January 29, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 300: A thunderstorm roared through last night. We would have slept right through it like cozy babies but Sera needed a quick outing at midnight to make sure her bladder wouldn’t be too stressed this morning (because of her steroids). You should have seen the look she gave me. You want ME to go out in THAT??
Anyway, that was a necessary soaking because at 7 am sharp she was click-clacking to the front door because she needed to go out again. It would have been much worse, and earlier, if we hadn’t gone out at midnight. As tired as I was, it meant that everyone got up and out on time for the first time in weeks.
The kids have been generally cooperative for the past couple weeks. It’s weird. There are the usual hiccups and temper tantrums and all that but it’s on the very mild end of the range. I have to hold on to the memory of this when we move into the next phase of very uncooperative.
A loved one is going through a medical thing right now. Not quite a crisis but it could be one if their body doesn’t respond to the medications. Something like Sera, I suppose, except their medical issue currently has a more clearcut set of pretty dire consequences if they don’t respond to the medication route. I’m checking on them daily and worrying in the back of my mind.
(more…)
January 22, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 293: It’s a holiday Monday, but not a day off work for me, so we were going to do a bit of juggling today. PiC was going to take the kids to play somewhere so I could get work done, I was going to have therapy. Then we’d have the contractor stop by to finish up a project. However. We thought we were approaching the clear on Saturday because Smol Acrobat had stopped vomiting (Zofran, a miracle drug), and Sera’s bloodwork came back with NOT dire results. We ran her back to the vet for more diagnostics and agreed on a treatment plan for the following week. I was still coaxing her to eat, unsuccessfully. Overnight, both PiC and then JB became very ill.
Most of Sunday was set to extreme hard mode. PiC had fever and chills with an upset GI, JB was throwing up and wiped out, Sera hadn’t managed to eat anything in two days. Smol Acrobat still wasn’t well but their energy level was back up to a nine out of ten. I was up at 5 am changing out sheets and doing laundry, calling the nurse to get a prescription, resettling JB in a new nest of clean bedding. Grabbed a short nap and then was back at it minding Smol Acrobat, picking up prescriptions, cooking food for Sera that she could tolerate, keeping Smol Acrobat out of everyone else’s hair. They missed JB a lot and kept peeking over at the nest every so often. I had to carefully ration my energy, and still crashed by 3 pm after putting Smol down for a late nap. Thankfully, they slept, JB slept, and PiC slept. Even Sera settled down to sleep. I managed to get a couple hours of rest before everyone was awake again. For the first time ever, I told JB they could watch TV however long they wanted because we just needed to survive. I managed to steal a few minutes to finish an email draft from Dec 23 to a dear dear friend S about shared health issues, updating her briefly on our status and the reason I wasn’t sending one of our usual long emails just yet. I promised her a new batch of pictures of the kids soon.
Which brought me to today. Everyone seemed to be improving a little bit. PiC was able to get up and walk Sera and play with Smol Acrobat. I was able to catch up on a few things and as I wandered back down the hall to get Smol to put them down for a nap, I saw an email from dear dear friend’s daughter. We have never spoken before, but I knew her name, and when I saw the subject line my brain glitched. I skimmed the brief email, sat down in the hallway and sobbed and sobbed. My dear dear friend of 20 years had a stroke and died three days ago. I am devastated. I’m still crying. She was so loved, even though we only ever saw each other in person once, in all our long friendship, and we cherished each other. She was my biggest cheerleader when I doubted myself, she gave me so much encouragement with the kids when I was sad or scared or worried. She could reassure me in the most loving ways and make me laugh. She could take a look at one of the kid’s pictures and see their entire personalities and tell me all about it – a rarity in my experience. Most people just see the superficial. She saw their souls, and she was accurate, too. She supported my Lakota project, shared it with friends and family, and I could FEEL her beaming with pride at me whenever we talked about it. Emailing with her was like getting a great big hug. I don’t know what to make of a world without my dear dear friend in it.
