October 20, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 175: Friday me: we won’t need to turn on the heat for another month, it doesn’t get all that cold here.
Today me: Freezing, looking for my cozy socks. Sigh. I wonder how much of this storm is responsible for how terrible I’ve felt for the past several days. I feel this kid’s message. But 7 days, not just 3. I’m so over work and unbelievably high pressure.
We have a table of weird dimensions so when I wanted a replacement tablecloth, an hour of hunting only produced a whole lot of irritation that nothing would fit for a reasonable amount of money. Instead I bought 6 different cotton fabrics ($60) and have sewn 4 lengths of them into 2 tablecloths. One more to go. They aren’t QUITE wide enough to overlap more than a couple inches on the long side so they are almost like overgrown table runners but that’s totally fine. They cover the table enough and they didn’t cost $50 each! Bonus, I picked a fabric with a map of the states on it because I can never remember where all the states are and figured the kids could learn some geography. They haven’t yet but they like playing a game using the states with PiC over dinner so that’s a win. I did just notice they never figure out how to put Hawaii and Alaska in there which is a darn shame.
Year 6, Day 176: PiC is concerned about my stress levels which is … fair. My rage (at work, but contained away from work people) has been consistently high which means my depression is taking over. The problem is I’m not really sure what else I can do about it. I’m on my meds, doing therapy weekly, trying to carve out tiny bits of time for myself to decompress amidst the too muchness of it all. I bought myself juice boxes for tiny doses of juice sugar. I eat when I feel hungry (midmorning) and eat less when I don’t (most meals).
I do know the dead garden and lack of dogs is steadily grinding away at my nerves. The putter in the garden was stabilizing, so is playing with a dog. But the intense pain days and fatigue chasers make it really hard to borrow a big dog and the garden, well. “She’s dead, Jim.”
Except for the potatoes. I’ve been in too much pain to dig potatoes for the past month but today I had wrapped my back in a heating pad for several hours which left me capable enough to dig a small bucket of new potatoes. That digging in the dirt is strangely therapeutic in a small way even if I didn’t come up with as many potatoes as I had wanted to see.
Year 6, Day 177: PiC asks every other day what he can do to lighten my load but he can’t remove this work related Sword of Damocles over my head and everything else is almost inconsequential compared to it. He’s already prepping almost all our meals and handling all the kid dropoffs. The crushing anxiety and fear of what happens if I can’t get this ship to harbor (work), or if the world’s falling apart continues apace and we can’t stop it, preys on my mind every minute of the day.
Courtney Milan said this in her recent newsletter: I went through a period of despair and hopelessness in my late teens and early twenties, spanning the first and second times I failed out of college. I don’t want to go into details, but I often thought that it was impossible for things to get better, and there were some years where it felt like I was right. I wondered, often, if there was any point in hoping, because it would only inevitably lead to disappointment.
The thing that got me out of it was probably, among other things, hormonal changes settling as I came into adulthood, but also because I remember there was a point where, in the throes of despair, I made a decision: maybe everything was hopeless, but there was no way to find out for sure without trying.
So I started with the assumption that things weren’t hopeless, and I asked myself: if things aren’t hopeless, what would I do? And I did that thing, and either it worked, or I would discover that it did not work, and then I would go back and say, “okay, if things aren’t hopeless, I have just learned that a thing did not work. What do I do given that information?”
In this spirit, I’m trying a few small things.
- I pulled out the frozen marinated tritip from months ago and cooked it with the new potatoes. That helps the part of my brain that’s sad that I can’t/don’t prep dinner like I used to. Bonus: it was really good.
- PiC has a habit of buying green onions that we don’t remember to use up til it’s too late, frequently. This time, I cut off the greens and stuck the root ends in water. They sprouted magnificently on the first round, a few weeks ago, and I’ve cut them down again. What I learned from this is that I will use green onions if they are always out on the counter. Today I rather haphazardly potted those green onions and they now live on the counter. This gives me plant life.
