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.
1. I learned about the Foodraiser years ago through Shep on Twitter because he knows Greg Doucette, and have been happy to contribute every year to this tremendous effort. Greg’s duplicated the Foodraiser thread on Bluesky, and they got a local write-up too. When I grow up, I’d love to have that kind of impact for the Lakota families.
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 $1,056 in dividends from the stocks portfolio. Immediately reinvested, we need to grow our portfolios enough so that if we lose our jobs, we won’t be totally up a creek. That’s a concern again! Layoffs at PiC’s, absurdity piled upon absurdity at mine.
I was gifted a $100 Clipper card in a stroke of pure luck. A friend of a friend didn’t need their card anymore and wanted to give it to someone who would use it. My Clipper card had malfunctioned several months ago and after too many phone cards PiC managed to at least rescue the balance, but that solution meant I needed to replace the card itself.
Year 5, Day 124: For the past two weeks, PiC has had at least one bad driver encounter on their bike commute. I hate it so much.
Just this weekend, a bicyclist was hit and killed by some asshole driver in an area we are familiar with.
It’s usually an asshole driver around here – rushing to cut off other drivers before the red light, and/or running a very red light. They’re definitely disregarding pedestrians and bicyclists.
*****
Smol Acrobat came home with a bit of a leaky nose and a moan-groan-bemoan attitude. “I’m not few-wing well” they say. Oh boy. (We tested, negative for COVID.)
Trainer time! Week 2! We are going to schedule my workouts for every other day. That feels like a pace I can handle. It helps that I want to do it and I like to do it, it also helps to have someone tell me to do less this week to avoid a fatigue crash.
My brain knows this up until the point of doing the thing and suddenly it gets caught up remembering this was a dopamine generator! Let’s push through! More is good! But no, no it’s not.
Year 5, Day 125: I ache from head to toe. Smol Acrobat is a bit sicker, though testing negative for COVID right now so it’s probably just a bit of a cold viral thing, and I’m keeping my distance but PiC had to get up with them in the night. I was first up, which is unusual. More so today because I slept badly. I keep waking up sweating buckets in the middle of the night. Don’t know what it is but this is getting old.
But the real whammy was that a friend needed childcare and we took on 3 bonus children most of the day. This, after hosting JB’s friend for 3 days. We vastly, deeply, overestimated our ability to deal with such a crowd. On the one hand, Smol Acrobat was tickled pink with the company, both of them had a ton of fun with the bonus siblings. On the other hand, children talk so much. SO MUCH. They talked my ear right off.
PiC handled half the day on his own, taking all four kids (minus Smol Acrobat who I raced to drop off and raced back to my desk) out on an adventure. I worked as fast as I could and then made their snacks, ordered dinner, minded them for an hour or so until we
I was very pleased to be able to tangibly help our friend who is going through a bad divorce from an abusive spouse, and it was good to see them, but also wow did that take so much energy.
Unfortunately that also required me to stay up and work until midnight to clear enough work off the desk to feel an ounce less despair over how behind I am. If I can get more caught up before the weekend then it’ll actually stay caught up. But getting there is going to take a lot of work.
Trainer rest day that wasn’t restful.
Year 5, Day 126: I’m still so physically tired from yesterday I don’t even have the energy to dopamine farm today. My brain status: dude, if you can lift your arms, you’re doing well today. Who cares if we get anything done.
Oh right. The job cares. The job cares and the bills care and the kids needing feeding care. Fine. I spent the day catching up painfully and slowly on one mountain after another, only taking a short lunch break and a Walk the JB break when they hadn’t been outside all day and refused to go do SOMETHING active on their own. They had been puttering around the house doing the laundry as instructed but filling in the gaps with books, comic books, and the occasional video game.
Trainer time! I didn’t like squeezing it all into the end of the day but that’s how the cookie crumbled today, between having to take JB out for their outside time and keeping me locked down at my desk to push through piles of paperwork. Luckily they felt easy: glute bridges and calf raises. Note for trainer: I accidentally did a cardio today.
Year 5, Day 127: Sent a nibling a belated graduation gift today. Tracking the birthday gifts for this weekend’s birthday party.
Annnnd another round of layoffs are looming at PiC’s work. My pessimism was spot on – this spring I darkly predicted that we could breathe safely for about one quarter before we’d be holding our breaths again. It’s not just us, I see a headline that I won’t link to because it’s Fox “Layoffs announced at multiple companies this summer”, and that tallies with the lists of layoffs we have been seeing. But here we are again. We’ve been stretched thin this year, emotionally, physically and financially, after Sera’s intensive care and vet bills, and as we helped out a bunch of people who are living far more on the edge. Most of it was direct aid so we won’t see it again, and that’s fine, and some of it was big loans and we’ll deal with that later.
Funny story: the toaster oven caught on literal fire today. I realized we don’t have any fire retardant in the kitchen and dithered over the idea of throwing flour on it because what a mess that would make. PiC found a more sedate way to put it out and all was well. Go figure this was probably the least taxing thing of the week.
