Year 4, Day 94: Rough start at 2 am with Smol Acrobat’s sadly calling for me: “Mama, not feeling good. Not feeling good, mama.”
They seemed to have dodged the COVID bullet from two weeks ago but they caught a different cold this weekend instead and a bit of fever was starting up. We cuddled so they could sleep again, while I tried to read my book on Kindle and remembered sitting with JB for them to sleep at this age.
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Weirdly enough it was a very un-Monday sort of day. Work was manageable. I had time to dig into a bigger project I’d put off for months. I still forgot one I’d been procrastinating, but that’s no surprise.
I had enough time to review some plans for the rest of summer, cook bulgogi and prep rice and salad for dinner, make PiC’s coffee for tomorrow and tidy up the kitchen a touch. Heaped on top of a pile of greens, the bulgogi made an excellent “steak salad” for me where I’d normally have devoured 3 cups of rice. We have enough left over for tomorrow thankfully, when I’m going to be running to stay on top of it all.
Year 3, Day 95: Smol Acrobat decided that it was PiC’s turn to suffer last night, rejecting me totally out of hand. I was trying to spare him. He was already facing a late night working but Smol was adamant they wanted nothing to do with me.
Despite that, this morning was unexpectedly smooth. Smol was irritatingly a jack-in-the-box at breakfast but their current obsession with the timers on my phone was leveraged to get them to wash their hands, put on their socks, shoes, and sweater. Each of those things is usually a separate, exasperating, fight until I want to pull my hair out. But letting them watch multiple countdowns got us right through to getting buckled up in the car. Whew!
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PiC bought me four ounces of fresh brie and I just realized that it must be consumed before July 3. I’m on it!
Year 3, Day 96: I’ve been rehabilitating my 15 year old backpack. It was a work pack that morphed into a Con bag and then became the go-to for everything backpack. It was the best pack. When the strap started fraying and separating, in fact when half of it was detached, I mournfully tried to replace it with an identical one but of course they just don’t make them anymore. Last week, I started wondering: what are the chances I can actually rebuild this strap? And replace all the zipper pulls that aged and broke?
I set the foundation of the strap bridge over the weekend and bought some upholstery needles for the bridge/patch ($3). I searched for zipper pull replacements but couldn’t commit to any style or price. Then inspiration struck today! I gathered my old free Con lanyards that we hold onto but don’t need, trimmed off 2/3 of the length and sewed some seams. They’re ugly but perfectly serviceable, easy to clip on and off, zipper pulls! 🎉
Excessively pleased with myself.
Year 3, Day 97: What a terrible morning. Smol got me up at 6. We muddled through the next hour looking at videos on my phone until body could start to function. We made breakfast (sausage! eggs! English muffins! toast!) for everyone and things were fine. But JB was sluggish, and didn’t get in gear until it was late and way past time to go, and they were in danger of missing the field trip bus. Think they’ll learn to get moving when we tell them that they’ll be late? (No, me neither) and PiC has caught whatever Smol Acrobat and I have. Boooo.
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This afternoon was a bit of a blur. We went for a walk, put up the garbage bins, she did zooms in the backyard, I cooked dinner, and went back to work for a few hours. Usually we walk later in the day and I feed her right after but I needed to be done with cooking dinner earlier than usual so my internal clock was tilted sideways. Embarrassingly, the days are starting to blend together so much I forgot I hadn’t fed Sera 🐶 dinner until much later than usual. She’d just patiently shadowed me the rest of the afternoon, without any increasingly pointed signals like Seamus would have given like tapping the food bowl or yodeling at me.
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After dinner, I put in the first of four seams on the backpack patch. The curved needle is exactly the right tool 😍 In hindsight, though, starting on the less padded side of the backpack would have been wiser. My hands ache from forcing the unfamiliar needle through the thickest part of the padding. The seam is ugly as all get out too, but that’s less important than how strong it is. With a quadruple thread, it seems like it’ll be quite strong indeed. Again, I’m quite pleased with tonight’s incremental progress!
Year 3, Day 98: Always nice to wake up to a swollen ankle. From sleeping. /sarcasm
It’s been swollen since yesterday but didn’t think it was worth mentioning if it’d pass in a day. It has not.
