Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (239)
December 30, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 250: Spiral cut ham is amazing and makes for some amazing leftovers-lunches. Who knew? If I had a deep freezer (one of my “if we could manage and afford a bigger house” sorts of dreams), I would have hams in there at all times. Dreams.
Also, and this is probably not news but, I cannot be trusted to go to Costco alone. If I’m not getting myself lost (which is most of the time), then I’m picking up that ten pound bag of pancake mix because it’s $4 for 2 lbs elsewhere but only $10 for 10 lbs here! FOOL. What 4 person family needs 10 lbs of pancake mix?? We do not have pancakes that often. I plead holiday / end of year brain. I guess we will have to have them that often to get through this.
Woof. Mostly unrelated: I’m logging our credit card bills due in January and they are double the normal budget. Lots of one-off expenses that added up so fast. I think we can cover it through cashflow but it’ll be a bit tight for a while. Also daycare’s price increase hits THIS month, I forgot. $2400. A month. ðŸ˜
I solved the toe blister mystery: I’d worn my cotton socks for a couple days and my precious toes hated them so much they all developed blisters. As soon as my wool socks came back on, they healed up.
Year 5, Day 251: It’s a four KitKat kind of day. It’s cold and dreary out. There’s very little growing in the garden. There is no furry-feet family member to greet me at the door when I get back from a loooong morning of running errands. Or to be snoring and then looking at me through bleary eyes as I tiptoe back in trying not to disturb them. Harrumph.
Speaking of Costco fails: We found Boudin clam chowder in the refrigerator section. I didn’t expect it to be as good as the restaurant when I bought it but then we (uncharacteristically) wandered through an area with a Boudin, had their clam chowder, and now the Costco version tastes flat (to me). I bet it would have been just fine if we hadn’t had some that was better. Taste bud inflation is terrible. PiC likes it well enough but that just goes to show you how easy he is to feed with my less than stellar cooking.
BUT. I put in a big order of snacks for my Lakota sponsee and staple foods for their family. I squared away raises for all of my people before the last days of the year trickled away. Those are the good things.
Year 5, Day 252: I’m doing big time grey rocking with certain people this holiday. I’m doing a good job! I’m not intensely irritated, I am simply a person floating out of time.
Wait no, I am irritated. By all this talk about trying to revoke the FDA approval for the polio vaccine. I can’t tell if they’re seriously this reckless and horrible (yes) or if it’s primarily intended to drum up panic among those of us who have an iota of sense and being reckless and horrible is just a bonus. I don’t know if he was the LAST American (as purported on Bluesky) to have used an iron lung and died, but this just makes me shake my head all over again about how utterly awful these people are: Paul Alexander, forced into an iron lung by polio in 1952, dies at 78
Year 5, Day 253: Do you like shinies? I keep saying that I don’t need any more earrings, but I love them so. Turns out Kythryne Aisling’s shop (I found her on Bsky) has a selection of perfect earrings to fill a specific genre of earrings that has been missing from my collection: small, dangly and tough so I can wear them all the time without discomfort or damaging them. I’d been going through these silly cycles of wearing earrings for some special thing or another and then leaving them off so long the holes would partially close up again (as they always do between earrings) because my preferred earring styles are too fragile to endure me being me. I got myself the elephants, the forbidden candy (they look like jolly ranchers!), fauxfire twisties, and kitsune. As a kid I always envied people who could wear all kinds of earrings. My metal allergies limited me to a very few pairs that wouldn’t cause infections. But now, if I never let them close up, I can wear anything I want! This is an unexpectedly fun jewelery era for me. Also Kythryne has very cute dogs and I appreciate the dog pictures on the skyline.
My sinuses are making their presence Very Known right now and I hate it. They’re angry. My heart rate keeps doing weird things late at night so I can’t get even the minimal rest I normally manage, I keep laying awake later and later.
Year 5, Day 254: A black lab encounter: Neighborhood dog came over for love, of course I obliged, and then wouldn’t leave. He kept looking at Smol Acrobat and PiC with “but you haven’t petted me yet? I cannot leave?” eyes. I gave him extra pets to make up for the fact that they couldn’t come pet him.
Saying this really quietly here so as not to jinx myself: shipping issues have plagued the dozens of shipments for the Lakota families so I was expecting the same for all my orders this month: books, clothes, prescription refills.
Also a nice surprise: a sale of a very old swimsuit (still in remarkably good condition) on Poshmark! I never open the app anymore, I just leave my listings up and occasionally it bears some fruit. In this case, $13 eventually. I also followed up on that money side quest from the Swiss government. Two weeks and that lady had done nothing with the revised information to send the bank transfer. She didn’t even start processing it right away when I followed up. “In a few days” she’ll start it. Cough up our money! They should be required to pay interest on money they’ve held onto for too long like the US government has to when they refund us.
I’ve hit the point in the holiday season grind where three out of four of us are sick. I’m just dragging myself through each day with gritted teeth. Not my favorite but also not super surprised. Everything is topsy turvy this year, our relaxing family time was swapped to the new year and that’s now in question because they are sick.
