cindy's world

It’s amazing what you can get done between diaper changes and feedings…as long as they can be done on the phone.

Last day to pay property taxes before late penalties is today, and when we refinanced our house to take advantage of lower interest rates, the mortgage company insisted on taking money out for a tax impound account. Last week, Mr. W and I both paid property taxes online for our separate rental properties, and then this weekend he thought to check on our house’s tax status. It showed “unpaid.” Weird, because when he checked our mortgage’s impound account online, it reflected that the correct amount of property tax was taken out of the impound account to pay taxes on November 17. Where has the money been for the past month? Both our rental properties already have a status of “paid,” so we know the tax website is updated. It was unnerving to see this on a weekend when nothing could be done and no one could be contacted until the next weekday. This morning after our pediatrician appointment, I actually managed to find a live person calling the mortgage company. She investigated the situation and confirmed that a consolidated check (which I gather means they paid for multiple properties with one check) was sent out to the tax collector in November, but that the check is still “pending.” The parcel number for the property is correct. She opened up a request for the tax people to call them to see why the check hasn’t cleared after all this time, and assured me that with the check number and a date/time stamp for receipt of the check from the tax people in the mortgage company’s records, we would not be charged a late penalty.

I also received a text from Maggie’s awesome husband Tom, whom I’ve burdened this month with practically being the management for my rental property. With his professional contractor connections, he’s been coordinating, supervising, liasoning, even participating in getting my property ready for the next renter. Josh and his wife moved out earlier this month and the next renters, a coworker with her adult son, are ready to move in at the end of the month. That gives a couple of weeks for a contractor to repair the drywall on the ceiling where it’d been leaking every rain since the flatroof had been done and scrape the popcorn off the ceilings to replace with ceiling textures, patch the nail holes on the walls, and for another painting contractor to paint everything. The problem was that the roofing company which did the flatroof, despite coming out many times after significant ceiling leaks from rainfalls, kept insisting that the leaks weren’t coming from their work on the flatroof; they say it’s coming from the composite shingle sections. Tom, however, took advantage of the rain today and crawled into the ceiling “attic” section and found the leak. It was coming from the flatroof section, he said 4 feet from the composite roof sections, which were totally dry. I called the roofing company as my roof was still under their warranty, told them the same leak is recurring, and where Tom described it was coming from. The receptionist remembered me and said they knew exactly where it was coming from — the drain. I said no, not according to my contractors. I explained the situation about the work being put on hold while the ceiling leaked, and hearing the house is vacant, the roofing company offered to go there immediately to check out the leak. Within half an hour, I received a call from Bobby, the roofer guy. He was at the property, had gotten in and seen the ceiling hole, the ladder set up to go in there, and the bucket holding the drippage, and he said he still thinks the leaks are coming from the composite roof and not their work. “Maybe your contractors didn’t know that the composite roof extends out over that section,” he said. It sounded like he didn’t go up in there the way Tom had so he didn’t see what Tom did. Bobby said he wanted to bring someone back with him later today or tomorrow morning so he could have one guy on the roof while he tapped on the ceiling at the leak site to figure out exactly what was above the leak — flatroof or composite roof. “He is wrong,” Tom texted when I told him what the roofer said. “I could see the entire comp section starting at the transitional metal flashing and it was dry. Leak was on flat roof side of mansart. Possible seam leak where it curves up onto wall?” I’m sure Tom’s right, but if Bobby needed to be proven wrong to himself, I was going to let him. He’s aware all workers have been told to stand down and work halted until the leak could be repaired, so that the ceiling could be closed, so that painting could be done, and people could move in.

I also made appointments at Kaiser’s optometry department for me and Mr. W. Unfortunately, along with a $10 copay, there is a $80 mandatory fitting fee for contacts, and Kaiser won’t release contact prescriptions until they know the contacts have been properly fitted. I’m trying to find a live person to speak to at the optometry department at Costco cuz I think even with an eye exam paid for out-of-pocket, they can beat $90.

Our crib people seem to have forgotten they still owe us the railings and accessories that will turn Allie’s crib into a toddler bed. Mr. W called the company and they’re going to try to deliver the missing pieces later this week.

