mojosmom

In no particular order.

A few weeks ago, Wife Becca had an abnormal mammogram. A biopsy found something, and an MRI found a little bit more, and this past Monday she had a double mastectomy. It went well and she's been declared cancer-free. She's got a great support network, and is staying with a nurse friend of hers for a few weeks to recover. Sophia has been understandably stressed. It doesn't help that their car died a couple weeks ago so they had the added expense of buying another one, but I think they'll be okay - in a lot of ways, actually. Their marriage has often been troubled but over the last year or so they've really worked a lot of things out. I think they've fallen back in love, which is good to see.

My guts continue to be grumpy. The Fiber One diet did not improve things so I went back to normal food and talked to my regular doc, who decided to halve my Ozempic dose while monitoring my sugars to see if that fixes the tummy issues without screwing up the diabetes issues. It's a weekly shot, so it takes a long time for the new dosage to really kick in. So far my sugars are fine but my gut isn't much improved, but it's early days yet.

Saturday morning my left ear stopped up. I tried drops and irrigation but I'm seeing the doctor this afternoon. This happens from time to time - my ears have always been a bit troublesome. To add insult to injury (sort of), at some point in the middle of the next night I pulled something in my neck. The pain was unbelievable. I couldn't move at all. The ibuprofen has dulled it quite a bit but I'm still not 100% even today. Thanks, middle age!

I continue to be two people. I know I need to be patient because this is the first time anyone has ever changed their name after getting married, but sometimes it's just comical. My favorite in recent memory is the pharmacist: when I get a text saying that I have a prescription ready for pickup, it doesn't say which medication or even how many prescriptions are ready. So since some existing refills have not updated yet, I often ask her to check under both Rau and Weber. The most recent time she confirmed the names and then asked, "Same birthdate??" "They're both me!" I replied.

Stepmotherhood continues to be a strange adventure. Last night, the second I'd gone upstairs into the bathroom, Wyatt started yelling for me. It turned out he wanted to settle an argument with his brother regarding whether Milo had ever eaten plastic. I explained that no, because there had never been any plastic in her tank, but if there was she totally would. (Wyatt was in the process of cutting up a six-pack soda ring, which I assume is where the discussion arose, as sea turtles are known for running afoul of those.) Elliott is a sweet kid most of the time, but often he seems to be working hard at perfecting his surliness. I don't know how much is just being a teenager and how much is something external, but we never know what's going to set him off. Luckily, Jason is a paragon of patience and understanding.

Recently Jason was playing an unevenly translated video game where the snakes said neigh instead of hiss and the lizards said shh. We got a chuckle out of that.

On February 25th, Jason and I went out to dinner to celebrate our one-year Rausiversary. It's the date we became legally married, but we agreed from the beginning that it would never be our officially celebrated anniversary, but rather an annual excuse to go out to dinner. We went to Clyde's, where our meals and a generous tip exactly used up the gift card my coworkers had given me for our wedding. Then we went to Cold Stone for dessert, where Jason gets a small veterans' discount. I told him that the three reasons I married him were 1. the cats, 2. the veterans' discounts, and 3. his luck at finding really good parking spots. It's a romance for the ages.

Singing Valentine's was fun as ever. We delivered about 20 over the two days, about half and half phone and in-person. All were very well-received. I think my favorite reaction was Stove's wife Van. He'd told her to expect a package and she'd have to answer the door for it. She came out, looked at me, and said, "Wait a second, I know you!"

We need to do our taxes soon. We had been hoping to have someone do them for us since we're dealing with filing jointly for the first time plus the sale of Jason's house and all that stuff, but the guy BP recommended was going to charge $1200 and all he did was send me a 55-page document to fill out in less than two weeks. It was almost like doing my own taxes by hand. If I'm going to be paying $1200, I expect to be able to just throw my forms at somebody and let them sort it out, not fill out my own interest tables. What we'll probably do is shell out for the highest tier of TurboTax which has a live person helping you. And it's still about eight times cheaper than the CPA.

We had been meaning to get a whiteboard calendar for the kitchen for some time, not only to keep track of upcoming events but also to write down what we have for dinner each night so we know how old any leftovers are. I bought one online and it ended up being a whole lot larger than I'd expected. Luckily, it fits perfectly on the wall where we had a baker's rack, so we swapped the rack with the trash and recycle cans, which were next to the peninsula. I discovered something strange about my brain in the process: when Jason moved the cans to the opposite wall, he kept them on the same side - that is, trash on the left, recycling on the right. And for some reason that has confused the heck out of me, and I think it might be because of thinking in terms of left and right, I was thinking in terms of which one was closer to the door. Brains are weird. Thank goodness for label makers.

This coming weekend is Awesome Con. I hadn't wanted to go but Robbie made a huge deal about it being his birthday weekend and Sophia made a huge deal about all the exciting celebrities that will be there (Firefly and Critical Role, most notably) and between the two of them they wore us down until we bought a Saturday pass. There are a couple things on the schedule that look moderately interesting but I suspect we'll spend most of the day wandering the dealer room and artists alley. And I know that no matter what we do, we'll have a lot of fun, because we always have a lot of fun.

Welp, I need to head to the doctor shortly. Here's hoping the poor soul who has to look into my ear can get it unclogged without too much fuss. It's hard to sing when you can't hear.