- I’m taking my anti-depresssants a little earlier in the day. Actually, I’ve always taken them in the evening to make sure I don’t forget but maybe it would be better to take them at the start of the day. I’m not generally aware of my depression overnight, after all!
Year 6, Day 178: Brain fog has finally hit. I noticed that I’d been a little while between fogs last week, so naturally it took over my brain today. It feels like my brain has turned into cotton, or like it’s shutting down and going to sleep without the rest of me.
After an hour of steady decline, I gave myself five minutes to lay down before picking up JB from school and was perplexed to find my synopses were firing more clearly. Rest doesn’t usually help brain fog! Or, does it? I can’t remember trying to rest, only trying to push through. I’ve gotten better at bouncing from one thing to another instead of trying to force a hyper focus that’s unachievable in a fog, but never resting. So after pickup I crawled back into bed and rested another 45 minutes. I wasn’t refreshed as normal people are but it took me a long way toward my baseline. That’s when it occurred to me that it was a combination of actual brain fog and exhaustion exacerbating it. The rest helped with the latter, so I could feel the fog more clearly. Little mysteries. So fun.
Year 6, Day 179: Had myself a mini privileged person panic about money. We’re doing all the “right” things (spending our values, not spending on less important things, using things til they wear out completely, buying quality things so they last, prioritizing saving aggressively and investing aggressively, giving back to the community). The what-ifs (this time: fascism breaks everything) got me. What if we do all the right things and the world goes apocalyptic because the richest people cannot conceive of putting the planet before their profits or their whims, so it’s Mad Max and Thunderdome here in a few or several years. What earthly good would any of our years of discipline and wise management do then? All these years would have been wasted. Well, we enjoy things now but there’s been a lot of frugality where maybe we could have enjoyed things more – I could have had therapy and better health sooner! (Maybe) – if I hadn’t been so deadset on making sure our money foundation was as solid as I could make it these past 20 years.
I talked it over with a PF friend and she said she also has the same fears. Her spouse reminds her that we’ll have much bigger problems than money should Mad Max become reality.
That did not help me even a little, it just opened the door to more doomfears. I have no interest in trying to survive a post-apocalyptic world but I have a responsibility to my family to fight if we do survive. Ugh.
Also, they said, all the rich people are in the market and that’s where their wealth exists so they’re motivated not to let it disappear.
That reassured and also felt gross. I hate that our money is tied up in the same place as people who have a vested interest in the status quo so that we have a vested interest in the status quo when I very much think we need something better than capitalism. But we can’t refuse to play the only game in town on principle, we all have bills to play.
In the end, I’m sad and conflicted about the world we live in.
October 13, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 168: My current form of self indulgence is mangos. For many years, my hands hurt too much to hold, peel, or cut up mangos so unless I was willing to pay exhorbitant prices for the cut fruit (I wasn’t, normally), we weren’t having any. It’s my fruit kinda like watermelon is PiC’s fruit so he’ll buy and prep that but I won’t. My hands still hurt of course but less so now and they are also getting stronger. Enough so that peeling and cutting up mango isn’t the trial that it once was.
My throat has been feeling ick for a few days and I couldn’t make out whether it was viral ick or plain exhausted ick compounding the ME/CFS as it does. Today was the first sign that it might be viral so I’m trying to be mindful and take better care of myself: drinking warm honey lemon water at least and trying to get to bed before midnight despite the pressing workload. I keep covering for my team being out sick and being out for other sad reasons which means my work has been doubled since the start of September. Taking time off really isn’t in the cards yet, they’re not trained enough to get on without me. I’m tired.
Year 6, Day 169: Here’s a subject line that I didn’t expect to see in our email: “Good News: Your Electric Rate Just Went Down”. Apparently “residential electric rates decreased by 2.1%.” I will believe it when I see it.
I didn’t expect that the latest Pixel update, whenever I finally allowed it, would be a good thing at all but I’ve discovered they updated a feature that I had been wanting. I can now pause my alarms for specific date ranges! This is great! When I’m on a different school dropoff/pickup schedule for conference weeks and so on, instead of hoping that I remember to turn the alarms back on when we revert to the standard schedule, I can just set a date range for the alarms to be paused.
