October 6, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 161: I was looking forward to this day all month. A specific form of stress was scheduled for this month and if I was lucky it was going to be over today. I was determined to be Zen Zen Zen. I probably 70% succeeded? But then layered on top of that, I had one key person on my team out for the first two weeks of the month. When they returned, a second key person on my team was out for a week. All unexpected and unavoidable and exhausting as I covered for all of them. Then I got the news that my friend is in her final days, and then the news that a relative is undergoing a scary surgery soon. Naturally, after making it through the very hard goodbye visit this weekend, walking away from our friend knowing we won’t see her again, SmolAc fell to the latest terrible viral incursion. Their throat was a misery all weekend, complete with fevers and a (thankfully mild) cough. They got no sleep, so I got no sleep. All of which to say: this month has been an absolute ball (draining, long and late nights, a whole lot of fuss, a whole lot of muss). This day that I was looking forward to was a haze of the shakes and flu like symptoms (which happen when I am so exhausted I’m about to slide into PEM). It’s lovely trying to work out whether I feel sick because I’m sick or because I’m so damn tired my body thinks it’s sick. I AM glad that the original form of stress has ended at least. And a few of the other stressors we will be recovering from if I can make it back to near baseline this week. Just. Dang. What a way to open the week. It felt like a week in a day.
Year 6, Day 162: Past me, all the kudos. The kids have turned on the grape acetaminophen flavor and SmolAc’s visible distress every dosing time for that instead of the ibuprofen pushed me over the edge. I planned to run out and buy them name brand Tylenol for the cherry flavor and for them to try the apple flavor. Anything but the now-hated grape. Except when I went on the hunt for some small round bandaids (I still can’t find them), I discovered past me had already anticipated this and loaded up on cherry flavor Tylenol. THANKS, ME.
Also why must my children be opposites in all the most unhelpful ways? JB only ever sustained giant lacerations, 2 inches and bigger. I have loads of giant bandaids and gauze and medical tape. SmolAc? TINIEST injuries requiring the smallest of bandaids. Which I never have because why would we bandage that? Oh, right, because they’ll forget and scratch, rip it open again and come crying to me with the most tragic of faces. I made do with a tiny square of gauze and a square of medical tape. Never let it said I could be defeated in first aid by tiny wounds and scratches.
Year 6, Day 163: My therapist warned me that I’m so burned out that I’m about to break, so I had to set a boundary for someone directly asking me for help that I can’t give. I’m not knowledgeable in that area they need help in and their case is complex. Even knowing that and even recognizing the burnout I didn’t quite recognize how bad it was, and I still felt guilty for not being able to help.
And oh, right, that’s my depression expressed as rage, missed that wee detail. I mean, I’m only sick of everyone and everything all the time, that’s not normal? No, not really. Normal is being light to medium exasperated by everyone and everything. Not so fed up with them that I want to bite off everyone’s heads for existing at me.
I had a really dark suicidal-type thought this morning quickly followed by, well THAT was dark. And then awwww MAN. Therapist was right. I am so tired and burnt out that the “logical” reply to a self-care comment was a suicidal type thought.
Late tonight I realized there was another contributing factor: missing my nightly handful of meds, which include my antidepressant, last night. Welp. Can’t live well without those. Quite literally. Other signs of burnout: I entirely overlooked a payday happened. I haven’t missed checking and recording a payday more than twice in the past 20 years. I love paydays for the money and the endorphins. To be so overwhelmed I miss a major source of endorphins, not great. But I had my meds, I vented with a friend, SmolAc is slowly recovering.
Year 6, Day 164: We’re a month away from being done with Project from Hell #1 (and starting Project from Hell #2 and #3), so that’s kind of a good thing. We are still in the thick of it now but there will be an end in sight.
Total subject change: Five and ten years ago, I was served Apple & Eve Orange tangerine juice after the kids were born and I’ve been wishing to get my mitts on it ever since.
Costco online seemed to have the brand in a large assorted flavors case, but said it wasn’t available at our local stores or online for shipping, so I couldn’t see which flavors it held. That sent me down the rabbitiest of rabbitholes. I gave up after 40 minutes of trying every possible combination of zip codes and locations and settled for buying a variety available at the local store: fruit punch, strawberry watermelon and mixed berry.
