By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (278)

September 29, 2025

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 6, Day 154: I felt that! 3 am quake in the Bay Area. I woke up to the rumble as it started up and counted the seconds waiting for it to either escalate or stop. As it wound down I guessed: 4 near us, or a 6 far away. I waited another 15-20 minutes to see if it would be followed up by a bigger one but thankfully that was it. 4s don’t concern me. 6 does. But more than that, I feel like the fact we’re well overdue for another Big One is unsettling. I keep whispering to the fault under us: do as many 4s as you need to relieve your stresses, don’t let it all build up til you liquidate the whole Peninsula!

There’s a life lesson in there somewhere.

I’m trying to get through this week’s PEM, brought on by doing a social thing on Sunday morning. I knew, when I was leaving the house, that I wasn’t actually up to the task but not going wasn’t fair to the kids who had been really looking forward to it. So I pushed through and, of course, crashed. Thankfully laying down until the evening was possible and repaired just enough of the damage for me to function minimally again. Really bad crashes make me pass out entirely so this was something like a 7 on the PEMs Richter scale.

Year 6, Day 155: I’m feeling the complexity of being in a relatively good financial position after so many years of fighting to find and build stability. It’s still not good enough to just do what we want, but tis good enough to help other people. I think about how people struggle with understanding when they have “enough” and how much that’s going to be me. Comparatively, we’ve made it. We can pay our bills, we can weather a lean year without income. We can’t live off our investments now. They would take us through a rough micro patch: illness, layoff, big bills. They would not cover us in a macro-level rough patch: fascism takes down the stock markets, major stock market crash for other reasons, a second Great Depression brought on by high unemployment and high prices due to tariffs. I won’t feel comfortable walking away from employment until we’re so well off that it’d take a severe series of events to make us go back but what that number is, well…! It keeps going up with everything going on here. These ruminations come more often as I see more and more need online, and as I have harder days at the job where I wish myself well out of the rat race. Who knew I’d be such a reformed workaholic that retirement savings simply cannot build up fast enough?

A complaint I wasn’t expecting to hear today from SmolAc: I ran out of green beans! (To eat, even).

Year 6, Day 156: I would very much like to know what’s wrong with dream me. I keep having dreams where I’m running to do errands or go somewhere whether on foot or driving and halfway there I find that I’m barefoot. Then inevitably I have to go into a public restroom which is absolutely filthy and gross. Why can I never remember to put on a pair of shoes in my dreams??

I am more disturbed by this dream than the non-zero number of times I’ve almost left the house without pants on. Says something about my priorities, possibly.

Year 6, Day 157: Work life has advanced to a new level of intense this week. We’re testing some new systems and the designers of those systems are giant arrogant blowhards, so my exasperation levels are at an all time high. That’s saying something considering the past 2.5 years which have sucked. I’ve worked with many a dev in the past, and even got on quite well with the ones who notoriously shunned everyone else around them and refused to commit to any deadlines, except for me. I don’t think I’ve ever met a software developer as arrogant as this fool who declares that the systems will absolutely work perfectly as intended by the go-live date. That’s not how this works.

There is always always something that goes wrong or some edge case or some damned bit of code that worked fine in production that zigzags in live and hocks up hairballs. It’s absolutely the nature of the business so you plan to mitigate those issues. I’m super grateful to my co-leads who have taken the hits in taking most of these meetings with these unmitigated jackasses because I’ll be honest. No amount of professionalism would have survived an encounter where I had to sit through hearing some of that bullshit first hand. Just hearing it secondhand had me wanting to Force choke him. (Anecdotally, it’s always a him.) I idly wonder if my new bosses already know me well enough to keep away the worst of the jackasses until I absolutely must cross paths with them because my patience is now rather famously limited and my co-leads are happy to shine up my reputation as being a hardass. Whatever the reason, I’m taking many many deep breaths to get through this and next week. If we can get through the end of November, when I’ll move on to my next massive migration project, maybe I won’t be on the verge of exploding like a volcano when an incompetent turkey gobbles aloud.

Year 6, Day 158: My hip pain was at an 8 today, which is: grinding my teeth involuntarily, and nauseous with the pain. I resorted to taking every pain medication I had – one of every variety, not all of the meds in total – in a giant handful and it feels almost miraculous that it did take the edge off. Sometimes not even that helps.

At daycare pickup I ran into a frazzled mom desperately trying to load her very angry 2 year old into their car. The kiddo was going full “stiff as a board can’t shove me into the car or a car seat” mode and she looked EXHAUSTED. I took a chance and made eye contact and said really sympathetically, gosh it is SO HARD to get into the car at the end of the day, isn’t it? It’s Friday, what are we thinking, asking this of you? And the kid was bewildered enough by this strange lady using her dog voice at them that they slid right down to the ground and stopped fighting. The mom and I chatted for a while, further confusing the kid who decided to just lean on her legs, and at some point she asked if I was PiC’s wife? Then the bewilderment was mine, have …we…met?? Go figure I was going to be mortified to be talking to someone I thought was a stranger only to find out I knew them. Thankfully no, she just recognized Smol Acrobat in the car behind me. We gassed up the littlest one a little and asked if they could show us how they got in their car? In that way of 2 year olds, tantrum forgotten, they happily scaled the SUV to their car seat. We cheered and clapped and waved goodbye. The mom mouthed THANK YOU!!! as she shut the door, finally.

It was really nice to help a mom who could have been me ten years ago, just beaten down and asking WHAT IS HAPPENING as the life of a toddler unfolds around me.