As long as I keep my weight off, I do ok but just ten minutes of hobbling around in shoes leaves my whole body aching with the knock-on effects of walking abnormally.
I got my first mammogram today. Friends and family warned me about the experience and it was as advertised: painful! It hurt too much to breathe when instructed to hold my breath, so I couldn’t sabotage it by gasping for air, and the technician was quick, so it went about as well as it could have. Results were back same day: negative. Many friends and family have been through the breast cancer wringer and we lost one dear friend to ALS after she’d bested breast cancer, so despite not having a family history (that I know of), a negative result is a relief.
Year 4, Day 80: I usually come into Monday feeling wrecked but this Monday comes with the extra spice of marrow-deep regret after spending most of Sunday washing loads of lost and found laundry and packing them away, and sorting and packing several unexpected boxes of donations from our friends who had also kindly saved empty large boxes for us to use. Unfortunately I burned through all my energy and my reserves of energy without realizing it, so I’m burnt out today. I had to pace myself very carefully all day, taking loads more breaks than my usual one, and work wrapped in a heating pad.
We also had a call with the daycare director today. There was another incident on Friday with the Prior Offender who attacked Smol Acrobat, this time right in front of PiC, where PO started shoving Smol when they wanted the toys that Smol was playing with. PiC intervened and they kept at it anyway. It’s developmentally normal but we still don’t want them in the same classroom where they’ll be around each other all day, everyday, and I don’t know what options there are but there had better be some.
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The one bright note: Smol Acrobat sat/stood at the table and ate their whole dinner on their own. No whining, no playing with their food, no flopping all over the place ignoring their plate. They just served themselves and ate!! It was a tiny miracle. The one odd thing was they called the BBQ sauce “spicy”, wanted to try it, deemed it thumbs up “goot”, but insisted that they only dip off my plate. That was an acceptable price for their feeding themselves without fuss.
Year 3, Day 81: We recently inherited a stack of old page protectors, from someone’s closet cleanout which is perfect because dun dun dunnnnnnnn….
Big project! Going through our financial and personal paperwork making sure everything is complete and organized. The paperwork currently merely exists in two binders. It’s not going to be particularly helpful to anyone in the event of our deaths. So everything is going into page protectors. Tabs will identify sections and the claims pages for life insurance and disability policies. I’m missing some information for my supplemental life insurance through PiC’s employer, and we’re missing his birth certificate so those two items are on the To Do list. Once things are complete and in order, I’ll type up a table of contents.
I’ve started a similar project with JB’s school records and notable moments. I’ve kept a journal with notes and pictures for them, in an old composition book, but it’s bloated with all the photos and cards I crammed in there to easily write in.
This inspires me to move my recipes to a binder system, too! My old journal method is good for storing data/recipes and useless for finding them quickly. I’ll need to pick up a new binder and possibly more page protectors by the time I get all these organized.
Generally I maintain a primarily digital records existence but some things you need to have in hard copy.
Year 3, Day 82: We were notified that Smol Acrobat was exposed to a COVID-infectious kid last week. We immediately tested the kids and we all came up negative but it’s going to be an anxious few days waiting to see if anyone else develops symptoms or tests positive.
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I’ve been trying to eat fewer carbs this week to see if it would help with my persistent pain spikes of the past few weeks and my unwanted companion belly bulge. It’s a bit rough going from ALL THE CARBS to some carbs, sometimes. This is a very moderate approach, just adding more veggies which I’ve always struggled with, and smaller servings of carbs but my cravings have zero respect for “moderation” and respond disproportionately. After three days of slightly reduced carbs, my body is urging me to throw in the towel. Shan’t. I’d like to give it an honest go for a few more weeks.
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Listening to my mentor and old friend talk to another old friend, both of whom I met through the PF blogosphere waaaay back in the day, talk about money is so heartwarming.
Year 3, Day 83: I’m doing the dropoff commute today so that PiC can bike in without having to stress about JB. I don’t mind doing my share of dropping off for camp and daycare but it sure eats up a large chunk of my day.
I lost another 45 minutes this morning to observing interactions between a white cop and a Black man. It seemed calm at first but then the Black man became upset at whatever he’d been told and I immediately worried for his life. I worried even more when three more cruisers showed up and surrounded the area. Why do you need to outnumber one upset, but absolutely and clearly non threatening, person by six or more officers?
