May 18, 2026
Year 7 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 7, Day 15: I wanted to try this roasted cauliflower recipe from Smitten Kitchen but we only had florets and no pumpkin seeds, so I accidentally overroasted the cut florets instead. Whoops. SmolAc claimed to love it, though, so we’ll try again tomorrow with a much shorter bake time.
It was a real mental slog today with the layoff-with-no-information still plaguing everyone. We still need the necessary information to make decisions, like say, LAST DAYS, and we’re *shocker* being strung along. Still. I had a medium chat of commiseration with my colleague who feels as despondent as I do today. They responded to my feelings of failure using my own words from last week which, ok, fine, fair play. We did the best that we could with the information that we had. For all that I regret not foreseeing this exact outcome on this timeline, my therapist reminds me that this is very consistent with all the reasons that I hated the new parent company coming into our lives in the first place. They’re callous, inefficient, incompetent, and entirely about money and power. I hated that at the start of my career, I hate it now at the end of this part of my career. I might be done with this industry. I’m good at my job but I’m terrible at the politics and you can’t survive in senior to executive leadership with my attitude towards politics (deep sincere loathing). I’m worse at tolerating incompetence, and it’s quite clear that that is the only way to thrive in this corporation and probably most others.
Year 7, Day 16: I’m less tired than yesterday but then burned some of that precious recovery going to my annual eye exam. I HATE eye exams. I always feel like I’m failing and this time, the results for the only test that I’m “good” at (the peripheral vision) were bad. The doc thinks that it was due to fogging in the visor thingie. We skipped the eye dilation in favor of the horribly blinding bright flash photos to view the optic nerves; that always makes me feel sick. The nausea wasn’t as strong as usual but it did leave me off kilter enough that, on my way home, I misjudged the distance to the curb and bounced off it a little bit. I almost panicked at the impact but managed to get myself into a parking spot safely. The rubber of the tire is a little chipped but I think it’s ok? I hope it is.
My mood isn’t good but the heaviness of yesterday eased up enough for me to do a handful of to-do items and that helps my mood immensely, generally. Submitted a praise nomination for an award for the compassionate nurse from last week. Submitted a change in camp schedule for JB. Submitted a request for a replacement debit card for PiC. Stopped by the bank and deposited cash from PiC’s recent sales.
Year 7, Day 17: I rescheduled one of JB’s camps for August to get around a schedule conflict. I hate how public school doesn’t just give us the whole year of scheduling in one go when most of these things that they give us so little notice for was set in stone for months! That’s going to cost a $25 cancellation fee which feels much less negligible then it used to feel. This reminds me I need to do an estimate of what camps that both kids might attend next summer to estimate what we should contribute to the 2027 FSA – best case scenario planning (assuming PiC still has his job in 2027) to go with my worst case scenario planning. I contain multitudes.
I’ve gone through our election ballot and selected most of our candidates for most position. I’m stewing over the governorship – why do we have SIXTY ONE candidates?? Argh. This is how we end up with a pair of Republicans in the general election! GRR.
Year 7, Day 18: A friend shared this cool site: https://reciprocard.com. You can check to see if you have reciprocal privileges at another library!
I spent 15 minutes looking at high-level job listings and have concluded I hate them all. I want to be independently wealthy, volunteer, and give my time and money to help people and animals.
MakeItSoPicard.gif.
We toured the middle school and the tour was led by sixth and seventh graders which was moderately annoying. We also didn’t get sufficient information on electives selection which I didn’t realize til long after we got home. SmolAc loved it because they snacked their way through the whole thing.
Year 7, Day 19: I’m feeling a lot like Stephen Colbert about my Schrodinger’s layoff: There are more important things in the worlds. I’m mostly concerned for my staff (and my financial future). I have no interest in litigating it at all. My colleagues/staff are all taking it really hard, and my primary job is to support them. Maybe I’m just numb (my instinctive coping mechanism), or being reasonably financially stable in a time of crisis for once (novel!), or because I’ve been through one of these already and they haven’t, or I know there’s simply no point in demanding to know why a corporation bought a perfectly good company only to strip it for parts. This happens all the time. Red Lobster. Party City. A hundred other companies I couldn’t recall off the top of my head. Private equity is of the devil and so is “line go up” corporate business management. It’s all the same: they only care about extracting value and kicking the husk into the corner.
I’ve always been at least a little fatalistic about the world and corporations specifically, so really, after I absorbed how quickly this went down, I also have no desire to prolong the pain by worrying over how and why they can be so terrible. Because they have continued to be awful, of course. My laser focus is on getting my staff taken care of and making sure they pay me every penny that they owe me before I get the hell out.
