August 21, 2015
This is a bit of a brain dump.
It’s Friday and on the one hand, holy crap, what have I gotten done this week?? I made it through 4 week days with unusual probably fibro-related brain fog and 4 bouts of my glucose levels bottoming out leaving me shaky, dizzy, and almost gasping for breath. Got some work done. Didn’t get any of my real writing done.
On the other hand, THANK GOODNESS it’s Friday.
I am grateful beyond measure for Fridays right now. This level of relief’s normally the sign to quit my job and move on, most people TGIF because work is so very onerous, but that’s not precisely my problem. I am at odds with my job, it’s true, but it’s manageable even when I take on too much. Usually I just power – or muddle – through but it takes more of a toll some weeks than others. This week more than last. Frazzled is not usually my thing and it’s usually a sign that something is twirling off the axis.
It’s the short break from being Juggler and Timekeeper Extraordinaire that I crave. There’s a sense, during the week, that every single minute has to be used wisely. During naps, between naps, I have to be Getting Everything Done. That go-go-go feeling is draining.
On the weekend, it’s ok to clock out of Mom duty and hand the Adorable Creeper over for a break. We can take turns, it’s not just a hamster wheel of work / child / housework / child / work / child / housework.
We didn’t do much on our weekends, in the pre-LB era, except when we did too much. I like that our weekends are a little more even keeled now. I like that I actually want to take small outings occasionally. It makes me feel human again. We went to the Ferry Building and you all know how much I love doing that. We might even go so far as to take the family to a little farm and meet farm animals. For FUN.
My days, since last month, are a little less hectic than before but they remain nonstop. LB needs a third nap now and that’s great. I get quite a lot done during naps and late into the evening but I haven’t made the time to work on my extracurricular projects as much as I ought to. I need to do more writing. A LOT more writing. I need to test some business ideas and determine my next steps after this job is over.
I do have time but it happens in bits and pieces so it’s not useful for tackling the bigger chunks of either project. The trick will be to figure out how to smush those bits together to make a usable large chunk, like the ends of soap. Until then, my anti-stress mechanism is, as always, planning so that’s where my little time chunks go. I research our next trip, our next investment, our next credit card.
Under the good news column, PiC insisted that I take some real me time, and I caved. So I’ll do that.
Also, I stretched out of my comfort zone agreeing to do an interview on Jessica’s podcast. It won’t come out for a while yet so now I have far too much time to think about how silly I sounded, or how much I rambled, or any number of things.
I blinked and it’s near the end of August. Did anyone see that coming? Before you know it, we’ll be into Fall. And into my birthmonth! I might take a leaf from a good friend’s book and celebrate all month. Low key, but all month, in little ways. Because why not?
Summer is winding down, are you planning any last hurrahs before fall rolls in?
July 3, 2015
We’re in between childcare helpers, still, so these days my schedule is a really weird non-routine routine. It’s not terrible, but it’s a really incredibly full day. I still log at least 8 hours of work, not continuously, but thank goodness my work allows this kind of flexibility.
If we’re really lucky, LB actually stays asleep after we put hir down at least til 8 hours later. Someday, I dream of this someday, maybe ze will even sleep 10 or 12 hours. In the meantime, every weekday is looking something like this:
Between 4-4:30am: get up, change diaper, feed, PiC gets up and tries to get hir back down to sleep, while I collapse in bed.
Between 7-7:30am: If I’m lucky, ze did got to sleep and is still sleeping which means I have time to brush my teeth and get to work. If not, ze probably got me up again and PiC is too beat so it’s my turn to play with hir for a couple hours til the next nap because ze is up for good.
Between 8-9am: Zip through some work before PiC leaves for the day. PiC makes me breakfast, I absentmindedly scarf that down with one hand, the other hand still working. LB lands in my lap to “help” for a while. If ze’s cooperative, ze will play with toys. If less so, ze will attempt to take over typing.
10-12pm: Try to get LB down for a nap. Wash dishes, wash bottles. Work like the wind while ze is sleeping.
If I get a 3rd hour of nap, I can do some household stuff: Pay bills, update tax filing info for 2014, get the laundry going, put food in the crockpot, follow up on weird things with billers.