I sat there as a witness, ready to film if anything went sideways, and was so thankful when they finally all pulled away without laying hands on him or escalating.
I hate this about our society. I hate that the moment he showed anger, I feared for his safety and his life because so frequently police have taken less as an excuse to murder. I hate that this is the norm and that my Black friends and neighbors and fellow residents cannot simply be human without potentially putting their lives at risk.
Year 3, Day 84: Whoops, I lost the note I’d written for Friday. Quick summary: a huge load of work came in and I cleared it all under Monday is a holiday for everyone else and I need to take some of it off to mind the kids.
PiC and JB are scheduled to help our friends move too, so they’ll be gone for a while.
Year 4, Day 73: You know it was a rough weekend when you’re looking forward to Monday because you can work without parenting for several whole hours.
Both kids are making me banana pants in their own special ways and to add insult to injury, it’s been ten days of this sleep regression. Smol’s waking 2x a night and refusing to go back to their crib on the second one (usually from 2-4 am). I am noticeably frayed around the edges.
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Sometimes, I feel dislocated in time. When I was 17, I felt ancient compared to my peers. Now I’m 40 and hear that my friend is sanding her deck and think: that’s what adults do. How does one both feel agéd and too young at the same time? It’s weird.
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Writing my net worth update for last month made me realize that I still have a lot of financial anxiety only half buried. It usually floats in the background but our extremely expensive summer is (probably) making it come to the surface.
Realistically, 7.5 years to reach our financial goal isn’t terrible. There are so many other factors that we’ll have to deal with in the meantime – getting small kids through daycare and primary school, prepping them for college, aging elders in our lives to care for, figuring out how to climate-change proof our lives (as much as is actually possible), activism against fascism, etc.
Five dollar bet that zeroing in on this financial goal situation is my subconscious’s attempt to hold onto some kind of semblance of (false) control. It’s following up with a tantrum because I consciously know I can’t control anything. You’d think saying that out loud would help, but it doesn’t yet. It will, I think, just not right away.
Year 3, Day 74: Between the sleep regressions and being the biggest pill in the world at every single dinner, Smol is really showing JB up in the Difficult Toddler Department. Their arms mysteriously lose the ability to convey food to their mouth but if you take them from the table, they scream EAT EAT EAT!! When you return them to the table, they sit and crumple a napkin or turn sideways to contemplate the cosmos or pick at the coasters. But those arms still can’t convey food to the mouth. 🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️
My rule of thumb is that they’ll eat if they’re hungry and don’t worry about it during the day, but the last meal of the day is the last meal. If they go to bed after 1 broccoli floret and 6 goldfish crackers from an earlier snack, I’ll be hearing “mama milk mama eat” at 430 am and then I just might transform into a banshee and scream. So I suffer through all kinds of contortions trying to get them to cooperate and consume the minimum number of calories into their system to hopefully get us closer to “through the night”. But my GAHHH is it frustrating to spend every single dinner trying to finagle food into the toddler whose disinterest in feeding themselves closely resembles a cat presented with an inferior meal. And it’s truly disinterest. They don’t have any issues with the food taste or texture. They’ll go from “food what food” to willingly eating anything if a sufficiently motivating greater prize has been offered. A kid that’s got texture or taste issues wouldn’t flip the switch like that.
Year 3, Day 75: PiC and JB are attempting to commute to summer camp by bike. I was quietly horrified by the idea as a very weak bicyclist but I knew they were in good hands with PiC who has years of bike commute experience. This second ride was a fun adventure for JB but it’s too stressful for PiC. JB can’t listen or hear well when they’re on the road. While the cars have been unusually careful around them this week, he was sweating bullets because JB’s ability to hear instructions on the bike on the streets is terrible. This experiment may end this week.
I had to run some paperwork to the elementary school and on my way out, remembered to ask the secretary if she knew when the lost and found giveaway was going to be. It turns out I’d gotten that wrong! Last year, it wasn’t an intentional giveaway, it was an old book giveaway and so they decided to put the lost and found items out too. She offered to let me pick through to find JB’s stuff so I explained that my interest was actually on behalf of the Lakota reservation. I’d planned to pack as many as I could carry back home for them (fingers crossed). She said, oh! No one’s come to claim anything so it’s all getting donated. May I have them, then? I asked, sight unseen.
