Year 2, Day 239: This morning was SUCH a struggle to get my brain working. Anxiety driven? Maybe. Case of the Mondays? Probably more that. My anxiebees were quiet for a lot of the day.
We got the news that there will be a daycare slot opening for Smol to attend part time next year. I don’t think the under-5 group will have a vaccine by then which of course sends my worries up again.
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The Dino Dash: When they are in the mood for it, we toss Smol on the bed and they turn into a little triceratops on the attack. They crawl madly cackling at you or towards the edge of the bed and we have to intercept them before they go flying off the edge. They clash into our bodies and get flipped on their back or proactively turn around and race the other way and you have to dash wildly around the bed to get to the other side before they do. It’s good cardio!
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We snagged a vaccine appointment for JB later this month. I will be stalking the site for any earlier vaccinations. I’m also wondering where the under-5 group trials are. Best I can find is that Pfizer’s trials are in process (Sept 28 article) and Moderna just started their trials. I suppose it’ll be too much to hope for approval of an under-5 vaccine before the new year.
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4:30 looked like 8:30 outside, gloomy and dark, with the light rains passing through.
The storm inside was much worse than the drizzle outside: JB was all kinds of frustration and acting out for a while after school. They were sent to their room for a good long while, surprisingly they started their homework without being told, and emerged for their Spanish lesson.
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I had cooked dinner at 1 pm because I had ingredients on hand, it was my turn to mind Smol so I couldn’t work anyway, and it was really nice to have dinner already made by the late afternoon.
We were able to work as late as 530 and just get the warmed up dinner on the table in a matter of minutes. I would really like to have more dinners just ready to go.
Year 2, Day 240: My fatigue was notably odd yesterday. Less “someone siphoned my tank again” and more “I could use several breaks”. I wonder if it’s because I forced myself to take a long midday walk? Today it’s back closer to the normal: anchors attached to every limb and heaved overboard. Not great. I took a walk this morning. It’s weird.
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Speaking of weird, our reverse water thingamadoo has been putting out a steadily decreasing amount of water for a week. What’s going on?? We have been staring at the slowing trickle thinking “we gotta fix this!” but today’s the first day I’ve actually managed to Google some troubleshooting tips. Time, energy, where do we get some extra??
I tried sugar, that didn’t go so well.
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JB got themselves up and ready on time this morning. I got very tired of chivvying them along every morning for the past few weeks so I told them clearly:not to lay abed more than 5 minutes after their alarm on weekdays. I think about how incredibly lucky we are with this.
A, they like (playing at) school. B, after the clear instruction they’ve gotten up on time every day since. It’s taken a few days to get the rest of the routine back in track but that was a huge help to getting us started in the first place. I never had an alarm when I was younger, I was just expected to get up on time and not surprisingly, I never could. I was also plagued by nightmares every night which helped nothing of course. But I’m glad our mornings have shifted in the right direction again.
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JB told us they didn’t want to enter an art contest because they might not win. Then they said that if they did enter and didn’t win, they’d never enter again.
Now, I don’t think contests are important but I’m appalled at the developing underlying all or nothing notion: that if you can’t win, you might as well not try. I shared my “don’t reject yourself” philosophy while withholding a screech of WHAT ON EARTH, explaining that even if you don’t always win, you definitely won’t if you won’t even participate and also you’ll miss out on a lot of fun and learning in life with an all or nothing mentality so we’re going to practice something different.
They went on to whine about other things so I have no idea if they actually heard me, if it made any difference, or if they were just being a contrary cuss for attention.
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I took all the kids out for an unexpectedly long (in time, not in distance) walk in the evening so that PiC could get some uninterrupted work done. I’d intended only to go for about 20 minutes but we were out for an hour because we kept running into people. JB ran into a past schoolmate and had to stop to say hi. I never had the experience of going to the school in my neighborhood and seeing my friends at school around my home. It’s a bizarre feeling and sometimes I don’t like it because I feel hemmed in and vulnerable. Not sure what the vulnerability is about specifically, just that sometimes I want the shield of anonymity up. There’s an impulse/reaction to interrogate at a later date.
