December 2, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 222: Victory! I made a really expensive and silly mistake late Friday night, buying a $200 pass for an entertainment park in entirely the wrong state for ourselves and extended family. I stressed all weekend because the site stated they were non-refundable. I did immediately email to explain the issue but couldn’t handle waiting any longer so I called this morning. In the meantime, I had purchased the correct pass on the weekend since the sale was ending on Sunday so maybe that’s why the CSR didn’t ask any questions after getting my order numbers. Huge relief.
I have so many of these little shopping mistake nightmares – usually it’s the wrong size or horror of horrors: wrong day or time for flights. Now I can add WRONG STATE to that paranoia.
The storm systems let up this weekend but the drippy gloom was back in force today. I’m hoping that it’ll be nicer tomorrow.
We took two items off my Black Friday sale list: the blanket (quilt fixed that problem!), next size up boots for Smol Acrobat (hand me downs for the next size up just landed!).
Year 5, Day 223: The phrase “fighting off this virus” doesn’t fit. I regret to inform you that choosing to rest most days last week wherever I could squeeze it in, instead of squeezing in more work, seems to have helped alleviate my sore throat and cough far more than my usual stubborning my way through. My feeling-like-roadkill meter is much lower this week than it was last week. I’m not totally out of the woods yet, but am starting to feel optimistic that I may feel up to our Thanksgiving Day cooking. My legs ache like death today, though, and I can’t put my finger on why.
Social coping and boundaries: I was delighted to provide a dear friend with a tool that another dear friend inadvertently taught me. When asked “are you busy on Xday?” your answer is not yes or no, it’s “why?” This should be deployed all the time to head off being voluntold oh good you’re free to run them to the store or the kids need you to pick them up or can’t you come clean my kitchen. All things that a boundary crasher could certainly choose to deal with for themselves but why would they if they can guilt you do the thing they don’t want to do. I also reminded them that they can always be busy. Plans to be a lump on the floor with the dog are still plans.
Year 5, Day 224: My Sterilite storage bins have arrived!! They were 25% off which isn’t great but they weren’t terribly expensive to begin with sooooo good enough for me! I’ve designated one for office and craft supplies, another for holiday gifts; two for donations to keep them safe and clean while I accumulate during either decluttering or organizing dropped off donations. Another one for hand me down next size up clothes for Smol Acrobat.
Year 5, Day 225: What a day. On the one hand, no work! And much of the food prep was done earlier this week so we were puttering around cooking the main dishes and putting the finishing touches on the last side dishes. Yay!
On the other hand, wow, were the kids moody and difficult and how many times in a single day can I sit down and have a serious talk about their rudeness with them?? Too Many. Sigh. There are days when parenting feels extra impossible because it’s completely unclear what the right thing to do is. Mostly it was JB today performing at extraordinary levels of pingpong between fine and super not fine. Smol Acrobat was their normal, and irritating, level of difficult and moody.
We had three long talks and nothing was resolved except for my making it very clear that whatever you’re feeling, your actions are your choices – you don’t get to behave like the Abomination because your feelings were hurt. In this case, that specially means: didn’t like your choice being corrected. They didn’t like being told that ignoring my direct requests multiple times was rude, they didn’t like being promoted to admit that they shouldn’t destroy Smol Acrobat’s tower even by accident.
JB’s constant (absurd) grievance that we don’t hold the two of them to the same standards for chores apparently does not extend to expectations of considerate behavior. They’re perfectly happy when Smol Acrobat’s behavior is correctly corrected, but when they are corrected for the exact same offense? Storm clouds and stomping and “(you) like Smol Acrobat better than me!!!” The number of times I’ve had to bite back the snarky “that’s not true because I currently don’t like either of you equally” doesn’t bear thinking about. It’s never made it past my filter but such are my grumpy parent thoughts bubbling beneath the surface. Which makes me feel guilty later. They aren’t bad kids! But the constant drama of harping on wanting equality only when it advantages them (lower expectations, fewer chores), and the sporadic bursting into temper tantrums when it means they get called on the carpet for choices that sucked, makes me oh so tired.
We did have an amazing dinner (foodwise) and they managed to get over themselves enough to eat it. But we sent both kids to bed without dessert. We adults ate half the cake ourselves – we earned it.
Year 5, Day 226: We inadvertently spent most of the day exploring bits of the city transit system. The sheer number of both commercial and residence property “available to lease” signs was surprising. The Macy’s storefront was done up with lights on every window, and the unsettlingly tall Christmas tree was front and center. I made eye contact with a large dog inside a store and we mutually and silently agreed that he should come and put his (giant) head in my hands for cuddles and praise. We had a lovely moment. I normally always ask the owner for permission before approaching their dog but this pup was independently conducting eyeball interviews and it simply couldn’t be helped.
