Year 6, Day 217: Every time I log into Fidelity, this message flashes at me: Attention: You appear to be invested too aggressively. Fidelity has investment strategies to help you stay on track for retirement.
So judgy! What business is it of yours that I am invested very aggressively? Could I not have a PLAN? In fact, I do. Invest as aggressively as possible to ensure our savings will see us through a long layoff or a medical emergency. Remember 2008-2009? I do. I job hunted for 18-20 months during a miserable economy. Nowadays we could probably, if it was just one layoff, make it a year without extreme panicking. Financially. Emotionally I might not be able to hang. But a medical emergency or crisis? THAT would be serious stuff and I don’t think we can withstand one of those. Not a severe one.
Every time I read an article about how folks have to go into full time medical care for something serious the calculator starts going. The costs of the care, the costs of childcare (if we could even get reliable childcare), the cost of feeding everyone when no parent has time or ability to cook, all adds up to a staggering number in my head. That would have to be entirely out of pocket for us. Like my pregnancy during 2020, we’d have to cope entirely on our own. We have no local family or friends who are financially set with the ability to put their lives on hold to help us out, so it’d be like the past ten years of parenting: one or two weeks a year when a trusted relative comes and cooks and hangs out with the kids. Everything else is on us.
Year 6, Day 218: There isn’t any day I don’t hate my job right now. We’ve been given impossible KPIs with next to no time to make them work and contradictory KPIs at that. Think: Double our productivity at the drop of a hat sort of impossible. “Dire” consequences are hinted at if we don’t meet them. Well, we won’t! It’s impossible. It’s been a long time since I thought any job was worth killing myself over, and this one definitely isn’t, but my priority is about my people, not the work and that’s what’s going to get me.
I’m damned if we do, damned if we don’t.
If I don’t put in the legwork now to prep support for next year, we definitely won’t have the support. So if we all still have jobs, my people suffer. Or if I’m the only one who gets the axe, they suffer because I didn’t take care of them. If I do put in the legwork now but we miss the target this year (as expected), maybe we lose that support anyway. It’s really stupid! Unless I can talk them around and say look – we’re all as well placed as we possibly CAN be to aim for the stars because I did all that work, surely you don’t want to waste it.
But my ability to talk sense into corporate “line goes up” types is naught because I argue logic and reality. They just want line to go up, completely divorced from logic and reality. So maybe I have a job for 12 more months before they decide it’s my fault that their impossible demands aren’t met.
That realization rubs up against my survival instinct. Day to day, I want to help people and that means giving money. Lots of it, these days. But if I’m likely to run out of job runway in 6? 12? Maybe 18 months at the outside? If nothing else, I don’t really want to be miserable for that much longer. It’s been awful since 2023.
And PiC is feeling similar heat at his work – massive amounts of work while having layoffs twice a year every year for four years. In his twelve years prior to that, maybe there were a couple layoffs? It was not the norm.
It’s hard not to give in to the feeling that we have to save every penny for our family. We do save aggressively but in the moments I remember the Great Recession, my whole being clenches up with stress.
Year 6, Day 219: Every day feels like a week these days but my cousin being in town for the holiday makes life seem bearable again (temporarily). This is the one long weekend in the year I can truly relax. There’s an adult in the house who can manage my kids that isn’t PiC and isn’t completely exhausted all the time and loves us. It’s a rare feeling and my body obviously feels it deeply because I can actually sleep deeply when she’s here.
We did cake deliveries in the neighborhood together, since we had a giant Costco cake and no party, and it was fun surprising friends with a large slab of cake.
It’s suddenly cold enough to see your breath now. I’m also finally feeling 80% human again. That’s about my baseline for health. Every time I hit this phase, I realize that I haven’t just been lazy for a month. I’ve been down and out. Now I can do my workouts. I can get out of bed and do a full day of work at my desk. It don’t have to work in bed all day to conserve every ounce of energy. It’s a huge difference.
