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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January 24, 2022
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 309: Everyone else has the day off today and I’m jealous. I’m also annoyed because JB’s morning shenanigans wasted an hour of my work time which means I can’t knock off early or take a long lunch time walk with them. Humph.
*****
Over the weekend, I made a pasta sauce with ground turkey. I set aside half for one meal this week and half to freeze. We also dug up our teeny tiny potato harvest and I think they’re going to become a plate of crispy garlic roast potatoes. Twitter enlightened me to the magic of parboiling and it works!
*****
My phone continues to mess with me. Adding to the randomly turning off trick, the keyboard has begun to refuse to actually type at a normal speed and inserting random caps locks and spaces at will. That’s less than ideal. I started researching possible replacement phones over the weekend and got really useful info from folks on Twitter. I think I’ve narrowed down my preferred candidates to three Samsungs: S10, S10e and S20.
*****
I should NOT have eaten that many shrimp chips in one sitting. 😶
Year 2, Day 310: It’s been a solid two weeks on a new supplements regimen and I think it has been doing some good for my fatigue. I was at rock bottom for my annual exam a few months ago. They referred me to a specialist who gave me a whole slew of lifestyle modification recommendations, some of which I already do, and the one that was easiest to act on was adding a lot of supplements to my daily routine. It’s still early yet to know if it really works for me but even with my other heartburn and heart palpitation issues, I’m a step up from my lay on the floor because I’m so steamrollered and hollowed out and can’t breathe mode.
Obviously still deeply fatigued, as one step away from rock bottom is not much and can be reached easily by a little overdoing it but still. It’s a step up that I’m on most days and I’m really grateful for that much. More please.
****
PiC fixed our water filter! Three cheers for PiC! It only took a $250 full replacement of parts which apparently has to happen every 3-4 years. 👀
*****
JB is really into chorizo burritos these days. We only tried it because of a mistake, we were given someone else’s order. But fun surprise for us, they’re good!
*****
I hate the plastic waste related to this but I’ve had to make some food plastic concessions for our sanity and energy. We have been going through our fresh fruits and veggies too fast, usually running out before the next shopping trip and we’re trying to keep our shopping time minimal, so I’ve bought cases of fruit cups. When we run out of whole fruit, we still have something for the kids. It helps us bridge gaps and reduces my stressing over that element of their diets when we’re juggling so much.
On that subject, feeding Smol has been a real challenge. They’re so opinionated about what and when they eat that they can spend an entire dinner yelling at me and waving their arms in negatory gestures. The fruit cups help smooth the way to their eating a balanced meal.
Speaking of dinner, I managed to make a lentil salad and salmon dinner tonight! It’s the first night in weeks that I was able to take up my dinner duties again and I’m so relieved to be capable of cooking again.
Year 2, Day 311: I had to gain consciousness at 4 am in part 3 of Smol’s jaunt down FUBAR Sleep Lane. First it was a diaper change. PiC took care of that and then passed out. 20 minutes later, Smol was hollering because they were hungry. PiC speculated (hours later) that we’re hitting another growth period where they’re hungrier faster than usual, but also they were a right pain about eating yesterday so I’m sure they simply failed to get enough calories during the day. I cuddled them in our bed while they drank a bottle (still trying to wean them) and then plopped them back into bed. I couldn’t get back to sleep until just after 5, expecting that I’d really regret going back to sleep later. I did. It was HARD waking up again to take JB to school and get to work!
*****
I had what should have been my last ortho appt today. PiC said that was fast! I said that felt like an eternity! He said, well that’s because you were holding your breath for 20 minutes!
It’s true.
My ortho is incredibly brisk and to the point which I VERY much appreciated in a time when I wanted to get in and out as fast as I can. It turns out I’m not done yet, alas. They still need a bit more work so while he’s removed the little bits that hold the aligners on, he’s also ordering another set of treatment trays.
*****
I made dinner two nights in a row! I’m happy that my thrown together chicken in enchilada sauce turned into taco salad night with blue corn taco shells, romaine lettuce and tomatoes, Mexican rice we’d had frozen in the pantry, and guacamole! We both grew up almost exclusively on our respective Asian cuisines but in a pinch, what I can throw together is an approximation of Mexican food for dinner with pantry foods. We’re kinda weird.
