About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
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November 6, 2024
On Money
Income
Our primary income comes from our full time jobs. We have minimal income from investing in index funds and dividend stocks (all reinvested). We earn money on the side to supplement our main incomes. We get a bit of income from Swagbucks, cash back sites (Rakuten, Mr.Rebates) and affiliate links to Bookshop and Amazon sometimes pay a micro-commission to keep the blog running. The sidebar has ways to support the blog and our charitable giving.
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.
***
Found money. We routinely pick up paper trash off sidewalks to pop into the nearest bins wherever we can and PiC picked up a receipt that was worth $4 in Ibotta cash. Woo!
Mystery money: I found a deposit in a checking account with no explanation where it came from or why it was there. It took me a week to unearth a letter from the bank saying this was restitution for having restricted outgoing transactions on our account and for the inconvenience and fees caused by their doing so. Huh? When did they restrict my account? When did they cost me fees? I’m mostly confused, but if I can’t find any record of any harm done, then this will just go towards defraying the car repairs.
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November 4, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
FIRST, an activism / political announcement!
If you can help with phonebanking or door knocking or ballot curing (just contacting people to let them know that something was wrong with their ballot so they can go fix it in time – people WANT those calls), go here to check for opportunities. I couldn’t get into the events that I was available for because they were full – which is amazing! – but if you can, I’m sure that would go a long way! The campaign may be optimistic but we still have to do everything we can up until the clock runs out.
Year 5, Day 196: Nicole and Maggie and I are on the same wavelength right now. I was answering an SES/environmental survey last week and it asked:
– how often did you put off buying something you needed because you didn’t have the money?
– how much difficulty did you have paying bills?
– have you set aside emergency funds that would cover your expenses for 3 months?
– how many times in the past month did you run out of food because you didn’t have money to buy more?
– how many times in the past month did you or your child skip a meal because you didn’t have money to buy more?
20 years ago, the answers to those questions were mostly “more than 1” (except the emergency funds one). I don’t ever want to stop being grateful for being financially comfortable now. I especially don’t ever want to stop being grateful that my kids don’t have to live with those fears and worries. I don’t want any kids to have to live hungry and wonder where their next meal is coming from.
Having enough money to help others and to have some extras, or to buy things just because I need them feels like such a luxury. We have several broken things we still haven’t replaced (our drying rack, our colander, I’m sure other things that I haven’t cared enough to do something about) but we CAN afford to replace them if we really wanted to. I do choose not to replace the smaller things to save for the bigger things a lot, but we replaced some kitchenware recently and I’m really happy about that.
Of course I still won’t waste money. Clipper screwed up a $20 transaction and never assigned it to my card. After a phone call last week where I was told to expect the money to come back to me by last Friday, I asked Chase to reverse the transaction. I’m surprised they just credited my account immediately. Usually that’s AmEx level of customer service, not Chase.
I’d like to be at the point where $20 didn’t matter, or $200, or $2000 or even $20,000 so that we could easily afford to give that away or put it into something sustainable to help people who have hit hard times. That’s the next dream.
Year 5, Day 197: Homework time with JB has been a nightmare these past two weeks. Their whole grade is mostly struggling with division, we’ve asked the teacher for some extra materials to figure it out. Their struggle wakes up my only semi-dormant stressors about struggling with math and it’s just a downward spiral from which there is no recovering. We’ve enlisted educator aunties and uncles to help out because we (PiC and I) are NOT good teachers in this situation. JB came out of their weekend tutoring session saying they still didn’t understand it and I needed to suss out whether that was lack of confidence or an accurate assessment. I was not looking forward to that attempt.
When they told me that they had math homework “and it’s confusing” today, my heart sank to my toes. I simply could not face going back to that place of STRESS so I didn’t until after 6 pm. Shockingly, though we had take it really slow and we needed the special graph paper, today was the first set of homework where I could gently point out a few simple errors (which usually provokes intense shame, freezing and tears), and walk them back to the point of the mistake to help them spot the mistake so they could rework the problems. They had to finish the full set of problems after dinner but they completed it all without a single tear. That’s a first. *huge sigh of relief*
Thank everything for chosen family who are good at the things we are not good at!
