Transplanting a Seattleite

A.’s first class was canceled. I hadn’t heard from my Dutch teacher / friend A., who recently moved, so I reached out to find out if we were really having class and specifically offering to punt for an other week if he was things were still crazy from the move. He had been aiming to do the class but was extremely grateful for the offered reprieve. Yay us! Not stressful. This took all the time pressure off getting A. to school. Altho she’s been really good about getting to bed at a reasonable (before midnight) hour, and getting up and getting out the door mostly on time and to school on time.

I did not do Duo before bringing A. to school, because we had a couple Hey We Forgot to Pick a Paint Color emails from the builder. One was for the inside of the turret, now that it is TuffHide instead of plaster — I had originally been thinking green (tree theme) but was now leaning towards the yellow (the room has two colors). R. picked yellow, so that was pretty easy. Trickier was the ceiling of the overhang at the entry. E. from the architect’s team suggested “haint blue”, which I was not familiar with. The other colors we are using on the exterior are a little darker than I want for that ceiling, but what showed up as “haint blue” was a little pale, so I went with Benjamin Moore “Blue Stream”, and R.’s response was hilarious. Basically an extremely hesitant, as he thought it through, but ringing endorsement. Go us!

On the way to school, A. told me about a drug design idea she had, and it was interesting to hear her describe the context and the idea. I asked her if she wanted any research assistance on the idea, and she didn’t — mostly she’s just taking what she now knows about various things, what receptors they work with, and how they might be modified to work a little differently. This led to a — foreshadowing — discussion of how I don’t necessarily want better drugs, I want people to get support in changing their lives so they feel better without the drugs. Not opposed to the drugs, but feel like they should generally be a bridge to a better life situation wherever possible.

Returning home, I intended to do Duolingo, but R. was distressed. Recently, one of the kids asked to have the years of birthday / holiday money from g-parents transferred to an account under his control. R. had kept the kids’s monies in accounts for them under his control. Kid is now an adult, and not a ward, so this is a reasonable request. It didn’t come from my family, so I figured other than observing, they are an adult, it’s their money, I didn’t have anything to do with it. R. did retain some ability to log into and observe activity on the account. He saw some distressing recent activity and brought it to me to discuss. Ugh. It did not occur to me that we needed to talk to the kids about Don’t Do Anything Crypto and Don’t Ever Wire Anyone Money Without Discussing It With A Trusted Adult and boy should we have.

I texted offspring to say I thought he might have been the victim of a scam, that they are not in trouble and asked them to talk to me. We talked, and I learned what a Task Scam was. If you don’t know what a Task Scam is:

https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2024/11/task-scams-create-illusion-making-money

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/data-visualizations/data-spotlight/2024/12/paying-get-paid-gamified-job-scams-drive-record-losses

Unexpectedly, my other offspring was well aware of these scams, largely because they had done a deep dive into scams a while back and developed an encyclopedic knowledge of All the Scams. Autism. So much fun.

I texted one of the uncles of the kids, who is Exceptional when it comes to dealing with nonsense and who is a lawyer, figuring if there was anyway to get anything back, he would know what it was. The act of making the request was enough to get me scheduling the kid and R. to go to a branch of the bank they use (not the one I use) to report the problem and find out what their options were. Fortunately, one chunk of outbound money had not been wired yet, which is kind of astonishing and makes me wonder if the person at that branch doing the wires just sat and said, maybe let’s be slow today.

But still, previous chunks are likely permanently gone. Tomorrow, they are going to do a whole list of Report This Fraud to various places: file a police report, report to FTC, FBI, etc.

I thought for a while about how impossible it is right now to get a job and how the victim of this scam really just wants something to do. So we also had a conversation about volunteering. They are going to hold off on that for a bit, because they want to get through all this paperwork (and the holidays) and they have a few more ideas about where they could apply for jobs. Apparently they tripped over this scam while on LinkedIn, and they absolutely inundated their WhatsApp with garbage pressure.

I also had further conversations with the kids’ uncle and various friends (delightful interrupted phone call with K., who as always is loving and supportive), about how to put some gentle protections in place. And I had a conversation with offspring about Not Wiring, and added some stuff about Don’t Short Stock, Gambling is Only Entertainment and Have a Limit, Don’t Use Options on Robinhood or other stock market platforms, and talked through what it means to freeze / unfreeze one’s credit.