Year 6, Day 165: Here’s me ruing the speaking too soon. The Project from Hell #1 is really doing a number on me today. By that I mean the incompetent fools who were responsible for key parts of this did a terrible job of setting it up and the most basic parts of it still don’t work. I’ve got something like 50 hours of work needed for it and 2-4 hours to do it in since I also don’t get to weasel out of all my other responsibilities.
A deep sigh.
And today’s fraught for deeply heavy reasons. My friend @isobelcarr has passed. 💔 It’s hard to grasp that I won’t share dog pictures or stories or political rants with her anymore. It all happened so fast. I exchanged messages with her just two months ago asking whether I could bring her anything for her then-current round of treatment. She’d been fighting cancer so hard for so long and I hoped this latest was just a blip. That we’d have her another 50 years. But we lost her this week and so many who loved her are bereft.
September 29, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 154: I felt that! 3 am quake in the Bay Area. I woke up to the rumble as it started up and counted the seconds waiting for it to either escalate or stop. As it wound down I guessed: 4 near us, or a 6 far away. I waited another 15-20 minutes to see if it would be followed up by a bigger one but thankfully that was it. 4s don’t concern me. 6 does. But more than that, I feel like the fact we’re well overdue for another Big One is unsettling. I keep whispering to the fault under us: do as many 4s as you need to relieve your stresses, don’t let it all build up til you liquidate the whole Peninsula!
There’s a life lesson in there somewhere.
I’m trying to get through this week’s PEM, brought on by doing a social thing on Sunday morning. I knew, when I was leaving the house, that I wasn’t actually up to the task but not going wasn’t fair to the kids who had been really looking forward to it. So I pushed through and, of course, crashed. Thankfully laying down until the evening was possible and repaired just enough of the damage for me to function minimally again. Really bad crashes make me pass out entirely so this was something like a 7 on the PEMs Richter scale.
Year 6, Day 155: I’m feeling the complexity of being in a relatively good financial position after so many years of fighting to find and build stability. It’s still not good enough to just do what we want, but tis good enough to help other people. I think about how people struggle with understanding when they have “enough” and how much that’s going to be me. Comparatively, we’ve made it. We can pay our bills, we can weather a lean year without income. We can’t live off our investments now. They would take us through a rough micro patch: illness, layoff, big bills. They would not cover us in a macro-level rough patch: fascism takes down the stock markets, major stock market crash for other reasons, a second Great Depression brought on by high unemployment and high prices due to tariffs. I won’t feel comfortable walking away from employment until we’re so well off that it’d take a severe series of events to make us go back but what that number is, well…! It keeps going up with everything going on here. These ruminations come more often as I see more and more need online, and as I have harder days at the job where I wish myself well out of the rat race. Who knew I’d be such a reformed workaholic that retirement savings simply cannot build up fast enough?
A complaint I wasn’t expecting to hear today from SmolAc: I ran out of green beans! (To eat, even).
Year 6, Day 156: I would very much like to know what’s wrong with dream me. I keep having dreams where I’m running to do errands or go somewhere whether on foot or driving and halfway there I find that I’m barefoot. Then inevitably I have to go into a public restroom which is absolutely filthy and gross. Why can I never remember to put on a pair of shoes in my dreams??
I am more disturbed by this dream than the non-zero number of times I’ve almost left the house without pants on. Says something about my priorities, possibly.
Year 6, Day 157: Work life has advanced to a new level of intense this week. We’re testing some new systems and the designers of those systems are giant arrogant blowhards, so my exasperation levels are at an all time high. That’s saying something considering the past 2.5 years which have sucked. I’ve worked with many a dev in the past, and even got on quite well with the ones who notoriously shunned everyone else around them and refused to commit to any deadlines, except for me. I don’t think I’ve ever met a software developer as arrogant as this fool who declares that the systems will absolutely work perfectly as intended by the go-live date. That’s not how this works.
