Miser Family update: power version

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Mom household.

Prewash continues to live up to the job associated with her name, but -- unlike her predecessor -- she is no Miser Dog.  After she developed a toe rash last weekend, we took her to the vet where we frivolously splurged on somewhere upwards of $300 of high-efficiency allergy meds (plus a few antibiotics).  She loves taking the pills, which we slather with peanut butter, and I guess they're helping.

One of many trees that came down on our campus.

On Tuesday, a minor version of the storms that are battering our southern neighbors came through our little town.  Even as weak as Harvey had become by then, it took down many trees.  We were 8 hours without electricity, and got to enjoy a dinner of tuna fish and tomatoes by candlelight.  I realized that for me, the hard part of losing electricity is not that the power is gone -- it's not knowing if the power will return in a half-hour or a half-a-week.    But for my husband and son, the hard part is living with a woman who responds to the power outage by saying, "this is cool!  We should try to turn off our electricity once a week just to make sure we can do it!  Let's go to sleep at sunset every day!"  Because they think I'm serious (and maybe I actually am).

N-son continues to love going to school at the culinary institute.   I think a huge part of what he loves is the cool outfit he's required to wear.  The jacket and apron come embroidered with his name, and the hat comes embroidered with his initials.  It makes me want to create a mandatory calculus uniform.

My husband and N-son started the week in New York City where they visited all sorts of museums: the Jewish Museum, the Met, and the Holocaust Museum.  And they finished out the week by participating in the Milton Harvest Festival Bike Race.  The picture off to the right doesn't look much like it was taken at a bike race, but it was.  (They didn't tell me how they placed, but they're wearing yellow jerseys/t-shirts, so I assume that must automatically mean they both won.  Yay!)

In the middle of the week, my husband got to go to his usual Tuesdays with Toomey protest, and also a DACA-themed protest.  As I said about losing electrical power, I know my students who came to the U.S. as young children and who know no other home are feeling the anxiety that goes not only with being powerless, but also the anxiety of not knowing what the future holds.  I feel for them.  

As for me, I started the week with a bit of a cold, which is fortunately waning now -- yay! A head cold is a bit like ideas for my math book, a bunch of stuff in my head trying hard to come out. (Yuck, can't believe I just wrote that).  I spent much of my week teaching calculus, doing my committee work, squeezing in time to work on my math book in wherever I could, and appreciating the bad weather as a wimpy excuse to avoid training for the upcoming Miser Mom Half Marathon.  Oh, and being interviewed for a video -- that's a bizarre experience, let me tell you!

What else?  I-daughter's eyes continue to be strong and healthy after her summer scare.  And K-daughter signed a lease for an apartment, so she'll move there in early October.  Our home will seem much more boring and lifeless when she and my granddaughter A-child have moved away, and I'm already doing a bit of mental toughness training to deal with that.

And that's the news from the Miser Family household, which continues to be prosperous in our adventures. May you and yours be similarly wealthy.