May 12, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (258)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 6, Day 14: What a bummer of a morning. Both an 8 am call and missed one of my favorite neighborhood dogs walking by. PiC assured me that he fulfilled the petting duties but that didn’t help my need to pet a dog!

I’ve spent the last few weeks cajoling my seeds to grow to mostly no avail. One intrepid cucumber seedling peeked through, and I hoped for more but hope was fading after more knowledgeable gardening friends said the seeds were probably all duds. Then two more cucumber seedlings peeked out! And one sugar snap pea, and today, two green bean plants!

Last week’s exercise was a real struggle, my fatigue isn’t the worst it ever was but it’s heavy enough that it’s messing with even my internal mental motivation. Usually, even if I physically don’t feel up to it, mentally I still want to try. It’s been hard to find even that bit of mental desire to try, or feel stronger.

Year 6, Day 15: The cost of rice at our local Asian market is up 20%. We’ve pulled out storage bins so we can store a bit more than we usually do in case the next problem after higher prices is shortages and then empty shelves. I don’t know how long that situation would last but we want to have some really basic staples on hand for the worst of it. I think back to my parents’ refugee days, when all they had to eat regularly was rice and fish sauce. Even I can’t imagine things getting that bad this year, boy do I hope I’m right, and they survived that for a year. We will find a way to manage.

JB asked what else we’ll stockpile and I’m not totally sure at the moment. Dry goods are easier. I’m making sure that we have necessities. They each have a next size up coat, shoes, and underwear. We need next size up socks. Smol Acrobat has a stash of next size up hand me downs. JB’s stash is mixed. I probably need to get half a dozen pants. They’re tearing out their knees at a slower rate than previous years so that’s a relief.

Year 6, Day 16: I’m putting in an order at Weee! for ingredients for two recipes and that led to 40 minutes of spreadsheeting the grocery prices we paid at the local Asian market in the past six months compared to Weee!’s pricing. It’s a mix. Many of the small items we’d get (coconut cream, rice flour) are more expensive locally. But I never happen across error pricing online. That only happens in person, if ever (just over 2 lbs of pork butt for just under $6).

Had to work til nearly midnight. We had a roofing person come by for an hour to make decisions, I had to hunt down COVID booster appointments for everyone to make sure we’re as immune protected as possible before summer sets in. I had to have a consultation call with someone in a completely different time zone. The FSA claims had to be submitted because our cashflow is quite borked from an unfortunate confluence of expenses and we need to weather this moment of the year where expenses outpace the cash on hand.

Year 6, Day 17: No dogs again this morning but a crow friend was on our driveway and scared off by the kids rushing outside. They weren’t rushing at the crow friend, they didn’t even notice them I’m sure, but I did and I waved to them on their perch across the street before I put down a few treats. They were in the watching mood so they saw the treats and once the kids and I cleared out of the immediate space, the crows came over to pick up their treats before flying off.

That was nice but wuuuff I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed. There are so many things that I need to do at work, both day to day and at higher levels, but my brain’s really not feeling up to the bigger things.

On the home front I’m also feeling this anxiety. Our GP and the pediatrician have both approved our boosters, we just need to get all our appointments set up. We also asked about their policy on measles titers and boosters, the PA will ask about our getting titers done to test for immunity so that we know what we’re dealing with. I’m having regrets – a lot of these things were meant to be done in April but the days got away from me so they’re all landing in May when things are always hectic. Next year, I will do better with our boosters – we’ll get them in April, if we still HAVE COVID vaccines. Sigh. That existential dread doesn’t help anything. I think it’s worse this week between the fatigue and having no time to do my usual political actions.

Oh. It’s not that. It’s that my surrogate parents truly believe that the Jan 6 insurrection was engineered by the FBI and I’m feeling physical pain and discomfort sitting with that knowledge. I suspected that they might be thinking along those lines, but having it confirmed – emotional and physical pain.

Year 6, Day 18: It’s possible, on the third hand, my overwhelm is simply because I’m overwhelmed. There’s too much to do, and only one me. PiC does a ton of heavy lifting but as always, there’s always so much to do. I took the time out for a massage today. Iit is always incredibly painful to reset my muscles, and then I’m exhausted after. I managed to wade through most of my work, wish all the moms happy early Mother’s Day, put together a chicken pot pie (I’d cooked all the components a couple weeks back and frozen them)(also it turns out my frozen pie crust needs to be out of the freezer for 5 hours, not 1.5, to be workable), water the plants, clean up, make nuoc mao in prep for making thit kho later, open a sack of soil and hill my potatoes without accidentally burying the baby green bean plants.

It sounds like I got a lot done but I didn’t to take my friend’s dog for a walk or play fetch, clean the shower, vacuum any part of the house, scrub the tile, submit another FSA claim, try on my new trousers with work blouses to make sure they’re worth keeping, or find a belt for the jeans I took for a test wear yesterday. I’m sure there’s another dozen things I’ve forgotten. The list is always neverending but it’s felt worse this week. Also the Okini coordinator contacted me about some bigger needs that came up and I need to put together an email update to past contributors for the April donations and for this appeal in case folks can pitch in for these.

