Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (231)
November 4, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
FIRST, an activism / political announcement!
If you can help with phonebanking or door knocking or ballot curing (just contacting people to let them know that something was wrong with their ballot so they can go fix it in time – people WANT those calls), go here to check for opportunities. I couldn’t get into the events that I was available for because they were full – which is amazing! – but if you can, I’m sure that would go a long way! The campaign may be optimistic but we still have to do everything we can up until the clock runs out.
Year 5, Day 196: Nicole and Maggie and I are on the same wavelength right now. I was answering an SES/environmental survey last week and it asked:
– how often did you put off buying something you needed because you didn’t have the money?
– how much difficulty did you have paying bills?
– have you set aside emergency funds that would cover your expenses for 3 months?
– how many times in the past month did you run out of food because you didn’t have money to buy more?
– how many times in the past month did you or your child skip a meal because you didn’t have money to buy more?
20 years ago, the answers to those questions were mostly “more than 1” (except the emergency funds one). I don’t ever want to stop being grateful for being financially comfortable now. I especially don’t ever want to stop being grateful that my kids don’t have to live with those fears and worries. I don’t want any kids to have to live hungry and wonder where their next meal is coming from.
Having enough money to help others and to have some extras, or to buy things just because I need them feels like such a luxury. We have several broken things we still haven’t replaced (our drying rack, our colander, I’m sure other things that I haven’t cared enough to do something about) but we CAN afford to replace them if we really wanted to. I do choose not to replace the smaller things to save for the bigger things a lot, but we replaced some kitchenware recently and I’m really happy about that.
Of course I still won’t waste money. Clipper screwed up a $20 transaction and never assigned it to my card. After a phone call last week where I was told to expect the money to come back to me by last Friday, I asked Chase to reverse the transaction. I’m surprised they just credited my account immediately. Usually that’s AmEx level of customer service, not Chase.
I’d like to be at the point where $20 didn’t matter, or $200, or $2000 or even $20,000 so that we could easily afford to give that away or put it into something sustainable to help people who have hit hard times. That’s the next dream.
Year 5, Day 197: Homework time with JB has been a nightmare these past two weeks. Their whole grade is mostly struggling with division, we’ve asked the teacher for some extra materials to figure it out. Their struggle wakes up my only semi-dormant stressors about struggling with math and it’s just a downward spiral from which there is no recovering. We’ve enlisted educator aunties and uncles to help out because we (PiC and I) are NOT good teachers in this situation. JB came out of their weekend tutoring session saying they still didn’t understand it and I needed to suss out whether that was lack of confidence or an accurate assessment. I was not looking forward to that attempt.
When they told me that they had math homework “and it’s confusing” today, my heart sank to my toes. I simply could not face going back to that place of STRESS so I didn’t until after 6 pm. Shockingly, though we had take it really slow and we needed the special graph paper, today was the first set of homework where I could gently point out a few simple errors (which usually provokes intense shame, freezing and tears), and walk them back to the point of the mistake to help them spot the mistake so they could rework the problems. They had to finish the full set of problems after dinner but they completed it all without a single tear. That’s a first. *huge sigh of relief*
Thank everything for chosen family who are good at the things we are not good at!
Year 5, Day 198: So much deeply depressing news from work on multiple fronts this week. Illnesses (multiple), injuries (multiple), people leaving, pets dying, car accidents, sudden deaths, and more. We’ll get through but I am really feeling it today with neither dog or garden to bring me even brief respite and solace.
Brushing and flossing one kid’s teeth, I sent PiC to take over flossing on the other kid because I was overcome with exasperation that I’m going to be doing this for 6+ more years until their dentist feels like they’re capable of doing a decent job. I don’t love helping w/people hygiene the way I love doing this stuff for dogs. I could clean dog ears, trim their nails, brush their teeth and everything all day and still love it. Not so for kids. Not so even for my own self, to be fair. Human body maintenance is more exasperating to me than canine maintenance.
“Gaming the insurance industry is what marriage is for, right?” Sherlock, Elementary.
Year 5, Day 199: Halloween! The first morning all year we haven’t had to roust a child from their bed. Both of them were up and getting dressed or yelling about getting dressed (Smol Acrobat) by the time I was able to move. They loved their costumes and were delighted with them all day long. I’m rather proud of my first and probably only attempt at making a costume. Very imperfect but it worked out with PiC adding all the embellishments. (At the last minute. I was done with my part of the costume a month ago. This is why we can’t work together as a team concurrently, we’d make each other batty. On the Gantt chart of life, we’re always at opposite ends of the project.)
We took Smol Acrobat to JB’s school parade and they were dopey-cute. Smol Acrobat kept cutting across from the parent side to the student side to hug JB and then sprinting back to leap at me in bellyflop position, elbow and knee out, to catch. I should bruise up quite nicely by tomorrow, thank you very much.
We crammed in most of a day of work before taking the kids, plus bonus kid, to our usual haunt for a round of leisurely trick or treat. I’m proud of Smol Acrobat being loud (for them) and enthusiastic about the whole thing, they’re the more reserved sort in a lot of situations. I’m glad they can almost keep up with JB for at least part of the time. They didn’t last long though, as expected. We treated the kids to our favorite local burgers and JB got to stay up late because they’ve got a teacher in-service day tomorrow anyway. We did a whole lot of work and cleaning before calling it a night, with aching aching bones.
Year 5, Day 200: The weather has turned very nippy overnight, I’ve needed extra layers to stay warm. I’m also out of patience with the downish comforter whose contents keep shifting so that by the middle of the night the down is piled off to the sides. I don’t know how I could be using a blanket wrong but I’m tired of waking up shivering. I’m putting a Sherpa blanket on my Black Friday shopping list, unless I see something better before then. I wanted something thick and plush like this but it’s got terrible reviews. This one has a greater proportion of far better reviews but it looks really thin. Recommendations welcome!
Much sadface. Our side view mirror had a run in with another car’s side view mirror. Theirs was fine but ours is not. Speaking of not spending on broken things! Collectively the other smaller broken things I’m not spending on doesn’t add up to the cost of this fix but that’s money we will put toward this expense instead. It is still a zero sum game for those of us who still need to earn income. It’s going to cost at least four figures to fix, not how I wanted to spend it, but we’re lucky that this is just sad and not devastating.
This quote hit me where I live: “When someone whose job it is to nurture you hurts you instead, it can’t help but have a profound and lasting effect on your sense of who you are.” – Sherlock, Elementary.
I mentally have pushed myself to get “used” to our new SES, at least in terms of not stressing about things that don’t matter. I won’t waste money and I’ll go after small amounts that I’m due. But sometimes we do throw money at problems, because our time/stress is more of an issue than cash flow for some things. My upbringing wasn’t like yours, definitely was much more money stressed than we are as adults.
And yes, brrr. We finally had to turn on the heat for the year, and all my sweaters are in rotation. My SIL got us a huge discount on a Pendonton wool blanket, and I highly recommend them (or other wool) for a sort of buy-it-for-life warm winter bed layer. But, $$$$, so may not be practical, and also doesn’t fit your plush desire