Year 6, Day 220: JB asked what Thanksgiving is about for us since we don’t celebrate the Pilgrims being colonizing jerks. Well, I said. It’s a federal holiday whether we buy into the reason or not so it’s our time and our chance to have our own family traditions with food and chosen family.
I used to spend this holiday with in-laws and other family but I haven’t been able to face Other People since my mom died a month before Thanksgiving. From my still-raw grief and need to avoid people grew a new tradition where I don’t travel, we just host whoever might be around and we set an overly ambitious table for five. It’s become a far better day than it used to be and I’m grateful for this time.
It’s funny. Stuffing (dressing) and being with a wide array of people this weekend used to be the most important thing to me, back when I was young. This year I forgot the stuffing and was happy that it was just the five of us. We wouldn’t have minded friends joining but I didn’t feel like anyone was missing, other than our beloved dogs.
Year 6, Day 221: We spent this day freezing our toes off in the city. It was planned so far as: we met up with SmolAc’s schoolmate and their sibling and parent at a park. They had a hell of a time biking and cackling their little heads off. JB didn’t like the biking conditions so I ran an impromptu calisthenics routine for them.
The play time dragged into snack time, we’d all packed some things, and then into forest exploration. That turned into a hike and then the end of that turned into an hour on the playground.
The kids clearly had fun and I was too busy trying to find patches of sunlight to care about much else other than hoping that no one tore the seat of their pants or their knees, sliding down the hills haphazardly as they were.
How this week flew by in a week of Mondays and ended .. oh right. It’s been Very Busy and I have been Very Slow and we’ve had work going on around the exterior all week which has been pretty disruptive. It’s necessary weatherproofing but I’ll be so grateful when the last of this is done.
A friend is being moved to hospice and I’ve scheduled a visit after they’re settled in. I’m not ready to lose them. Stupid sentiment I suppose, is anybody ever? I’m so tired of this relentless grieving of one loss after another, we all deserve an extended period of joy. Well, not the fascists. They can lose all their hate-fueled joy, that’d be ok.
Wins: I sorted TWO big bags of Smol Acrobat hand me downs and put half away for future use and half into the donation bin to share with friends with younger ones than ours. We’re going to have them over one night with all their kiddies, feed them dinner, and have them pick through the bins for whatever they’d like to take away. Win win for everyone!
PiC has to finish his endless painting project first and then we have to find a date before the rush of Fall and holidays and all that overtakes us. Cross your fingers for us that we don’t lose another 3 months before we manage to organize something.
Bestie turned 40 this week ❣️ I’m so proud of her in so many ways. She’s awesome.
Year 6, Day 126: I’m tetchy today. We went to a family gathering on Saturday. It was good fun for all of us! We very much needed that catch up. But it wiped me out completely. I spent most of Sunday laid up. No batch cooking for me. 🙁 Today was less bad but only less in the sense that I can sit upright but otherwise am kinda useless. Walking is a tall order, doing anything that requires standing is right out. I probably need another 2-3 days to recover, probably, and I resent that so much.
I took it very easy on Saturday, sitting down most of the time, mostly indoors shaded from the sun and wind. All I did was parent when the kids needed me, and talk to some friends. PiC did the bulk of the SmolAc herding. Yet, by the evening, it felt like I’d been plugged into the wall and every muscle was separately being electrocuted. I also resent how much this reminds me that I can’t do stamina-requiring things like go to protests. My friends did this weekend, and I’m grateful for their activism on these days when both the personal and world outlooks are so bleak.
Alas, no paws or claws today, either. That would have cheered me up immensely.
Year 6, Day 127: I always spend a little time reading current job listings, keeping feelers out the market for opportunities, in an attempt to stay informed enough that I don’t feel completely flat-footed when my time runs out at this job. It’s been a depressing exercise, the past 18 months of listings at best generate an “ugh. meh. bleck.” There was only one that looked remotely interesting last year, an Assistant Director in an advocacy organization helping incarcerated people reintegrate into society. I spotted one today that I am definitely not qualified for, running a conservation organization, but the employer piqued my interest. I don’t yearn to start yet another job in the workplace but this must be my gut telling me that if I must change jobs, only jobs that are about doing good in the world are going to fit the bill. That’s new.