Year 2, Day 312: Up at 5 am with Smol, both PiC and I were. Ugh. Why. What have we done to be punished so??
We did our best to keep on chugging today, but it was quite a slog to keep the body and brain in motion.
*****
My annual collection of tax forms dance has begun! I’ve got a W2, a 1099, just twenty more forms to go! I’ll have to wait up until the end of February to get my Vanguard forms. Booooo. I always look forward to being done with filing so of course I’m on tenterhooks the whole of January and February trying to gather all the forms.
I don’t know why I enjoy this but I do.
Year 2, Day 313: Smol slept well all night!!!! We didn’t have to get up at 4 or 5 am!!!
So that was exciting. AND we’re speculating maybe all the wake ups this week was for a developmental purpose because today, instead of screeching all throughout their meal(s), Smol suddenly started pointing with a purpose which clearly communicated what they wanted at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was amazing. It was so much better than the dramatic hollering at random that was impossible to figure out.
*****
JB celebrated their 100th day of school today. (We all did, because as I pointed out, this was not a solo endeavor.) They had a crown, and wrote 100 words as fast as they could, and brought in 100 small items to share. We had cheesecake for dessert with pretend candles to top it off.
*****
I’ve gone without a massage for several months and underestimated how severely I’d be in pain after my first one back. After much deliberation and anxiety, I’d taken up an appointment today and it felt good at the time. But the physical feedback afterward had me curled up on the floor in pain by the evening. Seamus and I used to share my heavy duty pain meds to manage his arthritis. Now I’m using his leftover heavy duty pain meds. Turn and turn about.
I couldn’t sleep until 5 am because that’s the tradeoff for being in slightly less than excruciating pain: having a brain that simply cannot fall asleep for the entire night. I wonder if pain meds actually reduce anyone’s pain because my experience with it has always been, at best, a temporary and mild reduction in pain with horrible side effects.
Maybe there’s a different med I can try in the future.
January 21, 2022
1. Last month, we had stocked up on rapid test kits at a huge markup for our travel ($300 worth 😱) but for various reasons didn’t use them all up as I had expected. I felt a bit foolish for miscalculating so when someone I know peripherally on Twitter mentioned an inability to get any tests at all, I was glad we could offer a few of ours. This shouldn’t be an issue but of course this country in this pandemic….SMH. This was just before the announcement that we could order free kits in the mail but that’s a whole 4 kits per address if you can even get them (as of Tuesday, people in multi-household buildings like apartments could not).
2. I organized our coupons and menu drawer and PiC’s t-shirt drawer. One drawer/section at a time!
Challenges this week: We had to make the call to push childcare again. It feels a LOT less bad than going in the middle of a surge with no vaccines but it still feels … rough.
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January 18, 2022
JB had a reasonable wish list this year. They wrote seven small items in their notebook and I took a picture in case anyone asked for it. A few loved ones did and they each got a truncated portion of the list to reduce possible overlap. Some family have set gifts every year so they didn’t need to ask. I like that because it’s predictable and practical, right up my alley.
This didn’t work out the way I expected. A lot of people went off book this past Christmas and some overwhelmingly so.
We have a one gift per person policy: a consumable for adults; a book, outfit, or money for kids. Everyone else took it to a whole other level: five gifts per kid on average. It made me feel slightly uncomfortable about the inequity and even made JB feel like their special handmade gift for everyone was not as good. They were fooled by the adults putting the kids’ names as the gifters. They really believed that their young (under age 10) cousins bought them fancy gifts. I had to explain that was a polite fiction and that their personal effort in designing, making, and remembering to pack their own gifts was every bit as meaningful.
I was torn between being grateful that JB and Smol are cared about and showered with tangible gifts, a thing I didn’t really have after age 7 or so, and being completely claustrophobic surrounded by so much STUFF. As a kid, I’d get a cheap watch and then my adult cousins would show up with one more to unwrap, or they’d take us to the matinee. That was pretty amazing but I suspect Kid Me would have also chosen the too many gifts scenario if that was on offer. Is adult me past that because I deal with the consequences of all the stuff, or because I deny that Kid Me deserved that feeling of abundance and love?
