By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (325)

August 24, 2026

Year 7 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 7, Day 111: Not to be all about the confirmation bias but I’ve been harboring a not-at-all-secret fear that this layoff will be as bad or worse than the last one. In length at least if not misery. My therapist is being all hope and sunshine about how this represents an opportunity. I’m not denying that it could be that, eventually. I’m not denying that I needed to leave this job and that it would have been unbelievably hard for me to leave to take a real break like I needed to without a layoff. I’m even doing my best to consciously be open to optimism and to making the most of this time so that it’s not all stress and doom. But it’s way too soon to feel hopeful – especially now before a job search begins in earnest. Mostly the open mind and keeping busy, between kids scheduling, chores and new crafts, has been working to keep me out of the dumps this month. And it’s been nice to discover new things while the clock ticks down on the “I still have an income” status.

The worry is still ever-presently lurking in my daily subconsciousness, though, and a recent discussion of how long some folks have been job-hunting (several months to a year and still counting) brought it bubbling back up to the surface. I know we can hang for a year, I’ve been doing the more detailed math, but then what? What’s my Phase 2 plan if this goes longer than a year? 18 months? 24 months??

Sigh. As I half-joked to my coworker, I have until PiC gets laid off, then I REALLY have to get a job. That’s not a time so much as a floating limit. I continue to hope that sometime in Months 6-10, I discover a hidden talent of something I actually want to do, physically CAN do and do well, and is lucrative. Go on universe, show me what good stuff you can come up with.

Year 7, Day 112: Hm. PiC’s employer is changing retirement plan providers from Fidelity to Empower. I’ve never heard of Empower before but they claim to be the second largest retirement plan recordkeeper in the US. Materially, we’ll see a decrease in the annual admin fee from $36 to $19. I don’t see any other differences that matter to us – the plans and funds available to us all remain the same. I won’t expend more brainpower on this until I really have nothing better to do since there’s nothing I can do about it but have an opinion (or not).

A funny coincidence: I have been on a cleaning binge and, last night, found one of the kids’ old sports uniforms that was never worn tucked in a tote bag. That made me sigh. It’s been listed on Poshmark for weeks without any interest, I wonder if I need to do something to bump it a little… then I forgot all about it. Today, I got a notification that there was a counteroffer on that very listed item. Counter? Where was the first offer? I opened the app to see that the little automation they had that sends an offer to anyone who likes an item had been triggered by a like, the buyer immediately countered the lower offer, and then accepted the app’s counter offer. Sold! That’s a pretty easy automation (if I were coding it with my dev, I’d describe it as: if an item is liked, send an offer with Price-$3) and effective too, it seems. I’ve packaged it up and it’s ready to go.

Year 7, Day 113: After four weeks of positively dismal workouts or weeks without working out at all for various reasons, I’m finally doing my workouts this week as written and may actually (knock salt, throw salt, all the things) get through more than half of them for the first time in over a month. It’s been demoralizing how many weeks I’d missed because I couldn’t squeeze it in and it’s clear that stamina has gone walkabout without me. But back on the metaphorical horse I go. I’d be more enthused if it was a real horse.

I’ve mostly got a pharmacy organization system down for travel but Hawaii Planner had me contemplating if it’s the best that it could be. I have a set of meds that I have to take daily – that’s easy and goes in the 7-day am/pm medication organizer. But there’s also a set of meds that I take as needed in the evenings and those are dependent on how I feel so the fixed week organizer doesn’t work for that.

Year 7, Day 114: Ooh I’m mad at Kobo. I have spent hours painstakingly organizing my Seanan McGuire short stories that I’d uploaded manually to the app into the right collections. Today, I opened the app and it ambushed me with an update and migration that I didn’t agree to and in doing so, it changed the author name for all the manually uploaded stories to Unread and deleted all the collection tags. WTAF!! I don’t have the mental energy to fix this right now.

Year 7, Day 115: We’ve tried really hard to get the kids back on an early rising schedule before school starts. It’s painful and largely unsuccessful. They will get up early on the day of, there’s no way to fake the adrenaline from when school actually starts ahead of The Day. Admittedly I’m also dragging from fatigue so much that without the true pressure, the dry runs have been dry fumble stumbles. It’s very irritating because best intentions! But no, says the body.

All that to say, they did finally get up early as needed, just in time. And now we have to be really strict about bedtimes because their bodies need a lot of sleep normally, which is why they tend to sleep in (mostly JB but SmolAc’s also been laying abed a little later than their norm) and if they’re cutting it short at the morning end, we have to make it up at the night end.