I’ve cried rivers trying to write a proper remembrance worthy of her for her family. (more…)
January 15, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 286: The first Monday back after winter break, whew. PAINFUL.
Someday Smol Acrobat will start sleeping through the night, every night. Or most nights. Someday!
The icy wind is really getting to me this week. My bones are extra grateful for the heating pad when winter gives us this extra kick of cold. It also makes me curious about electric blankets and how they work.
Year 4, Day 287: The good news: My new chair arrived! PiC put it together! It’s so much better than my old chair!
The bad news: there’s some weird stuff going at work that I can’t get into or pry into because it’s above my paygrade but my Spidey senses are tingling. They’re probably right and if they are, I hate this.
I goofed on the size of one nibling’s gift this year. The sizing at Old Navy ran much smaller than I expected so I put in a make up order today. I threw in a few shirts for JB and a couple pairs of jeans for myself in a possibly futile attempt to get one more good pair that are NOT skinny jeans. Before you know it, I’ve spent $80. SMH. While I’m decluttering, too! Tsk. But the goal is one of those jeans will fit. If so, I’ll return the other pair, and then I can donate the skinny jeans I can’t bring myself to wear anymore. If not, I’ll return both pairs and give up for the year.
Year 4, Day 288: I thought I was starting most days at 0% charge but I have to recalibrate my scale. I’m probably starting most days at 10% and this morning was 2%. I worked until 11pm, then was up until 2 am because Smol Acrobat needed soothing, then got less than five hours of sleep before startling awake. It feels like sandbags were attached to all my limbs. Sigh. Grateful for my nice comfy new chair. That helps a little.
We’re having some work done on the house. We suspect that all unexpected noise unsettled Sera so much that she threw up. Unfortunately we didn’t discover that until this morning so that was a half an hour of scrubbing out the rug. Sigh.
At least she otherwise seems generally ok, if still a bit slow and less interested in food than normal.
Year 4, Day 289: On the one hand, I’m grateful we’re still getting notifications from the daycare. On the other SIGH for still needing to get notifications. Someone in Smol Acrobat’s classroom was diagnosed with COVID and they were exposed this week. Their privacy restrictions mean we don’t know whether it was a teacher or a student or have any way of really assessing how much exposure there was. No one has spoken up on the parents group chat, though, and they tend to be proactive about informing the other parents when it’s their kid that’s sick so our semi-educated guess is that it was an adult (teacher or aide).
Then we got a notification of a recall on Smol Acrobat’s helmet. Great! Sigh.
Year 4, Day 290: It turns out that Sera is a silent vomiter. I used to always wake up to the sound of a dog horking but she threw up her dinner twice last night and I heard nothing. Then Smol Acrobat was holding their stomach and doubling over crying that their tummy hurt. We didn’t know what to do for it since we didn’t know if it was just a gassy tummy or what. But they resolved those doubts after I dropped off a headachy-but-otherwise-fine-and-masked JB at school by throwing up on me. And then on PiC. They asked for a fruit pouch after their stomach stopped hurting but couldn’t keep that down either. So we had to throw out our two old gel mats in the kitchen. They’re about 12 years old, have wide swaths of cracks across them and I’m not trying to clean vomit out of that.
So basically the entire morning was trading off holding Smol Acrobat and cleaning up vomit after they vomited on each of us. Why are they both (Sera 🐶 and Smol Acrobat) silent vomiters?? Thank goodness we were able to grab a video appointment with a pediatrician who immediately prescribed an anti-nausea medication because apparently stomach flu is going around big time along with all the other awful germs.
Then I had to get Sera to see the vet while PiC handled school pickup with a lump of Smol Acrobat.