JB is gratifyingly super vocally enthusiastic about all the gifts, so their gifters enjoy the experience as must as they do, so there’s that. They used to get overwhelmed and overstimulated after the tenth gift, so we’d exercise portion control on opening a couple things each day, but now they could go on for days.
I’ve spent three days decluttering and organizing. It’s still not enough. JB was assigned the task of picking older things they’re prepared to let go of as well. They managed to pick about three things. The one-in one-out rule is being gently enforced because this year they’re old enough to get it. We refuse to live among mess and clutter, daily breaking a path through the toys and books and clothes. There must be some kind of order here, darnit!
I understand the pull and delight of new things, we struggle with it on several levels, but we have to find balance on this together as a family. We talked about how we should be able to live in our home with actual clear surfaces to sit on and work at, how we should be able to walk through the house without tripping over things and kicking or knocking things over. We also talked about how we don’t want to spend ALL our time cleaning things because we have too many things. Here’s hoping that some of this sinks in.
:: How are things in your home? What are your gifting rules?
January 17, 2022
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 302: After a too active weekend, I started this day in a bad place. Bad mood, drained of energy, short of breath, mostly zombie.
I think everyone started around the same place because our morning was no good.
The rest of the day boded ill as well with Smol waking up early from their afternoon nap, but it got better once we adults flipped our mental commitments from work to family. Though too early, we stopped trying to squeeze in work and went for a walk in preparation for an earlyish dinner.
That was better. Then having a fun Zoom call with family helped revive my spirits a lot. Some days feel like weeks, this was one of them.
Year 2, Day 303: Have you ever had dreams about your adult teeth falling out? I used to have a recurring dream where I wiggle a tooth so much it falls out and then I realize it was an adult tooth and I needed that!!
Those all came back today when JB asked me to wiggle their loose tooth, and then to pull it out. *Shiver* I’d like to pull it out but it’s not ready yet. UGH.
****
Taking my fun where I can find it: tickling the breath out of Smol when they’re up for it. They also like plonking their face on my head and smushing their face into my face. Then they rub their face onto my face like a cat, and start chuckling. They’ve also discovered bouncing today. Happy bounce, angry bounce, shrieky bounce, giggly bounce. They tuck their legs underneath them and bounce! bounce! bounce!
I also quizzed, wait, no, interrogated PiC on his retirement desires and goals.
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January 14, 2022
1. Tami at Disabled Girl on Fire started her Patreon for helping her to help people in her community. A darn good cause. If you can, it’d be great to support her!
2. I’m getting myself in order for the 2021 tax year thing. I always feel very anticipatory about this even though it’s possible we’ll owe money. Suppose that’s the anticipation talking: I want to see if my projections last year worked out as intended.
3. Delightful: We got a case of a variety of formulas from Enfamil for … I don’t know what reason that we couldn’t use. I couldn’t donate it anywhere here but was loathe to just throw them out. That’s perfectly good formula! I shipped them to Penny and she was able to distribute them in a day!
4. We took Smol Acrobat out to greet JB coming home from school one day and the squeals from the happy elder sibling were really something. We’d stopped halfway up the street, Smol had given up walking, and was leaning on my legs but was so happy to see their JB that they practically ran home with the renewed vigor. It’s very nice to see them adoring each other right now.
5. Our friend sent us an absolutely hilarious gift.
Challenges this week: I’m still exhausted every week. It’s frustrating that my health did improve with therapy and still only moved my baseline from untenable to moderately to severe misery depending on the day. I hope this isn’t the best time I have left.
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January 11, 2022
Honestly that “happy” feels really strange to say right now. As hard as 2020 was between COVID and the stress of The US Presidential election campaign (and all the Congressional races), this year was worse for us.
We lost Seamus this year and 8 more loved ones throughout the year. We continued to work full time and parent full time without more than a little bit of physical help (lots of moral support and virtual support but no one here to hand off the baby to for a few minutes).
After umpteen months of coping during a pandemic, there was big upheaval at work and the fallout from that is still swinging a wrecking ball through my life. That by itself would have been bad enough but piled atop the grief and pain and stress of my personal life, it was just too much.
That was the theme of this year. IT WAS JUST TOO MUCH.
2021 Highlights in Health
Without Seamus, I rise to the top of the Complicated Health list again.