On top of my productive phone calls, I also received a phone call from the fertility doctor’s nurse, checking up on my delivery, asking whether the baby ended up being a boy or girl, and asking for details to relay back to the doctor. She said the doctor remembers his patients and would love to see photos, and to meet Allie. She invited us to come by after Allie’s had her 2-month vaccinations. Meanwhile, I promised to mail them a birth announcement, which I designed and ordered the end of last week and should be receiving this week. I would recommend that fertility clinic to anybody. Everyone I know who has gone there got pregnant first shot. Excellent customer service, as well.

Dear Allison,

Rather than continuously hip-checking me from the inside, if you’re squirmy because you want more space, you know where the exit is.

Thanks.

Your mom

Cindy, age 6 or 7: Mom, is giving birth like pooping?
Cindy’s mom: What do you think?

I never got an answer from her. She proceeded to ignore me and my further inquiries, so I filed the question away in my “Things you’ll find out when you’re a grownup” mental drawer. (There was a lot of stuff in that drawer.) And now, the answer will come any day.

I did get two interesting birth perspectives from women who had given birth both with and without epidurals, though. My cousin Olivia had her first one naturally, and her second with an epidural. She was adamant in talking with me that I should hold off on the epidural. She said the first birth, albeit painful, wasn’t beyond unendurable. She was expecting the worst given what everyone told her about childbirth, but everything went fine and it wasn’t that bad. Her second birth, she felt pressured by the doctor or staff present to get the epidural, so before she knew it, she was getting it. It prolonged her labor so much compared to the first birth, and she had such difficulty feeling anything to push, and it so slowed her recovery time, that she’s now convinced that the epidural is a big medical scam exploiting the fear of women so that insurance companies can collect money for the use of extra meds and an anesthesiologist, when it’s completely unbeneficial to the labor process.

The second story came from Mr. W’s coworker. She had her first with an epidural, had always planned on getting another epidural for the second child’s birth but missed the window. She went into labor on New Year’s Eve, there were people over at her house so there was a delay in getting ready to leave for the hospital. Also, her husband was out in a loooong In-N-Out Burger drive-thru line when she finally called him to ask him to come back as she thinks the contractions were such that she ought to go into the hospital. But he was stuck with cars all around him, he couldn’t back out and couldn’t pull forward, so he waited thru the line. By the time he got home, the contractions were so close together that they decided they didn’t have time to get to the hospital they’d planned to birth at, they would go to a closer hospital. But they got lost going to the closer hospital, fought in the car the entire way arguing over where to exit on the freeway and where to turn, and by the time she was admitted, she had the baby half an hour later. She was stunned at how smooth the second childbirth was, how much shorter the recovery time was (days compared to weeks), she loved that she was able to get up and walk around shortly after giving birth, and was happy to not have the week-long back pain at the epidural site that she had with the first birth.

It’s gonna be interesting.

(I didn’t care for that movie, BTW.)

My mom asked me a couple of days ago about how certain privacy settings on a particular social networking site works. We discussed who can see what information, and she said she’d assumed everything I posted on that networking site is open to anyone who wants to see it. I told her no way; there are some limited items (certain photos, for example) I allow people within one degree of separation to see, but just about everything else is restricted to just people within my circle. Turned out she was asking because a relative of ours in Taiwan, roughly my age, had seen something about me through my mom’s social networking page. The relative had told my mom that she’d looked on Google Maps where I live and made the comment to my mom that “Wow, Cindy lives so far from you.” My mom had of course agreed, since she’d always lamented about the 40-mile distance between our homes which, to my mom, essentially makes me equivalent to having moved to Egypt.
“So you must have your address public,” my mom concluded.
“No I don’t; in fact, I was pretty careful to not put my location on that site AT ALL,” I said.
And then moments later it came to me. On that profile, I’d put my location as Nadi, Fiji. You know, the island near Tahiti? I figured ANYONE would know I don’t actually live in that exotic locale, and that I had used it as a place-filler cuz I don’t want to reveal my actual city of residence. I’ve never even been to Fiji, altho there are photos of me and Mr. W from the Paul Gauguin cruise that took us to the Society Islands (Tahiti, Taha’a, Bora Bora, Moorea, etc) near Fiji. But she can’t see those photos anyway.

