April 4, 2022
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 3, Day 10: Somehow, it’s never easier in the way you’d think it’ll be when just one of us has the day off. One of us is trying to use that time to get a lot of work done and then overdoes it, leaving the other one to overdo it with childcare and meal prep, and then everyone’s grumpy.
On top of that, Mondays are definitely the day you find out that someone screwed up two months ago. That despite your weekly confirmations that progress was being made on this project and finding out that not only was it not being made, it was never going to be worked on ever, and all your reassurances to dozens of stakeholders that it would be ready soon were wrong. Yes definitely a Monday thing. Chewed up precious precious time I did not have to spare. Chewed up patience I did not have to spare. Harumph.
Today felt like Friday. It was not.
*****
Smol times… While this is my favorite age range for babies/toddlers, it’s also the time they start the real tantrums when thwarted and it lasts longer than the time it takes to distract them with something else that’s shiny. They’re also really quick to spot anything you’re holding and declaring they MUST SEE IT. So thaaaat’s fun. (more…)
March 28, 2022
Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 3, Day 3: As promised, the Things Got Even Harder edition!
Challenge 1: 3 hours of sleep, y’all. Painsomnia had me deep in the marrow and it burned until 3 am. Of course, right when I finally drifted off, Smol’s white noise app, which runs on an iPhone so old it’s literally splitting apart, shut off and up popped Smol like a chirping jack o’lantern. I fixed it and went back to bed quietly cursing, and finally slept at 4 am. Fab. U. Lous.
Perfect way to start an incredibly hard first day of a tough week.
Challenge 2: PiC had to go on site for work today. That left me with Smol most of the day. So naturally….
Challenge 3: Smol woke up after a 45 minute nap sobbing fit to wake the dead. I’d prepared myself for a short nap and so I maintained my emotional equilibrium. I sat on the floor with them patting and humming, my butt going entirely numb, waiting for them to calm down. Usually they take about 10 minutes to stop crying and then signal they’re ready to get going. Today was weird. Of course it was. They kept kneeing me in the stomach when I stopped humming or patting, so I kept it up, working on my phone as much as I could while also patting and humming. My arms and butt were losing feeling steadily. But I figured I’d enjoy the cuddle however long I had it, it’s rare that they sit still anymore. Then they finally sat up, I got ready to get up, and FLOP. They burrowed onto my left shoulder, right cheek bright red. They’d been sleeping! And were going to keep on sleeping. Alrighty. So they got a catnap laying on me while I did what little I could on my phone. Momentary regret that my phone is too decrepit to have more work apps so I could make the most of that time.
Challenge 4: When they felt ready to get up, it was time to go go go for three hours. Time for food, play, more play, try to cram in a minute or two of work here and there whenever they veered off to do their own thing for a bit. Already tired, this was a particularly rough patch.
Challenge 5: Realizing I botched my own weekly meal / dinner plans by not ordering earlier. They sold out. Sigh. I’m too tired to kick myself. I’m just disappointed. We’ll figure it out.
*****
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March 21, 2022
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 361: *The day numbering reflects when I started chronicling our lives in the pandemic, about a week or two into the shutdowns.
This two year “anniversary” of when our lives all turned upside and stayed upside down has been bonus difficulty levels with a yucky cherry on top. We’re all frustrated and angry because even with little bits of “normalcy” like in person school for JB, everything else remains so topsy turvy that the stressors outweigh any good exponentially.
I’m starting to feel some resentment that folks have routine childcare support and we don’t even though I care about them and want them to have it. Or envy of that resource at least. I’m most definitely resentful that companies are acting like things can go back to normal now and are scheduling in person travel and conferences as if we parents of under 5s don’t have ENTIRELY unprotected kids. I’m so angry and tired of feeling like every minute of every single day is a slog because we can never take a break. We can swap off childminding for an hour or two at a time, yes, but there are always chores to do and there is always household stuff to do and we are always fighting against a tsunami of Needs to carve out any time for ourselves. And then I feel like an absolute heel for complaining, even just in my head or here, because there are lots of people who are in far far far worse situations.
