From the Rising

Five Random Things for Thursday, August 6

  1. I need to remember that these Five Random Things posts are for me to look back on and remember bits of my day that stood out to me.
  2. I completely, completely ran out of coffee and had to do a Target delivery this morning. Truly tragic. I’m sure my Trade Coffee Co order will arrive tomorrow as a gotcha. Anyway, today was Transfiguration, so I ordered the coffee before liturgy. It hadn’t arrived after it was out, so I went up to work and monitored my messages…and monitored…and nothing…finally at noon I went downstairs to do something, I’m not even sure what — and there on the table was my grocery order. My long-suffering husband had brought it in for me before he went to the park with the kids. What a dear. The coffee was immediately brewed and consumed.
  3. It being Transfiguration in the midst of the Dormition fast, today was a fish/wine/oil day, so we had our usual Fish Feast of tuna sandwiches, spicy Doritos, and beer. It’s a lovely tradition, and the kids always look forward to tuna sandwich day. Isn’t that funny? I think in any other context they would refuse tuna sandwiches.
  4. Jarrod being done with seminary is absolutely clutch, as the youngsters say. (Do youngsters actually say that? I’m not sure.) This evening I needed to return some items to UPS and pick up  a few last-minute items for our fish feast, so I just…left the house and ran the errands by myself. I mean sure, I turned on Number Blocks for the kids so Jarrod could finish up some work, but like, it is so freeing just to have him not worrying about school assignments or services all day every day. Phew!
  5. The kids have been playing soccer with Jarrod in the evenings. Today they were all pumped to go out, and then discovered that it was raining! Jarrod initially said no, no soccer. But then he decided, hey, maybe it would be fun. So they all got drenched and had a great time. While I watched them from underneath the awning and read more of Charlotte, Sometimes. Speaking of which, I think I will go and do that right now…

Five Random Things for Wednesday, August 5

  1. I purchased a pre-order copy of Ben Meer’s book How to be Good At Life a week or so ago, purely based on a Facebook ad outlining his “Year of Systems” course that the first x number of pre-orders would have access to for free. I needed this Year of Systems. So I hit purchase. We’ll see if the book is any good (I don’t know! It’s not out yet!) but so far the Year of Systems has been enlightening, in the sense that I realized that all my problems in life are a result of me not having adequate systems set up for success. Forgot Ambrose’s allergy meds at home on a weeklong vacation? System fix: put together a kids’ dopp kit with everything in it for travel, so I can grab and go next time, and not even think about what’s in there.
  2. Anyway, all this to say: I am now experiencing a need for dopamine, and I can tell, because I logged onto my work computer and immediately wanted to do All of the Non-Work Things (like the Mail-Messenger-Facebook-LinkedIn-Reddit cycle I do zillions of times each day). But guess what? Ben Meer had me set up a Focus Blocker system this week. So I got Freedom going on my computers and phone, and now don’t have access to any of my usual suspects until noon-1pm and again until 4pm. Go me. I guess that’s why I’m here writing this at 9:47 am. Heyyyyy.
  3. I need coffee, man. Literally — I ran out of coffee this morning and had to fill out the rest of my first cup with decaf. I would love a second cup, but all I have is the rest of the decaf beans. I did order some from Trade, but I’m not sure when it’s supposed to arrive. I can’t even check, is the truly hilarious thing, because it wants to 2FA me into my account using my email. Which. I don’t have access to for another 2 hours and 9 minutes.
  4. I started a book called Charlotte, Sometimes yesterday. Based only on like, a Reddit thread I found once of people celebrating the book. Premise is similar to the Japanese film Your Name — main character wakes up in a different body/different time sometimes — but I’m not super far into it, so I don’t know what the driving plot will be outside this initial premise.
  5. Claude and I have been getting along lately, which is…kinda weird? But it’s been helping me work on some really terrible, un-replicable work cases by going through the code flow and finding flaws. I’ll take it. I guess.

