Except for getting COVID for the first time in February, 2024 started off as just business as usual until...
Three Funerals and a Memorial
Actually, it was two funerals and two memorials, but if you were aware
of movies in the 90s, you'll get the 30 year old reference to Three
Weddings and a Funeral. (Which I never actually saw.)
Heidi
One of my parents' long-time friends, Heidi, had a multi-year battle with ovarian cancer that she fought valiantly until she couldn't. She died in mid-March. What this has to do with me is that I had always admired her from the first time my parents and I went to Columbus to visit her and her husband when I was about thirteen. She had a witty, fun personality, she loved cats, and she and Kevin planted the seed for me to always seek out fun and interesting local restaurants. As it happened, Will and I moved to the same neighborhood of Columbus that they live in. Heidi wasn't particularly religious, so her husband hosted an informal memorial at a local funeral home.
We went, paid our respects, and were on our way back home when I got a phone call from my mother.
Ricky
"Your Cousin Ricky died last night. He was in Las Vegas. We don't know much more than that right now." I received the news in a daze. I had just shaken the hand of a grieving man that I had known since I was a kid, all the while already being on tenterhooks because my Auntie Carmen lay in hospice care. And now my cousin, 8 days my senior and the nearest thing I had to a sibling before ours were born, was dead. How do you process that? We learned over the next several weeks that he had overdosed on fentanyl. I hold no judgment of Ricky for that, only profound sadness that what small connection we had regained after drifting apart decades earlier was gone forever. And that in a span of 3 years, three generations of his family was lost. Him, my Uncle Mario, and our Grandpa Rosales.
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Family and Friends celebrating Ricky's life
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Auntie Carmen
My mom's eldest sister became family matriarch after my Grandma Lucy died in 1998, and thus filled a grandmother-like role for me and many of my cousins. She was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer the previous summer and she opted to fight the good fight--I was told later by an aunt that she never outwardly acknowledged that she might die of it even when it became obvious that she would. By Spring, she was being tended to by a rotating roster of family members while staying with my Aunt Mema and Uncle Paul and in late March my mom relayed that she stopped eating and drinking. And so everyone held their breath until she took her last on April 1st.
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Family gathered for Auntie Carmen
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Grandma Shaffer
Will and I were preparing to travel to California together to attend my Auntie Carmen's funeral and Cousin Ricky's memorial when he got news he had been dreading for months. His grandmother had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure the year before and had been under palliative care at home for months. I only met Grandma Shaffer a handful of times over the years, but one thing I knew quite well was that she was a woman who knew her own mind. And so when my mother in law told Will that his grandmother said she was ready to go about a week before we were scheduled to fly to Los Angeles, I knew that it meant that I was going to have to make the trip alone. Will packed up the car and headed to Pennsylvania, and somewhere between Columbus and Jefferson, she slipped away.
So, while I sat in a funeral mass for my Aunt, Will was standing before a room full of people eulogizing the woman who helped raise him. It was hard not being able to be there for one another in the midst of all that, but with frequent text messages and phone calls, we got through it.
Health and Wellness
Reverse Puberty
How much do you know about perimenopause? Turns out, the average person doesn't know much. Hell, the average medical professional doesn't get more than a cursory overview, and that even includes OBGYNs.
Looking back on my last 2 year-in-review write-ups, I have to chuckle because I was writing about it before I knew what it was. Turns out, I don't have a gluten sensitivity--I'm just in perimenopause. For the uninitiated, it's the ramp up to actual menopause (which is a 1 day event, 365 days after the last period) and it can start in your mid-late 30s and last as long as 10 years. There are an absolute slew of symptoms that you wouldn't necessarily associate with it. For instance:
- Itchy ear canals
- Waking up at 3:30 am every night with racing thoughts
- RAGE
- Aching joints
- Depression
- Mind fog
- Rapid weight gain
I could go on. I fell down the rabbit hole of Reddit and research, found a local physician through the Menopause Society (Formerly the North American Menopause Society, or NAMS), and got myself some hormone replacement therapy. It was as revelatory as getting diagnosed with ADHD and sleep apnea and getting medical treatment for both. And I've always described those events as what it felt like after I got glasses for the first time after squinting and sitting 3 feet from the tv for months. Within hours of applying my first patch, I felt a veil lift on my mood an energy. Within weeks, I slept better through the night, and within months my right knee stopped waking me up in agony every morning.