Unfortunately the news for Sera isn’t nearly so straightforward. Initial diagnostics point to liver problems. We don’t know how bad it is yet or even what it is yet, but liver problems are never easy to treat. We’re running tests to narrow the field from “maybe cancer, maybe systemic” to one or the other. A few months ago, a new cancer screening blood test came out, we might want to do that. The vet advised me to have a conversation with PiC about exactly how much we want to do. That’s the warning they give when it’s unlikely to have either a cure or a straightforward treatment plan with high success rate. I already know PiC will support whatever path I choose, and we both put their quality of life first. I just … *deep breaths* really hope that we can keep her comfortable long term. I’m not ready to contemplate losing another furry family member. We were finally in a good place after so many years of working with her on her reactivity.
I have just enough presence of mind to be grateful that Smol Acrobat’s vomiting didn’t start in the middle of the night like Sera’s did. It was all in all a terrible day but at least we got some sleep before it went to hell in a handbasket. Everyone is on anti-emetics for the night. Cross your fingers?
January 8, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 279: JB’s developed a hacking cough this weekend that’s sounding worse each night. We already did an at-home COVID test but I’ve scheduled a PCR (hopefully a combo with the flu and RSV test as well) for them later this week. They don’t have any other symptoms right now, but PiC is starting to feel a bit of something after being untouched by the last six rounds of viral infections that Smol Acrobat brought home so I’m concerned all around. I’m staying on my antiviral meds as long as I must to fend off the germs. I simply cannot afford to be any more tired than I already am.
*****
The blackberry leaves are turning a beautiful purple now. Yay, it’s still alive! I worry about the plants a lot.
Year 4, Day 280: The rain over the past two weeks supercharged my latest round of potato plants. The first container should have a mess of potatoes to harvest. The second container had two-inch sprouts two weeks ago. After three or four soaking rains came through, those two inchers are a foot tall! This shouldn’t surprise me, this is also how fast our weeds grow, but it’s still cool. Not the weeds, those are nothing but annoying.
*****
I’ve been bumbling around for weeks muttering to myself about needing new travel sized containers for our toiletries. I’ve bought two sets of silicone squeeze bottles over the past ten years and they now both leak. Thankfully I’ve always kept them in plastic bags before adding them to the toiletries bag but the leaks are exasperating. I asked friends for recommendations but nothing really appealed to me. It suddenly hit me that the pile of tiny Palmolive bottles that we keep picking up from Residence Inns over the years – those are 3 oz bottles. I had repurposed one for Smol Acrobat’s body wash, but for some reason it never occurred to me to use them for anything else. We have 8 more of them! This ticks all my boxes: not buying new and repurposing something keeps some plastic out of landfill. I’m eager to test my theory. I’m pretty sure it’ll work fine for the shampoo but I’m less sure about the conditioner which is thicker. (The 3-ounce detail only matters in theory since we’re not planning to fly anytime soon, but I prefer a solution that can be used for all our travels.)
Year 4, Day 281: We’ve moved Smol Acrobat out of their crib and into a big bed. We haven’t done anything with the crib yet so all that means is they started the night in the bed instead of going to bed in the crib, waking up 2-4 hours later screaming until we carry them off to a Big Bed. For their first night, they stayed asleep ALL NIGHT. Will this be replicated again? Only time will tell. Fingers are very crossed.
I am feeling a weird pang about the idea of selling the crib. It cost us a pretty penny years ago and is taking up valuable space.
It’d be good to move it out if we’re done with it. I’m 1000% done with having babies so we have no further use for it if Smol really is moved out. But also, FEELINGS.
*****
Chatting with an aunty, I found out that it costs $200K/year to care for Granny around the clock as she’s in her 90s and bedridden. Gramps saved and invested really well because they can afford it, but that figure set me back on my heels. How do you plan for that? How do you save enough in case you happen to live past the age where you can care for yourself for very long?
Year 4, Day 282: I jinxed it! Well, maybe it wasn’t me. But Smol did NOT do well last night. So the move to the big bed wasn’t the cure-all, alas. It could be that they’re coming down with something, they often sleep badly (more than usual) when they’re not feeling well and JB’s cough hasn’t been good for anyone. JB tested negative for COVID, RSV and flu, at least.
