July 2021

Here is a link to some photos and videos taken from July

Independence Day Weekend

We enjoyed a 4-day weekend at the house in Binghamton for July 4th.  The weather was cool with some occasional rain, and so we spent a lot of time outside visiting some of the usual parks, etc. in the area. That time of the year is peak firefly season, and those are the best fireworks in my opinion. We also encountered several salamanders as you'll see in some photos, which always makes me happy. In a break from a long period of social isolation, we invited the Vetticatt family over for dinner, who we knew from church and who I know from work (Matt and Jen are both professors in the Chemistry department). We made kebabs and had a BBQ in the backyard, and then came inside to play a round of Blokus when the evening downpour began. July has been wet, with regular rainfall interrupted by occasional downpour. You really have to take advantage of any dry moments in between, which we did when we lit a few fireworks in the front yard just to see how interested Alex would be. The town also had quite a few fireworks as that lasted well into the night, apparently making up for last year.

Fake Beaches and Other Outings

Apart from our visit to Binghamton, we also got out to various parks in the Hudson Valley area that you'll see in the photos. Bowdoin Park is a nice big space with a sandbox, playground, splashpad and some trails by a wetland area with snapping turtles. Earl Reservoir Park is a nice paved loop trail around a reservoir with a fake sandy beach. The beach area is private but no one seems to notice or care if we are there, except when Alex and I went this month and got kicked out. So we instead went over to a nearby field of wildflowers that Alex enjoyed picking. Speaking of fake beaches, we made a trip to Lake Welch Beach near Harriman State Park, which has a huge beach with imported sand that stretches about a mile. It was super crowded with people coming up from the city, playing in the water or grilling on the nearby lawns, and in that sense it did feel like a real beach. We also made it back to a weird metal sculpture garden that is nearby a pizza place that we like, an odd place to go for dinner. And we took a trip up to New Paltz to walk the rail trail, eat out, and enjoy the hipper side of a small college town where you can find things like a gourmet deli for dogs.

Job Hunting

The end of July marks the end of any allowance from my employer for working from home. Because we are settled in at our apartment mostly where Alex's therapy clinic is, and that is 2.5 hours away from where I work, I've been applying for other jobs so that I won't have to be gone during the week, as it was before the pandemic. This could mean a job at a small college in the Hudson Valley, something in New York City that has at least a partial remote work allowance, or most likely a fully remote job as many employers (but not mine) are more open to that now.  Of the applications I've sent out so far, this month I heard back from one at the Baylor College of Medicine, Section of Infectious Diseases. More specifically, a group of researchers there are looking for someone to help edit grant proposals and publications. I had a couple chats with them over Zoom, and then edited a couple documents as a trial. It could be a good situation for both of us, and they are open to me working remotely if their human resources can allow it. So I'll have more news on that next month.

Other Family Updates

Alex continues to enjoy physical therapy in addition to the other things he usually works on with speech and ABA. They've been able to get him to push himself on a scooter, as seen in a video below, which is something we haven't been able to do. Unfortunately Alex has decided that he no longer wants to sit on the potty to poo, although he does still sit to pee. So this marks a step backward in potty training, and is an example of some of the rigid behaviors we deal with. Another example is his sudden refusal to wear any new shoes except for two kinds that he was already wearing, and one of those is an old used pair of Nikes, which he's outgrown. I scoured eBay and the internet trying to find another pair of those Nikes that is a size larger, but with no luck, and so I bought something that looked very similar. He could tell I was trying to pull a switcharoo though and won't wear them. So we're stuck with his other pair of Target shoes for now. New York is very green in the summer, and Alex takes full advantage of picking flowers and weeds everywhere we go. He kept saying "boc" when he picked a weed and we didn't know why, until we realized that was how he says "broccoli." So he does make some associations with his limited vocabulary. Alex was home a few days with a bit of a fever and cough, and also some vomiting, but Becky and I didn't seem to get it. Was it Covid? I'm not sure. While at the house for July 4th weekend, I worked on a little landscaping project in the front yard making a stone bench and arranging some flagstones in an area that was never landscaped when we bought the house. The stone bench was more work than it looks like because as with a retaining wall, you have to dig down and get things as level as you can on a firm base (at least that's how I approached it). The flagstones I found buried in large numbers beneath years of ivy growth in the backyard, so I thought this might be a good way to give them a new life -- it's an ongoing project.  Looking ahead to later in August, we are are excited for our plans to visit family out west for the first time in a while, but also a bit worried about another wave of COVID due to the delta variant, low vaccination rates and general fatigue in taking measures to keep cases down.