August 18, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 112: After a really strong start – 8 green bean plants! 8 cucumber plants! A really tall snap pea plant! The garden has petered out. The green beans put out a handful of small beans, maybe 9 total. The cucumbers had half a dozen baby cucumbers per plant, it was going to be glorious. They have all given up on life. š I am very sad about this.
Working out: I’ve graduated to slightly harder exercises this week – exercises with weights. Goblet (which I read at goblin at first) squats; lateral raises with hand weights, and band pullaparts with my weight bands. I was being cheap putting off the weight and band purchases for months. Who knew these would be fun!
Unrelated: I need more wool socks.
Year 6, Day 113: The kids were soaking up their twice-yearly visit with a favorite Uncle so I took advantage of their leaving me alone: free haircut! Hovering upside down over the trash bag, I chopped roughly 4 inches off the length. Hard to see how much is getting lopped while upside down, but fortunately precision isn’t required. Unfortunately the quick and easy 2-ponytails method also gives me a lot of layers. I can live with that for a free haircut. The mop is still too long, though, so a follow up chop of another few inches to bring up the length would be good. Maybe that’ll reduce the layers, too? Much as I hate to ask, I might need a hand with that chunk.
All the dogs I wanted from the seniors-only shelter have been adopted, except the hospice dog. I’d gladly take him if our dog fund were refilled and we had a few more things settled. I’m making real progress on the “few things settling” at work, I’m seeing measurable change already thankfully, so that part may come up sooner than I had hoped but let me not count chickens before they’re hatched. Or cucumbers before they’re full grown. š
Year 6, Day 114: I’m reading three books at the same time and it’s jumbled my brain a bit: Seanan McGuire’s Toby Daye series, Kwame Mbalia’s Tristan Strong Destroys the World, and T Kingfisher’s Hemlock and Silver. They’re all good!
A white woman at our local library was gatekeeping the raffle entries for the library summer reading program. She rejected our kids’ multiple reading logs saying they were only allowed to have one raffle entry per kid at all. PiC told me this later, completely puzzled, and I insisted that was complete bullshit. That’s the opposite of the point of the summer reading program!
Today, he asked two dudes working the desk and they were appalled, “What kind of library do you think we are?? Of course you don’t only get one entry! You get as many entrees as they read and fill out logs for!” They sent him home with a stack of entries which he gave to me to fill out because I love forms. I wonder who that woman was and WTF her problem was.
Year 6, Day 115: These š¤¬š¤¬ tariffs. So many small businesses are going to be impacted. The loss of the de minimis tax exemption is summarized here. I might have to cancel my Patreon subscription to Pikaole as he ships from Korea and if it’s an additional $80 every quarter for a package of stickers, that really doesn’t work in our budget. Ugh.
This really sucks. The neighbor’s car was stolen in the dusk right in front of their home. Ugh. It was recovered pretty quickly, thankfully, but I really hate that it happened at all.
I put “Cancel Citi card” on my calendar a month before I really needed to cancel it and it’s a good thing because that can was kicked down the road about 12 times. Not today, though!! The call was made, the card was cancelled. Much rejoicing commenced, no more annual fee for meeee (for a card I don’t need anyway).
Year 6, Day 116: I tried replacing oil and water butter and milk instead of with a box cake mix. Maybe I’ve just lifestyle-inflationed myself out of the box mix life because despite assurances that people can’t tell the difference between the fancied up box mix and a from scratch cake, this one didn’t taste much better.
Whew Friday. I had my massage today and she really dug into all those muscles that I can’t stretch properly or that tighten up so hard during pain bouts that they can’t let go again. It’s therapeutic but I’m wiped out for the rest of the day. One of these days I’ll have a massage when I’m off work.