I give myself a little job hunting time every day, and a little do whatever the heck I want on my chore/to do list every day. I’ll start to volunteer at the local rescue soon because they have remote volunteering options!, to give myself a little joy in my life, to try to offset the weirdness of being unemployed when that final day comes. I also need to think of what to send each of my staff to personally thank them for their time and efforts since they started, for the last day. My old bosses sucked – they couldn’t even be bothered to take a minute to say goodbye to me when I left my last job to come work again for my Good Boss, I won’t have that last day go unremarked for my people no matter how this ship went down.
May 11, 2026
Year 7 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 7, Day 8: We’ve finally gotten some information on the layoff. I’ll have months to wrap up work, though there’s not much of it (any?) that I care about. Now that they’ve treated everyone so badly, my obligations are to draw a paycheck and dump information wherever they want it and ride it out til the last day. I’d almost prefer that last day to be sooner so I can get on with healing and resting but it makes no sense to give up extra income while the workload is lighter than it’s ever been, ever.
When all’s said and done the package could take me through the end of February. Then… I don’t know! I threw an application into the world for a job that closes in a week. Told them I wanted only remote work and a start date in 2027. It’ll be unlikely they even bother to look at it but I redid my resume from top to bottom and went for it anyway to shake off the rust. I’ve not had to apply for jobs in 15 years, it’s been a really good run of avoiding the whole process. But it does mean I’m out of practice and need to brush up while I’m still unwilling to commit to anything.
I’ll have to actually do some math to figure out how much money we need for me not to have to go back to work, or for us to live on one income, but none of the calculators I’ve run to date seem to come up with less than 3 years from the best case lowest spend scenario.
Year 7, Day 9: Actually, having finally edited the budget spreadsheet, I think I will have paychecks through mid-February. That should feel comforting but instead the panic is eating my brain today.
Maybe a small part of it is fueled by my secret competition where I’ve been trying to catch up to PiC’s salary. He’s older than me and started out with a higher salary when he entered the workforce but this past year I finally caught up to his salary to within $200. I was so proud of that! And I knew I wasn’t going to have this job and this salary long, failure felt inevitable because of what corporate was doing. I was so proud of finally making the highest salary I’d ever made and really enjoying wrapping myself in the temporary feeling of security. Before I could get used to it, it’s gone. And that’s sad.
But now I’m contemplating making choices that make less money for my health and happiness and my subconscious has begun to absolutely freak out.
A friend reminded me that my past trauma is rearing its head: did someone else make really crappy decisions that are impacting my life negatively and creating enormous piles of work that I have to clear up? WHY YES, that DID happen. Repeatedly. I can make all the good things to do lists I want, I can’t leapfrog the grief process.
I’m sad that 1/3 of my life’s work ended in such a shitty way. I knew I would have to walk away at some point but leaving a smoking crater that someone else caused behind was not in my list of imagined possibilities. I’m so mad that they have treated everyone so badly through this process. I hate that my carefully recruited and constructed and trained team are being torn apart.
Year 7, Day 10: I’ve reworked my 2026 spreadsheet and then set up 2027 to game out the rest of my severance period, get a sense of our cashflow, and see how long we’ll last on PiC’s income after my income runs out. I had to add in a lot of recurring expenses that I don’t normally spell out to have a better sense of cashflow, remembered that at the end. If I stopped saving entirely when my income stops, then we would cash land at the end of 2027 with very little cash. If there’s no spike in spending, we could make it through the year before we start tapping the savings. What I wonder is, longer term, how long could we go before my being unemployed becomes a problem? I’m entirely unnerved by the necessity of stopping our regular savings, so that’s not great. But it is good to know that’s one lever to turn. The other lever, of course, is reducing spending but would you believe I’m so out of practice with constricting spending like this (versus just telling myself I can’t have wants) that it feels like it’s kind of complicated to manage? The simplest things to start cutting are my healthcare: therapy and my trainer. But those are the ways that I manage my health, should they be first on the chopping block?
Year 7, Day 11: A neighbor’s tree hasn’t been maintained properly and now the power lines are entangled in the branches. I used PG&E’s report it function to send pictures of the problem and rather promptly got a status update stating they agree with us that it’s both a safety concern and a violation of a safety regulation. I just checked the status of the problem today and the Remedial Action Date is 04/28/2027. EXCUSE me? The last time I popped in, it was 5-7 business days, now you’re going to take almost a year to get around to it??