There is always always something that goes wrong or some edge case or some damned bit of code that worked fine in production that zigzags in live and hocks up hairballs. It’s absolutely the nature of the business so you plan to mitigate those issues. I’m super grateful to my co-leads who have taken the hits in taking most of these meetings with these unmitigated jackasses because I’ll be honest. No amount of professionalism would have survived an encounter where I had to sit through hearing some of that bullshit first hand. Just hearing it secondhand had me wanting to Force choke him. (Anecdotally, it’s always a him.) I idly wonder if my new bosses already know me well enough to keep away the worst of the jackasses until I absolutely must cross paths with them because my patience is now rather famously limited and my co-leads are happy to shine up my reputation as being a hardass. Whatever the reason, I’m taking many many deep breaths to get through this and next week. If we can get through the end of November, when I’ll move on to my next massive migration project, maybe I won’t be on the verge of exploding like a volcano when an incompetent turkey gobbles aloud.
Year 6, Day 158: My hip pain was at an 8 today, which is: grinding my teeth involuntarily, and nauseous with the pain. I resorted to taking every pain medication I had – one of every variety, not all of the meds in total – in a giant handful and it feels almost miraculous that it did take the edge off. Sometimes not even that helps.
At daycare pickup I ran into a frazzled mom desperately trying to load her very angry 2 year old into their car. The kiddo was going full “stiff as a board can’t shove me into the car or a car seat” mode and she looked EXHAUSTED. I took a chance and made eye contact and said really sympathetically, gosh it is SO HARD to get into the car at the end of the day, isn’t it? It’s Friday, what are we thinking, asking this of you? And the kid was bewildered enough by this strange lady using her dog voice at them that they slid right down to the ground and stopped fighting. The mom and I chatted for a while, further confusing the kid who decided to just lean on her legs, and at some point she asked if I was PiC’s wife? Then the bewilderment was mine, have …we…met?? Go figure I was going to be mortified to be talking to someone I thought was a stranger only to find out I knew them. Thankfully no, she just recognized Smol Acrobat in the car behind me. We gassed up the littlest one a little and asked if they could show us how they got in their car? In that way of 2 year olds, tantrum forgotten, they happily scaled the SUV to their car seat. We cheered and clapped and waved goodbye. The mom mouthed THANK YOU!!! as she shut the door, finally.
It was really nice to help a mom who could have been me ten years ago, just beaten down and asking WHAT IS HAPPENING as the life of a toddler unfolds around me.
September 22, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 147: I’ve been chewing on that idea that “when people don’t show up for you the way that you show up for them, it feels like rejection”. The phrasing is off but I think that’s the gist of it. I’ve been thinking of it since in the context of my right-wing family and the news of late. I’ve showed up for them in a lot of my usual ways but it feels like in a lot of ways, I don’t matter to them. These days, I kind of take their politics personally. That they could see the heartless evil messages out of Fox News and the patronizing bullshot spouted by their kids’ in-laws, and not see how dehumanizing it all is, like that jackass saying that the mentally ill unhoused should be killed, I feel like, but for a ton of really hard work AND luck, I could be that person they’re referring to. And if I didn’t have PiC, if I were on my own and hit a rough patch of illness and unemployment, I’d really be on my own. As usual, I’m the only safety net I have. I could disappear and none of them would even notice.
Now, I don’t actually know if that’s completely accurate. For that part of the family I’m pretty sure it is, but in the bigger scheme of things, I have at least a couple people who would care enough to lend me a hand. If I could bring myself to ask. Not much and not for long, and not to the lengths I have gone for family, but there are a couple. But by and large, the ones who do care are vastly outnumbered by the ones who don’t. That feels not great.
Don’t really know what to do with this thought process but just nod and say that’s the way it is? I guess? I don’t know if the smarter thing is to spend less time and energy caring about other people.
Year 6, Day 148: On the bright side ~woo~ we got our flu and COVID vax! I pre-dosed with cetizirine at 1 pm and sat down for the jabs at 330. 6 hours post, my injection site was sore but well within tolerable bounds. I moved my arm a lot and then committed to a full arms exercise session with weights and elastic bands. I can’t remember what time post-vax I’d normally crash though so I can’t quite tell if this is all fine still or not. I started feeling the full body yuck around 9 hours post-vax. Not terrible, enough to know I don’t feel good.
Now this bit is weird: the tech giving the shot told us we’d have to come back in 8 weeks for a booster. That guidance this applies to both Moderna and Pfizer 2025-26 formulations and is for adults and kids. I haven’t found a single thing to support that statement. The closest thing I found was the AAP recommendation that kids under 18 get two shots 8 weeks apart if they are severely immunocompromised. That’s nothing like what I was told. Weird. I’ve been trying to figure out who we talk to about this to either stem the misinformation or to confirm we really do have to do this dance again in 2 months. Given a choice, I want to be nowhere near the hospital mid-November.