1-3:30pm: feeding/diapering, play with a very awake Wiggle Worm. Read books, dangle toys. Take hir and Seamus out for a walk. Let hir “crawl” on the floor while I catch any easy to answer emails.
3:30-4pm: feeding, convince The Angry Inchworm to take another nap if ze is tired. Sometimes it’s a 30-45 minute third nap, sometimes this is the second nap of the day and lasts an hour or two. Seamus will start angling for his medications because after he takes them, he gets dinner. Whip through any dishes, knock out some more work.
Between 5:30-6:30 pm: LB will be up and at it again so I’m all hirs. Feeding, diapering, and playing again. Feed Seamus. PiC gets home at some point and takes over for an hour of daddy+baby time. Sometimes they go out for a walk with Seamus.
7 pm: I start gathering a change of clothes and we’re blasting some tunes for hir bath. We’ve got this down to a science, now. Ze was terrified by the big bathtub but with music, toys, and a super efficient routine, ze’s cool with it now.
7:30-8 pm: If we’re in good odor with the baby gods, ze is finishing up the bedtime bottle and nodding off. If not, ze demands another bottle and is wide awake.
9 pm: Adult people dinner. Talk through anything we need to discuss, if we still have brainpower. Sometimes PiC can get in a workout before dinner. Sometimes we BOTH get to take showers. Sometimes I’m still catching up on work. Other times, I’m trying to arrange travel or figure out what’s up with our commitments.
11 pm: Remember that thing called sleep and stumble to bed wondering why the hell we didn’t do this earlier.
February 24, 2015
My baseline for “tolerable pain” has inched up yet again. At least half my body is always aching, on fire, swollen, immobilized or whatever fresh indignity has dropped in for a visit.
But I’m living on pain meds just to stay at that baseline. When “not screaming in excruciating pain” is your new “I’m OK”, you start questioning life / choices.
Getting up to 4 hours of sleep per 24 hours, in half and one hour increments feels amazing.
I’m forcing myself to drink as much water as I can hold. Since having LB, and pain shooting up as dramatically as a game winning ball getting spiked, I’m struggling to eat and drink normally. I even made up a little ditty about water to remind myself but I’ve already forgotten the song.
My fingers were dislocated this week and apparently this isn’t surprising to my doctor. Hmm. They just keep on popping out everyday now. Worry when they turn blue, she says. Well….. OK…. I will.
I’ve been alternating between a headache or nausea for days. What’s up with that?
I’m really impatient with my slow healing. Like I needed a whole other heap of pain to make life interesting.
I’m even more impatient with my brain fog. It’s frustrating that I can’t comprehend the numbers in a brief accounting sheet, that half the emails I read have to be saved for later rereading. And re-rereading.
Seamus needs room to play and I hate that we don’t have a yard for him. Expensive way to be able to toss a ball for the dog but it makes me want a house and respectable yard for him. Most days I’m shuffling by inches so PiC does all the walks and more than we’d like are more functional walks than fun. We’d like to do better by him. And since I can’t take him to the park… A park should come to us. In the form of a house and yard.
On the other hand, while I wouldn’t want to buy a house in our current area, I can appreciate the convenience of the location. We have a fair number of grocery stores and food choices, and a decent array of transit. We’re not a good place to visit but it’s a decent starting point to get to somewhere interesting if you know what I mean.
January 9, 2015
“You don’t tell me ‘No’, you say ‘No’ to your parents!”
When I was nine, a landlady was prescribing the weirdest diet to fix whatever she thought was wrong with me. The details I remember involved raw eggs, sounded terrible, and possibly was meant to plump me up but I distinctly remember politely hearing her out and then answering truthfully when she wound up the unsolicited diatribe with the demand: so are you going to do it?
“No.”
She nearly burst with indignation! How DARE a scrawny child say she wasn’t going to follow her sage (and totally bogus homeopathic) advice?
She followed up with a lecture on how totally inappropriate it was for me to decline to follow the instructions and how out of line it was (I stopped listening around here to ponder on why someone who was basically a stranger would tell a little kid to defy her parents or feel the right to dispense “medical knowledge” and tell her off for trusting her parents better than a stranger in matters of…. Anything.)