Another PGE mystery: I’ve paid every bill in full. But they currently say that $1.50 from my last bill is now overdue. With a $0 balance. What??
Year 7, Day 12: I wish I could do something remote and part time and make enough money from that alone to coast but I have a lurking worry that relying on just one breadwinner is setting ourselves up for failure. In a more charmed existence, that wouldn’t be the case and we’d be fine on his income for several years. Many of my pre 30s years were very hard grinding traumatic years. Have I passed out of that or am I cycling back into that? Who knows!I’m not sure where we exist on that spectrum of luck and whatever else.
Headlines and updates on the economy aren’t helping me sleep at night. From Money Talk News, Expert warns: The 2030 economic cliff is coming for your retirement. A major economic shift is predicted to peak by 2030, driven by historic cycles and rapid AI adoption. Are you prepared for the “forced loans” that could target your digital assets? (I know something is happening because of the AI being forced down our throats but is that going to continue for the next four years or will pushback finally work?)
From Moneywise: “Goldman Sachs says the S&P 500’s run past 7,100 is ‘froth’ — Wall Street said the same just before the 2008 stock market crash” (Ok but how many other times have they said this and did they pan out or no?)
This is getting under my skin. I’d set aside cash for this year’s upcoming large expenses and the cash left over was sent to our Vanguard brokerage to be invested. But the market keeps going up (irrationally IMO but I have thought that for the past 10 years) and I keep not committing to the transaction for the lump sum. I kept repeating to myself in the shower: Time in the market is more important than timing the market. But even being an old hand at this investing unemotionally thing can mean nothing in the face of unsettlement like the imminent end of income for an unknown period. I keep thinking “but what if we need that cash?” I think the answer is that we already have cash on hand for this specific purpose so invest it already and if we blow through our liquid savings, THEN we pull it back out of the brokerage. I suppose it just feels like tempting fate? But rationally speaking, we shouldn’t need it before 2028 and if we do then we do and out it comes. It’s not a fail to have to pull money back out, there’s no penalty other than paying capital gains since it’s a brokerage account, it’s not a retirement account with age limits.
May 4, 2026
Year 7 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 7, Day 1: We have finally gotten the garage door fixed! It cost a bundle ($$$$) but we got a good price from the guy we used with more services for less than the Big Corporate company that sent through a quote for $200 more and half the services. Whew. That’s a huge relief.
The other mostly petty frustrations remain – my blog spam filter is utterly hopelessly broken (I’m now on my third one, hoping this will work), the WordPress app is also not functioning so I can’t blog quick thoughts, and I’ve got to get someone to do a thing about the oven. I would like my oven working again please.
Also how is it I’m working every bit as hard – or more – since being told my job doesn’t exist anymore (except we have no information to move forward from here!)?? I’ve been taking calls nonstop from morning to evening every day. It’s deeply too much. I need to be able to take a break for my own sanity from all this. Sigh. I’m trying to carve out an hour where I am not making or taking calls, each day. Today’s task is to pull job listings that give me some useful language for my laughably outdated resume. Yesterday I spent a few hours fixing up my LinkedIn profile as a test run and that did help shake loose a few cobwebs. Weirdly being faced with the Word doc of my resume feels impossible to tackle but I’ll hack away at this slowly.
Year 7, Day 2: Here’s something I didn’t expect with this layoff: I actually have people who respect and like me well enough to write me glowing recommendations. Back in 2008, I was still early enough in my career, and isolated enough, that I had to stretch to get as many as three references. My bosses at the time were horrible toxic creatures so they were to be avoided at all costs and they didn’t give two hoots about what would happen to us.
In today’s world, I’ve already lined up a minimum of three senior leaders to serve as references for all of my people so they don’t even have to ask and contacted half a dozen folks to ask them to be references for me across multiple departments. My instincts had reacted like I’d be as much up a creek with this layoff as the last one – perhaps job hunt wise I will be, because it’s bleak out there, everything is AI everything – this bit of things surprised me. I guess logging 15 years with the same boss also gave enough me time to build strong connections I hadn’t expected to be able to lean on. This probably doesn’t have any relationship to outcomes, but…one can hope?
Of course with not a single rec mentioning how scary (complimentary) I am, which is the first thing these people usually say when they’re describing me, it feels a little weird. I’m being oversold here! In response to that, my friend commented that many companies posting job descriptions are also overselling how great they are too so it all balances out. There’s a certain amount of merit to that idea and it helps with my anxiety.
Year 7, Day 3: I’m not feeling sorry for myself because I’m too busy being mad and worried for my teams; we are in a much better position than last time so I am grateful for what stability I’ve built over the years; and stopping working for the terrible people is a net good. A random glance at an October post, and my memory of 2024, reminds me I have been miserable for a long time.
