Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (234)
November 25, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 215: I might? maybe? be through the worst of my fibro flareup from the weekend. The prior weekend, and then last week was entirely too much – that was predictable but maybe more so in hindsight. This week is going to be a new kind of tough.
I’m tracking 15 shipments for our November families, the coordinators are having a lot of trouble reaching the recipient families reliably now and that translates to a lot of extra work for both of us.
I can cross the blanket off my shopping list for now. This wonderful gift of a quilt has kept me snug and warm since the cold snap and I’m very grateful for it.
Year 5, Day 216: This cold front is serious! It’s no longer advisable to wander out and about without a heavy coat, not if you want to still feel your fingers after five minutes.
I attempted to negotiate my hosting fees down and didn’t get further than a 20% discount leaving me with an $850 bill. That’s not going to work so we’re tackling the storage that’s causing the whole issue. By we I mean, planning to ask a web savvy friend if he has time to help and mentioning this to a very blog savvy former blogger now dear friend and having them volunteer to have a peek around the guts of this thing. Whew. Thank goodness for people who are smarter than me.
Mentally singing “Everything is awful!” Year end work stuff has me completely on edge and you know what we didn’t need? We didn’t need a BOMB CYCLONE and ATMOSPHERIC RIVER this week. That’s what. This couldn’t have waited a week? Or even just two days? This ruined a plan we had been looking forward to all year.
Year 5, Day 217: Reading Joe’s Dividend Growth Portfolio 2024 was a nice little dopamine generator. Entirely aside from my own preoccupations with money, I still enjoy reading about how people handle their money and seeing their outcomes. Maybe a little bit for comparisons but a lot of it is just nice to see different perspectives even if it’s not necessarily something I’d be doing. They travel the roads I don’t so I like the sneak peeks. I have a tidy little dividend stocks portfolio of 15 individual stocks that I built very slowly between 2009 through 2020 mostly. I made a few impulse purchases in 2021 and 2023 of COST and TGT. I don’t do anything with that portfolio, I just take the dividends and reinvest them into our index funds. All but two of the stocks that I’ve purchased since 2009 have done really well. The one bank stock I selected was acquired by another company and that’s just been holding steady. Holy sheets, I bought COST at what I thought was an exhorbitant $362 in 2021, and it’s nearly $1000 per share now?? This is the first time I’ve bothered to look at those prices in a while!
My worst performers have grown 30%; that’s 4 of them. My best performers have grown 340 and 540, that’s 2 of them. The rest of them fill in the range in between. Not too shabby considering I’ve never bought tech stocks which has, I’m sure, been to the detriment of our bottom line. I preferred stable solid companies that I could ignore; chasing tech stocks even if they seem like a sure thing in hindsight is really not my speed. There’s a lot of talk about Nvidia and the like but, tempted though I am to mimic the 1500’s financial portfolio, eh. Also I hate all this “AI” nonsense. It feels gross to profit off it when I hate the very thought of it and it’s poisoning so many useful tools. In my industry at least, and a few others I know of, it’s primarily used for fraud so I have a particular hatred for it.
Year 5, Day 218: Meetings, so many meetings. So many. I did get a heap of work done but like snowdrifts, many many more heaps built up while I wasn’t looking. I had to cut myself off and end my night well before midnight because I still feel awful and I need to get better. I keep reminding myself that they aren’t worth killing myself for. I’m also reminding myself of that in regards to my training. My training sets are adjusted every week but I have that grade school type need to always maximize my reps per set even when I feel bad. But that’s not good! Whether it’s fibro bad, or CFS bad, or virally sick bad, or some new thing, I have to be better about pacing myself and pushing myself. The trainer did say that the work within a week is more important than any single day of work so that gives me a level of flexibility I can work with and still feel some pride in it.
In lighter news, I did my first full run through of Elementary not too long ago, and then ran The Diplomat a while later. I just realized that Alfredo is Ato Essandoh is Stuart Heyford!
Visually my problem was that as Stuart he seems VERY tall, but as Alfredo next to Sherlock and Joan he seemed to be roughly average, or at least not toweringly tall. He’s my favorite character in The Diplomat. The shit he has to try to overcome!
Year 5, Day 219: Day three of this week’s atmospheric river / bomb cyclone thingie, and today’s fun news are flash flood warnings all over. So far we’re ok on the flooding front but I’m keeping a wary eye out and won’t probably be encouraging the kids to play in the rain and the gutter like I used to do. There’s something about the gloom that’s made today feel not much like an actual day of the week. It’s more like a weird proto-day.
It’s extra cozy in the house after trekking out into the teeth of the storm to pick up JB from school, and I am so grateful that we have a safe warm home. Also telling our roof to hang in there! Don’t leak now! We’re in the process of getting you all spiffed up! Please send our roof alllll the coping vibes.
Still sick but symptoms are much more mild than usual, so despite my guilt over making JB skip TWO after school activities this week solely because I didn’t feel up to taking them, it also feels like it was justified because my body really needed that rest.