They were happy to let me have it all! We packed up a huge box and 6 large garbage bags of jackets, sweaters, and vests. About half were already washed, I’ll have to wash the other half. Sera was quite surprised when I came home after my “quick errand” with many many sacks, like a rescue Santa. My local friend can provide 3-4 large boxes for me to pack these, so for the cost of shipping, we’ll be able to send at least a hundred, probably more, pieces of outerwear.
Year 3, Day 76: JB was the first up this morning. Smol had two wake ups in the middle of the night, PiC tended to both, so the two of them were out cold in the guest bed. I was aching and tired from yesterday’s haul, so I wasn’t up for another half hour.
They got up, got dressed, made breakfast, packed lunch for PiC, packed their own bags, and were ready to go without a single word from me or their dad. Amazing!
Now that I reflect on the day, I’m suspicious that we got a replacement JB. There was the whole morning thing. When I picked them up early from camp, they ran out quickly, no prompting needed, dressed for class, didn’t whine or complain when I gave them only 5 minutes to play after, didn’t dawdle when time was up, helped me at the grocery store, put on a pot of rice while I made the rest of dinner. They even bathed Smol after. I had quite the Supermom day myself, but that was very much enabled by JB being their (or someone else’s, where has THIS kid been?) best self today, unprompted. My guess is they were in an excellent mood because they had a field trip to look forward to and no school bully to deal with. They’ll be back to normal tomorrow. But I appreciated it!
Year 3, Day 77: Every day this week has felt like a highly compressed hour and also a week, rolled into one.
This was my first day all week without calls, meetings, or other out of office errands. I needed that solid block of focused work time to clear my desk before the weekend and finished just in the nick of time. Is it just me who feels this imperative to meet a totally arbitrary cutoff we set because that feels good? Because it’s very much my own deadline that I set. But it’s so nice to start the week with very long timelines on work rather than feeling crunched right from the get go because I didn’t clear enough work on Friday.
We had some commute logistics to straighten out. PiC had left the bike in longer term parking at work and JB’s bike was brought home, so he had to get that bike back before we could pick up the kids in the car. I don’t know if they’ll be doing the bike commute together again, it sounds like it was stressful.
Year 4, Day 52: There are days I’m tired of being the only working set of eyes around here. This isn’t one of those stereotypical overworked wives things. PiC sees all the clutter and cleaning that needs to be done, and maintenance and does his share. This isn’t a household fairness thing. It’s literally about eyesight. The two of them cannot find things!
JB let their backup set of glasses go missing, the pair that’s supposed to live in their backpack, and I was annoyed that PiC had to find this out when their primary pair broke. I was grouchy that I hadn’t remembered to follow up about whether they were wearing their glasses at school MONTHS ago like I’d intended. Anyway, he did the disgruntled first parent on the scene talk with them, then I followed up with the slightly calmer but still irritated orders that they were to spend the entire afternoon today searching for the glasses and doing nothing else until they succeeded.
6 pm rolls around, PiC had gotten dinner on the table, and JB still hasn’t found them.
Still irritated, I went through their desk area, knocking over the apparently never been emptied pencil sharpener in the process, vacuumed that mess up, and then checked their room. I found those damn glasses in 15 minutes without zero idea of where they had last been sighted.
Smol Acrobat had better have my finding ability, I refuse to be the only one that can find lost items in this family!
Year 3, Day 53: Smol and JB were sick all weekend and Smol spiked a really scary fever overnight so I was up all night with them making sure that the fever responded to meds. It did but it was a trudge along, trying to just get the bare minimum done, no-rest sort of day for me.
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Bless my GP, she doesn’t know whatall is wrong with me but she’s always willing to explore and test to cross things off the list if there’s even a semi plausible reason to consider it. While I don’t present with classic Cushing’s and she’s mildly skeptical that it is the (or a) cause for some of my issues, we’re doing a screening for it anyway just to be sure since I don’t object to it.
Year 3, Day 54: Squeaky and hoarse, Smol started talking at about 630 this morning. They made it through the night, thank goodness, without waking and crying like they’d done six times Friday night. They were even in a GOOD mood, thank more goodness. PiC was up too late working, and small miracle I wasn’t feeling as bad as usual, so Smol and I had an unusual early morning together. And it was ok! They were opinionated but not overly difficult.