I am anxious, though. I will probably know next week roughly what we’re working with and that will be good information and start a loud ticking clock in my psyche. It’s going to whisper a countdown and I don’t want a countdown in my head. My best case scenario is that someone will have a job that’s a good fit out there and I’ll connect with them sort of earlier than I want to be working again and we can agree on a start date that gives me actual time to rest and recuperate. Universe, y’hear me?
In realityland, I’ve put together one application for a totally stretch position that might be me getting in way over my head. That was true of one of the jobs I applied for back in the day but months later, I ended up with a role with the same company that was much more realistic and while that was admittedly miserable too, it gave me a huge springboard into the next stages of my career with some pretty great people and I can’t hate that so I think it can’t hurt to toss my hat in the ring and see what happens when I ask for what I want.
Year 7, Day 4: Mental ping-pong 1: Panic, will we run out of cash before I find another job? // Calm, we have a decent amount of savings before we have to tap the brokerage.
Mental ping-pong 2: Fuck this industry that’s going very rapidly downhill. I want to do something that I actually care about now – animal care or something like that. Not that I didn’t care about the quality of my work in this job/industry, of course I did. But that was on principle, not because I loved the work itself. I don’t want to be miserable anymore. // We need a high salary, I need to suck it up and try to land something lateral or higher than my last job.
Mental ping-pong 3: I really really need a break. I don’t want to get out of bed for a week. // I have so many things I should/want to do. There isn’t enough time to do it if I get a job in any reasonable amount of time (3-6 months would be good, I wouldn’t want to start after only 3 months off but I do want something in hand at that point for the future).
None of these include my specific need to have a job that I can do from bed if necessary. I don’t know how I’m going to manage to swing that despite successfully running this company for many years that way.
Year 7, Day 5: I had a whole battery of pokes and prods and general discomfort: bloodwork, cervical cancer screen, the HPV vaccine because it occurred to me last year that it came out when I didn’t have good insurance so I didn’t get the series back in the day. I’m just under the age cut off so I went ahead and got the first dose. My nurse was really terribly kind, she warned me it would feel bad going in (it did, it burned), made sure I had an ice pack and observation for 15 minutes to make sure I didn’t have any adverse reactions and sent me home with an extra ice pack. This is the first vaccine where I completely forgot I’d gotten it at all within hours and not because I was very still for too long. 98% of the pain was gone by the evening with only a dull almost bruise like pain if I really thought about it.
I’ve been worried that I take too much magnesium, putting my liver or kidneys at risk, but either the magnesium I take contains MUCH less Mg than advertised or I have some kind of deficiency because my Mg levels are well within the normal range. I don’t know what to make of that and kind of want a chemistry kit to test the Mg tablets I take for content.
April 27, 2026
Year 6 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 359: We’re in Week 1 of the Hardening Off the Pumpkin Seedlings. They are experiencing cold and wind from the safety of a sheltered bucket for a slightly longer stint each day and are still hale and hardy. So far, so good!
Over the weekend, I picked up a couple spare compostable cups, and dropped the 7 presoaked sugar snap pea seeds in there to test out this inside sowing thing. It’s worked out well for Smol Acrobat’s seeds, why not give it a whirl? For context, I’ve mostly been resistant to making this much effort to germinate seeds inside and transition them to the outside. But the prolonged non-germination period has broken me down. Today I was rewarded by the appearance of two teeny seedlings peeping up through the soil! In only two days! I’m pulling back the cucumber seeds that were put into the outside containers several weeks ago. They’re probably freezing and hiding as hard as they can in the soil. Need to rustle up some more trays or cups or whatever might fit on the windowsill to get those seedlings going.
Year 6, Day 360: Money well spent: I scoured a sale for an Oodie that now lives at my desk. After a hard meeting, I can literally crawl back into it, be wrapped in a cute soft squishy Sherpa-lined giant sized sweater thing and decompress. I’m cozy-warm at my desk all the time instead of slowly turning into a block of ice because I don’t want to turn on the heat! It’s so nice. I thought my friend might have been over-stating the wonders of the blanket-hoodie but nope, not even a little bit. I always have a little pang when a meeting comes around and I have to crawl out of it to pretend to be a working professional.
My cup now has THREE seedlings!
Annoying things I have got to get around to dealing with: The oven is still on the fritz. Need to find time to call in someone to fix it.
