1. Actual cold has set in. We always have cool temps around the 60s but it’s now down to the 40s-50s range which is Cold for me. And I am ever so grateful that the money we’re paying for running the furnace isn’t just thrown away because we actually get warm air all through the house now! Yes this isn’t new anymore but I still appreciate it every day we run it.
2. All holiday gifts have been purchased, and almost all of them have been wrapped and delivered. I WIN!
3. We found a local Japanese curry place and a) they are taking lots of precautions (take out and delivery only, phone and online orders only, masks required, no indoor dining) which makes me so happy to support them and b) their food is delicious and makes me doubly happy to support them and my belly’s needs at the same time. Absolutely delightful!
Challenges this week: Brain fog. So much tired and brain fog.
4. I FINALLY got our mortgage loan number and our online account set up so I could pay the next bill. It only took 6 weeks, 19 emails, and 3 phone calls. Why did they have to make it so hard for us to pay?? The refinancing bank immediately sold our loan, that’s why.
But YIPPEE for getting that set up and paid, finally! I was getting extremely squirrely.
5. I decided to add the Target RedCard to our wallets. We previously mostly shopped them with gift cards but lately we’ve had to use them more for staples that we can’t get elsewhere. It made sense to use their credit card for that 5% discount and the better return window.
It also helps stretch our donation dollars further when we buy for other people like our Lakota Families.
6. We braved Costco the Sunday before Thanksgiving to stock up on a couple weeks’ worth of essentials and we made it out intact! You should have seen it there. You’d be proud too.
After struggling to get things in order since we moved, 2020 has been an oddly productive year-long decluttering and organizing period.
After the 2019 winter holidays, I had a truckload of stuff to deal with: secondhand toys, books, art supplies, workbooks, clothes, and some presents. After visiting the homes of loved ones who are hoarders and just have plain too many things for anyone’s peace of mind, I was especially fired up to clear up and clear out all the things!
I asked PiC to feed me the boxes languishing in the garage from when we moved, one at a time. If we haven’t looked at them in 2 years, I’m almost certain we don’t need anything in there!
He got curious and pulled down three instead, so I took them all. I made quick work of two boxes – sorting them into a donation box and a bag of baby stuff that will go to a friend. The third has some electronics I have to figure out. I’m also sorted through another box of books that were passed on to me to donate to the library, the Little Library, and regift (the like-new copies) to young kids. (The pandemic has put a halt to the local regifting and donations for the moment, but the piles are sorted. The trick now is to keep them hidden from JB so they don’t raid it looking for things to clawback.) (more…)
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.
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Dividend income. We received $193.60 in dividends in October.
My experience with ibotta so far is: it’s slow. We don’t buy a lot of the brands they have offers for. But it’s a handful of spare cash, whenever I finally reach a cash out point, so I have no objections.
I’ve been holding a grudge against Achievement for the past few months because it took so long to get my last reward but also because I’ve been too lazy to log back into my mapping apps. Both silly reasons. I should add that back for that slow trickle of earnings.
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,905.47; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Saturday’s plan: organize the Smol Acrobat’s two dresser drawers to ensure we have age appropriate clothing on hand through six months and put everything else in storage. What really happened?
1. I worked on our ballots (almost done!) with 13 measures and school board people to vote for. Why do we always have SO MANY MEASURES?? It makes voting a real chore. I will check my choices against those of a much politically savvier friend.
2 I tackled the research for open enrollment. This year has a new twist which has eaten my brain. An HMO that acts more like a PPO with a deductible and comes with the option of an HSA and limited FSA (for vision and dental only). I’m very much not a fan of the PPO-like HMO, we’ll have to pay for services in full up to $2800 a year before coverage kicks in for anything that’s not preventative. My x-rays alone last year when my back was an issue was billed out at $1900. I didn’t pay a nickel for that, last year.
I’ve never had an HSA option before and I was excited. Then I learned that we lose our general FSA and HSA contributions and gains are taxable in CA so we’d be looking at a significant jump in our state taxable income. We double our federal pre-tax deduction but it might be a wash compared to the increased taxable state income. I’ve asked our tax person to run some numbers for us on that front, meanwhile, I need PiC to get a hold of the negotiated rates for the HSA-HMO.
Most years of my life I haven’t had health insurance but in my adult married life I’ve had great insurance. We always opted for the HMO for ease of use and to avoid this out of pocket maximum dance. I’m not looking forward to that being part of our lives.
3. Ordered Seamus’s medication refills and also called the vet to get a written prescription to submit.
4. Worked for 90 minutes to clear up some mess ahead of Monday. Monday me better be grateful. (Spoiler: Monday me failed to be grateful because Monday was crammed full of personal and professional issues.)