There’s a clock ticking on my ordering gifts for the end of the year. Everything / anything I still need must be ordered by midweek in the first week of December so that I can have everything squared away before the 20th. That’s a personal deadline: I HATE doing anything holiday related at the very last minute, especially discovering gaps in my gifting supplies or leaving out any sets of niblings because there are so MANY now that even with the best lists and best of intentions, things get jumbled at times. I did discover Bookoutlet.com which carries bargain books. They fill their inventory with “special buys, publishers’ excess inventory, and store returns” so the selection is hit or miss, but I found a reasonable pile of books to gift the niblings for this year and a couple books for next year as well.
We have a list of Black Friday related intended purchases but I think we’re only going to manage a few of them. A replacement laptop from Costco and a Microsoft license. Books. I was going to get new underwear finally but the sales failed me so these will have to manage another year. Couple of security things. Maybe passing on the Svaha sale this year as a gratuitous thing because I don’t need more clothes.
November 25, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 215: I might? maybe? be through the worst of my fibro flareup from the weekend. The prior weekend, and then last week was entirely too much – that was predictable but maybe more so in hindsight. This week is going to be a new kind of tough.
I’m tracking 15 shipments for our November families, the coordinators are having a lot of trouble reaching the recipient families reliably now and that translates to a lot of extra work for both of us.
I can cross the blanket off my shopping list for now. This wonderful gift of a quilt has kept me snug and warm since the cold snap and I’m very grateful for it.
Year 5, Day 216: This cold front is serious! It’s no longer advisable to wander out and about without a heavy coat, not if you want to still feel your fingers after five minutes.
I attempted to negotiate my hosting fees down and didn’t get further than a 20% discount leaving me with an $850 bill. That’s not going to work so we’re tackling the storage that’s causing the whole issue. By we I mean, planning to ask a web savvy friend if he has time to help and mentioning this to a very blog savvy former blogger now dear friend and having them volunteer to have a peek around the guts of this thing. Whew. Thank goodness for people who are smarter than me.
Mentally singing “Everything is awful!” Year end work stuff has me completely on edge and you know what we didn’t need? We didn’t need a BOMB CYCLONE and ATMOSPHERIC RIVER this week. That’s what. This couldn’t have waited a week? Or even just two days? This ruined a plan we had been looking forward to all year.
Year 5, Day 217: Reading Joe’s Dividend Growth Portfolio 2024 was a nice little dopamine generator. Entirely aside from my own preoccupations with money, I still enjoy reading about how people handle their money and seeing their outcomes. Maybe a little bit for comparisons but a lot of it is just nice to see different perspectives even if it’s not necessarily something I’d be doing. They travel the roads I don’t so I like the sneak peeks. I have a tidy little dividend stocks portfolio of 15 individual stocks that I built very slowly between 2009 through 2020 mostly. I made a few impulse purchases in 2021 and 2023 of COST and TGT. I don’t do anything with that portfolio, I just take the dividends and reinvest them into our index funds. All but two of the stocks that I’ve purchased since 2009 have done really well. The one bank stock I selected was acquired by another company and that’s just been holding steady. Holy sheets, I bought COST at what I thought was an exhorbitant $362 in 2021, and it’s nearly $1000 per share now?? This is the first time I’ve bothered to look at those prices in a while!
My worst performers have grown 30%; that’s 4 of them. My best performers have grown 340 and 540, that’s 2 of them. The rest of them fill in the range in between. Not too shabby considering I’ve never bought tech stocks which has, I’m sure, been to the detriment of our bottom line. I preferred stable solid companies that I could ignore; chasing tech stocks even if they seem like a sure thing in hindsight is really not my speed. There’s a lot of talk about Nvidia and the like but, tempted though I am to mimic the 1500’s financial portfolio, eh. Also I hate all this “AI” nonsense. It feels gross to profit off it when I hate the very thought of it and it’s poisoning so many useful tools. In my industry at least, and a few others I know of, it’s primarily used for fraud so I have a particular hatred for it.
Year 5, Day 218: Meetings, so many meetings. So many. I did get a heap of work done but like snowdrifts, many many more heaps built up while I wasn’t looking. I had to cut myself off and end my night well before midnight because I still feel awful and I need to get better. I keep reminding myself that they aren’t worth killing myself for. I’m also reminding myself of that in regards to my training. My training sets are adjusted every week but I have that grade school type need to always maximize my reps per set even when I feel bad. But that’s not good! Whether it’s fibro bad, or CFS bad, or virally sick bad, or some new thing, I have to be better about pacing myself and pushing myself. The trainer did say that the work within a week is more important than any single day of work so that gives me a level of flexibility I can work with and still feel some pride in it.
