crud about six weeks in and stopped updating, but he didn't. The weight was melting off, at a pace I couldn't have sustained even when I was a broke 20-year-old measuring out portions to ensure they'd last until the next paycheck. I was convinced he wasn't eating enough, that he was exercising too much.

Now I wonder, would a smaller man's cancer have been caught on the weight loss alone, before the elevated liver enzymes showed up in routine bloodwork, the same week the GI symptoms started? Another worry in my bouquet of them.

It was only 6 p.m. back home but I was exhausted to the point I was becoming concerned about making it home. So we slowly packed up a unicorn water table and our backpacks, I grabbed a handful of peppermints, and we migrated toward my SUV.

By the time I was back on I-40, on my second peppermint, I was more awake. I stopped at the exit for a college roommate's hometown, as I wasn't going to quite make it to Buc-ees, and filled up the tank while my daughter slept in her carseat. A red sunset, hazed over with smoke from the Alberta wildfires, dipped below the mountains. Then it was just the dark interstate, music from twenty years ago and more fun road trips on CarPlay, and me wide awake as midlife unfurled ahead.

I'd gotten the timing wrong because I'd had it in my head that there was a thirty minute gap between the end of the race and the start of the parade. Some of my happiest running memories are taking off from somewhere after the finish line at East Park and running to 12th Street to line up to march in with my runners. That second wind, going my own pace for the first time in two months. But my runners usually finished around the 45 minute mark, and if the race starts at 7:45, that would put the parade at starting at 9 a.m. If I'd thought more carefully, or remembered that the neighborhood festival is now run by a professional events company, I'd probably have gotten there sooner.

We passed the bacon house and reminisced. Some time in the next few years following that post, he ended up becoming friends with the bacon lady's husband. They live in San Diego now.

We didn't stay long. I hate queueing up anyway but watching a line of toddlers wait for bounce houses while older kids kept bypassing the line was my breaking point. My kiddo was hungry and upset that we tethered her balloon to the stroller (at least until I kept pointing out the ones floating away from the festival). We'd end up only seeing a few people we knew. Maybe four. For the most part those who haven't moved away stayed home.

But there was a brief moment, when we were past the bacon house, close enough to the route to hear the multi tenors, I felt my eyes well up. I was pretty sure I was going to cry. I thought it might be some anxiety about being in public after two years of covid, or being back at the festival after the same plus a break in 2019, or maybe some mourning that I haven't run the race in four years now. But as we got closer I think it was relief. That so much can change and still be the same.

But the stress: rearranging my (admittedly smaller, now) life around three group runs, making sure the timing is in my Garmin, can't take walking breaks because I'm the Coach. Throw in: Stephen's work hours are now later than mine, so is it too hot for the toddler to come with me? I'd've worried about getting hills in while pushing a stroller but one of the other coaches said she wasn't doing hills on weekdays, it was too damn hot. And add: covid cases go up when it gets too hot to be outside for any length of time, and you can't mask on a run in this weather.

There were only ever 2 or 3 runners in my assigned pace this year. Most of the usual suspects in that pace group dropped back into the run/walk pace. People are shifting into different seasons of life, moving away (or trying to), or are changed permanently by covid. Nothing feels the same, because it isn't.

I still feel bad, though. I feel like I left my buddy hanging: talked him into coaching, didn't coach. Referred him to my last job, and as of last week am no longer there.

I am 3 for 3 on starting a job and the tech stack changes to one I've never worked with. It's becoming my specialty and I'm not mad about it.

Onboarding into a fully-remote situation after 2.5 years working from home has been interesting. I'm so accustomed to one coworker living in 12 South and the rest of the scrum team being on the east side. Now the nearest colleague is in Atlanta.

Another big change is being shown a slide on day one during an onboarding presentation and that slide is a map of every state where there's already a nexus, so if you're looking to move, here's where you can.

