Mariners Postseason, Family Illness, and a New Job

I promised myself last time that I was no longer going to apologize when I came back after a long blogging hiatus. This project is and continues to be by me and for me so I am free to come on when I feel the need. The summer was spent on a lot of long road trips which I think were pretty well documented in other spaces so I don't need to go into them a lot here.

October has come, and with it comes baseball postseason, this time featuring the Mariners. While they have been in the hunt since probably June, it still didn't feel real until the playoffs started on Friday.

I've been a Mariners fan for as long as I can remember and have been there for every playoff run they have ever had. (Prior to this year, all previous playoffs took place between 1995 and 2001 and featured Edgar Martinez.) Saturday's game was a CLASSIC. I swear, when Crawford hit his Double I wanted to hear Rick Rizzs call "Everybody scores!" like in his famous call from 1995. Today I heard on the radio that there is a fan petition to turn Dave Niehaus's statue around so he can face the field and watch the action. It made me smile. 

I watched the game with James, who had some understanding of what was going on, and Max who did not. They enjoyed jumping up and down and yelling after big plays. It was a fun day. The playoffs now have 4 rounds (when I was a kid, they had 2, back in the days of the Mariners first playoff runs they had 3) so they now advance to Houston tomorrow which is going to be a tough series. I'm sorry James is in school but I am not so I will get to watch.

In not so awesome news, Dad was in the hospital from Wednesday-Saturday. The US healthcare system is SO TERRIBLE. I won't put details here because it's a long story and there's some privileged information, but I have been totally dissatisfied with the way he was treated and communicated with before and during and since his discharge. I'm hoping he will be in better health now but dad is 82 and his health struggles don't really go away. It's so incredibly hard having him so far away (it's at least an hour, given the Seattle traffic usually more, one way) and trying to be there for him and also be here for my family. I think this is called the sandwich generation. The distance and having him alone in his house is unsustainable but right now there's no other plan, so the frustration is ongoing. It's hard. We were talking about making a plan in 2019 and I was glad we didn't because we wouldn't have wanted him in a communal living situation in 2020 but while the conversation has been on pause the aging process and his increasing needs have not so now we have to figure out how to fast forward the conversation three years. I see some major stressors for me over the next couple of months at least, maybe longer. Ugh. I do hate problems for which there's no real solution except to keep going.

The third big thing this week, though, is that my new job starts on Wednesday! I am really optimistic although I really don't know what to expect. I did kind of stumble into this. I have been on the job hunt for quite awhile now, have sent resumes and had interviews, have received no offers and it's been super disheartening. I think a big part of it is that right now I really don't want to work full time, I just want back the job I was doing, but no one seemed to have part time openings. Last week, after a particularly disheartening experience where I was rejected for a job my neighbor had recommended me for basically as soon as the woman saw my resume, I started just trying to think outside the box, wandering around the Internet, away from places I usually check. Well, we have a new bookstore downtown, just a few blocks up from Max's preschool and according to their website they were hiring. I couldn't imagine how a tiny new bookstore had enough capital to hire someone, but I sent a resume. A few days later, amidst the chaos that was last week with Dad in the hospital, I went by and introduced myself. It turns out they need help...almost exactly the hours that Max is in preschool. So I will start being trained on Wednesday! I have no idea what to expect except they mentioned needing someone with more knowledge of kids books, which made me excited, and they are new so I'm hoping there will be some room to try out some new ideas and have adventures. And even if there's not, it's just a few hours a week, which is what I wanted, and I get to work in a room full of brand new books. So I'm very excited about that, even though I really have no idea what I've gotten myself into. I think it will be nice to have some kind of workplace identity again, even just a few hours a week. I had that before the pandemic and I have really missed it.

Other news of the fall...I am back in choir, which makes me so happy. I started with that choir in 2014 when James was four months old and have been away since spring 2020 and I have missed it so much. During the early weeks of the pandemic I lost my choir, my job, and my volunteer work at the hospital and outside of being a mom those had been the three biggest things in my life, so it feels like I am slowly getting bits of my identity back. So it's a lot of good news smashed together with the stressful situation about Dad. Oh, and Max has had a head cold and so we've been home with him for two days, including missing school today. Not fun. It's extra no fun to have a kid who is sick enough to not go to school but not so sick that they want to rest. So that's my week here.

Media consumption: I haven't been doing a ton of reading. I have a new thing where I read a graphic novel on Friday, so I did that and it was Pumpkin Heads. Working on a biography of Beatrix Potter, it's interesting if reading slow. TV, other than baseball, has been binging 30 Rock (always have to have an old show on binge mode I guess) and Josh and I are trying to get caught up on the Great British Baking Show. The kids and I watched the first few episode of Cars on the Road over the weekend. 

Today I'm grateful for my mom's homemade hot cocoa mix, my husband being home, drives to nowhere, bookstores, bookstagram, dog snuggles, the Mariners, my kids, dad being home, my deep support system, and new adventures.