In lighter news, I did my first full run through of Elementary not too long ago, and then ran The Diplomat a while later. I just realized that Alfredo is Ato Essandoh is Stuart Heyford!
Visually my problem was that as Stuart he seems VERY tall, but as Alfredo next to Sherlock and Joan he seemed to be roughly average, or at least not toweringly tall. He’s my favorite character in The Diplomat. The shit he has to try to overcome!
Year 5, Day 219: Day three of this week’s atmospheric river / bomb cyclone thingie, and today’s fun news are flash flood warnings all over. So far we’re ok on the flooding front but I’m keeping a wary eye out and won’t probably be encouraging the kids to play in the rain and the gutter like I used to do. There’s something about the gloom that’s made today feel not much like an actual day of the week. It’s more like a weird proto-day.
It’s extra cozy in the house after trekking out into the teeth of the storm to pick up JB from school, and I am so grateful that we have a safe warm home. Also telling our roof to hang in there! Don’t leak now! We’re in the process of getting you all spiffed up! Please send our roof alllll the coping vibes.
Still sick but symptoms are much more mild than usual, so despite my guilt over making JB skip TWO after school activities this week solely because I didn’t feel up to taking them, it also feels like it was justified because my body really needed that rest.
November 18, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 208: We had a long tough weekend so this Monday was the opposite of last Monday (which was a fluke but I appreciated it deeply). I woke up with the brain of an orange kitty: maybe 1.5 brain cells to rub together. Maybe not even that much. The rain was dumping buckets, we were running late, it’s a school holiday. Actually, the school holiday part works in my favor. We didn’t have to rush to get JB out the door by 8 am. I dragged myself out, got the laundry going, got to my desk with a snack sized breakfast, and desperately tried to keep up with what felt like hyperspeed Pong: catch up on emails, catch up on missed tasks, figure out what tasks are on board for this day and week, compose the very overdue email update to the Lakota contributors to let them know what I’ve been doing with the money since July (lots, actually!), figure out what I screwed up last week and fix it, mentor a staffer to build better skills, check in on friends I didn’t get to last week. Had a therapy session, vented about how terrible everything is going to be very soon and how it feels hopeless. Even if we have to carry on with day to day responsibilities, even though we are going to fight to keep our community safe, it feels awful to see this train coming down the track right at us.
JB was also home so I had to semi-mind them and their friend, and then deal with a parenting situation where I had to take them to task for making a crappy choice (trying to manipulate me). We had a Very Long Talk about that.
I took a long break for dinner and bed and then hit the desk again to winnow the stacks of work. Called it at 1030 which is really too late, I ought to be getting to bed around 8. I suppose the extreme multitasking today served a purpose.
Year 5, Day 209: One of those mornings where I ran into so many neighbors. Had to stop to catch up with one elderly neighbor. He told me that his wife was waiting outside and urged me to stop and say hi. This is the neighbor I check on periodically. On my way to do that, then ran into another neighbor who’d been MIA for a couple days. I was right, it’s because something was wrong! She had an injury. I reminded her to let me know if she needed any assistance. I gave elderly wife neighbor a hug and ran on my way.
I wonder how often the toothbrush heads on electric toothbrushes need to be replaced.
First Gen American had a bit of an answer for us regarding roofing materials over at Nicole and Maggie’s so I feel a little more ok about putting off the roof a bit longer.
Target.com keeps hacking up hairballs when I try to submit the orders for the November Lakota Family #2. This is annoying! It took, no exaggeration, seven tries just to get the Target circle coupons applied.
I contacted our House rep to thank them for voting against Bill Number: H. R. 9495.
Year 5, Day 210: The list of things I forgot to do feels much longer than the list of things I DID do. I know that’s inaccurate, it just feels like that but my time has been swallowed up but all the things I DID do: work, school related stuff, everyone’s birthdays (so many birthdays), the two November Lakota families, and the straggler October Lakota family.
It just feels like I’ve bitten off more than I could chew these two weeks. Adding the kids’ craft fair this Friday where the only booth time they could get is at dinnertime, and helping them prep for that has tipped me over into dropping things left, right, center.
I forgot to reschedule a call, I forgot to send out recruiting materials to four people, haven’t yet sent a new package to our Lakota sponsee…!
But I did set up shipping for one of the three packages we’ll need to ship to the Lakota November Family and finally got the Target orders in order.
Year 5, Day 211: My back was hurting quite a bit today, so I did a ton of stretching. Instead of alleviating the pain, it just distributed the aches all over! Rude.