- I continued brain therapy all year and fit in a couple massage therapy appointments. Physically, my pain improved significantly. I was living in a constant state of excruciating pain and it’s come down to an ebb and flow of moderate to severe pain in some unknowable cycle.
- It became obvious that my fatigue was less related to the pain than I previously assumed. My pain had improved but I still felt like I woke in a body weighted down by steel every morning and went to bed with double and triple weights every night. It turns out I check almost every box for ME/CFS.
- It took me half the year to physically recover from pregnancy and childbirth. I’m not totally back yet but the midwife who took care of me at Smol’s birth was amazing and my healing from actual childbirth was so much less painful.
- I was really lonely this year with much of my support network out of touch or out of reach.
PiC needed a lot more outdoor time than he got this year. He really needed more exercise to feel mentally and emotionally good. We are working on this.
JB, Sera and Smol Acrobat are all (with all our gratitude in the world) healthy.
The wild card: COVID. We got our vaccines as soon as we could get appointments and spent most of the year anxiously awaiting news on the kid vaccines. JB is now fully vaccinated and we’re anxious for the under-5 data.
Given my health and Smol’s vulnerabilities (a new baby who can’t mask and a still-developing immune system), we continued to stay relatively isolated and still stuck to most of the same rules even after we were vaccinated and in the case of the adults, boosted: Always masked, mostly outdoors. Global vaccine inequity haunts me. We needed to be much better people than we were, as a society, in 2020 and 2021, and it just didn’t happen. It makes me despair for the future that collectively we could not deal with this whole mess in a way that cared more about people than money.
2021 Highlights in Life
We celebrated our ten year wedding anniversary. We’re still happy with each other, rely on each other, and respect each other. There’s no one else we’d rather be in this whole thing with and that’s something I appreciate every day, no matter how hard the days are. Of course we have our moments, who doesn’t?, but they’re the exception, not the rule.
I marked 15 years of blogging. I’m glad to be here with y’all. I appreciate y’all being here with me, reading and commenting or still lurking (I see you now, C!!)
Last year I said: “Our personal lives will likely shift dramatically with an infant and no childcare.” YUP. But, while I hate the constant juggle, I love that I’ve had all this time with my baby.
JB was in school in person this year. I was highly anxious going into the fall but with their own excellent masking and the many precautions the school did end up taking, our anxiety has been overshadowed by their joy at attending and making new friends. I still hate their principal who we’ve met with a few times. She solidified the foundation for my dislike by lying to us about the communication protocols for COVID.
2021 Highlights in Money
- I ended 2021 with almost the same amount of cash in our checking account as we started. I like that weird feeling of stability or consistency that gives me.
- Our net worth went up 22% from last year. I think our savings rate worked out to approximately 50% but I’m not totally sure if that’s accurate. My spreadsheet turned into a bit of an octopus and well, tentacles everywhere. The data is good enough though, I don’t need it to be exact down to the penny for this summary.
- I stuck with our weekly investing plan all year, starting in June! This is a big accomplishment for me. This is related to the next point:
- On reflection, I realize that my reaction to the pandemic in 2020, though logical at the time because we had more risk exposure than I was comfortable with in the face of a pandemic, really emphasized that I need to stick with regular investing. We had enough cash in hindsight but that real uncertainty with the rental and lack of good tenants scared me into pulling back on all investing so I could have cash in hand to take care of a second mortgage without getting in over our heads. I really wish I’d had more faith that things would be ok if I carried on investing but that’s not how I work! So I am reminding myself to go into 2022 with my plan and stick to it.
- I went many many many rounds with the IRS working out amendments for my last three tax returns when I discovered an error in our accounting. Resulted mostly in refunds needed but also much teeth gnashing and hair rending.
- I added iBonds to our portfolio which I hope not to regret as I am still fighting with Treasury Direct for access to my old account.
- I quit our HSA / HDHP plan for 2022. In CA, we don’t get most of the tax benefits and the stress of tracking the costs we incurred through the year had driven me to avoiding seeking care as needed. I suspect that’s the design and frankly it’s not worth the rather minimal savings.