*****
I’m very proud of myself for figuring out how to set up this custom listing for JB’s art shop.
*****
Another aunty chat was several kinds of stress and grief. She has been dealing with my estranged dad and brother through my estrangement. She still has some kind of a relationship with them, and she was filling me in on their latest even though I hadn’t specifically asked. It wasn’t meant in a guilt trip or a mean way. She wanted me to know they were about as ok as they were going to get and insists that I must carry on with my own life, separately, and find my health and happiness. But even though I have no desire to have them back in my life, I still struggle with the grief and frustration related to them. I know it’s so much better for me to be no-contact with them. I also know that my aunty is stepping into the breach to try to get my brother to do the things he needs to do for his housing benefits, and it’s costing her time (and money that she can ill afford). It’s her choice but I was the only person that could get him to do anything, on my say-so. I wasn’t omnipotent, but I could make him do some necessary things. And now I’m gone and she has to resort to bribery to get him to make his appointments. She’s never made much money and now she’s wasting on my brother because I’m not there to do it. Intellectually I know I’m not wrong but I don’t feel right, either. It all makes me very sad. If he wasn’t mentally ill, if he was just the same sociopathic narcissist that my estranged dad is, I’d be so mad at him. But he’s not, and I’m now very sad for the loss of the sibling relationship that we might have had someday.
Year 4, Day 283: We are discovering the lack of good bike racks around the city as PiC is running more errands on the bike when he can. The renovated park has the best one, the Safeway has the worst ones.
I’m working a theory that Sera 🐶 has been off her food lately because she’s overheated in her dog sweaters. I’m testing it today. She’s been taking no more than a few bites of food at a time and last night was the worst yet, she didn’t eat anything but fish topping and left everything else. She was willing to eat if I scooped it in my hand but that’s not sustainable. This morning’s trial run seemed promising, she didn’t eat her whole breakfast at once but she did return and finish most of it by mid-afternoon.
Target has their BOGO 50% off (so, 25% off each when you buy two) vitamins and supplements.
I spent way too long doing the math on whether I should buy the 100 mg coq10 (I can still hear the infomercials in my head for this and it’s not great) or the 200 mg bottle and also decided I should try increasing my dose to 300 mg / day to see if that helps the fatigue more than 200 mg / day.
$25 – 100 mg 120 count
$12.50 – 100 mg 120 count
16¢ / each
300 mg (3*100 / 3*0.16) = .48/day
240/3= 80 days
$29 – 200 mg 40 cap
$14.50- 200 mg 40 cap
54¢ / each
300 mg (200+100 mg / .54+.16) = 0.70/day.
The differences are clearly negligible but my brain needed that little bit of exercise.
January 1, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 272: My family isn’t Christian so we had no real reason to do Christmas but our parents enjoyed doing the gifting and the trees early on when we were little so we got those until I was 8? 10?: the trees, the gifts, the time together. Then it all stopped. I know why. My parents worked every single day of the year and were far too tired to add unnecessary extras. I understood but it still kind of stung. I spent years after I got a job working trying to recreate a bit of it, buying gifts for my family and such like, but no one was interested in spending time like that together and so I eventually gave up and sought that with other families. Now, in my turn, I have very little interest in “creating the magic”. We get the kids a few gifts but they get showered with enough gifts from loved ones that it’s all extra bonus.
I don’t feel “Christmas spirit”. If we’re talking about kindness and generosity, that’s something we try to put into practice all year round. This time of year, we go along with the stuff that his family does but none of it appeals to me in any real way. I’m a bit curious what I would enjoy if I could remove what everyone else does and prefers from the equation. Is it nostalgia to want to go back to the days when we didn’t really celebrate Christmas but exchanged some presents and went to the movies with my cousins, or would that actually be fun now?
Year 4, Day 273: Every year winter sets in and I get pushed totally off my game. Why is it so dark so early? Why is it so cold? Although it’s actually less cold during the rainy days. The real question is why am I always taken by surprise by the shift? This happens EVERY YEAR.
