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
Read More
September 7, 2021
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 and cash back sites (Rakuten, Mr.Rebates). Some posts have affiliate links that pay a micro-commission to keep the blog running and I’ve added a way to support the blog in the sidebar to the right!
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 $887 in dividends from the stocks portfolio. Our YTD monthly average is $295.
(more…)
September 6, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 169: Oh Monday. PiC took the 630-930 am shift so I could take JB to school and then try to get some work done. I’m doing my best to stay focused in the time we have when Smol Acrobat is asleep. They had a rough go of it with the first nap, waking up after half an hour and crying inconsolably for an hour. Literally inconsolable, I changed their diaper, changed their sleep sack to a warmer one, offered a bottle, patted them, sang to them, rocked them, nothing. None of it helped. Eventually they physically pushed me away and I had to let them work it out on their own in the crib. I could only watch helplessly on the monitor. Thankfully they were clearly safe and just really tired, and eventually did pass out.
*****
I’m worried for my friends, near and far, affected by horrible COVID-related policies and threatened by wildfires. I miss my friend who is fighting a serious mental health battle and I worry about them. I’m worried for a loved one who seems to be making the same mistakes that have been a pattern all their life. I’m worried about my own sanity – my work has (temporarily) tripled and it’s not like there were enough hours in the day for the original work, which is piled atop my worries for JB’s safety at school and whatever is going to happen with this recall. There’s a lot of emotional turmoil and I’m trying to find moments of less turmoil rather than relief since I’ll just get angrier when I’m not relieved. I just want to stress bake cookies.
The emotion breaks out at odd times. Yesterday, I was stretching and just burst into tears. Smol Acrobat watched me with intent interest for a while and then started to laugh because faces are funny. Which in turn made me laugh a little.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I was stretching today but the emotion surge was less intense.
Insomnia still plagues me intermittently through each night. I can catch a little sleep in naps now and again but I keep waking up and struggling to go back to sleep. Sleeping like a baby, indeed.
Year 2, Day 170: I’m starting to turtle up emotionally. It’s been too much turmoil and worry, too much racism and fascism and sexism.
*****
Smol’s daytime schedule seemed to be shifting to dropping the third nap, which worked out a bit better in giving us longer stretches at night. We were trying to go 3 hours between naps, it worked for a couple of days, then they reverted again to shorter naps during the day and needing three again. Which in turn meant less sleep at night and waking up at 5 am again. That’s truly what the doctor ordered! /sarcasm
PiC speculated that it’s to do with their brain development. They do seem to be trying to achieve another level of mobility which I’m absolutely not ready for.
***** (more…)
September 3, 2021
1. The fragrance of ginger, garlic, and green onions = heaven.
2. I’m so grateful for clean running water. We’re so lucky to have it though as we move towards either perpetual drought or aridification, we may not have it for long.
3. I took Rae and Bethany’s baking advice to make my second batch of biscuits!
Last time the dough was too dry, I had to add extra milk while mixing, and I felt the end result was too dense and tasted strongly of flour.
This time I overcompensated by probably an eighth of a cup of milk. I used 1.25 cups instead of 1 because I had so much flour that couldn’t be incorporated last round. Next time I will start with the 1 cup and add a splash if it’s needed as I mix. This time I grated the frozen butter, which was a lot more work than I expected, and only folded the dough about 5 times instead of the prescribed 10. Oh also I soured up the milk with a tablespoon of vinegar to make it buttermilk.
They were very wet when I was working the dough and I despaired that they wouldn’t work out as I transferred them to the baking pan. But! They were actually quite good! Much less floury tasting, lighter and fluffier. Not yet the layers I wanted but much closer.
4. I loved Xena the Warrior Princess when it was on TV and this thread reminded me I wanted to watch it again. Also Lucy Lawless still seems great as a human. Much better than that limp tool, Kevin Sorbo.
Challenges this week: I’ve only been sleeping in short blocks of an hour or two at a time. Something in my mind or body or both is preventing me from actually getting the rest I desperately need and this will only end in delirium.
The wildfires are raging on and that means our air quality is garbage. We are staying inside as much as possible but we still have to walk the dog and take JB outdoors for their mental and ocular health. The optometrist wants them to have 2 hours of outdoor time a day and that’s not happening but we are trying our best to do as much as we can.
