About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
Year 5, Day 131: After issuing a draconian rule to JB last week, up by 7 am and out the door by 8 am, we made it to school without running like our butts were on fire. That bit was good this morning. Smol’s glacial slowness eating breakfast wasn’t.
That segued into a crappy work day where nothing worked as it should BUT I decided to make much of it someone else’s problem rather than trying to fix things myself. If corporate is going to make it impossible for me to be efficient and get shit done like I normally would, then they can bite me. Someone else will deal with it and I will hound them until they do. It’s a small shift but for now it feels better.
It was still a long damn day, though. After helping Smol Acrobat help me hang up their clothes before dinner, I ran clean out of cope and melted to the ground for about 20 minutes. They cuddled with me for a bit and then suggested games “wif no buttons” (quiet, non-battery operated) we could play from a recumbent position. That little breather got me through to dinner. The reports from the DNC were further uplifting, giving me enough fuel to buckle down one more time. I’ve got a bunch of personal stuff to deal with tomorrow so I have to get stuff out of the way now.
It’s been really hard watching this country elect a man who is incapable of stringing together two coherent complete sentences in a row, and then have to go through the painful process of seeing him run AGAIN despite January 6th.
The very powerful reproductive freedom segment at the DNC
Year 5, Day 132: Back to the struggle of running late to school. Sigh. I’m setting my alarm 15 minutes early to see if that helps us with incrementally waking up earlier. Cold turkey from summer hours isn’t working. This is one of my scattered days: work, do a personal appointment, work more, do another personal commitment, come back and work late into the night after dinner. And still not make a big enough dent in the piles.
Garden harvest report: this week we picked the One and The Only Blueberry that the bush managed to create! There were originally two but it fell off the bush when it was but a microscopic berry. We cut it in half for the kids. They both declared it amazing.
I also picked all the green beans off the two bush beans that are companions to the blackberry bush. Three one-inch beans! 😂 They were crispety crunchy and JB declared them SO GOOD. The 6 other bush bean plants aren’t doing much, just growing leaves and being green. They’re spindly little things, so it’s hard to imagine them giving up real sized green beans. We’re definitely well past the estimated time to maturity of 2 months. Speaking of the blackberry bush, it’s down to the last 3 berries of this growing period. We probably got about 40 berries all told. The kids kept picking them as they ripened so the count is rough.
Trainer time! He increased my sets to four per exercise this week so I have to not take that as a challenge to also increase my reps. Mostly aiming for the middle or high middle of the reps range. Except for the calf raise, that one feels so easy I maxed out on my first set (10 reps). Then I realized that too is a mistake and eased back on each subsequent set, so the last set was only 4 reps.
Year 5, Day 133: Today was meant to be a”see no one, get tons done” day buuuuut I forgot that it’s a minimum day for JB and they have to go to the orthodontist. Sigh. SO much for that. Though I will say, it’s nice for it to still be quite early when we finish up at the appointment. We had plenty of time left to get a lasagna in the oven AND for me to get more work done. So that was one less point of stress. Much appreciated.
My coworker and I had a long chat about the frustration with our jobs, the external problems that started last fall and how we’re on the verge of rage quitting. He’s got a more versatile skill set, he could switch industries pretty easily whereas I’m more specialized and limited. We agree that things are absolutely maddening right now. We both really like our internal teams, we just hate the parent company teams. And neither of us want to have to go back to any of the places we’ve been before: non-profit, corporate, start up, small family business, academia-adjacent. They got us here and all had their own dysfunctionality, but we don’t want to revisit them.
Easy dinners this week: leftover pizza one night, tofu+soba+Costco tempura shrimp another night, and lasagna tonight. I had every intention of cooking up those chicken thighs but it just doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.
Year 5, Day 134: Most of my joints felt mildly inflamed today. Just enough that everything felt swollen and lumpy. I wasn’t excited to do my workout for the first time since starting, and I didn’t want to take JB to self defense in the afternoon. Admittedly they also didn’t want to go, their tightened braces hurt too much, so it worked out that I was letting both of us off the hook, but that did feel like a bit of a fail.
I think the way my joints felt, no cushions, was a lot the way my brain felt today, no cushion. I’ve been burning the late night oil too many nights in a row and that deepens the usual fatigue dramatically. Instead of being terrible to myself about it when I had trouble re-focusing, or when I decided not to do self defense class, I spent some time packing up a box of COVID tests for our friends. We still get them free from our healthcare provider and they don’t, so I’ve been ordering extra (well within our permitted amounts) to share with friends.
