Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (280)
October 13, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 168: My current form of self indulgence is mangos. For many years, my hands hurt too much to hold, peel, or cut up mangos so unless I was willing to pay exhorbitant prices for the cut fruit (I wasn’t, normally), we weren’t having any. It’s my fruit kinda like watermelon is PiC’s fruit so he’ll buy and prep that but I won’t. My hands still hurt of course but less so now and they are also getting stronger. Enough so that peeling and cutting up mango isn’t the trial that it once was.
My throat has been feeling ick for a few days and I couldn’t make out whether it was viral ick or plain exhausted ick compounding the ME/CFS as it does. Today was the first sign that it might be viral so I’m trying to be mindful and take better care of myself: drinking warm honey lemon water at least and trying to get to bed before midnight despite the pressing workload. I keep covering for my team being out sick and being out for other sad reasons which means my work has been doubled since the start of September. Taking time off really isn’t in the cards yet, they’re not trained enough to get on without me. I’m tired.
Year 6, Day 169: Here’s a subject line that I didn’t expect to see in our email: “Good News: Your Electric Rate Just Went Down”. Apparently “residential electric rates decreased by 2.1%.” I will believe it when I see it.
I didn’t expect that the latest Pixel update, whenever I finally allowed it, would be a good thing at all but I’ve discovered they updated a feature that I had been wanting. I can now pause my alarms for specific date ranges! This is great! When I’m on a different school dropoff/pickup schedule for conference weeks and so on, instead of hoping that I remember to turn the alarms back on when we revert to the standard schedule, I can just set a date range for the alarms to be paused.
Year 6, Day 170: PiC’s employer gets Open Enrollment information ready much earlier than mine so I have dug into the details. They claimed we’d see “an average increase of $34 per month” in medical plan premiums. Ours will go up $70 a month, so about $840 for the year. I expect we may also see prescription costs increase. They’re already up to $30 for 100 day refills through the mail.
Most of their other changes are to fancier plans than ours, so I can ignore those. They always lag on the FSA increases, though, which I suppose is the tradeoff for getting this information early. This year we’ll get the full $3300 contribution limit. We’ll appreciate the increased contribution limit ($7500) for the Dependent Day care for the one year it still comes in useful. Oh wait, that’s not true! It’s also good for camps, after SmolAc is out of daycare. I might actually have to do math to see how much camp costs to see if we’d use the full allotment in 2027, though. Usually no math is required, our childcare and healthcare costs always max out the full contribution amounts.
Year 6, Day 171: Lately, every night I go to sleep nestled in a pile of pillows and every morning I wake up turtled down into my blankets well away from all the pillows. This might be seasonal. This might be a subconscious hiding. Could be a new symptom of cumulative extreme stress. I was so tired today that my face had gone numb and my teeth were uncontrollably chattering despite feeling perfectly warm. A friend surmised this was stress-related which was unsettling. I had to forcibly crank down my work output to a crawl, I could practically feel myself running down to empty, and that helped regain just enough equilibrium to get to the last late night meetings on my books. This fall season is every bit as bad, possibly worse, than I’d anticipated. There’s no hope of better this year, it’s just going to keep getting worse. My only hope now is that all the work we’re putting in these three months will pay off in 2026 when we are better staffed. Fingers, toes, and everything else crossed.
Actually, I was feeling like a failure over how it feels like the end of this year is every bit as bad as last year. I’d come into 2025 determined to make it better. It is still terrible but there’s a difference. Last year, we were just trying to survive 2024. This year is hard because we’re trying to survive 2025 (and not just professionally, we’re now in a world that’s gone absolutely topsy turvy for fascism) but also because we ARE taking steps to prepare ourselves in significant ways before, and for, 2026. I’m working with my partners in leadership, and we’re working truly working together, there’s no infighting with some egotistical powermonger who’s too busy blaming others for his failure. So that gives me a little heart back.
Year 6, Day 172: There’s frost on the windows this morning. I only noticed because folks are talking about finally turning on their furnace for the first time this season. We have frost on windows and/or roofs more often than not since it’s always sort of coldish here so we will likely go another while before we run the heat mostly because our “cold” isn’t very. The season is turning, though. I noticed that the sun is no longer directly in my eyes driving JB home from after-school activities. Bit of a relief but also a bit foreboding because pretty soon it’ll be dark when we’re driving home.
I’m not sure if the season of early darkness and cold creeping in will help my mental health. Sometimes the need for warm and cozy for the brain also works better in the winter. It’s been feeling hard without canine companions to take the edge off life stresses and losses. It’s been feeling extra hard with trying to continually support folks who are losing ground every day financially in this world, and knowing that I can’t solve any one person’s problems.
Showing SmolAc pictures of the dogs at the rescues, we both really liked a white pittie that had the saddest story. But he needs a canine companion, much like Sera did her first years, so SmolAc asked, can we get TWO dogs? Sadly, I’m not sure we can handle bringing home two dogs at once. They aren’t especially emotionally invested in this. They remember having a dog, they remember Sera, but they don’t viscerally need a dog the way I do. Still, it’s nice to have the chat with them.