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
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December 30, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 250: Spiral cut ham is amazing and makes for some amazing leftovers-lunches. Who knew? If I had a deep freezer (one of my “if we could manage and afford a bigger house” sorts of dreams), I would have hams in there at all times. Dreams.
Also, and this is probably not news but, I cannot be trusted to go to Costco alone. If I’m not getting myself lost (which is most of the time), then I’m picking up that ten pound bag of pancake mix because it’s $4 for 2 lbs elsewhere but only $10 for 10 lbs here! FOOL. What 4 person family needs 10 lbs of pancake mix?? We do not have pancakes that often. I plead holiday / end of year brain. I guess we will have to have them that often to get through this.
Woof. Mostly unrelated: I’m logging our credit card bills due in January and they are double the normal budget. Lots of one-off expenses that added up so fast. I think we can cover it through cashflow but it’ll be a bit tight for a while. Also daycare’s price increase hits THIS month, I forgot. $2400. A month. 😭
I solved the toe blister mystery: I’d worn my cotton socks for a couple days and my precious toes hated them so much they all developed blisters. As soon as my wool socks came back on, they healed up.
Year 5, Day 251: It’s a four KitKat kind of day. It’s cold and dreary out. There’s very little growing in the garden. There is no furry-feet family member to greet me at the door when I get back from a loooong morning of running errands. Or to be snoring and then looking at me through bleary eyes as I tiptoe back in trying not to disturb them. Harrumph.
Speaking of Costco fails: We found Boudin clam chowder in the refrigerator section. I didn’t expect it to be as good as the restaurant when I bought it but then we (uncharacteristically) wandered through an area with a Boudin, had their clam chowder, and now the Costco version tastes flat (to me). I bet it would have been just fine if we hadn’t had some that was better. Taste bud inflation is terrible. PiC likes it well enough but that just goes to show you how easy he is to feed with my less than stellar cooking.
BUT. I put in a big order of snacks for my Lakota sponsee and staple foods for their family. I squared away raises for all of my people before the last days of the year trickled away. Those are the good things.
Year 5, Day 252: I’m doing big time grey rocking with certain people this holiday. I’m doing a good job! I’m not intensely irritated, I am simply a person floating out of time.
Wait no, I am irritated. By all this talk about trying to revoke the FDA approval for the polio vaccine. I can’t tell if they’re seriously this reckless and horrible (yes) or if it’s primarily intended to drum up panic among those of us who have an iota of sense and being reckless and horrible is just a bonus. I don’t know if he was the LAST American (as purported on Bluesky) to have used an iron lung and died, but this just makes me shake my head all over again about how utterly awful these people are: Paul Alexander, forced into an iron lung by polio in 1952, dies at 78
Year 5, Day 253: Do you like shinies? I keep saying that I don’t need any more earrings, but I love them so. Turns out Kythryne Aisling’s shop (I found her on Bsky) has a selection of perfect earrings to fill a specific genre of earrings that has been missing from my collection: small, dangly and tough so I can wear them all the time without discomfort or damaging them. I’d been going through these silly cycles of wearing earrings for some special thing or another and then leaving them off so long the holes would partially close up again (as they always do between earrings) because my preferred earring styles are too fragile to endure me being me. I got myself the elephants, the forbidden candy (they look like jolly ranchers!), fauxfire twisties, and kitsune. As a kid I always envied people who could wear all kinds of earrings. My metal allergies limited me to a very few pairs that wouldn’t cause infections. But now, if I never let them close up, I can wear anything I want! This is an unexpectedly fun jewelery era for me. Also Kythryne has very cute dogs and I appreciate the dog pictures on the skyline.
My sinuses are making their presence Very Known right now and I hate it. They’re angry. My heart rate keeps doing weird things late at night so I can’t get even the minimal rest I normally manage, I keep laying awake later and later.
