I thought we were over this—he made it through the night for at least a week!

Sigh. Yeah. My dog who was sleep peeing is not doing that anymore, but is now needing to go pee late at night or in the night and is not waking me up, but instead peeing in the house.

NOT COOL, MILEY.

Your family is so fancy, msbelle! Their house is gorgeous

Oatmeal needs to become a habit. bleargh.

FWIW, JZ and I do a half mug of oat bran every morning. Because oat bran is more efficient at removing cholesterol you don't need a big bowl of it.

It has the added benefit of being very filling because any liquids you drink cause it expand in your gut many times over and make you feel full.

(Our diet went on and on about this effect referring to it as the "bolus" which is how we refer to this portion of our breakfast now.)

It's a recommended part of our diet plan but it has a lot of virtues.

(I tart ours up with a bit of Stevia, Kosher salt, a drop of maple syrup, cinnamon, blueberries and pecans.)

Oh, and I don't cook it on the stove. I just heat up a tea kettle and pour boiling water into the mug. Easy Peasy.

I have a feeling my family's T-day plans are going to wind up canceled at the last minute. As of today, we are planning a similar arrangement to our summer vacation which is everyone gets tested within 14 days of coming up, and everyone from out of state quarantines inside the rental house except for going on hikes. But warnings about Thanksgiving gatherings becoming super-spreader events have us all on edge.

I mentioned the possibility of quarantining in advance of Thanksgiving so we could be less vigilant during to my mom, she was not enthusiastic but willing to consider. Although now I realize I will be working the outlet sale exactly 2 weeks before Thanksgiving so quarantining couldn't start until after that...IDK

But it's just three of us and we can sit at opposite ends of the long table to eat and wear masks when we're not eating and that is all not that bad, really.

We're getting together this Saturday to drink beer and eat sausage & cabbage (my local Rotary club has a beer garden sort of event every year that I have never been able to go to because it conflicts with something else, but this year it's just "pick up a collection of beers and maybe get a totebag" so I'm bringing said beers over to my folks' to share on their deck) and have pumpkin pie, so that'll be a nice warm-up/test run. I've seen them face to face since this all started, hm, once in June, that time when the fire was scary close to my house, once in September...is that all? I think that's all. Weird.

It'll just be Emmett and his mom coming over for Thanksgiving, so we'll finesse that with a bit of testing.

But Emmett already had COVID back in April so he's not much of a concern, and EM has been tightly bubbled.

We haven't seen mr. flea's 81 year old parents in a year now, for various reasons, the most recent 7 months of which being covid, but... we could not leave the house for 14 days and then drive straight there to see them, pretty easily. But it would be a damned tight fit to sleep in their ranch house, all 4 of us, and staying in a hotel would invalidate all that nice quarantining.

They seem to be doing pretty okay, all things considered. But I worry a lot.

The rest of our family is much trickier to see safely due to travel distance, and most of them are doing a lot more public interacting than we are.

We've been talking about just having the 5 of us and my mom here for Thanksgiving (we often do a larger group, usually at my oldest cousin's house).

The challenges and risks:

It's New England, so we can't do an outside meal. Someone mentioned dinner in an open garage with space heaters. I've been trying to figure out if we could do that. I think our garage would require too much cleaning out, and we'd have no other place to store the stuff that legitimately lives in the garage, even when we're tidier.

My oldest son currently has his own place. He's working from home, and he's more careful than most people his age (no bars, no indoor restaurants), but he sees his nurse girlfriend who takes public transit, and her family (including her dental hygienist mother) and a small group of friends.

My daughter, who lives here, sees a very small group of friends, but outside, masked, and distanced (either in our yard, or, more often, in a friend's yard).

My mother is pretty careful, but every once in a while, she gets together with two of my older cousins (i.e. her nieces, but age-wise, one is just 7 years younger than mom, and the other's age falls right between mom and me, so they've always been more her peers). They stay outside, and mask, but they also eat together outside, and they're not really 6-10 feet apart when they do, although they lie to themselves (and me) that they are.

I'm the de facto family compliance officer. After everything my youngest son has been through with his Crohn's Disease, hospitalizations, and surgery, this household takes no risks beyond going to the store and necessary medical appointments.

My feeling was that since DH does our shopping, masked. Mom and oldest son do their shopping, masked. We'd only be increasing our risk by the amount that an extra trip to the store does.

My idea was that my son wouldn't see his girlfriend & friends for a couple of weeks prior to Thanksgiving and would get tested a few days before. (Daughter's time with friends is ending, because Mass. rates are on the rise, and Mom says her visits are ending too.)

Everyone seemed on board. Now my mother isn't sure we should. I don't think she's worried about us infecting her, but of her infecting my youngest son.

I have just put the whole thing in a box. Mom has a doctor's appointment coming up. I told her to talk to her doc.

She's the one saying, "There's always next year," but she's going to be 84 before the year is out, and I don't know. Every time I get this far in my thoughts, I start crying.

Relatedly, how do you spell the sound you make when you kind of puff out your cheeks and slowly blow all the air out of your body, so you don't cry?

Here's a little Monday morning amusement: I'm in the middle of SUPER low-stakes drama between 2 nuns! For real, y'all.

I do the layout of the newsletter for my high school's order of nuns, and there is this low-key conflict between Sr. E, who is the nun I work directly with (she's like 4 years older than me, was in the military before she became a nun, and now she rescues feral cats in her spare time; she's awesome), and Sr. M, who is the mother superior (they don't use the term "mother superior" any more, but I can't remember what the correct term is).

The way that the newsletter is physically printed, the page count has to be in multiples of 4. Sr. E says there's only enough content for a 4-page newsletter. Sr. M wants a longer newsletter this time, and wants to know if we can go to 6 pages, or if it must be 8 pages. So Sr. M emailed me asking if we could do that -- go to 6 pages, or if it had to be 8 pages, and then she said "Maybe the printer is the only one that can answer that question." I've been doing their newsletter for a long-ass time now; she can trust me that I know what the constraints of the actual physical printing are.

So I replied to Sr. M telling her to think of it not as individual pages, but that 4 "pages" print on a large sheet of paper -- because of that, the newsletter has to be multiples of 4. She replied and said that makes sense, and THEN asked me to not tell Sr. E we had this conversation! Is that okay? One nun asking me to lie to another nun??? I was laughing my ass off!

Then this morning I get an email from Sr. E complaining about Sr. M, which just made me laugh more. Like, is THIS what it's like to be a nun?

I wish I could get mac here, but he works and should get in as much as he can. I can't really go anywhere to quarantine for 2 weeks that I can take the dogs to.