Year 6, Day 170: PiC’s employer gets Open Enrollment information ready much earlier than mine so I have dug into the details. They claimed we’d see “an average increase of $34 per month” in medical plan premiums. Ours will go up $70 a month, so about $840 for the year. I expect we may also see prescription costs increase. They’re already up to $30 for 100 day refills through the mail.
Most of their other changes are to fancier plans than ours, so I can ignore those. They always lag on the FSA increases, though, which I suppose is the tradeoff for getting this information early. This year we’ll get the full $3300 contribution limit. We’ll appreciate the increased contribution limit ($7500) for the Dependent Day care for the one year it still comes in useful. Oh wait, that’s not true! It’s also good for camps, after SmolAc is out of daycare. I might actually have to do math to see how much camp costs to see if we’d use the full allotment in 2027, though. Usually no math is required, our childcare and healthcare costs always max out the full contribution amounts.
Year 6, Day 171: Lately, every night I go to sleep nestled in a pile of pillows and every morning I wake up turtled down into my blankets well away from all the pillows. This might be seasonal. This might be a subconscious hiding. Could be a new symptom of cumulative extreme stress. I was so tired today that my face had gone numb and my teeth were uncontrollably chattering despite feeling perfectly warm. A friend surmised this was stress-related which was unsettling. I had to forcibly crank down my work output to a crawl, I could practically feel myself running down to empty, and that helped regain just enough equilibrium to get to the last late night meetings on my books. This fall season is every bit as bad, possibly worse, than I’d anticipated. There’s no hope of better this year, it’s just going to keep getting worse. My only hope now is that all the work we’re putting in these three months will pay off in 2026 when we are better staffed. Fingers, toes, and everything else crossed.
Actually, I was feeling like a failure over how it feels like the end of this year is every bit as bad as last year. I’d come into 2025 determined to make it better. It is still terrible but there’s a difference. Last year, we were just trying to survive 2024. This year is hard because we’re trying to survive 2025 (and not just professionally, we’re now in a world that’s gone absolutely topsy turvy for fascism) but also because we ARE taking steps to prepare ourselves in significant ways before, and for, 2026. I’m working with my partners in leadership, and we’re working truly working together, there’s no infighting with some egotistical powermonger who’s too busy blaming others for his failure. So that gives me a little heart back.
Year 6, Day 172: There’s frost on the windows this morning. I only noticed because folks are talking about finally turning on their furnace for the first time this season. We have frost on windows and/or roofs more often than not since it’s always sort of coldish here so we will likely go another while before we run the heat mostly because our “cold” isn’t very. The season is turning, though. I noticed that the sun is no longer directly in my eyes driving JB home from after-school activities. Bit of a relief but also a bit foreboding because pretty soon it’ll be dark when we’re driving home.
I’m not sure if the season of early darkness and cold creeping in will help my mental health. Sometimes the need for warm and cozy for the brain also works better in the winter. It’s been feeling hard without canine companions to take the edge off life stresses and losses. It’s been feeling extra hard with trying to continually support folks who are losing ground every day financially in this world, and knowing that I can’t solve any one person’s problems.
Showing SmolAc pictures of the dogs at the rescues, we both really liked a white pittie that had the saddest story. But he needs a canine companion, much like Sera did her first years, so SmolAc asked, can we get TWO dogs? Sadly, I’m not sure we can handle bringing home two dogs at once. They aren’t especially emotionally invested in this. They remember having a dog, they remember Sera, but they don’t viscerally need a dog the way I do. Still, it’s nice to have the chat with them.