Five Random Things for Tuesday, August 4

  1. My favorite quote from Insomnia (which, upon Googling, does appear to come from an Actual Poet, Stephen Dobyns, not just a poet made up for the book: “Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else. In such a way do the days pass— a blend of stock car racing and the never ending building of a gothic cathedral.” No further comment or explanation needed, I think.
  2. Today has been the kind of day where I didn’t make it out of my pajamas. But hey, at least I managed to shower this morning!
  3. We are putting two shaker peg railings up in our kitchen mudroom area. My husband, the dear, is doing the task himself, start to finish, rather than buying a pre-made railing. He put the first part up tonight — looks great!
  4. I’ve coined a new term, “the squabs”. As in, “The girls have the squabs this morning.” I’ve noticed patterns of behavior/interaction. Some days the kids play together really well, and some days they just fight all day long abut the stupidest stuff. Hence the new term. The squabs.
  5. We had cleaners come and do our house for the first time today. We didn’t have cleaners come during our time at seminary because that would have felt a bit icky and showy to me. So this is the first time in three and a half years that I’ve had my house cleaned professionally and HOO BOY is it nice. But also, the speed at which my children can scatter a field of crumbs over a freshly-mopped floor. Insanity.

Five Random Things for Monday, August 3

  1. IT IS MONDAY! I like Mondays. And today is a good one. I’ve been able to get some really important/tricky adulting things done: citizenship application photos for the kids, and EdChoice applications on the way as well.
  2. I’m also jumping back into CGX again, finally and for real this time. It feels great to have a group of ladies to pressure me into not giving up for good 😉 Not that I’d be tempted to, really, but it’s easy to say, “Oh, not today,” or “Oh, we’re not settled in enough for me to pick it up quite yet.” But knowing my gals Stephanie and Julia are doing the workouts each day and reporting in makes me feel positively pressured to check in myself.
  3. So yes, I’m really finally starting to feel settled. We’re not 100% of the way there, but getting there, thank God. The cage is up in the gym. Jarrod is building out our kitchen bench as I type, and will install shaker pegs later today. The Next Big Thing that needs to be done is hanging all our artwork. After that…that’s pretty much it! (Well. Aside from the basement. But that is a) out of sight until we’re ready to address it and b) its own thang.)
  4. I got way too sugared out in Indiana. Or really, through the entire month of July. As of yesterday, I decided — that’s it. No more sugar for me. Aaaand then the first thing I was able to eat was donuts at coffee hour. Which, I resisted, go me! Aaaaaaaaand then Ambrose told me he didn’t want the outside of his chocolate-dipped ice cream bar later that afternoon. That’s my favorite part of the ice cream bar, so I did, ahem, take care of it for him. But I’m not going to let one little blip derail my overall resolution to give up sugar during August. Which feels like really good mental progress, I’m generally all-or-nothing. I’ll be making a key lime pie for Transfiguration on Thursday, and you know I’ll have a slice of that. But beyond that? No. Not right now.
  5. I’ve switched my budgeting from YNAB to Actual. Actual is free, but not quite as snazzy as YNAB, so I still haven’t quite made up my mind about it yet. It’s kind of fun that I have to run it via Docker container/localhost though.

Five Random Things: Wednesday, July 22

  1. We are still here settling in and feeling like our legs are constantly getting knocked out from underneath us. This has been the hardest move-in transition I can remember. Jarrod finally tried to address our master bathroom and decided we need to install the mirrored cabinet I bought before he can fully do that. Guess what? I dorked up the measurements. Built the entire dang cabinet, only to realize it’s too big. Now what are we supposed to do with a built cabinet? (Answer: I made a visit to Home Depot and they took it back, its built state. A small win that helped start the day off on the right foot!)
  2. Yesterday was a difficult day at work, too. One of our customers reported a pretty big issue causing the application to blow up/be basically unusable if a certain common part of it was accessed. Not great. Turns out it was an unhandled error in a bit of code I wrote, caused by some bad data. Easy enough to fix, and I put a code change in place to prevent it from happening to other customers in the future. But then I did a deployment after hours that was another whole disaster AND caused the error in an entirely different way. Goooood times. Also the kids didn’t want to go to bed. As per usual.
  3. Did I mention I’ve finally been getting back into working out? Our lifting cage isn’t set up yet, but I had a dumb little epiphany this weekend that my CG workouts don’t use the lifting cage, so there was no reason I couldn’t just clear a little spot in the garage and get back to it. So I did. The internet has been a bit wacky with playing the videos, but it feels good to finally be challenging my muscles again. Hoo boy is my upper body thanking me today. “Thanking” me.
  4. That said, I shirked the last 2/3 of my workout today (did the first third during lunch, but then the internet, predictably, started acting wonky) to get some good garage work done. I figured, hey. I have momentum for the first time in ages, so I’ll let it carry me through a bunch of little stuff that needs done.
  5. We received word today that the girls were accepted into the fancy private school we worked to get them into. Yay, I guess. No financial aid left, so we can’t send them there this year. In any case, they’re all enrolled in a Montessori school to the south of us, and prior to checking out these (UTTERLY GORGEOUS, IDYLLIC) private schools, Montessori would have been my first choice far and away. It’s literally the first thing I looked into when we found out we were coming here. So why am I so meh about it? I don’t know. I guess I’m just mourning the loss of the really really cool schools we “could” have put them in if we had unlimited funds. That’s just not our life.