I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong when I looked at Mom’s bemused face. After all, there was nothing wrong in saying No. I hadn’t called the lady a quack or been rude to her. But that was also the first time I’d ever said no to an adult. I had no idea it was going to become such a habit 🙂
In my teens, a dear friend’s dad told me something about parenting that really stuck: one of the hardest moments for kids growing up is to realize that their parents are actually human too, they make mistakes. They’re not gifted with omniscience just because they’re parents. And the moment you, as a child, realize that, your relationship evolves… And that can be painful.
It’s so true.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
In our culture, “Respect your elders” is one of the highest tenets.
To this day I still can’t call teachers who have become good friends by their first names. It’ll always be “Mr./Mrs./Ms. [X].”
Learning to manage my relationships with adults, including parents and parental fugues, required a great deal of learning to reason, to accept that we will disagree about things –fundamental life changing things– and still love and respect those who are important and disagree with me while walking my own path without their help or approval.
Heck, to this day, my dad still doesn’t know what I do for a living. It’s just completely outside the realm of normalcy in our family. They understand going into medicine (as a doctor or a nurse), engineering, and accounting. And some entrepreneurial things. But I’m the weirdo who went the Humanities route and then even further off the tracks into the professional world. I might as well be a lawyer, it’d make more sense to them 😉
By and large, I always respected my parents and what they taught me based on their life experiences.
As a first generation kid, though, there were more than a few situations in which it would have been a big mistake to follow their guidance. Oftentimes, it seemed to just be down to personality or cultural differences, and it wasn’t always clear who was right, but it was valuable learning when to trust my own instincts and seek other sources of wisdom.
When it came to functioning in the American workplace, the generational gap was the overriding factor and it became most obvious that there were ropes I’d have to learn on my own.
This isn’t a revelation, every new generation has to learn to manage adulthood without training wheels on, but even after years of standing on my own, some lessons still take time to learn. These were my two biggest though:
Don’t stand up for yourself
Then: Dad was always the pacifist in the family, the salve after Mom’s fire, and I had trouble relating to him. I was always frustrated by his lack of action or motivation to act when someone wronged him. When an employee embezzled and basically put them out of business, he felt that it was better to turn the other cheek or “take the high road”. So instead of possibly recouping some of that lost money and staying afloat, my parents had to declare bankruptcy and shut down what had been their livelihood for years. That embezzler screwed us and our long time employees over and I was outraged that Dad refused to fight.
Now: I realize I didn’t know enough about their recordkeeping to know if they could have made a case but it still bothers me that he didn’t fight.
Then: When my sibling was bullied at school, I’m pretty sure the advice was the same: take the high road. By the time it was my turn to get bullied .. Well let’s just say I never waited to get advice on the matter. Even as an 8 year old, I knew I wasn’t going to stand for being literally shoved around and hurt, especially since there were never any official consequences and he never got caught. When our class bully tried to throw me off a platform, he got the biggest punch in the gut I could muster. Years of fighting with my sibling had given me a pretty good right hook and I’m sure the kid, who had at least 30 lbs on me, didn’t have an inkling that was coming. He never laid a hand on me again. My reaction to unwelcome touching, with guys twice my size who would try and force themselves on me when it was clear I didn’t want someone hovering over and hugging me, remained the same throughout the years. No one ever had the temerity to repeat their aggressions after getting a sharp elbow in return but I could NOT understand why they thought it was OK to put their arms around me, uninvited and without permission. (Actually it was clear why they did it, it was a stunt to show off to their friends what they could get away with. Joke was on them, really.) Obviously, I’m not a natural hugger.
Now: Dad recently related an anecdote where he sharply told off his sister for advising my cousins to take the high road on some bullying situation, pointing out that if her grandchild was being pushed around and hurt, would she honestly advise turning the other cheek and keeping quiet?
Either he’s changed his stance or he only wouldn’t go to bat for his own. I don’t know what it was but he’s certainly never advocated standing up for yourself to me, he’s always tried to talk me out of it.
Trust your bosses: they mean well
Right.
