Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (329)
September 21, 2026
Year 7 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 7, Day 139: We’ve cobbled together a semblance of a routine. I drop off SmolAc, he drops off JB. I wade through my to do list, chores or desk work, until it’s noon and I’ve forgotten to eat lunch but too late now! It’s time to mosey out the door for SmolAc pick up. When we get back, I feed SmolAc a snack and we fill the time one way or another. We head back out two or three hours later to pick up JB, depending on the time they get out and where they’re meeting us. We have two different pickup locations and three different pickup times.
The one constant is how exhausted I am by 3 or 4 pm. Sometimes by 1 pm. I feel like I should still be taking JB to their after school sport like I always did 2 days a week but PiC has taken that over since school started. It’s not even in me to put up a token protest. I’m so tired that half the time, after we get back from picking up JB, I have to put myself to bed. Sometimes it’ll be because I spent the between pickups time cooking. Sometimes it’ll be because I did so many chores in the post dropoff chunk of time. Some days it’s because I was in so much pain the night before, sleep was impossible.
Today it was getting called in as emergency contact auntie to pick up a friend’s kiddo who was sick and we brought them home to keep them safe, fed, and occupied until their parents got home from work. I’m very grateful we have this ability to help out and I’m also very very tired. But I’m so tired every single day.
Except some days if we can make it to the library. On those days, the kids can craft for a few hours and enjoy the library and sitting up doesn’t feel too hard. But that’s more like good luck than anything else.
I can’t suss the amount of energy I’ll be allowed each day, this is not the first nor the last time I’ll wish I had a health meter bar installed like I’m a video game character, because it sure would help when I’m dropping in my tracks and wondering why. I’m pretty sure I used to last later through the day because my butt was firmly parked for 4-6 hours a day, not just 1-3.
Year 7, Day 140: I’m full of sadness and anticipatory dread today. I started the day a bit sad, just generally. Then getting the kids out the door didn’t feel like the relief it usually does. I had to untangle a lot of tangles at work and am taking big deep breaths over the many ways that the parent company is torpedoing our quality. I knew they would be doing that and had accurately predicted how and where they would cut corners. Having it actually happen shouldn’t be any kind of a surprise and yet it sits badly in my gut. We have several more weeks, and I don’t know how I’m going to stand it.
Chatting to a friend today was really sad. Their kid is going through a severe depression and the parents need more adult support in those gaps when neither parent can be home. That’s where I come in. We’re scheduling days and times where I’ll be picking up and minding their kid when they are at work. What a terrible weight they’re carrying right now, my heart breaks for all of them.
Year 7, Day 141: Are the Google docs and sheets apps cursed now? They keep refusing to open important files and telling me to check my internet connection and permissions. Having created the docs, I do darn well have permission! And I can do everything else that requires an Internet connection so what gives?? /grump
Oh and another thing on an entirely different subject. I think I might be a fool. I might have been PEMSing myself ever since school started. And it took a MONTH for it to even occur to me.
I’m trying to ease the tasks on PiC’s plate while he’s the one with a job that extends past this fall so far as we know and it’s really stressing him out. Both the fact that he’s the primary breadwinner for an unknown span of time and because the stress of the work itself is so much worse than before (several rounds of layoffs later).
We flipped from 90/10 him/me on meal planning and prep to 20/80 him/me. My meal prep is much more labor intensive since I’m cooking from scratch and even occasionally remembering to make veggie sides. I’m doing all the after school pickups and the after kinder care, the trash bins (out and back again) and the gardening. It doesn’t sound like a ton but it’s significantly more than I’d been doing. Then, usually late at night, I make myself do as much of a workout as I can so that I can check off the exercises boxes. I’m paying for a trainer, those assignments need to get done!
It’s been weeks of dragging myself through the day until I literally cannot anymore and have to lay down. Then, more dragging. It’s infuriating.
Almost accidentally, I gave myself the past two days in a row off from working out, which I have not done since July and … errrr. I lasted til dinnertime tonight. I was tired but not catastrophically pass out against my will tired like every single day for the past month. Crap. I think I did this to me.
Year 7, Day 142: Testing my theory again yesterday, I did only 1 set per exercise instead of pushing myself to do all 2 or 3 or 4 sets. My PEMs was distinctly lower today. Argh! I have to roll back the exercise. I’ve emailed my trainer.
I was browsing Costco.com and noticed their P&G offer good until Sept 20. We can get a $25 Costco Shop Card for things we bought last week. Score! For a second $100 of spending, we’d get another $35 card. I’m checking other receipts to see if there’s anything that fills that second hundred.
Update: I submitted the first receipt with $130 of P&G items only for them to say there weren’t $100 worth of qualified items. 🙄 I’m going to have to highlight these things for them, aren’t I?
Year 7, Day 143: Welp a decade later, we find ourselves back in the casting room at the local hospital. Back then, it was their nursemaid’s elbow. Today, JB took a bad step and their foot is in a cast for a month. The sports medicine floor is really poorly designed for kids who have these kinds of injuries. I saw at least four of them in similar situations just walking in, but they made us traverse the whole floor about 4 times. Insurance coverage is something to be thankful for. Our visit, three X-rays and a cast would have cost:
We paid $35.
The middle school secretaries have this down pat, so within minutes of our arrival with the doctor’s note they’d already arranged for JB to have extra time to hobble from one class to the next and all the other things they had to arrange for their late arrival, for pickup and drop-off and other bits and bobs for the next month.