November 28, 2022
Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 3, Day 248: What a freakin’ day.
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.
Anyway, all the work, still!
Pine Ridge / Lakota giving Daily update
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.
Pine Ridge / Lakota giving: Daily update
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.
Pine Ridge / Lakota giving: Daily update
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.
Pine Ridge / Lakota giving: Daily update
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.
Pine Ridge / Lakota giving: Daily update
I shopped in earnest today! Updates to come. Brain tired.
:: I hope you had a good holiday weekend if you celebrate US holidays and a good weekend if you don’t.
November 21, 2022
Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.
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.
(more…)
November 14, 2022
Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.
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.
*****
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.
(more…)
November 7, 2022
Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 3, Day 227: Halloween! 🎃
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.
*****
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.
(more…)
October 31, 2022
Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 3, Day 220: Drat! Sera’s collar broke this morning. I’m not prepared to expend the brainpower I’ll need for picking a replacement because it’s never as easy as buying the same one we had – they never have the same one in stock when we need a replacement.
Update, yes, that took two flipping hours searching for anything like what we have now and then researching what IS available. Especially miffed because I tried PetSmart, Petco, Chewy, Target and no one had anything we needed in stock, so I ended up at Amazon after all. A, I could have saved myself a lot of time but B, I would have been annoyed at myself for not checking elsewhere first. Grump. In any case, I know it’s not realistic to swear them off entirely. My rule is we make an honest effort to buy elsewhere first, which we did.
My insides were out of sorts all day. Maybe they were set off by the (really, very minor in the grand scheme of things) routine disturbance of Sera’s collar, maybe I was already on the verge of it anyway. Couldn’t put a name to it however hard I tried, just felt like an emotionally shaken carbonated drink: agitated, anxious, unsettled, set to explode. I offered the inner simmering beast a stack of graham crackers to no avail.
Perhaps it’s the emotional kickback from being sick for two weeks and then having fun this weekend for the price of being physically wiped out. Perhaps it’s the temporary shake up at work that’ll settle down by next week. Perhaps it’s anticipating the launch of the Lakota Thanksgiving fundraising this week and hoping so hard for a positive response, and also anticipating/hoping for really good sales so we can buy the Lakota families so many needed things. Perhaps it’s anticipating another shoe will drop because when it’s been even a little quiet, I worry. Or perhaps my need to have all our holiday gifts taken care of by now; they most definitely are not.
Turns out there are plenty of reasons to feel unsettled…!
Despite my sorts being all over the place, something must be trying to place for me to wonder how to fix my chicken soups gone wrong of late (smitten kitchen to the rescue?) and even experiment with matzo ball soup. Neither the time or energy is actually available for these endeavors but it says something hopeful? delusional? that the desire sparks at all.
Year 3, Day 221: I slept like a bear hibernating for winter. Waking up in the morning felt like crawling out of a deep and cozy pit entirely against my will. (more…)
October 24, 2022
Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 3, Day 213: I’m still hacking up a lung but a little less than yesterday so here’s to small improvements. But I discovered a painful bump, pimple?, on my shoulder and how am I still getting these in my forties? Is there no peace to be had??
Over the weekend I sent out a message to our giving group that helps me support folks on the Pine Ridge reservation year-round. I floated the idea of making a big purchase, taking advantage of the upcoming Black Friday sales, to send bulk basic goods to the reservation. Supporting indigenous people for Thanksgiving feels like the right way to observe that federal holiday.
Some folks were able to contribute quickly (yay!) and I started hatching shopping lists. One thing led to another, namely prices adding up really fast, and I started brainstorming ways to make the impossible happen.
Two boxes of diapers in each size (12 total) comes to $350 pretax. Just 10 packages of good socks comes to $280. I wanted to send a variety of supplies: socks, gloves, diapers, warm sweaters and vests, OTC meds, shampoo and conditioner, soap, lotion, and holiday gifts for kids (sports balls, puzzles, books). COVID is still a huge problem, the coordinator confirmed, and they can’t afford even the basic OTC meds.
Once again with the money we have, it’s variety vs volume. I hate having to prioritize.
I hate it so much I asked a couple of my high profile friends if they’re willing / able to help boost a bigger effort this year. Part of me secretly hopes it’ll be a massive success and we’ll be able to help so many families in one fell swoop. Part of me wonders if I’m biting off more than I can chew. Another part of me is pretty sure that I am. But I have a plan! It just needs money and good bargain prices!
It’s a good thing we had daycare today, we normally don’t on Mondays, because I got all my work done and set up some structure for a big fundraising effort this year.
FYI: you’re witnessing a real time obsessive spiral. I now have 50 links for dry goods and pantry foods that I’d like to buy to outfit X number of families and the cost most definitely leapfrogged the current budget by several leaps and bounds. One can dream, though, yes?
I also cooked dinner! Pork roast, rice, and bok choy. And Smol Acrobat even ate their dinner like a halfway civilized human! Except for the part after they calmly set their own bowl aside and demanded my plate. They wanted to eat off a plate like everyone else.
All in all, not a bad day despite how I felt physically. (more…)
October 18, 2022
Continuing on from part 1:
There’s the journey and planning…
This quote from the Fioneer’s interview with 1500Days has stuck with me. This isn’t a new idea, Carl’s been saying this ever since he retired: “FIRE won’t necessarily make you happy, and this was the case for me. My life was better, but not happier.” I bear this in mind as I navigate this whole thing.
I’m not counting on FIRE to make me happy. I have quite a few ways to enjoy my life already. Mainly I’m looking to remove obstacles. Removing fuel from the stress fire to use a very CA analogy. Getting back that 20/30/40+ hours a week and headspace to let me focus on the things I will continue to juggle: our money, our kids, hobbies we don’t spend time on now.