Random food thoughts: Cilantro suddenly tastes like soap to me this week. Liquid Dawn, in fact. It’s never tasted like soap before. It’s always tasted like green stuff. Not great, not terrible, and I didn’t love or hate it before. But suddenly, it’s a mouthful of soap. Weirdly, that wasn’t terrible like a real mouthful of soap would me. Surprising but I didn’t hate it.
That was related to the cilantro that I stopped adding to the leftover pozole I had for lunch – absolutely wonderful. I love fresh squeezed limes. Also apple fritters. I love those unexpectedly crunchy little bits scattered along the edges.
Year 3, Day 55: FINALLY! I remembered to follow up on the form I need to volunteer at JB’s school. Now, to be fair, I only just got my required physical done recently so it wasn’t that I was dragging my feet. I just forgot all this week that I could ask them to get the form filled out now.
I’m not particularly in love with the idea of more socializing but I do want to have the option of going on field trips with them or helping out at the library or in the garden if I can make time, someday. Here’s hoping I’ll have enough time to get those forms into the school office before the end of the year.
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It’s pitiful that it’s taken me months to get around to the dog bedding laundry but it has. Today, today was the day! Sera’s 🐶 bed cover was swapped out for the clean spare, and washed with her blankets and sweaters. The washing bit isn’t hard, though timing things so I wash and dry everything before 4 pm is tricky when squeezed in between working, doing school pickup, and walking and feeding Sera. The part I’ve not had the energy to cover is, when the washer dries out, needing to vacuum the whole thing or else the lingering fur gets all over the next load of laundry. But today, I did it all. I was tireder than a sloth but fit into today’s rounds and now Sera 🐶 is snuggling happily with a fresh blanket and we are both happy. No wonder I live a small life. The simplest things are satisfying.
Year 3, Day 56: The mass exodus from Twitter (and maybe also the economy? I’m less sure about that part) has made fundraising for the Lakota families
REALLY slow this year. I confirmed there will be a post-school giveaway of lost and found clothes where I’ll gather many armloads of kid sized coats to ship to the Allen Youth Center this month, I confirmed that’s still on. My fingers are crossed we’ll gather enough funds to help out another family in June but it’s hard to say if we’ll be able to hit that goal.
I’ll continue throwing notes out into Twitter in hopes enough folks are still around who want to contribute. I’d surely appreciate y’all sharing too if you can.
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 $223.60 in dividends from the stocks portfolio.
Note to self: We spend way too much at Costco. Our rewards hit about $450 this year.
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Setting the wheels in motion: I applied for two Wells Fargo checking accounts for their $300 bonus. (Not a referral link) If you’re interested, it’s relatively simple as these things go. Open with a minimum of $25, then direct deposit (must be ACH) $1000 within 90 days. If you can float $1000 for 3 months then you will get the $300 and can close the accounts after. I’m using it both to get the $300 bonus but also to redeem my $225 from the Wells Fargo credit card offers I completed earlier this month. These efforts won’t pay out until about the end of July.
I planned to use this money to cover direct aid to friends in a bind, and we also need a bit of extra cash to even out our own cash flow. It’ll all go to some good use.
Year 4, Day 24: The kids have been deeply into building JB’s old magnetiles set and a bin of 40 year old Legos handed down from our friend last summer. This is tempting me to buy a larger set of magnetiles that are on sale. But do I really want another set of magnetiles in the house? Yeeess … we could build taller! wider! more!
Do I want more stuff in the house that I’m constantly decluttering? Dammit. No. The answer is no, self, no more magnetiles. Even though it’s a lot of fun.
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My fibro flare continues. It feels like I’m a walking lava monster. I’m currently theorizing that this is a reaction to the cold-like virus that Smol Acrobat brought home last week. I haven’t had symptoms other than my own green snot, but Smol’s been a dribbly snot factory this entire time. Not that it matters a how or why this flare-up started, I’m just speculating while grumping about pain that drains all my daytime energy and doesn’t let me sleep at night. Rude.