I've been thinking about moving north for years, even though now we know there's really not anywhere in the lower 48 that isn't going to be an oven in summer. In 2020 I'd idly look at real estate in Duluth, a place I've never been but seemed to be a good place to ride out the heat death of the holocene. Then last summer, in the wild stumbled-upon genealogy story I hope to actually share about here soon, I learned both of my grandmothers' maternal grandmothers had lived near the Duluth-adjacent Leech Lake reservation, so maybe it was something epigenetic.

At any rate, we've had extremely good fortune thus far on the childcare front and we're not planning to go anywhere until the toddler is old enough for public school. Even then, I'd be a little wistful about leaving a house within a short walk of said school.

I also needed a root canal, 23 months after having a crown put on the same tooth postpartum. Fun times! Thankfully, the dulled thinking, clock-watching for the next dose of ibuprofen, and extra attempts to sleep coincided with an engineering-wide hackweek when I'd already self-selected into a Python project. I have thoughts about the whole experience too, but this has run long enough.

(PS: I almost ported this blog from AstroJS to Hugo in frustration with breaking changes, but then I would have had to theme it, so I dug in and fixed the issues. Software is terrible.)

Where to start? Two years ago, we huddled in the hallway while the tornado sirens atop nearby schools blared. Just a few branches landed in our front yard. When morning came, we learned how bad it was elsewhere. We didn't have internet at home for a week - no big deal, yet. We took circuitous routes around the tornado's destruction to our separate offices to work. I was already nervous about every cough and sniffle in the office, as I was seven months pregnant. I washed my hands with scalding water after each (frequent) retreat to the bathroom. Back at my standing desk in the open floor plan office I probably had active bitch face every time someone breathed wrong.

The next Wednesday at noon the company-wide work-from-home email went out. Stephen came into the building to lug my monitor out for me and that was that. We ordered groceries for the first time ever and wiped everything down. We sprayed the mail down with the only Lysol that was on the shelf when we supermarket swept through the Inglewood Kroger, some floral concoction that smelled like Boone's Farm. We paid our amazing dog walker but walked the dog ourselves for the next two months, wandering the same loop twice a day. It was unseasonably cool until the week our daughter was born.

About a year and a half before that, I walked through our midcentury ranch's pass-through bedroom and decided it had to be reconfigured so both of us could work in there. I ordered an 8' by 8' L-shaped cubicle desk from Wayfair and hired a painter to paint the paneling. It felt frivolous at the time. We didn't work for the kind of places that let local employees regularly work from home and, despite regularly pairing with a talented Portland-based engineer whose goldendoodle was usually curled up on the couch behind him, I earnestly believed I needed to be in an office to do my best work. I just felt deeply important to me that we each have space in that room.

I think about that pull at least once a week now, often while on a daily standup Zoom.

I'd read Severance not long before, and afterward If Then, Naamah, The Dreamers, Station Eleven. None of these books were on my mind when I emailed the painting company for a quote. But it certainly feels like everything impending was on the edge of a collective consciousness.

“The end begins before you are ever aware of it. It passes as ordinary.” — Ling Ma, Severance

Our ordinary now is a lot of team effort: feeding and dressing the toddler, driving across town and back twice a day for childcare, the security theater of taking everyone's temperature before we leave her to breathe the same air as a bunch of other little unmasked kids while we stay home. (Where to start about what it's like to have a pandemic baby? Probably a whole new post.) I have a hard stop at 4:30 everyday and still don't manage to return home before the sun dips below the horizon. It's been the most sedentary winter of my adult life, and the little yellow house on 11th has been gone for two years.

