Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (247)
February 24, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 302: This is the first day I’ve had to mostly myself (while still being responsible for JB) for so long I actually can’t remember when last I had this luxury. The morning was dedicated to setting up the back-up laptop (3 hours in and about 60% done). I planned to pop out for a spot of gardening (hauling soil) afterwards but my hips said absolutely not so instead the plan became trying to get a better rate from Comcast (also no dice, I have to wait til my promotional period is almost over because their offers right now stink).
For some time off my butt, I discarded the ideas to make pretzels, or mozzarella cheese, from kits. Both too time consuming and apparently you cannot make cheese from ultra pasteurized milk so we didn’t have the right ingredients. I mixed up a marinade for seared tuna steaks and baked a load of mini muffins from scratch using an easy recipe a PF buddy shared (turned out great but that zapped all my energy). The recipe WAS simple but the physical demands were too much and sent me to bed for two hours. Unfortunately, amid all the attempts at decompression, my plan from last week to hack off a foot of my hair was entirely forgotten. Drat!
This was the first homecooked meal I’ve made in at least that long, or longer and it’s no coincidence that it lands on my single day off but it was also fortuitous that I defrosted the fish two days earlier. We had seared tuna in a soy honey sesame marinade with rice and roasted broccoli. Mini muffins for dessert!
Year 5, Day 303: Double Mondays are the pits. I front loaded the day with three dog encounters and agreeing to dogsit for our elderly neighbor who has a family emergency to tend to soon. That will be weird, we haven’t had a dog around for ten months now. I felt like jumping out of my skin half the day, not sure why but speculated it was being too keyed up with stress and being full to the brim with emotions about the work and the world.
Still, I managed to avoid any meetings today so I was able to power through so much work, my personal backlog was as close to tamed as it ever gets.
The kids moved up in their self defense class to a more intense class. I was dreading this change because of the time of the new class, but I’ve tested a few ways to deal with it and might be making it work well enough to reduce my stress over the change.
I’m easing my way back into training this week. It’s both frustrating to have broken my streak and to feel so weak again after a couple bad weeks. It’s taken six months to feel a little stronger and so little time to feel like I’m back at the beginning. I know I’m not, but the first pushups and planks back are
Year 5, Day 304: What a frustrating day. I could feel the virus getting the better of me so I had to work from bed. Increasing chaos with several upcoming transitions at work means more of my attention is spent on answering questions (ohhhhh I hate questions!) than working. An hour of calls, and an hour and a half at the orthodontist, and no lunch. I was at the end of my tether by 530 pm by which point I had to figure out what to feed people. I didn’t try very hard. It was quick cheese pasta from Costco, pasta sauce, and mini corn dogs alongside bell peppers and carrots.
What is it with kids? I hollered for JB while I was trying to get dinner on the table and they just yelled “YES??” back. Get your young behind out here where I can actually talk to you. By the time they dragged their tardy butt out to the kitchen my patience had snapped. Is it too much to ask them to use their legs, blessed with the energy of healthy youth, to travel the less than 50 feet to the room where I am doing three things at once to hear me out? ARGH. I have told them both that I had better hear the running of feet when I call their names from now on, do not make me call you twice. The “or else” is unspoken but very loud nonetheless.
Bedtime was another six rounds of nonsense. PiC is as overworked as I am so he keeps falling asleep in the middle of reading to Smol Acrobat (I don’t blame him, I’d be falling asleep everywhere too, I just suffer from insomnia/painsomnia so I can’t. Almost wish I could). Smol Acrobat then escapes containment to come find me and reports “Daddy fell asweep”. Last night, JB was enabling the escapee by cuddling and offering to read to them, tonight they offered a session of calming stretches. NGH. GO TO BED. I chivvied two into bed and one out of bed (he said he had too much work tonight to sleep early) and set myself back up in my bed desk.
Year 5, Day 305: It’s a takeout sort of day, crammed with meetings and running around, but I’m drawing a total blank on what to get. Also, my throat is killing me. I was optimistic and worked at my desk today for the first time all week but that was a bad call. It ate up too much energy. Or maybe falling sick was using up all the energy and it wouldn’t have mattered? Hard to say! Back to bed for me tomorrow. Tonight all I can do is try to get as much work done as possible before dinner and not work late again.
Instead I ruminate on hypernormalization and the feeling that our democracy, flawed and broken as it was, is completely going away. We have to keep taking the kids to school, to their activities, feeding and caring for them as normal. We have to keep up the house, put gas in the car, menu plan or get food on the table one way or another. We can’t just stop.
And from a money perspective, I’m worried because I have no idea what to do. I am working my tail off to keep my job and keep my income for however long that can last – we need the income to pay our bills, my staff needs their income to pay their bills. Even as things are falling to a shambles, we need to pay the rent and put food on the table.
But it also feels like I should prepare for disasters that I’ve never contemplated before – like the FDIC being dismantled and US banking systems failing. I’m contemplating moving some emergency money to an overseas bank (TBD) so that we’re not completely destitute if this attack on our entire country and every institution wrecks our finances.
Thing is, I am also under no illusions about there being any easy escape from this country if things go that deeply wrong. There is no safe haven. Canada doesn’t want us. Mexico doesn’t either, I’m sure. We’ve been awful. There is no country that isn’t racist, sexist, that isn’t prone to right wing hardliners and Nazis. We stand and we fight, we help others who are less fortunate – that’s our first response. We yell at our representatives to do something and we take care of our communities and the most vulnerable.
But I am not me if I don’t plan for multiple contingencies. It’s just never been less clear what roadmap or hierarchy of contingencies begin to make sense in all of this.
Year 5, Day 306: I’m deep in the hiring slog and was struck by a memory. When I was new to one of my first four year jobs, the office manager called me into the office. She told me that my brother had applied, could I work with him? She wouldn’t consider him if I said no. I was taken aback and felt the NO! well up from practically my toes. I could NOT work with him. I knew what he was like – flaky, bombastic, thought he knew better than everyone. It shamed me to my core to think of being associated with him at my workplace, where I was earning the money that paid our rent and for my school, and the idea of that livelihood being threatened near about choked me.
She didn’t call him back and we averted what seemed in the moment to be a potential crisis. I worked so many hours there that I paid for my entire college education and continued to pay the rent and all our bills. I agonized over that decision here, even. And it hit me all over again today: Was I wrong? Could that have been the stabilizing influence, the chance that he needed, to get himself on a path that would have led him through his dark moments? Or would he have done what he always did and screw it up somehow, only to take me down with him?
I don’t know. I don’t know why it bit at me today.
On a lighter note, PiC did the Costco run so we have provisions again and we have survived the week that kept kicking me in the shins. I’ve been getting sicker all week and will need the whole weekend to try to not get worse. Getting better is a whole other ask and may require the symbolic sacrifice of something.
I’m no therapist but my first feeling is that your brother has likely had a million choices & chances in his life, and thank goodness you didn’t ignore your gut in a (likely vain, possibly destructive) attempt to help him. I wonder what your face telegraphed when your supervisor asked that question!
YAY for PiC and Costco stocking up the household. I hope you get some mental or physical relief – or both!