Year 5, Day 198: So much deeply depressing news from work on multiple fronts this week. Illnesses (multiple), injuries (multiple), people leaving, pets dying, car accidents, sudden deaths, and more. We’ll get through but I am really feeling it today with neither dog or garden to bring me even brief respite and solace.
Brushing and flossing one kid’s teeth, I sent PiC to take over flossing on the other kid because I was overcome with exasperation that I’m going to be doing this for 6+ more years until their dentist feels like they’re capable of doing a decent job. I don’t love helping w/people hygiene the way I love doing this stuff for dogs. I could clean dog ears, trim their nails, brush their teeth and everything all day and still love it. Not so for kids. Not so even for my own self, to be fair. Human body maintenance is more exasperating to me than canine maintenance.
“Gaming the insurance industry is what marriage is for, right?” Sherlock, Elementary.
Year 5, Day 199: Halloween! The first morning all year we haven’t had to roust a child from their bed. Both of them were up and getting dressed or yelling about getting dressed (Smol Acrobat) by the time I was able to move. They loved their costumes and were delighted with them all day long. I’m rather proud of my first and probably only attempt at making a costume. Very imperfect but it worked out with PiC adding all the embellishments. (At the last minute. I was done with my part of the costume a month ago. This is why we can’t work together as a team concurrently, we’d make each other batty. On the Gantt chart of life, we’re always at opposite ends of the project.)
We took Smol Acrobat to JB’s school parade and they were dopey-cute. Smol Acrobat kept cutting across from the parent side to the student side to hug JB and then sprinting back to leap at me in bellyflop position, elbow and knee out, to catch. I should bruise up quite nicely by tomorrow, thank you very much.
We crammed in most of a day of work before taking the kids, plus bonus kid, to our usual haunt for a round of leisurely trick or treat. I’m proud of Smol Acrobat being loud (for them) and enthusiastic about the whole thing, they’re the more reserved sort in a lot of situations. I’m glad they can almost keep up with JB for at least part of the time. They didn’t last long though, as expected. We treated the kids to our favorite local burgers and JB got to stay up late because they’ve got a teacher in-service day tomorrow anyway. We did a whole lot of work and cleaning before calling it a night, with aching aching bones.
Year 5, Day 200: The weather has turned very nippy overnight, I’ve needed extra layers to stay warm. I’m also out of patience with the downish comforter whose contents keep shifting so that by the middle of the night the down is piled off to the sides. I don’t know how I could be using a blanket wrong but I’m tired of waking up shivering. I’m putting a Sherpa blanket on my Black Friday shopping list, unless I see something better before then. I wanted something thick and plush like this but it’s got terrible reviews. This one has a greater proportion of far better reviews but it looks really thin. Recommendations welcome!
Much sadface. Our side view mirror had a run in with another car’s side view mirror. Theirs was fine but ours is not. Speaking of not spending on broken things! Collectively the other smaller broken things I’m not spending on doesn’t add up to the cost of this fix but that’s money we will put toward this expense instead. It is still a zero sum game for those of us who still need to earn income. It’s going to cost at least four figures to fix, not how I wanted to spend it, but we’re lucky that this is just sad and not devastating.
This quote hit me where I live: “When someone whose job it is to nurture you hurts you instead, it can’t help but have a profound and lasting effect on your sense of who you are.” – Sherlock, Elementary.
November 1, 2024
1. I checked off so many boxes this weekend! Paid bills, submitted FSA claims, ordered supplies for two Lakota families, logged the tracking numbers for the coordinators, ordered some holiday gifts from Michael’s, wrapped (bagged) all the kid gifts we already have on hand, ordered a few extra shirts for myself because all this exercise seems to be making the sleeves of my new shirts from last July too tight. Annoying but rather than be annoyed getting dressed most mornings, I’ll get some looser shirts. Problem solved.