Five Random Things for Tuesday, July 21

  1. It is gloomy and thunderstormy today. My favorite type of summer weather. (In moderation, of course!)
  2. Yesterday the kids wanted to go out and play with the hose. I told them not until it hit 80 degrees — this was always my parents’ rule when I was growing up, and as a parent now, it makes a whole lot of sense. Even 80 degrees isn’t super duper warm, but at least the kids would be less likely to get chilly at that temperature. I have this great core memory of calling the Key Bank Time & Temp number (574-534-4111, still functioning but with ads now, welcome to 2026) over and over again one day as a kid, because I really wanted our babysitter to take us to the pool. Finally it changed from 79 to 80…it was a glorious moment.
  3. I had to turn down a job offer last week, and I’m super bummed about it, but it just wasn’t going to work with our family, not this summer and probably not for the school year either. It involved going into the downtown Cleveland office 4 days a week. But there were pros to the job — I really liked the guy I interviewed with, and he would have been my manager. The company gets all the Jewish holidays off, and the PTO is fairly generous…after 5 and 10 years…bleh. Something else will open up. Or it won’t, and I’ll be happy where I am. Until they find out that I actually don’t do anything useful and can me, that is. 🙃
  4. I made Butter Swim Biscuits this morning, for the second time. They’re ridiculously easy to throw together, and super tasty. The worst part about making them is having to score the dough after you’ve poured it into the butter.
  5. I started reading The Psychology of Money yesterday. It’s aight. Although I suppose I couldn’t tell you a thing I listened to during my workout yesterday. Money is weird! There’s the summary.

Brainstorming July

I’m a bit behind on my July planning, but hey, a bit behind is better than never, right?

Being as I’m in Kansas City, I don’t have my handy-dandy Best Laid Plans book in front of me to remember what all I need to consider when planning out July, but I can at least scan through my Summer ’26 page and pick the goals that are right for the month + schedule in some of the stuff that needs scheduled.

July Goals: 

  • Set up composting. The house is not in a state where we can even begin thinking about adding a garden into the chaos right now, but I can at least get a bucket of compost going. I think. I’m putting the task of researching a compost situation into my reminders for the 3rd week in July.
  • Find a group. This is actually in the works — I’m going to a trivia night with some other ladies from the Cleveland reddit sub on the 7th. Hopefully I don’t get murdered. I also just signed up for adult ballet, but it might be an ongoing class registration twice a week for an hour and a half? I have no idea what I’ve just done. I just wanted to try out one class! Oops.
  • Go on dates. Also sort of in the works — I’ve got a lunch date with Jarrod planned at Lock Keepers on the 6th. Just gotta put the other three dates on the calendar. Aaaand done.
  • Pool 2-3x/week. This one has sort of been derailed by the fact that there’s not a pool in Maple Heights, and outside neighborhoods won’t allow us to sign up for pool passes. Which sucks. But I’m going to enroll the kids in Goldfish — task is already scheduled, actually — so between weekly lessons and hopefully attending family swims at Goldfish, this one will be fulfilled to the max extent possible.
  • Blueberry picking & Lake Michigan. We should be able to check these off when I visit Indiana at the end of July.
  • Farmer’s Market. Cuyahoga Valley Farmer’s Market. Scheduled for Saturday after I get back. Boom.
  • Finish applying to schools. This is almost done, just a few more tasks to button up.
  • Get down to 150.0. This might be unreasonable, I don’t know.
  • Keep going on Beastmode. I had to pause it for quite a while because the seminary shut down the gym, and then we moved!
  • Get to at least 10k steps per day. I’m going to phase out my Apple Watch and Oura ring in September, so this is sort of a moot goal, but still. I’m used to it.
  • Walk/run/blade 2-4 miles per day. Or as much as possible.
  • Read with the kids each day. To achieve our Book It! pizzas for July.
  • Walk 1 mile with the kids each day at lunch. I’ve paused these personal goals because of all our upheaval, but hopefully I’ll be in a mental space to start them again mid-July, once Jarrod’s parents leave.
  • Do XBX with the kids each day. Ooh, that reminds me, I haven’t done my XBX today!