August 11, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 105: Our town isn’t super walkable but with my ME/CFS, it’s debatable how much I could really walk about running errands anyway. I miss that time in my life when I could, unless I was having a flare-up, walk out the door and to the nearby store to pick up whatever I needed. I do appreciate that most of our routine things are close by. The dentist is 5 minutes away. The doctors are 10-15 minutes away depending on traffic. Groceries are between 5-15 minutes away. That really keeps down the traffic overhead. I was reminded of this when I had to trek as far as 15! whole! miles! away! to run an errand. This is kind of hilarious given my past life in the LA area, or close enough, which meant everything was always 15-75 miles away. My radius has changed dramatically and I like that.
Year 6, Day 106: Prepping for the start of school, I’ve been deleting alarms I don’t need anymore. I have weird summer alarms: Find Seanan at 3:30. Get ready at 4:35. Call T and S at 2:50 pm. Sunblock at 12:50 pm. Ella at 12:55 pm. I’ll be reactivating all the boring routines: get up. Therapy. Lunch. Finish what you’re doing, which is the extra reminder before the alarm for school pickup.
I’ve also been having some weird dreams lately. The one I remember is being in line to be fed to a woodchipper but I was a Lego person so it was just sort of funny/ok? So strange. Most other nights I am not having particularly memorable nightmares, instead I’m waking up sometime in the night soaked in sweat. It’s incredibly gross and annoying.
Year 6, Day 107: I had my second dental cleaning for the year with a new hygienist and they were excessively rigorous. My gums are twanging still. I picked up a tube of overpriced Fluoridex to try and support my enamel that’s thinning. The consequences of enamel thinning sounds terrible and like something I would want to hold off as long as possible. I love going to the dentist generally but I have a certain amount of anxiety about my dental health. The irony of some of the bone or gum weirdness is that they said it can be caused by orthodontics. So that’s great. I do one really expensive thing to help my dental health and it causes a whole other long term problem? Rude.
We’re trying organic mango vinaigrette from Trader Joe’s this week. Normally mango anything, sign me up! But this is maybe not the light zingy dressing that I was looking for to wake up a salad. It’s more like an almost pudding that got drizzled on the greens. Tasty, but not sure if we’ll do it again. I want a lemony vinaigrette.
Year 6, Day 108: Good news, y’all, my workaholism is likely cured. I worried it was coming back this year with all the added stressors making me feel like I had to work around the clock. Many days I did work from 7 am to 1 am, with some short breaks in between to do pick up and drop off and eat. Bad habits, definitely. But the -aholism part? Probably not. I woke up every weekday this week (after having had time off) mentally whining like a child: I don’t WANT to get up. I don’t WANT to go to work. I kept it to myself, as I am an adult on the outside, but it’s mildly reassuring that I’m not getting addicted to the work grind again. And this isn’t even the hardest part of the year. There’s nothing specific I’m dreading, I just have a terrible case of the Don’t Wannas.
The bad news, this is really bad timing. A couple years back I figured I was at the peak of my career. I was a little bit wrong only because things happened out of my control that led to my unwanted and unlooked-for elevation. This year I’ll be at my peak and it’s a peak I do not like. But even though I’m emotionally ready to swandive off the career path, we don’t even have enough invested for me to quit in normal times. In these terrible and fascist times? We have to be fighting back and helping the communities being harmed. For that, we need money. It’s not a good time to practice being retired on a shoestring. So here we are.
Year 6, Day 109: The dead mom dreams are back in force. These are the ones where I relive losing her over and over except in completely strange and false scenarios. None of these are how she died but the theme is always I wasn’t there for her. In one of them, her unhinged younger sister was the one to call and tell me, harassingly which is definitely her MO, and it was just all very strange. What is up with my subconscious this week? Might have to start taking those anti-nightmare meds again. I didn’t like the way they tanked my blood pressure (which is historically low) so only take them when things get bad.