USPS Informed Delivery showed that my DMV car registration was due last Monday. It still hasn’t appeared so now I have to put in Missing Mail search request and hope it works. I’ve a suspicion that it was misdelivered to a non-friendly neighbor who has chosen to keep it as their registration sticker instead.
The garage door opener went on the fritz. I need to get someone in to fix it, PiC’s done what he could to troubleshoot but it’s at the end of its lifespan (15 years) so it doesn’t feel like it makes sense to replace the control panel.
Year 6, Day 361: What a frustrating week. Our friends’ kiddo is having a terrible run of health luck and the poor child is now so scared of seeing new doctors because they’ve undergone so many tests and scans.
And drumroll, please: our whole company’s been laid off. We were part of a purge of wide swaths of departments. It was handled so badly that I was devoid of any words except cursing. Zero compassion, zero sense, it’s entirely about cuts to slash costs because they couldn’t make their projections that were wild conjecture with no basis in reality. I know it’s not my fault, those were circumstances several levels above my pay grade, but I’m still so angry about all of it. They took a perfectly good company that was turning a steady profit each year, and wrecked it. Having done that, they blamed us and gutted us. I will never forgive them for it but they won’t ever care. Now I have to figure out how we get on with things.
Year 6, Day 362: So, layoff money stuff. Presumably we’ll have severance pay but that’s theoretical right now. Along with everything else they bungle (shorting payroll, shorting bonuses, marking people ineligible for bonuses, stalling promotions for half a year at a time, emailing confidential information to the wrong SameName person in the company, shutting down the accounts for the wrong SameName person in the company because they accidentally sent them a password reset instead of just telling them to ignore it, managing to brick every single PC user for one shining afternoon), they didn’t bother to get any separation information together before dumping our asses. Just another way they’re a horrible employer.
Since we don’t know our last day(s), I can’t make a lot of useful projections. For now, I can tally up how much accessible cash we have to cover my part of the household income. That’ll be saved cash and i-bonds, and the cash meant to be invested.
I’m reviewing the rules around unemployment benefits to stretch my timeline of available cash. For unemployment in CA, it looks like my best bet is to apply right away because it’s based on the highest quarter in my last 18 months of income. I should be eligible for $450 per week up to 1 year. I found this bit interesting: “The California Training Benefits (CTB) program allows you to attend school or training while receiving unemployment benefits.” That might be useful! My industry has been taking some really awful turns with the proliferation of GenAI and I don’t want to go back. Maybe this is one way to pivot back into animal care that I’d rather be doing, down the road. I’ll return to that later. My brain doesn’t have room for it now but I have to dig into it probably in my first two months of being laid off since we have to apply before the 16th week of unemployment.
If the initial information was accurate, severance should be 2 weeks per year of service and I’ll max it out at 26 weeks. That’s taxed at a higher rate, about 41%, so 60% in take home cash works out to roughly 3.5 months of income.
Year 6, Day 363: I’m just sad today. I’ve been working every day this week since the announcement to support my team, and maybe incidentally keeping too busy to think much about my own situation but the questions of “who am I when I don’t spend 40 hours a week doing my thing” and “what do I want / what can I do next?” and “how bad does it feel not to be in charge of my own team anymore?” (answer: so bad) are rising to the surface. I hated my actual job of the past 2-3 years. That was miserable. I was still good at it, I had been making life significantly better for my team and that was so many lives improved, but I hated the corporate pressures where nothing mattered except “line goes up” well beyond the possibilities in reality. None of their lies and platitudes serving as reasons for this devastation matters, I’m just sad. In therapy I’m going to have to explore how to handle being a person whose job of 15 years revolved around doing the work itself but also building an amazing team that was just summarily axed. I have lots of feelings about this. I thought that cutting off my dad was a hard identity transition. This one may be a lot harder? But maybe a positive one, in the end, like going no contact was, ultimately.
There’s some shades of relief knowing that there’s an end to my personal suffering but I would never have taken that route at my team’s expense if I had any choice about it.
There’s also resentment that I’d finally found some kind of balance between my saving (extreme) and spending (extremely no) impulses and now it has to flip around a bit until I know where the money is coming from.
April 20, 2026
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 352: I love it when friends share their meals and the basics of how they cooked it. A former chef friend’s most recent texts jogged my memory about the pork belly I’d frozen last year and forgotten about: mince garlic and ginger, saute the salted pork belly and tofu, season with some mirin, dish sauce. I didn’t take the extra steps of adding greens and making a broth since we’d run out of both but it all went great over rice. Next time I might want to use ground pork instead, and try to add greens. SmolAc HATES fat (they’re weirdly obsessive) so the pork belly wasn’t a great fit for them.