I’m sure there are more I’ve forgotten about, but this is a good, very full start to our month.

Oh Mah Jongg!

Tonight I “audited” a Mah Jongg class, taught by a friend of my in-laws who plays trivia with them every Sunday. (She is a busy lady!) I’ve always wanted to learn Mah Jongg. It was such fun! The highlight of the night was when I unironically announced, “I need to expose myself” in the middle of a round…whoops. Apparently that is *not* how you call for a tile.

Sometimes I think I need to reflect more on what I did get done during the day than what I didn’t get done. Have I written about this yet? I can’t remember. No, I didn’t do my Dickens reading (and it’s late — I need to go to bed!) but I did read a bit of the Satter book, did a 2-mile walk in the morning, listened to a bunch of Emma M. Lion (sighhhh), got my favorite-ever lunch salad at The Mixx and favorite-ever barbecue for dinner from Jack Stack, went swimming with the kids, did a bunch of work stuff…and went out in the evening and had fun socializing. It’s been a pretty good trip to KC.

Life Right Now

Just a general check-in here today, to say hello! and I am alive! Not that anyone other than Future Me is really reading these entries, but you know. I feel obligated.

A few random tidbits about life right now:

  • We made the move to Cleveland! Settling in is turning out to be a bit of a long process, and things are pretty depressing right now because of the lack of furniture, storage solutions, etc. But when we do finally make it our own, it’s going to be great. I’m confident it will. In the meantime we’ve been coping with copious trips to the creek.
  • I have also been lost in Emma M. Lion land. I just finished the 5th book this evening and started in on the 6th. What will I do when I reach the end of the 8th? Start over from the beginning, I suppose. Or just…weep at the beauty and loss of it all. I can’t decide which #team I’m on. Hawkes is lovely and ethereal, but I do worry he’d be too preoccupied with his books to really take care of Emma. Islington is wonderful and oh so proper but I’m not sure Emma needs all that in her life. Then there’s Pierce, who is a bit wild but definitely has the most chemistry (and I read a spoiler about a kiss soooo). I don’t know. Personally, I’m kind of still in love with Hawkes.
  • We all went to Toy Story 5 this past Friday. It was a very sweet movie, as Toy Stories tend to be. Toward the end Theda leaned over and said, “This is why you don’t want us to have a tablet, huh?” Yes, my darling child. But I appreciated how we weren’t whacked over the head with the message of NO SCREENS EVIL EVIL EVIL! I mean, at first that was kind of the movie and I was worried it was a bit…unsubtle. But Lilypad redeems herself in the end.
  • Here’s a funny story: I’ve been struggling a bit with the washer at our house. (Which is going to be replaced, but in the meantime, clothes do need washed.) I thought it was malfunctioning but I realized that it was actually just SUPER DUPER slow. Like, set it and walk away for 4 hours, then at the end of that you’ll have clean clothes. TURNS OUT there was a malfunction: the water to it was turned off, but it was still filling (very, very, veeeery slowly) because the faucet couldn’t be closed all the way. Hah. Oops. For being very old, it is a good washer. I almost don’t want to get rid of it.
  • I ran 2 miles this morning! Back to it!
  • I’m still reading (and enjoying) Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family and waffle between wanting to do the Right Thing and embrace the competent eating and my right-size body as Sattyr outlines in the book…versus wanting to microdose a GLP kinda ASAP and get back to my what-was-once-right-size body of (gulp) 10 years ago. If I can go reeeeally really slow maybe I can trick my body into thinking 130-140 is right-size again. We’ll see.

