Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (328)
September 14, 2026
Year 7 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 7, Day 132: My tiny victory with the oven was followed up by a power outage. I told the oven VERY STERNLY that it had better come back from the power outage fine because we don’t need to be going through taking it apart again! (It did.)
The power outage was useful in that it was pretty short, it was resolved about 6 hours later, so we had the chance to put ourselves through our paces of “what do we do when lights don’t work” without a giant load of stress. It did make me realize that we’re reasonably set for power outages but boy howdy do I not want to have to also go through a power outage, and broken water lines, and broken gas lines and whatever else a bad quake would bring us.
Year 7, Day 133: I am wrestling with my feelings over a job listing. I have some hard lines (that I share with a number of other people) which has made job hunting taste more like despair than usual. No genAI, no travel, do some social good, prioritize good work over profit margins.
I found one that checks a lot of boxes except the travel bit. They emphasize that the travel bit is important. And they want a lot of it.
It checks all the other important to me boxes and that’s unusual. Every other listing so far is all about implementing AI or driving up revenue or some other thing that’s simply not important to me. So this one is unusual. Still, I find myself grumbling “I don’t want it” while crafting my cover letter and resume.
Update: I went through four rounds of editing and called it good. I submitted and put it out of my mind. If they bother to read it or my LinkedIn recs and are interested, we’ll talk. I have a whole lot of other stuff to keep me busy in the meantime.
Year 7, Day 134: Yesterday I woke up to my hands being REALLY weird. The swelling had gone down to nearly normal levels. It hasn’t been down to this point for months. I reveled in it but didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t want to jinx it. Naturally today we’re back to LEGO person hands so that was short-lived.
This is frustrating. I made myself work out the night before, had a good dream for once, and woke up with my hands in decent shape. I gave myself last night off working out, had horrifically stressful dreams, and woke up with my hands and wrists in awful shape.
Year 7, Day 135: Argh. Middle school Picture Day was last week and I completely forgot that we have to order pictures before the actual day for them to be delivered to the school with no shipping costs. Now I have to figure out how to rectify this miss.
Garden update: the first green bean plant to survive is starting to put out buds. We harvested our first snap peas. I’ve been picking off the tendrils for a while to encourage it to focus on the peas. The acid amendment for the blueberries and blackberries seems to be helping both bushes a bit! The blueberries are putting out a second round of (a few) flowers for the year, the blackberries might be putting out a first set of buds?
I’ve transplanted the second small green bean seedling and the darn roly polies are already at those leaves. I’m also babying another itty bitty seedling, here’s hoping that one will get nice and strong soon.
Our two day heatwave doesn’t seem to have affected the garden badly except the next green bean seedling I was trying to germinate. It seems to have given up.
Year 7, Day 136: One of the One Spirit coordinators contacted me saying that hunger on the reservation is really bad now with no help to be had. I depleted most of our funds supplying one of the families from the Okini list but I’m thinking about how best to help. I asked her if she could locate a single community organizer who would be willing to help share out food supplies across multiple families so we could try to help more folks in one go. She’s working on that while I’m working on gathering funds and compiling a grocery order. I put out the word on Bluesky but my reach and mutuals there is so vastly diminished from our days on Twitter that I don’t expect much from that.
Update: friend shared on Mastodon to go with Bluesky posts and after a few days, it seems to have gotten some traction. I’m working out the details of what they need with the local who is taking on the responsibility of sharing the food with the community.