February 19, 2024

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (194)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 4, Day 321: (TMI for those of you who don’t track your pets’ every movement, literally.)

Sera and I had the weirdest morning walk that we’ve ever had. She was wearing her “on a mission (to poop, probably)” face at her “on a mission (to poop, probably)” trotting pace. But she’d already pooped, twice, even! She even did the weird boy-dog attempt to squeeze out a few more drops of pee. She’s never done that before, nor has she basically decided that she was going to go for a much longer walk and I could come along if I wanted but she was GOING. I had to coax her to turn back around to go home. She trotted most of the way back, too.

*****

Every Monday takes a bigger bite out of me than the last. I was grinding my teeth by 10 am facing down the mountain of nonsense work added to my usual overflowing plate. That doesn’t usually happen until I’m asleep. This isn’t a good development.

A friend reminded me that I’m only one person. Then I reminded me I am terrible at pacing myself when faced with a giant list of things to do, maybe work on that by not trying to vanquish everything before noon? I hated my suggestion but reality bites.

I was also having a sensory thing. My fingernails were apparently two millimeters too long, and the way they landed on the keys irritated me beyond all reason. I clipped my nails and that helped a little.

*****

Given my tizzy last week, this was ironic: Sitting down to dinner, Smol Acrobat requested “a call”. A call with whom? “A call wif Wee’s school!” They wanted to listen to a PTA meeting! πŸ€¦πŸ»β€β™€οΈπŸ˜…

Year 4, Day 322: 3 hours of sleep last night thanks to painsomnia. There’s something really insulting about knowing you’re in too much pain to sleep, but also knowing that for every hour you can’t fall asleep, that sleep deprivation will drive the pain higher.

Plus 3 hours of my day taking Sera 🐢 to her consult. Utter and complete wipeout sort of day. I wanted a nap when we got home. I got another hour to work before school pickup and an hour to work before after school activity. I’m so tired I could cry but the pain has ridden with me all day so that’s not a good prospect for a good night of sleep.

JB leapt to be extra helpful when they understood just how depleted I was after we picked up fast food for dinner. They helped prep the rice and my meds and set the table and played with Smol Acrobat as soon as they came home, keeping their spirits up so they didn’t dissolve into the usual post-homecoming sulks because they want to play but it’s dinner time. (Fried chicken on the table won the little one over, truth be told.) They and PiC did their best to pull the nighttime duties from me so I could try to rest. For my part I tried not to feel guilty for needing accommodations / help, and worked on breaking the pain cycle. My bones have increasingly felt like lava for three days, usually it kicks in at night but it lingered all day today, so I used heat and massage gun and heat again. When that didn’t shake it, I turned to my last resort of pain meds cocktail.

Year 4, Day 323: I can’t recall if I shared this article link with y’all but it has been on my mind since I first read it: A discovery in the muscles of long COVID patients may explain exercise troubles. My fatigue has always puzzled me. I could feel the differing levels so clearly and it always bothered me that I could walk up a hill one day and the next day, be winded halfway up the hill. And the next day, even more winded. It made me feel like I was deconditioned.

I’ve always used the analogy that my tank is never full. Sleep and rest never bring my tank back up to full, they just pull the indicator back up to slightly above the red empty line. It’s clear my body gets depleted over and over at a faster rate than others but what else can you do to refuel it if food and sleep hardly do anything?

These bits hit home:

Among the most striking findings were clear signs that the cellular power plants, the mitochondria, are compromised and the tissue starved for energy.

In his own research, Systrom has found evidence of abnormal oxygen uptake by the skeletal muscles during peak exercise in both long COVID and ME/CFS patients, which indicates there’s a problem with oxygen delivery to the mitochondria.

Most nights I’ve been feeling unbearably tired, dragging myself through the last hours of the evening to collapse into bed. Most mornings I’d roll out of bed because sitting up was too hard, I felt too heavy and exhausted, and I was existing solely through sheer willpower despite my desperation to just quit. Some of that was the weight of some incredibly fraught family conflicts. Finally facing up to them in therapy and out of therapy literally took some of that weight off my body. I could breathe more freely. But I was still, am still, fatigued from things that wouldn’t have fazed old me ten times over. This is now a largely imaginary memory of old me, I guess, of a young me with youth and vitality?