• The very day after the anniversary of the last day the dog peed or pooped in the house - which we knew because it was the day he ate drywall - he pooped in his crate. A few more times, a couple of vet visits, hosing off the dog and his bedding in the front yard, some prescription food, and probiotic powders we call "flavor packets," and he seems to be back to normal. Tonight we upgraded him from the "X-Large" crate to the "XX-Large" crate; it's barely perceptibly bigger, but he has a little more clearance when he sits in it and, if he poops in it, he should have enough room to curl up and snooze away from the poop. He wagged his tail furiously and kept licking our legs between loops running into the new crate, so I think he likes it.
• 5K coaching ended. We ran so many hills and I felt so much stronger than the last few years! I did not actually get to run the Tomato 5K, however; I pulled an inner thigh muscle working with my trainer the Thursday before. That Saturday morning I grabbed a whistle, put a tomato bandana on the dog, had Stephen drop us off, and stood at the finish line ushering each of my runners across. There was a two-week running hiatus, then I showed up to the Wednesday night run and managed to shave 5 minutes off the same route's May time.
• Half marathon training has started in earnest. Sunday long runs in this August heat can be miserable, though. This week we met at the Two Rivers Dog Park, ran a gradual down slope toward the pedestrian bridge and the Shelby Bottoms Greenway ... then had to slog the 2.5 miles back across the river, uphill, to my car. The turnaround point was only a mile from my house, so that was a test of willpower.
• I joined the PyTennessee organizing committee as marketing co-chair.
• I started my term on the board of NLC Nashville.
• I also started a fiction workshop through The Porch. The participants are all so different and the instructor is such a talented short story writer - I'm really looking forward to seeing what we all generate over the next month.
• Somewhere in all that, I need to start studying for my AWS certification, because I've signed up for the exam.

Next week the carport will be gone, and the week after that the backyard will be completely fenced in. I can hardly believe it.

Goodreads update

Still reading a lot.

Here I am almost six months later, finding flakes of primer on my fingers as I type.

We met with the hardscapes contractor on Friday at lunch, and now we wait for the quote to remove all the concrete from the backyard, fence it in, and widen the remaining driveway for two cars. The earliest we could get started is September and that's if the price is just right. In the meantime, the dog has taken to lying in the driveway or the front yard as if he were solar-powered and in need of recharging. As miserable as it is to bake in the midday Tennessee sun after the dog tricked me into taking him out with getting a frantic "I GOTTA POOP" whine, only to lie down on the grass and not even pee, it's way worse in the dead of winter when said dog is part sled dog and the driveway's icy and he puts his shoulders fully into mush mode.

Tonight, when the paint is dry, we'll hang the first permanent blinds in this house and continue to be patient as things come together.

Goodreads update

Starting and finishing over the pedestrian bridge. The only time I've run across that bridge at any decent pace was when finishing a 9-mile half-marathon training run, and it was because my car was on the other side.

Coaching yesterday was good. It feels hotter than usual this summer, and I need to help one of my co-coaches get a better feel for the pace we're supposed to be running, as we were about three minutes too fast for one interval. But I am ready for this summer rhythm: a little overscheduled, a lot accomplished.

I'd signed up for #1000wordsofsummer but this is possibly one of the worst two week periods to do this. The first day was the last day of a sprint at work, and the last day is a day my parents will be in town. It also feels like nobody talking about participating has a day job. At any rate I've decided to save all the emails and start my own 15-day writing streak on the 30th, right before the 4th of July holiday.

Goodreads update

I've reached the "the library only had paper copies of the book in my hold list" portion of my reading backlog, so my Goodreads progress has slowed significantly.

I only felt slightly called out.

It looks like Stephen and I will have to take him on walks before and after work, in addition to his weekday walks with his rescuer. (We quote the husky panel from this collection of drawings a lot in our house.) The extra activity works out in my favor, though. I'm working back up to a half-marathon distance, and I know from the carnage that happened to my feet last time¹ that I have to drop some weight and build up some leg strength. Plus having a fitness goal helps me see any goals along the way as just tasks to check off, and I'm scheduled to take my AWS certification exam in September.