Then: When my manipulative boss tried to give me cash for personal use, my parents guessed he was just trying to be nice. But my gut said there was something not kosher in being handed cash out of pocket by a married male boss with tendencies to hold unvoiced expectations over your head. He made it very clear he considered this money a personal gift, but it wasn’t so clear what he expected in return. He certainly wasn’t saying he wasn’t expecting anything nor that it was OK to decline, so from his position of authority over me, it was an incredibly awkward place to be in.
Now: I don’t know if trusting someone in a position of authority is a cultural thing or if it’s the habit of deferring to authority because they can make trouble for you (mine certainly did) but I don’t think I ever asked for their advice when it came to workplace dynamics ever again.
Are you a product of both a culture or generation gap? One or the other?
December 8, 2014
I love the little things…
Office supplies: awesome pens, planners+calendars. Sometimes it’s nice knowing what day it is.
Mailing supplies: labels.
Brown kraft paper: for wrapping parcels. Also, I love that word. Parcels.
Foods I’m Missing
(Obligatory disclaimers: Yes, these are the “not-recommendeds”; yes, I know I don’t have to religiously adhere to it; yes, I’m choosing to do so anyway. I love food but given my craptastic and unpredictable medical history, I’d rather avoid even minimal risk for LB where possible for some months. I’ll be grumpy but it’s still my choice. I have no judgment or opinions on what other pregnant choose or don’t choose to eat. And I reserve the right to have a wee whine about it.)
Brie.
All the runny eggs. Poached. Sunny side up. Soft boiled.
Raw fish.
Sprouts for my sandwiches.
Rare roast beef.
Steak. Medium rare.
Salami.
Prosciutto.
Corned beef.
Albacore tuna. Cooked. Raw.
Where’d you go?
My Toes: I know they’re there, and I guess basically everything else is still there too, but I can’t really see the rest of myself below the top hemisphere of this globe I call my belly.
Dexterity: As if there was much before but the toppling over like a felled tree is happening more and more often. Falling off curbs is nothing new.
At least once a day, trying to work: In the chaos of cleaning and purging, I can’t figure out where anything lives anymore.
Feels like…
I have been congested for six months straight.
I’m smuggling a globe/There’s a madly spinning rotisserie in my midsection/I’m hosting a swim meet.
There’s a squirrel nesting in my head, occasionally taking my brain off for a stroll.
We’ll never finish this organizational kick.
We may actually get a winter around here… Maybe?
It’s time to wrap All The Things. For Christmas, for birthdays, for anything! Send me your parcels, I will wrap them!
12 am to 2 am snacks
Half an orange.
Two string cheeses.
A basic quesadilla.
Cheesy toast.
Popcorn. (479 degrees may be a pretentious-ish brand but I loooove their sea salt caramel flavor)
A fried egg on toast.
Things I say a lot now…
What is going ON?
I’m going to squish the dog now. I can’t squish the dog now. I shouldn’t have squished the dog, I’m stuck.
Seamus, stop licking!
I need a quesadilla.
Geezus, Wesley! #AngelRewatch
Aggravating person, I HATE YOU.
If I were to create a new job, what would that be?
None of these are productive lists, really.
September 8, 2014
Most of my days are “those days”. Days where I’m happy if I’ve managed to work a full day and get things done, fed myself real food, taken care of the dogs, and possibly even created less mess than I cleaned up.
Most of them are “Igh, feels like crap” days.
But on occasion there are those stellar days when I didn’t just work, I didn’t just eat, I’ve also: cleared the monthly finances, done the housework, made an actual meal, and done some financial research. Even played with the dogs, not just skated by with a walk and some petting.
They’re rare and I love them all the more when they come around. Never mind that there’s a big ole letdown in the aftermath when I can’t do that much in one go again, the actual day is pretty fantastic.
Anyway, I haven’t decided yet which day this is, but PiC’s caved in our ongoing (wimpy) battle over whether to handwash or use the dishwasher because the time and energy we save not handwashing can really be better used on the 30,000 other things that need doing but for which we don’t yet have some sort of automated, robotic way to do them. So that’s kinda nice. It does mean that I more routinely horrify horrified the dog when the dishwasher runs (just Doggle, Seamus is utterly indifferent), but today’s run has had me hopeful he’s going to he would get over it as we‘re not stopped fighting over where he should go in case of Dishwasher Lives! Emergency.
