Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (264)
June 23, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 6, Day 56: It’s my first glorious summer day with both kids away at camp and daycare – fabulous delicious solitude and silence! It’s amazing. There were interruptions. The roofer unexpectedly dropped by. Gave myself 18 minutes to add Miracle-Gro to the garden before planting the basil plants I impulse-bought over the weekend. I even cooked dinner! A pork sirloin roast, scalloped potatoes (cheater style, the Costco premade potatoes which are super cheesy), and green beans with Penzey’s Justice seasoning. Even with half a day of meetings and all those interruptions, this day felt SO GOOD because of the alone time. It would have been better with dogs but the lack of humans in the house for the workday period is so critical to my mental health.
JB is reunited with their former daycare compatriots so they’re also loving that. It’s a bit sad though, the kids are aging out of that summer camp program so this may be their last year together.
Year 6, Day 57: It’s really time we replaced our meat thermometer. Yesterday’s roast was slightly overdone to my taste. Everyone else protested it was fine but I suspect they just felt bad I’d done all the dinner prep while they were out having fun.
We accidentally destroyed our meat thermometer two summers back and I’ve been cooking by guesswork since. Alas, that usually results in my overcooking meat a little by way of overcompensating because I worry about food poisoning. The IKEA lingonberry sauce made a very good addition to the pork, though, lucky we had that on hand.
There was a boatload of stress today, but we still limped over the finish line (dinner, bath, bedtime) somewhat worse for wear.
Year 6, Day 58: It’s been a wild week… month… 👀 Yes I’m going to have to limit this to the start of June. We had two electrical breakers blow so we couldn’t use parts of the house for several days. Thank goodness for the Yeti saving our bacon (literally, the bacon, eggs, and the rest of our food). We attempted to fix it ourselves but that was a no go because under the main panel’s door was a mess the likes of which I cannot adequately describe. Second “thank goodness”: we already needed a tradesperson out to fix several other long-standing problems and so we had them fix this too. Total cost: $25 at Home Depot because I impulse bought more plants and ??? for the tradespeople to fix the thing. We’ll have to return the supplies we didn’t end up needing ($85).
I spent half the day juggling the messages from the tradespeople to PiC and back because he couldn’t be here and needed to make decisions. I could make them but I didn’t want to. I care much much less than he does about the details, so if (when) I get the decision wrong, he’d have to live with the mistakes and I’d have to live with him. One key to a reasonable marriage? The person who cares most about the thing gets to make the decisions about the thing. I have opinions but they’re broader in scope, they’re never about the tiny details.
Year 6, Day 59: This is the first year we’ve all had Juneteenth off and it feels a little like a vacation day. A real one, not one where I have to plan and schedule and pack and pay and organize and whatever else before doing the day which turns out to be exhausting. Possibly also fun, but definitely exhausting. We also expect to have workers here for the whole day to get some maintenance done so my vague notions of going to the zoo or something went out the window before they took real form.
My very tired legs agree that’s for the best. I’d pushed myself to do a good chunk of my workouts earlier in the week and I’ve been feeling it every day since.
PiC even got to sleep in today, his belated Father’s Day gift. It was accidental, SmolAc got him up at 6, but when he fell back asleep SmolAc just carried on reading to themself until I went to the office.
Year 6, Day 60: Well, shoot. It’s a good thing that things shook out the way they did this week because after the tradesfolks started work, they found oh so much dryrot. That’s going to add to the estimate. O_O