Anyway, it’s late and I need to get these kids to bed, so. Be back tomorrow with something. I don’t know what! But something.

Moving Secret: The Random Stuff Bag

Today, right as Jarrod was getting ready to run out the door and drive the kids to school, he got a call from the U-Haul store. We were scheduled to pick up our truck on Tuesday evening, but the store closes at 1 pm this week, so could we possibly pick up the truck today? Answer: absolutely yes. An extra day to fill our truck? For free? 100%. I took the kids to school while Jarrod went into a minor spiral about how we would rearrange the next couple days.

The answer ended up being this: he would call the guys we had scheduled to help us load and see if they could come tomorrow, instead of Wednesday. Then we would finish packing today and do a leisurely load tomorrow. Well, minor issue: the guys couldn’t come tomorrow. They could come today. At noon.

So we spiraled a bit more, then ran out the door to drive to STAMFORD, CONNECTICUT, where we had scheduled our U-Haul pickup — it being the only location with a big enough truck available to us. Jarrod got the details of the truck worked out and gassed it up while I drove back with Liesl to meet the movers. The house? Total disaster. Not ready to load at all.

And yet, somehow, it happened. They got everything out that was ready to go — which was actually darn near all of it (thanks to my efforts of incremental packing, go me). Jarrod’s bedroom is still a disaster zone, but that’s his own thing to deal with. The rest of the house looked hideous after the guys left at 4:30, but I shuffled stuff around and organized it into zones, and things make sense to me now. Just as long as I don’t go into the bedroom. Which…is where I have to sleep tonight. Ugh.

Anyway, this leads me to the meat of this post: THE RANDOM STUFF BAG! I need to think of a better name for it. It’s this amazing hack that I sort of stumbled into when we moved from Alabama to Las Vegas and completely forgot about until today, when I re-discovered its amazingness.

Here’s the deal: kids are messy AF. They leave behind a tiny snail-trail of chaos everywhere they go. Doll earrings, K’Nex, LEGO, puzzle pieces, art supplies, whatever. You name it. So when we move our furniture out of the way, it’s all there: the coins, the PlusPlus pieces, the random keys that go to random diaries. Where to put it? You don’t want to just stash it at the bottom of random boxes. You want to make sure the pieces are eventually reunited to their respective LEGO sets, puzzles, and crayon boxes.

So here’s what you do: You get a Ziploc bag and just start throwing stuff in there. Anything small that has a home that’s probably packed away goes in there. You hand-carry that Ziploc bag to your new place like the precious cargo it is, then when you get there and unpack boxes, you put everything back in its place. Can I tell you how immensely satisfying that is? Because it is. It really, really is. Back in Alabama we had a little counting board that was made up of felt balls in 10 different colors, 10 balls each. Those suckers got everywhere. It was great to put the set back together when we rolled into Vegas.

It’s a bit of a silly hack, and I’m sure everyone who has ever moved with small children has figured it out one way or another, but I want to commemorate just how cool it is. So there.

Today, as you may have ascertained, was crazy. But I still got a little bit done out of my regular lineup of things.

Listened To: All of the K-Pop Demon Hunters album
Read: Most of the rest of Vol. 2 of The Unselected Diaries of Emma M. Lion. Onto 3 tomorrow, eeeep! Also read more of Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family, and I’m planning on reading a couple more chapters (they’re short) of The Eyes of the Dragon tonight.
Ate: A McDonald’s hash brown two exits before we got to the U-Haul place, yum. I also made a Trader Joe’s frozen lasagna that nobody but myself touched. Also yum. These people don’t know what they’re missing out on.
Wrote: Aside from this, nothing — it’s late, and I won’t get a chance to do any scene work.