Year 6, Day 149: I’ve been lightly hoarding necessary supplements and prescription meds so that we have a relatively decent volume stored against issues with medications thanks to the tariffs or other Trump fuckery. I just went through and filled my medication daily pill holders and was able to fill five weeks out. Not everything is fully stocked, I’ve got to pick up a few more supplements, but five weeks is a decent chunk of time in which to replenish stores.
It feels like a meditative exercise in some ways. There’s no doubt a bit of this is my hypervigilance coming out to play, but it’s not delusional. We had those formula shortages early into COVID, ADHD meds have been difficult to get for months, another diabetes related med is now artificially understocked. With the tariff nonsense, I can’t imagine that other meds won’t be impacted in some way. There’s no telling when or if my specific necessary meds will be impacted but it will deeply impact my quality of life if they are. I keep thinking of the post-Shift world where currently commonplace meds like ibuprofen become precious.
Year 6, Day 150: Coming out of my second night of waking up in enough pain to wake me from sleep, and also sweating ruthlessly because there’s nothing that pairs as nicely with muscle and bone aches as being drenched in sweat, was moderately miserable. But! This feels like a corner turned on the post-vax yucks because this morning wasn’t nearly as bad as yesterday. Hats off to the cetizirine pretreatment and the ibuprofen for getting me through a semi-rocky two days. I was mentally calling it flu and COVID-proofing until I worried about jinxing us. Because that’s how viruses work, obviously 😆 Then I decided it’s not jinxing because if you childproof stuff it’s reasonably safe but a sufficiently determined toddler could still bypass certain safety measures and it was still (probably) better than not doing it at all. We never childproofed the power outlets when JB was at the peak danger age for that stuff because their danger-seeking was directed in other directions.
Year 6, Day 151: Ah, yes, note to self. The first night after vaccines, SmolAc always has weird unsettled sleep punctuated by bursts of loud sleep-protesting. Wakes me up, every time.
Mosquitoes have invaded the house. 😡Hisssss of being bitten many times while I slept. Evil disease vectors! I can’t find where they might be laying their eggs, we’re usually good about not keeping standing water anywhere, but they could easily have snuck in from outside. On the recommendation of more knowledgeable friends, I’ve treated the drains with bleach in case they’re somehow managing to hole up in there. Cross your fingers they’re not being more sneaky and hiding elsewhere?
September 15, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 140: New goal: be independently wealthy so that I can help as many people as I can reach and so I can quit my job and go work with animals all day. I was vetting some pet boarding facilities, initial research for one of the two problems I have to solve before I can adopt again, and saw a job listing which made me go YES I WANT TO DO THAT. Sigh. I miss being around and working with animals all day or night. Having an office dog when we have dogs at home is great, but it’s not the same. I don’t know if my body could actually handle that physical commitment anymore but if I was wealthy then I could do it part time! Win win!
Year 6, Day 141: Did I fail down the jetpens rabbithole? Yes I did. Did I doubt I’d want enough stuff to meet the $35 minimum? Yep. Did I find ten things to buy? Also yep. A mix of wants and gifts. I sent all the links to myself to ruminate on for a few days because I’m pretty sure I told myself I wasn’t allowed to buy more pens. But look, so cute! A Uni-ball One P mini gel pen! Panda donut washi! Kitty washi!
This is one of my current forms of meditation, I don’t use it often as it is habit forming, and it works like magic.
Year 6, Day 142: Walking back to the house, I realized I feel human again!? For the first time in weeks. Not good, but physically back to the usual baseline of aches, pains, and tired which is tolerable. What a huge relief.
This means I can tolerate a 5 minute shower again. I can now walk for 10 minutes without being bed bound for 4 hours. I can work and take JB where they need to go without collapsing like my skin only contains a mass of jellyfish! These things don’t seem like much to a normal person but they are everything when they’re gone.
I’m very slowly adding back very low-rep sets of my normal exercises. They’re still pretty low key to begin with and I have missed being able to do them.