This whole thing’s got me thinking about how else we can save more of our energy.
Also it’s got me thinking about how in the old country, as recently as during my childhood, food was always fresh and we weren’t connected or didn’t rely on electricity around the clock ..
BUT:
dishes and clothes were always washed by hand, using rainwater or water brought up from the river if it’d been a dry winter or especially hot summer;
meals were planned based on what was fresh at market and cooking them always included marketing once or twice a day;
electricity was only possible when you cranked the generator and sometimes not even then so bedtime was sundown;
forget actual running water for showers or toilets;
and good grief, the mosquitoes. I don’t care who you are or how tough you are, if you’re a blood bar for mosquitoes, you would hate them too.
I loved my time growing up in the rural farmstead but never will I ever romanticize that pioneering type life!
Right, so back to the point… !
I’m still mulling over whether it’s worth hiring help to lightly clean the house; we don’t typically care about super cleanliness unless people are coming over to stay.
Perhaps the solution to my inability to keep up with the shedding (by rugs and by dogs) is really just the robot vacuum? Or is cleaning that thing more trouble than it’s worth?
I’m actually back on the fence about the dishwasher – I need a better tutorial on how to load it or something.
We’ve experimented with ordering in a little bit more during the hectic times using coupons and deals. It’s absolutely a load off my brain and energy to not think about what to cook on delivery days but I’m not in love with the offerings all the time and without a deal it’s not quite cost effective enough to win me over. Still, we’re playing with the idea of scheduling delivery twice a month and economizing by buying and cooking more fresh produce regularly.
Is it weird that the only outsource candidates are cooking and cleaning? Everything else seems to require our input/judgement calls: looking for deals, managing the household finances (though I am now outsourcing our taxes because BRAIN), routine shopping and tidying, laundry, dog medical care. Of course I do enjoy doing laundry, and most of those other things, so probably that’s why it doesn’t make the list.
It’s not like we have vast sums of money to spend on this stuff, I’m just pondering aloud while I figure out how to maximize the money we do spend and the time we could use more wisely.
What would make your lives easier?
July 3, 2014
I’ve been seeing tweets about how whiners whining about the Hobby Lobby decision are stupid and then I saw: “you’re paid cash to go buy food, why can’t you also take that cash and pay for your own damn health insurance?”
And I’m even seeing PF bloggers apparently agree that these are equivalent. And it’s driving me a little crazy.
I don’t even know where to start with the ways this whole thing drives me crazy: financially, scientifically, medically, philosophically but I’m just throwing a few of them here so I can get back to work. I’ll grant this could be more polished but seriously, I need to get back to work.
1. Health insurance is vastly, VASTLY, more expensive than food. And plenty of people go without health insurance in order to pay for food. It’s a compromise that simply cannot go in the other direction. So given that you’re only paid X amount per month, one of the first things you’re going to pay for is FOOD. And shelter. And we all know that medical care is so expensive in this country that one or even two medical emergencies can bankrupt you. Food is not the same thing as healthcare.
2. You’re paid cash for your work, yes, but your health insurance is a part of your compensation package for work you do for them.
It is either offered as a competitive advantage over other employers or you’re paid more money because the smaller employers cannot afford to offer it as part of their benefits. And that’s if you’re working at a level or a place where benefits are even offered. But either way, they sure as shootin’ aren’t offering NON employees health insurance, so what the heck is with the the implication that you’re expecting free lunch? So I expect to be able to use my health insurance just like I use my cash: how-the-frak-ever way I choose.
As Greg Rucka said: Health insurance is not “free abortions” or “free contraception” or “government anything.” It is compensation. For work.
By the way, plenty of top companies ALSO tout their actual free lunch (and even dinners) as a benefit of working for them. But you have to ACTUALLY WORK FOR THEM. I should have thought that was obvious.
3. The audacity of any employer, or any layperson who is NOT my health care provider/professional, telling me what I can or cannot use in treating my medical condition because they decided it violates their personal beliefs is beyond the pale. Heck I don’t think the health care provider/professional’s personal beliefs should have any bearing on my medical care.
