Beautiful October

Although I'm a little tense this month -- Rocket Boy is supposed to be home, why isn't he home, why did he have to miss Teen B's concert, what are we going to do about the furnace (it's getting colder), what about our health insurance, are we going to have enough money, etc., etc. -- as usual, October in Boulder is just beautiful. It is the prettiest month. 

We don't have the best spring. Ann Arbor had a fabulous spring, every year, flowers and trees and plants just busting out all over. Boulder is more subdued -- it's much dryer, and you can have snow in May, and all that. 

But fall! Fall in the Midwest is glorious, fall in the East is glorious, but fall in the Rocky Mountains is glorious too. And the skies are blue and the leaves are turning and it's awesome. We haven't had any rain for a while, which is bad, but it means the leaves stay on the trees longer. So pretty.

So here's where things stand right now. Rocket Boy's last day at work in St. Louis will be October 18th, and then he'll probably start driving home on the 19th (or the 20th, if necessary). He'll be home that Sunday or Monday. He's retiring, rather than resigning, so we get to keep our health insurance -- forever. (The twins get to keep it until they're 26.) If Rocket Boy dies before me, I still get to keep it as long as I live. This is very good.

His clearance finally came through with this contract job he got, so he'll be starting that as soon as he gets back (but we won't need to use the insurance they offer, which is more expensive than our government insurance).

He's going to start getting Social Security payments in a couple weeks, $2,421 each month. The twins will start getting their own Social Security payments at the same time, $720 a month until they graduate from high school. I have tentatively agreed to give them an allowance of $20/week until then (I control their SS money). Since their allowance has been $2.50/week for many years, this will be a huge bump, and I am a little uneasy about it. But now's the time to learn how to manage money, so I guess it will be good. Better than continuing with the $2.50 and then suddenly giving them almost $14,000 or whatever as a graduation present. Because I'm required by law to do that -- maybe I have to give it to them when they turn 18, I'm not sure. Teen B will of course put his thousands in the bank, but I hate to think what Teen A might do with a sudden windfall like that.

So maybe getting $20/week for a year and a half will help him learn more about how money works (and it will also reduce the windfall by a couple thousand). I don't know. I googled "how to teach teens about money" or something like that and found some websites with all these great ideas, most of which it was too late to try or else they just seemed impossible. "Talk to your teen about blah blah blah." Doesn't that require that the teen listen when you talk and not just say "OK, Boomer" to all your words of wisdom?

One thing about your kids getting older is that you realize how little control you have over their lives. Like, I worry about my kids' social lives, or lack thereof. Guess what? That is none of my business! When they were little I could have worked harder to set up play dates or whatever, but when they're in high school, no. 

I did suggest, a couple weeks ago, that they go to the Homecoming Dance. They both gave me these looks. "OK, OK," I said. "Never mind."

So, with money, I can certainly offer advice, but in less than a year and a half, I won't be able to control anything they do anymore. It's a terrifying thought, but also something of a relief. 

Anyway, after a few weeks of everything seeming like a mess -- Rocket Boy's homecoming, money, insurance, etc. -- it now seems to be working out. And I have two more weeks to (not) get ready for him.

***

Last night we had dinner at Panera, my choice (I wanted someplace cheaper than where we've been going -- last week at BJ's the bill was around $120 just for the three of us). I had a bowl of Autumn Squash soup, Teen B had a bowl of chicken noodle soup, and Teen A had a chicken avocado BLT, something like that. Plus drinks it was $45. I really miss the days when restaurant food was reasonable.

After dinner we went to Target to buy Halloween candy (for snacking, not for handing out). We bought M&Ms (both plain and peanut), Reese's peanut butter cups, and KitKats, and when we got home I brought out my Halloween candy dish and filled it up. It looks very lovely, and I realized that I did not want any of it. I'm totally off chocolate. Actually, I keep looking at it and thinking about eating something from it, but then I think, nah, wouldn't taste good. Honestly, if I could have thought of something to buy for me, I would have, but there isn't anything. The only kind of candy that appeals to me right now is mints, and there don't seem to be any Halloween mints. Christmas, now that may be a problem. But not Halloween. I don't know who is going to eat all this candy. Rocket Boy, maybe.