Trainer time! I did do my workout, though. I don’t want to break my streak so early. It felt like a good challenge when I finally got around to it which is why I’ve still been keeping up with it. I started with fewer reps and increased in the third and fourth sets if I felt ok. That felt better than the other way around. Smol Acrobat is sneaking up on me now, gotta go!
Year 5, Day 135: Boy, did we nearly blow it this morning. Everyone slept through their alarms again. I was the first one out of bed 15 minutes before we had to leave for school. It took all day to figure out that, at least for my part, this was likely because I haven’t had any recovery time from the last weekend. I’m not sure why everyone else is dragging. They’re usually a lot more peppy but we have got to reset for next week somehow. How do we get everyone energized and back to their more usual early morning schedules?
I had a delightful visit with our neighbor’s puppy today. I had planned to borrow his older sister but she managed to make herself sick (still crossing my fingers that she will be just fine after all the shenanigans she pulled), so we agreed it’d be Little Brother’s turn today. He was a curious soul, exploring and examining everything he could put his nose to, but it was a polite sort of investigation. He didn’t try to steal anything or chew on anything, he just wanted a really thorough sniff. We went through his commands, and he earned so many treats.
It’s good therapy to have dog time and it’s also a great reminder that if I adopted a dog now, I’m not going to but if I did, I’d be 100% committed to their well being and that can be a lot on top of what we’re already handling. The initial transition period can be so so hard. It was with Sera. I find myself more at peace with taking this time and space for me now without piling on caretaking.
1. My mini munch cucumber plant is growing five teeny cucumbers! This is delightful AND I’m again ever so grateful we don’t need me to grow any real amount of our food.
2. I petted strangers’ dogs at the county fair and they were all so cute.
Challenges this week: Getting everyone up and out the door on time.
Year 5, Day 124: For the past two weeks, PiC has had at least one bad driver encounter on their bike commute. I hate it so much.
Just this weekend, a bicyclist was hit and killed by some asshole driver in an area we are familiar with.
It’s usually an asshole driver around here – rushing to cut off other drivers before the red light, and/or running a very red light. They’re definitely disregarding pedestrians and bicyclists.
*****
Smol Acrobat came home with a bit of a leaky nose and a moan-groan-bemoan attitude. “I’m not few-wing well” they say. Oh boy. (We tested, negative for COVID.)
Trainer time! Week 2! We are going to schedule my workouts for every other day. That feels like a pace I can handle. It helps that I want to do it and I like to do it, it also helps to have someone tell me to do less this week to avoid a fatigue crash.
My brain knows this up until the point of doing the thing and suddenly it gets caught up remembering this was a dopamine generator! Let’s push through! More is good! But no, no it’s not.
Year 5, Day 125: I ache from head to toe. Smol Acrobat is a bit sicker, though testing negative for COVID right now so it’s probably just a bit of a cold viral thing, and I’m keeping my distance but PiC had to get up with them in the night. I was first up, which is unusual. More so today because I slept badly. I keep waking up sweating buckets in the middle of the night. Don’t know what it is but this is getting old.
But the real whammy was that a friend needed childcare and we took on 3 bonus children most of the day. This, after hosting JB’s friend for 3 days. We vastly, deeply, overestimated our ability to deal with such a crowd. On the one hand, Smol Acrobat was tickled pink with the company, both of them had a ton of fun with the bonus siblings. On the other hand, children talk so much. SO MUCH. They talked my ear right off.
PiC handled half the day on his own, taking all four kids (minus Smol Acrobat who I raced to drop off and raced back to my desk) out on an adventure. I worked as fast as I could and then made their snacks, ordered dinner, minded them for an hour or so until we
I was very pleased to be able to tangibly help our friend who is going through a bad divorce from an abusive spouse, and it was good to see them, but also wow did that take so much energy.
Unfortunately that also required me to stay up and work until midnight to clear enough work off the desk to feel an ounce less despair over how behind I am. If I can get more caught up before the weekend then it’ll actually stay caught up. But getting there is going to take a lot of work.
Trainer rest day that wasn’t restful.
Year 5, Day 126: I’m still so physically tired from yesterday I don’t even have the energy to dopamine farm today. My brain status: dude, if you can lift your arms, you’re doing well today. Who cares if we get anything done.