5. Another two hours organizing and paring down the family photo albums meant I was in shouting distance of finishing. That’s 8 hours I’ve spent on this project across several days. I must have started with nearly 2000 photos because I’d winnowed it down a massive amount and hundreds are left. I was initially feeling guilty discarding a batch of photos of my estranged sibling but today’s work revealed that even keeping only the photos with him and someone else in them leaves with me with over 100 of them. Guilt gone!
I never touched Smol Acrobat’s clothes!
6. Sunday had to be desk reclamation day. I’d left my piles and piles of photos all over my desk. If I didn’t get that squared away, I couldn’t work on Monday. And I couldn’t deal mentally with the chaos. Four more hours of sorting, discarding, and transferring resulted in a final photo album, with many photo slots doubled up or more. Looks like an accordion and I don’t care! The photos are consolidated in an album which went with the contents of my medium box into one large box and I can wash my hands of the mess! One day I may even sit down to sort and discard duplicates of the school era photos. The album spanned 1978-1990, my photos span 1994-2008.
7. I tackled packaging up Halloween pouches for the zoom Halloween scavenger hunt we will do with JB’s friends, then I organized SA’s dresser. I’m sure there were other things I wanted to do but I’m D-O-N-E.
Pumpkin banana bread will have to wait another day.
Challenges this week: my sciatic nerve pain is an all day every day thing now and it’s the pits. The news is a mess and depressing as all get out.
We attempted to satisfy a craving I had with take out and were appalled to see so many people are dining indoors and outsiders in such crowded setups – lines going out the door and wrapping around the sidewalk and the block – that they may as well not be masked or distanced. Since the restaurants were set up on the sidewalks, there was no safe way to walk past diners without being right on top of them. We didn’t even try to park. It was a disappointment, three different places were the same way. After many hours on this “adventure”, and a few tears from JB who was homesick because when you’re 5 and haven’t been on a 9 hour road trip in ten months you forget what an hour feels like, we managed to scavenge some dinner and managed to feed ourselves by 9 pm. Sheesh.
I asked Joybird for an update on our sofa. Their updates have been non-existent up to now and I don’t think we’re going to be getting it anything like on time. I could live with that if they were proactively telling us what’s going on and not leaving me in the dark so I wonder if they’re just scamming us. After three days of trying to get an answer, we found out they have been six weeks behind schedule and hadn’t even started making it until this week. But somehow they still think we should trust them to deliver. I cancelled the order. We won’t be shopping from Joybird again.
8. We got a small refund from the rental property escrow! It’s nice to put money in when we’re contemplating a lot of money going out soon.
9. I finally put in my first order at Penzey’s which was exciting! I also happened to wait long enough that they had a promotion: buy 5 spices and the cheapest six spice is free. In writing this I realize that I forgot to get one more spice mix I wanted. Darnit.
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,816.35; Rural libraries, $346.69.
Surprise! Chores!
I’m pleased with the occasional initiative JB continues to show. They got up early one morning and while I still lay abed, they set up the dogs’ breakfast without being asked AND remembered the whole rigamarole of the kibble, and the supplements, and the medications, and the everything. Seamus’s dietary needs are many.
They can also be responsible for most of the laundry now. They load the washer and start it after an adult has poured in the detergent. They check and spin it again if it hasn’t spun enough water out. They can transfer to the dryer and then they hang up and put away the clean clothes. I generally do the sorting first just to make it more efficient (and I like sorting). I also do most of the folding but they’re good at folding the dish towels.
The initiative is still very sporadic though.
Education
I will leave this space free of my rant about the state of education for the moment but commenting on JB’s education: we spent the entire summer cobbling together a consistent education stream for them.
We were very lucky to have the help of a trained teacher to do the actual teaching and I added occasional supplemental classes through Outschool to give them some variety. They’re exploring all kinds of fun educational experiences as and when I can fit them into our schedule: “visiting” the cultures of other countries, dance, literature and math.
I was oh so grateful we had that solid foundation when they started kindergarten. JB is well accustomed to regular remote learning if done well (that part remains to be seen) and the regularity of a five day school week. Whether I feel like that formal education structure is best for them is not relevant right now, it’s what we have.
Different generations
Breakfast when I was growing up: small bowl of rice porridge, maybe soy sauce.
When PiC was growing up: bowl of cereal.
JB: Bowl of raisin bran, scrambled eggs, bacon, fresh mango and strawberries.
We ALL eat the same meals now (except for the parts I can’t eat), so it’s not like I’m blaming them for the choices we make. It’s just a huge contrast!