On the cooking front this week, we did shockingly well, for us. I cooked pork chops (served with Costco scalloped potatos and a salad) on Tuesday, and Thursday we defrosted a thit kho (served with rice and steamed broccoli) I froze several weeks. We filled in the gaps with leftovers on the between nights. That’s the last of the made ahead foods so now I need to go recipe browsing again to see what foods strike my fancy that is relatively simple and freezes well to make batches of. I’ve been gearing up to make banh khot for ages but that’s a labor and time intensive recipe that’s best fresh, it probably wouldn’t freeze well.
I’d love to hear your favorite comfort food suggestions of anything that would freeze well! Someone mentioned shepherd’s pie, that’s going on the list.
August 4, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 98: For the past two weeks, the weather has been perfectly nice and I have sweated buckets, like I’m powered by an internal nuclear reactor. Nothing else is particularly wrong, so I have no clue what this is about. Meanwhile the most heat sensitive folks, PiC and JB, have been practically frolicking in the mild temps. Bodies continue to be Weird. Well, mine, anyway. Perimenopause?
Also my left shoulder tendon (or ligament, or muscle, I don’t know how one isolates which thing is twanging) has been stressed for three days which is not ideal.
First aid kit debate: hard case or soft zipper pouch? I saw a prepacked first aid kit in a hard case and it triggered my container avarice. Our freebie from Target or Walgreens ages ago is a fabric rectangle zip pouch (has the depth of the hard case but flexibility of fabric) but the inside is shedding plasticky bits everywhere now. I thought maybe a pencil case? But it’s not quite the thing.
Year 6, Day 99: I just realized that the tubing assigned to the sugar snap peas had pulled loose and the plant hasn’t been getting water! No wonder half of it’s suddenly dying š I have to buy more tubing anchors but for the moment, my first task was to (finally) get the netting up on the 6 foot tall stakes. I did (to no one’s surprise) zero research on training the plants to grow on a trellis before now so the plants mostly leaned on a stake or two if they were at the right angle. This was my avoiding setting up a proper trellis but if I can get the plants to grow up the netting and stakes, I can continue avoiding a real trellis for another year!
Year 6, Day 100: Electronics hygiene! I had no idea how much keeping my electronics plugged in, while I’m working, impacted battery life but my one laptop went from 3-4 hours of battery life off charger to 60-90 minutes. It’s older, but not THAT old. There is a good reason for that habit – we kept having power outages so it was always a gamble if I let the battery run down naturally before charging back up. Now that I have a second laptop and the Yeti, I can change my habits. I’ve been super mindful to only charge the backup laptop as needed and my phone only gets charged to 80% most of the time. Their batteries are still in really decent shape, they still work even when run down to as little as 10%. Both the Pixel 6 and laptop only die at 3%, which is a vast improvement over the Pixel 2 that would turn off at 33%.
Year 6, Day 101: When someone who should have some idea of how much free time you have (none. I have negative free time) says something like “just add this half hour (or an hour) activity to your day like I do”, I just want to snap my teeth at them. It’s not like I wasn’t incredibly busy before kids. I was. I also didn’t underestimate how much busier I would be with kids. That’s part of why I didn’t want to have them in my 20s! Added to that, now I’ve got a job that’s tripled in worries and responsibilities with two young kids so no, in fact, it’s not possible for me to “just add an hour” to do a thing I want to do. I promised JB that we would look into a new sport for them this time last year. It’s taken me 12 months to create one gap in my schedule to take them to a new activity. I was interested in it too but homigosh the logistics of making one more thing possible during the school year is simply brainswoggling.