A little crash course in the terrifying landscape of modern personal finance. Stay safe out there, and talk to people whenever you are doing something New to You! People you know personally, ideally, and people who are willing to entertain new ideas but don’t latch onto every new idea right away. Someone who says no to everything or yes to everything is generally not going to help you make sense of the world. Someone who makes choices that generally go well, and who is forthright in sharing when they _don’t_ go well is your ideal pick.

No blame, no shame. Don’t hide your mistakes and don’t hide from mistakes. Share, care and help everyone find a good path forward.

ETA: I did eventually do Duolingo, and FF, and got to walk with M.

I have autopay set up on my ngrid acccount (for the construction site). It was supposed to trigger on Nov 29. Weirdly, it says the _next_ payment is Nov 29, 2025. What? OK, sure, fine, whatever. And also, it show shows on the account as of Dec 1 as being paid. Despite that, I got a text saying I haven’t paid yet.

I just can’t even.

Meanwhile, I have an order that is supposed to be delivered by FedEx today from Woman Within for A. (shorts, mostly). They charged at order, but then let it lapse, and have been charging the smaller amounts as they ship. The first one went through; subsequent ones keep failing at Chase and Chase is not notifying me of a fraud or anything. I emailed Woman Within saying, do you need anything from me on this, and they misunderstood my description as being about something in the order process. I do not want Woman Within sending me free clothes. I want them to stay in business so I can reorder more clothes for A. in the future.

Why is this hard.

No one else on the planet nags the people they owe money to to actually collect. It’s just me. I get that I’m weird. I just want the transaction to complete.

ETA:

FedEx package arrived, still getting those declines. I called Woman Within, and apparently I placed the order through Apple Pay and Customer Service can’t switch the payment method so there’s nothing they can do. I cannot believe I am working this hard to give more money to a seller. But I am who I am. I contacted Chase, who sent me to their fraud department. They see the declines, but there’s no reason attached. Helpful! And of course once they retry 3 times, the merchant gets put on hold. So they undid the hold, and had nothing particularly helpful for me to try (did you try manually entering the card? I’m like, how? Where? Shipment arrived.).

Anyway. I wound up adding a different card to Apple Pay, and then removed the card I had on there (I’m not stupid, I want there to be _some_ card in place before I remove and re-add). Then I added the card back, but left the Pay to default to the other card. We’ll see if things go differently as a result. If it re-declines, I’m really not sure what to do next. Probably call Chase again, and get escalated and wind up in a three way call with the Merchant, the way my luck is going.

It was wet white stuff. I shoveled part of the driveway while R. was out retrieving A. Definitely exercise. Probably good for me. A.’s school closed about an hour before her usual end time. We thought she was going to be leaving 2 hours before per a phone conversation, but A. was apparently not informed. So. Well, hopefully she got some more work done during that last homework cafe?

She got up more or less on time, and we got out the door _on time by my preferences_, and arrived in plenty of time for her to get upstairs and be _on time to class_. So, I’m kinda loving this.

She made her lunch again this evening. I did have to remind her several times to get in the shower, but it’s not that late yet, so I’m feeling a degree of optimism. I made turkey cacciatore with the last sausage from the package I opened to make the stuffing, and the turkey meat that fell off the frame when we made stock. It turned out well.

Remote only for OAC / MEPFP, because of aforementioned white stuff, which was considerably worse to the west.

We got the holiday lights listed, and they have been claimed. Someone picked up the Pfaltzgraff bell holiday ornament, but other than that, people have delayed pickup due to the weather (fair and preferable, honestly!). I got out a pair of ice bugs to walk the bell out to the person who picked that up, and also for when I was shoveling.

I finished putting together the holiday lego, and I sorted through the tissue paper we wrap the ornaments in. We’re going to compost the really tiny bits, and I folded up the larger pieces for when we take the tree down in January.

A. really needed to wash her hair yesterday, and I commented that showering on Saturday would remove one of her Sunday tasks. I reminded her again in the evening. Around midnight — my hard stop for her, no more phones, and no more noise because I need my sleep — she said she wouldn’t be able to sleep without showering.

!!!

So I marched her through the shower in record time, and then she took forever to even start brushing her teeth. She was trying to get her hair dry with a towel. That only works with several towels. *sigh* So I got her hair dried with a really nice hair dryer that we normally never use (this is why we shower earlier!) and she finally got to bed, but by then, I was pretty awake and it took a while to settle down enough to sleep.