October 6, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 161: I was looking forward to this day all month. A specific form of stress was scheduled for this month and if I was lucky it was going to be over today. I was determined to be Zen Zen Zen. I probably 70% succeeded? But then layered on top of that, I had one key person on my team out for the first two weeks of the month. When they returned, a second key person on my team was out for a week. All unexpected and unavoidable and exhausting as I covered for all of them. Then I got the news that my friend is in her final days, and then the news that a relative is undergoing a scary surgery soon. Naturally, after making it through the very hard goodbye visit this weekend, walking away from our friend knowing we won’t see her again, SmolAc fell to the latest terrible viral incursion. Their throat was a misery all weekend, complete with fevers and a (thankfully mild) cough. They got no sleep, so I got no sleep. All of which to say: this month has been an absolute ball (draining, long and late nights, a whole lot of fuss, a whole lot of muss). This day that I was looking forward to was a haze of the shakes and flu like symptoms (which happen when I am so exhausted I’m about to slide into PEM). It’s lovely trying to work out whether I feel sick because I’m sick or because I’m so damn tired my body thinks it’s sick. I AM glad that the original form of stress has ended at least. And a few of the other stressors we will be recovering from if I can make it back to near baseline this week. Just. Dang. What a way to open the week. It felt like a week in a day.
Year 6, Day 162: Past me, all the kudos. The kids have turned on the grape acetaminophen flavor and SmolAc’s visible distress every dosing time for that instead of the ibuprofen pushed me over the edge. I planned to run out and buy them name brand Tylenol for the cherry flavor and for them to try the apple flavor. Anything but the now-hated grape. Except when I went on the hunt for some small round bandaids (I still can’t find them), I discovered past me had already anticipated this and loaded up on cherry flavor Tylenol. THANKS, ME.
Also why must my children be opposites in all the most unhelpful ways? JB only ever sustained giant lacerations, 2 inches and bigger. I have loads of giant bandaids and gauze and medical tape. SmolAc? TINIEST injuries requiring the smallest of bandaids. Which I never have because why would we bandage that? Oh, right, because they’ll forget and scratch, rip it open again and come crying to me with the most tragic of faces. I made do with a tiny square of gauze and a square of medical tape. Never let it said I could be defeated in first aid by tiny wounds and scratches.
Year 6, Day 163: My therapist warned me that I’m so burned out that I’m about to break, so I had to set a boundary for someone directly asking me for help that I can’t give. I’m not knowledgeable in that area they need help in and their case is complex. Even knowing that and even recognizing the burnout I didn’t quite recognize how bad it was, and I still felt guilty for not being able to help.
And oh, right, that’s my depression expressed as rage, missed that wee detail. I mean, I’m only sick of everyone and everything all the time, that’s not normal? No, not really. Normal is being light to medium exasperated by everyone and everything. Not so fed up with them that I want to bite off everyone’s heads for existing at me.
I had a really dark suicidal-type thought this morning quickly followed by, well THAT was dark. And then awwww MAN. Therapist was right. I am so tired and burnt out that the “logical” reply to a self-care comment was a suicidal type thought.
Late tonight I realized there was another contributing factor: missing my nightly handful of meds, which include my antidepressant, last night. Welp. Can’t live well without those. Quite literally. Other signs of burnout: I entirely overlooked a payday happened. I haven’t missed checking and recording a payday more than twice in the past 20 years. I love paydays for the money and the endorphins. To be so overwhelmed I miss a major source of endorphins, not great. But I had my meds, I vented with a friend, SmolAc is slowly recovering.
Year 6, Day 164: We’re a month away from being done with Project from Hell #1 (and starting Project from Hell #2 and #3), so that’s kind of a good thing. We are still in the thick of it now but there will be an end in sight.
Total subject change: Five and ten years ago, I was served Apple & Eve Orange tangerine juice after the kids were born and I’ve been wishing to get my mitts on it ever since.
Costco online seemed to have the brand in a large assorted flavors case, but said it wasn’t available at our local stores or online for shipping, so I couldn’t see which flavors it held. That sent me down the rabbitiest of rabbitholes. I gave up after 40 minutes of trying every possible combination of zip codes and locations and settled for buying a variety available at the local store: fruit punch, strawberry watermelon and mixed berry.