- Collectively, we did an amazing job with our Lakota families project. We fulfilled 18.5 requests for aid (the 0.5 is a box I haven’t been able to send because I’m in a fight with USPS over my account but I will get that done in 2022!). We started the year with a big load of kids’ supplies to the Allen Youth Center (part of the reservation meant to help the kids of course), and ended the year with a big load of gifts for kids. In between we helped 49 individuals in total, ranging from newborns to elders in their 70s and all the folks in between.
We continued to be fortunate in continuing to work full time and safely at home all year. PiC’s company went through some layoffs and reorgs, which was cause for some anxiety, but we have a solid money plan and we’ll stick to it. If we get hit later on with a change, we’ll deal with it as it comes. (I say through clenched teeth and deep breaths.)
Our spending stayed high this year. We had our internet covered for the year because of PiC’s working from home long term but that was a drop in the bucket compared to our spending. We spent a lot on direct aid, my therapy, insulation for the house, take out a few times a week when we were basically laid out on the floor with fatigue. We also spent a lot on groceries: some convenience foods, some decent ingredients for me to cook bigger batches of meals.
Financial Checklist for 2022
- Confirm that all our accounts have the right beneficiaries.
- Roll over the HSA from our employer-sponsored company to Fidelity (no fees!)
- Figure out our savings / investing schedule so that we don’t ever overdraw the checking account
Thoughts for 2022
Our family doctor said: “I don’t want to be a downer but I just don’t know about 2022.” Though that was very vague, I feel the same way. There’s so much that’s up in the air: Funerals, weddings, will Comic Con happen and can we go?, when do we get vaccines for the under-5 group?, the world is both metaphorically and at times literally (I do live in CA after all) on fire, Republican politics and politicians make me sick to my stomach. It’s so inhumane and the Democratic party continually caving the Republican pressure makes me want to scream.
My financial goals are the same: save more, invest more (weekly), give more. Aim for an FI number that’s not impossibly high but not too optimistically low.
Our expenses are going up. We will likely be paying for childcare and maybe a new car sometime this year (chip shortage dependent!). Both are still a little up in the air for various reasons but if and when they happen, they will be big wallops to our wallets. If interest rates stay the same, I’ll take a loan instead of paying in cash since the cash in the market is making more than interest is costing. This is a very weird choice for me in that I hate loans but I much prefer that to overspending.
We know to expect a minor increase in PiC’s salary. That will be going towards defraying the increased expenses, but it definitely won’t cover all of them.
COVID remains our wild card going into 2022 as we closed out the year with omicron sweeping the nation. CAN we get vaccines for our under-5s already? PLEASE.
:: I hope that 2022 is kinder to all of us. How was your 2021?
January 10, 2022
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 295: What’d we do last year for Christmas? PiC asked. I don’t remember but I was a lot less stressed and anxious since we did no socializing. Though we also had a tiny baby so … Probably not less stressed but certainly less anxious than this year.
Today I had childcare coverage all day in the form of PiC still being off work one more day and it was both amazing and a grind because then I really really really had to make the most of that focused work time. I got caught up on a lot of important or overdue stuff with some intense effort to stay on task, so that’s something. I was sad to have missed out on midday baby snuffles and snuggles but that’s the trade off, isn’t it?
PiC took care of everything today: dog walks, feedings, kids, lunch, and dinner. I’ve got a great partner.
I’m still decompressing from a remarkably tough holiday season. We socialized much more than usual. We were super careful everywhere (vaxxed, masked, no indoor dining, running an air purifier wherever we could) and the anxiety that it still wouldn’t be enough was ever present. There was a lot of internal conflict when I met with conservative family members who did respect my needs (masked and outdoors meeting) but still clearly expressed their views which are in direct opposition to mine. We were able to say our goodbyes to a longtime friend and carried a lot of sadness back with us. My fatigue was always so bad that I felt sick most of the time – it expresses itself as cold symptoms when I’ve gone too far. Of course I rapid tested to be sure it was just my body sending up alarms and not COVID. Naturally that was another source of anxiety: we didn’t have enough rapid tests for the serial testing that I’d prefer considering omicron was taking off in the days after we’d hit the road. I was also trying to get all of us an appointment for PCR tests so we could be reasonably certain we were all COVID free before returning to school and that was an inordinate amount of effort. Of course I was working the entire time we traveled. Basically I now don’t want to leave my house for a month. Maybe two. (more…)