That leads me to: it’s been hard feeling cashflow-broke. We can absorb most impacts but I impulsively gave enough to put us in the hole for a couple months. Oops. I had to halt all giving this month and borrow a significant amount of money from our emergency fund. I was commiserating with a friend that it’s very hard to want to spend on all the things and save all the money at the same time.

May 5, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (257)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 6, Day 7: I started making lists of consumables to stock up on a little bit. Who knows how long we’re going to be impacted by tariff related shipping failures.

I’ve wanted a deep freezer for years, but we’ve only now got room for one – if I’m willing to commit to it. Really a bad time to be waffly. My hesitation is the commitment is threefold: deep freezer, backup generator, and then the more trivial by comparison cost of filling it up. It doesn’t happen very often but if we have another 2-3 day outage, our one generator can’t keep everything going long enough to save the contents of the fridge and freezer and what’s the point of filling up a freezer and losing it all to an outage? But I hesitate. Even if I hadn’t just donated four figures worth of cash to so many people in need two months in a row, and had to cobble together a professional mini wardrobe, the costs of both a freezer and a generator would still be a solid hit. As it is, it’s a lot. We’re also circling back to the roof work. We got so busy earlier in the year, we never got that work started. That gave me time to save, thankfully, but this feels like the year of all the money going out the door while our investments are completely bonkers.

Year 6, Day 8: My psyche is still healing from the bruising on Friday. I can tell because my dreams have been especially weird and revolve a lot around people and betrayal. Getting booked for 6 meetings over the next two weeks also messes with my psyche. I hate meetings. I especially hate more than one meeting a week, that eats deeply into my solo working time and management time. All of them have a legit need, still doesn’t make them any more palatable.

Very annoyed I was too tired and busy this weekend to complete the Christmas presents book order for Independent bookstore weekend. Or day. Whichever it was, bookshop had their annual free shipping event and that might be the last one we get for a while. I may have to go browse our local bookstore which I love but I just can’t find the energy to try to make that happen.

Year 6, Day 9: The jeans arrived! While the nice soft sweaters I tried with them make me look odd and lumpy, I’ve finally sized up appropriately and have jeans that fit. I know I said this before, was it a few months ago?, but that fitting was so wrong. I’m up to an 8P, the 00P and 2P days are well in the back mirror. I’d clearly forgotten what it felt like to have jeans that fit right. Also I snagged a pair of cargo pants that also fit for $13. I’m assuming that this is the last of the new clothes I’ll buy for several years, barring business pants if I can find just one pair that fit. That should be enough for the level of business professional I’m willing to present. If nothing else, COVID, bearing 2 kids, and hitting 40 should have sufficiently aged my face so that I no longer look like a child and don’t need makeup and full professional attire to be taken seriously. Plus my “I’m too old for this shit” facial expression ought to carry me nicely.

Forced myself to do all the sets of pushups scheduled for one day today, then forced myself to work late. My brain and arms are floppy noodles.

Year 6, Day 10: We’re seeing a lot of this absolutely ridiculous “just farm / hunt your own food” stuff on Bluesky in response to the slashing of the FDA and food standards. A whole lot of people forget that today’s foods and other consumables are only what they say they are on the packaging because of regulations and inspections and all that, don’t they? And a whole lot more swallow TikTok or whatever trad wife nonsense is spouting the “homesteading is easy” line without a lick of sense. I tell you, if we had to farm, just us right now the way our home is, for survival, we’d starve. Even if I put real effort into it, if we had to do that on top of our normal lives, we’d never make it. Even if we had actual farmland, weather and weeds that don’t sprout, and pests and predators and insects could easily devastate whatever crops you grow before you managed to harvest anything! How about we don’t let go of the wonders of modern life with foods that are available year round even during the starving time, and foods that are what they say they are, and medications that are what they’re intended to be, and clean water and air? Good grief. All these ignorant hateful people romanticize a fake perfect past that never existed and we all have to suffer for it.

Year 6, Day 11: The flippin ants are back!! Argh!! I’ll have to add boric acid to the mix. It’s somewhere around here.

I was on edge most of the day and couldn’t figure out why until I realized that it was a week ago today that my staff’s parting gift was a knife in the back. Right. Even though that’s likely in the rearview, it’s still haunting me with the ghosts of “having to trust new bosses to know my integrity and back me up” which historically is a thing I don’t, and they didn’t, do. I spent the day, and the weekend, primed to defend myself against the boss and HR. Turns out my boss didn’t want to see the proof that I documented of all the ways I provided Benedict Arnold support, they just wanted to know if I was ok and to apologize that I went through that alone with HR, without them. That was deeply unsettling. I’m not ready to extend trust to them yet but apparently my reputation, and my dealings with them directly, were enough for them to know that I’d never do what Benedict claimed in their call to HR, and that I would have gone above and beyond for them like I do any of my team. It’s true, I just didn’t expect to be treated like it was true, or humanely, after HR.