On that note, in two days, I’ve (deeeep breath):
- taken JB on a 2-hour excursion,
- done the laundry,
- collected and organized donation items,
- took out the trash,
- deep cleaned the bathroom vanity,
- directed JB’s room cleaning efforts with very specific targeted tasks (pull all the plushies out of X, canvass the whole house for all pens, pencils, color pencils, markers, crayons and put them in their homes, collect all hygiene related things and put them in their homes, sort through plushies to see which will be moved out),
- then taken JB on a 3-hour errand that’ll net $250 in gift cards in a month,
- coordinated our correspondence (addressed 6 envelopes and stuffed them with goodies, JB’s working on the letters, to family and friends),
- organized Christmas gifts for several niblings,
- set up a cart full of books for another set of niblings,
- hunted down and ordered a new backpack for JB,
- ordered a giant tote bag for our use,
- ordered the garden tubing anchors and set them up when they arrived,
- compulsively checked reporting on work KPIs,
- scrubbed the stove,
- started catching up on my workouts that have been neglected for 3 weeks due to travel (ow, my everything),
- ordered refills of several medications,
- ordered a sink drain cover so I can (briefly) soak and scrub our cast iron range grates,
- unplugged the toilet,
- figured out how to fix our Internet connection (only took 3 hours!),
- took JB to their activity,
- Did our net worth summary,
- Paid all the bills,
- Checked, sorted and recycled the mail.
These were on my 2 days off. PiC took care of dinners because I had no brain left to think about food. Mostly this was what I wanted to get done, so I’m not feeling particularly put out, but I did want to do a few more things that were just for me: baking biscuits or bread, and sewing a simple project. Maybe tomorrow.
Year 6, Day 102: Ah ha! My pencil case idea to replace the first aid kit was a bust, the one I picked was too small. I considered using one of our Costco turkey plastic containers but I’ve already doled them all out: 4 for JB’s art supplies, 2 for Smol Acrobat’s stickers and markers, 1 for my receipts and 2 for masks. I considered buying 4 extra large replacement pencil cases for JB and trade for the turkey containers, then realized it’d be cheaper to just buy myself one extra large pencil case. Duh. But no, that didn’t feel right. PiC suggested a tackle box. No, that didn’t feel right either. Too big, I want this to be small enough to fit in our current cabinets, a tackle box requires too much shelf space. Then I remembered! I bought PiC a washi tape container with removable slats several years ago, I’d bought some for my jewelry, and he’s never used it! It’s still in the garage! I ran to get it and transferred everything over and it all fit! š Money already spent years ago now being put to good use. I feel so accomplished. Go figure it’s something like this that makes me feel good and not the mile long list of things I’ve gotten done this week.
July 28, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 91: For the first time in 10+ years, someone I care about made a judgemental comment about my parenting and hurt my feelings. This isn’t the first time I’ve been criticized, it’s just the first time since I learned to stop running myself down as a parent annnnd it turns out that defense mechanism, though unhealthy, was really effective at protecting me from hurt feelings. It might be the first time I’ve thought, though I didn’t say it, “you don’t understand, you’re not a parent.” 99% of the time I don’t believe that you have to be a parent to understand that family dynamics can be complicated. I’m not sure this is that 1% of the time either, maybe my feelings were just hurt and they had a point, albeit an incredibly harsh and rather mean point. Not my favorite milestone! But a clear sign that therapy has removed some of my walls. Don’t exactly love the side effect but I accept it.
Year 6, Day 92: As a joke, I started listing my “good deeds” for the day in hopes of building up goodwill in the universe and had a weird amount of them today. I noticed some workers had locked themselves out and got the attention of their oblivious coworker. I gave strangers directions (the right ones, even, which is not usually my strong suit). I ran an errand for a friend. Donated a huge batch of points to help someone fleeing abuse. Someone else asked for a favor which is taking all week to figure out. I snapped a picture of a menu that strangers were struggling to read and let them zoom in on my phone.
Year 6, Day 95: I’ve been so full-on this week, I just read a headline that Cambodia is calling for a ceasefire. What?? I had no idea they’d been skirmishing with Thailand. We’re such a disaster here in the US, it’s almost hard to focus attention on anywhere else. Except Gaza. That’s always in the back of my consciousness.