Year 5, Day 254: A black lab encounter: Neighborhood dog came over for love, of course I obliged, and then wouldn’t leave. He kept looking at Smol Acrobat and PiC with “but you haven’t petted me yet? I cannot leave?” eyes. I gave him extra pets to make up for the fact that they couldn’t come pet him.
Saying this really quietly here so as not to jinx myself: shipping issues have plagued the dozens of shipments for the Lakota families so I was expecting the same for all my orders this month: books, clothes, prescription refills.
Also a nice surprise: a sale of a very old swimsuit (still in remarkably good condition) on Poshmark! I never open the app anymore, I just leave my listings up and occasionally it bears some fruit. In this case, $13 eventually. I also followed up on that money side quest from the Swiss government. Two weeks and that lady had done nothing with the revised information to send the bank transfer. She didn’t even start processing it right away when I followed up. “In a few days” she’ll start it. Cough up our money! They should be required to pay interest on money they’ve held onto for too long like the US government has to when they refund us.
I’ve hit the point in the holiday season grind where three out of four of us are sick. I’m just dragging myself through each day with gritted teeth. Not my favorite but also not super surprised. Everything is topsy turvy this year, our relaxing family time was swapped to the new year and that’s now in question because they are sick.
December 27, 2024
1. We went on a walk and were accosted by two grey tabbies that DEMANDED petting. Naturally, we obliged.
Challenges this week: Too much peopling this week.
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December 23, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 243: For many reasons I feel zero holiday cheer so far. PiC got the tree up, and it’s nice to see the shiny sparkly but I’m just not feeling it. Busy-ness is definitely a factor. Everything (in the world) also feels so much harder than it needs to be. Every day with the kids is a whole lot of struggle. On the plus side, I’m not feeling the deep-seated anxiety that I usually feel around family stuff this time of year. Am I just too tired to? Maybe! But also I noticed that working through things in therapy and I am no longer feeling the anxiety-driven need to pack for these things six months out.
Lack of anxiety – good, lack of energy driven by the anxiety – less good.
It was another struggle today with brain fog and a storm passing through at the same time. Work was much tougher than it should have been.
But lots of packages arrived today! They were the key ones: books and treats I have to pack up by Wednesday for distribution. Whew. I was sweating the books package the most but a few other things were also important.
I hate this for Cloud @ Wandering Scientist. Her daughter caught whooping cough at school and now Cloud is sick too which ruins her plans to shop for presents in person. This reminds me of how much of my life is centered around doing most things 1-2 months in advance because odds are high that I’ll get sick, overwhelmed, or fatigued, or all of the above if I leave important things until near the day of.
Year 5, Day 244: Joe Udo at Retire by 40 has been retired for 12 years already! That really flew by. In his housekeeping post, he said: For 2024, the Roth IRA contribution limit is $7,000 for those under 50. If you’re over 50 like me, you can contribute up to $8,000. The Roth IRA is the best retirement account because you don’t have to pay tax when you withdraw from the account. Everyone should max out their Roth IRA every year. If you haven’t maxed out your contribution yet, now is a great time to do it. Actually, the deadline for 2024 is April 15th. But I like to contribute in the same calendar year to keep it simple.
I don’t have any such advice. I had to max out a 401K this year, and we haven’t contributed to our Roth IRAs for a few years. I stopped contributing to the traditional IRA as well since I wasn’t getting a tax benefit from it and didn’t want to be constrained by RMDs in all our accounts.
I threw together our New Year cards and ordered them today. It’s too late to get them in the mail before I’m steamrolled by the holidays, but that doesn’t matter! Because they’re New Year cards and can go out in January! Go me, planning ahead for potential failures for once. And buying them at 60% off for a custom design at Office Depot made them much more affordable. Updates to farflung family and friends are nice, better when it doesn’t cost $200+. Plenty of people use Minted and other fancier services but it just doesn’t rank that high in my spending plans. I have to conserve our dollars for direct aid to folks (Larime, Linda Tirado) and others.