I’ve experimented with increasing my dose of coQ10, one of the supplements the ME/CFS people advised me to add for a few weeks now. I probably should have documented this a little better than just blogging about it but it does seem like the weighty feeling of fatigue overall is a touch lower these days even despite the higher than ever stress levels and feeling like I’m juggling too many balls for any one person at work.

Year 4, Day 324: Enervating day. Ran JB to school, then ran Sera to the vet for bloodwork (1 hour), then worked briefly before diving into 2 back to back conference calls. I just wanted to curl up and nap or cry, or both, when I got off the calls. They weren’t difficult calls, it’s just the amount of energy it takes these days to TALK to people and keep up that professional front takes more than I’ve got in the tank.

Because I’m completely pandering to Sera’s demands these days, I moved my work into the bedroom and worked from bed after hours so that she wouldn’t have to come stare at me in the office, asking me to go to bed, late at night. Somehow 9 pm turned into 10 pm and then turned into 11 pm before I called it quits but it meant that there was a little bit less pressure when things happened to cut into my working hours. As they keep doing.

*****

This year JB has a whole week off next week, instead of two long weekends, and they were going to do a weekend trip to visit family except everyone they meant to visit came down with COVID. We’re scrambling to figure out how to schedule next week, now, but I’m so relieved we heard about it before they left.

*****

PiC gleaned info from a parent volunteer thing he attended: the pair of parents in JB’s year who have been the most prominently active in the PTA until this year were actively recruited for some committee for the fourth grade year and they bowed out saying this is their last year, they’re burned out. I guess that answers one of my questions!

Year 4, Day 325: JB had a fun field trip today but sadness strikes (elsewhere) again. After only 4 hours at daycare, I got a call that Smol Acrobat wasn’t feeling well, had a slight fever, and needed to go home. I dashed out to pick them up and after a long wait while they napped, we made our slow and sad way home. They settled in to read a book with PiC and got a second much needed nap while I worked.

Then found out that a person I respect, though I only knew her online, Fiqah, had died. She’s been ill a long time from Long COVID and suffered greatly in her last months, having to crowdfund for housing and medical care. I’ve known her for… must be over a year?

She was a friend of a friend, when I started to contribute to her crowdfunding regularly for care and other needs, and I developed my own relationship with her directly over time. I never got to know her at her best, only in the worst year and change of her life when she was ill, terminally so, and suffering greatly from the effects of Long COVID. Yet even in her last days, she was still smart, kind, empathetic, and rightfully furious at a world that’s failing all of us. She was a lovely human with incisive wit and intellect, and she deserved so much better. She wished to die housed, and she was when she went, and I’m glad for her but it’s such a basic thing that a person shouldn’t have to HOPE or wish for.

I hate how this world keeps failing good people stuck in the margins while the evil people keep thriving. I hate that we have to continually do the calculus of how many people we can help, and how much, and how often, without endangering our own financial health because we have kids and who has a safety net at the other end of things if not of our own making? I had to decide which of several mutual aid needs we could assist with every month and how much, while still paying our bills. It’s a demoralizing calculation. How do we balance people’s very real needs today against our very real future needs that we have to assume is entirely our own burden to carry? Who knows if anyone will be able to help us when our time comes. More than ever, I feel bereft of community and feel/know we’re on our own when disaster or problems befall us. But these precious people are here, today, and deserve to live and thrive, too. It’s heartbreaking.

February 16, 2024

Good Things Friday (260) and Link Love

  1. I managed TWO, no, THREE short yardwork sessions this weekend. I pulled weeds for ten minutes Saturday morning. Smol Acrobat very sweetly asked for a weeding session later that afternoon, which I’d been promising them for days, so it was time to make good on my promise. The last one was for Smol Acrobat’s sake too, but mostly to divert them from the Lego trolley they wanted. However. Ten minutes of chopping hedges is not the same as ten minutes of pulling weeds. My hands were shaking terribly after whacking off the sticky-out bits all along the hedges and dumping them into compost. I needed an hour to recover from that one.
  2. I have come to like my Darn Tough wool socks so much that I don’t want to wear my cotton socks anymore. The first part is good. Not sure what I’m going to do about the second part since we try to keep things out of landfill as much as possible. They’re still in good shape but I think they’re too worn in to be handed down. Actually maybe I’ll set them aside for one of the kids to wear when their feet catch up. They like borrowing my stuff.