*****
Some of this is because things that were already hard are going to get even harder. PiC has to go back to work on site. He now has conferences that require him to travel. I have absolutely ZERO idea how we’re going to manage that.
Spring break and summer are fast approaching. We’ve looked at multiple scenarios and they’re mostly impossible to manage because it adds hours of commute in addition to our work and Smol Acrobat schedules. And no matter what we choose, daycare or some combination of camps and at home virtual stuff, it’s going to cost $2000 a month just for JB.
I broke down and cried today. I don’t know how much more I can give.
***** (more…)
March 14, 2022
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 354: Smol started the festivities at FIVE AM.
I, having had severe heartburn until 2 am, was less than pleased. And less than half conscious. Thank goodness PiC took them for the morning round as usual.
I finally crawled out just after 7 am, barely functional and wishing for day’s end. What a way to start the week!
*****
JB had the gall to watch PiC making their lunch, to their exact specifications, and then asked: can I buy lunch today?
I came down on that like a ton of bricks. How rude!! Children, I tell ya.
*****
We had leftover ramen for lunch, yum. I’m glad that PiC pushed me into catering to my cravings yesterday. There was nothing on Bentocart we wanted so we decided that local takeout would be our “ease the pain” meals this week. It’s still surprising how much decision making capacity is freed up by choosing ahead of time to pay for just two meals that someone else cooks ready to reheat for dinners and maybe some leftovers for lunch. The planning ahead is one huge bonus, we’re no longer stressing over what to order and pick up while juggling two kids who need our attention now now now. We plan ahead and get the meals in the course of our chores. It also frees up enough energy to cook the rest of the week, without scraping rock bottom, or snarling to ourselves like bewildered rabid badgers!
Saturday afternoon I had cooked a big batch (4 large chicken breasts, from 2 Costco chicken packs) of the baked panko chicken. Remembering to spray oil on the foil before baking was instrumental to this batch turning out better than my first try and JB declared it their FAVORITE. That was a big enough batch for two dinners and a snack. I’d not have this foresight or energy without the takeout assist.
*****
I finally asked the right questions and updated my spreadsheets with a whole chunk of investing information on a portion of PiC’s portfolio I didn’t have before. We make decisions on that portfolio together but since I’d assumed the website was through his company intranet, I couldn’t access it. Not true! So now I have a whole load of information at my fingertips to work with and make better decisions with. That’s exciting.
***** (more…)
March 8, 2022
With the usual caveats that I know that I’m usually doing the best I can with what I know / knew, and we’ve managed to make our way to a decent place financially with the requisite combination of hard work and good fortune, as I map out our 2022-2026(?) financial plans, I wonder what I don’t know now.
How much I didn’t know five, ten and fifteen years ago when I made important decisions about our money!
I didn’t know that my experiment with real estate wouldn’t necessarily be the game-changer originally hoped for, not when balanced against my desire to be an ethical rental owner who did repairs quickly, maintained the property well, and keeping rent relatively low. It’s possible that just putting that seed money into our investment accounts, and the maintenance costs over the years, would have generated similar or better returns for less angst and less work. But I also sold earlier than the plan originally called for so it’s also possible that had I held on to good renters for several more years, if the whole project hadn’t risen to truly irritating levels, it would have beaten market returns. It made enough to be worthwhile but it wasn’t as much fun as I had hoped.
I should have prioritized my make up retirement savings over JB’s 529 plan. I wonder if Nicole and Maggie talked about this earlier than 2016. If so, I should have thought about it in the context of my own plans and revised them. They definitely discussed prioritizing retirement over college savings, I just can’t remember when it was.
I made the mistake of mixing pre-tax IRA contributions and post-tax IRA contributions in the same account.
I definitely shouldn’t have believed my dad’s lies. I suppose the internet did tell me so at one point.
So….. what don’t I know enough about today?