Oh right. The job cares. The job cares and the bills care and the kids needing feeding care. Fine. I spent the day catching up painfully and slowly on one mountain after another, only taking a short lunch break and a Walk the JB break when they hadn’t been outside all day and refused to go do SOMETHING active on their own. They had been puttering around the house doing the laundry as instructed but filling in the gaps with books, comic books, and the occasional video game.
Trainer time! I didn’t like squeezing it all into the end of the day but that’s how the cookie crumbled today, between having to take JB out for their outside time and keeping me locked down at my desk to push through piles of paperwork. Luckily they felt easy: glute bridges and calf raises. Note for trainer: I accidentally did a cardio today.
Year 5, Day 127: Sent a nibling a belated graduation gift today. Tracking the birthday gifts for this weekend’s birthday party.
Annnnd another round of layoffs are looming at PiC’s work. My pessimism was spot on – this spring I darkly predicted that we could breathe safely for about one quarter before we’d be holding our breaths again. It’s not just us, I see a headline that I won’t link to because it’s Fox “Layoffs announced at multiple companies this summer”, and that tallies with the lists of layoffs we have been seeing. But here we are again. We’ve been stretched thin this year, emotionally, physically and financially, after Sera’s intensive care and vet bills, and as we helped out a bunch of people who are living far more on the edge. Most of it was direct aid so we won’t see it again, and that’s fine, and some of it was big loans and we’ll deal with that later.
Funny story: the toaster oven caught on literal fire today. I realized we don’t have any fire retardant in the kitchen and dithered over the idea of throwing flour on it because what a mess that would make. PiC found a more sedate way to put it out and all was well. Go figure this was probably the least taxing thing of the week.
Note for trainer: Oops, another accidental cardio today. It’s my rest day though, so this was just bonus.
Year 5, Day 128: It’s been a week of overcommitting, both for work and personal stuff, and today’s no exception.
I’ve been working flat out and late into the night most of the week to burn through my backlog to create time for a doggy playdate today. It felt hard to fit in but there was no question of giving up the plan because it’s been 3.5 weeks since my last dog time. That’s far too long.
Pup and I spent about an hour together. My soul needed that. There’s a special sort of happiness generated from spending time with a dog that simply can’t be made any other way. Then I got back to work and cranked through another few piles. There’s light at the end of that tunnel yet.
Note for trainer: Oops, another accidental cardio today. Well, not accidental. More like a plan with consequences I ignored beforehand. I went to a friend’s to borrow their dog for a walk. That plan was revised almost immediately to taking him home to play because they’re so busy they haven’t played in ages and my legs were going to fall off if I didn’t sit down, or at least stop walking so much, for a while. We hung out in the yard playing fetch for nearly half an hour and that was perfect. Pup was happy and exhausted and I was happy and exhausted. We’ll bridge this dog-less life gap with more of these doggy playdates. It doesn’t erase the sadness but it does generate a special kind of happiness.
In the end, between that and an adventure with PiC that involved so many unauthorized and unappreciated stairs, leagues and leagues of them, I had to quit on my workout plan for the day. Or so I thought.
When I got home and realized that two of the three exercises were arms, I knocked those out so that my body was evenly balanced, top and bottom, with fatigue. Win?
I let the kids eat blackberries right off the bush in the backyard and that feels like, I hope, a fun core memory that will stick with them.
They’ve had a pretty whirlwind summer with big chunks of time with both sides of the family, but it never seems like enough. One week with my side, one with his side: they don’t want to come home. Two weeks with my side, they don’t want to come home. I don’t know if I could handle living in each other’s pockets the way parts of the family do… ok no, I can’t. But there are moments when I think that it wouldn’t be so bad to be able to go hang out with Grandma when we are missing her without having to pack for a ten hour drive and a week away from home.
I grew up with cousins right next door, and I loved it, but that didn’t last long. People began moving away from each other after several years as kids got older and needed more space, or rent got too expensive, or some other adult reasons. Even if we were still in the same city, things just weren’t the same when people had to drive to get to each others’ homes rather than walk. So while I do empathize with JB’s yearning to be with their people all the time forever, life just pulls us apart and I hate that kind of change but I think this is the first time I’m really processing my own childhood loneliness from the mini diaspora that I hated. JB’s experience isn’t that, we’ve never been that physically close to family, but they are envious of those parts of the family who ARE that near to one another and I feel for them.