Around 9:20, she comes into my room and wakes me up. It has not been 8 hours since I fell asleep. I napped a bit longer, got up, got her breakfast, got me breakfast, go ready for an 11 am walk (which was fortunately canceled) and then tried to get her through the checkin process for tomorrow’s annual in the morning before school. But she wanted to read all the disclosures. No obvious way to download them or link to them — which honestly, is probably illegal? — so I screenshotted them but I don’t normally bulk screenshot files so it took me a while, and I couldn’t remember how to get the little thumbnail to go away immediately so I was waiting for it and at that point the 11 am walk was looming and I was hungry and she was sloooooowly eating and I started losing my shit.

Walk got canceled, I figured out how to swoosh the thumbnail, I got the various disclosures screenshotted and sent to her phone (which I also took away from her), and then I explained to her in some detail how I was feeling about things. I had been yelling, but by this point, I had managed to convert it into a job for me. I said, basically, you know my one rule is let me sleep. I said, you may have it in your head that you want me to prove that I truly love you, even more than my sleep. You are going to be wrong. We’ve talked about what methamphetamine does to humans, but what it really does is it stops them sleeping and the bad things that happen thereafter are what humans do when they have not gotten sleep. Violence. Violation. Not caring about relationships. All the horrific stuff that the Japanese army did to China mid-century. Etc. I told her, you may have it in your head that I should prove that I truly love you, and sleep when you are not around, so that I am always available to you, which is something I gladly did when you and your brother were babies, but I am not doing that now because you are a full ass adult. Not a legal adult, but an adult. If you don’t let me sleep, I — and your dad, if you don’t let him sleep — will leave you here in the house and go sleep somewhere where you do not have access to us. I also reminded her that I went No Contact (before that was a meme) with my mother (sometime around 2002 +/-) and refused to see her again (she died in 2017, IIRC). I told her I am not threatening, but this is who I am and what I am capable of, when someone is actively harming me. And then I sent her upstairs to brush her teeth, do her hair and put on clothes to leave the house, which is something I long ago stopped requiring her to do on weekends except when we are on vacation.

I think I’m going to send her out with R. to get some groceries. We also need to pick up the advent beer box. And I need to get a walk at some point.

I think one of the reasons I find this all so incredibly infuriating is, in true teenager style, she has zero interest in interacting with me during the day (except for the occasional, do you know about infodump, what you don’t know about infodump? How can you not know about infodump? Which I am sympathetic to as a conversational style because I have for sure committed this myself and also please find another overture), doesn’t remember to eat on her own until she has a hangry meltdown, will tend to put off offers of a meal or forget to eat the meal in front of her until meltdown, etc.

I mean, I get it. This is what happens with kids. You get the worst aspects of yourself at some point. And also my mother went down from dementia, and she spent a lot of years not sleeping at night and I see a real connection there that I have no intention of repeating.

I carefully bought my tickets yesterday, and bought nothing at the museum and ate only at home. But I failed at Buy Nothing, because I ordered the enterprise over at the Lego website, and I paid for parking when I went to the MFA. I don’t know if any of the other things I will ultimately be financially responsible count as “me buying something” (family members using family credit card for entertainment and groceries).

We did NOT put a tree up (yet)! Instead, R. and I did Duo and I walked with M. and had a delightful phone chat with K. and then we went to the Rachel Ruysch exhibit at MFA. It was absolutely wonderful. I highly recommend it. She was an amazing artist and this exhibit is a first ever opportunity to see this kind of overview, and then also the exhibit is structured really well, with lots of explanations about the showy flowers and the amazing bugs, work by her sister and their teacher and one of her inspirations. There’s a substantial amount of explanation / depiction of career trajectory and tons of historical context provided as well.

What surprised me most was how broad the effective angle of view is on most of these paintings (broader than many other artists of the time, right from the beginning) and how Ruysch clearly was consciously pushing that angle of view wider over most of her career. After her mid-life reduction in productivity, her return was to a slightly reduced angle of view, but a big jump up in dimensionality / immersiveness. By her last painting, she has a boldly curved line for the bottom edge of the table that now has a corner jutting out towards the viewer instead of being placed straight on the edge. That downward curve straightens out if you move back just a little bit, and the painting clicks into 3 dimensional focus. It’s subtle, remarkable, and utterly unexpected.