A running around like !!! day: not my favorite kind. But I got the two remaining shipping labels out to each respective person doing the shipping of their lot of donations, recorded most of the Target order tracking numbers, stayed up extra late to finish a load of work – which I really shouldn’t have done because I was so run down. After packing up the bags of supplies for the craft fair tomorrow, I snuggled down under the beautiful new quilt filled with wool batting that a longtime online friend made for me where I reflected on the fact that things in the outside world are legitimately horrible but inside our little sphere, we’re hanging together and caring for each other. People are coming together to contribute to helping folks who have been systematically failed in every way and that’s meaningful.
The kids are already creative and enjoy doing crafts. Now, they’re testing the waters of entrepreneurship. Even if it is extra work for me, it’s a lesson I’m glad they can learn now with a lot of support. The standing household rule is that JB has to save half their allowance and they can spend the other half. They would spend every penny they had in their possession if we didn’t have this rule, so we need to help them build this habit. We also established ahead of time that they had to bring a set amount of spending money to the fair. They’re not allowed to dip into the till during the event to go spend at other booths. I’m thinking that for this one-off event, the lesson is in the experience of creating inventory and the selling. This time they will be allowed to split their gross proceeds in half with their art/business partner, instead of taking only the net, and that’ll go in their spending wallet for the school year.
Year 5, Day 212: Staying up as late as I did really was a mistake. I was dizzy and nauseated at 730, and could barely get myself together in time to take JB to school. PiC ended up taking them while I got Smol Acrobat ready, petted the neighborhood puppy, and crawled back into bed for the morning to try to recover equilibrium. The rest helped, and I tested negative for COVID so this must be exhaustion.
Managed to get some work done, while PiC managed the roofing estimate folks. Turns out, even though I thought maybe we had 3 more years before we really needed to get this done, they’re seeing enough wear and tear on the shingles that we may not make it through the next big rain without a leak. I’m wondering if we should preemptively put down the plastic sheeting we have left over from something a while back under those weak spots. Meanwhile I think he’s got one more estimate lined up.
The local Big Business roofers offer an 18-month 0% financing plan that I’ll look into – it’d be nice to make debt work for us and save the cash gradually over the next 18 months instead of taking it out of our cash. We can, if we have to, but with this election I’m even more motivated to strengthen our protective financial shell. We’ll see how competitive the other local shops are. The ballpark they gave PiC was, unfortunately, what I was mentally earmarking: $30-50k.
We were initially considering whether we needed to get on this pre-47 administration due to tariffs and anticipated shortage of labor but that’s now a lesser concern compared to the roofing just plain being tuckered out.
*****
HR 9495 is scheduled to go back to the floor again. This is the bill that gives the Sec. Treasury powers to strip non-profits of their C3 status. PLEASE call your House members and your Senators. Scripts and explanations from Celeste Pewter.
November 11, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 201: I did a bunch of work on the weekend to make it possible to be relatively caught up today for the first time in months. I really needed this to free me up for my shift of phonebanking tomorrow, couldn’t make that if I was starting the week neck-deep in work like most Mondays, and usually things don’t break my way, but so far so good! 🤞🏼
I really appreciated the very brief, very temporary reprieve.
Year 5, Day 202: A hugely busy day for both of us. PiC had to do two round trips to work because he was chaperoning a school thing for JB. I had an early meeting and a ballot curing volunteer slot, plus the usual school run and afterschool activity. All my Election Day anxiety, knowing that we’d be on tenterhooks for some prolonged period of time, was channeled into the phone calls. Surprise, I forgot how much I hate phone calls until I started feeling all kinds of anxiety during the training. Still. For democracy. I made as many calls as I could before my voice got tired and face hurt, mostly leaving voicemails, alerting likely Democratic voters that their ballots had not been received. Only one woman picked up, my age, and she was VERY anti-Harris, so that was not fun. I hung up immediately (as they instructed us to), with a fast OKTHANKYOU. Then one of the people I’d left a message for texted me back saying they had voted for Harris, so that was a nice way to end that part of the day. Friends and I agreed not to watch returns that could take days to come in completely. Heck, having seen a bit behind the curtain, I knew that ballot curing could still take another several days. The remaining bit of my anxiety was spent on doing my workout for the night.
Year 5, Day 203: It took me two hours to come to terms with the fact that this country has really elected a rapist felon intent on ushering in fascism, TWICE. I didn’t think it was real. I didn’t want it to be real. I knew it was a strong possibility but I briefly allowed myself to hope. My feelings towards more than half this voting population are unspeakable. These people hate us so much and, you know what, the feeling is mutual.
Ballot curing is still important and needed for us to hold the House.