I’m trying to return some 2 year old logo stuff to the local gym to get my money back. Nothing has changed with their logo so there’s no reason they should deny the refund but it turns out that it’s such an old transaction they are having tech problems with it. We’ll have to come back and deal with it next week since they couldn’t figure out how to process the refund. Fingers crossed they won’t have forgotten to figure it out in the interim.
Year 6, Day 353: On one hand, I’m making a real effort to put together a reasonably adult human wardrobe. A friend helped me pick a few nice linen-like pants which are perfect for warmer weather (which we don’t usually have….). I’ve picked out cute skirts from Maya Kern, my successor shop to Svaha, and am learning how to put them together to make actual outfits instead of just jeans + tshirting. For cooler weather, so far, I’ve got a pair of fleece lined leggings, 2 large Elhoffer Design sweaters from several years back and 2 chunky sweaters, plus my warm boots. That’ll work for more than one outfit if I can avoid being covered in dog fur or slobber (no guarantees). If I don’t need to care what I look like (most of the time) then it’s cargo pants or fleece lined cargos plus a tee and a hoodie.
(Flip side of the wardrobe rearrangement coin: I’ve extracted 4 maternity shirts for donation, 2 old shirts that are the epitome of threadbare, and 5 Svaha dresses that I’ll never fit in again (sad). We’ll see if the kids want a shot at them before I attempt to list them on Poshmark or donate them.)
On the other hand I discovered the existence of blanket hoodies, Oodies, on clearance and now I live in this giant blanket with the kangaroo pocket down at my knees. It’s so COZY. Like I needed another excuse to hunker down and never leave the house. (This is what I need a dog for, to force me to leave the house when it’s just don’t wanna and not a fibro/CFS thing.)
Year 6, Day 354: Good grief, the big feelings from SmolAc this morning. I don’t know why it was a trigger, or if it really WAS the trigger or if anything would have done the trick, but PiC sharing that the school would be doing school pictures today set off a complete sobbing meltdown. I gave it a few minutes before I came in to cuddle them (they will kick and flail and push you away if you come too soon), and helped them get back on their mental feet. They required a lot of cuddling and shepherding to get moving.
Ironically, they had a grand time at the picture session with their buddies, the teachers reported, so grand and so overstimulating that most of them conked out during the rest period. I’m mildly surprised they still do rest time at this age but this group seems to need naps far more than say, JB’s group. JB quit napping one day age 3 and never went back even once. We didn’t stop sending SmolAc for naps til just before they turned five because they were Always. So. GRUMPY. tired.
Anyway, we ended up being glad that they didn’t mind the photos and horrified by the news that the kids in the class, and in the whole center in fact, shared ONE CAP for all the pictures. OH NO. Please join me in hoping this is just a funny-horrible story to share later and that no head lice were shared among all or most of the kids.
Year 6, Day 355: The swim center has cancelled the kids’ swim lessons for the rest of the month unfortunately. The pool was undergoing some emergency repairs and they can’t get it done in time for any of the weekend lessons. This frees up our Saturday mornings temporarily but it’s still disappointing since their swimming was developing nicely.
We are now entering a new era of gardening: hardening off. I’ve never done this before but Smol Acrobat’s seedlings are growing so vigorously I want to give them their best chance at survival. They got to spend one hour in a shaded bucket to protect them from the wind and sun. We’ll increase their daily outdoor time by 1-2 hours a day until they get to the point of being able to overnight outside without withering or wilting.
Year 6, Day 356: I grumpily ranted about this on Bluesky yesterday. We try to actively parent while balancing our guidance and encouraging independence for both kids. We’ve been pulling back a touch on managing JB’s socializing but as they’re only in elementary school and moving into middle school, we still actively engage with other parents so we’re not relying solely on our kid’s reporting which isn’t always accurate or complete.
I have this parent asking me for info on why this team splintered and I was rather shocked to find out that she didn’t know that happened until the final presentation, today. Her response: husband is the one who picks up from school. Ok, sure, but you don’t talk to your kid at all just because you’re not the picker-upper? Mind, I’m already cheesed off at her anyway because she refuses to make even a minimal effort like any of the other parents do. Not even when we ASKED her to take an active role in coordinating at get together. She ignored us, left it up to her flakey kid, and ended up with kids being left out because those other parents rightfully expected that a real plan would include their parent contacting the friends’ parents.
