No It All

On Friday I take the boys for shots.  The sharp kind, not the fun kind.

It’s been so long that no one remembers what to expect.  Apparently it’s been eons since those needles were put into the little dough-balls we called thighs.  At lunchtime James admonishes me for trying to prep the boys by mentioning it the day before.  Apparently it created a lot of visible Nate anxiety.

We arrive and there are some new COVID protocols, but honestly, I prefer waiting outside in the sun versus in the germy little kid waiting room.  Nate’s scheduled for one flu shot, and Jake’s scheduled for… wait for it… four.  Unfortunately there is a buffet of middle school shots I seem to have blocked out from my sixth grade memory bank.

Nate goes first.  The nurse tells him to count Orcas on the aquarium wallpaper border and “What?  You’re done?”  Nate hardly even notices.

Jake’s up.  He has to have two shots in each arm.  He powers through with nary a peep.  The nurse is sincerely impressed.  The warriors leave with their various multi-colored cartoon bandaids.

I work for the rest of the afternoon and when I come in at the end of the day, Jake has set himself up on the couch with a blanket and a movie.  He’s not feeling great.  I’m struck by his independent, self-soothing set-up.  We feed him his fave spaghetti for dinner.  Jake’s a T-Rex.  He can no longer extend his arms.  The soreness has really set in.  Before bed he confesses he’s lost half his dinner to the porcelain gods.  Poor kid doesn’t have a fever but the shots send him willingly to bed.

Saturday morning they both wake-up almost good as new, and vaccinated for almost all things except the one thing we all really care about… the Corona.  Nate shows me evidence embedded in the little crease of one of his fingers where it appears he has a permanent graphite tattoo and declares, “I’ve poked myself harder with a pencil!”

I don’t doubt it.

The monotony of the lockdown life…

I find myself waking-up again.  Making coffee again.  Time to set the table again.  Time for bed again.

Mostly I find myself standing in front of the pantry cupboard, staring at the same shelves.  The same snacks.  I say, “I’m ready for this pandemic to be over.”

And James says, “You always say that.”

And I say, “Well I’m always thinking it.”

Early in the pandemic I was a Bob Jones Trail die hard.  James was home and so I’d submit a request for leave and hit the trail as often as I could.  But these days I’m only free in the early evening and so the next best thing is what I call “The Loop.”  It’s basically about a 45 minute circle from our house up the mountain, down the mountain, and up the mountain.  It’s peaceful to then cool down on Treehouse Bench.

I was noticing a lot of trash of late and so last week I talked James into doing The Loop with me while I also used my handy dandy trash grabber for some local community service.  I got the blue doctor’s glove and the thing that looked like Quip toothbrush packaging and at least one beer bottle.  Down along the canyon I went to get a plastic bottle full of discolored water and James yells at me, “Don’t get that!  It’s a bottle full of pee.”  And naive me is like, “Naaaani?  Nah.”  (OK, I didn’t speak Japanese.  But I totally should have.)

And then he gives me the backstory on how bottles such as this come to be and are flung out of people’s pickup truck windows.  I added that pickup truck part which I’m sure is a veritable stereotype but based on the forensic evidence, this bottle is totally from a pickup.  I use my grabber to put it in the bag as I do NOT plan to walk past it now every day and have to look at it, and am glad for this life lesson given I might have emptied it in order to recycle the bottle.

A few nights ago I’m enjoying a golden, sparkling wine beverage and Jake is like, “How can you drink that?  You won’t even drink water out of yellow glasses!”  Then he gets a huge case of the giggles at his own wit.

He’s right.  At some point I proclaimed I will not drink anything from our yellow glasses.  And now….  yellow water bottles.

We’re deep into season three of Cobra Kai and are loving every karate minute.  Except yesterday when there was an exceptionally brutal scene of a cruel Cobra kid named Hawk breaking Dimitri’s arm.  Jacob was profoundly disturbed by the violence and stomped off close to tears.  I’m grateful he could appreciate how wrong it was, and that he rejoined us for two more episodes tonight.

We love to soak up all things Japanese, not just sushi and fancy denim.  It reminded me of a story from maybe two years ago.  Jake is in the kitchen and he keeps answering anything I say with “Nani?”  Said in a really yoda-esque, cartoony kind of voice.  And I’m like, “Stop with the naaaani!  What does that even mean?”  And he claims it’s Japanese for “Whaaaat?”  And I’m totally like, “Yeah right.”  And then he says, “Omae wa mou shindeiru.  Naaaaani?”  And of course I google this and it means, “You are already dead.  Whaaaat?”  And Jake is right.  Again.

