Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (252)
March 31, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 337: I chopped off another 3-4 inches of hair. It’s been down to my waist for over a year and now it’s only halfway down my back. It’s very nearly at a length that I don’t find inconvenient for washing and drying! Naturally, after the second chop, I dreamed about waking to hair going down to my knees. Clearly this too long hair thing has been haunting my psyche. Or the hair has become representative of the unmanageable nature of life now. That’s also true.
Dinner prep! I usually hate executing other people’s ideas but today PiC suggested soba noodles with tofu and tempura shrimp (Costco, frozen) and I had no brain left to come up with my own idea so I threw that together. That was easy. I also boiled the dry udon noodles from the local Korean market to try. They’re not as thick as I’d like but they were a decent noodle. I’d really like the thick Vietnamese rice noodles but I can’t find them anywhere. Granted, I hadn’t looked that hard yet.
It was a really nice day, warm and sunny, and I tried to bask in it as much as I could in the short school run. Trying to soak it all in to store up the energy for the rest of the week.
Year 5, Day 338: So many meetings, so much energy depleted š 2 of them were worthwhile, the third definitely was not.
Of the worthwhile chats, I got some traction in my to do list. Not everything I wanted for my team but a start and a commitment to more later in the year. Don’t love it but I can work with that.
I’m behind the 8-ball on my workouts, this is a heavier workout week but I’m a sloth. A slug. The crumpled tissue shoved in a back pocket. I’m so tired! I’m still forcing myself to do exercises every day but they don’t feel anything like good right now.
Year 5, Day 339: We were promised two nice days this week and that’s exactly what we got: no more, no less. I’m grateful. Usually we hear predictions of good weather, or hot weather, I get excited about it, and we are cheated with some low 70s temps. That’s not basking weather at all. But we had a couple nice hot days and our towels and dishes dried really quickly and then it’s back to the gloom and fog before we could get tired of living in the tropics.
We’re living in a kleptocracy now, aren’t we? Thank goodness increasing my depression meds helped because this is such a terrible timeline. I thought the weight of the world was heavy a few years back, this is so much worse. But thanks to the meds, I’m not carrying all the misery in my bones anymore.
Year 5, Day 340: It’s a sad thing when I run out of brain power before I run out of laptop battery power. I’ve been taking advantage of the relatively light meetings schedule this part of the week to cut down my work backlogs and while I made serious inroads in the many many emails piled up, my brain felt like it was withering under all the processing.
I had to cut short one of my powering through work sessions and just watch the kids for a while.
Dinner was unexpectedly fun. We broke out the four year old musubi and onigiri molds, we’ve never actually used them, and made quick spam musubi (no sauce because that would take way too long) and spam onigiri. Spam with a slice of Japanese ginger is excellent. They also made a curry onigiri. We should try it with the sushi rice next time to see if it works better but these were fine with our usual leftover jasmine rice.
Year 5, Day 341: I encountered a crow friend on my walk today, and left it some treats. It hopped over to pick them up pretty quickly after I walked away.
The first poppy bloomed today! The plants have been mostly greenery so this was a happy surprise.
It finally occurred to me to chop off a couple of the 18 inch tall onion-like growths off the garlic plants. We used them to top our tofu.
Also last week me was a genius: I asked PiC to pick up hot dogs from Costco and we had chili dogs for dinner tonight.
It hasn’t been an easy week, nor was it quiet, but I finally finally managed to end the week with a comfortable amount of work done so that Monday won’t be automatically horrible starting with today’s leftover work. We’re going to take a couple days off next week to force some R&R, I’m not going to cook or worry about how to feed people for those days.
Catching up after next week’s fun will be rough, so I really needed to end this week on a decent note before going off.
Huzzah for closing a week on a decent note, and taking some R&R. I hope you can relax into it.
I hope the poppy brings lots of friends to your yard party.
What kind of treats do you leave for crows?
I hope so, too, I’m not actually good at relaxing. As I’m sure you know š
Three more blooms are preparing to bloom!
Usually little dog treats that I keep on me for the dogs I pet š