So when she asked me for details at last night’s event, I hesitated for a moment. I tend to be honest but their kid is the reason the group splintered. The kid eavesdropped on a private conversation, then deliberately used what they heard to cause unnecessary drama and distress. So do I tell her that her kid is the problem? I kinda want her to know her kid sucks but I landed on the side of Nope. Not my circus. We got through the thing and I am not required to care about her kid’s drama anymore.
A) I don’t feel like being used as her crutch because she can’t be bothered to pay attention. I have a full time job running a damn company, 2 young kids, no help aside from my spouse, & make the effort to at least know roughly what’s going on. That takes work! Her decision not to try does not earn her a place on my list. JB says “she deserves to know.” Sure. But she isn’t entitled to MY time and energy after not bothering. She can make some effort for herself. Asking me doesn’t count. I wouldn’t feel this way if she made any effort whatsoever but she doesn’t.
B) I also think she sucks in every way to do with this group project. They didn’t bother to engage with any parent (parental permission was required), they didn’t bother to make sure their kid was at the mandatory group meetings at school. They didn’t bother to make sure all the kids were invited to the practice at their place. There was no way any conversation about how her kid sucks was going to avoid how I feel about her right now.
All that was more than I felt like engaging on at this point in the night, or really, my life.
April 13, 2026
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 345: I want the job of giving away a billionaire’s assets in the vein of Mackenzie Scott’s giving: MacKenzie Scott Makes Another Blockbuster Gift To An HBCU. She’s making a real difference to institutions that are usually not prioritized. I’d like to do that. Preferably money from billionaires who are doing nothing but harm to the ecosystem, socially, environmentally, etc. though, that would feel much more right.
Related: My W-2 job sent around a shockingly tone-deaf gross note to colleagues stationed in the Middle East encouraging them to take time off now (and max out their vacation allotments) so that they can have a productive last half of the year. So you want them to use up their PTO because you can’t be bothered to extend the courtesy of PTO because of WAR? And then when that’s all used up and the latter half of this year continues to be a crazed rabid barrel of monkeys, you’ll what, fire them for needing more leave? Are all CEOs required to turn in half their brains when they get into the C-suite? FFS!
Paying bills! I was shocked to see our near-$4000 credit card bill. I’d totally forgotten that 75% of the summer camps were paid in this month, along with the payments for Spring Break that included one nice dinner, along with a lot of contributions to struggling folks.
Year 6, Day 346: It’s been six weeks and my cucumber seeds still aren’t germinating. I’m guessing our soil temperature just isn’t warm enough, though I could swear that it’s roughly the same weather we always have. So disappointing. My lettuce and onion seeds have never germinated, so I’m starting to think the real problem here is me. Oh but cutting back the blackberry bush last year was the right move! It’s put out several new branches covered in leaves now so I need to come up with a way to tag the branches as primocane or floricane as we get into the growing seasons.
We’ve been slowly filling up our Got Sneakers? bag since January 2024. They ask you not to send their giant FedEx bag until it’s full, and we don’t give up our shoes til they are worn through so it’s taken us a while but I think it’s nearly full enough to ship out. They used to pay $0.25 for the recyclable condition shoes but they don’t anymore so we just send these to keep them out of the landfill. I hope it does, anyway, they say: “All heavily used and damaged footwear is recycled to reuse materials or to convert waste into new energy.” Looks like our assessment of what was worn all the way through didn’t match theirs and we made a couple dollars from the last bag. Who knows, maybe we’ll make a buck or two off this bag.
Year 6, Day 347: Nicole and Maggie got me thinking about my sibling and the last time I saw a picture of him, he was basically like a feral hermit. Despite our always rocky relationship, thinking of that image of him hurts my heart.
Commenting on an older Nicole and Maggie post, they also got me thinking about how I’m most productive when I have something specific to avoid. I procrastinate when I don’t feel like doing That Thing but because there’s no end to the amount of work I have to do, it doesn’t feel like procrastination. It’s now redefined it as re-prioritizing. But if I know I need to do something I’ve been putting off, tattling on myself works pretty well. Telling a friend that it needs doing is often enough to make me do it. Maybe that IS a function of guilt.
$50 and one smog check later, my 24 year old car is good for another year on the road. I’m hoping we can hit 30 years and 250K miles before we have to replace it.
Year 6, Day 348: A friend shared amazing news that enabled them to retire early and I’m thrilled to my toes for them. So glad that a genuinely good thing has happened for a genuinely good person that I care about.
$$$. I found a set of cute sweaters for Christmas gifts. I DID considered off-brand types but they weren’t significantly cheaper than the brand name on clearance so I went with the original brand, picking from only the clearance bin designs.