The backdrops on the forest floor paintings have some really delicious ambiguity to them. In at least one instance, it is recognizably a painted canvas hanging from somewhere above, as if in a display or on a stage. Are we intended to believe them as the fading background or are we intended to see this as more of the setpiece? How did Ruysch sort her viewers, based on what they saw and how they reacted to it? The discourse of the heavily programmatic paintings done by her instructor (and his generation) had taught everyone to consciously look for theme and setting to ascertain the moral of the painting (often signaled by the title). We don’t read sermons but we do still sometimes read the comedies of manners and occasionally stage the plays of this and related eras in other empires. It is delightful to wonder about all that in a vase of flowers from all over the world, wilting and being crawled on and around by lizards and snakes and beetles and the actual dead bodies of butterflies.

No school for A. Woot! Also, no therapy (not because of us). So R. and I went to dinner at Woods Hill Table. Then I went home and cooked. Weird but fun! I pulled the turkey neck out of the bird and made turkey stock. And I baked some sweet potatoes and one “yame”. I made a couple different stuffings / dressings. I got caught up on laundry including kitchen towels and removing the table cloth from the table we will use for Thanksgiving. I was going to set the table, but in the event, I did not get to it.

Very enjoyable and relaxing day!

MB from book group (surprising number of people in my life with the initials MB) called to chat and explain her recent absences, and that she would be absent again tonight, and to tell me about her travel to Greece and some recent health challenges and also her rug shopping adventure. Fun! I mean, bummer she won’t be at book group, but it’s nice that she isn’t just disappearing on us, and that she wants to continue and would like to get together just to hang out some time in December. We’ll see what we can do.

I finished _Last Light_, and I will note that Louise Nevelson was a strong note to end the book on. I really dislike Edward Hopper’s work, but I was pleased to learn about Josephine Nivinson and I wish it was easier to find her work online. What I have seen online is gorgeous, much better than her more famous husband’s.

Lacayo’s ideas about artists in later life are quite interesting to think about, both from a stay busy / occupational therapy / art therapy / staying connected to a community throughout life perspective but also in terms of how the skills we build over the course of our life may be diminished by the aging process and trying new things that can build on the remaining capacity is a way to find ongoing pleasure. I hope to find more books of this nature in the future.

Also, the many side trail I pursued along the way were rewarding in their own right, and I hope to return to the early / many uses of canvas part of that exploration.

I had a delightful phone call with J.

I cooked the two small squash that have been sitting on the counter possibly since last November. I accidentally caramelized them on the stove. Does not seem to have been a bad thing.

I also spent a bunch of time working through the park ticket process. It was enough to generate a fraud alert, which is fine. I think I would have been more worried if it had not.

We dropped A off at fusion and then went back to CBS exotics to pick out specific slabs. It was fun to see the gantry in operation, altho R. definitely tends to want to be a lot closer to it than the folks there feel is safe. The woman who was helping us does Lego! We had a delightful conversation and she showed me pictures of some of the lego cars she has built. Very fun!!!

We stopped at Fly By Night in Maynard. I’d put it a step down from Circle, but they had some interesting local producers, and it was more solid wood + plywood versus MDF with veneers. Tradeoffs! We only looked at stuff on the main floor (living room) — we didn’t go upstairs (bedrooms).

R made a decision on the green roof railing, so we’re through that. I can at least stop worrying about people climbing on that little patch of roof and then walking over and falling off.

I walked with M.

I texted with C. about window treatments for K and C’s rooms, which was fun.

The payment I mailed last Friday still hasn’t shown up, which is aggravating. We’re giving it till tomorrow, but I’m going to probably just wire the money and have them destroy the check.

I drove out to the house. I made A’s breakfast and lunch before I left, and also my own breakfast and lunch. D. supplied vegan cupcakes from Wild Chestnut which were extremely yummy.

We had an 11 am meeting to wrap up the window treatment discussion. And we had a meeting with N. about the bar countertops.

I stopped at Slattery’s in Fitchburg and had dinner with T. That was fun.

I was a little discouraged to arrive at home to learn that while R. had heated up chicken and rice for A. and handed her blueberries, she hadn’t gotten any vegetables and wanted some. *sigh* I mean, I made the two other meals of the day for her. Why is this hard. Also, honestly, she really ought to be able to get carrots and lettuce out of the fridge for herself.