October 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: $1,905.47; Rural libraries, $346.69.
We will be wrapping up on November 1st!
1. I had three bites of red velvet cake that was actually worth eating. I usually consider red velvet a waste of cake but Nothing Bundt really came through.
2. We “celebrated” two birthdays this week with surprise cake for friends. We took pictures “together” with them standing six feet in front of us and just to the side so we could simulate being together. I love and hugely appreciate that our few local friends are taking it as seriously as we are.
3. JB and I held a cleaning session on Sunday and it was really satisfying. They cleaned their whole desk area and scrubbed down all the sticky surfaces on the desk and stool and activity mats. I recycled a bunch of catalogs and empty pill bottle and ran the robot vacuum.
Challenges this week: I have had to work late every single night for weeks. I don’t typically feel it in the moment, so I had forgotten what a toll the long hours over several days and weeks takes.
Smol Acrobat is the flipping Energizer Bunny. They do not stop kicking, rolling, punching, somersaulting and punching my bladder. They are active full days and well into the night absolutely nonstop. This cannot be normal. (It probably is. There is nothing remotely comfortable or dignified about pregnancy, lemme tell ya.)
The SCOTUS confirmation was awful.
4. I can’t wait to watch “Over the Moon” on Netflix.
5. I’ve been doing more regular targeted stretches and micro exercises and they seem to be helping the back strain enough that just the one heating pad during the day instead of at night is working relatively well. Ironically, I find it easier to do now when I’m working way more hours then I was when I was trying to keep it to 35-40 hours a week to make room for rest (and the rest didn’t even really happen).
6. We stopped by Sprouts on Wednesday and I got to indulge in a bit of $5 Sushi Wednesday! No raw fish for me, alas, but a bit of California roll was still a nice treat. Though I just realized that I forgot to pick up some sugar free Lily’s PB cups, drat. I discovered the Lily’s sugar free chocolate brand a few months ago and they are so tasty. I can get them from Target, turns out, so I will watch out for a sale.
:: How are you feeling? What’s good right now?
October 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, $1,905.47; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Saturday’s plan: organize the Smol Acrobat’s two dresser drawers to ensure we have age appropriate clothing on hand through six months and put everything else in storage. What really happened?
1. I worked on our ballots (almost done!) with 13 measures and school board people to vote for. Why do we always have SO MANY MEASURES?? It makes voting a real chore. I will check my choices against those of a much politically savvier friend.
2 I tackled the research for open enrollment. This year has a new twist which has eaten my brain. An HMO that acts more like a PPO with a deductible and comes with the option of an HSA and limited FSA (for vision and dental only). I’m very much not a fan of the PPO-like HMO, we’ll have to pay for services in full up to $2800 a year before coverage kicks in for anything that’s not preventative. My x-rays alone last year when my back was an issue was billed out at $1900. I didn’t pay a nickel for that, last year.
I’ve never had an HSA option before and I was excited. Then I learned that we lose our general FSA and HSA contributions and gains are taxable in CA so we’d be looking at a significant jump in our state taxable income. We double our federal pre-tax deduction but it might be a wash compared to the increased taxable state income. I’ve asked our tax person to run some numbers for us on that front, meanwhile, I need PiC to get a hold of the negotiated rates for the HSA-HMO.
Most years of my life I haven’t had health insurance but in my adult married life I’ve had great insurance. We always opted for the HMO for ease of use and to avoid this out of pocket maximum dance. I’m not looking forward to that being part of our lives.
3. Ordered Seamus’s medication refills and also called the vet to get a written prescription to submit.
4. Worked for 90 minutes to clear up some mess ahead of Monday. Monday me better be grateful. (Spoiler: Monday me failed to be grateful because Monday was crammed full of personal and professional issues.)
5. Another two hours organizing and paring down the family photo albums meant I was in shouting distance of finishing. That’s 8 hours I’ve spent on this project across several days. I must have started with nearly 2000 photos because I’d winnowed it down a massive amount and hundreds are left. I was initially feeling guilty discarding a batch of photos of my estranged sibling but today’s work revealed that even keeping only the photos with him and someone else in them leaves with me with over 100 of them. Guilt gone!
I never touched Smol Acrobat’s clothes!
6. Sunday had to be desk reclamation day. I’d left my piles and piles of photos all over my desk. If I didn’t get that squared away, I couldn’t work on Monday. And I couldn’t deal mentally with the chaos. Four more hours of sorting, discarding, and transferring resulted in a final photo album, with many photo slots doubled up or more. Looks like an accordion and I don’t care! The photos are consolidated in an album which went with the contents of my medium box into one large box and I can wash my hands of the mess! One day I may even sit down to sort and discard duplicates of the school era photos. The album spanned 1978-1990, my photos span 1994-2008.
7. I tackled packaging up Halloween pouches for the zoom Halloween scavenger hunt we will do with JB’s friends, then I organized SA’s dresser. I’m sure there were other things I wanted to do but I’m D-O-N-E.
Pumpkin banana bread will have to wait another day.
Challenges this week: my sciatic nerve pain is an all day every day thing now and it’s the pits. The news is a mess and depressing as all get out.
We attempted to satisfy a craving I had with take out and were appalled to see so many people are dining indoors and outsiders in such crowded setups – lines going out the door and wrapping around the sidewalk and the block – that they may as well not be masked or distanced. Since the restaurants were set up on the sidewalks, there was no safe way to walk past diners without being right on top of them. We didn’t even try to park. It was a disappointment, three different places were the same way. After many hours on this “adventure”, and a few tears from JB who was homesick because when you’re 5 and haven’t been on a 9 hour road trip in ten months you forget what an hour feels like, we managed to scavenge some dinner and managed to feed ourselves by 9 pm. Sheesh.
I asked Joybird for an update on our sofa. Their updates have been non-existent up to now and I don’t think we’re going to be getting it anything like on time. I could live with that if they were proactively telling us what’s going on and not leaving me in the dark so I wonder if they’re just scamming us. After three days of trying to get an answer, we found out they have been six weeks behind schedule and hadn’t even started making it until this week. But somehow they still think we should trust them to deliver. I cancelled the order. We won’t be shopping from Joybird again.
8. We got a small refund from the rental property escrow! It’s nice to put money in when we’re contemplating a lot of money going out soon.
9. I finally put in my first order at Penzey’s which was exciting! I also happened to wait long enough that they had a promotion: buy 5 spices and the cheapest six spice is free. In writing this I realize that I forgot to get one more spice mix I wanted. Darnit.
:: How was your week?
October 16, 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, $1,816.35; Rural libraries, $346.69
1. We’re seeing improvement in JB’s reading comprehension from PiC’s reading with them every single day and with their tutoe. That’s really heartening amid all my frustrations with the kindergarten teacher who is working at a snail’s pace of one letter or one two-letter word a day/week. They spend a lot of time reading comic books we find at the library and early reader books. Oddly, they gravitate to reading under my desk or the dining table. Not a great deal of light under there but they seem happy and all I care about is that they develop a love of reading.
2. Saturday we each had an ambitious list of things to get done. Too ambitious. We had about a week’s worth of work on each of our lists. I sat down to start working on my top priority and immediately started working on something that wasn’t even on the list. I pulled a huge stack of old tax paperwork from my overstuffed filing cabinet, checked the digital copies, and scanned and filed everything that was missing. Same for our closing docs for every property we have bought, sold, or refinances. Then the whole five inch stack of documents went into a sack for shredding later. So. Satisfying. I added that to the list just so I could cross it off.
3. PiC and JB tackled the furniture situation in JB’s room. We needed to make some space in there for various uses and the heavier furniture also needed to be secured to studs in case of earthquake. Naturally that meant that all the books and everything in the bookshelves had to come out for the moving and it looked like a tornado hit. I hollered at them every so often to focus on actually putting things away and not get sucked into reading every book before it goes back on the shelf. (more…)
October 9, 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, $1,816.35; Rural libraries, $346.69
1. I was in a tough spot on the weekend and made myself ask for help from a friend. Their kids, actually. I asked if they might be free for a Zoom playdate with JB and they happily obliged. They read books, colored, did art for each other, played tic tac toe and play-doh for HOURS. It was amazing and made it possible for me to pace myself for the rest of the day. I won’t call it a silver lining because that seems weird but I definitely appreciate that only under these circumstances would they have been available. When else would social ten and thirteen year olds have hours to spend with a five year old and actually enjoy it?
2. I sorted through my and an old friend’s gift of handed down comics this weekend. They were gifted them to me over ten years ago and I only JUST got the chance to go through them. 😬 But it’s perfect timing. The kids from #1 were interested in taking the whole shebang off my hands for themselves and to share with their friends. I won’t even have to sort them, that can be their project! I’ll look through my shelves one more time to see if there are good younger kid graphic novels to add to the already full box. I’ve picked up a handful of bargains at SDCC over the years that were good reads but not necessarily keepers so it’d be great to pass them along to someone who will enjoy them and reduce my sense of Stuff Claustrophobia.
3. JB has had permission to, under strict supervision, go through a few of my comics and they’re really enjoying the treat. I should go through them and organize it so the age appropriate ones are more accessible.
Yotsuba&! is a wonderful read and probably suitable for their reading level. I also found a small stack of Powerpuff Girls that are about the right level. Weirdly the Walt Disney comics seem to be a little too advanced for them right now (by my estimation, I haven’t had them try it yet).
Challenges this week: I’m not sure what words there are for the state of this federal government / presidential administration that lies so often you can’t tell if they’ve met a truth in their lives. I honestly can’t help but think that 45 is just lying about having the virus, still, because his behavior continues to baffle me.
We’ve pulled a bunch of previously inaccessible boxes out of storage and now we have to deal with them. It was always on the list of things to do but it’s rather daunting now that we’ve doubled down on the stash.
I need to consolidate old photos and also just plain get rid of a lot of old duplicate photos but darn if I can think of when I can make time for that to happen.
4. I did tackle and condense two boxes into one. I recycled a bunch of old paperwork and had a moment of reminiscing about my finances and filing system 10-15 years ago as I sorted a big pile of paperwork to be shredded. In 2010, I declared $43,000 of income, and $11,000 of that was unemployment. I’ve come such a long way.
The rest of the boxes are going to be tougher. I didn’t realize I had saved my yearbooks so now I have to figure out what to do with the darn things.
:: How was your week? Any good things to share?
October 2, 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, $1,886.35; Rural libraries, $346.69.
1. I made deluxe grilled cheese sandwiches (ham, tomato and cheese) for the first time in forever. I cannot remember the last time I made a grilled cheese and it was delicious!
2. Sleep eludes me most nights now (not good) but on the weekends I’m allowing myself a midday lay down when I need it. Remembering that it’s ok to take care of myself is a big step. We all (well, not JB) took a good portion of Saturday afternoon to rest instead of forcing ourselves to run all kinds of errands.
3. In the aftermath of RBG’s death and the absolute circus of politicizing her death before we can even mourn her, and the gross absurdity of nominating a SCOTUS justice to take her seat less than two months before the election, I’ve been bogged down with despair and rage and spiritually exhausted. I’m also physically exhausted for other reasons but none of this helped that. Thanks to Katherine and Cloud for sharing their actions, and particular thanks to Cloud and Nicole and Maggie for sharing actions consistently. This stuck and when I had energy, we donated to flip the Senate.
Challenges this week: Seamus’s legs were extra wobbly this week and my poor buddy fell down a couple steps. I couldn’t catch him in time, and he had a bloody nose from it.
Birthday dinner should have been lunch but the day itself was incredibly emotionally rough, and I couldn’t shake the funk until I admitted how much I’d been replacing hurt over not being important enough to remember on the day with an emotional shield of telling myself that my birthday didn’t matter, and therefore I didn’t matter. It all bubbled up in a strong sense of worthlessness on the day of. That was no fun at all. But. Weathering it was good for me long-term.
4. We enjoyed outdoor patio, far from other people, self service burgers for my birthday dinner.
5. Therapy has been one revelation after another, in session and out. As I metaphorically open up and flush out old wounds, I start to see the ways I had devalued myself as a person as a self protective response starting way back when I was still dependent on people who didn’t care about me. I am working on being less harsh because I shouldn’t have to be a horrible drill sergeant to myself to prove I’m worthy. A) it never proved anything to the parent who didn’t love me. B) it only hurt me, not them. C) it didn’t make me more lovable if I forced myself to be the most productive person ever.
It was a warped sense of logic where I decided to make myself indispensable as an alternative to understanding and accepting that my horrible parent and sibling just didn’t love me and that it was their problem. If I blocked out the latter, I wouldn’t have to face the hurt or pain of the truth. Instead I set myself up to be used and to turn their indifference into self-loathing. Lose lose.
And it led to my telling myself this terrible message: 
As I stay committed to the journey of leaving behind all the negative self narrative about my lack of worth, the less inflammation I’m encountering when I occasionally eat carbs or sugar. In January, I’d swell up like the Michelin Man after three sneak bites of something delivery. Now, I can have meals that include the verboten gluten or carbs or sugar and only feel twinges and aches. The fibro isn’t gone but the inflammatory response to food is significantly reduced.
My totally amateur theory is that removing these own self erected obstacles is removing stressors on my body so that it’s not so “on edge” and teetering on a cliff. Therefore it’s less primed to go inflammation-mode at the first possible challenge.
6. We got our flu shots done! I was flabbergasted at our HMO’s inability to give us any appointments at all online through their flu clinic scheduler. I’m glad that I emailed our pediatrician to ask for help. They called back to set us up with a real appointment rather than a one hour drive up slot and though it was a terrible experience due to having a child who is VERY VOCAL about their fear of needles, we got it done.
:: Have you managed to get your flu shot?
September 25, 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, $1,816.35; Rural libraries, $321.62.
1. I’m grateful to have already purchased the obligatory nibling holiday gifts. They should be ready for delivery well ahead of any holiday rush / election-related USPS breakdown. I want all our holiday stuff done before Halloween. In fact, I need all holiday things OFF MY LIST before a busy and bizarre holiday season.
2. I’m also very grateful we won’t be traveling for the holidays this year.
Challenges this week: I’m not sure how much more loss I can take. May RBG’s memory be a blessing, may we do all the work to honor her memory and her body of work fighting for us.
3. We had a masked and distanced dinner and a movie (doors and windows open for air) with a couple of very local friends, and it was lovely. I even played hairdresser and cut our friend’s hair (masked, outside). I was whipped by the time they left but it was nice to have some fun. We always stay isolated for at least two weeks after any get together. It’s been four weeks, in this case, but we are generally isolated anyway. Our county’s infection rate remains high. Even if things now just feel surreal, we are still mindful that there are too many people who don’t take this illness seriously and we can’t trust our fellow citizens to take sufficient care to limit the spread. Even if the virus weren’t fatal to us, we simply can’t risk the impact of a slow recovery or a long tail, or worse yet, chronic lingering symptoms. We have plenty of chronic issues in this household without signing up for more.
4. A king sized bed with a headboard is a glorious luxury.
:: How was your week? Do you have anything good planned for the weekend?
September 18, 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, $1,763.51; Rural libraries, $321.62.
1. I spent a lot of time perusing tax code to make sure I’m prepared to record all the relevant details from the rental sale if it actually goes through soon. I hate our tax code, it’s ridiculously convoluted even for someone who is interested in combing through the fine print to collect all the necessary details. It scratched a particular itch in my brain but it’s still absurd.
2. Halloween is definitely not happening, nor are the rest of the holidays in 2020, happening in any way like normal so I am pondering what small things we can do to make our own Halloween. JB LOVES the dressing up and spends the whole year planning and plotting their costumes. It’s still not clear whether they’ve made up their minds but I need to start planning way ahead of anything we might do.
Maybe a Zoom costume playdate with their friends? With spooky themed dinner foods? I found a few ideas to mull over: mummy dogs which make me laugh, spider deviled eggs for which I need a good food substitute for the spiders because I hate olives, mummy loaf, a baked brie spider.
It shouldn’t be a carb fest though. Maybe I’ll fashion orange and green spiders from carrots and celery somehow.
What are y’all planning for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas if you observe them?
Challenges this week: ruff. It feels like every single time we get our feet under ourselves, making some new normal and making the best of what we have facing us, the kaleidoscope shifts again and we’re scrambling to make it work. Again. This is exhausting.
Seamus has been struggling again with incontinence AND a need to wake up between 3-5 am. Sometimes he needs to be let out, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he needs to be let out twice in an hour or he won’t stop pacing. Thanks to a chat with a friend, we finally figured out this wasn’t just arthritis or old dog insomnia or bad timing with too much water intake. We have a course of treatment finally and thankfully it seems to be helping. It’s been so rough for him and we haven’t gotten a good night of sleep for weeks.
I have a lot of sadness and grief this week about the shitshow this year has been in so many ways. Dear friends are going through sickness and grieving, we’re doing our best to show up for them in remote and safe ways. We’re going through a lot of changes mostly unsupported and alone outside of our small family unit. I’m learning to accept that I do need emotional support and cannot just be a robot and what a terrible time to be discovering THAT tidbit about being human. Couldn’t I just robot my way through this pandemic at least? (No, I cannot, it makes my physical pain exponentially worse.)
3. A friend sent us a small box of pastries as a pre-thank you for helping them with some manual labor. I was tolerating those carbs ok so I really enjoyed the unexpected treat with our breakfast for a few mornings.
4. We finally got some clean air!
:: Was your air breathable this week?