By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (308)

April 27, 2026

Year 6 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 6, Day 359: We’re in Week 1 of the Hardening Off the Pumpkin Seedlings. They are experiencing cold and wind from the safety of a sheltered bucket for a slightly longer stint each day and are still hale and hardy. So far, so good!

Over the weekend, I picked up a couple spare compostable cups, and dropped the 7 presoaked sugar snap pea seeds in there to test out this inside sowing thing. It’s worked out well for Smol Acrobat’s seeds, why not give it a whirl? For context, I’ve mostly been resistant to making this much effort to germinate seeds inside and transition them to the outside. But the prolonged non-germination period has broken me down. Today I was rewarded by the appearance of two teeny seedlings peeping up through the soil! In only two days! I’m pulling back the cucumber seeds that were put into the outside containers several weeks ago. They’re probably freezing and hiding as hard as they can in the soil. Need to rustle up some more trays or cups or whatever might fit on the windowsill to get those seedlings going.

Year 6, Day 360: Money well spent: I scoured a sale for an Oodie that now lives at my desk. After a hard meeting, I can literally crawl back into it, be wrapped in a cute soft squishy Sherpa-lined giant sized sweater thing and decompress. I’m cozy-warm at my desk all the time instead of slowly turning into a block of ice because I don’t want to turn on the heat! It’s so nice. I thought my friend might have been over-stating the wonders of the blanket-hoodie but nope, not even a little bit. I always have a little pang when a meeting comes around and I have to crawl out of it to pretend to be a working professional.

My cup now has THREE seedlings!

Annoying things I have got to get around to dealing with: The oven is still on the fritz. Need to find time to call in someone to fix it.

USPS Informed Delivery showed that my DMV car registration was due last Monday. It still hasn’t appeared so now I have to put in Missing Mail search request and hope it works. I’ve a suspicion that it was misdelivered to a non-friendly neighbor who has chosen to keep it as their registration sticker instead. 

The garage door opener went on the fritz. I need to get someone in to fix it, PiC’s done what he could to troubleshoot but it’s at the end of its lifespan (15 years) so it doesn’t feel like it makes sense to replace the control panel.

Year 6, Day 361: What a frustrating week. Our friends’ kiddo is having a terrible run of health luck and the poor child is now so scared of seeing new doctors because they’ve undergone so many tests and scans.

And drumroll, please: our whole company’s been laid off. We were part of a purge of wide swaths of departments. It was handled so badly that I was devoid of any words except cursing. Zero compassion, zero sense, it’s entirely about cuts to slash costs because they couldn’t make their projections that were wild conjecture with no basis in reality. I know it’s not my fault, those were circumstances several levels above my pay grade, but I’m still so angry about all of it. They took a perfectly good company that was turning a steady profit each year, and wrecked it. Having done that, they blamed us and gutted us. I will never forgive them for it but they won’t ever care. Now I have to figure out how we get on with things.

Year 6, Day 362: So, layoff money stuff. Presumably we’ll have severance pay but that’s theoretical right now. Along with everything else they bungle (shorting payroll, shorting bonuses, marking people ineligible for bonuses, stalling promotions for half a year at a time, emailing confidential information to the wrong SameName person in the company, shutting down the accounts for the wrong SameName person in the company because they accidentally sent them a password reset instead of just telling them to ignore it, managing to brick every single PC user for one shining afternoon), they didn’t bother to get any separation information together before dumping our asses. Just another way they’re a horrible employer.

Since we don’t know our last day(s), I can’t make a lot of useful projections. For now, I can tally up how much accessible cash we have to cover my part of the household income. That’ll be saved cash and i-bonds, and the cash meant to be invested.

I’m reviewing the rules around unemployment benefits to stretch my timeline of available cash. For unemployment in CA, it looks like my best bet is to apply right away because it’s based on the highest quarter in my last 18 months of income. I should be eligible for $450 per week up to 1 year. I found this bit interesting: “The California Training Benefits (CTB) program allows you to attend school or training while receiving unemployment benefits.” That might be useful! My industry has been taking some really awful turns with the proliferation of GenAI and I don’t want to go back. Maybe this is one way to pivot back into animal care that I’d rather be doing, down the road. I’ll return to that later. My brain doesn’t have room for it now but I have to dig into it probably in my first two months of being laid off since we have to apply before the 16th week of unemployment.

If the initial information was accurate, severance should be 2 weeks per year of service and I’ll max it out at 26 weeks. That’s taxed at a higher rate, about 41%, so 60% in take home cash works out to roughly 3.5 months of income.

Year 6, Day 363: I’m just sad today. I’ve been working every day this week since the announcement to support my team, and maybe incidentally keeping too busy to think much about my own situation but the questions of “who am I when I don’t spend 40 hours a week doing my thing” and “what do I want / what can I do next?” and “how bad does it feel not to be in charge of my own team anymore?” (answer: so bad) are rising to the surface. I hated my actual job of the past 2-3 years. That was miserable. I was still good at it, I had been making life significantly better for my team and that was so many lives improved, but I hated the corporate pressures where nothing mattered except “line goes up” well beyond the possibilities in reality. None of their lies and platitudes serving as reasons for this devastation matters, I’m just sad.  In therapy I’m going to have to explore how to handle being a person whose job of 15 years revolved around doing the work itself but also building an amazing team that was just summarily axed. I have lots of feelings about this. I thought that cutting off my dad was a hard identity transition. This one may be a lot harder? But maybe a positive one, in the end, like going no contact was, ultimately.

There’s some shades of relief knowing that there’s an end to my personal suffering but I would never have taken that route at my team’s expense if I had any choice about it.

There’s also resentment that I’d finally found some kind of balance between my saving (extreme) and spending (extremely no) impulses and now it has to flip around a bit until I know where the money is coming from.