If you're an Elder Millennial, it's time to look into all of this, babe. I like to think that our generation got adequate preparation for puberty, but hardly anyone I know was told shit about (peri) menopause besides having hot flashes and needing more lube. And most of us didn't expect anything before maybe our late 40s or early 50s. Nobody really sees this coming at 38/39/40, and I sincerely hope that this changes as more of us enter this phase. HRT isn't going to be for everyone, but as it turns out, estrogen protects our cardiovascular systems, brain function, muscle mass and bone density and we have estrogen receptors all over our bodies, such as in joints and skin. So it's worth looking into if you want to avoid becoming a frail old lady someday.
Speaking of muscle mass...
I Can Deadlift You
After 2 years of CrossFit, I realized how much I enjoyed the workouts that involved slow, controlled sets of weight lifting with barbells over anything else. All of my perimenopause research also taught me that at this stage of my life, I have to do what I can to retain muscle mass and bone density, which strength training is the gold standard for. And since I especially loved deadlifts and backsquats, I started working with the weightlifting coach at my gym who was game to create powerlifting programs for me even though she herself did Olympic weightlifting. She programmed my sets and I executed them for 12 weeks at a time until it was time to test for a new personal record. At the end of my second 12-week cycle, I hit a 162kg/357lb deadlift, a 65kg/143.2 lb bench press, and a 130kg/286 lb backsquat. If that sounds crazy--I could probably have done a little bit more of each.
I'm quite proud of this, of course, but I did learn an important lesson about the protein piece of the puzzle. See, another fun thing that comes with perimenopause is muscle atrophy. Estrogen does a lot of work to keep your muscle mass up, and as it declines, you have to compensate by doing strength training to stimulate muscle fibers and you have to eat more protein than you ever thought you would. If you do the weights without adequate protein, you put yourself in a catabolic state (break down muscles), don't recover as well, are more susceptible to injuries, etc. My gym periodically hosts a mobile DEXA scan that shows you your body composition, and I got one scan done in March and another in September. My results after 2 cycles of powerlifting showed that I lost some muscle mass everywhere and gained fat--mostly around my abdomen. Oops.
So eat your protein and your greens.
Scandinavitour 2.0
In honor of Will's turning 40 this year, I told him to pick our travel destination since I decided where we went for my 40th. At first he fancied train travel from Switzerland up through Germany, and then at some point he took a left and chose Iceland instead. After all, I had been telling them for years about my dream trip to Iceland, Denmark and Norway that was my 35th birthday gift to myself--and I was thrilled for a chance to return. We spent 2 weeks doing a loose re-creation of what I had dubbed Scandinavitour, with the key differences that we spent more time in Iceland and didn't take a day trip to Sweden as I had done. The first week was a whirlwind tour between Copenhagen, Oslo, and Bergen and the second week was a much more relaxing stay in Iceland. We rented a car and took up an Airbnb cottage about 30 minutes outside of Reykjavik, and aside from a day driving around the Golden Circle and a day exploring Reykjavik, we mostly rested and enjoyed the countryside view. As amazing as the trip was, one big lesson that we took away was that we would enjoy our big, long trips a lot more if we minimized the amount of times that we schlep our bags from place to place. So unless we go on a cruise with multiple port stops, we're unlikely to take on quite so many cities in one trip again.
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| Enjoying our 5 year marriage anniversary in Denmark |
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Will contemplates the beauty of Nærøfjord in Norway
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The Northern Lights, as seen from our Airbnb in Iceland
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Everything, Everywhere All at Once
A New Job
It all started at Corey and Ariel's wedding. As Will and I stood on the lawn with our friends, reveling in the gorgeous surrounding of the farmstead nestled up in the mist of the Blueridge Mountains, he told me at last that he missed his friends more than he hated Pennsylvania.
And that was all I needed to hear.
See, I never really wanted to leave Pittsburgh in the first place. We only left for the economic opportunity of my new job. Well, that's not entirely true. While I've been shuffling from one corner of the country to another and traveling the world for the past 40+ years, my husband has spent 99.9% of his existence living in Western PA. He was ready to move far, far away and not look back. Ohio wasn't exactly his first choice, but it was Not Pennsylvania and that was good enough. As infrequently as I traveled back to PA, I did miss it terribly. Since he had been working full time remote and my company was holding firm on a hybrid schedule that required employees to live near an office, it would be down to me to find a new job that would allow us to return.
