Cerina

Honestly, I don't have any major issues with Biden. And I doubt too many people do (R's excepted). He's just kinda...blah. I think he was a good solid choice for 2020, but I'd prefer that the party move on. But I'll vote for him over 95% of republicans these days. That party has moved from "conservative" to "crazy" and I just can't with that.

Somebody text me about 10 minutes before I'm supposed to open the Zoom. I might forget because I'm fairly sure I'm perimenopausal and my brain sucks these days

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5168117350

It's not really that. His base does not care one iota what he does. That won't change. But all this culture war bullshit is starting to really grate on many other people in their party, those that care more about their corporate profits than banning books or drag shows or whatever new thing they come up with next. Culture war fatigue. It's real. Even most of the leftists I know have it. People will vote for less drama.

I really don’t believe he’s electable in a general election. Most republicans know this. They know they screwed up by going along with his bullshit all these years because they can’t lose his base, but they also know he won’t win in a general election. It’s why I don’t much care that Biden is on the ballot again. He’s electable. His only real liability with the general public is his age.

He was a baby the last time you and I hung out. A baby. I don't understand this passage of time bullshit.

Yup. They’re both going back. Noah still prefers homeschool, so I told him that if he does well next year, learns good study skills, and then gets his drivers license next summer, I’ll pull him back out to homeschool, but he has to do dual credit at the local community college so he’ll graduate with an associates. We’ll see how that goes. He’s a great kid, but he has little to no ambition. I already know we’re going to have to push and drag him to earn his Eagle.

School update!! Despite occasionally trying to say otherwise, Noah wound up rather liking his school. And he did so incredibly well academically. They just threw him into algebra without testing his math level. We’d just barely started algebra in homeschool. I think he was maybe 4 weeks in, but he picked up right where they were without missing a beat. Even I’m impressed with that! He finished the school year with all As except science, which was a B, and all As on all his final exams. Can I just say how validating that is for me as his main homeschool teacher? This is a rigorous classical school where all the core classes are actually honors classes, and he crushed it. I didn’t even know how much anxiety I had about his academic “readiness” until it all started to dissipate. Noah also has zero social anxiety. I didn’t know that was possible for a 14 year-old. On his very first day of school, he mixed up his class schedule and wound up dressing out for PE only to discover when he walked outside that it was lunch time instead. So there he was, obviously in his PE uniform an hour early in front of the entire class. But he was just like “oh oops”, went back inside for his lunch, and found a table of kids to sit with. The he just went on about his day. When he told me about that after school a part of me was completely mortified for him, but he didn’t think anything of it. I told him that if that had happened to me I would have rather moved to Siberia than go back the next day. He thinks I’m weird. So anyway, he made several friends in the 2 months he was there. Even went to a birthday pool party the weekend after school ended. Luke also did amazingly well this year. He started school in January and was behind in reading and writing, which I expected as we’d barely started formal lessons with him. Since he was in the early childhood program in Houston in ‘19-‘20, they immediately set him up with group speech therapy, a paraeducator for one-on-one reading/writing, and a pull out group for social skills. He, like his brother, totally crushed math. His teacher mentioned to us several times how advanced he thinks mathematically and how quick he picked up new concepts. And by the end of the year, we were told that they recommended that he start 2nd grade without the one-on-one reading support as he has now “caught up” to his peers. Reading and writing skills are so varied at this age that I think he’s still kinda on the lower end of “on level”, so we’re trying to do more reading with him this summer. He’s actually really into a lot of Dr. Suess books and we’ve found him reading them spontaneously on his own several times now. We’ve also noticed an improvement in his expressive language and story telling. One of his biggest challenges is telling or retelling stories and answering why and how questions. He’s started to voluntarily retell events from his day or from his shows, and he even stops to correct himself when he gets something out of sequence. My favorite thing though is how all of his teachers and paras and therapists keep going out of their way to tell us how kind he is to them and to his fellow students. I try to cling to that now that it’s summer and he has a meltdown every time we ask him to do anything that’s not watching YouTube videos of people playing Minecraft.