It’s hard balancing the minutiae of everyday life, including a complement of its own horrific stressors like racism, COVID, being affected by the actions of horrible people, being subject to terrible decisions by political leaders, with the concerns almost too vast to comprehend with climate change and what feels like a sweeping wave of right wing Christian extremism taking over our laws, destroying our rights and suppressing votes.
(more…)
August 30, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 162: We’re still cautious about in person school but we’re also well aware that unlike our friends across the country, our district has at least some of the most needed mitigation strategies in place: universal mask mandate, they claim to have updated all the ventilation and to have an air purifier in every room (the latter two I want to see with my own eyes before believing it).
Naturally, Republican Californians had to try to make this darkest timeline even worse with the ridiculous recall election. Newsom is not the best governor ever but at least we have mask mandates. Not a single one of the candidates on the ballot inspires anything but disdain or disgust.
*****
I’m on Day 4 of not getting good sleep. At least last night was just interrupted sleep but not as pain-riddled as the previous 3 days. I had finally escalated to the heavy duty pain meds and that helped enough so that when I slept, it was relatively decent. But not nearly enough. I can usually function on moderate sleep deprivation. It gets tougher when it hits high sleep deprivation like it has now. I took a long rest both Saturday and Sunday but clearly I need another rest today.
It makes me wonder if I should try caffeine but that’s not going to give me more energy. It’ll just stave off sleepiness, which isn’t the issue, so that doesn’t help anything. Right? That’s how caffeine works?
*****
Because just doing my own work at twice the speed anyone else would isn’t enough, I had staffers out today so I had to cover for them. I made a couple executive decisions: I’d take care of most of their stuff, within reason, most of my stuff, and bump the rest to tomorrow. And I’m taking a short rest today. I’m not going to kill myself for work. I’m not going to use up my last dregs of energy and then be a growling monster at my family because I’m clean out of patience. Priorities.
*****
Meanwhile, in Smolville, Smol Acrobat done lost their little infant sleeping mind. They were showing all the signs of sleepiness, including doing their yelling at me that they do when it’s naptime. I comply and go through the whole routine. Do they sleep? They do not. They holler for 55 minutes. We tried three times to resettle them, finally feeding them some more formula, before they finally passed out. I do not know what broke there but it was a whole lot of mess.
Year 2, Day 163: Boy, I thought the past few days were rough. They were. But then last night was the worst. I caught two hours of sleep, then was stuck awake for the next five because of painsomnia and anxiety. I’m guessing the fatigue is why I spent most of the work day (counted only as the time spent in front of the computer, not the time I was minding Smol) in a state of being poised for flight. I just wanted to run away screaming. Pandemic normal, right?
***** (more…)
August 27, 2021
1. We happened past a produce shop we used to frequent a couple years ago, and stopped in. It was such a delight to pick up loads and loads of fresh produce for $22 again. I feel like we just don’t get those prices and that quality, even if the prices aren’t spectacularly low, at the bigger stores. I think we also feel more motivated to eat better and cook more when we get their produce. Though my seasoning for the veggie soup I made was the opposite of inspired. I won’t be making that flavor profile again. PiC wouldn’t admit to disliking it but that’s as close as he’s ever come to showing he didn’t like something I made.
2. I pivoted in the middle of making this lemongrass chicken with bone in thighs, not liking how it was turning out. The rescue recipe used the boneless diced chicken breasts that were intended for another recipe and turned out a lot better than I had expected. Too bad I didn’t have enough lemongrass to make enough to freeze but now I know that I do like it with the diced preparation. I was concerned that it’d be dry, which is why I went with bone in thighs but they required too much cook time for the aromatics. I may play with the recipe some more to make it work with bone-in chicken. Update: actually both recipes were good in the end. I’m glad I tried them both.
3. I made up a big batch of coconut lime chicken for the weekend and will freeze one portion for some later meal. Future me will thank today me for that. I managed to cook enough to cover this whole week of dinners without takeout, supplementing with some frozen foods. I’m proud of myself for making it a whole week and it was really nice to be able to cook even when under extreme pressure at work.
4. I made an experimental batch of biscuits. Everyone else liked them but I want them to be flakier and lighter. I can’t remember what makes biscuits light and fluffy, with those great pull apart layers. Working the dough less? More butter?
Challenges this week: Parenting a six year old feels exponentially harder than parenting a baby.