Year 6, Day 143: Wow, are my children WHINY. SmolAc has started their transitional kindergarten program at daycare and one exciting (/s) addition to their routine is they now have take-home (optional) homework. It is terrible. SmolAc just spontaneously forgot how to write some of their letters that they’ve been writing just fine for months and so we had to practice it over and over with a letters book where they could trace and then write. I helped guide their hand a few times, then had them retrace and re-write. It was like pulling teeth. They whined and pouted and stomped and tried to quit over and over and over. Good grief, child, it’s ONE letter. Lots of deep breaths until I couldn’t take it any longer and I sent them to have a snack.
This was published back in July when I was too busy to read the news and now it’s looming on the horizon: “In around 90 days, millions of Americans will learn about out-of-pocket cost hikes of more than 75 percent on average.” Open enrollment is around the corner in October so we’ll see how much of that giant percentage increase is going to impact us. This and losing the charitable deductions for itemizers are the two expected blows to our 2026 operation budget that I know of so far. It feels like I’m always adjusting for yet another hit to our finances, these days.
Year 6, Day 144: Two blows of bad news at once. A friend from blogging and Twitter for well over a decade has been fighting cancer and it’s now terminal. They aren’t that much older than me, and it is heartbreaking to imagine my world without them. This isn’t fair or ok or right. Another loved one is losing their dad to a serious illness, and it’s heartbreaking that this whole section of the family is having to absorb another loss so soon.
Several friends have come down with COVID or the flu, and JB’s been congested all day, so this cold/flu/COVID season is just roaring in. We just got the news that Kaiser will be stocking the COVID vaccine starting the 15th though, so with the Joker at HHS trying to do us out of vaccines with his ACIP meeting later this coming week, PiC and I are strategizing how we can get our vax ASAP without doing it on the same day. We’re grateful that it’ll be available! And we’d really appreciate if we could count on it being available for everyone and for more than 5 business days rather than being subject to the whims of the multitudes of anti-vaxxers.
September 8, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 133: A while ago, I asked Darcy at I Want Guac if she would share what she knows about international banking and currency, and I’m delighted that she obliged. Her post led me to Wanderer’s Norbert’s Gambit which was new to me, and also Wanderer’s banking operational security post which is very relevant to my interests.
I’m still absorbing a lot of this information to see what we can incorporate in our emergency planning (for one of the worst case scenarios: if we have to flee this country), and our day to day online and banking security practices. Those are two very different scenarios. In the former, I have to figure out how we’d survive if we couldn’t get access to our money in US banking institutions because fascism; versus functioning as normal day to day.
The comments put Fidelity on my list for possible international ATM-friendly cards and accounts. I hadn’t thought of them before, but a couple details sounded appealing so I need to do more research to confirm these will be useful to us:
Your Fidelity Cash Management account will automatically be reimbursed for all ATM fees charged by other institutions while using the Fidelity® Debit Card at any ATM displaying the Visa®, Plus®, or Star® logos. The reimbursement will be credited to the account the same day the ATM fee is debited. Fidelity does not charge foreign transaction fees; however, if you choose to pay a foreign debit card transaction in US dollars, your transaction may be processed at a rate different than market exchange.
Year 6, Day 134: Corporeality was such a mistake.We’re now on Day 11 of this Fucking Flare.
Is it just me or are the Amazon First Reads Historical Fiction selections ALWAYS WW1 and WW2? I’ve been skipping most of their free book selections because there’s only so much WW1/2 set fiction I can take. But I now need to decide if we cancel Prime entirely. We’d been splitting the cost with a few other people for years, and they’re taking that sharing ability away October 1st, so I have to decide if we cut them loose entirely and give up access to Prime Video which has been one of my main (Leverage Redemption!) reasons for continuing the sharing arrangement. We have been using them less and less for shipping reasons. Our primary shipping use case is that sometimes there’s literally no one else who will ship to the reservations and when people need food and babies need diapers, you get that to them any way you can.
Year 6, Day 135: TWO bits of good news today. After 12 days I might finally be turning a corner on the CFS part of my flare. We may be moving into the “is just excruciating fibro pain” part. Yay! I’d sound a little sarcastic there but honestly just being in terrible pain, while not fun, is more manageable than pain and overwhelming fatigue. Fingers crossed.