So I did. Over the next 3 months I applied to several places before I finally reached out to an old colleague looking for job leads at his company, and he ended up hiring me himself. A week after we returned from Scandinavitour, I started my new job and went into the throes of packing for...
A New Home
My new job is fully remote with expectation of occasional travel to the headquarters in Chicago. Just before we left for Europe, we took my in-laws, my dad and stepmom out to dinner as a very belated Christmas gift and then announced that I had a new job and we were seeking to come back to Pennsylvania as soon as we could find housing. Without missing a beat, his parents offered up Grandma Shaffer's house, which had been standing empty since April. (It was as if they had already discussed this...hmm...)
Will and I talked it over throughout our trip, as the implications of this offer were significant. For starters, it's in a small town an hour away from Pittsburgh city proper. But most importantly for my husband, it's the site of his childhood. The original house was rebuilt from the studs up after he left for college, but for all intents and purposes, it's where he had grown up. And he never, ever saw himself returning there to live. Couple that with the residual grief of losing his grandmother earlier in the year, and you have yourself a heady cocktail of emotions. I, of course, have none of that kind of baggage when it comes to the house. Only the nervousness that comes with living so far out of my comfort zone environmentally and, let's face it, politically. But the offer of a spacious, relatively new house without the worry of finding a landlord willing to rent to a couple with 3 cats made too much sense not to take up.
And so, the week before Thanksgiving we moved into Grandma's house and started a new chapter in the hills of Greene County. Being home for the holidays was such a joy, as it's just a walk across the road to my in-laws. They hosted us and my parents for Thanksgiving, and we hosted them and a great aunt for Christmas Eve dinner, and then spent Christmas Day dinner with my parents.
We don't know how long we will be here in this house, but for now it's just so, so good to be home in PA.
...And Everything Else
I'm still not ready to talk much about the other events of November 2024. I will say that I am proud of myself for canvassing for the first time for a state senator, and also proud of Will for accompanying me on one of my shifts. I didn't find out the results until the morning after, but I think my body knew before my brain did because I awoke curled up like a shrimp with a knot of anxiety in my stomach.
I've tried to make sense of it all, and I find some small cold, mirthless comfort in knowing that what happened in the US is what has been happening to
incumbent governments all over the world this year. We aren't that special, and this is much, much bigger than any singular issue or candidate.
It's only been in the writing of that last paragraph that it dawned on me that there's a correlation with what happened in Kappa's elections this year as well. I'm still a volunteer and since July I have been leading a small but mighty team of volunteers who are determined to help make financial management in our collegiate chapters more successful.
Looking Ahead
This year's entry did start and end on rather dour notes. Certainly, it's been a challenging year, but there were plenty of high notes too. Such as the Summer Olympics and Paralympics, which were so much fun to watch that I plan to enter the lottery to attend events in LA in 2028. After all, I've got family all over that city! Even though I trained in powerlifting, watching the Olympic weightlifting events was that much more exciting because I appreciated their technique in a new way. Unfortunately, with the move I lost access to a plethora of weightlifting equipment. Don't worry--there's a lot I can do with my own bodyweight and a kettlebell. Being on a couple acres of land also means no shortage of yardwork for us to do either.
Also, I bought a new car for myself for the first time in 16 years and it's made driving fun again.
I got my nose re-pierced for my birthday. I had it done when I was 20 years old, but the stud fell out and the hole closed up one night and I didn't get around to getting it re-done until now.
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Getting pierced at 20 vs 42
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And here's a biggie that I didn't mention in my 2023 year-in-review recap: we got a new cat! Westley came to us just days before New Year's Eve last year. He bonded to me right away, but took longer with everyone else in the house. Now he's very much a part of our little pride of cats and cat-like-humans. In many ways he reminds me of Norman, whom we still miss tons.
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Look at our handsome Ham Son
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We hope to return to Japan in 2025 because we enjoyed our 2023 visit that much. Sadly, Alyse won't be there anymore because she's accepted a position back in Orlando, but that also means it will be much easier to visit her Stateside again.
And obviously, being back home in PA means that I get to see more of some of my dearest friends much more often than before. We've barely been back for a month and have already had a few people over, and will be having some friends over to celebrate NYE tonight with a long game of Mario Party Jamboree.
Wishing you and yours well in 2025.