Year 6, Day 165: Here’s me ruing the speaking too soon. The Project from Hell #1 is really doing a number on me today. By that I mean the incompetent fools who were responsible for key parts of this did a terrible job of setting it up and the most basic parts of it still don’t work. I’ve got something like 50 hours of work needed for it and 2-4 hours to do it in since I also don’t get to weasel out of all my other responsibilities.
A deep sigh.
And today’s fraught for deeply heavy reasons. My friend @isobelcarr has passed. 💔 It’s hard to grasp that I won’t share dog pictures or stories or political rants with her anymore. It all happened so fast. I exchanged messages with her just two months ago asking whether I could bring her anything for her then-current round of treatment. She’d been fighting cancer so hard for so long and I hoped this latest was just a blip. That we’d have her another 50 years. But we lost her this week and so many who loved her are bereft.
September 29, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 154: I felt that! 3 am quake in the Bay Area. I woke up to the rumble as it started up and counted the seconds waiting for it to either escalate or stop. As it wound down I guessed: 4 near us, or a 6 far away. I waited another 15-20 minutes to see if it would be followed up by a bigger one but thankfully that was it. 4s don’t concern me. 6 does. But more than that, I feel like the fact we’re well overdue for another Big One is unsettling. I keep whispering to the fault under us: do as many 4s as you need to relieve your stresses, don’t let it all build up til you liquidate the whole Peninsula!
There’s a life lesson in there somewhere.
I’m trying to get through this week’s PEM, brought on by doing a social thing on Sunday morning. I knew, when I was leaving the house, that I wasn’t actually up to the task but not going wasn’t fair to the kids who had been really looking forward to it. So I pushed through and, of course, crashed. Thankfully laying down until the evening was possible and repaired just enough of the damage for me to function minimally again. Really bad crashes make me pass out entirely so this was something like a 7 on the PEMs Richter scale.
Year 6, Day 155: I’m feeling the complexity of being in a relatively good financial position after so many years of fighting to find and build stability. It’s still not good enough to just do what we want, but tis good enough to help other people. I think about how people struggle with understanding when they have “enough” and how much that’s going to be me. Comparatively, we’ve made it. We can pay our bills, we can weather a lean year without income. We can’t live off our investments now. They would take us through a rough micro patch: illness, layoff, big bills. They would not cover us in a macro-level rough patch: fascism takes down the stock markets, major stock market crash for other reasons, a second Great Depression brought on by high unemployment and high prices due to tariffs. I won’t feel comfortable walking away from employment until we’re so well off that it’d take a severe series of events to make us go back but what that number is, well…! It keeps going up with everything going on here. These ruminations come more often as I see more and more need online, and as I have harder days at the job where I wish myself well out of the rat race. Who knew I’d be such a reformed workaholic that retirement savings simply cannot build up fast enough?
A complaint I wasn’t expecting to hear today from SmolAc: I ran out of green beans! (To eat, even).
Year 6, Day 156: I would very much like to know what’s wrong with dream me. I keep having dreams where I’m running to do errands or go somewhere whether on foot or driving and halfway there I find that I’m barefoot. Then inevitably I have to go into a public restroom which is absolutely filthy and gross. Why can I never remember to put on a pair of shoes in my dreams??
I am more disturbed by this dream than the non-zero number of times I’ve almost left the house without pants on. Says something about my priorities, possibly.
Year 6, Day 157: Work life has advanced to a new level of intense this week. We’re testing some new systems and the designers of those systems are giant arrogant blowhards, so my exasperation levels are at an all time high. That’s saying something considering the past 2.5 years which have sucked. I’ve worked with many a dev in the past, and even got on quite well with the ones who notoriously shunned everyone else around them and refused to commit to any deadlines, except for me. I don’t think I’ve ever met a software developer as arrogant as this fool who declares that the systems will absolutely work perfectly as intended by the go-live date. That’s not how this works.
