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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November 13, 2024
Life with JB
We were talking with our friends about their overachiever parent friends whose kids have grueling schedules at the age of 13-14. Kids who are getting up at 3-4 am to train for 3 hours before a full day of school, for example. They wondered how unhealthy that might be especially if it’s really the parents pushing an agenda. Even though those parents protest “they love it!” my friend wondered – do they love it or do they not know that there’s any other way? It’s hard to know you can do things differently from the way you’re living, as a child, if you never have time and space to even see those other options existing.
Their own preteen kid has found his stride at school and in sports (they plays their sport regularly and chooses to compete every so often on their own), and their balance of academics and an active lifestyle sounds really good to me.
I’m not always a supportive parent. I try to be but definitely notice the deficiencies in my support. Some things, like tournaments, are probably good for them and so I gently encourage them to consider it but after they chose to do the first one (and did well), they’ve never chosen to do another. It’s too stressful for me anyway to prep them when I have no time or energy and then worry myself sick the week of because I get even worse nerves when it’s my kid competing than when i did. Hilariously, they were mad at me one day for observing their belt progress was impacted by their choice not to compete. It’s not required, but it has a marked effect on performance and how their coaches judge them. They yelled at me: you just want me to compete! Like hell I do. I don’t want six weeks of MORE heartburn! I didn’t try to argue by saying the tournaments are incredibly stressful for me, I just pointed out that that’s not at all what I said – the coaches want you to compete. They’re quite clear about that.
JB recently said they wanted to do the school talent show and internally I cringed so hard. I hate talent shows. I especially hated them at JB’s age.
Life with Smol Acrobat
They are a cautious late adopter sort of personality, suspicious of new things and/or change, which is very familiar now that I write that. They’re a little less so when they get to pick for themselves, which is rare when it comes to clothes because we still circulate hand me downs.
When I showed them new shoes last year, they rejected them out of hand. When we first started cutting their hair, they hated it. But with repetition they get better about it. I’m learning though! I offered them one bite of my cream cheese and lox bagel: I don’t WIKE dat. The next day: may I twy one bite?
I let JB use their electric toothbrush long before I bought Smol Acrobat’s. They could be heard hanging around JB brushing: may I try dat?
Pupdate
I love it when I catch the neighborhood dogs on their walks. Especially the ones who know me, they refuse to keep walking until I’ve given them sufficient pets.
Precious Moments
SmolAc: What are you going to be for Halloween?
Me: Mommy.
SmolAc: You can be a mommy wif wots of bandages! You can be a mummy! 🤣
That’s their first pun! They were so tickled. JB hasn’t yet cracked the code on puns.
SmolAc, holding up the plastic popsicle wrapper with their melted popsicle: What’s dis? Bwood? (Blood).
Me: My god I hope not.
SmolAc: I want to go to the moon some day. I’m going to live on the moon!
Us: Oh man, are you going to come back?
SmolAc: Yeah I will.
Us: Oh good. We’d miss you.
November 11, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 201: I did a bunch of work on the weekend to make it possible to be relatively caught up today for the first time in months. I really needed this to free me up for my shift of phonebanking tomorrow, couldn’t make that if I was starting the week neck-deep in work like most Mondays, and usually things don’t break my way, but so far so good! 🤞🏼
I really appreciated the very brief, very temporary reprieve.
Year 5, Day 202: A hugely busy day for both of us. PiC had to do two round trips to work because he was chaperoning a school thing for JB. I had an early meeting and a ballot curing volunteer slot, plus the usual school run and afterschool activity. All my Election Day anxiety, knowing that we’d be on tenterhooks for some prolonged period of time, was channeled into the phone calls. Surprise, I forgot how much I hate phone calls until I started feeling all kinds of anxiety during the training. Still. For democracy. I made as many calls as I could before my voice got tired and face hurt, mostly leaving voicemails, alerting likely Democratic voters that their ballots had not been received. Only one woman picked up, my age, and she was VERY anti-Harris, so that was not fun. I hung up immediately (as they instructed us to), with a fast OKTHANKYOU. Then one of the people I’d left a message for texted me back saying they had voted for Harris, so that was a nice way to end that part of the day. Friends and I agreed not to watch returns that could take days to come in completely. Heck, having seen a bit behind the curtain, I knew that ballot curing could still take another several days. The remaining bit of my anxiety was spent on doing my workout for the night.
Year 5, Day 203: It took me two hours to come to terms with the fact that this country has really elected a rapist felon intent on ushering in fascism, TWICE. I didn’t think it was real. I didn’t want it to be real. I knew it was a strong possibility but I briefly allowed myself to hope. My feelings towards more than half this voting population are unspeakable. These people hate us so much and, you know what, the feeling is mutual.