Year 5, Day 204: An exceptionally busy day for PiC, with several appts and meetings, and a moderately busy but emotionally very heavy day for me trying to get through as much work as possible. I’m still processing my feelings about the election and my brain is pingponging all over the place in reaction to all the feelings. Friend and I exchanged venting time about the loss and the reasons for the loss (that we could see) and the frustrations with the current administration continuing to fund genocide, and cracking down on people who are protesting that genocide.
The gentlest I can be with myself, since curling up into a ball and hiding under the covers pretending this didn’t happen and screaming all day to let out the rage isn’t an option, is to just let my brain do what it wants in the order it wants even if it’s not the ideal order. Sounds small but it makes a huge difference in my physical tension.
Had another go-round with JB about keeping our commitments even on the harder days because we can’t cut and run or rather refuse to go when we’re frustated with something totally unrelated to the commitment. In this case it’s fourth grade math doing our heads in and causing collective dismay and they’re really struggling with it right now. We’re spending way more time on explaining it than we ever have before and this brings up all my own math inadequacies again. Though they were mightily displeased with my decision, unlike last week they managed to go blow off steam and then get themselves back together. Last week was so much worse. Tiny ephemeral wins, I suppose.
Year 5, Day 205: This was a day of complete overwhelm, trying to finish work in time to deal with family stuff and blowing my deadlines by a few hours, no wonder I didn’t notice this day’s entry didn’t save! I picked up 2 Lakota families for November even though I am still tracking the October shipments that haven’t been completed yet.
If it would help you to be doing direct aid for people who will really need it for this coming winter, we’d very much welcome your help. Info here.
November 4, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
FIRST, an activism / political announcement!
If you can help with phonebanking or door knocking or ballot curing (just contacting people to let them know that something was wrong with their ballot so they can go fix it in time – people WANT those calls), go here to check for opportunities. I couldn’t get into the events that I was available for because they were full – which is amazing! – but if you can, I’m sure that would go a long way! The campaign may be optimistic but we still have to do everything we can up until the clock runs out.
Year 5, Day 196: Nicole and Maggie and I are on the same wavelength right now. I was answering an SES/environmental survey last week and it asked:
– how often did you put off buying something you needed because you didn’t have the money?
– how much difficulty did you have paying bills?
– have you set aside emergency funds that would cover your expenses for 3 months?
– how many times in the past month did you run out of food because you didn’t have money to buy more?
– how many times in the past month did you or your child skip a meal because you didn’t have money to buy more?
20 years ago, the answers to those questions were mostly “more than 1” (except the emergency funds one). I don’t ever want to stop being grateful for being financially comfortable now. I especially don’t ever want to stop being grateful that my kids don’t have to live with those fears and worries. I don’t want any kids to have to live hungry and wonder where their next meal is coming from.
Having enough money to help others and to have some extras, or to buy things just because I need them feels like such a luxury. We have several broken things we still haven’t replaced (our drying rack, our colander, I’m sure other things that I haven’t cared enough to do something about) but we CAN afford to replace them if we really wanted to. I do choose not to replace the smaller things to save for the bigger things a lot, but we replaced some kitchenware recently and I’m really happy about that.
Of course I still won’t waste money. Clipper screwed up a $20 transaction and never assigned it to my card. After a phone call last week where I was told to expect the money to come back to me by last Friday, I asked Chase to reverse the transaction. I’m surprised they just credited my account immediately. Usually that’s AmEx level of customer service, not Chase.
I’d like to be at the point where $20 didn’t matter, or $200, or $2000 or even $20,000 so that we could easily afford to give that away or put it into something sustainable to help people who have hit hard times. That’s the next dream.
Year 5, Day 197: Homework time with JB has been a nightmare these past two weeks. Their whole grade is mostly struggling with division, we’ve asked the teacher for some extra materials to figure it out. Their struggle wakes up my only semi-dormant stressors about struggling with math and it’s just a downward spiral from which there is no recovering. We’ve enlisted educator aunties and uncles to help out because we (PiC and I) are NOT good teachers in this situation. JB came out of their weekend tutoring session saying they still didn’t understand it and I needed to suss out whether that was lack of confidence or an accurate assessment. I was not looking forward to that attempt.
When they told me that they had math homework “and it’s confusing” today, my heart sank to my toes. I simply could not face going back to that place of STRESS so I didn’t until after 6 pm. Shockingly, though we had take it really slow and we needed the special graph paper, today was the first set of homework where I could gently point out a few simple errors (which usually provokes intense shame, freezing and tears), and walk them back to the point of the mistake to help them spot the mistake so they could rework the problems. They had to finish the full set of problems after dinner but they completed it all without a single tear. That’s a first. *huge sigh of relief*
Thank everything for chosen family who are good at the things we are not good at!