But the cold brought out beautiful red leaves on our blackberry bush so that was nice. Here’s hoping it bears fruit when spring comes.
*****
While walking Sera, I started counting our neighbors. There are the really awful ones who picked multiple, daily, petty fights with us when we had a newborn at home. They are either moving or renovating, I’m hoping they’re selling and leaving forever. I’ll never trust them not to be petty horrible liars again. There’s the family we trade package safety with, we text each other to take in packages for us when we’re out and that’s a nice reciprocal favor trading. We see two sets of neighbors at school dropoff and pickups, they’re friendly. There’s a set of dropoff neighbors who won’t ever say hi to us, despite my attempts to at least politely greet them. There’s the nice hippie who always pets Sera 🐶 or waves good morning and the nice old lady who used to always ask after Seamus when she walked her dogs. We don’t know everyone but we know at least a half a dozen now, and that feels a little like the start of a local community.
This doesn’t come easily to me, I’m generally not into socializing, but we’re alone here and it’s important to build some local connections. My friends are all online and sometimes you need local people.
Are your neighbors friendly?
Year 4, Day 274: Drat, I wish I’d defrosted the scallops and shrimp earlier to make seafood pasta. That’s something I don’t feel comfortable defrosting in the microwave – I hate to ruin good seafood.
*****
I used to knock out 270 points on Bing a day easily, maybe 2 minutes of time a day, and it’d add up to $100 in gift card redemptions a year but lately they’ve added so much friction (lower points for activities, not rewarding points for searches) that it’s not worth the amount of time/attention I’d have to spend on it anymore. Alas, I’ll miss that tiny stream of random spending money.
Year 4, Day 275: Therapy was hard this week. Talking about the my need for support with some complicated family dynamics, every part of me still struggles with the idea that I deserve help or support or that I can do hard things with help instead of having to tough it out alone.
Increasingly, though, there’s increasing evidence that doing the opposite of my norm is better for me. My asking for help I don’t ever want to admit I need, or even just acknowledging that I need it, to navigate understanding one complicated relationship after another creates a significant change in my pain. It’s not a straight line from therapy to improvement and it’s not a cure, but I have observed: my flares are less frequent, they last fewer days (where they used to span 2-3 weeks of crippling pain), the high intensity level is lower than it used to be. Even if I wanted to go back to old patterns, I don’t want the pain that goes with it.
Also I am still struggling with internalizing the notion that my offering support can sometimes simply take the form of being there for people without taking any physical action. The need to DO something is so deeply ingrained.
Related, in a fictional way: I put on very old shows that I can mostly ignore during my work day. This week it’s Bones. In the episode where Hodgins learns he has an institutionalized brother he’d never met, he only found out because the bills came due (and he’s no longer rich). Booth offers him a large sum of money to pay for his brother’s stay “until you figure something out”. Hodgins declines, “I’ll take a loan, like the normal person I never was.” That struck me as nonsensical. How is he going to pay that loan back? If he can’t afford the institution fees now, how is he going to afford the fees plus interest if he and Angela make no changes to their jobs and salary? To my mind, this is one of those times you let your friends help your family. It’s not like you’re taking it yourself. Of course, that’s easy for me to say in a hypothetical way. If I were to be offered a large sum of money from a wealthy friend to pay for a family member’s care (can’t speculate on siblings because I already have such a bad history with mine) I wonder if I would still feel the same way. Maybe I would.
What would you do?
Year 4, Day 276: How long-lived are your clothes? How often do you feel the need to replace pieces?