2. PiC did the prep he needed to try (again!) to sell the car. Here’s hoping that it gets snapped up quickly! The garage is too tight a fit and I keep collecting bruises from trying to navigate in there.
Helping folks in Taos, NM, from Aji and Wings on Bluesky: a local effort to provide life-sustaining supplies to unhoused folks with pets, organized by a woman I vouch for also. We have a record number of locals forced into houselessness, and winter temps will be here starting tomorrow night. The wishlist is here.
I struggled with picking, everything is a survival need! I ended up buying one of the ten packs (TEN!) of sleeping bags for now. I still have to balance our cash flow which isn’t quite holding steady and I’ve been giving a lot of cash to direct aid needs.
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October 30, 2024
Life with JB
I need to make some decisions about JB’s placement in their self defense class. Or not. I could just wait until they age out of this class naturally. That’s coming up sooner than I’m ready to face. I hate the timing of the next age up class. It’s also unbelievably crowded and they need to split the class somehow. JB is still showing up and putting in the time but they aren’t putting in the kind of effort I would like to see to keep building their skills. Their same-age peers have already bailed on this age class, which means they’re getting practice partners who are very inexperienced instead of someone just about their level that can give them a challenge. I don’t care if they compete for the medals. I care if they compete because it gives them more experience with reacting under pressure. They tend to freeze and this whole exercise is about getting them to a place where they are comfortable defending themselves against the next kid who hits them instead of putting up with getting hit or kicked for weeks before telling anyone.
Sigh. We’re so different. At this age, I would vomit if I had to speak in front of the class but woe betide the kid that laid a hand on me. I’m not saying my way is better but their way worries me for their general safety.
JB’s whole school seems to be obsessed with Disney’s Descendants. Where did that come from? The show/movies have been around for a few years, it’s just hit the elementary school consciousness all of a sudden. I don’t love it.
Life with Smol Acrobat
Both kids are so clingy this month. Mostly clinging to me randomly, jostling each other to hold my hands when we walk anywhere, and occasionally with each other (Smol wanting to sit next to JB for dinner, not the adults). It’s a lot of touch. Too much touch.
Smol Acrobat is getting better at putting up utensils, they actually do better without me nearby so I now just tell them to do it and walk away. They still needed some handholding for laundry at the start of the month but at the end when I sent them to deal with the small pile waiting to be put away, they did it entirely independently!
It feels like they are a year behind JB in almost everything. No idea if it’s their being a pandemic baby, we’re so much more busy and tired, or just their personality. It doesn’t matter, either, it’s just struck me that we’re doing lots of things a year later than we had with the first round. We had their first dishwashing lesson this month; we did dishwashing with JB at 3. That was just me not thinking about it. But I saw them deliberately mismatching their socks this month, JB started that around 2. They’re talking a lot more, and singing now, even! JB sang at the top of their lungs starting around 2. Hasn’t stopped. (I wish it would stop on occasion, there are only so many times I can hear the same song before my ears quit.)
Pupdate
I’m spending time with every local pup that I come across. Doing what I can to fill my dog quota even just a little.
Precious Moments
Half crouching, Smol Acrobat: don’t wook at me pwease.
Me: Uh ok. Why?
Smol Acrobat: Because you’re doing someping and so I don’t want you to see me.
Me: Well, that didn’t clear anything up.
*****
JB, out of the blue: E picked me for the noodle but then C took the noodle and picked A for the Yoda ball instead!
Me: Whoaaaaa back up. What??
They frequently begin in the middle of conversations and I mimic pressing “Rewind” which, of course, goes right over their head.
*****
Smol Acrobat: I have so many teef in my body! An’ in my head, an’ my cheek, an’ my odder cheek, an’ my neck, and dis neck, and my what’s dis called?