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February 14, 2024

My kids and notes: Year 9

Life with JB

We have a nine year old! πŸ‘€ JB got a small party this year.

We booked part of a pizza parlor early in the day so we were the only ones there. 9 kids (5 families) showed up of the 16 kids/8 families we invited. I was very worried about how much energy it’d take and how it’d go, especially because we were just coming off a rough week of illness, but it worked out really well in the end. It was small enough to be just manageable, with one family helping us with Smol Acrobat, and the other families occasionally assisting with stages of cleanup and kid management.

We splurged on the activity and the food, we saved on the cake (Costco: $25, first time we’ve ever had one of their famed sheet cakes) and the decor (Party City: $20). The place provided almost none of the assistance they had promised so I was orchestrating so most of the event unexpectedly. That kept me too busy to socialize but we did each catch up a little with each set of parents. JB was thrilled to see their friends and ran an illicit (temporary) tattoo parlor out of the bathroom for them. Of course they did. Smol Acrobat was briefly put out that they didn’t get one too, but they weren’t willing to wait with the older kid crowd and moved on quickly.

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February 12, 2024

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (193)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 4, Day 314: I’ll do a full write-up later. Our power is still out today, internet is still down, my phone’s data connectivity is next to nothing. The kids are sick, I have a sore throat and a huge workload, and we spent too much of the day navigating choked roads to get to a safe place where we could connect to the internet and charge the devices enough to get us through the day and night.

The county libraries were all open to the public for water, snacks, and charging.

I’ll tell you what, functioning by lamplight, with only power for the fridge and no other appliances, really narrows your focus on what you can do. No dishwasher, no vacuuming the mess tracked in from the storm, no toaster oven, no microwave, no hair dryers, no space heaters, no heating pad.

We still have running water and plumbing, and gas to heat food and the water for bathing, and I cannot tell you how thankful I was for that much. We are so not equipped for the loss of power, internet, gas AND running water.

Year 4, Day 315: POWER IS BACK. It’s weird to see the utterly still blue sky, with one enormous grey cloud hovering as if copy-pasted in place, after the stormy weekend with all the challenges and consequences. We get a one day reprieve, then it rains again tomorrow. I think that may be the end of the wet for a handful of days.

I may have overdone it trying to right the ship doing all the things this morning: 3 loads of laundry, ran the vacuum twice, ran the dishwasher, while trying to catch up on a couple hundred emails and projects.

With JB home sick another day, and trying to heft an unbelievable amount of work, I’ve been on edge and snappish. I decided JB won’t be going to their class this afternoon. They probably have the energy to and would be fine (masked as always) but I needed to take any one damn thing off my plate and that was my pick. It was a good call.

Smol Acrobat came home meowing sadly. They’re running a slight fever, appear flushed, and tell us “I’m not feew-wing well.” Their throat hurts and they’ve got that weird dry congestion that doesn’t result in a drippy nose, just leaves you feeling stuffed up with no relief. I had to spoonfeed them their dinner. I pulled out the remaining frozen half of the Japanese curry I cooked a while back for dinner. Thanks two weeks ago me!

We’re in for a rough night. Well, PiC is. He’s been fielding all the nights for a while. Even if he hadn’t, Smol Acrobat switched from wanting Mom cuddles and feeding at dinner to the quavery: “Daddy, can you take care of me?” and only wanting Daddy to give them their medicine and prepare them for bed.

Year 4, Day 316: JB hacking coughed their way through the night, Smol Acrobat sobbed and fussed through the night. I offered to take over at 2 am but PiC waved me off. In the end that was for the best, I needed that sleep pretty badly and Smol Acrobat had to stay home with us today with that fever. We traded off work time slots throughout the day.

They were surprisingly chipper, despite their very rough night, and managed a halfway decent nap midday. I was so tempted to lay down with them but I’d just get mad having to get back up again even if I napped. As a night ogre, the waking up transition at any time is unpleasant.

