Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (229)
October 21, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 183: Holiday Mondays are weird Mondays.
We took the kids to the park where they took minor injuries, both to the knees doing completely different things, and came home needing a big lunch and a rest. While my time with the trainer is definitely showing (tiny) results and helping reduce how badly my body reacts to this sort of flagrant overuse, it’s still pretty unhappy with the decision to take fresh air and several thousand steps instead of sitting in my soft but supportive office chair for several hours. My brain doesn’t mind the break, my body strenuously objects to the change in routine.
The subject of filial responsibility came up on Bluesky and it brought up my low-level creeping uncertainty about what’s in store for the future. Seven years ago, I had a consult with a lawyer who felt I had no legal reason to worry about making a break with the biodad and that I was on firm legal ground to stop supporting him. I would hope that after this many years of estrangement, and likely more by the time a nursing home comes into play, that my legal responsibility is similarly not. I would like to talk to a lawyer again in the near future to confirm their understanding of the CA filial responsibility law and confirm the likelihood that I would be pulled into that vortex without my consent.
Year 5, Day 184: We had house guests for the long weekend and the dynamic has been such a rollercoaster. Now we know what having three kids three years apart could have been like: constantly up and down. Love, hate, love, hate, love, hate, bicker bicker huuuuuuug. We three adults are simultaneously bemused and exhausted. I’ve so appreciated having the company of a long time friend who knows my medical stuff and is super mindful of COVID risks, so that’s been so good for my soul. But the children. ššµāš« I am so grateful they made the trip to visit us, we’re so lucky that they still love us after all that. At least I hope they do. š
Is my brain broken: Going over homework with JB, I seem to have just lost all memory of how we borrow numbers when subtracting. Like there’s a block of knowledge that used to live in my head but isn’t there anymore. What. I know that I keep losing memory but to lose a core set of computing rules that I’ve been using since I was 7 is really disturbing. After waiting for it to come back, I gave up and looked it up but it still feels foreign like this is knowledge I never knew at all. There’s nothing familiar about the facts I relearned. There aren’t any echoes of familiarity like addition or multiplication tables or division which may feel rusty but the memory-feel, the layers of having done that for years, is still there for those things. Not so for this part of subtraction.
Year 5, Day 185: Back to the metaphorical donut shop for me today after seeing our friends safely to the airport. I’m really tired both from prolonged socializing, as enjoyable as it was, and from catching some viral thing yesterday. Just my luck. I get to spend time with this friend for the first time in years and of course my body craps out after a few days. So rude. I have no regrets! Just continued annoyance that some of our meatsuits are so incredibly fragile. Everyone else is, of course, fine. I’m glad everyone else is fine, I just want to be in that group.
Today’s my first trainer day since Friday and have I already lost all conditioning? Last week, arms days were feeling pretty good. I was doing the max number of reps, not a huge number of course but high for me, and feeling a smidge stronger each day. Today, after only 20 modified pushups and 24 lateral raises, my face was in extreme danger of being ground into the carpet during planks. We barely made it to the end of three planks. Summary: noodle arms.
Probably doesn’t help anything that I’m not feeling well either. Maybe that’s connected. We’ll see!
Year 5, Day 186: So much drag, today, physically.
PiC finally got the second car to the shop! He had to go about it in a convoluted way since we had registered it as non-operational: get it registered as operational, tow it to the shop, get key maintenance and smogging done, drive it home, sell it. Registration was $164, smog check and a water thingie replacement ($600). It’s been SUCH a relief to have it out of the garage where it’s been a Very Tight squeeze for more than a year but it’ll be home again in only a few days so please join me in crossing my fingers that someone buys it before the end of this year.
Also it just occurred to me that I should just order JB more Vogmasks. If I attach the liner to them to protect them from stains, that’ll get them a better fit until the custom masks come in. The custom masks are a couple months out. This way, I can stop driving myself up the wall about the aged materials’ poor fit! I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before.
Year 5, Day 187: Today would have been a dog borrow day but for the mountain of work that towers over me. I took a risk earlier this week, hoping someone could come through for me but they couldn’t, so here I am with a week’s worth of work on a Friday. The saddest of faces I’m making. I ended up working until 11 pm.
I had no idea filial responsibility laws were a thing! It does seem like – at some point – you might want to dig into this, because you will sleep better having it sorted out. And also I suspect that even if this DID come into play, it’s likely the state would have much more reasonable limits than certain vampires would.
I’m gonna guess the feeling unwell is connected to the loss of conditioning in your workout. I hope you found a way to walk a middle line until you are back to your baseline.
Looking at this website: https://careindeed.com/blogs/legal-responsibility-for-your-parents-in-california
I think you have SEVERAL grounds to refuse filial support if it ever comes up. (Which I think it probably wouldn’t because I bet he’s covered by MediCal.) You are financially constrained and his living situation poses a threat to both your physical (you have a chronic disease) and mental (years of emotional and financial abuse) well-being. If it ever comes up, get a lawyer ASAP, but I think if it does come up you will be in the clear.