Pupdate
Seamus is losing senior dog friends left and right, as his cohort ages, and it’s so sad. They were all getting on in years and it was time for each of time, but it’s still heartbreaking. I’m glad he has Sera to keep him a bit engaged, even if he doesn’t necessarily appreciate her. They have a bit of a bond though, they check on each other every so often and she functions a little bit like his remora fish, cleaning up after him after their morning treats.
I keep tracking the number of Happiness Rolls he does every day. Once he stops having Happiness Rolls, loses mobility, or stops eating or drinking, we’re going to know it’s time. It’s very important to me that we do our best to get that right. We want him to squeeze out every good day and bit of joy he can but not hold him in misery because we’re too selfish to let him go. We know people who have been holding their suffering pets hostage to their emotions and it’s absolutely awful. When your pet hasn’t been able to get up or walk to tend their basic needs in months and has seizures almost regularly, it’s not a secret that they are suffering.
I think it’s been three years since we brought Sera home and for the first two and a half years, I was pretty sure she didn’t even like us. She was happy to eat our food and wanted to show submission but she was only bonded to Seamus, she didn’t want much to do with us humans.
We’ve spent loads of time on her training, even though it was frustrating to feel like we were pouring in gallons of energy into a bottomless pit. She’s still very reactive and therefore cannot be trusted off leash or on leash with JB. Not that she’d ever deliberately hurt JB, she’s simply still not capable of paying attention to the human on the other end of the leash and would absolutely drag JB face first on the ground to go after a dog she thought was menacing her. Well, she previously couldn’t. She’s finally making some progress. She looks at us when she sees another dog, anxiously and ever so briefly, but she does break that intent gaze voluntarily sometimes and that’s a world of difference from her earlier levels of hypervigilence. She’s also very much into the treats I’ve been getting her and she’s learned what heel means, though she won’t STAY heeling so that’s the next step of training. Her sit game is weak but she’s recently learned down!
What I find absolutely fascinating is that she listens to JB. (Seamus categorically will not obey JB unless there is obvious bribery. He considers himself above them, and he’s been a mature adult longer than JB has been alive so his judgement has been trustworthy much longer. But that’s diminishing now in his 15th or 16th year. It’s funny to hear JB adopt my low deep training tones to try and exude authority over him because it does not work.) Sera, though, will obey JB when we’re home. She’s obeyed commands to go to bed, sit, and lay down. She’s obeyed the sit and stay when JB is feeding them, and she’s sort of obeyed, about as well as she ever does for anyone, the “walk” command which is her release to go eat. JB scruffs her as best they can to “help” her slow down which is also hilarious because a five year old cannot possibly hold back a 60 lb pibble dashing for her food bowl. But they try.
Random questions
How do we make chips?
How do bears get their sounds?
What does ‘dire’ mean?
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Things I didn’t expect my five year old to know about: Baba Yaga (thanks to Itty Bitty Hellboy which is a great read)
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Amelia Bedelia moment
In one of their lessons, JB learned to make fish decorated with tissue paper. On a day they needed something to keep them busy, I asked JB to make me a school of fish for my office.
They taped together a few sheets of paper to draw a large building with a sign at the top: “Fish school.”
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Believe me, I know you.
JB: Can you ask if mom can come on our walk?
Me: they just want me to come so I can walk Seamus and they can go fast with you and Sera.
JB: NO!! I JUST WANT YOU TO WALK WITH US. *Offended face* Outside two minutes later…
JB: ok! Mom can take Seamus, you (PiC) ‘n’ me can go first.
Me: AH HA! J’accuse!
:: What were your favorite kinder-level books? What was your favorite childhood breakfast?
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,816.35; Rural libraries, $346.69.
Week 29 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Week 29, Day 199: Between JB and Seamus, and now TBD nickname Smol Human, I am not getting anything like enough sleep.
I was teetering on the very edge of the cliff of No Patience, and nearly bit off PiC’s head for asking me any questions.
I had to take several deep breaths and a giant step back, and stop working for a little while. I did a spot of organizing. Stress cleaning usually evens out my mood and stress organizing was close. It took the edge off at least but it was enough for me to realize just how tired I was. I never snap at PiC.
After I realized that I’d been woken up or disturbed no less than a dozen times over the night, I gave up trying to fight and went to lay down for a short 30 minute rest. I really needed a couple hours but I did not have that luxury on a Monday. We made it through but not without a lot more bumps and bruises along the way.
After hours, I discovered Seamus, fresh off one round of medications yesterday, has developed yet another problem! That poor pup cannot get a break. I gave him some medication and monitored it but he neither improved nor seemed in distress so we left it til morning to talk to the vet. (more…)
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,732.74; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Week 29 of COVID in the Bay Area.