There is always always something that goes wrong or some edge case or some damned bit of code that worked fine in production that zigzags in live and hocks up hairballs. It’s absolutely the nature of the business so you plan to mitigate those issues. I’m super grateful to my co-leads who have taken the hits in taking most of these meetings with these unmitigated jackasses because I’ll be honest. No amount of professionalism would have survived an encounter where I had to sit through hearing some of that bullshit first hand. Just hearing it secondhand had me wanting to Force choke him. (Anecdotally, it’s always a him.) I idly wonder if my new bosses already know me well enough to keep away the worst of the jackasses until I absolutely must cross paths with them because my patience is now rather famously limited and my co-leads are happy to shine up my reputation as being a hardass. Whatever the reason, I’m taking many many deep breaths to get through this and next week. If we can get through the end of November, when I’ll move on to my next massive migration project, maybe I won’t be on the verge of exploding like a volcano when an incompetent turkey gobbles aloud.
Year 6, Day 158: My hip pain was at an 8 today, which is: grinding my teeth involuntarily, and nauseous with the pain. I resorted to taking every pain medication I had – one of every variety, not all of the meds in total – in a giant handful and it feels almost miraculous that it did take the edge off. Sometimes not even that helps.
At daycare pickup I ran into a frazzled mom desperately trying to load her very angry 2 year old into their car. The kiddo was going full “stiff as a board can’t shove me into the car or a car seat” mode and she looked EXHAUSTED. I took a chance and made eye contact and said really sympathetically, gosh it is SO HARD to get into the car at the end of the day, isn’t it? It’s Friday, what are we thinking, asking this of you? And the kid was bewildered enough by this strange lady using her dog voice at them that they slid right down to the ground and stopped fighting. The mom and I chatted for a while, further confusing the kid who decided to just lean on her legs, and at some point she asked if I was PiC’s wife? Then the bewilderment was mine, have …we…met?? Go figure I was going to be mortified to be talking to someone I thought was a stranger only to find out I knew them. Thankfully no, she just recognized Smol Acrobat in the car behind me. We gassed up the littlest one a little and asked if they could show us how they got in their car? In that way of 2 year olds, tantrum forgotten, they happily scaled the SUV to their car seat. We cheered and clapped and waved goodbye. The mom mouthed THANK YOU!!! as she shut the door, finally.
It was really nice to help a mom who could have been me ten years ago, just beaten down and asking WHAT IS HAPPENING as the life of a toddler unfolds around me.
September 22, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 147: I’ve been chewing on that idea that “when people don’t show up for you the way that you show up for them, it feels like rejection”. The phrasing is off but I think that’s the gist of it. I’ve been thinking of it since in the context of my right-wing family and the news of late. I’ve showed up for them in a lot of my usual ways but it feels like in a lot of ways, I don’t matter to them. These days, I kind of take their politics personally. That they could see the heartless evil messages out of Fox News and the patronizing bullshot spouted by their kids’ in-laws, and not see how dehumanizing it all is, like that jackass saying that the mentally ill unhoused should be killed, I feel like, but for a ton of really hard work AND luck, I could be that person they’re referring to. And if I didn’t have PiC, if I were on my own and hit a rough patch of illness and unemployment, I’d really be on my own. As usual, I’m the only safety net I have. I could disappear and none of them would even notice.
Now, I don’t actually know if that’s completely accurate. For that part of the family I’m pretty sure it is, but in the bigger scheme of things, I have at least a couple people who would care enough to lend me a hand. If I could bring myself to ask. Not much and not for long, and not to the lengths I have gone for family, but there are a couple. But by and large, the ones who do care are vastly outnumbered by the ones who don’t. That feels not great.
Don’t really know what to do with this thought process but just nod and say that’s the way it is? I guess? I don’t know if the smarter thing is to spend less time and energy caring about other people.
Year 6, Day 148: On the bright side ~woo~ we got our flu and COVID vax! I pre-dosed with cetizirine at 1 pm and sat down for the jabs at 330. 6 hours post, my injection site was sore but well within tolerable bounds. I moved my arm a lot and then committed to a full arms exercise session with weights and elastic bands. I can’t remember what time post-vax I’d normally crash though so I can’t quite tell if this is all fine still or not. I started feeling the full body yuck around 9 hours post-vax. Not terrible, enough to know I don’t feel good.