My therapist had offered me this link to guided meditations and we tried a short one. I’ve been pretty jumbled up recently. I know things are ticking off my anxiety (less alone time than usual, my routines have been and will stay upset for at least a month, anticipating an unpleasant upcoming week with unpleasant people, I’m covering for absent staff, etc).
I know that all this transitional stuff knocking off my routine is putting me off my stride. I know what the problem is. But knowing doesn’t dissipate the tension it generates. The stuff still fundamentally sets off my fight or fight reflex which cannot be satisfied, so there’s a self sustaining feedback problem going on. The guided meditation helped a little bit so I’ll be trying to do a short one each day to see if it reminds my body how to let go a little.
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I didn’t know that Smol Acrobat knew how to say: handbag, castle, medicine. That was a surprise!
They’ve been trotting around for the past few days saying ohhhkay (in a really mellow tone) to everything and it’s weirdly cute.
Year 3, Day 25: Whoops. So it’s Picture Day for Smol. We don’t usually care about school pictures but in the spirit of fairness, agreed to get a small package for them like we did for JB. One time in their daycare “career” per kid. We had to pay for the package ahead of time (which I thought was sort of silly, and that was foreshadowing for you).
JB absolutely loved their photo shoot but that was pre-COVID, we were able to be there, and toddler JB was a total showboat for the camera.
Poor Smol Acrobat found the whole experience frightening. We couldn’t be there for it. The big flashbulbs were popping. They were separated from their peer group and taken to a strange room with strangers behind big cameras. I was 0% surprised that they cried and refused to take the picture. Poor kid. We decided it wasn’t worth distressing them to try again. We get plenty of candid photos.
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I’m happy about two food treats we splurged on: a po’boys and beignets lunch and a stack of banh mi that’ll make three meals for everyone. That cost $109.
I’m equally happy about a surprise Poshmark sale. A perfectly new-with-tags dress I can’t wear leaves my closet and $16 comes back to me. This only thrills me down to my toes so I suppose it’s fair that it’s not much money compared to our spending on food.
Year 3, Day 26: Our wind feels like getting ice water dumped over your head. *shiver*
Testing my physical limits today, to see if I’m through this flare, and the results are mixed. My muscles are still upset, my bones are less so. That’s a bit of progress but I’m still relatively sidelined. So even though I got through my critical work early enough that I could have gone with JB to their library activity, my body was staying planted right here.
I used this time to process an Old Navy return. I’d bought myself a shirt, in addition to clothes for gifts, but it didn’t fit right. Organized more clothes for the Lakota Giving Box I’m filling, I’m hoping to stuff it to the brim with jackets the end of next month. Sent a Coffee on Ko-Fi to an artist because I want to support them a bit but I can’t afford their super high quality jewelry. It’s amazing art but the pieces that are my style are wildly outside my price range.
Who doesn’t feel this tired? While I’ve always had prepper tendencies by nature, after all we’ve already been through, I’m not volunteering to navigate through a post-apocalyptic world.
I posted this on Instagram and it may be the most shared clip of my stand up ever and that’s fun… but also disturbing because thousands of people are saying “SAME” we are not well pic.twitter.com/DVX3FDtS80
Year 3, Day 27: I feel ~100 lbs denser this morning. As if every part of me is exponentially heavier and thus requires more energy to move.
But the good parts of this morning: one load of laundry, done! one dental cleaning, done! (I love the dental chair, it’s so soft and cushy) one UPS drop off return, done!
After a couple hours of intense work (and an ill advised 2/3s of a delicious chocolate hazelnut piroshky), naturally, I crashed. Since I couldn’t actually tap out, so I just kept slumping down further in my chair.
Year 3, Day 28: This tweet gave me a good laugh today.
I disagree. Wealthy people might spend less money on attire proportional to their income/cash flow but I do not think that wealthy people, as a group, spend less in absolute dollars consistently enough to make this a rule of thumb. I think spending on clothes is much more related to each person’s inclinations and career and a whole host of other things that aren’t defined by their money.
I have a handful of wealthy friends. The ultra-wealthy think nothing of spending $500-1000 on a single high quality piece of clothing. Or they DO think about it and it’s worth it to them.