A few weeks back, we were headed to our cars after one of our last evening soccer games before Thanksgiving when Cal Poly sent all the kids home and locked-up the fields.  Little Jackson jumps into the bed of his dad’s truck and like a cool-haired little werewolf, under the light of the moon, howls, “Naaaani?”  And I howl back with my most perfect anime accent, “Omae wa mou shindeiruuuuu!”

Which is not really the best thing to be yelling during a pandemic but…. the look on his face?  Priceless.

Last week James told me our neighbor Ralph told him that the two ugliest trees on our road are right in front of a Biden sign.  It was a well-timed dig and just about the funniest thing I’ve heard in a long time.  Seriously, we’ve had two of the ugliest trees right at the entrance of our dirt driveway leading to our orange house with brown trim.

The first was a strangely scraggly thing that vaguely resembled an apple tree but without fruit or blossoms or any redeeming qualities.  Possibly because it was being strangled by a non-native, invasive jade plant but probably just because of genetics.  A few yards beyond was a giant spiky tree that was palm-esque with needle sharp ends.  It was round and bushy and I always thought I could put one giant eye on it at Halloween and it would be Mike Wazowski.

I took down ol’ Scraggles several months ago, like, thanks for noticing Ralph.  But Mike looked like he’d be more of a battle.  Today it was on.  He only almost took out my eyes multiple times with his needle leaves.  I found a nest in the middle.  I want it to be a bird’s nest but that would not be my style…  My next door neighbor comes along as I’m snapping off every monster branch by hand and she tells me it’s a yucca.  And that it can look really pretty if you trim it up– they have several do I want to come see them?  Their garden is intentionally planted and beautiful and unfortunately, I tell her and her innocent daughter, Mike’s a goner.  He must be sacrificed for the beautiful baby oak in his shadow.  Then James comes along and chainsaws off the remaining branches.

Hey Ralph, now we’ve got the two ugliest stumps on the road.

So Jacob’s been pretty set on studying computer science or computer engineering when he goes to college.  I’m not sure the exact difference between these two, but I’m sure we’ll google it and get that checked off our list shortly.  In any case, when he learned you can build your own PC and that we know a handful of people who have successfully tackled it… he was hooked.  And so I’ve found myself discussing computer parts with the dudes that work at Best Buy.  Who are kind of the same but slightly different from the dudes that work at Game Stop.  Yo Best Buy– where are your diversity initiatives?

I’ve spent several weeks in charge of purchasing motherboards and RAM and graphics cards and powers supplies and I have to say, I may not be Best Buy’s target demo, but I am head and shoulders the most qualified person on this job.  I used to quote multimillion dollar computers for a living.  Seriously.  Ever since my friend Tony, a master sales engineer took me under his wing and explained all the parts of a computer to me in English, I could totally hang with the dudes at Best Buy.  Which for the record, I most certainly do not want to do.

I will literally never forget the time I went to Fry’s electronics, during the workday.  It was definitely the cowboy Fry’s, not the pyramid Fry’s.  I’m sure I was dressed in a suit jacket from Banana Republic and one of my pairs of kitten heels.  I needed to buy DRAM (pronounced D-Ram) for a customer’s system and one of dozens of guys brings it out to me in an anti-static bag.  Now I have more than one Fry’s story and none of them are good.  They’re generally of the Home Depot genre where you get the thing home and realize it’s obviously been sold and returned because it’s faulty.  And the store just slaps some tape on the box and shoves it straight back on the shelves.  I looked at that Fry’s salesman’s name tag, committed his name to memory aloud, and made him swear on his life that not only was it the exact part I’d asked him for, but also that it wasn’t defective.  Twenty-two-year old me looked him dead in the eye and was like, “I will hunt you down if this thing is wrong and I have to come back here.”  I’m sure he wasn’t that scared because none of those guys lasted longer than a week or two at that place.  But still… I saw him think twice.

So far despite all the curbside pick-ups and in store conversations, I haven’t had to threaten a single Best Buy worker.

The other day Jake and I are anticipating this exciting engineering project and he mentions one of his best buddies, Jackson.  “And Mom, can you believe he doesn’t even know what he wants to be?  I mean he’s had years to think about it.”

Yeah, Jackson’s also eleven.