It somehow amuses me to picture this relative looking at the limited information about me, seeing “Nadi, Fiji,” googling it to see that it’s an island in the South Pacific practically next to Australia, and then thinking, “Wow, that’s quite a commute to Diamond Bar.”

This is the horrific way I was woken up this morning:

The bedroom window faces the back yard and given the warm weather, was open all night. Bursting through my slumber was the low-pitched yowl of a cat outside. Soon following was a second cat snarl, this time louder and longer, sounding like an angry violent cat scream. In my mind’s eye I saw a cat form, crouched low, ears plastered back, teeth revealed, and I thought, “cat fight.” Simultaneously I felt a wave of peace and gratitude that Dodo is an indoor cat and doesn’t get involved in stuff like that. Within seconds of the cat scream, I heard Mr. W’s voice coming in from the window, saying, “Dodo!!”

Sleep was immediately a lost cause. I listened carefully, and heard the sliding door leading to the back yard close. I half-expected Mr. W to run upstairs into the bedroom in a panic, holding a bloody black-and-white cat, but instead, only heard “normal” morning sounds of dishes and utensils clinking in the kitchen below. I got up, went to the restroom, and crawled back under the sheets, staring into the foggy sky outside. I guess I was hoping Dodo would walk into the bedroom to greet me with his higher-pitched wails, like he does to wake me up and announce himself in the mornings. No Dodo.

Eventually, Mr. W came upstairs and walked in. I was still catatonically staring into space. “What are you doing?” he asked. I turned my glazed stare in his direction. “Dodo is now a battlecat,” he announced rather proudly. I gulped back the resentment I felt, as I had trained Dodo to be an indoor-only cat, but had only learned in the last week or so that unbeknownst to me, Mr. W had been letting Dodo out into the back yard unsupervised in the mornings. According to Mr. W, Dodo just walks around the brick path, sniffing flowers and chewing some lily leaves, sometimes taking tastes from puddles of water made by the early morning sprinklers, and when Dodo was ready to come back inside, he’d meow by the door and Mr. W would open it for him. (I’d seen Mr. W encourage Dodo to go outside before, but Dodo wouldn’t stay there for long, only venturing a few steps out and then running back in within minutes.) This morning, Dodo did his usual round but didn’t yowl at the door to be let back in. Instead, he went for a second round. Mr. W had come back inside, and then heard the fierce yowls that I had heard. When he went to investigate, he found Dodo squared off facing another cat, which Mr. W recognized as a smaller gray tabby belonging to the new people next door (“I guess their cat ISN’T an indoor cat like I’d thought,” he said). When he approached the two cats, the gray tabby turned and ran off onto the low wall. Dodo sprinted after it, which was when Mr. W called out “Dodo!!” and my cat, knowing it wasn’t allowed to go much farther, froze in place. Then Mr. W picked up Dodo and brought him inside, closing the door behind them.

“You shouldn’t leave him outside unsupervised,” I said after his story, frowning.
“I know, I won’t anymore. This is the first time I’ve seen another cat in our yard.”
“He probably smelled the other cat and was being territorial.” I didn’t like the idea that my 13-year-old indoor cat felt the need to defend his house from random younger cats, which cats I don’t even know were properly vaccinated against rabies.
Dodo came strutting in at this point and greeted me, jumping onto the bed as usual, albeit later this morning.
“And now that cat taught Dodo how to get on the wall.” Great, just great. “Dodo kept going back to the glass door and looking outside,” Mr. W said almost gleefully. “He’d take a drink of water, then turn back to the door and look around.” Mr. W imitated the suspicious alert looking-around movements he’d seen in Dodo earlier.
I leaned my face toward my cat, who touched the tip of his damp nose to mine. I rubbed his soft head, telling him, “I know you’re a tom, but you’re not young anymore. Don’t go out there trying to fight stupid little cats, okay?” Dodo didn’t make me any promises.