Year 2, Day 241: Our reverse osmosis system is totally down today, boooo! PiC has been trying to troubleshoot it, but no joy, alas. We’re calling in professional help.
He did fix the temperature issue in our shower so that’s a huge help. We still need to deal with our broken eaves and gutters and replace our hot water heater but that’s going to have to wait for …. either desperate times or energy, whichever comes first. I think we all know which it’ll be. Actually that leads me to….
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Happy(?) news: My doc came up with a medication recommendation for me to try out and see if it helps at all with the overwhelming fatigue on a couple days a week. I’m briefed on the side effects so I’m crossing my fingers that on very low dose and an as-needed basis only, the side effects will be minimal. I also have a full battery of bloodwork on order to see if there are any medical issues we can address. Obviously I have medical issues, I just got the package of ailments without solutions or treatments.
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Smol’s naps were pretty terrible today. That by itself isn’t so bad but after yesterday’s prolonged outing, my body was on fire with fatigue by 1:30 because I needed a lot more sitting down time before baby chasing time. PiC took over and I slumped at my desk for a few hours while muscles went back to some semblance of baseline tolerable pain. Not awesome.
Year 2, Day 242: I’m on my second to last set of Invisalign aligners. I’m a month away from having to make the decision about whether I am happy with the new alignment. At my recent check up, I was uncomfortable with being so close because while the alignment of my teeth has been corrected, my bite is uncomfortable in this configuration. Well it feels like this set of aligners is tackling that but OMG OWCHHHH. It feels like every tooth is screaming.
Also I was told that I’d have to wear my retainers full time for 12 months (preferable 18 months) to ensure they don’t move again *cries*
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We had a last minute lunch guest. A dear friend we don’t see often enough retired recently and has been traveling the world having adventures. She realized that she has been very responsible with her money, enough so she has enough for years and years, and very few needs and responsibilities so she can afford to go live her life and enjoy it instead of working.
I’m so happy for her and am so eager to join her in the post-work life stage. We joked that even if I didn’t have a dozen things I wanted to do, I’d be happy to retire to enjoy a time of good food, good rest and good dogs, without work.
PiC and I both grumbled that we don’t want to work tomorrow and / or anymore and he asked me if we could retire now.
Sure but it’ll be a short retirement! I wish I (and my job) were the sabbatical type but I’m more of a push hard for the final goal and don’t look back type. Since sabbaticals aren’t possible in my line of work anyway, I have to embrace the means that are available to me.
Seeing my friend was a boost to the soul. I missed her and miss my other dear friends so much.
Year 2, Day 243: I didn’t have the day off work for Veterans Day but the day after a school day off is still disorienting.
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Every time I think about the climate and how we have all kinds of possible solutions and it feels like there is zero effective political will to do anything about this before our time runs out, I catch myself holding my breath. Symbolic unconscious reaction, I suppose, for a world that may all too soon be uninhabitable for humans of today. I don’t know how to fight the existential dread that all of this is for naught because we cannot, as a planet of people, get our acts together on a global and nation-sized scale. This can’t be about individual action anymore, and that realization that we’re depending on people leading countries to do something while it seems like the world is being taken over by right wing fascists… I don’t know how anyone functions like we’ll have a tomorrow.
It’s getting harder for me not to feel like hiding under the bed. For a multitude of reasons, certainly, but this one’s a biggie.
:: How are you coping this week? How do you feel about contests and doing things for the sake of winning vs for the sake of enjoying them?
I just did the math and I’ve been blogging in these here parts for 15 years and a few months!
No wonder it felt like time for a name change or something to freshen up the place a little bit.