Year 6, Day 349: Kaiser is finally starting to be affected by all the anti-vaccine bullshit from this administration. We used to be able to get 6 month boosters for the COVID vaccine under our own decision making. This year, we can’t. I did talk directly with one of the pediatricians who shared that Kaiser has been keeping their own data on COVID and it’s lower than previous years, though admitted that some of that is self reporting (or lack thereof) to go along with the officially reported diagnostics and hospitalizations. I’m trying to decide what this means for our year and how we protect ourselves. I was thrashed by a “mere cold” more than once this year.
Money: I made a second sale on Poshmark, that’s another $7 we can put away.
April 6, 2026
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 339: Taking a minute to be oh so very grateful that I’m not sick right now. I spent so many weeks of this year flattened like a pancake from the sick and fatigue that I get flashbacks sometimes. I am so so grateful that I’ve managed to stay at my rough baseline of yuck, uncomplicated by some virus or another, for three whole weeks.
We took the kids to see Mychal Threets talk and then to explore a new-to-us park that PiC’s noticed several times. It was huge and there were friendly dogs there too so I got a really good dog fix and they got to play at a pretty neat playground. It was soul-cleansing.
Money: Ah ha! Costco gas receipts are valid for the ibotta “any receipt” redemption thing. $0.25 in our pocket.
Year 6, Day 340: I’ve been thinking about things I’d rather do/enjoy doing. I love working around and taking care of animals. I like cleaning and bandaging up wounds (also for humans, not just critters). I don’t enjoy the constant needs of human infants or baby animals, that’s a bit too much. I don’t want to go back to school and I have never gotten past my antipathy for math and my brain doesn’t hold on to new information as well as it used to so probably medical training isn’t in the cards but I would like to take that 3 day wilderness survival care training class. I wish it weren’t 3 days, though.
Put all together, this means I’d like to be a part time basic injuries only Night Nurse / pet bather (not groomer, I can bathe dogs, clean ears, and trim nails but I can’t clip and make them pretty) / pet less intensive care treater. The last time I did a flight of fancy for my future career was when I was 17, working full time, saying I’d like to be paid to do X. After months of applications, I got a very low paying job to do X, and built my entire career up from that by acquiring a whole lot more similar skills. Maybe it’s time to see if putting that out in the universe will work again. *Patient hat on*
Year 6, Day 341: Text I received: “Territorial Seed Company: Growing basil at home is a game-changer for flavor!” Not if it just DIES ON YOU. Harumph. I bought both sweet basil and Thai basil plants last year, planted them in the garden, and two weeks later they were all dead. #bitter Every time someone says that it’s so frugal to grow your own herbs I silently demand to know exactly how they’re being kept alive because I missed that class.
Year 6, Day 342: I was reading this article from Kiplingers, How to Protect Yourself and Others From a Troubled Adult Child: A Lesson from Real Life, and this line struck me: “Alex made clear that his parents refused to have Gabe arrested — and he could still be, for assault, vandalism, terrorist threats — and taken to a mental facility. I spoke about this with two clinical psychologists, who asked not to be identified because they are not involved in Gabe’s case. They both indicated that the fact that he has not been arrested is evidence of the parents being caught in a spiral of enabling.”
It reminded me of something my biodad said to me when I was a kid. “Even if a parent knew of a kid’s wrongdoing (or vice versa), I still have to protect that family member from outsiders if the police showed up.” 8 year old me felt like that was off somehow but couldn’t put the reason into words. It occurs to me now that even if he wasn’t laying groundwork, he absolutely believed he deserved to be bailed out of all his problems by his parents, then his sibling(s), and later, me and there’s definitely a corollary to that early belief.
Year 6, Day 340: Well. That was short-lived. JB came home with a sore throat and a cough and since they have insisted on bunking with me since my last depressive/suicidal cycle, I now have some version of what they have. I’m starting to think that it’s unwise to express gratitude for health because the universe takes that as an invitation.
Money: This headline made me snort “Gas in US hits $4 a gallon”. It’s been over $5 here for so long I can’t remember when it hit that amount, but just two days ago I saw a few stations charging well over $6. PiC was wondering why Americans are so obsessed with gas prices. I don’t really know the answer to that but I speculate it’s to do with our national culture of driving over public transit and ever-larger cars. Especially in California, we tend to also drive incredibly long distances regularly in addition to the trend to large cars. (Collective us, not us-us because he bike commutes as much as he can and I don’t commute at all.) Mind, this isn’t about deeper impacts of gas on the economy like the cost of delivering groceries which is actually a big problem. The reactions we’re thinking of are all people who are primarily concerned with their personal price at the pump.