And one crow friend was alerting on the neighbor’s roof today, and came over to ours for a snack so I ran to oblige. Usually I only put down two treats at a time in case they don’t spot me distributing them. This time I was pretty sure they were waiting so I put out a handful. They were flying solo so they took a few minutes to eat some before stuffing their beak with the rest and flew away. It was fun to watch.
Year 6, Day 136: Labubu dolls: I don’t get it. At least, even though the Beanie baby craze was also irrational, they were cute.
The start of a new school year is a lot. Back to school night. Fundraisers start up. Parent teacher conferences are at the end of the month. The big fundraiser culmination celebration event is this month. Start of the monthly PTA events (which JB wants to attend and PiC often feels obligated to volunteer at). PTA meetings that come with the side of guilt I can’t seem to shake about not doing more than paying for membership, attending meetings virtually and attending some of the community events. I absolutely don’t have time or energy for more. And yet the stupid guilt always bites at me. It’s worse in the first meeting because they’re asking for volunteers for committees. They do put on a lot of events that the kids love and it’s meaningful. But there’s just no wiggle room I can eke out and if I could, this wouldn’t be top of my priority list. Maybe I’ll shake it by the time SmolAc is through elementary school.
Year 6, Day 137: This year is the band year for the local districts. All kids are invited to join the band and learn an instrument this school year. The lessons are free, you have to supply the instrument. The teachers strongly encourage all the kids to try it. It’s a great way to dip a toe into music! I haven’t been able to figure out how to fit in music lessons in JB’s schedule so this is good. This is also Yet Another Thing.
I talked to JB very seriously about how challenging it’ll be at first and once they’re committed, they aren’t allowed to quit just because it’s hard sometimes. The work will pay off. It’ll get easier only with practice. We were able to borrow an instrument from a friend, and had to spend $100 on the other required supplies. Otherwise we would have had to rent one for $30-40/month.
Sadly, their nemesis, a kid I’m heartily sick of, has declared their intentions to join too because they’re going to “master the flute just like their sibling” and good God can we not catch a flipping break from this obnoxious brat? They’re in JB’s class, they’re assigned to JB’s small group in PE, now they’re joining band, they’re constantly picking fights and stirring shit and lying about JB to other kids to turn them against JB. Half my imaginary empire for this kid to move to another state.
I keep reminding myself that JB knows they’re loved. They have dozens of friends their age and trusted adults all over the country. World, even. They have a buddy in the UK who comes to visit them once or twice a year! They have multiple activities and friends at every one. It’s the very rare library visit (PiC takes them almost every weekend) that they don’t run into a friend or three to play with entirely unplanned. A couple jerkface kids, annoying though they are, shouldn’t make or break their school year. They are thoroughly over the kid, I certainly am, but they’re still enjoying life and school and they’re not miserable over school. But I would still give half that empire for that kid, the source of so much annoyance for everyone, to disappear. They’re that classic mean kid who everyone placates in hopes of delaying the target on their backs a little longer. Ugh. Anyway as long as it’s petty stupid shit, we try to focus on all the ways we can make life and school positive in spite of the misery-maker.
PiC asks me if I think the parents of the crappy kids know their kids suck. I say, no, the kids are both themselves and the products of their parents in varying degrees. Unless the parents are garbage, they probably think their kid is the normal one.
September 1, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 126: I’m tetchy today. We went to a family gathering on Saturday. It was good fun for all of us! We very much needed that catch up. But it wiped me out completely. I spent most of Sunday laid up. No batch cooking for me. 🙁 Today was less bad but only less in the sense that I can sit upright but otherwise am kinda useless. Walking is a tall order, doing anything that requires standing is right out. I probably need another 2-3 days to recover, probably, and I resent that so much.
I took it very easy on Saturday, sitting down most of the time, mostly indoors shaded from the sun and wind. All I did was parent when the kids needed me, and talk to some friends. PiC did the bulk of the SmolAc herding. Yet, by the evening, it felt like I’d been plugged into the wall and every muscle was separately being electrocuted. I also resent how much this reminds me that I can’t do stamina-requiring things like go to protests. My friends did this weekend, and I’m grateful for their activism on these days when both the personal and world outlooks are so bleak.
Alas, no paws or claws today, either. That would have cheered me up immensely.
