Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (270)
August 4, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 98: For the past two weeks, the weather has been perfectly nice and I have sweated buckets, like I’m powered by an internal nuclear reactor. Nothing else is particularly wrong, so I have no clue what this is about. Meanwhile the most heat sensitive folks, PiC and JB, have been practically frolicking in the mild temps. Bodies continue to be Weird. Well, mine, anyway. Perimenopause?
Also my left shoulder tendon (or ligament, or muscle, I don’t know how one isolates which thing is twanging) has been stressed for three days which is not ideal.
First aid kit debate: hard case or soft zipper pouch? I saw a prepacked first aid kit in a hard case and it triggered my container avarice. Our freebie from Target or Walgreens ages ago is a fabric rectangle zip pouch (has the depth of the hard case but flexibility of fabric) but the inside is shedding plasticky bits everywhere now. I thought maybe a pencil case? But it’s not quite the thing.
Year 6, Day 99: I just realized that the tubing assigned to the sugar snap peas had pulled loose and the plant hasn’t been getting water! No wonder half of it’s suddenly dying 😠I have to buy more tubing anchors but for the moment, my first task was to (finally) get the netting up on the 6 foot tall stakes. I did (to no one’s surprise) zero research on training the plants to grow on a trellis before now so the plants mostly leaned on a stake or two if they were at the right angle. This was my avoiding setting up a proper trellis but if I can get the plants to grow up the netting and stakes, I can continue avoiding a real trellis for another year!
Year 6, Day 100: Electronics hygiene! I had no idea how much keeping my electronics plugged in, while I’m working, impacted battery life but my one laptop went from 3-4 hours of battery life off charger to 60-90 minutes. It’s older, but not THAT old. There is a good reason for that habit – we kept having power outages so it was always a gamble if I let the battery run down naturally before charging back up. Now that I have a second laptop and the Yeti, I can change my habits. I’ve been super mindful to only charge the backup laptop as needed and my phone only gets charged to 80% most of the time. Their batteries are still in really decent shape, they still work even when run down to as little as 10%. Both the Pixel 6 and laptop only die at 3%, which is a vast improvement over the Pixel 2 that would turn off at 33%.
Year 6, Day 101: When someone who should have some idea of how much free time you have (none. I have negative free time) says something like “just add this half hour (or an hour) activity to your day like I do”, I just want to snap my teeth at them. It’s not like I wasn’t incredibly busy before kids. I was. I also didn’t underestimate how much busier I would be with kids. That’s part of why I didn’t want to have them in my 20s! Added to that, now I’ve got a job that’s tripled in worries and responsibilities with two young kids so no, in fact, it’s not possible for me to “just add an hour” to do a thing I want to do. I promised JB that we would look into a new sport for them this time last year. It’s taken me 12 months to create one gap in my schedule to take them to a new activity. I was interested in it too but homigosh the logistics of making one more thing possible during the school year is simply brainswoggling.
On that note, in two days, I’ve (deeeep breath):
- taken JB on a 2-hour excursion,
- done the laundry,
- collected and organized donation items,
- took out the trash,
- deep cleaned the bathroom vanity,
- directed JB’s room cleaning efforts with very specific targeted tasks (pull all the plushies out of X, canvass the whole house for all pens, pencils, color pencils, markers, crayons and put them in their homes, collect all hygiene related things and put them in their homes, sort through plushies to see which will be moved out),
- then taken JB on a 3-hour errand that’ll net $250 in gift cards in a month,
- coordinated our correspondence (addressed 6 envelopes and stuffed them with goodies, JB’s working on the letters, to family and friends),
- organized Christmas gifts for several niblings,
- set up a cart full of books for another set of niblings,
- hunted down and ordered a new backpack for JB,
- ordered a giant tote bag for our use,
- ordered the garden tubing anchors and set them up when they arrived,
- compulsively checked reporting on work KPIs,
- scrubbed the stove,
- started catching up on my workouts that have been neglected for 3 weeks due to travel (ow, my everything),
- ordered refills of several medications,
- ordered a sink drain cover so I can (briefly) soak and scrub our cast iron range grates,
- unplugged the toilet,
- figured out how to fix our Internet connection (only took 3 hours!),
- took JB to their activity,
- Did our net worth summary,
- Paid all the bills,
- Checked, sorted and recycled the mail.
These were on my 2 days off. PiC took care of dinners because I had no brain left to think about food. Mostly this was what I wanted to get done, so I’m not feeling particularly put out, but I did want to do a few more things that were just for me: baking biscuits or bread, and sewing a simple project. Maybe tomorrow.
Year 6, Day 102: Ah ha! My pencil case idea to replace the first aid kit was a bust, the one I picked was too small. I considered using one of our Costco turkey plastic containers but I’ve already doled them all out: 4 for JB’s art supplies, 2 for Smol Acrobat’s stickers and markers, 1 for my receipts and 2 for masks. I considered buying 4 extra large replacement pencil cases for JB and trade for the turkey containers, then realized it’d be cheaper to just buy myself one extra large pencil case. Duh. But no, that didn’t feel right. PiC suggested a tackle box. No, that didn’t feel right either. Too big, I want this to be small enough to fit in our current cabinets, a tackle box requires too much shelf space. Then I remembered! I bought PiC a washi tape container with removable slats several years ago, I’d bought some for my jewelry, and he’s never used it! It’s still in the garage! I ran to get it and transferred everything over and it all fit! 🎉 Money already spent years ago now being put to good use. I feel so accomplished. Go figure it’s something like this that makes me feel good and not the mile long list of things I’ve gotten done this week.