Note for trainer: Oops, another accidental cardio today. It’s my rest day though, so this was just bonus.
Year 5, Day 128: It’s been a week of overcommitting, both for work and personal stuff, and today’s no exception.
I’ve been working flat out and late into the night most of the week to burn through my backlog to create time for a doggy playdate today. It felt hard to fit in but there was no question of giving up the plan because it’s been 3.5 weeks since my last dog time. That’s far too long.
Pup and I spent about an hour together. My soul needed that. There’s a special sort of happiness generated from spending time with a dog that simply can’t be made any other way. Then I got back to work and cranked through another few piles. There’s light at the end of that tunnel yet.
Note for trainer: Oops, another accidental cardio today. Well, not accidental. More like a plan with consequences I ignored beforehand. I went to a friend’s to borrow their dog for a walk. That plan was revised almost immediately to taking him home to play because they’re so busy they haven’t played in ages and my legs were going to fall off if I didn’t sit down, or at least stop walking so much, for a while. We hung out in the yard playing fetch for nearly half an hour and that was perfect. Pup was happy and exhausted and I was happy and exhausted. We’ll bridge this dog-less life gap with more of these doggy playdates. It doesn’t erase the sadness but it does generate a special kind of happiness.
In the end, between that and an adventure with PiC that involved so many unauthorized and unappreciated stairs, leagues and leagues of them, I had to quit on my workout plan for the day. Or so I thought.
When I got home and realized that two of the three exercises were arms, I knocked those out so that my body was evenly balanced, top and bottom, with fatigue. Win?
Year 5, Day 26: Last week, I was eagerly anticipating the arrival of my seeds today for planting the front yard and the garden. Not only are they still in Florida today, throwing my planting schedule into a shambles, I’m anticipating a terrible conversation with the internist about Sera’s prognosis. She relapsed over the weekend and was hospitalized for lifesaving care. After going through half a box of tissues and putting a cool washcloth on my eyes, I did some grasping at straws research. None of it did any good. Her prognosis is bad. She’s already on the best possible treatment plan and it’s still failing. The other treatment options aren’t truly options, they’re desperate attempts to prolong life without regard for quality of life. We’re bringing her home for doggy hospice for as long as she still feels good. If she relapses again, when she relapses again, it’ll be her time. It would be deeply unkind to force her to go through this over and over.
It’s a good thing that I did a lot of work on the weekend because I’m fit for nothing today.
But she felt better enough from the overnight care to have a laugh at me.
Trying to shift her for her last walk of the night at 945 pm: Sera. Sera. Sera. (Gently shake her shoulder) Come. Sera come. Sera, come. Seraaaaaaa come. (Start worrying she’s relapsed again the past hour) Sera. Sera. Serraaaaaa? Ok fine, you leave me no choice. Open the wipes packet to get a wipe. (To wipe her down because she IS still a bit grubby from the hospital but I’m not going to make her have a bath now.)
She pops up like a jack in the box.
AH HA YOU WERE JUST IGNORING ME.
We finally went out and instead of going right back in like normal, she took me on a jaunt to sniff the ALL sniffs. She still doesn’t want to eat much of anything but her energy is much better than it’s been in days. I don’t know how long this will last but we’re going to make the most of what time we have left.
Year 5, Day 27: I can feel the depression gloom creeping in. I don’t want to eat, I don’t want to talk to most people, I want to be left alone with Sera to just be quiet together. I hand fed her boiled eggs this morning, she was strangely excited about it so I boiled some more for her. Of course she then decided she was done with eggs. I’ll have to think of something else for her dinner. Several cries later, I got some work done, listened to her snore, cuddled with her a bit, and then she took me for the longest walk in the recent history of walks. She was either feeling her oats or taking her farewell tour, or both.
We were both fairly wiped out but there was still the usual stuff to do so I went through our usual routines: “I’m going to pick up JB now, you can stay here and nap”, then “we’re going to run an errand now, we’ll see you when we get back”.
And she was here when we got back and she was coddled some more with hand feeding and head rubs. JB wistfully says, now and again, I wish she could get better.
Me too, kid.
She was hospitalized overnight and part of one day and the house positively echoed with her absence. It’s going to be so much worse when she’s gone.
Year 5, Day 28: Sera woke me before 5 am trying to get out the door because she had the Tummy Troubles and we didn’t get out in time so the first hour and a half of this predawn was spent scrubbing the carpet, the floors, her tail and bum, and washing blankets and towels. That was a lot.
She seemed fine the rest of the morning so I decided it was more important to get some calories into her around lunchtime than to go the full 24 hours of withholding food. This proved to be a Big Mistake. She frantically (for her, this just looks like a tense body and an intense eyeball) got me to take her out at 6 pm and had a real mess before we got across the street. I had to get some warm water and wash her up. She smelled of Mango Tango for about ten minutes before she continued to have Tummy Troubles a few more times. Oh well, good effort.
