March 30, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $640.74; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Week 2 of shutdown in the Bay Area.
This is a record of our weekdays. We are attempting to set up the occasional video call with other kids so that they can socialize that way.
This week’s menu planning: Roast pork shoulder, veggie curry, a rotisserie chicken from Costco. I meant to also make dumplings and tandoori chicken from scratch but PiC surprised me with that rotisserie chicken on our last run to Costco for a few weeks.
Day 1: I was finally mentally ready to get my act together and set up a tentative schedule for JB. I don’t know if we can manage this same thing all week but I like the general outline that gives us some structure and some chances to get work done without having to entertain.
8 am -8:30 am, Breakfast
8:30 am – 9 am, “art lesson” – watching an artist draw something new and copying it
9 am – 10 am, Call with Auntie – practice writing
10 am – 10:30 am, dance party with music
10:30 am – 11:30 am, free choice (probably art)
11:30 am – 12 pm, snack
12:30 pm – 2 pm, walk dogs and have lunch
2 pm – 2:45 pm, rest
2:45 pm – 3:45 pm, solo free choice – aka work at my desk but do not talk to me
3:45 pm – 4:30 pm, numbers/math time – maybe a few worksheets that they enjoy doing. *Note: couldn’t find it. Oh well.
4:30 pm – 5:30 pm, movement of some kind.
5:30 pm – 6 pm, inevitable lost transition time to whining or tiredness
6 pm – 7 pm, dinner (more…)
March 24, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $640.74; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Money
Our spending went way (waaaaaay) up this month because of the stocking up on food and medications and the house repair which had nothing to do with the pandemic, just the weather.
The groceries were manageable, I focused on sales and specific recipes to make the most of our food and prevent waste. I also picked up a lot of apples and oranges that will last a few weeks in the fridge to stretch out time between grocery trips.
The real kick in the teeth was the medications and Seamus’s final labwork. I think we spent about $800 all told on his stuff. But we simply cannot risk him going without his pain medications due to any interruption in the supply lines.
I canceled both our dogwalker and my massage therapy but I paid the former anyway and bought a gift card from the latter to help the business with a bit of income while they have to be shut down. Luckily, my brain therapy is already remote so I will keep that appointment this week.
As much as our budget can bear, I’m trying to anonymously help out folks who have lost their income.
We are both very fortunate that, for the moment, our jobs are relatively safe. We don’t know how long that’ll be the case and I have always planned against the worst case scenario happening and will continue to do so but I won’t forget to be grateful. The not great thing is that PiC had finally located some jobs to apply for and we don’t know if the companies will freeze hiring. I hope not. He’s been unhappy in this job for so long, I sure hope he still has opportunities open. But either way, we know we are so incredibly lucky and we are grateful for our current financial stability however long it lasts.
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March 23, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $640.74; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Week 1 of shutdown in the Bay Area.
I haven’t written anything substantial about this because I’ve just been too busy trying to deal.
We had begun taking steps weeks ago. Around March 1st, PiC and I were adding moderate overage to our canned and frozen food stores.
A week later, I started cooking up fresh and frozen stores to make actual meals in case I got sick myself. (Not that PiC wouldn’t care for me but he’d also have JB and the two dogs to care for. That’s a lot for any one adult.) Traffic was noticeably light going to and from work this second week of March, many employees who could were already working from home. Unfortunately since we have no help, and we both had to work full time and on site (PiC), we weren’t prepared to make that shift. Still, it was in our future and I was going through our stores of supplies to create a Treasure Box for JB.
By March 14, I was on the verge of pulling JB out of school. We had planned to spend the weekend finalizing our stock up of our supplies and start to hunker down. Unfortunately, Mother Nature had other plans for us, and we had to spend the whole weekend fixing the house instead. That was frustrating but we were so (so so so) very fortunate to have a couple of friends who were available and willing to come help us with the repairs and with entertaining JB. I haven’t had local friends in a long time and I’m still stunned by their generosity.
By the evening of March 15, I couldn’t justify keeping JB in daycare even if they stayed open. I didn’t want to risk them being exposed to anyone who had been exposed to the germs over the weekend. We made the call when we went to bed.
By Monday when this post goes up, it’ll be Day Ten in calendar days but I’m only recording weekdays.
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November 25, 2019
Mental illness speckles my family tree like leaf mold.
The bipolar uncle who cackled uncomfortably like a cartoon character, his mirth punctuated by random outbursts of rage. The cousin fallen prey to the lure of drugs to quiet his anxiety, lost when the drugs pushed him to suicide instead of helping as he’d hoped. Then his brother couldn’t handle the anger and loss and pain, he was finally diagnosed as bipolar and refused to be treated. Then Mom’s dementia and anxiety and depression, desperately intermingled, trapped her in a dizzying kaleidoscopic world until she passed. My dad was, and remains, a hardcore narcissist. If he doesn’t actually have NPD, his life and choices certainly mimic it very strongly, and he raised a son who was the same.
Mostly this kind of thing is hushed up by the family, as if not talking about it means that it doesn’t exist. That doesn’t work, family. It hasn’t protected any of us.
Some of got lucky. Some of us danced with acute depression and/or anxiety, lasting weeks, or months, admitted it, got help, and finally made it through to the other side. Humbled and a little wiser about the realities, and vagaries, of mental health with some tools to manage that anxiety and depression, we’ve understood the struggle a little better. And some of us who won free still live with the specter, daily.