It’s a bit of a luxury criteria considering the number of people out of work now, and at the payscale I’d want/need, so I should adjust my attitude and hold on to this job which at least does some measure of good with a reasonable moral compass and isn’t outright evil.
Year 6, Day 128: Every time I try to deal with Comcast for an outage credit, they try to upsell me on their mobile service. Why on earth would I want a year of terrible free mobile service from them when they can’t even give us reliable high-speed internet? I had 3 outages in a single week alone! Honestly.
I’m still very much on the cusp of this flare up so I’m still having to be careful to coddle my body what seems like a ridiculous amount. But after less than ten minutes standing, my whole body starts initiating a shutdown sequence so my opinions don’t matter here. 😒
By spacing out the prep for this really simple recipe for Vietnamese Pork-Stuffed Fried Tofu In Tomato Sauce, skipping stuffing the tofu entirely, and sitting down for 95% of the prep, I did manage to cook a whole new dish. It’s pretty good! It’s now meatballs and tofu in sauce but still good. That’s kind of nice.
Year 6, Day 129: Normally, I only read ebooks on my Kindle and Kobo apps on my phone so I’ve never replaced my old timey Kindle since it was too annoying to read on a device that didn’t have a light of its own. This isn’t usually an issue, except when I buy a Humble Bundle and then have to download every file, text them to my phone, download them there and THEN upload to the Kobo app. What a PAIN. It’s not something I do often, maybe once a year, but woof is it a timesink.
The app interface is also frustrating. We can’t do bulk actions that I’ve been able to find (adding multiple books to collections), and I hate that series of books are organized alphabetically instead of by volume and that I have no way to change that within my collections. So when I have a 20 book series, I have to open the info for every single one to hunt down the next book in the series.
I wonder if it’s even worth submitting feedback. I’m going to try.
Year 6, Day 130: I’m on Day 6 or 7 of this damn flare and am reflecting on how this is awful and yet it’s lucky that the way they present, I can force myself to do some of the things I need to do. It’s miserable and I pay a very steep price for forcing it, but I can force the issue. So crucial things like work and school pick up can usually happen even if my insides will then threaten to be my outsides if I don’t collapse in short order. But cooking is going too far, and sometimes showering is, too, even a quick ten minutes version. “Lucky”.
On the COVID front we personally know four people, one in July and three in August, who have caught it and it’s hard not to feel like it’s hemming us in on all sides psychologically with the usual late summer surge, and the latest bullshit restrictions on vaccines taking away one major layer of protection (we still mask regularly). Our main supplier of masks these days, Vogmask, is seeing lower demand which is affecting their inventory so that’s a bit worrying. I spent a big chunk of cash recently replenishing our supply now that SmolAc and I are wearing them, too.
(Yes, there are likely better masks but fitwise these are consistent good fits for our size and shape faces, and the kids can easily carry and put them on and take them off. And they get the super colorful ones. Those factors all add up to wearing them happily and for long periods of time as needed instead of avoiding them or taking them off repeatedly.)
I used to wear my flomask most regularly so I have tons of those filters. I stopped because the bottom elastic was overstretched. They recently started stocking those, so I can fix that, and wearing that more. Our healthcare provider is still supplying us with home tests, so I’m collecting those and tucking some into holiday gifts for folks who don’t have ready access.
It’s interesting watching the kids’ relationship develop. Compared to my lived experience, it’s super weird. We insist they treat each other with kindness, fairness and respect. It’s not always easy for them to do but we enforce the same rules for both of them, within age-appropriate reason.
JB has adored SmolAc since birth. (They have declared SmolAc to be “so annoying” about a dozen times over their lifetimes, a quota so low it was met on any single day of my life.) Likewise, SmolAc is deeply attached to JB. They fight and bicker and tattle, of course, but they also, with and without prompting, look for compromises and try to broker peace on their own. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But they do try their best, for whatever variable value of “best” they’re capable of that day.