My clothes tend to last roughly 7-9 years before I cycle them out. I’m still using maternity underwear from the first pregnancy, they’re getting threadbare. I could probably stand to get a couple new packs. But maybe not yet. My jeans from 7 years ago died an ignominious death, as my pants generally do. I’ve been wearing hand me down skinny jeans but I hate skinny jeans when my hands are hurting. It’s hard enough pulling them up on a good day, it’s impossible on a bad day. So the current jeans are brand new. Three of my four Target tees, bought 6 years ago to attend a FinCon, have sprouted so many holes even I’m a little embarrassed to wear them anymore so those are out. I replaced them at Comic Con this year with Fat Rabbit Farm shirts. They are much more expensive but also much higher quality, judging by the one I have owned since 2014(?) that’s still in great shape. My hoodies and sweatpants are new from the second pregnancy, er, well, “new”. I guess they’re actually about 3 years old now but they still seem new relative to the rest of my wardrobe.
December 25, 2023
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 265: Brrr. Cold, dark, and rainy. Best for sleeping in, not best for Mondays when you have to get up and get out. I’m eagerly awaiting the last of the gifts I ordered to arrive today, mostly for my furry niblings.
It feels like I must be buying things (cold meds for the kids, shampoo/conditioner/toothpaste, etc for us, gifts for other people that are on their wishlist) to feel better about something but it’s probably more my natural hoarding tendencies kicking in, along with a small side of self-soothing pre holiday anxiety. Generally, they’re all practical things. Even the things I don’t need, just want, aren’t terribly extravagant – all of the Toby Daye series, the few Incryptid books I’m missing, the rest of the Murderbot series, nice pens, cool stamps.
*****
You know what would have helped this morning? Remembering that I have to generate dopamine before getting into complicated work. Going at it backwards made the work a lot more painful than it needed to be.
Year 4, Day 266: More than 4 hours of sleep after a late night of work and before a very running around day would have been deeply appreciated but it wasn’t in the cards. Smol Acrobat was on the night terrors track and then my body was angry for the next few hours.
So I ran Sera 🐶 out for her walk. I ran JB to school. I ran back to school for their Winter Performance. I ran back home. I had therapy. Then I ran to pick up JB from school. Later I ran them to their class. Then I threw together dinner in 30 minutes: tortellini (3 min boil from Costco), a pot of rice in case the tortellini was rejected, the last of the salad bag, quartered the pound of brussels sprouts and sauteed them in butter, oil and brown sugar (which I added after tasting one and it was disgustingly bitter), heated up the leftover panko chicken.
Of course that’s around the time Smol Acrobat decided they were Very Very Sad/Angry and had to have a screaming fit. JB couldn’t jolly them out of this one so they and I went to sit (lay down on the floor) in their bedroom while they worked it out of their system. By 7 pm I was entirely out of gas. But not out of work!
Year 4, Day 267: We’re four days into the first bout of the rainy season. My toes are perpetually cold, and my overprotective (very kind) neighbors are shocked that I insist on wading out into the wet without an umbrella. This is a holdover when my hands hurt far too much to hold an umbrella, I still avoid using my hands for anything that I don’t absolutely have to, to spare them for the things that are very necessary. A hoodie or a hat will suffice, I’m lucky enough to head back to a warm dry home after I get soaked so it doesn’t bother me.
Most of the year I wonder why we pay for rain boots for the kids, these are the days I’m glad we did. The Crocs rainboots we got for Smol Acrobat are pretty delightful. They’re bright and cheerful, and so lightweight they can tromp around in the rain without losing a boot, unlike the clunky old hand me downs they’ve had. I’m all for hand me downs normally but sometimes it’s better to just buy what you need.
Year 4, Day 268: We’ve bought so many things for other people in a short period of time that I’m having trouble tracking all the charges to my credit card. I’m JUST keeping on top of it with extra spreadsheet notes but the Amazon charges are bizarrely off by a few dollars each. That troubles me. Is this a potential hacking problem or something else? Hopefully it shakes out fine in the end without extra work from me.