We’re no longer speaking to my MiL or her brother. I’ll have to post the whole story in the morning or when I have the bandwidth to do so. That woman just went completely batshit on us. a few random comments: My birthday is now a federal holiday, so hopefully I never have to work on it again. I should probably also tell my boss this since it’s in like 9 days. Apparently, we’re not at the top of the list to get my sister’s daughter if they die. We’re on the list, but our income bracket knocked us down a bit. Their best friend is their #1 choice at this point, but he’s single and my BIL doesn’t want to burden him with a kid if it might keep him from having a family of his own which is his goal in life. We were all a little drunk last month having this conversation as a group hours after my grandpa’s funeral. We actually “discovered” (everyone totally already knew) that their best friend is now dating my BIL’s little sister during this whole conversation. So I guess he secured that spot. We also found out that my BIL’s sister considers Trevor and I third on her list to get her 11 month old baby girl. I was pleasantly surprised. My sister and BIL are 1st, then her newly announced boyfriend (who she’s known for 20 years so it’s not really as irrational as it sounds), then us. She and BIL have a married older sister who has twin girls, but apparently they’re not in the running. And we all promised each other that no matter what, none of our parents would ever get custody of any of our kids. That said, I would take any of y’all’s kiddos in a heartbeat. I’m all about keeping kids away from crazy family members.

Background info: My husband Trevor and I started dating in May 2000. We moved in with each other that summer and stayed together until October 2001. He moved out, we broke up. He eventually joined the Navy and married some random girl moments after she turned 18. I started a friends with benefits sorta thing with one of his closest friends, Jason. Jason and I kept this up for years. Real feelings developed but we never upgraded our status beyond friends with benefits. Trevor eventually left the Navy and came home, wife in tow. They divorced. I balanced a friends with benefits thing with both Trevor and Jason for about a year, but it was tumultuous to say the least. Eventually, Jason was slowly replaced by Trevor, and in 2007 I got pregnant with Noah. Trevor and I married in 2011, and things have been pretty solid with us ever since. Trevor and Jason had a falling out not too long after, and we've only seen him a small handful of times since. Also of note, about 8ish years ago another mutual friend of all of ours told Trevor and I that Jason had told her that he regrets not taking things further with me back then and that he feels I'm "the one that got away". I had always assumed that my feelings were stronger than his, and if I had known this at the time, there's a very real chance that I never would have started things back up with Trevor. Ongoing issue: About once every 2-3 months, I have a dream about Jason that brings back all the old feelings. They're insane. The dreams are never sexual but always very intimate, usually about reuniting or finally breaking down and admitting feelings or something along those lines. Now during the normal course of my life, I don't spend any time thinking about Jason at all. And under normal circumstances, I can admit that I miss him and our friendship (we had a very close bond beyond all the sleeping together), but I don't carry any lingering feels other than that. Trevor and I even talk about him every so often as he was a huge part of both of our lives for many years and so many of our good-ol'-days memories include him in some way. However, when these dreams happen they seriously throw me off. You guys ever have dreams that feel so real that you keep the feelings with you for hours or even days after you wake up? This happens every time. For a day or so after these dreams, I basically float about in a daze of longing and heartache. Like I said, I don't really think about him normally, but for a good 24-48 hours these feelings are very real. And then I start thinking about reconnecting - I still have Jason's number (it hasn't changed in so long that I actually have it memorized from the early '00s) and know where he works (head of security at the outlet mall). So I start envisioning myself finding him and sparking up a friendship again. (I do actually miss his friendship. He helped me deal with my and Trevor's breakup in so many ways. I would have spiraled into a much deeper depression without him.) So I don't know what to do with all of this. I had one of these dreams last night, so today I'm sitting here in my office trying to concentrate on work but instead keep thinking about what might have been, how much it feels like I have a hole in my life from the loss of his constant friendship, and fighting the urge to text him. Like I said...the feelings are very real right now despite everything I know about my normal feelings. Somebody tell me that I'm not crazy.

Yay interview! So I think we're going to move back to Austin in a year or so. There's a lot of details to figure out first. My husband's grandparents died last year and left a house to my MIL and her brother. Neither of them want it. So we're considering it. The thing is, it was built in 1978 and while decently maintained until roughly 5-7 years ago, everything in it is original to the house (except appliances, roof and HVAC) and also occupied by hoarders. All of the flooring, wallpaper, fixtures, and hardware are straight from '78 and covered with a good half inch of dust. So good news/bad news. It'll be highly unlikely to sell in that neighborhood unless to an investor, so it'll need quite a bit of work to make it livable. Also good news, once updated it'll be worth probably a good $100-150k more than it is now. It's 2050 sq ft on a quarter-acre corner lot. More bad news, Trevor's uncle will likely want all of his half through a sale rather than working with us. We're unlikely to qualify for a decent mortgage since none of our jobs are really transferable to Austin. So now we're thinking of ways to make this work. We have a few things in mind, but are open to any and all ideas.