My brother and I? Feral badgers. We physically brawled over everything. He never wanted me (specifically, me) as a sibling and tried to beat me into the shape he wanted: a brother who was a passive follower. What he got out of that effort was a sister who was exponentially more mean. I started out a fighter and he just honed my fighting technique. Ironically, what he wanted is how I felt inside much of my life as the youngest of most of my cousin groups: I felt like a follower who never had an original thought because so many cousins had already traveled before me, for better or for worse, and had spent my entire lifetime following and/or fighting an older brother who had already done everything before me. My path diverged sharply in high school but I didn’t quite have the perspective to see it then.
I hope that these relatively auspicious beginnings will lead to an equally loving, if occasionally exasperated, adult relationship for the two of them.
Life with Smol Acrobat
SmolAc has inherited my childhood possessiveness. Sitting at the dining table, they yelled, politely, to JB: “JB, could you not snuggle my bear please?! Because I want to.”
Pupdate
I have a semi sort of maybe 2026 (later in the year probably) timeline in mind for adopting a dog. It’s very squishy. It’s more of a anti-timeline. I don’t know when yet, I just know when it’s not (now). I’m using this time to trickle cash in the dog savings and multiple other upcoming spending situations.
Knowing all this, I occasionally go look yearningly at adoptable dogs when I’ve played with zero dogs for too long and just need a dog fix to get by. It’s usually at a safe emotional remove.
Today, however, I poked around because I’d just had a very fun chance meeting with a neighbor’s dog. That’s the exact wrong mood to take into looking at listings. I not only found an awesome local rescue specifically for senior dogs, I’ve fallen for three dogs. I want them. I want to kiss their noses and hug them and pet them and (here’s where PiC says: hi, Elmira! and I do not deny that one bit, YUP THAT’S ME). But I cannot have them all.
We aren’t ready for a new dog, much less three. The kids are older but they are nowhere near helpful enough to assist with three dogs. Their help runs along the lines of feeding them and telling the dogs where to go. We have a roof to replace. We have my Massive Job to wrestle into submission. PiC has to figure out how much effort he’s going to sink into any attempt for a promotion and navigate a labyrinthian bureaucracy. And if that wasn’t enough, completely independent of our professional efforts, both our industries are under serious threat from this administration. (At this point, who isn’t? Outside the broligarchy, that is.) We could both lose our jobs a year from now. We have to stabilize our finances before we bring anyone home because I’m incapable of rehoming or returning a dog. We had such a hard time integrating and training Sera 🐶 that she had me doubting my abilities to be a good owner because her reactivity was such a challenge. I still couldn’t give her up. Or give up on her. Safety issues aside, but that was never a question for Sera – she’d never even shown irritation at us for anything, rehoming isn’t an option so we have to be rock solid. Once you’re part of our family, that’s it. You’re ours forever.
It does occur to me, about the anti-timeline, that if I did wait until Fall 2026, SmolAc starts kindergarten (there’s a new source of anxiety, btw). I’ll remove that daycare tuition line item from our budget and that’s a huge amount of money to stop spending so that’s one good thing about pushing it out that far. But that’s 18(?) months away and it doesn’t take away anything from the list of concerns above. So I’ve got to stop torturing myself looking at beautiful older dogs who need a forever home.
Precious Moments
SmolAc peeling an egg, sing-song: we’re going to find out what’s in here!
Me: boy, I hope it’s an egg!
SmolAc: No. It’s going to be yummy. Dad put something inside one dat is very good. Tadaaa! Yolk!
******
SmolAc: I have had all my main food! I am done! Can I have owanges now?
Me: Are you sure your tummy is full? Check in with your tummy.
SmolAc: Hi tummy, are you full now?
*squeaky voice* yes I am!
JB loud whisper: Awwww it’s just like I used to do!
******
SmolAc: Daaaad? I have too many toys.
Yeah you do. Do you want to give some of them to kids who don’t have as many?
SmolAc: yeah I want to give dem to (Rich Kid Friend).
Oh kiddo, RKF has MANY toys.
******
JB trips over a toy. OW!
