By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (271)

August 11, 2025

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 6, Day 105: Our town isn’t super walkable but with my ME/CFS, it’s debatable how much I could really walk about running errands anyway. I miss that time in my life when I could, unless I was having a flare-up, walk out the door and to the nearby store to pick up whatever I needed. I do appreciate that most of our routine things are close by. The dentist is 5 minutes away. The doctors are 10-15 minutes away depending on traffic. Groceries are between 5-15 minutes away. That really keeps down the traffic overhead. I was reminded of this when I had to trek as far as 15! whole! miles! away! to run an errand. This is kind of hilarious given my past life in the LA area, or close enough, which meant everything was always 15-75 miles away. My radius has changed dramatically and I like that.

Year 6, Day 106: Prepping for the start of school, I’ve been deleting alarms I don’t need anymore. I have weird summer alarms: Find Seanan at 3:30. Get ready at 4:35. Call T and S at 2:50 pm. Sunblock at 12:50 pm. Ella at 12:55 pm. I’ll be reactivating all the boring routines: get up. Therapy. Lunch. Finish what you’re doing, which is the extra reminder before the alarm for school pickup.

I’ve also been having some weird dreams lately. The one I remember is being in line to be fed to a woodchipper but I was a Lego person so it was just sort of funny/ok? So strange. Most other nights I am not having particularly memorable nightmares, instead I’m waking up sometime in the night soaked in sweat. It’s incredibly gross and annoying.

Year 6, Day 107: I had my second dental cleaning for the year with a new hygienist and they were excessively rigorous. My gums are twanging still. I picked up a tube of overpriced Fluoridex to try and support my enamel that’s thinning. The consequences of enamel thinning sounds terrible and like something I would want to hold off as long as possible. I love going to the dentist generally but I have a certain amount of anxiety about my dental health. The irony of some of the bone or gum weirdness is that they said it can be caused by orthodontics. So that’s great. I do one really expensive thing to help my dental health and it causes a whole other long term problem? Rude.

We’re trying organic mango vinaigrette from Trader Joe’s this week. Normally mango anything, sign me up! But this is maybe not the light zingy dressing that I was looking for to wake up a salad. It’s more like an almost pudding that got drizzled on the greens. Tasty, but not sure if we’ll do it again. I want a lemony vinaigrette.

Year 6, Day 108: Good news, y’all, my workaholism is likely cured. I worried it was coming back this year with all the added stressors making me feel like I had to work around the clock. Many days I did work from 7 am to 1 am, with some short breaks in between to do pick up and drop off and eat. Bad habits, definitely. But the -aholism part? Probably not. I woke up every weekday this week (after having had time off) mentally whining like a child: I don’t WANT to get up. I don’t WANT to go to work. I kept it to myself, as I am an adult on the outside, but it’s mildly reassuring that I’m not getting addicted to the work grind again. And this isn’t even the hardest part of the year. There’s nothing specific I’m dreading, I just have a terrible case of the Don’t Wannas.

The bad news, this is really bad timing. A couple years back I figured I was at the peak of my career. I was a little bit wrong only because things happened out of my control that led to my unwanted and unlooked-for elevation. This year I’ll be at my peak and it’s a peak I do not like. But even though I’m emotionally ready to swandive off the career path, we don’t even have enough invested for me to quit in normal times. In these terrible and fascist times? We have to be fighting back and helping the communities being harmed. For that, we need money. It’s not a good time to practice being retired on a shoestring. So here we are.

Year 6, Day 109: The dead mom dreams are back in force. These are the ones where I relive losing her over and over except in completely strange and false scenarios. None of these are how she died but the theme is always I wasn’t there for her. In one of them, her unhinged younger sister was the one to call and tell me, harassingly which is definitely her MO, and it was just all very strange. What is up with my subconscious this week? Might have to start taking those anti-nightmare meds again. I didn’t like the way they tanked my blood pressure (which is historically low) so only take them when things get bad.

On the cooking front this week, we did shockingly well, for us. I cooked pork chops (served with Costco scalloped potatos and a salad) on Tuesday, and Thursday we defrosted a thit kho (served with rice and steamed broccoli) I froze several weeks. We filled in the gaps with leftovers on the between nights. That’s the last of the made ahead foods so now I need to go recipe browsing again to see what foods strike my fancy that is relatively simple and freezes well to make batches of. I’ve been gearing up to make banh khot for ages but that’s a labor and time intensive recipe that’s best fresh, it probably wouldn’t freeze well.

I’d love to hear your favorite comfort food suggestions of anything that would freeze well! Someone mentioned shepherd’s pie, that’s going on the list.