In semi-related news, my travel and holiday related anxiety appears to continue to hover at lower levels than historical baselines. I noticed this shift earlier in this year and wondered if it would continue to hold. Instead of big giant holding-breath level anxiety and needing to do things like packing six months out, I find myself managing my cope with smaller actions. Setting up spreadsheets for 2024, paying bills, buying consumable supplies for the household, semi-obsessively checking bank accounts – all of these help me cope with the balance of feeling in control of some things and not in control of other things.
Rosacea: It’s been about a week since I started using the cream. In the morning, I used my micellar water to wash, applied the cream and a bit of lotion. Later I’d put sunblock on top before going outside. In the evening, I used the same. I’m not really sure if it’s making any difference yet. At least one day in the past week my redness flushing and that weird feeling like the reddened skin is thickened flared up pretty seriously. It took a few hours for the effects to settle down some. The feeling like the flaring skin is thickening makes me nervous about longer term developments. My mom struggled with incredibly painful and widespread rosacea and I don’t want it to get that bad. I’ll keep using the cream and observing here how it works.
Year 4, Day 269: The kids being on break plus my working until midnight every night this week = today feels like a very bare minimum kind of day. I don’t want to do anything that doesn’t absolutely have to be done today.
A moment of “we live in the future now”: a cousin texted me asking if she could Zelle me something for the kids for Christmas. Our family tradition is to gift red envelope money but you have to show up to get it. My kids have been out of luck because we haven’t traveled for Lunar New Year since they were born? We don’t make the traditional rounds (in part because time is short and mostly because my feelings about my family are complicated and I didn’t know until last year that they were on my side), so they haven’t gotten any gifts. It’s not an exclusion thing specifically, it’s just how we worked. You give a traditional blessing and they give you the red envelope. My energy has been too limited to make that happen. Anyway, it amuses me to have my elder cousin bring this gifting into the present using technology.
December 18, 2023
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 258: My three sweet potato sprouts are dead. Unexpected cold got them, maybe. More slips are growing in the garage, we’ll try again after January. My onions are still going strong, though, the green tops show no sign of going yellow and flopping over. Here’s hoping they continue to grow another month so we don’t have to worry about them right in the middle of holiday stuff.
*****
JB lost a specific set of screentime privileges and has to earn it back by setting the table ten times in a row without being told. They have failed to do this 9 times out of ten so far, and that tenth time they only managed it because I wasn’t home to tell them. Every night, I have to tell them to do it which means they don’t get to check the box that says “I set the table X times without being told.” The whole point of this exercise is to train them to remember we eat dinner every single night and to set the table without my having to tell them what to do and clearly I have failed to set them up for success. Open to suggestions.
Year 4, Day 259: This may have been brought on by being mostly awake since 3 am but I’m having an existential … not-crisis … hiccup? I feel like I’m in a bubble of not-being. Or rather a bubble separated from who I am. In the big picture, this hiccup doesn’t matter because I have a dog to walk, the recycling to take out, paperwork to process, kids to pick up and feed. These things are going to happen whether or not I feel wholly at home in my skin or part of my/any community.
I also feel disconnected from so many people right now even as the holiday cards roll in. Maybe they’re a reminder that I’ve felt so isolated all this year and there’s some guilt over that as well as frustration about having wasted an entire year battling a nonstop circus of viruses. It sucked feeling sick all the time for a whole year. I got nothing done. What a waste.
*****
There is something really grounding about running into a neighbor with their puppy that likes Sera, though! They “played” which was the puppy trying to roll under Sera while she grumpily snarled at them to submit and then getting mad when the puppy kicked her. I gave them both treats and they settled right down.
*****
Had to grab impromptu takeout for dinner because the chicken wasn’t defrosted in time for me to cook it. We used to limit our eating out to twice a week and it was usually $27 after tax and tip. These days it’s more like $55-65 after tax and tip to feed four, usually with some leftovers.
*****
I’ve had to shop Amazon this fall for a number of items we can’t get elsewhere. Just heard that if you tell your Echo device or Alexa app “Thank my driver” they’ll give your driver a $5 bonus. Echo and Alexa are not allowed in my house but if you search “Thank Driver” in the app, you can do it that way too. This little message appears at the top of my app screen:
Amazon should just pay generous cash bonuses and cover the taxes, along with real living wages, but since I can’t make that happen, I’ll do this as long as they have it.
