Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (251)
March 24, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 330: This is going to be an incredibly hard week emotionally. A big change is going into effect and at the same time, I have a complicated management situation that requires more handholding each week than any one of my regulars need in a year. There are compelling reasons for this. I do hope we get through it intact on the other side. I won’t regret doing the right thing even if things don’t work out, but MAN do I hope they work out. I also need to make sure that I pull back enough that I don’t drain myself dry trying to be there for them. There’s also a reorg in the works as well and the changes from that reorg will give us an opportunity to fix longstanding problems and are going to be really sad. I’ve cried sad stress tears between meetings for the past week. At least I’m letting it out.
I think the universe took pity on me because we knew these things were landing this week. I haven’t seen neighborhood dogs for three weeks. This morning, PiC spotted one of them and hailed me before I missed her. Then the beautiful black lab we might see once a week showed up! He was as happy to see me as I was to see him, he took a running leap and tackled me. He’s never done that before and got extra hugs and love for it even as I apologized for encouraging bad manners. We had our other neighbor scheduled to pop by to pick up a treat I had for her, and when I came out to deliver that, my third dog friend showed up! We had a quick game of catch. What a treat for me. The spirit uplift from the trio held me up all day, despite all the Monday frustrations.
Year 5, Day 331: A second game of catch with dog friend, and two giant pitties needed petting. Again, I appreciate the confluence of whatever that’s taking pity on me and my nerves. Dog time is the best therapy. It’s keeping my blood pressure much steadier than it would otherwise be after a day of meetings without any time to get real work done, and then having to get that work done. And then having my wifi cut out on me.
Know something funny though? My “genius” solution to my inability to remember to stop reps during workouts was to count backwards. I did that. It revealed that I can’t count backwards. 20, 19, 18, 16, 15, oh wait 17, 14?
Then I went back to counting normally except my brain was still all turned around so I caught myself counting like Smol Acrobat a few months back: twenty-eight, twenty-nine, twenty-ten, twenty…wait.
I remember how bad I was at math beyond algebra in high school and wonder how much of it was my brain failing to stay on the rails long enough to follow the logic.
Year 5, Day 332: I knew it’d be too much to hope for a third day of dog petting but I hoped anyway. We had a power outage instead. Thankfully it didn’t last too long.
It was a molasses brain kind of day. Everything was slow and sloggy. I could never find my flow state so every single file I reviewed felt like a heavy lift. Every email felt impossible to resolve, even the easy ones, and after 3 hours of processing one stack of work there was still more than half left. That was demoralizing even though it was really because I had twice as much work as usual. I took my computer to bed after dinner vaguely thinking maybe I’d get a thing or two done, I tend to work whenever I’m on the computer even if work wasn’t on the agenda, but this was not that kind of night. Thankfully my only specific goal was to write a handful of words and anything else was bonus.
Whether this is because of emotion overload finally maxing out my brain or because Smol Acrobat’s virus is waging war on me, it’s just not a getting things done kind of day or night.
Year 5, Day 333: Oh. Of course my brain was slow yesterday, I was slowly coming down with a bug. Today was extra rough, not quite brain fog but halfway there, with extra aches and dizziness and greying out episodes. Better than the first time this happened though, didn’t have a near miss again. I just felt bad.
PiC took over my afterschool run, Smol Acrobat and I were two sickies in bed this afternoon.
I read up on IRS Revenue Ruling 2023-2 that changes the way assets are treated if they’re in an irrevocable trust. Our trust is revocable until one of us dies but more importantly at least until 2026, this won’t impact us because we aren’t anywhere near the federal estate tax threshold ($13.61 million). In 2026, it’ll come down to $5M. Maybe we’ll aim for the stars and that threshold, but I have my doubts that we’d be able to grow our assets enough to hit that amount in the next two years barring any big unanticipated changes. My read on the horizon is that all big unanticipated changes are going to be negative for our net worth, not positive.
Year 5, Day 334: This is the hardest day of the week so I’m trying to also remember the good things right now.
The neighbors have custody of a new wee tiny puppy for a week and I got to introduce said puppy to playing with a Chuck it! He was ecstatic.
Q of BraverMountain finished his own personal Iditarod after the race organizers removed him from the official race. So many happy tears for them and Queen Pepe, she who does NOT ride in the dog box because she runs!
I planted four more garlic cloves in the garden last week and three of them are putting down roots. The blueberry bush is starting to put out leaves and already has three beautiful little pink blossoms with more blossom looking buds on a lot of branches. The blackberry bush is starting to show some signs of life, too.
This one isn’t good, just news: I’m keeping an eye on the Mt. Spurr news out of Alaska, we’ve got friends there.
I’m sorry things are hard and I hope you got through okay – and with more happy doggy encounters!
I missed that update on irrevocable trusts (which my parents have) – thanks for mentioning it.
I’ve been away in London/Brussels/Amsterdam and jet lag is still biting me (4 days since I came home). UGH. But the trip was good even though it was hard to come home.