Ballot curing is still important and needed for us to hold the House.
Year 5, Day 204: An exceptionally busy day for PiC, with several appts and meetings, and a moderately busy but emotionally very heavy day for me trying to get through as much work as possible. I’m still processing my feelings about the election and my brain is pingponging all over the place in reaction to all the feelings. Friend and I exchanged venting time about the loss and the reasons for the loss (that we could see) and the frustrations with the current administration continuing to fund genocide, and cracking down on people who are protesting that genocide.
The gentlest I can be with myself, since curling up into a ball and hiding under the covers pretending this didn’t happen and screaming all day to let out the rage isn’t an option, is to just let my brain do what it wants in the order it wants even if it’s not the ideal order. Sounds small but it makes a huge difference in my physical tension.
Had another go-round with JB about keeping our commitments even on the harder days because we can’t cut and run or rather refuse to go when we’re frustated with something totally unrelated to the commitment. In this case it’s fourth grade math doing our heads in and causing collective dismay and they’re really struggling with it right now. We’re spending way more time on explaining it than we ever have before and this brings up all my own math inadequacies again. Though they were mightily displeased with my decision, unlike last week they managed to go blow off steam and then get themselves back together. Last week was so much worse. Tiny ephemeral wins, I suppose.
Year 5, Day 205: This was a day of complete overwhelm, trying to finish work in time to deal with family stuff and blowing my deadlines by a few hours, no wonder I didn’t notice this day’s entry didn’t save! I picked up 2 Lakota families for November even though I am still tracking the October shipments that haven’t been completed yet.
If it would help you to be doing direct aid for people who will really need it for this coming winter, we’d very much welcome your help. Info here.
November 8, 2024
1. We’re still trying to cure ballots before we run out of time to save the House, can you help?
Actions we can take: subscribe to independent journalism outlets not owned by billionaires and take away money from NYT, WaPo etc. The Guardian comes to mind, the Philly Inquirer refused to bend a knee, I’ve seen strong reporting out of Propublica now and again.
Caveat: I haven’t had time to dig deep on these yet so if you know of things wrong with them, please drop a line in the comments! Your thoughts are welcome in either direction. I’d bookmarked this list for future review.
I’m going to take a hard look at the budget to figure out how to balance our upcoming plans against the increased needs of vulnerable people. I’ve picked up two more Lakota families ahead of enough money coming in so if you’d like to help get a mom with a broken foot some shoes and clothes, and another elder a sewing machine for quilting, we could always use the help!
It sounds like there is a strong start at coalition building at worth fighting for.
How to survive the apocalypse (again)
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November 6, 2024
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.
***
Found money. We routinely pick up paper trash off sidewalks to pop into the nearest bins wherever we can and PiC picked up a receipt that was worth $4 in Ibotta cash. Woo!
Mystery money: I found a deposit in a checking account with no explanation where it came from or why it was there. It took me a week to unearth a letter from the bank saying this was restitution for having restricted outgoing transactions on our account and for the inconvenience and fees caused by their doing so. Huh? When did they restrict my account? When did they cost me fees? I’m mostly confused, but if I can’t find any record of any harm done, then this will just go towards defraying the car repairs.
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November 4, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
FIRST, an activism / political announcement!
If you can help with phonebanking or door knocking or ballot curing (just contacting people to let them know that something was wrong with their ballot so they can go fix it in time – people WANT those calls), go here to check for opportunities. I couldn’t get into the events that I was available for because they were full – which is amazing! – but if you can, I’m sure that would go a long way! The campaign may be optimistic but we still have to do everything we can up until the clock runs out.
Year 5, Day 196: Nicole and Maggie and I are on the same wavelength right now. I was answering an SES/environmental survey last week and it asked:
– how often did you put off buying something you needed because you didn’t have the money?
– how much difficulty did you have paying bills?
– have you set aside emergency funds that would cover your expenses for 3 months?
– how many times in the past month did you run out of food because you didn’t have money to buy more?
– how many times in the past month did you or your child skip a meal because you didn’t have money to buy more?
20 years ago, the answers to those questions were mostly “more than 1” (except the emergency funds one). I don’t ever want to stop being grateful for being financially comfortable now. I especially don’t ever want to stop being grateful that my kids don’t have to live with those fears and worries. I don’t want any kids to have to live hungry and wonder where their next meal is coming from.
Having enough money to help others and to have some extras, or to buy things just because I need them feels like such a luxury. We have several broken things we still haven’t replaced (our drying rack, our colander, I’m sure other things that I haven’t cared enough to do something about) but we CAN afford to replace them if we really wanted to. I do choose not to replace the smaller things to save for the bigger things a lot, but we replaced some kitchenware recently and I’m really happy about that.