Coaching starts back up next Saturday. I'm not ready. I will almost be coaching myself as much as anyone else. But I am delighted that this year my two co-coaches are people I've coached before, people who have become runners through incredible odds. When they use my own words against me - including "never give up on a downhill" - I can't help but dig deeper. So bring on the oven heat, the sunscreen in my eyes, whistle at the ready and eyes on my Garmin.

Goodreads update:

1: I developed blisters the width of the balls of my feet. One popped as I landed hard around the 8 mile mark on the sidewalk along Music Row. I yelped so loud my running partner thought I'd broken something. I had to walk two miles to my car, parked across the river.

It's the sort of detail that — put together with many other recent improbabilities — makes you wonder if you yourself once quietly slipped from reality into some solipsist hell.

At least the dog surprises me. I've never had a dog that burped before, nor one that felt it was his duty to lick my shins after I get out of a shower. That's not something I would have imagined.

I traveled to Cleveland for PyCon 2018 this weekend. The talks were excellent, but I felt like they were either just affirming that my team and I are following best practices or they were so packed with information that to truly absorb the concepts, I'll have to watch them again on YouTube.

Like nearly every other catered event, the conference food lumped in the gluten free with the vegans, so I kept to a decently stocked mini fridge (with one delightfully quick stop in to pickup an online order at a Chipotle on the way back to the hotel from the grocery store) and spent meals drafting and submitting some talk proposals to upcoming regional Python conferences.

I spent a fair amount of time on Wikipedia, too. First, because I couldn't remember much about The Drew Carey Show except loud eye makeup and two theme songs about Cleveland², which alternated as earworms as I walked around downtown. The second because the city has light rail and bus rapid transit and half the population³ of my own city, which just soundly rejected either. (They also have Amtrak, but that is not a local decision.) It was nice to be somewhere I could walk to a good grocery store and reliably catch a ride every 15 minutes.

I'm contemplating replacing my carry-on bags. I have a much longer trip to NYC happening later this summer, and taking my running gear along for the PyCon 5K (cancelled for lightning, thankfully, because I did not do the timezone math and realize I'd have to be to the shuttle at 5:15 a.m. Central) put my bag at capacity. I am not sure where I will get the mileage in around Manhattan but I'm going to coach again this summer, so I will not be able to take a week off from running a week before their target race. I also have the Backyard Project approaching, so any dollar that is not socked away toward that feels wasteful.

I'm still reading a lot.

1: I've used this expression before. I really need to start keeping a list of them.

2: I also spent a fair amount of time wondering what could be in memory if not for the space wasted by those theme songs.

3: To be fair, they had a population of nearly a million in the crucial postwar period, when it was far easier to lay the groundwork for a good public transit system.

But first, we need to cut a channel in the carport concrete. Both to pull water away from the house when the carport itself is removed and to help the hardscapes contractor have a better idea of what he'd be dealing with, so we have a better idea of how much cash to sock away. We were supposed to do this last weekend, but my parents are renovating their kitchen. This weekend it is raining. Next weekend I am at PyCon.

The other effort of mine that keeps being thwarted is getting ready for coaching a new summer of couch-to-5K. I've gone back to my personal trainer, running a race a week, and I'm taking a bunch of classes at a new yoga studio … but something comes up every time I want to just go for a run with friends. This week, it was a sore throat caused by allergies. I keep reminding myself that, for coaching, all that matters is that I'm about a week ahead of my runners, but that doesn't help me with, say, the half marathon I signed up for next spring.

What has not been thwarted yet? Daily planks. I choose to believe my trainer's exuberant whoop was not a lie and that I am, in fact, holding good form.

I am also still reading a lot.

1: That sounds adorable, actually, except when it is happening in the middle of the night or at the crack of dawn.

• I'm now an RRCA-certified running coach! I'd originally planned to do an entire post about this but, when I sought out others' posts, they're almost all the same. I commuted to Franklin for the two-day classroom portion, held at a resort-like gym in what used to be farmland near my pediatrician's office way back in the day.