Still, I can’t see going back to a life in Southern CA with the unending traffic and the .expectations
Life with Smol Acrobat
Smol Acrobat’s been promoted to helping me put the wash in the washer and transfer wet clothes to the dryer. They’re also tall enough to put away clean utensils now and mostly remember where everything goes so they are now in charge of that portion of clearing up. JB loves this development, they hate putting away the utensils. SA is super proud of themselves.
SA is finally mooooostly putting on their own socks and shoes without a prolonged fight over it. Fight: telling them three or five times (each) to go get socks, then to put them on, then to stop running around and put shoes on and then get them on the right feet. One less exasperating fight a day! Mostly. Sometimes.
Precious Moments
PiC: Alright kiddies!
Smol Acrobat, offended: Huh?? We not kitties!
JB: I’m a kitty.
Smol Acrobat: Me too!
*****
Me: Do you like almonds?
SA: No.
Me: Do you like pistachios?
SA: No.
Me: Do you like cashews?
SA: Yes.
Me: Do you like peanuts?
SA: Not vewwy well. But yes.
*****
SA: dis means it’s happy? (Holds up smiling cat)
Adults: yes.
SA: dis means it’s angwy? (Holds up scowling cat)
Us: yes.
SA: Puuuuoiiiiifect!
Us: … Was that a (badly mispronounced) pun???
*****
Smol Acrobat is starting to devise tactics to get what they want (to sleep in our bed): Mommy can you shower first? Den I can sweep wif you?
When advised by PiC that no, they cannot sleep in our big bed because they kick too much: “but today will weave her awone” /pleading
But you can’t help it, it’s not on purpose.
“Today I won’t!” they continue pleading.
😅 I’m sitting in the next room listening to the negotiations and was almost tempted to cave until I remember how much I can’t sleep when they cosleep.
Year 5, Day 124: My struggle with brain fog for the past decade has routinely made me feel akin to Charlie from Flowers for Algernon on the back end of the experiment: my mental capabilities have have peaked and now I was just on an inexorable downward slide. That was before I had a term for what was happening when my brain felt like cotton and I almost physically struggled to get my brain to work or think. These days, I know what it is but that doesn’t help the slight depression that sets in when my own personal Karl the fog rolls over. This is one of the reasons I started Duolingo, out of a hope that maybe the language practice will both sharpen my skills a bit and maybe get the brain synapses snapping enough to ward off the fog.
I’ve been lucky to be clear for a few weeks, but I can feel it edging in again. Sigh. I didn’t miss mini-Karl. Fitting that it’s rolled in thick, along with SF-Karl.
Getting back into the swing of things of work again has meant dealing with the height of people’s incompetence. I knew the pendulum would eventually swing this way, but hoped it would be a lot further off in the future. I published this tee and tote design to let off some steam.
Trainer time: we agreed to start with four small workouts a week to see how that goes. This week it’ll be Sun/Tues/Thurs/Sat to give me a rest day in between all workouts at first. Yesterday’s was broken up across the day: a 14 minute walk / 2 sets of 4 modified pushups (my wrists hated that) / 2 sets of 5 lateral raises (not bad), 3 sets of 15 second planks (I didn’t give myself much recovery time in between, no wonder the last two felt so much harder). Today is my rest day and the way I’m crackling, boy howdy. Nothing hurts too much yet so we’re going to not push it. That’s the whole motto of this training work: don’t push it. Consistency is our goal.
Year 5, Day 125: All Neil Gaiman works have been evicted from my shelf. They’re all in a box to be labeled with something appropriately scathing. I won’t be angry at myself for believing he was a reasonably decent person at the time I was a fan and enjoyed his works, the Death of the Endless is my headcanon, but I hate that he betrayed everyone’s trust so badly.
Work was sixteen kinds of frustrating today so I consciously chose to work on a personal project at night instead of putting in free overtime. I’m making packing cubes for the kids. I had completely forgotten how much I hate sewing corners. Hate hate hate. Jabbed myself several times with the pins and sewed over the zipper a few times trying to navigate those corners. By the end, I’d attached the zipper to the side fabric and the top fabric but was completely disgruntled instead of proud. The seams are hideous and the top fabric is trying to fray. Once I attach the bottom piece of fabric, it’ll be done. Ugly but done. I’d had a moment earlier today where I thought about auctioning a set of packing cubes or zipper pouches for a Lakota fundraiser but that’s going to have to sit on the back shelf until I get much better at this. How much of the problem is my fabrics mismatch? This time I’m combining a soft fuzzy material with canvas instead of a plain basic cotton and canvas. Maybe I measured better last time.