Year 5, Day 198: So much deeply depressing news from work on multiple fronts this week. Illnesses (multiple), injuries (multiple), people leaving, pets dying, car accidents, sudden deaths, and more. We’ll get through but I am really feeling it today with neither dog or garden to bring me even brief respite and solace.
Brushing and flossing one kid’s teeth, I sent PiC to take over flossing on the other kid because I was overcome with exasperation that I’m going to be doing this for 6+ more years until their dentist feels like they’re capable of doing a decent job. I don’t love helping w/people hygiene the way I love doing this stuff for dogs. I could clean dog ears, trim their nails, brush their teeth and everything all day and still love it. Not so for kids. Not so even for my own self, to be fair. Human body maintenance is more exasperating to me than canine maintenance.
“Gaming the insurance industry is what marriage is for, right?” Sherlock, Elementary.
Year 5, Day 199: Halloween! The first morning all year we haven’t had to roust a child from their bed. Both of them were up and getting dressed or yelling about getting dressed (Smol Acrobat) by the time I was able to move. They loved their costumes and were delighted with them all day long. I’m rather proud of my first and probably only attempt at making a costume. Very imperfect but it worked out with PiC adding all the embellishments. (At the last minute. I was done with my part of the costume a month ago. This is why we can’t work together as a team concurrently, we’d make each other batty. On the Gantt chart of life, we’re always at opposite ends of the project.)
We took Smol Acrobat to JB’s school parade and they were dopey-cute. Smol Acrobat kept cutting across from the parent side to the student side to hug JB and then sprinting back to leap at me in bellyflop position, elbow and knee out, to catch. I should bruise up quite nicely by tomorrow, thank you very much.
We crammed in most of a day of work before taking the kids, plus bonus kid, to our usual haunt for a round of leisurely trick or treat. I’m proud of Smol Acrobat being loud (for them) and enthusiastic about the whole thing, they’re the more reserved sort in a lot of situations. I’m glad they can almost keep up with JB for at least part of the time. They didn’t last long though, as expected. We treated the kids to our favorite local burgers and JB got to stay up late because they’ve got a teacher in-service day tomorrow anyway. We did a whole lot of work and cleaning before calling it a night, with aching aching bones.
Year 5, Day 200: The weather has turned very nippy overnight, I’ve needed extra layers to stay warm. I’m also out of patience with the downish comforter whose contents keep shifting so that by the middle of the night the down is piled off to the sides. I don’t know how I could be using a blanket wrong but I’m tired of waking up shivering. I’m putting a Sherpa blanket on my Black Friday shopping list, unless I see something better before then. I wanted something thick and plush like this but it’s got terrible reviews. This one has a greater proportion of far better reviews but it looks really thin. Recommendations welcome!
Much sadface. Our side view mirror had a run in with another car’s side view mirror. Theirs was fine but ours is not. Speaking of not spending on broken things! Collectively the other smaller broken things I’m not spending on doesn’t add up to the cost of this fix but that’s money we will put toward this expense instead. It is still a zero sum game for those of us who still need to earn income. It’s going to cost at least four figures to fix, not how I wanted to spend it, but we’re lucky that this is just sad and not devastating.
This quote hit me where I live: “When someone whose job it is to nurture you hurts you instead, it can’t help but have a profound and lasting effect on your sense of who you are.” – Sherlock, Elementary.
October 28, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 190: Blergh. I made myself go to bed early (for me) last night and still felt like a waterlogged foam pillow trying to get up.
My plan to start the week with enough rest was derailed by a jerk male of indeterminate age going around the neighborhood banging on / kicking in doors. I contacted all the neighbor-friends and found out it already happened to one of them. Their kids reported it sounded like a real break-in attempt so my dander was up. Whoever this is needs to be caught – this is stupid and dangerous. I strung together about 8 hours, even after the requisite 2-3 hours of settling down time (trying to read), but felt like I got no rest at all.
This morning was not much better. We notified a few more neighbors and found out that we’re the fourth ones that we know of to be hit and there’s more than one of them. Then I remembered that, many years ago, a friend’s brother was murdered in a break-in and I never heard from the family again. That, and my aunt and cousin narrowly escaped similar when their home was broken into when I was even younger. No wonder what sounded and felt like an attempted break in brought up such a visceral reaction of rage.
Year 5, Day 191: Welp. I was prepared for a shitty day. Had my consolation danish ready to go when I emerged from the first, second, or third hyperfocus sessions. Instead we woke up to a feverish Smol Acrobat declaring “I’m going to stay home wif you and Wee because I do not feel good! Not Daddy. Oh wait, yes Daddy.”