April 28, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (256)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 5, Day 365: Had a heck of a pain flare up last night thanks to an unexpected hike on the weekend. I think the Celebrex might have helped around midnight. It’s harder to tell if it’s the medication because the pain got a lot worse before it got better. I also didn’t get full relief the way I did with other meds but it was enough to let me sleep without the horrible nausea side effects. If that’s really the med, I can accept that compromise.

I tried on a bunch of clothes today. Out of 6 blazers, none fit. The oversize “boyfriend” look will probably never work for me. Before, that long and large fit overwhelmed my slight frame. Now that I’m 30 lbs heavier, but still short, it overwhelms in a dumpy sort of way. Highlights the belly I’m not trying to showcase. Of the 12 shirts, only four may work. I need to try them on with appropriate pants now, though.

Year 6, Day 1: My emotional burnout is pretty fierce. We had a situation develop with a friend, they’re in crisis, and none of us knew to what extent they were struggling until this week. When some? most? all? of the truth came out, it hit me like a freight train. I had a near panic attack. The similarity to the way my parents variably hid developing bad situations from me until it was nearly impossible for any single person to fix, and then I had to fix it, whew. It was so clear that even I had a good idea of why I was shaking like a leaf. I turned to a more grounded friend who helped me through the responsibility spiral. It wasn’t my fault for not knowing what was going on before it got this bad, and it isn’t entirely on me to fix – I can’t. It’s too much for any single person. After texting a few friends who were closer, to the person and to the situation, thankfully they were able to let me know they had the first steps of handling the crisis in hand. I am taking a step back to assess what I can actually handle without mentally or physically crippling myself. It’s probably not a coincidence that my hands swelled up today shortly after the news came out, just like the good ole days!

Year 6, Day 2: In more trivial matters, I’ve been holding on to my jeans that are uncomfortably too small out of a silly stubbornness which means that I haven’t been wearing them at all for months, it’s too uncomfortable! Duh. I found a sale that brought the price down to less than $20 so I’m picking up a couple pairs in hopes that they’re the right size and that I’ll actually be able to wear them. The too small pairs will be put away for handing down. After finally adjusting my thinking on too small clothes, I’m starting to look forward to having pants that fit.

Year 6, Day 3: We’ve got package accords with a neighbor: when one of us travels, we ask the other to pick up any packages left at their door. Sometimes if we see strangers roaming the neighborhood, it’s not often but a pack of roughhousing teens we don’t recognize that have started displaying slightly questionable behaviors like wrestling in the middle of the street (it’s not a safe street for this), or worse, random adults going from house to house to house looking for someone without identifying themselves, we grab each other’s packages first and tell them later. I appreciate having this extra bit of caution and mutual community action on a small scale. They texted us this week to grab a package for their teen I’d seen it when cleaning the front yard and meant to ask if they were home or not. PiC popped over and picked up three.

Neighbor groaned: I only knew they bought one thing, I have no idea what the others are.

I guess we’ve reached that stage of teens ordering things without asking first. Obviously their parents seem fine with it, but it definitely got me wondering: in today’s society, when are parents letting their kids buy things on their own? Especially ordering online? I’m not sure where I am with it. I seem to recall buying some things on my own, self funded, when I was about 15, but I didn’t start ordering online til I was 17.5 and that was only because I needed to try to find books for college for better prices than the college bookstore. I’ve definitely not yet let JB experience online shopping.

Year 6, Day 4: What a completely shit day at work. I’m still decompressing from the choices people made today in a vain attempt to game a system for personal gain, at my expense. I can’t quite say it shakes my faith in humanity, first you have to have faith, but I am definitely regretting the months and months of care, compassion and flexibility. They outright lied, saying we had done nothing for their needs. The things we did do to be flexible for them? Well, they spun as retaliation. It’s absurd but our HR only cares about how things look and not how things are. Never mind that I have reams of documentation of the support, and their enthusiastic agreement with that support, in writing. That doesn’t matter to them. As far as they’re concerned, I screwed up on this person’s say-so. That stings. And the people who know me best and trust me implicitly are no longer in charge. I know where I made mistakes in the bureaucratic processes now, but they were not mistakes in the things that mattered.  Anyway, my error is trivial compared to the shock of learning they had weaponized all of the work we put into supporting them to play the victim. I’m hurt, angry, and bitter. I’ve vented to friends and my therapist and shed really angry tears. I want to throw things. (My therapist is happy that I’m so openly angry and sad and hurt. Apparently, therapeutically, this is healthy.)

This will teach me to go the extra marathons for people. I wish them all the consequences they were happy to inflict on other people with their lies. Selfish bastards.