JB and I also had an appt at the orthodontist after school. They’re headed for braces in a few months. Sigh.

Texting with an old high school classmate who’s visiting our old teachers brought on the sads of a blobby amorphous feeling that I don’t belong anywhere in meatspace. I think this is about feeling very disconnected from the friend groups online and off. One of my closest daily friends has dropped out of contact for almost two years now, and I miss them deeply. I know it was for their own reasons, I respect that, I just miss them. (Separately, it makes me wonder if I’m just a bad friend because I’m the only one who was dropped. Maybe I’m just too much of whatever I am.) It’s gotten worse since Twitter went to pieces and my social web was destroyed. I have this space, some folks in the Discord and a bit of Bluesky, I peek into Instagram because I was forced to create one for the business. It feels scattered. That sense of wide connectedness is gone. Even though I still text with a handful of friends from the ‘nets, I feel out of sync with myself and with the world, emotionally.

I had to do a Murderbot and face the wall this evening for a minute when the feelings were too much. I’m in the middle of Network Effect right now and very much empathize with Murderbot. I hate feelings. πŸ˜”

Year 4, Day 317: Frost everywhere this morning! Aftermath cleanup continues. I’ve finished recharging all the lanterns and the Yeti. That just leaves the crank radio to charge. It can be charged by cranking of course, that’s the point of it, but why not save our arms if we can charge it ahead of time. So I finally get JB to school, load Smol Acrobat up for their ride with PiC, clean up a bit around the house and reheat my breakfast eggs. Sit down and really start to dig into emails and urgent morning work stuff. Take a bite of egg. Miss a text. See a call come in from PiC: they got a flat tire 3 miles away from daycare. ARGH. The full round trip rescue ate my morning. Who put this curse on us? It’s one thing after another this week. Relentless.

We had to skip JB’s afterschool class again because I could not handle losing another 2 hour chunk of my time today. It’s all management work today and I don’t fancy working until 11 pm again. (That was last night.) It wasn’t until dinnertime that I remembered my whole breakfast, lunch, and snack was a plate of scrambled eggs and half a box of Wheat Thins. Not ideal.

There were “this is where rain may fall again Thursday!” headlines that I waved off and YEP! IT WAS US. PiC and Smol Acrobat got caught out biking home. They were drenched.

Year 4, Day 318: Work work everywhere, as far as the eye can see. This was my first mostly uninterrupted workday all week. I was desperate for one but didn’t dare say it out loud for fear of triggering another spontaneous combustion of my day. I’m not at all recovered from the week but having gotten through the worst of the workload, I can finally say TGIF.

Also not great: PiC’s company is a multinational one so from their POV this isn’t (maybe) that big a deal but from ours it is: They just laid off a couple hundred people. Still no idea on how much of this will roll over to his department, and we wouldn’t know until it hit. He’s not high enough up to be privy to those conversations.

February 7, 2024

Money & Life Report: January 2024

Net worth and life update: Image of nest with 5 blue blackbird eggs.

On Money

Income

Our primary income comes from our full time jobs. We have minimal income from investing in index funds and dividend stocks (all reinvested). We earn money on the side to supplement our main incomes. We get a bit of income from Swagbucks, cash back sites (Rakuten, Mr.Rebates) and affiliate links to Bookshop and Amazon sometimes pay a micro-commission to keep the blog running. The sidebar has ways to support the blog and our charitable giving.

Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.

***

Dividend income. We received $1852 in dividends from the stocks portfolio mostly made up of a surprise dividend from Costco. Well, surprise to me. They announced it last year to the whole world, I just wasn’t paying attention. My buy-and hold, and not timing the market, strategy all lean heavily on the “don’t even pay attention to it at all” tactic. It’s very effective! As you can see. But the value of that, plus my annual bonus, have hardly had any time to spend with me before it’s flown off to take care of home stuff and health stuff. It was nice knowing ya.

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February 5, 2024

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (192)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 4, Day 307: JB has the day off so they are running errands with me and having a second tutoring session with the second of two teachers I booked to try to help them get a grip on fractions.