Year 6, Day 127: I always spend a little time reading current job listings, keeping feelers out the market for opportunities, in an attempt to stay informed enough that I don’t feel completely flat-footed when my time runs out at this job. It’s been a depressing exercise, the past 18 months of listings at best generate an “ugh. meh. bleck.” There was only one that looked remotely interesting last year, an Assistant Director in an advocacy organization helping incarcerated people reintegrate into society. I spotted one today that I am definitely not qualified for, running a conservation organization, but the employer piqued my interest. I don’t yearn to start yet another job in the workplace but this must be my gut telling me that if I must change jobs, only jobs that are about doing good in the world are going to fit the bill. That’s new.
It’s a bit of a luxury criteria considering the number of people out of work now, and at the payscale I’d want/need, so I should adjust my attitude and hold on to this job which at least does some measure of good with a reasonable moral compass and isn’t outright evil.
Year 6, Day 128: Every time I try to deal with Comcast for an outage credit, they try to upsell me on their mobile service. Why on earth would I want a year of terrible free mobile service from them when they can’t even give us reliable high-speed internet? I had 3 outages in a single week alone! Honestly.
I’m still very much on the cusp of this flare up so I’m still having to be careful to coddle my body what seems like a ridiculous amount. But after less than ten minutes standing, my whole body starts initiating a shutdown sequence so my opinions don’t matter here. 😒
By spacing out the prep for this really simple recipe for Vietnamese Pork-Stuffed Fried Tofu In Tomato Sauce, skipping stuffing the tofu entirely, and sitting down for 95% of the prep, I did manage to cook a whole new dish. It’s pretty good! It’s now meatballs and tofu in sauce but still good. That’s kind of nice.
Year 6, Day 129: Normally, I only read ebooks on my Kindle and Kobo apps on my phone so I’ve never replaced my old timey Kindle since it was too annoying to read on a device that didn’t have a light of its own. This isn’t usually an issue, except when I buy a Humble Bundle and then have to download every file, text them to my phone, download them there and THEN upload to the Kobo app. What a PAIN. It’s not something I do often, maybe once a year, but woof is it a timesink.
The app interface is also frustrating. We can’t do bulk actions that I’ve been able to find (adding multiple books to collections), and I hate that series of books are organized alphabetically instead of by volume and that I have no way to change that within my collections. So when I have a 20 book series, I have to open the info for every single one to hunt down the next book in the series.
I wonder if it’s even worth submitting feedback. I’m going to try.
Year 6, Day 130: I’m on Day 6 or 7 of this damn flare and am reflecting on how this is awful and yet it’s lucky that the way they present, I can force myself to do some of the things I need to do. It’s miserable and I pay a very steep price for forcing it, but I can force the issue. So crucial things like work and school pick up can usually happen even if my insides will then threaten to be my outsides if I don’t collapse in short order. But cooking is going too far, and sometimes showering is, too, even a quick ten minutes version. “Lucky”.
On the COVID front we personally know four people, one in July and three in August, who have caught it and it’s hard not to feel like it’s hemming us in on all sides psychologically with the usual late summer surge, and the latest bullshit restrictions on vaccines taking away one major layer of protection (we still mask regularly). Our main supplier of masks these days, Vogmask, is seeing lower demand which is affecting their inventory so that’s a bit worrying. I spent a big chunk of cash recently replenishing our supply now that SmolAc and I are wearing them, too.
(Yes, there are likely better masks but fitwise these are consistent good fits for our size and shape faces, and the kids can easily carry and put them on and take them off. And they get the super colorful ones. Those factors all add up to wearing them happily and for long periods of time as needed instead of avoiding them or taking them off repeatedly.)
I used to wear my flomask most regularly so I have tons of those filters. I stopped because the bottom elastic was overstretched. They recently started stocking those, so I can fix that, and wearing that more. Our healthcare provider is still supplying us with home tests, so I’m collecting those and tucking some into holiday gifts for folks who don’t have ready access.
August 25, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 119: The parking enforcement company that a local town has contracted always take all the best parking spots on the business lots. Irony?