July 21, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 84: I’ve become such a pillow hog. I want, depending on if I’m working or resting, 4-6 firmish fluffy pillows at a time. I’ve entered the stage of life where there is so much discomfort from pain, painsomnia, heartburn that strikes randomly, and sleep deprivation that I require ALL THE PILLOWS as recompense. I’m still searching for a good cushion of some sort that will properly support my neck and back when I have to work from bed. Currently the imperfect solution is a stack of 5 pillows but they eventually slide or squish down.
Year 6, Day 85: Nothing like realizing that in your haze of overworkedness and sleep deprivation, you’ve gone and written the giant check using the wrong checkbook so that giant check is being drawn on the account that doesn’t have that much money while the right account that has all that money is sitting RIGHT THERE. DAMMIT! I went through all the options and none of them were “the best one” so I picked the least troublesome one for the guy: writing him a fresh check from the right account today and then plan to beg fee forgiveness from the wrong bank account whenever they return the check as unpaid. Sigh. Call this the “dumbass / too tired to exist” tax. I knew I’d drop some balls because of how tired I’ve been but I didn’t think it’d be a five figure ball.
Year 6, Day 86: We have the good fortune of having basic dental insurance that covers two cleanings a year and we’re diligent about making sure everyone goes. I’ve finally completely shifted us to a relatively consistent Jan/Feb and June/July schedule which feels like a small victory. My attempts to keep all routine appointments out of the Sept-Dec period are a tiny step towards keeping that fall to winter period a little bit more sane. I enjoy my own time in the dentist’s chair, but miss coasting for months and months without having to think about yet another appointment.
Naturally my current task is trying to find a slot on the calendar to add a “dabbling in — lessons” this summer before they return to school. There’s a local place but we’ve been warned that the traffic and parking in that area is terrible and that’s off-putting. For being SoCal born and bred where terrible traffic and bad parking is so common, my tolerance for that is almost non-existent. We’ll see. I promised JB that we’d give it a shot to see if we like the place and the sport enough to put up with the inconveniences. No pun intended. No clue how we’d make that work during the school year but if we can fit in 2-3 lessons before school starts, that should be a good taste.
Year 6, Day 87: Here’s an exasperating thing. I’ve developed a scent aversion to my deodorant. Both Degree and Suave which have been totally fine and don’t irritate my skin. It’s just that suddenly, I cannot stand the smell. This is really quite annoying. I bought some Dove deodorants which smell better but don’t work half as well. Also annoying.
I’ve been utterly dislocated in space and time this summer. Everything that should be routine hasn’t been. My weeks of alone time for whole days – nope. Instead it’s been travel and work stuff and home maintenance and more. My brain has gone into a weird (self protective?) huddle where it never really knows where I am on a map. Even when I was just walking around SF which I’m reasonably familiar with, my brain refused to connect to anything as familiar. I might as well have been in the city for the first time.
Year 6, Day 88: I was feeling Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer in my bones, so I put that on, following by Journey’s Any Way You Want It. Wilson Phillips and Hold On was next, as I contemplated how many of my friends who keep getting into bad relationships could do with taking those lyrics to heart. Pat Benatar’s We Belong came up next in the rotation and my heart felt gripped in maudlin remembering.
Very longtime readers were around during a tumultuous period of life when my coworkers and I loved to play Pat Benatar but everything else in that office was pure hell. I carried the awful from that job for years, took me ages to shed most of the defensive mechanisms. Rcently a colleague from that time affirmed my recollection of the toxicity and evil. They were further along in their career back then and even they were horrified by the pure meanness that dominated that office. Grateful that’s so far in the rearview that it’s just the occasional momentary ICK that sets in thanks to sensory memories.
July 14, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 77: It’s backlog city at work, with pretty rough waters ahead. No one is loving this. Nor am I loving how many times the blog has been acting up this week. This is very annoying.