I was out having a late lunch with Mr. W, his newly graduated son (B.S. in Bio), and his daughter on Friday when I got a text from an old district attorney pal that I hadn’t had contact with in awhile.
DA Joe: Are you at Open Sesame right now?
me: No, at Ruth’s Chris in Irvine. Do I have a doppelganger?
DA Joe: There is a woman who looks like you but eyesight is not what it used to be
DA Joe: You do, I should take a picture
me: Take a picture! If she’s hideous I’ll have to hunt you down and kick you.
(I was thinking about this.)
DA Joe: No she is hot
me: Whew! Really, take a pic!
DA Joe: Kind of afraid to take a picture
DA Joe: If I can do it subtly I will
DA Joe: I think my lunch companions would trip
me: “Excuse me, I’m sorry to bother you, but I thought you were a friend of mine until I just texted her & found out she’s not here. She wants a picture, do you mind if we take one together? My name’s Joe, I’m harmless, I promise.”
(I figured that’d help him hook up, too, if that’s what he wants.)
DA Joe: Too late she just left
me: Gah! What a tease you are.

Where the heck is Open Sesame? Has anyone seen “me” there? Send me a picture!

Yesterday I posted about my grandma’s little adventure with the emergency room, which came into existence because she was going to have a foot surgery today and was too stubborn to miss out on an overly competitive ping pong match on Sunday, knowing she’d be out of commission post-surgery.

I just spoke to my mom. She and my dad dropped off my grandma for her 8am surgery and my two parents are now hanging out at a park across the street from the hospital. I knew my mom was nervous about driving to the hospital, because it was in a city she’d never been to, and despite her insistence that we all go out and look at cars on Saturday so she could buy the luxury SUV she’d had her eye on, and the fact that she immediately made the decision she wanted that car and bought it on Saturday, she is too scared to drive it. She was lamenting the bad timing of having to drive to this hospital with a new car. I told her it was PERFECT timing, as the new car has a navigation system to help her. But she is totally intimidated by the car. So apparently she made my dad take the day off and drive.
“So where did grandma go yesterday?” I asked.
“Oh! She went to the senior citizen center! Her FRIEND had a BIRTHDAY PARTY! It wasn’t her birthday but she wanted to go.”
“Did she drive, or did someone else take her?”
“She drove! She got a long scolding from me.” Of course my grandma had to go. She’s a socialite and she LOVES cake. She loves sugar. We watched her pour a tablespoon of white sugar into a half bowl of porridge on Saturday for lunch. She uses 4-5 packets of sugar per teacup of coffee. “Your grandma is awesome, man,” my bridesmaid Sandy had remarked upon seeing the coffee thing at our wedding rehearsal dinner. We certainly don’t have the courage to spike our insulin like that, but grandma is fit and her blood test results are consistently better than just about everyone else’s.
“She’s just like a kid,” my mom went on. “My supervisor told me that after her foot surgery, I should take her car keys away and hide them.”
“She’d be mad…”
“Yeah,” my mom sighed. Doesn’t sound like my mom’s going to be mean like that, but she does seem resigned to be chasing around her mother now as if she’d gained a second child.

Yesterday morning, I got news that my maternal grandma had fallen while playing ping pong at the senior living apartments where she lives. She plays ping pong regularly with the people there, and is reigning champion. I guess what had happened was that she fell mid-game, hit the back of her head on the ground, and then another person fell on top of her. She experienced dizziness and trouble standing/walking, but refused to let them call for an ambulance. So my mom was contacted early Sunday morning, she and my dad rushed over, and THEY called 911. By the time I found out about this, mom, grandma, and a family friend were already at the ER.

Grandma was released later the same day — no concussion, no evidence of blood clot/stroke/aneurism, but she did sustain a minor lower back fracture. There’s no way to put a cast on that, so she was given painkillers and told to take it easy. I called my grandma to check on her soon after my parents took her back to her apartment. “It’s the first time I’ve ever ridden in an ambulance!” she told me with almost child-like glee. She explained that there was nothing else wrong with her except for the small fracture, and that she considered the event an opportunity to get her entire body checked, and came out clean. Such a well-adjusted tough old bird. “Your mom was soooo mad at me,” she said discreetly.
“Why would she be mad?!” I asked. Grandma didn’t get into it, but soon got off the phone to take her usual afternoon nap. I figured she misunderstood my mom’s concern.

