By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (272)

August 18, 2025

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 6, Day 112: After a really strong start – 8 green bean plants! 8 cucumber plants! A really tall snap pea plant! The garden has petered out. The green beans put out a handful of small beans, maybe 9 total. The cucumbers had half a dozen baby cucumbers per plant, it was going to be glorious. They have all given up on life. 😭 I am very sad about this.

Working out: I’ve graduated to slightly harder exercises this week – exercises with weights. Goblet (which I read at goblin at first) squats; lateral raises with hand weights, and band pullaparts with my weight bands. I was being cheap putting off the weight and band purchases for months. Who knew these would be fun!

Unrelated: I need more wool socks.

Year 6, Day 113: The kids were soaking up their twice-yearly visit with a favorite Uncle so I took advantage of their leaving me alone: free haircut! Hovering upside down over the trash bag, I chopped roughly 4 inches off the length. Hard to see how much is getting lopped while upside down, but fortunately precision isn’t required. Unfortunately the quick and easy 2-ponytails method also gives me a lot of layers. I can live with that for a free haircut. The mop is still too long, though, so a follow up chop of another few inches to bring up the length would be good. Maybe that’ll reduce the layers, too? Much as I hate to ask, I might need a hand with that chunk.

All the dogs I wanted from the seniors-only shelter have been adopted, except the hospice dog. I’d gladly take him if our dog fund were refilled and we had a few more things settled. I’m making real progress on the “few things settling” at work, I’m seeing measurable change already thankfully, so that part may come up sooner than I had hoped but let me not count chickens before they’re hatched. Or cucumbers before they’re full grown. 😒

Year 6, Day 114: I’m reading three books at the same time and it’s jumbled my brain a bit: Seanan McGuire’s Toby Daye series, Kwame Mbalia’s Tristan Strong Destroys the World, and T Kingfisher’s Hemlock and Silver. They’re all good!

A white woman at our local library was gatekeeping the raffle entries for the library summer reading program. She rejected our kids’ multiple reading logs saying they were only allowed to have one raffle entry per kid at all. PiC told me this later, completely puzzled, and I insisted that was complete bullshit. That’s the opposite of the point of the summer reading program!

Today, he asked two dudes working the desk and they were appalled, “What kind of library do you think we are?? Of course you don’t only get one entry! You get as many entrees as they read and fill out logs for!” They sent him home with a stack of entries which he gave to me to fill out because I love forms. I wonder who that woman was and WTF her problem was.

Year 6, Day 115: These 🤬🤬 tariffs. So many small businesses are going to be impacted. The loss of the de minimis tax exemption is summarized here. I might have to cancel my Patreon subscription to Pikaole as he ships from Korea and if it’s an additional $80 every quarter for a package of stickers, that really doesn’t work in our budget. Ugh.

This really sucks. The neighbor’s car was stolen in the dusk right in front of their home. Ugh. It was recovered pretty quickly, thankfully, but I really hate that it happened at all.

I put “Cancel Citi card” on my calendar a month before I really needed to cancel it and it’s a good thing because that can was kicked down the road about 12 times. Not today, though!! The call was made, the card was cancelled. Much rejoicing commenced, no more annual fee for meeee (for a card I don’t need anyway).

Year 6, Day 116: I tried replacing oil and water butter and milk instead of with a box cake mix. Maybe I’ve just lifestyle-inflationed myself out of the box mix life because despite assurances that people can’t tell the difference between the fancied up box mix and a from scratch cake, this one didn’t taste much better.

Whew Friday. I had my massage today and she really dug into all those muscles that I can’t stretch properly or that tighten up so hard during pain bouts that they can’t let go again. It’s therapeutic but I’m wiped out for the rest of the day. One of these days I’ll have a massage when I’m off work.