I’m thinking of Jim’s 2016 thoughts on how to transition to early retirement, and how he might have done things differently, and his updated thoughts on the matter in 2021 since he has a second chance at this retirement thing. The main point he raises is one that Tanja’s been talking about for years as well: retire TO something, not just FROM work. I think a lot about the things Tanja writes about – like our holiday plans that will be $$$ if they happen but I’m choosing them anyway because I don’t want to forget and let life pass us by. That’s something I’m very likely to do. I’m also contemplating how a friend was even busier for the 30 years of her retirement doing passion projects than she was during her intense career and I would be surprised if we didn’t have a similar shift to working hard on things that we care about, whether or not it pays money.
Like my friend, I doubt any of our efforts would yield income, that doesn’t happen to be a norm in the kinds of things we are interested in. It’s far more likely that we’ll be spending our own money to support others.
Maggie asked me if I really honestly think we won’t make any money after retirement, and really honestly? I thought we’d work a lot on things we care about and we won’t make money from it. But also really honestly, I’ll want to make money. Not enough to support a whole lifestyle maybe but enough to matter.
Originally this post wasn’t about retirement
I started a draft three years to ask: Where do you find your fun and fulfillment? I was thinking about how some days, it’s hard for me to remember what I did for fun when I could do almost anything, health and money permitting. The kids are holding me back! But so is work. So is my decrepit body that can’t remember the vitality of youth.
Anyway, chatting to Nicole and Maggie about what one might do in retirement made me think more about what I envision long term. Medium term, I have 17 more years of children in the house so if we retire anytime between now and 17 years from now, we still have at least one kid at home. Hawaii Plan gives me an idea of what the latter half of that range might look like as older kids need us less.
In that event, I have days, nay weeks, of short term things to do. My dream is that upon retiring, I’d sleep for a week. Then I’d go to the library, fill a backpack and tote bag full of books, and read for a week. I’d stop only for meals, walking the dog, bathing and getting into bed to read some more. Then sleep for another week. Maybe two.
Then I’d have some sort of routine of reading, binging shows, thinking and writing, grooming and walking the dog, growing more than just one container of food plants, learning to cook more of the delicious foods we get at restaurants now for lack of time (soondobu!). Of course I’d continue my giving projects and maybe pick up something activism related that my body can handle. I’d love to pick up more frugal activities, couponing and maybe even a spot of eBay reselling a la Katy Wolk-Stanley. I enjoy a bit of that but not when I’m extra pressed for time and energy. I’d love a first year something like Purple’s first year of retirement.
PiC wants to do more cooking, outdoor sports, and hiking. Things we already do in a very small measure.
Once the kids are largely out of the daily routine picture, maybe we’d need more. He doesn’t think he needs much more, and if he gets to go outdoors every day and then come home and cook dinner, I guess he’d be right for a while.
The things I loved 25 years ago: eating good food (SO MANY CARBS), playing with dogs and horses, horseback riding, running, hiking, doing other competitive sports, grooming dogs, reading, reading, reading, the occasional glass of wine or beer or a good cocktail.
What I love now: cooking and baking for my family, petting and playing with our dogs (I rarely see horses anymore, so sad), reading through my painsomnia. Writing this blog. Connecting virtually with friends. Some travel when that was possible. Sometimes I still love eating. My relationship with food isn’t the love affair it once was.
My world narrowed so long ago because of my health. Without a pandemic in play, I’m pretty happy!
I once said that there’s a ton more I’d like to take up but can’t for lack of time and money. I wish I’d written them all down at the time I said that just so I could review and see if I still want to plan for them. But since they’re lost to the hazy mists of memory, I’m pondering what kinds of projects would be meaningful.
There are lots of activities I want to do:
– Learn how to sew and knit, just for my own enjoyment and convenience. I’m unlikely to ever do anything serious with it. That’s something I’m practicing being ok with – not needing to justify a hobby as being useful before I’m allowed to enjoy it.
– There’s a chance taking up calligraphy OR just learning to write with fountain pens might make its way into my life. That also would be just for fun.
– Get in good enough shape to get back on a horse regularly.
– Traveling for food experiences. Surely someday in the years ahead, it’ll be safe enough to travel and enjoy delicious food in other countries. I want to hang out with Maggie and Donna in Alaska. I want to go back to Thailand. We must visit Japan and Indonesia for the first time. I have friends in DC I haven’t seen since JB was born. Friends in Pennsylvania we haven’t hung out with since before the pandemic. Friends in Arizona and Louisiana and Tennessee and and and. There are actually a surprising number of places and people I would like to see.
– Learn three languages. Or five. I’ve got a smattering of Spanish and Italian. I’d love to be conversant in both, plus Portuguese (I hear Portugal is expat friendly if it ever comes to that), Japanese, and Mandarin. Also if I ever reach fluency, that opens up even more new worlds of books to read.
These are all just for fun things. I’m divided on how to assess my level of fulfillment with this thinking exercise because I have a worrying habit of equating self worth with productivity. It’s time to flex the muscles of doing things for enjoyment and not only because they can bring in income.
If I keep working at it, I should be able to pinpoint what I want to do for true fulfillment and not just to scratch my codependency (need to rescue or caretake) itch. Fostering kids and dogs may fall into that category but until I know I can handle it in a healthy way, it’ll have to stay at the bottom of the list.
It occurs to me that I should include, for the sake of remembering that it’s part of my list, volunteering with the local CASA chapter if I can handle that in a healthy way. That remains to be seen. In that category, I also want to try to volunteer to be an adult literacy tutor (not sure if I would be any good at this) and volunteer to help refugees settling in the States.
:: What would your plans for retirement or semi-retirement look like?