In 2006, I started this blog because I was desperate to talk about money with someone. No one in my cohort was concerned about money. They all had housing and college paid for or they were confident about taking out massive loans. I was the odd one out: living at home and paying all the bills, and working at an incredibly toxic workplace to do it. It sucked. I’d also been living with chronic pain for over ten years so by this point, my health outlook was bleak. My assumption was I’d be dead or crippled by 2012. Thankfully, I had access to new exciting financial information at Fatwallet and the determination to be strategic about my remaining functional years. When I realized my bosses were rusty nails and gangrene terrible, following the shared wisdom of my elders here in PF blogging, I plotted my career course and took what I could from this job to the next: experience doing everything whether or not it was my job, negotiating my face off to move my base salary up so that I’d have a better stepping stone to the next phase, taking courses in management and reading all the Ask A Manager I could hold. My goal was to grow enough at this job to give myself some real escape velocity, and pay down all my parents’ debt and get them set up for retirement, then get the heck out of Dodge. I was especially concerned about my body’s expiration date. (more…)
Year 2, Day 232: So the good news? Smol slept in until 730 am!!
The bad news is I woke up every hour because of internal temperature fluctuations, I’d wake up in a sweat, then wake up freezing, and then leapt out of bed at 1 am startled because my subconscious brain was positive that something was wrong. By 9 am, my entire body was fatigued beyond belief.
But Smol’s sleeping in was so much appreciated.
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JB was so wiped from the day before that they slept in until 930 which was both surprising and appreciated too, just in a different way.
They are grumpy that there’s laundry to put away again. Yeah shocking how with two kids there’s always some laundry to put away, isn’t it? Also shocking there’s always food to be cooked and dishes to wash as well. Life requirements, so tiresome!
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Light rain all day. I’m glad for the gentleness, we need the rain but the heavy rains bring worries of floods.
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My doctor’s office wanted me to take the 13 question questionnaire meant to ferret out depression and can I ask if there’s anyone who isn’t feeling most of those things every day? As an example: Feeling down, depressed, or hopeless; Little interest or pleasure in doing things; Feeling tired or having little energy; Feeling nervous, anxious or on edge. Yes, yes, yes, and yes…. who isn’t??
I function but of course I feel all these things every single day.
A friend pointed out that it’s the people who ignore the pandemic and just live like nothing’s changed who aren’t experiencing this. They’re probably right and that ticks me off too. This could have been so much better, and we could be back to some semblance of a safer normal, if it weren’t for people acting like we aren’t in a deadly pandemic.
I can’t help but feel bitter that the tide shifted from alarm and attention to the “fuck them, I’m fine” attitude the moment the data started showing that this affects PoC more than white people. And it’s not like they were hiding it. They just came right out and said so.
Year 2, Day 225: My Anxiebees were incredibly active today, slowing down my brain processing by a factor of ten, and inspired a new design (women’s V-neck; standard tee). I stopped to make those to burn off some of that oppressive worry / stress / brain fog / creeping depression / fiddly twitchy feelings.
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I had Royal Pains on in the background while I was working and Henry Winkler’s character — can I just say, MAJOR FLASHBACKS. That scene when he and Evan talk about his taking all their money: “You’re gonna get your money back, day or two, week tops.”
That exact same expression on his face is what was on my dad’s face when I was following up with him on getting the money back from the loan I’d made. That lying manipulative asshole expression of “trust me, I’m your father” when he really meant “trust me, I need to take more of your money.” That shook me pretty hard. I still can’t deal with these flashbacks. I think about how angry Hank was, and how angry I am, and how that tracks as we were the responsible siblings. How easily Evan forgave him, I still can’t wrap my head around. Maybe it’s because he had a protector, where neither the Hank character or I did.
