Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (334)
October 26, 2026
Year 7 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 7, Day 174: Farnoosh of So Money has started using her email list again. Turns out that I signed up for it, must have been a decade ago?, and I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to unsubscribe or not but this bit happens to align with my current state of being.
If you’re questioning your next chapter, try asking:
What still interests me?
What keeps draining me?
What could I change or get help with?
Your answer might be to stop doing something. It might be to try a different version. Give yourself some room to find out.
I’m mulling over these questions in the back of my mind this week while I deal with collecting tax documents for our donations from the past few months. I’ve kept records but hadn’t kept up with downloading the receipts.
Year 7, Day 175: We’re rapidly coming up on the end now. After what has felt like an interminable wait, it’s right around the corner. We only have days left.
I’ve been tidying as I go and now trying to make sure I’ve checked all the boxes before the last sand grains trickle through the glass. I’ve done the personal thank you gifts; the thank you notes to external folks; offered recommendations to the external people who have worked with my department who have concerns about their futures; cleaned up historical documentation that doesn’t need to exist any longer; cleaned up personal communications that should stay personal. I’ve maxed out my 401k and claimed all my FSA money. I’ll be pulling everyone’s permissions on all our thingies next week.
I still have some grieving to do, certainly, but the length of this winding down has given me enough time and space to settle the big affairs. Small favors.
Year 7, Day 176: Multi-level shopping planning! There was a 100% rebate offer on at Office Depot so I used gift cards to pay for 2 packs of AA batteries. The purchase price, $59.98, in rewards rebates has landed. That will pay for the holiday cards in a few weeks or so when I get that together. Basically I got a cheap side of batteries to go with our holiday cards.
Also today’s project: collecting all the transaction records for my Rollover IRA. I’m almost sure I might have missed filing a form for it one year but I’m not positive. I definitely don’t know how the heck we tell which gains correlated to the taxed and untaxed contributions. But at least I’ll have a complete record of the transactions to start from.
This also probably answers my semi-eternal question (again) about whether it’s actually worth the trouble of contributing to the IRA solely so that it’s there for future Roth IRA conversions. Maybe not. This much admin work is a total pain and I’m not even positive that it’ll be worth the effort later. Meaning, I’m not sure if the math will make sense to do conversions, or when we should do it. We can’t this year, our income last year and this year will be high. Our income next year will be … er, right now, projected to be ~75% of this year’s. That’s assuming I don’t land a job (very likely) and don’t have another income stream develop (unsure). The year after that, who knows what the future holds. Speaking of the future, I have been up nights worrying about our final retirement number because of reading up on Long COVID (given its high overlap with ME/CFS), particularly about the kids. I am so worried that one of these days they’re going to catch an infection that they never recover from and how we’d bear the costs of that to support them long term. Heck, if any one of us gets hit that way, it’ll be really bad. It’s one of the futures that I fear. I’m already living a version of that life, with the good fortune of being at least half ablebodied enough to work well past my originally presumed expiration point. At 19, it seemed like my train would run out of steam by early 30s, and the stark reality of that existence is very clear. I don’t want it to hit one of us, any of us, and then also not have the money to pay for sufficient care and support.
Year 7, Day 177: Our ballots are filled out and dropped off in a ballot box! The research was, as usual, a total pain in the neck but it’s done done done.
I did one hour of yardwork and it put me flat on my back for the rest of the day. Not that I was able to stay there. Had to drag myself out to pick up kids twice and then to drive to lessons after that. I keep thinking if I could lay abed for a solid 12 hours
Year 7, Day 178: