Year 3, Day 267: If I ever have to justify why I insist on prepping for things like travel or holidays six months ahead, this is why. How I feel today and will likely feel all week is why. A viral steamroller has come through and absolutely crushed me at one of the worst possible times. December is a terrible month for my immune system and it’s inevitable that something will derail any plans to prepare at the last minute.
I’d had a bit of a sore throat last week but after so many sleepless nights, naturally it was fatigue. Saturday night I was starting to feel iffy. Sunday morning confirmed it. I had caught something. I’d had more than a few hours of sleep and still felt like I’d been completely flattened by morning. I feel like that on and off normally but combined with actual sleep and a sore throat, it’s most likely something viral. Sigh.
So I’m very glad that A) PiC was amazing and ran every single errand on Saturday, including the Costco run where he B) found a few premade foods so we can get through the week with minimal cooking from scratch. We liked their confusing but tasty ravioli lasagna, so we are going to do that more often.
Year 3, Day 268: I’m doing my best to think and wish it away but it’s possible I caught Smol’s HMF disease. I’ve got a variety of symptoms and some fit and some might fit or might be unrelated. Please be unrelated.
There was a new episode of Leverage Redemption today! YEE! It helped me through the tired and sick brain fog hump.
I recently discovered that a friend had escaped a DV/stalker situation with very few belongings and I put out the Bat signal on Twitter. I had to be discreet and protect their privacy but we raised enough to get them a winter coat and boots. Someone else is donating some gently used clothes as well. Depending on cash flow, we’ll see what else we can get together. I remember our family sheltering a cousin, when I was about 6?, from an abusive stalker ex and I hate that this is still such a problem 30+ years later. Another good friend recommended these resources. I hope you never need it but I’m sharing them here: Stalking Resource Center, SafetyNet, and NNEDV.
As a brain relaxer, I browsed things on sale at Kate Spade. There’s dopamine from looking at pretty things, and sale prices, without the danger of buying anything because I’m not paying even 60% off Kate Spade prices today. $80 after discounts on a wallet? Not today, darlin.
I do like that little nylon backpack. I have a use for something like that for day trips and errands without kids, it’s handy to have something hands free but that’s something to think about later.
Year 3, Day 269: Today’s arguably the worst day of this illness so far. My ability to remember faces and names and similar facts was just gone. That’s not super critical to my work but it’s important enough that I cancelled a meeting to conserve the few remaining functioning brain cells for the critical stuff. While angrily griping to myself mid morning that I still wasn’t better, I caught myself. I’d done nothing to help me get better. I’ve been popping pain meds around the clock for days to ignore the sore throat and other symptoms, and doing the bare minimum at work and at parenting, but that’s not actually resting. Oops. I moved myself to work from bed, since I still had to get through some things, and took a lot more breaks.
I wrote JB’s teacher a thank you for doing a unit on a variety of fall and winter holidays, instead of Christmassing it up, because that is important to us. Finished up my last handwritten letter of the year to my senior friend and put that in the mail. We’re not sending Christmas / family cards again this year. I enjoy getting them but have simply not been up to the task of getting any together for us. Maybe in the spring I’ll throw together a tiny 4 year look back. One picture from each year we’ve missed since 2020. That’s a lot of ground to cover.
Minor food victory: I helped Smol eat a little bit of salad with dressing, and then they chose to eat a little bit more on their own. They can be a very reluctant eater most of the time, and reject veggies a lot, so these tiny wins feel big.
Year 3, Day 270: We’re having a really rough time with JB this week in particular but this situation has been developing for some time. They’re staying up later and later, I can hear them singing some nights, and waking up very late the next morning which almost always means they’re dragging their feet and having to be told to get through a routine they already know. At the start of the school year, they were getting up on time, on their own, and getting completely ready without a word from us.
They tell me that they’re really tired in the morning, which I can see and am unsurprised by, because there are a lot of nights they’re up singing to themselves late into the night. They claim a dry throat is why they’re getting up in the middle of the night too. Gee, correlation?
Parenting remains frustrating.
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Seeing Scalzi’s offer to write a short story to get Locus Magazine to their fundraising goal made me think, gosh, it’s too bad I don’t have any talent or skill that I can offer as incentive when we do these giving things that come up every so often or…every year. I’m good at a few things that are useful but nothing at all useful to offer up as a prize of sorts.
Year 3, Day 271: I’m admiring stamps again. I still want the elephant stamps. Also the women cryptologist stamps. The red fox ones look very cute but I’m not sure I have a real need for 40¢ stamps. Charles M Schulz ones are cute. Next year they’re coming out with the Tomie daPaola and John Lewis stamps.
I’m not a philatelist, of course, I just love using neat stamps when I send people letters and cards.
Smol Acrobat slept hard today, sleeping in until 8:30. It’s been a rough week for them too, I think. But happily they were so enthused about breakfast, I didn’t have to fight with them at all. They asked for two helpings of eggs, ate them all!, half a banana, and a whole waffle. Amazing.
My headache is still a constant companion, as is the iffy throat and congestion.
Year 3, Day 260: Smol’s third round of fever started last night, coinciding perfectly with my fatigue deepening to the point I didn’t even hear them wake and cry at 4 am. PiC took care of them, but I usually hear and respond to all middle of the night wakings. Getting up felt like a forced swim up through multiple levels of sediment. Heavy and yucky and my ears kept popping.
Working felt the same way today, too. Just a lot of yuck and struggle to get the basics squared away. Pre-holiday hangover?
My arm is still sore from my flu shot which reminds me that yay I finally got my flu shot! It’s been hard to muster any energy or time. No new symptoms from the shot, I just continue to be generally headachy, muscle achy, fatigued and have an on again off again sore throat. Maybe, maybe if I can pull off another night of sleep or ten, I’ll feel better? It doesn’t help that I’m also anticipating with great stress and no joy the upcoming time with family that involves a lot of logistics and problem solving and no help whatsoever.
Year 3, Day 261: Ah yes one of the few days I have meetings scheduled would be following a horrible up constantly with a very sad Smol Acrobat night. It’s not clear what was wrong. They were sad and couldn’t get comfortable, but I didn’t know why. Their fever was down and I had administered Tylenol just for their general discomfort but they just couldn’t deal. They napped at daycare, thankfully, twice even, but were terribly sad at lunch and refused to eat. This was a puzzle and teachers tried to feed them to no avail. According to the doctor, though, this is actually their third virus in the past 2.5 weeks, so we have to take them for another round of COVID and flu tests. Also, it turns out there’s a chance they were exposed to hand foot mouth disease last week, we’re just finding out now. Mega sigh.
For my part, I was 90% zombie today. I’m just so tired. And maybe this contributed to my feeling slightly inadequate. One of my dear friends (#1) was a key player in planning a major inauguration and gala, and she did a magnificent job. I simply cannot imagine wrapping my head around doing anything that immense or that highly visible. Our mutual dear friend (#2, much older than both of us) selected #1 over me to be the executor of her will in this year’s rewrite and #1 is also the designated party planner. #2 doesn’t want a funeral, she wants a big party. Don’t get me wrong, I am not gunning for more jobs, but I admit to a small pang of “well gosh, what am I good for then?” As you know, if I don’t have a use, a job to do, then I don’t know what the point of me is in a friendship.
It’s possible I’ll write the obituary, I wrote her late spouse’s, but that feels like small potatoes. Then again, I’m not sure how I’ll even do that, my heart is in my throat whenever I think about writing it. And yet I feel like I need to prepare raw material now before it’s too late. In any case, I agree with #2s choice of #1 for an executor. It’s practical, her kids are quite a bit older than ours and she’s more intimately familiar with #1’s tastes and preferences because she’s very particular about tastes herself. I’m not that person. I’m a nuts and bolts, behind the scenes person. Pure functionality over form, entirely about getting a job done with zero thought for performance and flair. I’m no good at the latter, I’m uncomfortable with fanfare. I 0% wanted to be the center of attention at my own wedding and only got through that by ignoring people if I wasn’t face to face with them. The choice truly does make sense to me. I just want to be more of service in the event of #2’s passing. If nothing else, to numb the grief, I suppose.
Year 3, Day 262: I really don’t know what’s what with COVID anymore. PiC’s employer has noted higher community transmission rates and moved their company guidance accordingly. But it’s only “masks recommended and limited in person meetings”. Meanwhile everywhere I look, hardly anyone is masked. Half the people at the orthodontist were unmasked, and they actually require masking. One lady had the nerve to tell her kid to REMOVE their mask when they stepped inside. I guess that’s “require” since they didn’t enforce it or chastise it unmasked people.
Smol’s still sick and in a lot of pain. They couldn’t eat all day and PiC and I were racking our brains on how to help them. I’m exhausted from the past two nights of all nighters with them. I had to set aside time to just lay down and rest during the day because it doesn’t look like this will resolve quickly, it’s very probably hand foot mouth disease. They were exposed last week and we only got the notification yesterday about the exposure. Not that we could have done anything about it last week, either.
After I had the brilliant notion of picking up Jamba Juice for them, and it worked! They slurped down a huge amount and were smiling for the first time at a meal in days! They opened their mouth wide saying ah! ah! ah! They suddenly felt good enough to let me take a good look inside and sure enough: herpangina. Sigh. They’re miserable and it’s so sad.
Year 3, Day 263: Not for the first time since I started using them, I’m grateful someone mentioned setting phone alarms for things like appointments. It’s been a huge help for picking up JB from school. I get very deep into my focused work day to day and really need that sharp jerk to pull my brain out of the depths on time.
Especially on days like today, my third day after a sleepless night, and my brain is barely just creaking along, at least I don’t have to also worry that I’ll forget someone somewhere. That’s happened a couple of times, before the alarms, and I know they’re fine but I would just as soon skip that guilt (strongly linked to how I felt when I was constantly left at school), thank you very much.
I thought about cooking with that chicken I defrosted on Monday and haven’t touched. Since I started work at 530, I had some time by the afternoon. But the two and a half brain cells I had left piped up and said maybe don’t wipe yourself out the rest of the way cooking when there are still classes to drive to? Good job, tiny voice.
Year 3, Day 264: Mulling over how, since starting daycare, I’ve gotten a few days a week with chunks of uninterrupted time to work which is REALLY good. But the tradeoff is germs germs germs omg germs. Thankfully so far not COVID, but every other kind of viral fever-inducing thing out there has come home with them. They’re on Virus number 6 in 3 months and this one is absolutely brutal. I thought patting them down 3-5 times a night was bad (and it was). This go-round, they’re absolutely hysterical with discomfort throughout the night, night after night.
Today is an at-home day for Smol, who is still sad and sick, which reminds me just how physically exhausting it is to be ON constantly with an active toddler when I’m super tired, plus have work to do (which I of course cannot even think about while I’m on Smol minding duty). Feels like all the options are bad right now.
Big sighs.
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I noticed that my lifelong friend had big smile wrinkles that weren’t there before this year, in pictures she texted me. Then I noticed that I have them. We’re prematurely aging! The long running joke is that this sort of thing doesn’t usually show up on our (Asian) faces for a few more years, and then generally it happens all at once. I guess the pandemic kick-started it.
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We donated again to the Child and Family Relief Round 2: Our goal is to provide 500 food packages to families in need in different provinces of Afghanistan. Aseel’s Emergency food Package Emergency Food Package 1 (92 USD per package) feeds a family of 6-8 members for five weeks.
Year 3, Day 253: *creak* go my bones and *creak* goes my brain. Having gotten up with Smol several times overnight, I’d logged maybe three hours of sleep by the time it was time to get up for the day. This mystery illness is the pits.
After seeing everyone off, I made the call that laying down first, rather than last after I’d done the majority of my work and felt like a herd of elephants had trampled me, was the wiser choice. It was but I didn’t feel refreshed after a 45 minute liedown during which my back started complaining. What’s with our bodies getting hurt from laying down?? Honestly.
Work itself was happily uneventful. I ironed out more details for holiday stuff and when my brain stalled out, hopped over to organizing the administrative details of the Lakota orders. Several are pending or starting to ship.
I have several orders of my own pending. Some things are for packing, some things are for wrapping. All the things I bought already have a place to go: closet, or wrapped gift pile, but the combination of several boxes of hand me downs and shipped goodies overwhelmed my brain.
One last package arriving tonight hit my limit of patience with the amount of STUFF in the office which triggered a cleaning cascade. I can’t work surrounded by mess. An hour of sorting and cleaning mostly returned us to pre holiday equilibrium mess. That’s not good. I need to do a bit more decluttering or I’m going to be a real mental mess going into the end of the year. (more…)
PiC had an 8 am meeting so morning runs were on me again. After a thankfully slightly less rough night with Smol Acrobat’s and their friend, THE FEVER, we were off to the races. We had to drop off JB, drop off Smol Acrobat in their new classroom, drop off thank you cakes to their own classroom, drop off a return at the UPS store, run to the butcher for our Thanksgiving main entree, and run to Trader Joe’s for other groceries. We made it back before lunch but only just.
Cousin saved my bacon doing the last grocery run that I didn’t have the time or energy for. She’s saved my bacon for the past few days, doing the menu planning, cooking and helping with the kids. This tells me that our lives would be MARKEDLY better if we had a full adult available to cover the cooking and all related to cooking activities. Even with that, we still feel stretched to our limits with all the other things we’re managing.
I think our original ratio of 2-4 adults to one kid remains ideal. I don’t know what we’d do if it was flipped the other way and I don’t want to find out.
Incoming money! Kohl’s Cash! I’ll need to use this within a specific timeframe, starting on Saturday. I can do that.
This takes a little pressure off. I’ve been feeling the need to make the most of our last few hundred in the “right” way. The most perfect last orders, as if there is such a thing. The knowledge that I’m not going to be able to keep fundraising like we did on Twitter weighs so heavily on me right now. It’s possible that by this time next year we’ll have something new and effective in place, but we might not. Maybe I’ll have to do less, which would be sad. We don’t know what a year from now will look like.
So this moment from Leverage:Redemption really spoke to my soul in this moment in time.
Year 3, Day 249: I suspect “what a day” is going to be the theme going forward until January. I wish it weren’t highly likely.
I FINALLY cracked down (and found the time thanks to Cousin’s help) to place two orders for things we need, and returned two of the three things that I have to return. The last one is getting packaged today but I am loathe to attempt going back to the UPS store which was chaotic the last time I was there. I also started a new card for elder friend who I haven’t written to in a few weeks.
Smol is getting more symptomatic, runny nose and coughing, and I’m starting to really fade from lack of sleep. They woke up 4 times last night whimpering and crying.
I have to recuse myself from the Holiday Okini this year for the sake of sanity but if anyone is interested in buying gifts for kids who won’t otherwise get any, they’re adding families to the list now.
Year 3, Day 250: One more day til Thanksgiving! I was hoping to get loads of work done before today and make it a light one but my shoulders are up by my ears with how much I didn’t make it to my self declared finish line.
This was, in part, because we had a dear friend over for lunch and we all enjoyed her company for many hours. It was worth it, we don’t see her often, and we treasure the time we have with her.
I’m reconciling orders and shipments and tracking numbers and reimbursements as orders ship and arrive at their destination. It’s not, by itself, a lot of work but it is a ton of details to stay on top of and it’s in addition to everything else. I expect tomorrow and Friday to be my big shopping days, depending on how cooking goes.
Year 3, Day 251: We had a plan. Things did not go accordingly. We wanted a 3 pm sit-down and started cooking an hour earlier than initially plotted, but the numerous derailings by two children (one of whom is still a bit sick and therefore quite cranky) and two dogs, of all sorts, was too much. They were cute but so chaotic.
We managed to get everything on the table by 530 but I mismanaged the side dishes and they were served cold. That was disappointing given we’d cooked, baked, and roasted all day but it was all tasty and cooked well. Oh but my turkey was uncharacteristically a bit too salty. Not at all dry and excellent with cranberry sauce but still. Imperfect. I was overzealous when brining. I heavily salted it on Tuesday, when I normally brine just one day in advance, and so didn’t account for the effect of the extra time. Next time, less salt or less time.
We usually spend part of dinner talking about the real history of the holiday and the mistreatment of indigenous people but we’ve talked about that all month. I let JB help me pick out blankets to buy for our Lakota families instead. Knowing the truth is good but doing something to help is more good.
Yay more money came in! Just in time for me to do some budget allocations and increase my order of women’s gloves. JB and I discussed our next order, and they suggested that we now focus on bedding. I agreed so we started shopping and talking through how to balance price and quality. We don’t want to pay very little for poor quality. We can’t pay a lot for luxury quality. We need to pay a moderate amount for good to excellent quality that will last. It’s not kind to send people junk.
Year 3, Day 252: A much needed day off. We tended to the kids, had a couple more cooking projects, and thanks to Smol Acrobat napping very heavily, I had my first afternoon liedown in two weeks.
Sadly, they woke up with a new fever. Big sigh. I don’t know what they’ve got. They’ve all had their flu vaccines, but this has got staying power. I’m doing my best to rest between night wakings so I don’t fall victim to this thing too.
PiC took advantage of the quiet to run several errands that’ll help us this coming week and we’re slowly starting to mentally regroup in the aftermath of the holiday. This is a very brief respite. It starts again on Monday in earnest, with appointments for COVID testing, dentist appointments and my massage appointment and planning office events (remote only!). We only have two more weeks before we have to be completely ready for the end of the year which is going to feel, in some ways, like a tsunami.
Year 3, Day 241: An unfortunate confluence of events for this Monday making it an Extremely Monday Monday. PiC had both overlapping meetings and a time sensitive morning errand to run so all before 9:30 I had to: get two boxes of donations out the door for a pickup, get 2 boxes of donations for shipping out the door. Drop off both kids. Drop off a bag for a friend, and drop off a return shipment at the UPS store. It was all a bit of a scramble, made more challenging by Smol Acrobat’s inexplicable (to me, anyway, I’m sure it made sense to them somehow) angry tantrum as I wrassled them out of the stroller and into the car seat.
It’s super satisfying getting five boxes of stuff out of my house but it was also REALLY hard to focus again when I finally got back to my desk.
We’ve got a heck of a week in front of us so this feels like an inauspicious start, especially when we ended the day with some real parent-child headbutting. I hate that. Not much makes me feel like a bigger failure than letting my kid get under my skin.
I’m sure that feeling is exacerbated by this deep pain flaring up on my right side. It started in my hand at 7 am and by 7 pm, my whole right arm and shoulder were aching.
Year 3, Day 234: I’m trying to put together a backup plan in case Twitter goes belly up. I’ve come to rely on it as the gathering place for many friends and acquaintances and the place where neat information comes up or hilarious interactions cross my path that I otherwise wouldn’t ever have known. I have plenty of one on one connections but there’s something unique about the (highly curated) experience of Twitter as a round the clock no commitment social gathering place that’s been really helpful in easing my health-induced isolation.
It’s my digital pub, and it may well be going away. It’s sad. The process of curating a list so that spoiled brat of a billionaire throwing tantrums and threatening to make it impossible to see your own feed unless you pay means I keep running across old fallow accounts. I hate that because it also makes me sad and I don’t know why when I clearly haven’t talked to the person behind that account in 2, 4, 7 years. It’s a thing that always gets to me: reading comments on my blog from years past, people who touched my life for just a moment and disappeared.
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Prices just keep going up at the grocery store and I’m sort of insulated from seeing it because PiC continues to do the majority of our grocery shopping but I pay the bills and see the totals there adding up faster and faster. Making our next to last batch of pasta carbonara was a real shocker. I looked up our favorite bacon (Zingerman’s) and it’s now $19/lb!!! I normally buy a bunch when it’s half that price and freeze it to use throughout the year. We may not get our next year’s batch at these prices.
After a trunk or treat, a scavenger hunt playdate, and a school parade, my body was so done this morning that I woke up too late to take JB to school and my brain didn’t even understand that until PiC and JB were almost out the door. Oops 😬 😵💫
We still had today’s trick or treating so I cranked that heating pad up as high as it could go as if it were a magic carpet that could transport me out of the Peninsula of Pain I currently live in. It helped take the edge off but only just.
I had to consciously decide to slack off at work: only catch up on the weekend’s work backlog and not care that I didn’t clear my inbox or do every single task that could possibly be done. It’s Monday. I’m tired enough for it to be Friday but it’s only Monday.
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Pine Ridge / Lakota giving update
I’m extremely online on Twitter, and here, but that’s it. I don’t Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or anything else. So the news out of Twitter with the Awful Musk Gland takeover is depressing. It’s my water cooler, my direct connection to the world on terms that I can handle, and I hate that it might all go away soon because he’s a horrible person who is intent on transforming Twitter in bewildering ways likely to render it unusable (like reinstating accounts full of hate). That’s also why I’ll keep a set of the Lakota families updates here as well as the Twitter thread I started on the weekend. If Twitter falls apart, I don’t want to lose our progress.
Day 6 spend: $0
Day 6 balance: $1318
Year 3, Day 228: We’re wrecked from Halloween festivities, and we only did half of the parties and carnivals JB had an invitation to! It was a load of fun but I’m D-O-N-E. Phewwwww.
Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.