Of course I still won’t waste money. Clipper screwed up a $20 transaction and never assigned it to my card. After a phone call last week where I was told to expect the money to come back to me by last Friday, I asked Chase to reverse the transaction. I’m surprised they just credited my account immediately. Usually that’s AmEx level of customer service, not Chase.
I’d like to be at the point where $20 didn’t matter, or $200, or $2000 or even $20,000 so that we could easily afford to give that away or put it into something sustainable to help people who have hit hard times. That’s the next dream.
Year 5, Day 197: Homework time with JB has been a nightmare these past two weeks. Their whole grade is mostly struggling with division, we’ve asked the teacher for some extra materials to figure it out. Their struggle wakes up my only semi-dormant stressors about struggling with math and it’s just a downward spiral from which there is no recovering. We’ve enlisted educator aunties and uncles to help out because we (PiC and I) are NOT good teachers in this situation. JB came out of their weekend tutoring session saying they still didn’t understand it and I needed to suss out whether that was lack of confidence or an accurate assessment. I was not looking forward to that attempt.
When they told me that they had math homework “and it’s confusing” today, my heart sank to my toes. I simply could not face going back to that place of STRESS so I didn’t until after 6 pm. Shockingly, though we had take it really slow and we needed the special graph paper, today was the first set of homework where I could gently point out a few simple errors (which usually provokes intense shame, freezing and tears), and walk them back to the point of the mistake to help them spot the mistake so they could rework the problems. They had to finish the full set of problems after dinner but they completed it all without a single tear. That’s a first. *huge sigh of relief*
Thank everything for chosen family who are good at the things we are not good at!
Year 5, Day 198: So much deeply depressing news from work on multiple fronts this week. Illnesses (multiple), injuries (multiple), people leaving, pets dying, car accidents, sudden deaths, and more. We’ll get through but I am really feeling it today with neither dog or garden to bring me even brief respite and solace.
Brushing and flossing one kid’s teeth, I sent PiC to take over flossing on the other kid because I was overcome with exasperation that I’m going to be doing this for 6+ more years until their dentist feels like they’re capable of doing a decent job. I don’t love helping w/people hygiene the way I love doing this stuff for dogs. I could clean dog ears, trim their nails, brush their teeth and everything all day and still love it. Not so for kids. Not so even for my own self, to be fair. Human body maintenance is more exasperating to me than canine maintenance.
“Gaming the insurance industry is what marriage is for, right?” Sherlock, Elementary.
Year 5, Day 199: Halloween! The first morning all year we haven’t had to roust a child from their bed. Both of them were up and getting dressed or yelling about getting dressed (Smol Acrobat) by the time I was able to move. They loved their costumes and were delighted with them all day long. I’m rather proud of my first and probably only attempt at making a costume. Very imperfect but it worked out with PiC adding all the embellishments. (At the last minute. I was done with my part of the costume a month ago. This is why we can’t work together as a team concurrently, we’d make each other batty. On the Gantt chart of life, we’re always at opposite ends of the project.)
We took Smol Acrobat to JB’s school parade and they were dopey-cute. Smol Acrobat kept cutting across from the parent side to the student side to hug JB and then sprinting back to leap at me in bellyflop position, elbow and knee out, to catch. I should bruise up quite nicely by tomorrow, thank you very much.
We crammed in most of a day of work before taking the kids, plus bonus kid, to our usual haunt for a round of leisurely trick or treat. I’m proud of Smol Acrobat being loud (for them) and enthusiastic about the whole thing, they’re the more reserved sort in a lot of situations. I’m glad they can almost keep up with JB for at least part of the time. They didn’t last long though, as expected. We treated the kids to our favorite local burgers and JB got to stay up late because they’ve got a teacher in-service day tomorrow anyway. We did a whole lot of work and cleaning before calling it a night, with aching aching bones.
Year 5, Day 200: The weather has turned very nippy overnight, I’ve needed extra layers to stay warm. I’m also out of patience with the downish comforter whose contents keep shifting so that by the middle of the night the down is piled off to the sides. I don’t know how I could be using a blanket wrong but I’m tired of waking up shivering. I’m putting a Sherpa blanket on my Black Friday shopping list, unless I see something better before then. I wanted something thick and plush like this but it’s got terrible reviews. This one has a greater proportion of far better reviews but it looks really thin. Recommendations welcome!
Much sadface. Our side view mirror had a run in with another car’s side view mirror. Theirs was fine but ours is not. Speaking of not spending on broken things! Collectively the other smaller broken things I’m not spending on doesn’t add up to the cost of this fix but that’s money we will put toward this expense instead. It is still a zero sum game for those of us who still need to earn income. It’s going to cost at least four figures to fix, not how I wanted to spend it, but we’re lucky that this is just sad and not devastating.