Year 5, Day 245: Smol Acrobat has been wandering about like a cranky old fogey grumping out of the blue, “but I wanted sushi!” every few days. They never tell us they want sushi at any point where it would have done any good, mind you, they’re just rolling up with a grievance while we’re putting together dinner as if we’d taken a poll and rejected their ask. Strong reaction from the kid who only eats cucumber rolls! I should give them a bowl of slivered cucumber on rice with a side of nori and see if that solves the problem.
Year 5, Day 246: I was reviewing Smol Acrobat’s doctor’s visit notes to find their height, I’m trying to get their Global Entry applications ready, and was very pleased to see that the doc recorded my request for a 6 month booster of the COVID vaccine next spring and approved it. I appreciate it when people listen to me and do what’s necessary without having to be told twice!
The GE application process is a total pain right now though. I had to change a detail for JB but I can’t do it myself, I need them to. Six emails in, they’re still insisting they changed it already and I’m sending screenshots of how they changed it (incorrectly) in one place but not the other place so I still can’t move forward. My “thanks for any help you can provide” is getting more and more sarcastic with every repetition.
My nightmares are back even though I’m still taking the prazosin. They’re not as intense as they used to be, yet, but still decidedly impactful. I usually remember the dreaming when I wake up pretty clearly but this one lingered all day: we were in small boats crossing oceans and meeting people we sort of knew in some faraway unknown places. I suspect it came from a pondering on the diaspora of boat people from Vietnam and how my cousins 20 years older than me lived that and remember it clearly.
Year 5, Day 247: Our car insurance went up 18% in the summer, and I just got the notification that it’s gone up again another 15%. What the hell??
Also annoying: I have blisters or blister type pain on almost all my toes today. The tops, sides and bottoms, variably. What did I do wrong now?? I asked each toe individually, why are you suddenly such a bad neighbor? I gleaned zero satisfactory information from this interrogation.
Searching the internets, specifically Mayo Clinic since general Googling is useless these days, didn’t turn up anything super useful but it did teach me about Bullous pemphigoid. Things could be much worse, is what they’re telling me. Still, having pretty much all toes hurt isn’t great.
December 20, 2024
1. I FINALLY tackled 2/3 of the wall boxes! You know the boxes that get piled against a wall “for now” that then grow into mountains as people stack things on top of those boxes “for a minute” and eventually there is no hope of reclaiming that space? I’ve reclaimed 2/3 of it! That last third, or quarter, of the pile remains, slightly mocking me, but that’s still progress.
Can we help this young man? Elijah Romero metastatic cancer
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December 18, 2024
Life with JB
I am continually amazed by how fast they make friends. It turns out that it’s also hard for them when they have conflict because when they make a friend, they want to KEEP the friends.
Large and deep sigh. Parenting this age is feeling really hard right now. I can’t tell how much is it being complicated and hard versus how to tell how much of this is our own failings as humans and parents versus how much is that it’s just hard to deal with younger humans whose brains are still developing and whose emotions are still all over the place and big and loud. Some people don’t find kids confusing and difficult and those people are not me. I know I’m trying my best, we both are, but sometimes our best is really not good. It’s hard not to have a right answer to every situation. It’s hard not to feel like it is so damn messy and that we’re making mistakes that will require intensive therapy later. Maybe my parenting suffers when I don’t have a dog, because dogs are my refuge and I have no refuge in those hard moments when I want to scream and/or tear my hair out because the kids are being totally irrational and nothing I can say makes things ok or better or make sense.
Life with Smol Acrobat
Smol Acrobat loves their electric toothbrush.
They also love tacking on “pants on fire” to literally any phrase they might be saying at the time. Guess what chicken butt PANTS ON FIRE!