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I finally asked Michael’s if they were still going to ship my fabric. They confirmed that the fabric was still in stock, and that their warehouse was just ten days behind. I started to ask if it was ten days in addition to the two weeks they’re already late but decided that doesn’t matter. It’ll get here when it gets here, it definitely won’t be in time for me to get through my holiday projects. They sent a $10 gift card for my trouble so that was nice since there’s nothing they can do to hurry along the shipment. I guess it’s a good thing I bought that back up fabric after all. Now I just need to learn to sew on the machine! 😬
Year 2, Day 218: Huzzah!! Smol made it through the night to 6 am! A painful hour but so much better than 3 and 4 and 5. The combination of overnight diapers and a touch of sleep training the first night they woke automatically predawn without real cause, no leaks!, and we’re back to square two with their sleep. Thank goodness. Zero (1-4 wake ups every night) really sucked. Hard as it was to crawl out into the dark cold to fetch Smol, they were so HAPPY, babbling and chatting away to their little plushie friends, it was hard not to be infected by their mood.
For my part, the flu shot we got over the weekend is kicking my behind up and down the corridors. I was fatigue-aching from head to toe, not unlike a pain flare tbh, yesterday and today my whole left side aches in a different way. Like it’s inflamed and angry. Here’s hoping this is actually producing an immune response and not just torturing me.
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It feels like I blinked and here we are deep into fall and Halloween just around the corner. I’m glad that I thought ahead enough that JB and Smol already their costumes for whatever small activity we do with their little friends, and I’m trying to use this time to get equally prepared for Turkey Holiday and the winter holidays. I’d rather put in the hard work early so I can enjoy what I feel like enjoying come the time. Half the winter presents are done but there are some I forgot to put on the list or haven’t been able to come up with yet.
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Yesterday I’d tackled the problem of all the kids’ clothes in too small (to give away) and too big (store sensibly for future use). Today I tackled the problem of boxes of uncurated hand me downs from friends clearing out their old stuff and figuring JB would probably like it all. They would, they are a budding pack rat, but I went through to sort things to keep, donate, or recycle. It was spiritually freeing to clear up the post-hurricane-looking closet and floor. This was during my long childminding break from work and it was deeply satisfying to get most of the way through.
I was reading this Inc article on happiness and fulfilment and they talked about relative deprivation: when “persons may feel deprived of some desirable thing relative to their own past, other persons or groups, or some other social category.” Then they gave an example of a businessowner who fell prey to “keeping up with the Joneses” in material ways and somehow that led to a massive decline in the happiness at his once thriving business in six months. I don’t know how true that story is but the idea that you should find your own happiness without comparing to others isn’t exactly new. The advice was basically to know yourself, and only compare yourself to yourself.
I thought about that in the context of my life.
I like things as much as the next person but I’m not sure that I experience that much relative deprivation that can be temporarily assuaged by spending. Sure, I could go bananapants over buying stickers that are adorable and stationery, that’s one definite weakness, along with books books and books. But my need to not feel claustrophobic among my belongings goes a long way to offsetting that strong pull.
My areas of envy are typically in my areas of weakness: intellectual. If I were to envy anyone, it might be Nicole and Maggie for being able to make good rational decisions about their kids. Or Cloud for having had the foresight to be in an area where she could enroll her kids in Spanish immersion (her eldest can read literature in Spanish. HOW. COOL. IS. THAT.) Or it might be Tanja for making the early retirement happen, while making it seem manageable, and writing and publishing TWO books (second one coming out in December!). But these are things I mostly admire about them. Money isn’t going to make them happen for me. Well, not the kind of money we’d need. Except for early retirement, having more money would help there but my point is about spending money rather than having it.
I like the good cheese, but I don’t want it all the time. Same with any other edible treat. Yummy but even I have learned moderation.
Certainly there are things we can and want to buy that have that snowball effect. Rather than being pulled to it, the snowballing repels me. The nicer car thing, for example, is a real life current example. We were mentally putting that off until it became clear it’s going to be more pain than it’s worth to delay. But the spending, the need to rearrange our parking situation (a huge pain because garages here are TINY and parking on the street is not an option), the need to figure out how to dispose of our existing car(s). All of that is so tiresome that I’m back to trying to figure out how to avoid the purchase again.