Trainer time: my first assigned exercise was 2 sets of squats, up to ten reps per set. Ok, no problem. I watched the video on form and set to it. It felt so easy so I was cranking them out but as I got to 6, 7 I remembered that this is my first week of exercise in decades. Also that pacing thing? Oh yeah. Stopped at 7. Gave myself a full minute of recovery time so I could fetch my lunch. Did another 6 being mindful I shouldn’t blow it all out in my first week as I am wont to do, and those 6 felt much harder. My legs had recovered enough from that initial set to say nope don’t like it.
It took two hours for the pain and fatigue to pass. I could still feel the strain by the time I wrapped up
Year 5, Day 126: I grew up hearing this song but never knew the name of it, or the lyrics. Thanks to The Brothers Sun for bringing it back to me. It’s first nostalgic and then painful because my earliest memories of it are my parents singing it together and that’s a period of time I just don’t know what to do with.
“The parent is always the parent. The child is always the child.” Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. I didn’t expect that bit of therapy.
Trainer time: Today’s a rest day. Stopping after the one exercise instead of pushing through for pride’s sake yesterday was ultimately the right call. I’m very tired today but not so wiped that I can barely function. Tomorrow, I’ll dial way back on the reps in each set so that I can do all of the 3 or 4 planned exercises across the day. Also it’s best if I don’t do them all in one go, I think, that way my body can’t surf on endorphins in the early sets and then crash like it usually does when I’m doing something fun.
Year 5, Day 127: Happy surprise, a few people donated to the Lakota Pine Ridge Giving Project today! ❤️ Not sure how they found me but happy they did.
Also, I got so many compliments on my Reading tee-shirt and Svaha shirt that I refreshed the design: Read Recklessly shirt and tote.
Trainer time! Still dragging this morning but I started early with one of the three exercises anyway: lateral raises. I like these! I did my modified pushups in the afternoon, my lying leg raises in the evening. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that doing it broken up this way is “wrong” but so far, doing it this way means I’m better able to gauge how much a single exercise has taken out of me before I completely go over the cliff. It can take a couple hours for that to sink in, so I’m hoping that after a while, I’ll be able to join up two sets of exercises further down the line, then all three or four, into a single session without more than this level of fatigue. There’s definitely more fatigue but it’s still bearable.
Year 5, Day 128: I had an awful nightmare where I lost track of JB and Smol Acrobat in an airport due to a series of terrible decisions I made in the dream that I would never make in waking life. I remember at the end of the dream asking myself why did I decide to do that?? It makes no sense! And it got me thinking about what my subconscious is anxious about (I’m a terrible parent?) and then about my mom and how she was at age 10 already carrying the responsibilities of an adult. About how the only thing she wanted was to feel loved later in her life but I was so ill-equipped to offer that to her because I didn’t even recognize how to show or accept unconditional love myself. Love is always conditional in my subconscious, when it comes to me. My kids only love me because I kept them alive, for example.
So I woke in a very emotionally ruffled state. Sadly, so did Smol Acrobat. I shook it off after trading terrible nightmare stories with a couple friends on Bluesky but they decidedly did not. They reacted to every little jostle with tears, and when JB helped them put their lovie to bed so they could go to breakfast, that also caused a waterfall. (A little related: Must resume my search for ice packs for the kids and for myself that can stay in the freezer longterm. My last couple of tries were returned since the instructions said the packs could only be in the freezer for a couple hours at a time. That’s not helpful!)
Anyway the latest on the UHC FSA debacle: after the Department of Labor questioned their practices, they immediately processed the claims again, however, we couldn’t log in to access the Explanation of Benefits. We tried 20 times on different browers and computers and internet connections: sometimes it would almost log in and then kick us out.
When PiC finally got someone on the phone to see why the log in wasn’t working today, they claimed that the username was case sensitive and that we weren’t entering the right combination of upper and lowercase. Except that we most certainly didn’t make any changes since we called them, and we definitely would not have changed it to the combination that they claim is the right one, so I’m positive that that isn’t the whole truth, and also that someone on their side changed it out of spite if it was indeed changed. Because if it had actually been changed, why would the log in work enough to get us partly logged in and then log us back out when we tried to access anything? That’s not how logins work.
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.