They’re a completely grumpy noodle when they wake up most mornings now, any excuse to pick a fight and grouch. Which is super awesome when combined with the grumpy noodle that is their sibling. I think this is related to their inability to nap at daycare anymore – they’re not getting enough sleep. Usually when they get an afternoon nap in, they’re good for a 630 am wakeup. Not that we WANT that, 7 is more civilized, but they’re groggy and overtired even at 715 or 730 on weekdays after not napping. We make sure they can nap on the weekends, and, boy do they, but we can’t do anything about the weekdays. Unlike JB who dropped their nap at 3 years old, this one still really needs that sleep. And naturally, now that we need them up early, JB is also not sleeping enough even with an early bedtime so they’re always tired in the morning. Two grumpy noodles is two too many.
Pupdate
We still aren’t adopting yet. We had Cousin Dog over for a week and he’s so easy and my heart was so happy to have him here. But he’s easy. My friends are remaining me daily that we’re still on Team Not Yet with all the stories of their dogs and shenanigans: one is eating all the non food she can get her jaws around, including their fence and their walls. One is having a tantrum about going out for walks. One is not allowing Mom to go home yet because she has to walk walk walk walk play!! then run then walk.
I laugh a little and remember Ahhhh, right. We don’t have time for that yet.
Precious Moments
SmolAc: da wadder is too cold
*Turn up heat* how about now?
SmolAc: still cold
*Turn up heat* how about now?
SmolAc: still cold
*Turn up heat* how about now?
SmolAc: still cold
*Turn up heat* how about now?
SmolAc: still cold AUGH TOO HOT TOO HOT I DIDN AH-SPECT DAT
🤦🏻♀️
*****
JB: I heard the teachers saying that she could spend some amount of money and get a free turkey at Safeway…… It was like $200. I guess that’s a lot.
Me: Why is that coming up now? It’s 10 pm.
JB: I heard you say turkey.
Me: Nooo… I said I was trying to order COVID tests.
JB: Oh, I heard COVID turkey.
Me: Gross.
*****
SmolAc: I got DIS ONE. *waves a rock around*
JB: that’s a pumice! (Pronounced it poo-mus)
SmolAc: poo??? EWWWWW
Me: Puh-mice, y’all.
*****
Smol Acrobat’s aphorism: if it works, great. If it not works, not great.
*****
Smol Acrobat got mad at me one morning because I picked clothes for them. They wanted a different shirt and asked if they could wear that one instead. I told them that was fine, just go hang up the other one I set out. “But YOU unhanged it!”
December 16, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 236: 🎉🎉 I finally got my new retainer! It is tight so I have been instructed to wear it all the time for three months to adjust to the fit, alas, but the tech will now order the two sets that came with the $900 plan for the 2024 allotment. Thrilled to throw away my old nearly broken aligners and to have backups on the way. No matter how heavy duty these are, they’re not going to hold up against the stress that destroyed the old aligners.
Smol Acrobat is sick again and this time it comes with a side of Extra Cling. They keep asking to sleep in our bed, for me to sleep in their bed, and waking up crying for me at midnight. I have to cuddle them until they fall back asleep. And it has to be me. When PiC tries to offer a cuddle, they turn into an octopod and wrap around me even tighter whimpering in a high pitched protest. Finally after the third cycle of this, I whispered “they know what you’re doing, they’re reattaching, stop trying to help.” They relaxed a little after that. It still took 3 hours to escape their room.
Year 5, Day 237: We got some bad/disappointing news about JB’s coach leaving the group 🙁. They’re the only one who’s consistently there, good with managing the kids and they don’t have a replacement lined up. I hate change normally. When it leaves us with a whole lot of uncertainty, I hate it even more. This stinks.
Also I really hate when I took steps specifically to ameliorate burden on my team only to find out, because I can’t see the future, a week later that everything I did to help is actually doing the opposite because of other people not doing their part. I’ve found other ways to patch the holes I deliberately created but oh was that frustrating.