• I finally made it to Rivendell Writers Colony. I was supposed to go for a weekend workshop with Jami Attenberg in January, but a snowstorm made a trip up Monteagle Mountain hazardous and the workshop was cancelled. I emailed back about a March stay on Saturday and on Monday learned that the woman who owned the property wanted to turn it into a different kind of retreat. My visit was on the last weekend they were open, before Easter. I didn't get any fiction written, but I did write a boatload of poetry. The supreme quiet and the spotty cell signal was great for productivity. (Also, not having to go outside every two hours with a dog is, too.) When I wasn't writing, I was studying for my RRCA exam. I slipped out to the car at 7 a.m. Sunday, drove home, opened my laptop, and took my exam.

• The dog is shedding so much. We ran the Roomba three times in our bedroom alone last weekend. Only puppies lived in the house when I was growing up, unless it was particularly cold. We had a chow chow puppy so briefly that I can't even remember where he would have slept. He was certainly not around long enough to blow a coat. Needless to say this is an adjustment.

• We replaced the existing fence with a much nicer one and demoed the rotting, leaning shed, replacing it with a "garden hutch." We still have to remove the carport and the concrete slab behind the house before we can enclose the backyard and regain a bit of sanity around the whole "letting the dog out" thing.

• I took Facebook and Twitter off my phone a while back. Probably not related at all, as of today I will have logged as many read books into Goodreads in 2018 as I did for all of 2017.

I figured I'd be older than in my mid-thirties before I'd open an app like Spotify and not recognize more than half the artists recommended to me.

Time took a different shape when I went to software school, and since.

I went to a literary meetup and the intros went around the room and for the first time in a long time, nobody introduced themselves as "not really a writer." They talked about pieces they'd published and where they were shopping around next. And here I am, introducing myself as a marketer turned software engineer, just recovered enough from burnout to start writing again at all. I wondered if I'd write more if we didn't have a TV out in the open, if we had a fireplace.

One of the attendees really wanted to get published in a specific outlet, wanted to give them first right of refusal on each piece. "Oh, you can't do that," the woman I've known the longest said. "You could wait your whole life."

I'm not sure, after that, if I ever was able to look directly at him. His frustration was palpable. It's hard to hear people say it'll take years for something to happen when you're still trying to get there.

At the last workshop, after my speed partner used the term "glass ceiling," I used it too. I've cracked my head on it twice. I spent the better part of a decade lighting myself on fire for people who didn't care how they were kept warm.

I went home and signed up for a Duotrope account. Nothing remains still, except me, unless I move.

We worked with a contractor to put in a new porch railing and front walk after last fall's concrete demolition, and I liked his work so much we're having him tear out the last 100' of spalling patio, use up the pavers from the sidewalk as a base for a new, smaller kit shed, and build a fence to match the porch railing. Our tentative start date is a little over a month from now.

But first, we have to demo the existing shed, cut down / grind a rotten tree stump between our fence and our neighbor's, and dig a very short french drain. Mild in comparison to busting up two layers of sidewalk and a crumbling patio, or tearing down a wooden shed built around a metal shed, or digging a 10' french drain that just happened to be in a spot where a thirsty water maple had run a root — all of which we have done in the less than two years since we bought this house.

I also have a conference this month, a few long-awaited classes through USN's Evening Classes fundraiser, and running coach certification. This leaves precisely two weekends available to get everything done. Hope it doesn't rain!

Other things I need to do before it gets too hot (read: before Easter): remove the bushes that are too close to the house, plant replacements and taller hedges away from the house, buy a composter, look into replacing the last original window on the house. And then, of course, I'd like to finish painting and install blinds that aren't paper. Oh, and sleep.

Sidenote: I really don't like listening to podcasts on Spotify, because there isn't a playlist of new episodes of podcasts you subscribe to, but it is my listening app of choice on my work machine, so.