It’s probably a good thing for our finances, though less so for my psyche, that my hatred of change will lead me to look for ways to make do than to upgrade to the newest thing. I don’t WANT to have to learn how to pilot a spaceship that is a modern day car. I’m convinced that this will be me:
The first time I had to drive a car made in this decade, my shoulders were up by my ears the whole time. Hated it. Haaaaated it.
You know the thing that I MOST envy right now? This isn’t solely a pandemic thing but it most certainly is exacerbated by it. People with time. Time enough to be alone AND have to spend with other people too! Time to do one thing at a time and not have to multitask every minute of the day. Time to be creative. Time to be contemplative. Time to experiment. Time to be still. Time to be themselves and not “mom” or “manager” or “employee” or “cook” or “household manager”. I mean, I actually enjoy all those things in moderation but not when I have to be at least three of them at all times. We don’t have nearly enough money to make that kind of time happen.
I also envy people who have more choices than we have solely because they have massive shedloads of money. But since the kind of money we’re talking about is vastly more than what we’d ever see or deal with, it’s not the kind of envy that sticks. So yeah, I get green, sometimes. But thankfully not enough to feel like that has a huge impact on our lives.
Perhaps also the always ongoing Lakota project helps keep my head on more straight than it would otherwise be. If so, I’m thankful for that, too, along with the opportunity to lend a helping hand.
:: Do you have areas of relative deprivation that you struggle with or are you pretty good?
“I’m trying to teach JB to operate from a spirit of abundance.” I said to a friend. You?? My dear friend hooted. I laughed too.
Isn’t it nice to have friends who know you?
As much as I (intellectually) know we are well off, both by comparison to the rest of the world and in absolute terms even if we aren’t in the same league as our neighbors, I’m still me. My gut is still deeply rooted in the past. It’s lodged in the year 2000 when I didn’t have any financial support for college as promised, when I had to figure out how to make rent AND tuition, still protecting the Past Me that clawed her way to where we are today, inch by bloody inch.
What do I know about the spirit of abundance? Not a whole lot. I’m learning but, confession that’s not going to be a surprise to anyone who’s been here for a while: I’m still scared of being poor again. I’m still scared that it’ll all go pants. That we’ll have to start over with nothing and I won’t have it in me to do that again. I’m still scared of reliving the harsh cold last years of my mom’s life: fighting daily to get by, stressed to the gills about the bills, dying without a penny to leave behind for my kids.
As my therapist says, these are fear thoughts. I know they are. Earlier I stated unequivocally how I know we’re rich. It riled some folks when I said that it’s ridiculous not to know you’re rich when you have multi-millions in the bank. I also said that not feeling rich doesn’t make that a fact, and that if you can’t feel rich with millions, you’re deficient in something but it’s not money. I didn’t write that for clicks. If I had, I would have named names. I wrote that post because it’s both my valid observation and because I know those feelings. I have them from time to time myself! That’s how I recognize them. It’s important to remind myself, as much as anyone else it resonated with, that whatever our feelings are, we ARE rich.
The hell of it is, I can know we are rich, and also have a metric ton of fear thoughts bubbling under the surface. When I make a purchase, especially for myself, I agonize over it. I talk myself out of it, or I need a friend to talk me into it. I know $20 is ok to spend. I know $20 is ok to give. We can afford to send grieving friends flowers more than once, I know that we can help friends in need. Yet I still lie awake some nights (especially if painsomnia is already keeping me up) toting up the spending and second guessing myself. That’s going to happen, and I can’t just tell it to go away.
But maybe, aside from simply being honest with oneself, that’s another reason why it’s so important to be brutally honest about the facts of being rich. Logic can’t banish the fear but logic can pierce the fog that the fear creates. It can elbow aside the overwhelming worry that it’ll all go to pot, and point out that, as scared as my inner child is about how we were always scraping to make rent, we will probably be ok. (more…)
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.