Year 5, Day 238: PiC insists that my puffer coat with holes in it has died its final death. It now refuses to puff back up after the last washing, so he might have a point. I also “know” that it’s ok for me to have good things that will last many years, but it was still an internal struggle so instead I tried to ignore his good point. He, knowing me, just went ahead and found me a replacement.
Part of me wants to be grumpy about how much it cost even after 40% off, but it’s a smaller part of me than it used to be.
I used to hate ceding control over anything at all, because I controlled so little. In reality I still control so little but my awareness of that fact, and glacially slow acceptance of it, has improved. Like, for example, I’m on week 19 in a row of doing exercises. They’re still laughably little compared to my fond memories of working out 30 years ago but those memories have been an impossibility for decades. Now I’ve committed to consistency with the hope of becoming stronger, less disconnected from my meatsuit, and maybe dropping some bulges. That last one has to stay the last in the list of priorities to make sure I stay focused on what’s most important. And the hell of it is, I think this is only working because I ceded control to a trainer who writes my weekly fitness plan and I just do as he says. I do pick and choose from the plan as if it was a menu, depending on how I feel on any given day, and I am curious if that really matters for my level of low fitness but generally, I am not making requests. I’m just doing the things and we’ve logged 18 weeks and still going.
My therapist calls this “being supported”. The mean gremlin inside me calls it something else entirely. But it’s a little quieter these days.
Year 5, Day 239: I had to go and jinx it, didn’t I? I was kicking rocks over the weirdly nice weather this week (because the bad weather messed up our special plans last month) so an atmospheric river landed on our doorstep early this morning.
Work continues to be a rollercoaster of “maybe we’ll be done soon? AUGH noooo another problem!!” I can’t even really take refuge in “it’ll be better soon” because the new year brings with it at least five major tasks I have to get on top of. I’ve made minor headway on three of them, but two remain elusive. I am going to have to decide how to take a few days off at the end of the year, though. I badly need the break. (And sleep. I need so much sleep. I won’t get it but I wants it, precious.)
Every time I think our cashflow looks good, we’re ok to give more in direct aid, it hits me shortly after that we actually have a 5-figure bill coming up soon which I DON’T have money set aside for. So no, not quite good. Drat. I’m transferring some of that cash into the house maintenance fund now so I don’t have to keep reminding myself.
Year 5, Day 240: My mom was diabetic but I’m not so I haven’t taken blood glucose blips very seriously. I’ve often ignored late night hunger with no issue but last night, that was totally the wrong move. The sudden hunger, despite having had a normal dinner at the normal time, was exceptionally irritating given I had just dropped into bed after another late night working. Fully intended to just ignore it but when I caved and got up, I started seeing spots, became lightheaded, dizzy, and nauseated. My whole body felt wrong. Painfully wrong. I couldn’t think at more than a crawl, and my thoughts were mostly: “ah, crap.” I inhaled a bagel with cream cheese, then a yogurt and some granola, and then drank most of a Gatorade. Probably should have gone in the opposite order because it was dicey by the time I got to the Gatorade – my breathing was irregular and vision was blurry and grey around the edges. It occurs to me this could also be related to the blood pressure meds I take for nightmares but that would be a bit odd since I’m on such a low dose.
Looking ahead to January isn’t just bad for work (still), it’s also chock full of appointments. AIYIYI. Birthdays, dentists (again??), parent-teacher conferences, a maintenance massage, we have to get together with 4 sets of friends. I’m not ready to face any of that.
*****
This GFM to repay debt for a pup that didn’t make it could use some help.
December 13, 2024
1. I got to pet TWO dogs this week, total strangers but lovely and friendly.
2. I can hardly believe I’ve survived yet another one of these harrowing weeks of overwork but here we are on Friday. There have only been 3 meltdown level clashes with the kids this week, mainly Smol Acrobat, so that’s better than usual. That’s good, I only have so much left in me.
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