This quote hit me where I live: “When someone whose job it is to nurture you hurts you instead, it can’t help but have a profound and lasting effect on your sense of who you are.” – Sherlock, Elementary.
November 1, 2024
1. I checked off so many boxes this weekend! Paid bills, submitted FSA claims, ordered supplies for two Lakota families, logged the tracking numbers for the coordinators, ordered some holiday gifts from Michael’s, wrapped (bagged) all the kid gifts we already have on hand, ordered a few extra shirts for myself because all this exercise seems to be making the sleeves of my new shirts from last July too tight. Annoying but rather than be annoyed getting dressed most mornings, I’ll get some looser shirts. Problem solved.
2. PiC did the prep he needed to try (again!) to sell the car. Here’s hoping that it gets snapped up quickly! The garage is too tight a fit and I keep collecting bruises from trying to navigate in there.
Helping folks in Taos, NM, from Aji and Wings on Bluesky: a local effort to provide life-sustaining supplies to unhoused folks with pets, organized by a woman I vouch for also. We have a record number of locals forced into houselessness, and winter temps will be here starting tomorrow night. The wishlist is here.
I struggled with picking, everything is a survival need! I ended up buying one of the ten packs (TEN!) of sleeping bags for now. I still have to balance our cash flow which isn’t quite holding steady and I’ve been giving a lot of cash to direct aid needs.
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October 30, 2024
Life with JB
I need to make some decisions about JB’s placement in their self defense class. Or not. I could just wait until they age out of this class naturally. That’s coming up sooner than I’m ready to face. I hate the timing of the next age up class. It’s also unbelievably crowded and they need to split the class somehow. JB is still showing up and putting in the time but they aren’t putting in the kind of effort I would like to see to keep building their skills. Their same-age peers have already bailed on this age class, which means they’re getting practice partners who are very inexperienced instead of someone just about their level that can give them a challenge. I don’t care if they compete for the medals. I care if they compete because it gives them more experience with reacting under pressure. They tend to freeze and this whole exercise is about getting them to a place where they are comfortable defending themselves against the next kid who hits them instead of putting up with getting hit or kicked for weeks before telling anyone.
Sigh. We’re so different. At this age, I would vomit if I had to speak in front of the class but woe betide the kid that laid a hand on me. I’m not saying my way is better but their way worries me for their general safety.
JB’s whole school seems to be obsessed with Disney’s Descendants. Where did that come from? The show/movies have been around for a few years, it’s just hit the elementary school consciousness all of a sudden. I don’t love it.
Life with Smol Acrobat
Both kids are so clingy this month. Mostly clinging to me randomly, jostling each other to hold my hands when we walk anywhere, and occasionally with each other (Smol wanting to sit next to JB for dinner, not the adults). It’s a lot of touch. Too much touch.
Smol Acrobat is getting better at putting up utensils, they actually do better without me nearby so I now just tell them to do it and walk away. They still needed some handholding for laundry at the start of the month but at the end when I sent them to deal with the small pile waiting to be put away, they did it entirely independently!
It feels like they are a year behind JB in almost everything. No idea if it’s their being a pandemic baby, we’re so much more busy and tired, or just their personality. It doesn’t matter, either, it’s just struck me that we’re doing lots of things a year later than we had with the first round. We had their first dishwashing lesson this month; we did dishwashing with JB at 3. That was just me not thinking about it. But I saw them deliberately mismatching their socks this month, JB started that around 2. They’re talking a lot more, and singing now, even! JB sang at the top of their lungs starting around 2. Hasn’t stopped. (I wish it would stop on occasion, there are only so many times I can hear the same song before my ears quit.)
Pupdate
I’m spending time with every local pup that I come across. Doing what I can to fill my dog quota even just a little.
Precious Moments
Half crouching, Smol Acrobat: don’t wook at me pwease.
Me: Uh ok. Why?
Smol Acrobat: Because you’re doing someping and so I don’t want you to see me.
Me: Well, that didn’t clear anything up.
*****
JB, out of the blue: E picked me for the noodle but then C took the noodle and picked A for the Yoda ball instead!
Me: Whoaaaaa back up. What??
They frequently begin in the middle of conversations and I mimic pressing “Rewind” which, of course, goes right over their head.
*****
Smol Acrobat: I have so many teef in my body! An’ in my head, an’ my cheek, an’ my odder cheek, an’ my neck, and dis neck, and my what’s dis called?
Me: the back of your head?
SmAc: yeah! Dere too!
Me: Oh wow, that’s a lot of teeth. A whole lot.