I talked to my mom today, and mom mentioned that grandma had been really happy I’d called her. I said, “She said you were mad at her!”
“I was sooooooo mad at her!” my mom corroborated.
“You were? Why?”
“She’s a 91-year-old woman, she was already scheduled to have foot surgery on Tuesday, and I TOLD her to stop doing stupid things like playing ping pong! She doesn’t listen! She’s like a child! And you know when she plays sports, she’s aggressive and competitive, she won’t just play casually. This isn’t even the first time she fell. And the person she plays with! They’re always fighting for the ball and pushing and shoving each other. I told her to take it easy and not play but she said she won’t be able to play after her foot surgery so she wanted to get this last game in!” I could picture my grandma (who taught me my killer unreturnable serve, but whom I’ve NEVER been able to beat at either ping pong or tennis despite being 1/3 her age), crouching low at her end of the ping pong table, eagle eyes keen on the ball, about to slice some poor ball invisible before it whacks the opponent on an unsuspecting body part.
“Is she still going to do the foot surgery tomorrow?”
“Yeah, I’m taking her tomorrow. She’ll have to rest completely for a month or so after the surgery, and I told her to take it easy NOW and not go out, because if her driving is impaired by her back fracture and she gets into an accident, she’ll cause more damage to herself AND to someone else. But when I called her earlier, she DIDN’T PICK UP THE PHONE! So she didn’t listen to me AGAIN and SHE WENT OUT! I’m SO MAD!!”
“You don’t know that, maybe she was napping and didn’t hear the phone.”
“She didn’t call me back and I left a message!”
“Did you try her cell phone?”
“No, because I know her — if she’s driving and her cell phone rings, she’ll pick it up! So I never call her when she may be driving.” My mom’s unsaid I-told-her-not-to-drive-and-talk-but-she-doesn’t-listen hung in the air.
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to wait until closer to her nap time and then call her again. She’s just like a kid!” Someone’s gonna get yelled at. Poor grandma.

Mr. W found this whole thing to be HILARIOUS. Not grandma’s fall and injury, of course, but the whole dynamic between my mother and her mother. “Let her live and have fun!” he said.
“Not if it’s causing her injury and risking her life,” I said. I agree with my mom on that point. But mom and I are more conservative than Mr. W and, apparently, grandma.
“I wish I hung out bars where people play ping pong and stuff so I can actually say to people, ‘You call that playing ping pong? My grandma could beat you!’ ”
“Um, people don’t play ping pong at bars.” Maybe in Chicago, where he’s from. But that is a pretty cool concept. We’d tell some cocky table tennis player that my grandma could whip your ass at this thing, and then we’d go to the car and bring out nonegenarian grandma, and she’d proceed to whip his ass with lightning ball blurs. King’s Court was never fun with Grandma, cuz she’d beat me and every one of my friends in succession, then gawk at us when we’re too tired to keep playing her.

If she recovers soon and defies my mom again to play ping pong with the same ridiculous competitive pro attitude, I’m gonna try to video her and post it on YouTube.

It wasn’t my choice to come to this country, because I was too young to be involved in decision-making at age 6…but this has truly been the best decision made on my behalf. Thanks, mom and dad, for the immigration and citizenship, and thank you to our troops, past, present and future, for making this country everything that it has been, is, and will be. Happy Memorial Day, God bless America.

My social networking profile’s status message last night was:

Cindy does NOT understand how the weekend can be over already. Where did it go? This is like how back in 1992 or so, they had never isolated the “naked beauty” (or “naked bottom”) quark. Not that particle physics (bosons & quantum electrodynamics) quite rise to the mystery of disappearing weekends…

I thought it’d be funny cuz, who compares a weekend to particle physics? It’s so arbitrary. (Unless you work for NASA, I guess.) BUT, I also thought that at least a few of my science-minded friends would get a kick out of the analogy of “a weekend you know exists but that you somehow can’t quantify : a quark that all theory points to existing but that still hasn’t been officially isolated and quantified.” But the only comment this status message drew was from my friend Dardy, with whom I had an entire preceding convo about posting this status message before I’d even posted it.

BUT… “Cindy thinks some ice cream is in order now.” 19-comment-long interactive string of conversation with various people.
“Cindy had non-fat yogurt, which then entitles her to full-fat string cheese, right?” 15-comment conversation string, various people, 3 “likes.”

I guess I made an “analogy fail.” =P