If I look at myself as an example of being relatively financially comfortable, my conclusion is the same. I came from being deep in the hole, paying off so many tens of thousands of dollars of debt for my parents, to being reasonably comfortable on our two salaries. Mostly, I dress the same as I did back then. Jeans, t-shirts, and a sweatshirt. I still wear the sweatshirt my cousin gave me back in 2006.
Yes, we can both afford to dress better. No, getting to this level of “rich” did NOT give either of us better taste. We do have a few very high quality pieces. I bought him a nice watch (nowhere near $1000), I bought myself a few pieces of clothing from Elhoffer Design. We both have very warm coats. I do own more cute earrings but that’s more about being able to wear them without an allergic reaction and less about having money.
But other than that? We are walking proof that how you start is often how you carry on. Making enough money to make ends meet and a little more did not come with a magic style boost for either of us, and we don’t mind! He likes his free t-shirts and I like my three identical black sweatshirts I bought during pregnancy and a pair of athleisure pants from ten years ago. Money =/= magic.
Related thought: more generally, if you’re poor and hope to succeed in higher income fields (barring computer / tech because that’s probably a weird industry for dress norms), you probably need to dress more nicely than you might normally. My friend who entered the i-banking field from a non-wealthy background had to drastically upgrade her wardrobe in order to look like she belonged. When I entered management, I had to dress up much more formally to look my age and be taken seriously. Now that I’m senior management, I’m back in my preferred uniform and my reputation speaks far louder than my hoodie.
Anyway I’m not trying to make any academic points here. I just think it’s as silly as the proclamations that only poor people buy new cars or buy new phones or whatever the current faintly derogatory declaration is.
If you earn enough, that’s what is going to make you wealthier, not just abstaining from new technology and looking like a slob.
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It was a beautiful sunny, even warm!, day and that went a long way to boosting my mood. I’m soaking it in and holding it as a hedge against next week when I will be dealing with some Unpleasant People TM. Wish me luck?
Year 4, Day 17: Sunday was a perfect beautiful weather day. Smol Acrobat and I took a late morning walk with Sera, and that was the last time I’ve felt close to ok.
I’d missed my Friday’s medications and assumed that’s why I felt off balance Saturday but that was just the beginning of a fibro flare. The rest of Sunday was agonizingly painful. It very much felt like my entire lower body was molten lava and I needed to lay down for hours and nap for an hour just to maintain consciousness all day. This morning was 50/50 whether I’d be plunged back into the lava so I restricted myself to sitting at my desk with extremely short ventures to the kitchen and bathroom. My bones were on a low-medium simmer all day but thankfully the sitting helped enough that it didn’t flare up beyond that.
JB and PiC went on a BART and museum adventure. I was mildly jealous in the abstract but definitely couldn’t have gone. Any walking veered dangerously close to Doing Too Much. I had to rest.
Year 3, Day 18: I hate how I feel in my body after Smol’s arrival. I feel lumpy and heavy. Specifically, I’m carrying too much extra volume in my belly. It’s weird. After JB I also had this problem but it didn’t bother me as much.
Going no or low carb might help. But I don’t wanna. Pretzels! Girl Scout Cookies! English muffins! They have a firm grip on my heart.
I should do it this month if I’m going to do it. It’d be the easiest time to do it. PiC has some time off this month and is using it as a staycation so he’s running all the errands and doing a lot of cooking.
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Speaking of food, Safeway had pork shoulder on sale for $1/lb. We always jump on that. What I didn’t account for was that Safeway doesn’t package them by halves (about 8-10 lbs each). They do the whole shebang, at 16-20 lbs each. We went for it anyway, thankfully it was cut in half at least, and one went into the slow cooker and one went into the oven for a slow roast. Now we just have to make space for some of both in the freezer. I really wish we had room to have a deep freezer.
We kept our old fridge when we moved. That is really luxurious! Buuuut…. my hoarder self, along with my realistic chronic pain and fatigue self, really wishes we had a deep freezer too so that I could stock up on sales and freeze more than a few meals ahead for bad weeks. We can keep about 3 entrees in the freezer along with all the other foods we normally keep in rotation. I tried reminding myself that, without one, we don’t have to worry about the additional energy costs but that is small comfort when we run out of prepped meals. Ah well. We pay in other ways, like for prepared meals from Costco or take out, so it’s not like that saved costs are a strong reason not to. We just don’t have the space for it.