Do you ever get twitchy needing a specific kind of sensory input? I had to stop wearing my rings for several months or more. My fingers keep randomly swelling up and then at some point, I noticed the gems were loose from my heirloom rings, thankfully before I actually lost them. (Heirloom? The word looks wrong now.) I splurged on a couple of rings from Peculiarity Shop because I really liked the look of them but also! Genius crafters that they are, the rings are adjustable! So I can wear them on good and bad hand days and that’s great because I didn’t realize til I put them on that my hands had been *needing* the feel of rings. Weird!
Happy paw-and-claw: TWO dog encounters today! My dog friends, I haven’t seen them most of the summer and I missed them so! <3
Year 6, Day 120: I don’t know why I was semi-resistant to trying out this online math tutor for JB last year but I’m not now. We are doing some trial (online) lessons with a tutor who PiC’s coworker recommended. They had worked with the coworker’s kid who is two years ahead of JB. Please cross your fingers that they make sense to JB! JB has some math anxiety from last year, long division and fractions were hard for many kids and the teachers struggled with a wide swath of them just not getting it. We can trial other tutors on this platform if this one doesn’t work out but I think(?) we’ll need to give them at least 4-6 sessions to see if they are able to present the material in a way that JB can absorb. Maybe it shouldn’t take that long to pick a good fit? I don’t know, tutors didn’t help me much but that might be because we had extremely limited options. If you have any math tutor recommendations, I’d be glad to hear them!
Happy paw-and-claw: Two more dog encounters today! May all my dog friends keep coming by.
Year 6, Day 121: Getting back into the school schedule swing of things is a slow process. Getting irritated at everyone in my family before 8 am? Like lightning. It’s nice when they all leave the house and leave me alone in peace.
We tried a new very local Mediterranean place in hopes that it would be as good as the one that’s 20 miles out of town. They had a couple things that were new to me and so good: beyti (seasoned beef & lamb wrapped in flatbread topped w/sauce) and muhammara (fire roasted red pepper with nuts, bread crumbs, spices & pomegranate molasses). But everything else was just ok. I couldn’t put my finger on anything wrong, we both agreed it was just the original did everything better somehow. PiC’s theory is that it’s the seasoning.
Speaking of disappointing foods, the Auntie Anne’s cinnamon rolls in a can are totally disappointing. The ease can’t be beat: once I get over my fear of the can exploding in my face, you just plop the rolls into the cookie sheet and bake. But the dough is always dry and the icing is only so-so. I suppose that’s what we get for the price and convenience.
Happy paw-and-claw: The crow buddies are back in town (our neighborhood)! Unfortunately for them, they were accompanied by the ravens. The crows and I have an understanding. I click to them when I’m putting out treats for them and when I’m a safe distance away, they come fill their beaks. The ravens are so fearless (and with those beaks, why wouldn’t they be?) they hop over for treats the moment I put them down. They don’t wait for me to get more than 5 steps away. They’re still cautious, if I turned around they’d back up, but otherwise they’re coming in for pick-up. They swiped everything before the crows were willing to come down from on high, so I retreated into the house to let them get comfortable and then came out with a handful of peanuts. One crow managed to sneak in there and snag a couple. It was fun sharing this with SmolAc who’d never seen me working on my long distance corvid friendships. JB has, and is mildly amused by it.
Year 6, Day 122: Grmph. I’ve had a dry cough occasionally for the past week and change and pronounced fatigue all week. SmolAc has had a runny nose for the past three days. No other symptoms. It feels like cold and flu season is gently threatening us but it might just be back to school season kicking our asses, generally. Today, I couldn’t shake a headache all day and now I’m really worried that some virus has gotten hold of my system.
… turns out it did. I don’t know what got me but a friend on here admonished me to go rest and they were right. I had to go to bed for a few hours voluntarily or risk crashing and burning. Since that came with a risk of actual crashing when I drove to JB’s after school activities, I acceded to their greater wisdom. Good thing they know me better than I know me.
Year 6, Day 123: Happy paw-and-claw: Two crows came by the house. One of them is slightly bedraggled and very fearful and nervous. That doesn’t quite match my usual pair of crows from last year that were a touch bolder than all the others. They visited a little more often and even did fly-bys to get my attention, but maybe there’s a connection between the bedragglement and the fear. I hope it’s ok. I put out a few peanuts to see if they’d investigate and the bigger bolder crow happily chomped them up. Smaller crow was sad. I was sad for smaller crow. I put down a big handful of peanuts and retreated to the house so they could feast in peace.