Other things I'm recommending? These stainless steel straws. We recycle and we're starting to compost, so I get it, but every time I read someone chastising folks for using straws all I can think is, don't you want to have tooth enamel in your fifties? So far I've only tried them with kombucha, but when my current fitness thing is over I will try them with wine and report back.

About that fitness thing: a local supplement shop also has a metabolic testing and imaging lab, and they run a contest every January to April. Technically I am vying with a few dozen other people for cash prizes if I lose the most body fat or gain the most muscle mass by percentage, but what I am really doing is holding myself accountable for building up my fitness before coaching season comes back around. Which essentially means I'm taking this time to force myself to finally become a morning person, because after a few years of group runs, this "block off multiple nights a week for running" business is wearing thin. I'm also reading a lot of Ask a Swole Woman (RIP The Hairpin) and refusing to feel guilty about having a Freshly subscription.

Over the next few days, after work, I primed and painted just the wall behind where the units would go in the laundry room. That was my intention with the wall behind the piano last summer, too — not to worry about the rest of the living room, just get this one wall done because moving the piano would be a pain in the ass — and then I painted the whole thing. This time I was able to stick to my original task without too much eyelid twitching. (That said, the rest of the room is being painted this week.)

Speaking of involuntary movements, my dentist gave me a thicker nightguard on Thursday and I thought I was going to hate it but it's turning out to be amazing. After noticing that my three-year-old nightguard was getting somewhat worn, I sent the mold of my upper jaw along with Stephen during his appointment a few weeks ago, with the clarifying note I did not want the whitening-tray-thin guard they once offered me. I wanted the one that was two layers laminated together. Except I didn't use that terminology; I said the "thicker" one. I knew something was off when they called to confirm that, and then when my usual hygienist said something as she was reviewing my chart. I tried it on in the chair and felt that old prickle of panic I felt as a kid when something interfered with my sleep, be it hot stale summer air or a new pillow that has no cool side or both. I thought of the month between getting temporary crowns and getting the last nightguard, made to fit the permanent crowns, trying to sleep with a drugstore nightguard that was only bite surfaces.

"Give it a try," the dentist urged me.

So I did. The first night wasn't great but my Fitbit says I'm spending 30% less time awake overnight.

At the end of the week our ongoing, sporadic email chain with the dog's rescuer/walker, fosters, and littermates' owners resurrected over the subject of their birthday. We found ourselves standing with three of the brothers' owners in the back corner of the Shelby Dog Park - not the worst dog park in Nashville, but not the best - unsuccessfully avoiding dog poop left behind by lazy people and hoping none of the people who brought in toddlers (children under 10 are not supposed to be at Metro dog parks) wandered our way. The dogs all look very different now, with very different personalities. The two absent pups were the only girl and the largest dog in the litter; we all wondered how different they might be.

Stephen and the dog napped the whole afternoon while I was at a workshop led by Megan Stielstra. I usually really hate that level of class participation, but she's very skilled at making everyone feel comfortable. I had no expectations going in; while most of my reading in the last year and a half has been reactive and deadline driven (have to read that lit mag before going to have wine and talking about it, have to read that book before that Q & A) this time I just … didn't read the book yet.

I am doing better overall, though, about reading. Mostly because I've made an effort over the last month or so to open the Kindle app if I can't sleep, rather than the nightmare box that is Twitter. I keep thinking about using the Goodreads API to share some things I've read without unlocking my account too much. There's apparently no endpoint for the yearly reading challenge, which is disappointing.

Not shabby.

Three and a half years is definitely my personal record for longest stretch of time without writing in a public space. I wrote stories in my introductory computer class in the first grade, pounding away on the keys of the Apple IIe. I was on my middle school, high school, and college newspaper staffs. I started a literary journal on Geocities as a way to teach myself HTML … 22 years ago. I co-ran a writing-centric domain in the late 90s. I wrote marketing copy for eight years.

Now most of my writing is in commit messages, in Slack messages to colleagues, in captions on Instagram, in the occasional non-retweet in a private account.