Year 3, Day 19: It’s probably not a good thing that I’ve passed on my mild-to-moderate obsession with Hello Kitty to both kids. This could (will) get expensive.
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I thought my fibro flare up was over yesterday but the brain fog effects are lingering. My short term memory is either not encoding or incredibly hard to access. I’ve missed two scheduled plans this week already. Our lives are a touch too complicated for my taste and current ability but I’ve not forgotten about a therapy appointment in years so that got under my skin.
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Using the AT&T Fiber advertising as leverage, I negotiated a reduction in our internet bill that has been steadily creeping up since COVID started. It’s now $55 a month, down from $76. This will help cover my increased pledge for Shep’s move to escape anti-trans legislation.
I also calculated precisely how much I’d need to charge to my Wells Fargo Active Cash Card to redeem the $200 bonus plus the 2% cashback in increments of $25. Between our two cards, we’ll get $450 in bonuses. Most of that’s already been sent out to support friends and folks in crappy financial situations.
On that subject, I’ve been pulling in direct aid support from a wider circle of people back to my primary contacts because so many of my main people are going through very rough waters right now. I may keep the direct giving circle tighter going forward. Many of the wider-range people that I give smaller amounts to haven’t been acknowledging it. I don’t mean thanks, I don’t need that. I mean there’s zero reaction, emoji, anything to indicate the money was seen and received. It makes me wonder if the money is noticed/received/going to the right hands. Rather than worry about whether they’re getting it, I’ll adjust our giving strategy to those who do confirm receipt. It’s a minor thing but it matters.
Year 3, Day 20: Smol Acrobat’s got a fever and green snot and I am also infected. This is the pits. They sleep terribly when they’re sick and that means I don’t sleep with all the wake-ups.
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We’ve been defending against multiple ant invasions this year. Several weeks ago, I stopped one incursion into the kitchen. This week, the ants pressed their advantage by invading three fronts simultaneously, eating holes right through our walls. I watched one push chunks out of the wall in horror and fascination. I hate them in the house so much! I’ve put down boric acid in several places hoping that it wards them off again but am not holding my breath. I’ve wiped down our outlet covers with vinegar in hopes that it’ll deter them from that point of entry. Their three room attack, spread from the front to the back of the house, makes me think that our walls are full of ants. *shudder* 😭
PiC’s pointed out that other people pay for a regular exterminator service and I really don’t want to have to do that. Cross your fingers for us?
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In other massively underappreciated efforts, we cleaned Sera’s ears. One of them was a bit infected so I also medicated it. She drooped for an hour after, as usual, and it’s pitiful! But I’ve got to make time to clean them more often.
I’ve been trying to brush her teeth most days of the week, some weeks are more successful than others, but she especially hates the ear cleaning. Smol Acrobat tried to “help”, so they were entrusted with feeding Sera treats to mollify her while I did the dirty work.
She was unmollified.
We’re going to be at odds for the several days of her ear medication course. I can deal with that.
Year 3, Day 21: All week my stomach has been on strike against breakfast. No matter what I ate, or how little, it transformed into a belly full of knives within half an hour. Just awful. It’s putting me off even trying to eat in the mornings until I’m too hungry to wait any longer.
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I had been paaaaaaatiently waiting for our CPA to confirm that our taxes had been filed. We reviewed final details last week, made some tiny corrections, and it’s been silent since then. I assumed she was swamped – though most Californians have an automatic extension – and figured I’d hear soon enough. Instead both CA and Federal refunds landed this morning. Too swamped to email but not to file. In a choice between the two, that’s the right priority!
Uncharacteristically, I dumped them both into our checking account. Usually it goes straight into investments, however, I am looking at the year’s income and outflows plotted out and the spending estimates are currently outstripping the income estimates by A LOT. I didn’t revise the credit card spending (on food and other household supplies) down when I added the $2000+ daycare bill, so that’s one root cause. The overage amount is greater than the total daycare will cost, though. I didn’t really feel like doing the legwork. *hides face*
Correcting the projections isn’t worth the work; our monthly spending fluctuates a lot from month to month. My compromise is to leave it as is, adjusting the amounts in real time, and trusting that we will ultimately spend less than my rough space-holder projections. Meanwhile I’ll keep trimming fat and creating little bits of extra income too.
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