Oh.
Well. Shit.
PiC rescheduled his meetings, my truckload of work is not negotiable, and we split 80/20 kidcare and muddled through the day. I did a lot of the cuddling, which got Smol through their rough bits and was terrible for my currently already impacted immune system that’s just struggling to get past last week’s cold-type viral thing, but that was most of my 20%. I was wilting with fatigue and general ick by 3 pm, desperate for a nap.
It wasn’t until I sat down after bedtime that I came anywhere near hyperfocus again. Frustrating but got just close enough to put a decent amount of work to bed. I gave myself a few minutes with the latest posts at Ilona Andrews and The Struggle feels so familiar to my overall work right now. I got some unbelievably disheartening updates today and just wanted to quit on the spot. I hope the information is half baked and mostly wrong because if even half of it is true, life will be impossible in six months. Just sheer impossible.
Year 5, Day 192: The kids had their dental cleaning today. They love their dentist, or the dentist experience because they get to watch TV and get goodies at the end, and their hygienist and dentist are pretty great. However. Next year, the dentist is going out of network in the way that means they will still bill insurance on our behalf for our reimbursement but we have to pay the full freight and get a portion of it back later. Another expense AND another thing to keep track of. 😫
Speaking of overstretching: between my still feeling under the weather and Smol Acrobat’s fevers this week, I’m SO grateful on one point. When PiC and JB were rear-ended on the weekend, it was minor enough that we decided it was unnecessary to report to the insurance. We didn’t want to – the driver who hit them was clearly distressed about the prospect and it would have impacted his insurance much worse than it would have impacted us financially. Apparently his foot slipped off the brakes and the car rolled into ours.
Year 5, Day 193: Some days you struggle with getting the kids to see and do the chores, some days you break up fights over which chores they get to do. These are weird extremes.
Coffee grinding is the Chore of Choice. JB has been doing it on their own for about 6-8 months and now Smol Acrobat is grumpy because they’re not allowed to do it yet. “I do good wistening!” they protest. Yes, you do good listening for a 3 year old. This needs a 6 year old good listener. They grumbled but agreed to spectate only. Then we had to holler at JB to pay attention because they got distracted playing with Smol Acrobat. 🤦🏻♀️
JB is currently going through a bunch of playground conflict with their same gender friends. We were so hopeful for less conflict this year with newer kids in the mix but then BullyKid from 2nd grade joined the group. Their other gender friend also had a conflict and split with their same gender friends. I don’t know for sure if 2ndgrade Bully is the instigator but given there were no conflicts for many weeks before they joined, and the conflicts immediately started when they joined, I have my suspicions.
Year 5, Day 194: “The great love of my life is a homicidal maniac. No one’s perfect.” I really liked the premise of Lucy Liu’s Elementary when it first came out but never got to see much of it. Now that it’s on Netflix, I get to enjoy it as my background noise. I like it!
Good news, JB and the other kids apparently mended bridges. I wasn’t sure which way that was going to go. That’s a bit of a relief but I expect the larger issues with the conflict-provocateur remain.
Money: If you use any of the listed P&G brands, they have holiday and sports-related rebates: Get $15 when you spend $50 and Get $5 when you spend $20, good from Sept 29-Dec 29 2024.
My exciting Friday night: working until I had to make dinner, cooking dinner and getting everyone else off to bed, and then doing tutoring prep (scanning pages out of JB’s math book for their uncle professor to use) and then researching and predicting preventative healthcare costs for 2025 so we can make open enrollment decisions next week. The dental bit is the most painful. They say they’ll pay 90% of “reasonable and customary fees” but I need to know what that means in order to figure out how much of that 90% stacks up to my dentist’s costs and therefore what our anticipated OOP costs will likely be. Only I can’t because according to the ADA: the words usual, customary and reasonable are not interchangeable and UCR is a misleading acronym.
UCR is actually three different concepts, not one. Usual fees are determined by the dentist. The fee the insurance company determines to be customary may be lower than the area dentists’ usual or reasonable fees for the same service. There is no universally accepted method for determining the customary fee schedule, which may vary a great deal among plans, even when those plans operate in the same area. So, the benefit paid will generally be based on a percentage of the insurance company’s customary fee schedule. Patients often do not know what their out-of-pocket costs will be because third-party payers generally do not release these customary fee schedule maximums to the public.
That’s VERY ANNOYING.
SIGH.