Also annoying: The house maintenance is still not done. We’re through 78% of the interior work and I’m so fed up, I don’t WANT to do the last 22%. It doesn’t have to be done right away, thank goodness, because that’s another $5000 and 2 weeks of disruption when we do get to it but *deepest disgruntled sigh* I am tired of living in drywall bits and dodging plastic covering. Can we please just have everything back to normal for a while?
Background listening: the Magnum PI reboot.
Higgins: Oh no, he looks angry.
Magnum: That’s just his face, isn’t it?
#ItMe
Year 6, Day 78: I’m stressed to my very marrow with deadlines, impossible KPIs, and … well. Need there be more? Oh yes, and working myself into the ground, late in the wee hours every night. I finally had to take a night “off”. It was off in the sense that I didn’t do actual productive work. It was not off in the sense of having turned off the stress meter.
I decided to combat stress with “stress”: Examining our tax spreadsheets closely to better understand each line of each Schedule. This sort of thing usually starts with frowning but over time as I pore over the instructions, it forces my brain to let go of the things I can do absolutely nothing more about and focus on learning something. This time: SALT. I didn’t realize that I’d been slowly mentally miscategorizing what actually falls under the SALT deduction and today’s close examination cleared that up. It’s comprised of the state and local taxes we pay (on our W2s), state and local real estate taxes, and state and local personal property taxes. The italics were necessary for my brain to actually absorb what specific taxes they’re talking about. Now I know where my car license registration deduction belongs (personal property tax)! I reorganized our spreadsheet to follow the exact order of Schedule A. Honestly it hasn’t really mattered since 2017, because of the $10,000 cap but if the cap has really changed to $40,000, then getting these numbers all right will matter this year.
I do still need to figure out which part of the property tax payments fall into the 2025 tax year because ours are split weirdly across years and it’s too late for my brain to take this information and do anything useful with it: “Only taxes paid in 2024 and assessed prior to 2025 can be deducted for 2024. State or local law determines whether and when a property tax is assessed, which is generally when the taxpayer becomes liable for the property tax imposed.”
Year 6, Day 79: HOOOOboy. 7 hours of meetings. What a crap day. I did manage (thanks to Costco readymade foods) to put dinner on the table in reasonably short order: scalloped potatoes, beef kebabs, sauteed green beans and broccoli. I was disappointed in this bag of green beans, though. We normally handpick every green bean from a local produce market but I was in a hurry at Costco and threw a bag of their prepackaged green beans into the cart. I should have noticed the condensation that was going to lead to bad beans.
I bought the last two items our Lakota sponsee requested recently. Once I send the shipping information, sadly, I’m going to end our sponsorship. The organization asks that we send packages 4-6 times a year and talk to the individual to build a relationship. I started off strong at first, sending packages every 4-6 weeks but, without judgment – this is purely observational – the sponsee’s communication is very sporadic. It’s tough under normal circumstances, it takes a lot of effort to get enough information to work with but it’s feeling impossible now. These past 24 months, my work has increased exponentially. I can barely manage to throw hot food on the table twice a day for the people I live with. Chasing down my sponsee to get more than a few words now and again takes time that I simply don’t have anymore. This also feels crappy because the point of a sponsorship is to build a relationship. I hate failing at that but I’ve already been failing them from this aspect. So rather than beating myself over the head with guilt for not being able to be five people at once, I’m going to need to step away.
Year 6, Day 80: I still hold close a daydream of a time when I’ll have the time, money, energy and stamina to ride horses again. It’s what I’m working towards every single time I do a few minutes of exercises. That, and the ability to heft a large dog over 55-60 lbs into the car. I can’t adopt a dog I can’t lift since I’m the primary dog caretaker. It’s my own personal rule, I hate being dependent on other people to care for my own, even if it’s PiC. Sometimes that’s just pure practicality, it’s easier for me to break away and take the dog to the vet than for him. He handles more of the kids back and forthing, I handle the dogs’. No idea when all the planets will align.