That seems like a good segue into the Mounjaro update.

• Weight the morning I took my first shot: 254.6
• Weight last Sunday: 236.8
• Weight this morning (after 16+ weeks on Mounjaro): 236.2
  

So I'm now down 18.4 lbs in a little over 16 weeks, for an average of 1.15 pounds per week. I don't like this slow losing! But I'm glad the number keeps going down. I was supposed to start the new higher dose, 7.5 mg, tomorrow, but the stupid King Soopers pharmacy made a mistake and gave me another box of 5 mg. That is, I picked up the new box of 7.5, but then I got some more robocalls saying my prescription was ready, so I went back a couple days later, got my rosuvastatin -- and another box of Mounjaro. "That's weird," I said, "but OK." Took it home, took it out of the bag, and realized it was another box of 5 mg. If I'd actually seen the box at the pharmacy, I would have noticed it was wrong -- the different doses come in different colored boxes -- but it was already packed in a paper bag and stapled shut.

I didn't think they'd take it back -- I don't think you can return medication -- and in any case, I didn't try. And the copay was $53, so I don't want to waste it. I'll just do four more weeks of 5 mg (and probably not lose much weight). However, I'm planning to take the shots every 6 days instead of 7, as a compromise. That means I'm going to take a shot tonight, and next weekend on Saturday night. We'll see how it goes.

I did better with exercise this week -- I took a walk on five of the last seven days. On a couple of those days I wasn't feeling energetic, so I just walked for 15 or 20 minutes. My usual walk takes me about 28 minutes, and then one day a week I try to go longer, so that was 42 minutes. I will try to take a walk today too, in a little bit.

I've been doing pretty well with cooking, though not so much with eating. One day last week I made a new (to me) recipe from the NY Times, for macaroni beef casserole, something like that (of course I made it with fake meat, which might have been part of the problem). I thought it would be similar to goulash, without actually BEING goulash, since I made that just last month. Well, it was complicated, took a long time to make, had to make a stupid ROUX, which is not my favorite thing to do, and in the end it wasn't very good. Plus, it gave me absolutely terrible heartburn, don't know why. Maybe the tomatoes, maybe the butter in the cheese sauce. Anyway, the kids didn't like it, and I didn't want to experience that heartburn again by eating leftovers for lunch, so into the compost it went. But first I left it sitting on the dining room table for a couple of days, under aluminum foil, but fruit flies can get under aluminum foil. Here it is just before I finally dumped it in the compost. I don't know if you can see the fruit flies.

Euw.

We are having a fruit fly problem. I put out a cup of apple cider vinegar for them, and a few jumped right in and died, but the rest went and sat in the macaroni beef casserole. Then I remembered you're supposed to put plastic wrap over the vinegar, with holes punched in it, so I tried that, but I think it wasn't then smelly enough and all the fruit flies went away. So today I took the plastic wrap off and mixed in some dish soap, but so far nobody's taking the challenge. Stupid fruit flies. Pretty soon it will be too cold for them, fortunately.

OK, well, I'm sure there were other things I was going to write about, but this is probably enough for today. I need to take my walk, and then the kids have homework. Plus, I need to finish reading last night's ghost story. I bought a book of ghost stories at the Bookworm last weekend and decided to read one each night all through October. What I didn't think about is that reading a ghost story at night (when your husband is in St. Louis for two more weeks) is perhaps not the best idea if you want to fall asleep easily. The noises this house makes! The other night there was a noise and both cats perked up their ears, like what the heck was that? But anyway, last night I started reading the next story and I thought, you know what, this seems like it's going to be very scary, and I'm just going to go to bed. So I did. But I need to finish it now, to stay on track. It'll probably be much easier to read in daylight.