(more…)
August 24, 2021
Growth
We had a lot of discussions about trusting people and how you decide to trust someone this month. I can’t remember how it started but the conversation continued when JB was reading the graphic novelization of CoCo. They wanted to know why Ernesto yelled “Security!” and what Miguel did wrong for Ernesto to call security to take him away – what was the justification? It was a great teaching example. We talked about when we trust someone: We observe their words and their actions, how they make decisions, whether they believe (as Ernesto clearly did) that the ends justify the means where the means are “sacrificing literally anyone else” and the ends are “so I get what I want when I want it”. We shouldn’t trust people who show us that they are willing to hurt people to get what they want, and a lot of times, people / abusers will hide who they truly are from the rest of us. Miguel didn’t do anything wrong but he made a mistake in trusting someone because he thought they were family, and family doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. We talked about how Ernesto had power over Miguel, who was alone and too little to fight back, and power over Hector who didn’t know that his best friend was a sneaking slimeball, but he chose to hide that part of himself from his fans because he wanted something from them. Very classic abuser!
JB very quickly connected the dots to: “You trusted your dad and you didn’t know he was going to hurt you! And Auntie trusted her husband, who isn’t her husband anymore, because she didn’t think he was going to hurt her!”
Yep.
Yep. People hide the bad parts of themselves from some people, notably the people they aren’t abusing. They hide it from the people who they want something from. So we can be fooled sometimes, it happens. It’s not doing something wrong – it’s a mistake because you don’t have all the information or the experience to know to be more careful around that person but then you’ve got to do something with the information when you do have it.
Responsibility
Nicole and Maggie bestirred my brain cells to thinking about helping JB develop a habit of maintaining their own paper planner. I don’t know if they’re actually the right age developmentally but they do use our family calendars to see what is scheduled so I think it’s just another step from using what’s in front of their faces to developing the skill/habit of writing those things down for themselves. I should have started earlier in the summer, though, more fun things to add than school things probably make this more fun? Oh I don’t know. I started when I started!
(more…)
August 23, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 155: Yesterday was such a bad day with JB that the funk has followed me into today. I just want to lay my head down and be left alone for hours. Naturally, I cannot. We have school drop-off, work, more work, Smol to take care of, more MORE work, Smol to settle down for a nap, work, school pick up, JB’s after school lessons that will stand in for some version of aftercare to schedule.
I don’t know if it’s tempting fate but I filled almost in the rest of the school year’s dates on our calendar for JB. Who knows if these dates will stand. But I will want to know them later and what better time to do that then when I’m stressed and looking for administrative mindless scutwork?
I did sort out their tutoring and Spanish scheduling too, so I was able to start booking those out for a few weeks. This gives me a (faux) sense of control over something. Look at me! Planning things!
*****
I finished our two direct aid projects for friends and did tell myself that I’m not allowed to pick up another project for at least 24 hours. Will I be able to do that? WE. SHALL. SEE.
*****
We donated to the Jewish Family & Community Services East Bay to support their refugee resettlement efforts. This situation in Afghanistan hits really close to home. Our family had to escape their homeland after the US withdrew their troops after the fall of Saigon. One uncle who worked with the CIA disappeared forever, leaving behind his wife and three kids. No one has seen or heard from him since 1975. Another uncle was thrown into jail for decades for fighting for the “wrong” side. Most of my family had to flee under cover of night, embarking on a dangerous journey they were lucky to survive.
People deserve a safe place to live and I think we have a moral responsibility to extend that safety (dubious though it may feel when I look around at how citizens of this country have behaved in recent years).
Year 2, Day 156: I am forcing myself to wait at least until tomorrow before starting up another project. I do have plenty of work to do, I just don’t want to do it and I am clearly using these projects to help me feel a tiny bit better about a world that I strongly resent and dislike.
I’m realizing that I’m simmering at a high amount of rage every day. I haven’t been in this emotional space for a long time and I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten until this weekend when JB and I had the worst most terrible-parenting interaction I’ve ever had and it’s finally sunk in that I’m so overtaxed, so filled with anger at the world, that I have lost every reservoir of patience.
I had to meet someone that a loved one has been seeing for a while and it was immediate red flags and I just want to yell nooooo but they won’t listen so there’s no point. Having been their near-daily support for years through similar bad situations, it was so hard to watch what appears to be them walking down the same path again. I’m also furious with some family because GET YOUR SHOT AUGH. The refugee situation in Afghanistan pushes some very personal buttons, as my family including my generation, were refugees after a war. (more…)