My brother wasn’t one of “some of us”. He didn’t have a sharp psychotic break. He didn’t step in and out of schizophrenia, managed and not. It was almost a gentle transition. He’d always had delusions of grandeur – he flashed through get rich quick schemes like credit cards. Braggadacio fed his outsize ego which fueled his arrogance in an endless loop.
He never worked harder than when he was trying to dupe me, our parents, or family and friends. He was the first to fall head over heels for the earliest MLM scams of our time, dragging our worried parents and their connections in with him. He managed two quarters at the local state college before dropping out with parking tickets and failing grades trailing in his wake.
He slipped into the warm embrace of true delusions easily, just like he’d done every night when we lay in bed in our shared room, dancing through one imaginary scenario after another. His created world had always been far more desirable than the one we lived in, the one of bills, of hard work, of gritting your teeth and dealing with the daily mundanity that keeps the car running and the water on.
Is it any wonder then, as his delusions deepened, as he swatted away our reality to create a new world for himself where he didn’t have to do any actual work, that it simply wasn’t clear if this wasn’t just another one of his long cons? (more…)
November 19, 2018
Last summer, I talked about how we made it work around here and I think it’s worth revisiting a year, and a lot more stressors, later.
We’ve been settled into the new home for a year now – thank everything for being done with the massive renovations. We’ve been ignoring all the other projects around the house that need doing for a while just to recoup our savings and sanity.
We still manage with just the two of us: working, parenting, maintaining a semblance of a personal life. I continue to blog, albeit a bit less with my job problems, and added a monthly massage to help alleviate my pain. He has picked up a hobby again and we try to ensure he gets out at least once a weekend for exercise, during which time JB and I spend quality time together. Mostly we spend that time cleaning and puttering around the house but once in a while we can have a friend visit. We are adding some visits of our own to PiC’s friends we don’t see nearly often enough.
Childcare
Daycare: JuggerBaby is in daycare five days a week, now enrolled in their preschool program (for all 3 year olds and up). We’ve been on the waitlist for the local preschool since 2015 but no dice so daycare and $$$ bills it is. They’re in a new facility now, still open from 6:30 to 6:30 which is still really important for us and spoils us. I know we’re going to face an uphill battle once ze is enrolled in public school – apparently the school system still works on the assumption that at least one parent will be home and ready to accommodate all sorts of weird scheduling.
Last year, we added one chauffeur day to my schedule but PiC needed some more him-time so I now have two designated drop off days.
Babysitting: We tend to avoid babysitting because at $25/hour, it REALLY has to be worth it but we’ve been terrible about hiring the sitter for anything. Maybe we should have tried for our anniversary? It’s felt desperately needed and yet we don’t really have any space for it to happen. (more…)
August 1, 2018
I’m an introvert, through and through. I’ve preferred to work from my home office, sofa, bed, a dark corner, over going into the office since 2006 and pretty much nothing has shaken my core love of being alone for 8-10 hours a day to work my work thing, dog at my feet.
On the other hand, I adore my little family so I always look forward to seeing them at the end of each work day. In those hours that I’d normally keep working or cut bait and relax … well, no, bury myself in a book because I don’t relax well, my evenings have been wholly subsumed with family time and I’ve been happy with that.
It’s limiting, of course. There’s no such thing as a late night date, or even an early night date, when you’ve got a ravenous wee beastie to feed before meltdown. Spending time with friends is almost entirely relegated to the weekends, as well, though I can’t in good conscience pretend that I was ever a fan of meeting up socially on a school night.
I’m a creature of habit, so all in all, it’s been a good balance of alone time to family and friends time.
Of course, whenever I settle happily into my routine, something comes along to shake it up. Like, for example, PiC deciding to take JB on a trip without me earlier this year.
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July 9, 2018
FIREcracker says don’t give your kids money and let them fail if you want them to succeed.
That’s similar to my core parenting tenets.
I will save JB’s life when ze is choking or about to pelt over the edge of a cliff.
I don’t spare zir the bumps, bruises, scrapes and scratches that happen when you run pell mell through life without your feet under you. Ze takes after me so won’t ever be graceful but eventually ze will learn to stop falling so much. BY FALLING SO MUCH.
I just stopped being the biggest klutz in town at age 35 so I could send zir to gymnastics lessons for fun and an attempt to learn some physical balance, but my guess? Ze will just be pretty good at the sport and STILL go through life collecting bruises like Mario Coins. Fine. Bruises won’t kill you.
Back to the point – there’s more nuance to this whole parenting thing. We are saving a bundle for zir college education even while I’m hesitant to commit to paying for all of it because I think ze needs skin in the game. At the same time, I know what life was like when I had to work all through college – I barely remember anything I learned.
The reality is, if we’re doing our jobs right, ze will very likely have some resources inherited from us or from one of many grandparents. We must teach zir to fend for zirself, making a living wage, saving, investing, and making good decisions. In short, have the skills to survive without money coming from anyone else. But I also want zir to have the skills and discipline when resources are plentiful and not live in short-termism.
Some people are naturally frugal, some people learn it. If JB is the latter, the lessons should come from us – we have the knowledge. It would be a massive failure on our part not to try to pass along the lessons and philosophies that create the life that ze lives now.
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