Roth backdoor conversions always felt like a big pain that I couldn’t quite get my hands around until I realized that quite likely our income bracket at this point in life is the highest it’ll be versus in retirement.
I’m not sure how to untangle the withdrawals from my IRA when the time comes (with the mixed pre and post tax nonsense). The account is too old to see the original transactions but might try to sleuth out what the holdings were by the time I started mixing funds. That might be possible.
I don’t know of any cryptocurrency that makes sense to me and doesn’t seem to destroy our environment. I cannot get behind an alternative investing route that is so utterly destructive.
Health insurance (affordability, what plans will be available) in the next five to whatever years, if we should manage early retirement savings, is a total mystery. This is less a my-knowledge-is-lacking and more a what-on-earth-is-America-doing problem.
How much do we really need to have in liquid funds? Hindsight says we were too conservative from 2020-2021 but that’s also only because hindsight also knows we didn’t get laid off between 2020-2021. In the moment, we had no way of knowing whether that cash would be desperately needed to keep up with the bills.
When will we have enough for me to feel secure about subtracting work from both our lives and taking better care of my health? (What kinds of compromises will that create with the perception that if we don’t have to work anymore, we MUST have all kinds of free time?) I noodle around with various spreadsheets all the time because I enjoy mapping out those possibilities but PiC and I need to keep discussing our actual expectations for that life, too. It would be terrible to work hard for a future we don’t know what to do with.
Obviously there’s a lot more that I don’t know that I don’t know, particularly with our climate and the future of the US and whether our children are growing up into a hellscape that we can’t survive etc etc, but those are the money things off the top of my head.
:: What do you want to learn more about?
March 7, 2022
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 347: An ill-timed Amber Alert at 1 am woke me up and destroyed my ability to sleep the rest of the night. 😩 It was not good. Smol was up before 6 am which was also not appreciated and so I welcomed the dawn with bones made of lava. Le sigh.
*****
JB’s latest musical obsession is with the soundtrack from Encanto and it’s deeply uncomfortable. The songs cut so close to home and especially after brain therapy, Surface Pressure broke what little remained of my composure:
I don’t ask how hard the work is
Got a rough, indestructible surface
….
Under the surface
I’m pretty sure I’m worthless if I can’t be of service
….
Give it to your sister, it doesn’t hurt and
See if she can handle every family burden
Watch as she buckles and bends but never breaks
No mistakes, just
Pressure like a grip, grip, grip, and it won’t let go, whoa-
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February 28, 2022
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 340: Woof. Still recovering from the weekend physically. And I foolishly skipped the full dose of diphenhydramine I’ve been taking to force myself to fall asleep at a reasonable hour. On purpose or by accident? I don’t remember. Either way, I couldn’t sleep until very late and then couldn’t get up early. Sigh. I don’t want to be dependent on a sleep aid in the sense that I always need it to help me sleep at a reasonable hour but I am very dependent on sleep to live. Not loving this impasse. But for now I’m putting myself back on the full dose this week to get my body the rest it needs.
Upon emerging from our bedroom, in my haze, I was greeted by a chuckling Smol escaping from the bathroom, zipper bag of trial size mouthwashes swinging from one hand, headed straight for my knees. They were in such a good mood, it was a bit contagious, especially when they started chasing me around the house cackling.
*****
I’m fighting with myself to maintain a healthy boundary in one of my relationships. A loved one is having financial difficulties after an already long and arduous road to get where they are today. I have been supporting them for years in various ways, knowing that I have to NOT go overboard and have been relatively good about making myself stick to boundaries, but I still instinctively want to rescue them. I know that is unsustainable, it can’t be my (fifth) job, and it cannot be what my life revolves around. But it’s still hard to tell that part of me to sit down and just care without trying to take on their burdens for them.
This impulse is what my biodad played on for so long and it needs to be corralled.
I also have to stop feeding that deep down belief that I only have value when and if I help people. I need to find the belief that I am a good enough person as is somewhere in me.
***** (more…)