I squeezed in some hours of work over the weekend to clear more of my inbox of the routine stuff so I’d have time to do errands without falling too far behind. The only good thing about that is when I hit “Exasperation: HIGH”, I can walk away. Not so much during the week.

I overdid it both days on the weekend on the personal side too: cleaning the house on Saturday, walking the kids to the park on Sunday for an hour-long outing, and passed out both afternoons when I was resting from the exertion and the pain it stirred up. It’s not a pain flare, it’s more of a pain … volcano bubbling up? There are no good analogies for this stuff. But after being on my feet for any amount of time, my back and hips ache and burn. That pain combined with the fatigue knocked me on my butt. I’ve been taking 200 mg of CoQ10 daily on the recommendation of the ME/CFS folks at Kaiser but this week I’m experimenting with upping that to 300 mg daily. Their recommendation for magnesium is only one tenth the amount that my body prefers, so there’s always a chance that the same principle applies to some of the other supplements. Here’s hoping that the increase doesn’t set off any/many side effects.

In the garden, my onions are now on Day 146 after planting day, and the green tops are still not turning yellow and falling over. They aren’t even from seed, they’re from sprouted onions we broke down and planted! The guidelines all gave rough ranges of 90-125 days from planting, growing, and ready to harvest. Do we have mutant onions? Do we have onions at all? Do we just have onion tops that won’t stop growing and nothing underground? Is it weird that I’m afraid to poke around and find out lest I somehow disturb and therefore destroy them?

I’ve never grown onions before, obviously, this is all strange.

Year 4, Day 308: A friend shared a TikTok about a cat who needed a bit of sedation before going back to the vet and the mental image of the little cat face, pupils dilated and totally stoned, with the little mrow? got to me. Having never had the slightest curiosity about drugs in any way, and hardly any interest in alcohol, the “must be nice to be checked out of reality for a bit” sentiment is new to me. I’m not seeking it, my reasons for never experimenting still stand, but it’s telling how overwhelmed I’m feeling right now.

I’ve been working late hours all month, trying to catch up from the holidays and then sickness and then sickness and then exhaustion… And work is its own maelstrom of stress right now in so many ways.

Then we had JB’s self defense class and we got assigned homework which made me regret picking this place that expects parents to practice with their kids as if we have the time and energy to do that on top of taking them to classes. Then the part of me that knows it’s important to do that practice at home feels guilty because they’re not going to improve without support. And it is so important to me that they learn these skills so I have to provide that support. So we practiced after dinner which sucked because they didn’t take it seriously and kept giggling and I was at the end of my rope already anyway so that made me mad and while we hugged after it was all over there was a lot of snapping and sternness during the practice session because I hate it when people disrespect my time and very limited energy. Even if people = my own kid.

Tiny bright side: Smol Acrobat actually ate most of their dinner without being fed or fussing. I had to help with a bit of their salad but they ate the pasta and oranges on their own.

Further disheartening: Sera’s bloodwork came back and while she’s responded to the steroids, her liver enzymes are now going up and that’s not good at all.

It’s only been 3 days on the increased CoQ10 but isn’t it supposed to increase my energy? I feel so depleted.

Year 4, Day 309: Big storm moving in today.

Courtney Milan’s warning about apocalypse food brought up a funny/weird thing I have. In January 2020, when it seemed like things were going the wrong way with COVID, PiC went to the store and picked up a variety of canned foods that would keep.

Courtney Milan says: Lots of people talking about apocalypse food storage in my mentions because of Zuck, so here’s my reminder that your food storage should include things that taste good and that you like to eat. Source: my parents got apocalypse food storage that was literally like several tons of wheat and nothing else. We had to live on it for a few months when my dad had no income. It was Not Good. Please have seasonings and like, variety. My parents still have like a thousand pounds of that wheat. (They got it 43 years ago). They still grind it for flour. I am the executor of their estate and this is going to be the Least Fun part of that job.

It turns out that while I have a great imagination for things I will crave, I do not have the ability to continue wanting that food when we have it in stock. It’s like my prepper appetite was satisfied by the acquisition and my body just shuts down any desire to actually EAT that food. Granted, we were never in a position where food scarcity was enough of a problem that we HAD to rely on them. But still.