The last few years have been full of stories. I wouldn't know where to start. I quit a marketing job to retool as a software engineer. I spent a year writing software in an obscure functional programming language I only heard about the first day on that job. We bought a house and have: replaced the gutters, fascia, a 25-year-old HVAC system, and water heater; moved the electrical panel out of a bathroom; installed a French drain, temperature-controlled crawlspace vents, bathroom fans, and floodlights; tore down a metal shed within a wooden shed; removed a dumpster's worth of bad concrete (with at least two more to go); and cut down three sick trees. I coached couch-to-5K groups in the summers. I found Iyengar yoga. We adopted a 7-week-old puppy around the time I accepted my current job, last March. For my birthday I bought the piano I'd wanted for a quarter century and spent the weekend before it was delivered painting the living room the greige you see above instead of the builder's beige - the color of liquid foundation a teenager grabs off the shelf at Walmart - the whole house had been slathered in before we bought it. The puppy developed autoimmune anemia and we spent the last three months of the year doling out spoonfuls of Fage 2% with prednisone and omeprazole hidden inside. He has recovered beautifully, except the vet specialist's office did a terrible shave job on his belly while ruling out heart problems and cancer and the fur is taking forever to grow back. Because his gums are 98% black, every day and a half or so I have to pull one of his eyelids down to see if his conjunctiva is pink enough. Because my husband is colorblind, I still fret.

I thought about writing. I dreaded maintaining the previous Ghost instance.

The more I learned about software the more intimidated I was about spinning up a new site. This one uses Gatsby, deliberately because this backend developer needs to force herself to use React.

So, I guess we'll see how this goes.

Not "just" as in true and right, or "just" as an assurance ("Just two more steps …"), but "just" as used to describe the level of complexity of a problem and/or to offer a solution to said problem. It slips into conversations between people who are and who aren't, who can and who can't. I think of pundits declaring what the poor should just do. I think of the guy who couldn't do a task himself but would aggressively ask why I wouldn't just do something out of scope. It is the verbal stamping of feet and it is dismissive, all at once.

Just exercise more.

Just eat healthier.

Just change jobs.

Just move.

As if nobody had thought of those "solutions" on their own, and dismissed them because life is just not that simple.

It took me less time to install this blogging software — no "five-minute install," either — than it did for me to decide what I'd use it for. What do I write, these days? Code. (Lots and lots of code.) Handwritten notes about code. E-mails and texts to friends, full of snark and advice and too much truth to be exposed. Not blog posts.

And what will I write about? I rarely travel anymore. There are no fat little feet in my household to document. I drink my coffee black, so there are no latte hearts to capture. I prepare a limited repertoire of gluten-free, mostly dairy-free meals, so I would make a terrible food blogger.

Facebook is the worst.

I'm finding it really difficult to understand the folks who don't see the difference between A/B testing or optimization and Facebook running a full-blown psychology experiment. No reasonable person should expect the site to be a neutral content-delivery service; I think most of us expect certain content to be weighted higher to encourage interaction / clicks / revenue for and from advertisers. To sell us something. (After all, if you're not paying, you're the product.) What I don't think any of us expected an attempt to make us feel bad, just to see if they could.

I am kind of surprised they did that by merely filtering statuses by tone instead of, say, showing a bunch of wedding- and engagement-related updates to folks who have listed themselves as single for an extended period of time.

No, seriously, it is.

It's pretty much a mix of Shares From Your Aunt, people who #hashtag #everything, and that clique from high school who all still hang out together.

I was at a mixer a few days ago after a long day and found someone I knew standing in a circle with others, all holding beer, not really talking to each other. I squeezed in next to and said, "I'm going to stand here and not say anything, but look like I'm halfway social." That's what Facebook feels like to me these days — I feel like I've had all the exhausting parts of being social, with none of the restorative, and I don't really say much.

Then I get used to not saying much.

Then I waste the better part of a day wondering why I even bothered to set up a blog.