SmolAc: Oh, dat’s because of my toy, JB.
JB: I KNOW, SmolAc. It shouldn’t BE there.
SmolAc: Yeah, it shouldn’t be dere.
JB: So can you move it??
SmolAc: Oh! Yeah! I can!
Year 6, Day 42: I’ve got an executive level meeting invite for a 3 hour meeting this month that requires 14-16 hours of travel. That doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m not a key contributor at this level. I’m very much inclined to skip it since the timing is absolutely terrible for our family. It’s during the one week that I have JB signed up for a camp that requires me to drop off and pick up, it’s right before an exceptionally busy week, it’s right after we onboard another new hire. We cannot have me gallivanting all over the place when my team and my family both need me to be fully present.
In personal news, the whole ICE situation is overwhelming and frustrating. Details have been sparse and unclear. I’m getting information second- and third-hand and can’t be sure that all the information is accurate. Right now it seems like ICE is hopscotching him from state to state without any notifications to the family or letting him call home. I suspect this is intentional to stay ahead of any court orders that his lawyer might be able to file. His lawyer doesn’t seem to be moving fast enough to catch up. I’m not judging the lawyer, I have no idea what’s needed to get motions filed.
I had really hoped that I could at least leave the legal stuff (filings and advice) to the lawyer. The underage child keeps texting me asking for advice that should be directed to the lawyer, IMO. I’ve been pretty clear that I am learning as we go as well and that my only expertise here is in communications. But that only works if I can get information and a lot of the time I’m working with a quarter deck.
Year 6, Day 43: ICE situation: It’s been like pulling teeth to get any of the adults in the family to respond to me or to take actions the past few days. And when they do take actions, they often don’t update me so I have no clue where we are on anything. They were originally responsive but have defaulted to directing everyone to me even when that’s not practical.
I composed termination notices to their scammy lawyers for them to send but they didn’t send it because “we thought you were going to”. Well, no, I cannot cancel contracts on your behalf. So then they finally follow directions to contact the scammy lawyers and panic when the scammy lawyers call them back. “No I won’t talk to you, you go call Revanche.” But I’m not available …. ! We set them up with the press, I got a local reporter interested in doing an exclusive with the family, but they needed to decide who would talk to him. We got them in contact with our Senators’ offices caseworkers, they needed to sign releases to let those staffers get to work.
I’m not family, so I have no standing to be making unilateral decisions for them. Even though I was orchestrating everything for them, I need information and input from them before I can make an informed decision. But I have to ask questions multiple times and the only person responding to me is friend’s underage child. And when they do reply, it’s incomplete or lacks comprehension. I see that they are leaning on me to do what their remaining parent isn’t: making decisions, making judgement calls, figuring out how to bring their missing parent back. I’m not angry or resentful. I’m just recognizing what an impossible position I’m in. I offered them my time and energy in fighting this terrible situation but I always want to be respectful of their autonomy and their right to make the necessary decisions. Unfortunately, and I do understand – there’s a language barrier and likely a legitimate fear of ICE coming after them too, it feels like they’re hoping that I will do everything on their behalf. It’s just that I can’t.
Year 6, Day 44: ICE situation: It looks like we’ve lost this fight. He’s no longer in the ICE database and the family is telling me that he’s now in his home country where he is not safe. I don’t know what else we can do. Once they’ve gotten him out of the USA, they can bar him from reentry for years. I am honestly at a loss. And his kid is distraught, of course. He was their primary breadwinner so this is devastating for him and them both. I knew we faced some really long odds but, still, the final reality is like a cold lump in my stomach. It’s even more disheartening that this is the reality for so many people, regardless of their actual status. The legal retainers have cost them at least $4000, unless they were able to get some of the scammy lawyer’s retainer back, and that was a tough stretch. Even more so now that it looks like he won’t be able to resume working here.