Where the hell do businesses get off redefining science and medicine for their employees? And why do so many people seem to think birth control is birth control is birth control and is ONLY used for birth control? Here’s a secret: It’s not.
A) One medication does NOT work just the same as any other for every single person. There’s a REASON we have to have alternatives. 20 pain medications prescribed to me do nothing but make me sicker. ONE of them makes me physically better and mentally a cracked up mess. If the 22nd medication worked for me, that’s the fricking one I’m going to use! And if an employer wanted to tell me that, well, they believe that 22nd medication is from the devil and so I should only use the 21st, I’d toast Satan while quaffing my meds and flip them off with the other hand.
That doesn’t even touch on my next point …
B) Cost. COST! I’m SOL on the point of controlling pain, I live in constant pain every day, but if there was an alternative that cost $1K a month and my employer-offered health insurance refused to cover it only because they philosophically disapproved so I should use the other cheaper and religious-belief approved options? Y’all would see Mount Vesuvius all over again.
C) Do you know what else birth control is used for? Just a few reasons it’s been prescribed to just the people I know:
To mitigate the crippling (literally crippling) effects of menstrual cycles. I’ve had more than one friend who had to be on birth control because they had passed out from the pain and the excessive blood loss.
To mitigate the crippling effects of, or even to treat, endometriosis.
To mitigate the side effects of the menstrual cycles in relation to other conditions. I had to stay on it for 3 years because that to allow me to remain mobile and productive because otherwise I’d lose weeks out of the month as it aggravated my fibro.
The day that Magic Elixer Snake Oil Ltd comes out with something that treats all of those conditions, problems, and all the other ones that birth control helps with? We’ll talk. Until then, non medical and science professionals need to take a BIG step back in declaring what exactly medications do or are.
4. This judgement offends my conservative nature to no end. I believe in small government and that the government should stay out of my bedroom, my shed, and get the hell off my lawn. I also believe in the health of the herd and I believe in health care; you want to prevent a huge financial burden on the nation due to aging and chronic preventable illnesses? You want to poor people to stop having so many babies that will need assistance? *points to healthcare* Hi, there’s a really good answer for that. I believe in personal responsibility and I believe there are times that common sense, not politics, is the answer.
And there’s not one ounce of my being that would think that my employer should have the right to hang out in my doctor’s waiting room dictating what science and medicine is or does or is acceptable according to their beliefs.
More specifically, saying that prevention of pregnancy is the same thing as aborting pregnancy doesn’t make it so and saying that any religious beliefs of ANY sort should dictate how I or any of my family or friends or fellow citizens can receive treatment based on the fact that they’re employed by someone holding those beliefs is beyond preposterous. I respect your religion, so you damn well better respect mine.
In short, this decision is poor on so many levels and sets a precedent that doesn’t bear thinking on but now we have to because the “narrow” ruling’s already being broadened from “only four” birth control methods to “for-profit employers who object to all twenty forms of birth control included in the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, not just the four methods at issue in the two cases decided on Monday.”
Lastly, I was very interested to see religious leaders speaking out against this:
Although the owners of these for-profit corporations oppose the contraceptive requirement because of their pro-life religious beliefs, the requirement they oppose will dramatically reduce abortions. Imagine a million fewer unintended pregnancies. Imagine healthier babies, moms and families. Imagine up to 800,000 fewer abortions. No matter your faith or political beliefs, our hunch is that we can all agree that fewer unplanned pregnancies and fewer abortions would be a blessing.
Julia K. Stronks, evangelical Christian and political science professor together with Jeffrey F. Peipert, a Jewish family-planning physician
The New Testament never—not one time—applies the ‘Christian’ label to a business or even a government,” he writes. “The tag is applied only to individuals. If the Bible is your ultimate guide, the only organization one might rightly term ‘Christian’ is a church. And this is only because a church in the New Testament is not a building or a business, but a collection of Christian individuals who have repented, believed on Christ, and are pursuing a life of holiness.
Jonathan Merritt, an evangelical Christian writer and blogger for the Religion News Service