I camped out on the sofa so I could get to her quickly during the night if she needed to go out urgently again. She did. Every single hour until 5 am. But not for Tummy Troubles, half the time she needed to pee, half the time she was asking for water. I’m grateful I didn’t have to clean up but am ever so tired.
Year 5, Day 29: Just in case, I’m switching her to morning meds only. I gave her the steroids she’s been on for months last night. I’m not sure whether it was the steroids or if it was because I camped out and she was thrown off by the light and relocation. Thankfully no tummy troubles since 7 pm but I am whipped and it’s only 7 am. Another 12 hours of water-only and tiny amounts of rice to be safe.
I’ve cycled through all the stages of grief in the past few days and I’m sure when the clock really starts ticking I’ll be cycling through them again a few more times. But for this moment I’m finally in a brainspace of trying to just be in the moment with her, whatever that moment contains.
I’m mentally (and photographically and sometimes here) recording her maybe-lasts. Tonight, she came to Smol Acrobat’s room and laid down nearby when they started to tantrum, following Seamus’s tradition of going TOWARDS the alarming and loud screaming. They never interfered with the yelling, they would just be nearby radiating support. She followed me out of the office yesterday afternoon to see where I was going, like she used to do all the time. I’m trying to commit these all to memory. Smol Acrobat cuddled her face gently tonight. It breaks my heart that they’re not really going to remember her. They’re still too young to remember this year on their own, outside of pictures and stories. I hope we have a good night tonight, maybe a good day will follow that.
Life is still inexplicably going on around us. We’re scheduling the final review of the will and trust. I marked up my first round of edits and sent those back already. This week I marked up a second round of clarification questions to be sure I know how some of these details work when we brief our new executors/trustees for our meeting. Then it has to be notarized to be official. That’ll be one giant important thing off my list. Then we need to make sure all the relevant people have a copy of the paperwork and understand our wishes and our thinking.
My seeds are still in transit. I’ve been itching to plant them and have something good to look forward to, to do something that’s positive and not sad.
Year 5, Day 30: Starting at midnight, she kept coming to fetch me to go outside every hour, then half hour, then quarter hour. She threw up everything she’d eaten yesterday evening, and it wasn’t that much to begin with. It tore my heart up trying to support her as she heaved.
It’s been almost seven years together and she’s only now communicating clearly to me. Each time she comes to get me, I know she wants me to take her out. Maybe it’s less about clarity and more about consistency. Most of the time, prior to her illness, she didn’t need anything, she was just keeping me company. I’m just slow and sluggish on my third night of this, having had no sleep, day or night. She settled on the kitchen bed, instead of coming back to the bedroom like usual. She wanted to stay near the door. We went outside seven times by 330 am and I was absolutely beat. I begged her quietly to sleep for a while. We both needed it. I was dizzy and no longer seeing straight. Miraculously we got three whole hours of sleep before she fetched me again and out the door we went.
I wondered how much longer we could keep this up. She was still interested in food, she was still ambulatory, but she wasn’t going to get better. The disease had progressed too much. And I was getting delirious.
I sat and held her paws for a long while, crying and contemplating what we could do to make her more comfortable. I wondered how we’d make the decision. I wondered how I could let her go. I don’t want to. She’s come so far, we’ve tried so hard.
But by mid afternoon I had my answer. She was crashing again. She had always jumped up for her midday walk. Today, she didn’t even try to get up. She just looked at me. It took such coaxing and encouragement and helping her up to get out the door. Once out, she was fatigued and unsteady. Not nearly as bad as when we took her to the ER but we already knew that we could not let her get that bad again. When we returned, and I offered her baked salmon, she’d only take slivers. Nothing like enough to sustain life.
She sat nearly in my lap as I hugged her and snuggled close to me for a while. That was a first, and last. She’s never, not once, been a lap dog like I’d hoped she would become. Seamus certainly was and he had 30 lbs on her. It’s like she was checking every last box this week except the one where my dogs are on 20 year contracts. But she was telling us it was her time, so we called the vet, got the kids, and brought her to say goodbye. We were with her every minute, telling her how much we loved her. I felt like the world’s worst traitor. She trusted me and I tried but I failed her. And now …
The vet was as kind as could be. She pointed out that Sera’s 🐶 body condition showed it was time and reminded us that we’d done everything we could do. She talked the kids through what was going to happen and gave us time to say our goodbyes.
This has been one of the most painful days of my life, having to make this decision because of a disease, before her time. She deserved more years, more pets, more cuddles, more love, more treats. Everything feels terrible and unfair and awful.
Frankly I don’t remember how to exist with my dog. She’s been a constant companion, day and night, and everything in between. She’s my officemate, snoring and running in her sleep while I gripe at the computer. Sometimes stinking up the joint with her toxic farts. When your heart breaks, you hug your dog. What do you do when your last dog is gone?
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.