Talking about this with my friends who are also children of immigrants, we feel such shame and indignity and fury at the attitudes that have led us here, particularly from other immigrants. We can just about understand white supremacists, but refugees / immigrants supporting this BS? After they benefited from whatever policies allowed them to come here? Slamming the door in the faces of people who have the same needs that they once faced? That’s hypocrisy and selfishness to the highest degree. It’s shameful. And maybe it’s not guilt precisely that I feel when I reflect on my/our failing to save him from deportation over an administrative error that could have easily been corrected if he had a little more access to his rights and to bilingual assistance; maybe this is survivor’s guilt that it could have been us and it was him and his family. I hate this so much. We’re gathering money to assist the family through this rough patch while they try to navigate their new reality.
There’s going to be a whole lot of hypernormalization going on as we have to keep living our lives knowing this is happening to many families. I’ll be donating money to the local community organization that did help, and looking into sharing the ICE related materials from the Rapid Response network.
Year 6, Day 45: We’ve been cramming our necessities into two 2009-era carry-on suitcases. Carry on size-limits have changed since, I’m sure. I looked up the capacity of carry on bags and it’s somewhere between 37-47L. We’ve needed more and/or larger luggage for years as the kids got older but I handwaved it because dropping diapers would open up space. It’s true we don’t have to pack diapers anymore but nevertheless both suitcases are stuffed to the brim when we have to travel for more than 3 days. If we pick up odds and ends while traveling, even expanded it’s not possible to fit everything into the cases anymore.
We have to visit family later this summer and I finally remembered the suitcase situation in time. Macy’s had a sale on my preferred brand, Victorinox with the lifetime guarantee including wear and tear, so I ordered a large suitcase and an attachable tote. The current cases are maybe 50L? capacity. The large case is twice the capacity at about 102L and the tote gives us another 47L. This should finally be enough space to keep everything in the suitcases instead of needing 16 extra tote bags hanging off our arms and suitcase handles. Fingers crossed that packing inflation doesn’t happen. Though I sort of want to start occasionally carrying our own towels because it turns out that I’m fussy about the smell of other people’s towels.
Year 6, Day 46: The rate at which these kids are plowing through my first aid kit’s bandaids this week is much higher than usual. JB with the giant bandage needs, SmolAc with the many small bandage needs. They’re both a LOT more accident prone than usual this week.
I’m mildly annoyed that I keep getting these emails: “Great news! You are pre-qualified for a generator or battery rebate. Prepare for outages, including Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS), with a $300* rebate on the purchase of a qualified generator or battery.”
But we are never eligible! They have our address, they should be able to easily tell if we are truly qualified, and yet they keep wasting my time telling me we’re pre-qualified for a thing we aren’t eligible for. And like a rube, I always go check. Of course, I would love to be eligible for a rebate on something I already want to buy for our disaster prep, but I’m just as glad not to be in a high enough threat area as required to be eligible.
We’re hosting a longtime friend this weekend and we’re all going to be so glad to see them. They are wonderful with the kids and so the kids will hog them as much as humanly possible. It’ll be a miracle if we get any actual adult time to hang out and catch up so we’re just going to plan to feed them well and thank them for being awesome. It’s been one hell of a week.
Helping folks:Lily Meade could really use some help. Her situation is so hard. I hate that healthcare in this country is so tied to income and employment.
Year 6, Day 21: What a day (negative). I dislike most of the new people I’ve worked with for the past 18 months, they are so incompetent and make my life so much more complicated than it needs to be. Today’s confidential news was like a gut punch: Someone I actually like working with is scheduled to be laid off. I hate this so much. Within this new and larger structure, my voice is not valued or respected at more than one level above me so I can’t do anything other than be angry. So! many! incompetent people all around us so of course this one actually competent person gets laid off. 🤬 I made it a point to give positive feedback about them in case it did make some secret sort of difference. I doubt it will but I had to do something. In other enraging work matters, upper management seems to think it’s ok to handwave clear violations of labor law and expect I’ll just go along with it. Newsflash, I won’t. I will never be that person. So I fought an uphill battle about that as well. More reasons for them to hate me but I won this round for my people. It doesn’t feel like a victory, though. Even though eventually someone had to admit they were wrong and apologize (not to me, though, couldn’t possibly apologize to the person who caught your department-wide mistakes) for the royal fork-up, I’m furious that I had to fight the fight in the first place.