Year 4, Day 310: I have hit my limit, again. Today, everything was too much.

I was looking forward to our friend visiting in a couple weeks but she cancelled. I’m hurt and frustrated, this is the second time our getting together has been canceled because some other thing was a higher priority, and because getting new plans together is a whole effort.
I’m unsettled and frustrated with Sera’s health mystery and pre-grieving that this might be cancer. We don’t know yet but what data we do have points to cancer more than not.
There was a shooting just a few blocks away from us and we weren’t alerted even though the campus was secured (not fully locked down).
I’m still grieving the loss of my friend.
My boss is in some upper management tizzy and keeps interrupting my day to give me new priorities (which were already my priorities, what do you think I spend my time doing??) and then to ask me a dozen questions so I can’t attend to the priorities.
Everyone needed something from me today.
I also have to recruit, hire and train more staff to support the team which is a whole other job in and of itself.
Customers are continuing to be just The Worst.
The frustration with trying to help JB but not helping enough is sitting like a cold lump in my gut.
Parent teacher conferences are coming up again.
Smol Acrobat was eating guacamole which they used to dislike, then completely melted down over eating broccoli which they said was their favorite two days ago. TODDLERS.
JB wanted to compete in a thing in April and I didn’t want them to because it’ll require a lot of time and attention from me to support their prep but then they changed their mind because they’re intimidated by another kid (who is competitive) and I hate that reason. I’d be fine if they chose not to participate because they didn’t want to this time but to opt out because another kid’s better than them is a terrible reason. But at the same time, I also don’t want to be roped into this. Conflicted.
I’ve worked late most nights this month and I am TIRED.

There were some small bright spots in the week that carried me from one frustration to the next. I had good interactions with the crow murder coming by for treats. Our neighbors got a puppy and shared pictures. I conducted an interview that seemed promising. (Please cross your fingers that they’re a good fit for us long-term! I hate recruiting, I hate hiring, I hate training. But I love having gotten through all those transitions and having a solid team.)

Year 4, Day 311: Our floor desperately needs mopping and there are crumbs everywhere. The robot vacuum was a great compromise for my inability to (or lack of time) vacuum as much as I want but there isn’t a good answer to the mopping/everyday other cleaning. I started thinking about how maybe if we dropped something optional from our budget we could afford to hire help, like babysitters who can take the kids to things or cleaners, but then I can’t think of anything that’s easy to give up. The only thing that we spend on that doesn’t benefit us personally at all off the top of my head is mutual aid, just giving cash to people / friends who need it, and that’s not really something I’d consider optional or ok to trade. Then again, I have trust issues with people driving my kids and PiC’s got trust issues with people cleaning our house so maybe it’s just as well we spend where we spend. Though, arguably, hiring people to help us would be helping those people by paying them but it’s still not a help to our far away friends who are laid off or cannot work and need to pay rent.

We had another PTA meeting and people were talking about the need for new volunteers for the PTA, and to run the Science Fair, and so on and there were people who just kept volunteering for stuff. HOW do these people have the time and energy for all this?? I can get my kid to and from school, and attend parent teacher conferences and listen to the PTA meetings over dinner when they are hybrid. We can’t make it when they’re in person. Who has time to take on the running of a Science Fair and PTA positions and and and? I know at least one of the moms and I know she works in addition to her two kids, along with some of the more visible parents who are also working parents. I just don’t get it. It makes me feel like I’m failing at something. To be clear, I don’t want one more thing on my plate. I want many things OFF my plate. This is probably me feeling jealous that others have the money or time or energy or help or all of the above that makes it possible for them to want to take on optional things like PTA related activities. I suppose the guilt there is knowing that the PTA stuff does support the kids’ education and educational experience, so it’s not frivolous. It’s just not something we have room for.

My autistic friend sent this to me, it’s so her, and I laughed so much. That was much needed.

@brainsandspoons #CapCut #jasonmomoa #pleasehold ♬ original sound – Lindsey Brainsandspoons

Surprisingly I don’t feel as drained or despairing today as I normally do on Fridays. Is there any chance that the 300 mg of coQ10 might be helping? Or maybe the fact I remembered to do back stretches two whole times this week?

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