I found a local barn today and got overexcited considering all the lesson options they have. I know how to ride but my body has to do the slow and steady rebuilding of foundational rides again before I can even think about asking to jump. I miss it so much it hurts (but what doesn’t?) and I feel that urge to be cruel to myself for my body’s shortcomings. Now that I know what it is, it’s easier to redirect and not fall into the negativity spiral.
Anyway, barns made me think of boots and I went looking for work boots. Used to be, I could buy a work boot style for $20 at Payless and they’d last me several years, protecting my toes from mischievous hooves. Now, browsing Boot Barn, there’s nothing with a heel and steel/reinforced toe under $100 and ranging up to $250. I’m looking for something like this. I’d also need a helmet and comfortable riding pants, when the time comes.
Year 6, Day 81: Every day I end my day trying to remind myself that we can only do what we can do and I can only do so much. I’ve already wrecked myself twice this week trying to do more than my body can handle.
Some things are getting better at work but not enough and not fast enough, so it’s back to feeling like I can’t get enough done in any single, even 18 hour day, anymore. I don’t like this at all.
July 7, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 6, Day 70: We’re scrambling to get everything financially important done today. I hate when month end, quarter end, and first half of the year all clang together like four sets of cymbals. Yes, like the seasonal time changes, this happens every year but like every year, this one feels like the worst.
I did, however, set a small record for myself in how many records I managed to approve/process within the business day. Self congratulatory pats.
Year 6, Day 71:Ā My Synology photos app went off the rails and it’s taken 3 hours to figure out how to fix it. It kept claiming that there was no network connection. If there’s no network connection, how am I connecting to the Internet with every other app?? It wasn’t Synology itself, I can access that and upload/download files easily. It’s not Photos the program, PiC’s mobile connection using the iOS app was updating just fine. It’s just mine that’s being a jerk. Sigh. I hunted through article after article trying to find the fix but nothing posted in the past four years with similar keywords made sense. I finally tried logging out and logging back in. It’s the logical first troubleshooting step. But it wouldn’t let me log back in. š¤¦š»āāļø I had to change the password, reset the whole thing from the desktop app, change the password on the app and finally got access again. But it refused to update any of my pictures taken this week. Ugh.
Year 6, Day 72:Ā I have this beautiful row of cucumber plants about 6-8 inches tall but none of them show any inclination to put out flowers of any kind. The one sugar snap pea plant that managed to grow at all, by contrast, is suddenly popping out flowers today. I count 8 flower clusters, and two of them are already shedding the petals as the wee tiny peas are starting to peek out. Exciting! The green bean plants have remained rather spindly so I was losing hope that they would make any beans but today I spotted the world’s tiniest green bean budding from the top of one of the plants.
I’ve checked the watering system and found a couple nozzles had fallen out of the planters so I’ve reset them so we’re not losing precious water to the ground.
Year 6, Day 73: I normally never order fish at a restaurant, aside from fish and chips. American restaurants generally over season or over-something-it like they’re trying to hide that they’re preparing fish, and all that effort takes away from the fundamental deliciousness of the fish itself. My one exception is made for Italian restaurants. They’ll serve a whole deboned fish that always lets the actual fish shine.
I still have happy memories of picking a whole fish to be roasted and deboned at the table in a small hole in the wall place in Florence two decades ago; I’m not so secretly always hoping to repeat that experience. We rarely eat out these days but I recently had the choice between a filet mignon or a whole branzino and jumped at the branzino. Scrumptious.
Year 6, Day 74: I had to rescue a friend, temporarily, from the airport. Their flight delays made me think they’re even more cursed than Nicole and Maggie! Two flights were delayed several times and finally cancelled and the third was delayed. It must have taken 42 hours end to end. I felt so bad for them. All I could do was bring them a snack and keep them company for a bit when it was safe for them to leave the airport. They apologized for messing up any July 4th plans we might have had but I assured them that this year in particular, there’s nothing to celebrate about Independence Day in America. I wish there were.