Now this bit is weird: the tech giving the shot told us we’d have to come back in 8 weeks for a booster. That guidance this applies to both Moderna and Pfizer 2025-26 formulations and is for adults and kids. I haven’t found a single thing to support that statement. The closest thing I found was the AAP recommendation that kids under 18 get two shots 8 weeks apart if they are severely immunocompromised. That’s nothing like what I was told. Weird. I’ve been trying to figure out who we talk to about this to either stem the misinformation or to confirm we really do have to do this dance again in 2 months. Given a choice, I want to be nowhere near the hospital mid-November.
Year 6, Day 149: I’ve been lightly hoarding necessary supplements and prescription meds so that we have a relatively decent volume stored against issues with medications thanks to the tariffs or other Trump fuckery. I just went through and filled my medication daily pill holders and was able to fill five weeks out. Not everything is fully stocked, I’ve got to pick up a few more supplements, but five weeks is a decent chunk of time in which to replenish stores.
It feels like a meditative exercise in some ways. There’s no doubt a bit of this is my hypervigilance coming out to play, but it’s not delusional. We had those formula shortages early into COVID, ADHD meds have been difficult to get for months, another diabetes related med is now artificially understocked. With the tariff nonsense, I can’t imagine that other meds won’t be impacted in some way. There’s no telling when or if my specific necessary meds will be impacted but it will deeply impact my quality of life if they are. I keep thinking of the post-Shift world where currently commonplace meds like ibuprofen become precious.
Year 6, Day 150: Coming out of my second night of waking up in enough pain to wake me from sleep, and also sweating ruthlessly because there’s nothing that pairs as nicely with muscle and bone aches as being drenched in sweat, was moderately miserable. But! This feels like a corner turned on the post-vax yucks because this morning wasn’t nearly as bad as yesterday. Hats off to the cetizirine pretreatment and the ibuprofen for getting me through a semi-rocky two days. I was mentally calling it flu and COVID-proofing until I worried about jinxing us. Because that’s how viruses work, obviously 😆 Then I decided it’s not jinxing because if you childproof stuff it’s reasonably safe but a sufficiently determined toddler could still bypass certain safety measures and it was still (probably) better than not doing it at all. We never childproofed the power outlets when JB was at the peak danger age for that stuff because their danger-seeking was directed in other directions.
Year 6, Day 151: Ah, yes, note to self. The first night after vaccines, SmolAc always has weird unsettled sleep punctuated by bursts of loud sleep-protesting. Wakes me up, every time.
Mosquitoes have invaded the house. 😡Hisssss of being bitten many times while I slept. Evil disease vectors! I can’t find where they might be laying their eggs, we’re usually good about not keeping standing water anywhere, but they could easily have snuck in from outside. On the recommendation of more knowledgeable friends, I’ve treated the drains with bleach in case they’re somehow managing to hole up in there. Cross your fingers they’re not being more sneaky and hiding elsewhere?
September 17, 2025
We’re doing our best considering real life constraints. Sometimes our best isn’t the ideal solution, but neither is life or circumstances.
We stopped shopping at Walmart and Sam’s Club 20+ years ago. This is much easier here in Northern CA because I don’t know where Sam’s club OR Walmart is.
Our replacement was Target and I’m currently mostly boycotting them, and emailing investor relations to remind them why every couple of weeks, for being jerks about DEI. That’s really annoying.
We avoid Amazon as much as we can so we’ve reduced our spend there a significant amount. I still have to use it to ship food to the reservations when we can’t get it any other way, so I also use Prime Video to get my money’s worth on Prime. I’m considering whether we should just
We won’t buy from Lululemon, having been founded by a racist. Even if it’s not owned by him anymore, I haven’t bothered to look, there’s no reason to add them to our lives.
Costco’s been solid, thank goodness, and I was smug when the VAST majority of shareholders rejected the anti-DEI proposal. They do have some labor slips that need improvement but, by and large, they’re much better than many others.