Of course I’m a little suspicious why they have it going, because they’re not to be trusted generally but unfortunately they’re the only source for a number of things we need to buy right now.
Year 4, Day 260: Do you consider your statements to be commitments? Suppose you say “I’ll pick up the potatoes today after work.” Would that be a solid commitment in your mind, or do you assume that it’s automatically hedged with “if I can”?
We have a difference of opinions here. I think if you make a declarative “I will” statement then you’re committing to the thing so either be upfront with your known limitations/conditions (if I have time, if that meeting doesn’t run long, etc) or say you’ll try and leave it at that. PiC thinks treating a statement as a promise is too . I say his way leads to chaos. Disclaimer, this isn’t a huge problem for us. It’s just one of those things we disagree on the basic premise for and I’m curious if it’s just us or if other people see it differently as well.
I see this playing out with JB now. He’ll say “we’ll take a ride on Xday”, so they expect a ride to happen come hell or high water on Xday. And then if something comes up, they’re not just disappointed, they’re also confused about how the statement of fact became false: we were going to ride but we didn’t.
I explained that extenuating circumstances happen and they happened in this case. But as kids will do, they fixated on when when when will we take that promised ride?
How do you receive these statements?
Year 4, Day 261: Now that TV ads are a thing on our streaming services again, I’m seeing those holiday car commercials “Lease a BMW for $699 a month!”. It got me thinking I can’t imagine having a giant monthly payment ever seeming like a good thing to take on again. But on the other side of it, the idea of saving that same amount each month in preparation for buying something large seems totally reasonable. Both are taking money out of the paycheck, but the perspectives feel completely different.
*****
This is my fourth day trying out Dear Klairs Midnight Blue Calming Cream in what feels like a probably fruitless attempt to calm down my rosacea redness. The redness annoys me and this is the first time I’m trying a product to combat it. Maybe it takes a week or two for this sort of thing to work if it’s going to help? Maybe it can only help reduce redness temporarily, it’s not like it’s curing anything.
*****
Out of four pairs of Old Navy jeans, boot cut and straight cut, in dark wash and black, only the black pairs fit and the straight cut fits best. Drat. I don’t love boot cut like I used to. They’re all the same size but the dark wash was a struggle to pull on. The working theory is the dark wash jeans were made at a different factory. The takeaway: buy two of each of everything when trying to figure out what size you are to have a chance at having two pairs of something fit well.
Year 4, Day 262: A friend insisted on giving me a Christmas gift, despite my protests she’s already been so generous to us, so I caved and admitted I would love an ebook from any of my comfort reading series that I’ve only given the library money for (Murderbot, Toby Daye, Kate Daniels). I’ll pick up the others myself, probably slowly, but she can start me off with the first one. I have some of the Innkeeper books and some of the Incryptid series already, when I found sales a few years back.
*****
I planted two sets of onions from sprouts. The six sprouts from the first set are still going strong. One of the three from the second set turned yellow and flopped over which is how you know they’re ready to harvest, except that it was just dead. Eight possible onions left! 🤞
*****
Friday food! This was very much a make-do week. Monday we had the fundraiser burgers. Tuesday we grabbed Chinese on the way home from activities because the chicken was still frozen. Wednesday must have been leftovers, and I also threw together a diced chicken and Chinese broccoli slivers stir fry with a packet of leftover bulgogi sauce. Thursday, PiC and Smol got home first so they started prepping breakfast for dinner. Friday I tried to place an order to the taqueria for pickup four times online before I finally gave up and sent PiC in my place. I’ve taken to adding a pozole to my order so we’d have a warm delicious soup for dinner or for leftovers.
The three remaining packets of chicken thighs were still kind of frozen so they had to wait for weekend cooking.