Anyway, I worked out most of our expected fees because the hygienist helped me schedule all of their appointments for next year in one go, so at least I have that information to go on. I think I’ve wrapped my head around this: they cover 100% preventative care at their discounted rates so the other percentages of coverage for treatment don’t matter. I don’t have to wrangle with the other stuff for now because all we have planned is preventive care and we can’t predict anything else at this point. So that’s dental done for now. For my 401k, since I’m already accustomed to the accelerated rate of contributions, I may keep that percentage for the first half of the year and be done with that, similar to how we do PiC’s plan. That’ll give us better cash flow for the second half of the year and ensure we’ve maxed it out a second time before dreams of rage-quitting start up again. Hopefully.
October 21, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 183: Holiday Mondays are weird Mondays.
We took the kids to the park where they took minor injuries, both to the knees doing completely different things, and came home needing a big lunch and a rest. While my time with the trainer is definitely showing (tiny) results and helping reduce how badly my body reacts to this sort of flagrant overuse, it’s still pretty unhappy with the decision to take fresh air and several thousand steps instead of sitting in my soft but supportive office chair for several hours. My brain doesn’t mind the break, my body strenuously objects to the change in routine.
The subject of filial responsibility came up on Bluesky and it brought up my low-level creeping uncertainty about what’s in store for the future. Seven years ago, I had a consult with a lawyer who felt I had no legal reason to worry about making a break with the biodad and that I was on firm legal ground to stop supporting him. I would hope that after this many years of estrangement, and likely more by the time a nursing home comes into play, that my legal responsibility is similarly not. I would like to talk to a lawyer again in the near future to confirm their understanding of the CA filial responsibility law and confirm the likelihood that I would be pulled into that vortex without my consent.
Year 5, Day 184: We had house guests for the long weekend and the dynamic has been such a rollercoaster. Now we know what having three kids three years apart could have been like: constantly up and down. Love, hate, love, hate, love, hate, bicker bicker huuuuuuug. We three adults are simultaneously bemused and exhausted. I’ve so appreciated having the company of a long time friend who knows my medical stuff and is super mindful of COVID risks, so that’s been so good for my soul. But the children. 😆😵💫 I am so grateful they made the trip to visit us, we’re so lucky that they still love us after all that. At least I hope they do. 😆
Is my brain broken: Going over homework with JB, I seem to have just lost all memory of how we borrow numbers when subtracting. Like there’s a block of knowledge that used to live in my head but isn’t there anymore. What. I know that I keep losing memory but to lose a core set of computing rules that I’ve been using since I was 7 is really disturbing. After waiting for it to come back, I gave up and looked it up but it still feels foreign like this is knowledge I never knew at all. There’s nothing familiar about the facts I relearned. There aren’t any echoes of familiarity like addition or multiplication tables or division which may feel rusty but the memory-feel, the layers of having done that for years, is still there for those things. Not so for this part of subtraction.
Year 5, Day 185: Back to the metaphorical donut shop for me today after seeing our friends safely to the airport. I’m really tired both from prolonged socializing, as enjoyable as it was, and from catching some viral thing yesterday. Just my luck. I get to spend time with this friend for the first time in years and of course my body craps out after a few days. So rude. I have no regrets! Just continued annoyance that some of our meatsuits are so incredibly fragile. Everyone else is, of course, fine. I’m glad everyone else is fine, I just want to be in that group.
Today’s my first trainer day since Friday and have I already lost all conditioning? Last week, arms days were feeling pretty good. I was doing the max number of reps, not a huge number of course but high for me, and feeling a smidge stronger each day. Today, after only 20 modified pushups and 24 lateral raises, my face was in extreme danger of being ground into the carpet during planks. We barely made it to the end of three planks. Summary: noodle arms.
Probably doesn’t help anything that I’m not feeling well either. Maybe that’s connected. We’ll see!
Year 5, Day 186: So much drag, today, physically.
PiC finally got the second car to the shop! He had to go about it in a convoluted way since we had registered it as non-operational: get it registered as operational, tow it to the shop, get key maintenance and smogging done, drive it home, sell it. Registration was $164, smog check and a water thingie replacement ($600). It’s been SUCH a relief to have it out of the garage where it’s been a Very Tight squeeze for more than a year but it’ll be home again in only a few days so please join me in crossing my fingers that someone buys it before the end of this year.
Also it just occurred to me that I should just order JB more Vogmasks. If I attach the liner to them to protect them from stains, that’ll get them a better fit until the custom masks come in. The custom masks are a couple months out. This way, I can stop driving myself up the wall about the aged materials’ poor fit! I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before.
Year 5, Day 187: Today would have been a dog borrow day but for the mountain of work that towers over me. I took a risk earlier this week, hoping someone could come through for me but they couldn’t, so here I am with a week’s worth of work on a Friday. The saddest of faces I’m making. I ended up working until 11 pm.