I stopped using Duolingo because they went fullbore on using AI in their lessons. I won’t use Adobe’s AI either.
I have similar stances with artists who are horrible. We’ll never give the Harry Potter franchise a dime. Neil Gaiman can go to hell for his serial bad treatment of women, he’s been pulled off our shelves. As we learn we change what we consume.
Where do you shop and where have you stopped shopping?
September 15, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area
Year 6, Day 140: New goal: be independently wealthy so that I can help as many people as I can reach and so I can quit my job and go work with animals all day. I was vetting some pet boarding facilities, initial research for one of the two problems I have to solve before I can adopt again, and saw a job listing which made me go YES I WANT TO DO THAT. Sigh. I miss being around and working with animals all day or night. Having an office dog when we have dogs at home is great, but it’s not the same. I don’t know if my body could actually handle that physical commitment anymore but if I was wealthy then I could do it part time! Win win!
Year 6, Day 141: Did I fail down the jetpens rabbithole? Yes I did. Did I doubt I’d want enough stuff to meet the $35 minimum? Yep. Did I find ten things to buy? Also yep. A mix of wants and gifts. I sent all the links to myself to ruminate on for a few days because I’m pretty sure I told myself I wasn’t allowed to buy more pens. But look, so cute! A Uni-ball One P mini gel pen! Panda donut washi! Kitty washi!
This is one of my current forms of meditation, I don’t use it often as it is habit forming, and it works like magic.
Year 6, Day 142: Walking back to the house, I realized I feel human again!? For the first time in weeks. Not good, but physically back to the usual baseline of aches, pains, and tired which is tolerable. What a huge relief.
This means I can tolerate a 5 minute shower again. I can now walk for 10 minutes without being bed bound for 4 hours. I can work and take JB where they need to go without collapsing like my skin only contains a mass of jellyfish! These things don’t seem like much to a normal person but they are everything when they’re gone.
I’m very slowly adding back very low-rep sets of my normal exercises. They’re still pretty low key to begin with and I have missed being able to do them.
Year 6, Day 143: Wow, are my children WHINY. SmolAc has started their transitional kindergarten program at daycare and one exciting (/s) addition to their routine is they now have take-home (optional) homework. It is terrible. SmolAc just spontaneously forgot how to write some of their letters that they’ve been writing just fine for months and so we had to practice it over and over with a letters book where they could trace and then write. I helped guide their hand a few times, then had them retrace and re-write. It was like pulling teeth. They whined and pouted and stomped and tried to quit over and over and over. Good grief, child, it’s ONE letter. Lots of deep breaths until I couldn’t take it any longer and I sent them to have a snack.
This was published back in July when I was too busy to read the news and now it’s looming on the horizon: “In around 90 days, millions of Americans will learn about out-of-pocket cost hikes of more than 75 percent on average.” Open enrollment is around the corner in October so we’ll see how much of that giant percentage increase is going to impact us. This and losing the charitable deductions for itemizers are the two expected blows to our 2026 operation budget that I know of so far. It feels like I’m always adjusting for yet another hit to our finances, these days.
Year 6, Day 144: Two blows of bad news at once. A friend from blogging and Twitter for well over a decade has been fighting cancer and it’s now terminal. They aren’t that much older than me, and it is heartbreaking to imagine my world without them. This isn’t fair or ok or right. Another loved one is losing their dad to a serious illness, and it’s heartbreaking that this whole section of the family is having to absorb another loss so soon.
Several friends have come down with COVID or the flu, and JB’s been congested all day, so this cold/flu/COVID season is just roaring in. We just got the news that Kaiser will be stocking the COVID vaccine starting the 15th though, so with the Joker at HHS trying to do us out of vaccines with his ACIP meeting later this coming week, PiC and I are strategizing how we can get our vax ASAP without doing it on the same day. We’re grateful that it’ll be available! And we’d really appreciate if we could count on it being available for everyone and for more than 5 business days rather than being subject to the whims of the multitudes of anti-vaxxers.