This all feels like a flipping exhausting, completely unnecessary, exercise. It sent me spite job hunting. Sadly I’m still not seeing anything I especially want to do instead. If only we had retirement money. I would like to be secretly retired. I could handle all the usual kid stuff that I do, garden, continue with doing my Helping People work. Sigh.
Year 6, Day 22: Week 40 of working out with a trainer remotely. Sometimes I feel a little stronger. Most of the time I feel like I’m struggling to make progress. He keeps inching up the workouts every week, one way or another, that’s what he’s supposed to do, but that confuses my sense of progress because I only focus on how I feel doing today’s workout. More often than not I feel like noodle arms or weak. I noticed that my arms are probably (can’t say for sure, I haven’t measured for actual data) bigger because the sleeves of tees that fit fine last year feels too tight this year. Maybe I should measure for actual data. Part of me remains in denial about my changing body shape because I love my Fat Rabbit Farm tees, they don’t make these three designs anymore, and I don’t want to give them up.
Year 6, Day 23: ’tis a rough morning when I’m the first one awake, much later than we should be. I was up working til midnight last night, everyone else was long asleep by the time I called it quits so I thought they got good rest but we’re all running a bit ragged today.
I visited the garden for a moment of peace and maybe a reset. Out of 10 seeds, the green beans are doing the most. 5 out of 7 have a healthy start with leaves! 2 are trying their best (mood). 3 never germinated (also mood). Of the 10 cucumbers, 4 germinated and they’ve not been doing more than peeking a pair of tiny leaves above ground. I encourage them but won’t get my hopes up. Of the 6 sugar snap peas I planted, only 1 germinated and is doing a fine job of making a bundle of little leaves. Sometime this weekend I need to fix part of the auto watering setup and run it to make sure it works.
Year 6, Day 24: My personal policy is never to open the door to unexpected visitors because they’re either evangelicals or scammers. I don’t hold with being evangelized at by any religion or scammed TYVM. Unfortunately, PiC was home when someone came by and learned the hard way about my firm policy. They asked for times he’d be home and his phone number to schedule a visit. Personally I don’t think there’s any reason any legit company would be sending people door to door without business cards or having contacted us through official means so I was even more skeptical than usual. I did a few searches and asked if they said anything about an energy bill. Yep, they said they’d be coming to “review your energy bill” for savings related to the “IRA”. And there’s the scam. They’ll steal our account number and transfer our account without our authorization and rack up charges.
It was an object lesson for dinner: scammers can get anyone. They come at inconvenient times, they get you when you’re distracted, they pressure you to give personal information face to face which can be socially uncomfortable to refuse. They do this because their tactics are effective. If they can get you off guard, you’ll make mistakes that they can exploit. That can happen to anyone sufficiently distracted.
Year 6, Day 25: It’s daddy long legs season. Every year, there’s a point in the year when they are out in abundance and keep swarming our front door trying to get in. I don’t know why they want in so badly but it gets tiresome catching and releasing them. We’ve evicted four of them already.
It’s ALSO the time of year when I’m scheduling meetings 2-5 weeks out and having to shake myself when it crosses over into summer: Oh! I don’t have regular school pick up that day. What DO I have? The summer schedule (with camp, without camp, with travel, without travel) might just break my brain.
I was very frustrated this weekend when I took my 8P jeans for a test wear. It’s the right size and fits at all points. Until I start walking around. Then they kept slipping. Argh! The mental load of this week has been such that it wasn’t until today that I realized I don’t have to return them and start shopping again. There’s this thing called a belt! It helps keep pants up! They’re not purely decorative! So I’ll be trying on some belts next week. It’s a pity how little processing power I had this week for common sense problems.
Murderbot is out on AppleTV and to my great disappointment, it does indeed require a subscription. I suspected as much but hadn’t ever had enough interest to see for myself. I can do a free 7day trial. Maybe I wait til all the episodes are out and then binge them in a week.