Me: the back of your head?
SmAc: yeah! Dere too!
Me: Oh wow, that’s a lot of teeth. A whole lot.
October 28, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 190: Blergh. I made myself go to bed early (for me) last night and still felt like a waterlogged foam pillow trying to get up.
My plan to start the week with enough rest was derailed by a jerk male of indeterminate age going around the neighborhood banging on / kicking in doors. I contacted all the neighbor-friends and found out it already happened to one of them. Their kids reported it sounded like a real break-in attempt so my dander was up. Whoever this is needs to be caught – this is stupid and dangerous. I strung together about 8 hours, even after the requisite 2-3 hours of settling down time (trying to read), but felt like I got no rest at all.
This morning was not much better. We notified a few more neighbors and found out that we’re the fourth ones that we know of to be hit and there’s more than one of them. Then I remembered that, many years ago, a friend’s brother was murdered in a break-in and I never heard from the family again. That, and my aunt and cousin narrowly escaped similar when their home was broken into when I was even younger. No wonder what sounded and felt like an attempted break in brought up such a visceral reaction of rage.
Year 5, Day 191: Welp. I was prepared for a shitty day. Had my consolation danish ready to go when I emerged from the first, second, or third hyperfocus sessions. Instead we woke up to a feverish Smol Acrobat declaring “I’m going to stay home wif you and Wee because I do not feel good! Not Daddy. Oh wait, yes Daddy.”
Oh.
Well. Shit.
PiC rescheduled his meetings, my truckload of work is not negotiable, and we split 80/20 kidcare and muddled through the day. I did a lot of the cuddling, which got Smol through their rough bits and was terrible for my currently already impacted immune system that’s just struggling to get past last week’s cold-type viral thing, but that was most of my 20%. I was wilting with fatigue and general ick by 3 pm, desperate for a nap.
It wasn’t until I sat down after bedtime that I came anywhere near hyperfocus again. Frustrating but got just close enough to put a decent amount of work to bed. I gave myself a few minutes with the latest posts at Ilona Andrews and The Struggle feels so familiar to my overall work right now. I got some unbelievably disheartening updates today and just wanted to quit on the spot. I hope the information is half baked and mostly wrong because if even half of it is true, life will be impossible in six months. Just sheer impossible.
Year 5, Day 192: The kids had their dental cleaning today. They love their dentist, or the dentist experience because they get to watch TV and get goodies at the end, and their hygienist and dentist are pretty great. However. Next year, the dentist is going out of network in the way that means they will still bill insurance on our behalf for our reimbursement but we have to pay the full freight and get a portion of it back later. Another expense AND another thing to keep track of. 😫
Speaking of overstretching: between my still feeling under the weather and Smol Acrobat’s fevers this week, I’m SO grateful on one point. When PiC and JB were rear-ended on the weekend, it was minor enough that we decided it was unnecessary to report to the insurance. We didn’t want to – the driver who hit them was clearly distressed about the prospect and it would have impacted his insurance much worse than it would have impacted us financially. Apparently his foot slipped off the brakes and the car rolled into ours.
Year 5, Day 193: Some days you struggle with getting the kids to see and do the chores, some days you break up fights over which chores they get to do. These are weird extremes.
Coffee grinding is the Chore of Choice. JB has been doing it on their own for about 6-8 months and now Smol Acrobat is grumpy because they’re not allowed to do it yet. “I do good wistening!” they protest. Yes, you do good listening for a 3 year old. This needs a 6 year old good listener. They grumbled but agreed to spectate only. Then we had to holler at JB to pay attention because they got distracted playing with Smol Acrobat. 🤦🏻♀️
JB is currently going through a bunch of playground conflict with their same gender friends. We were so hopeful for less conflict this year with newer kids in the mix but then BullyKid from 2nd grade joined the group. Their other gender friend also had a conflict and split with their same gender friends. I don’t know for sure if 2ndgrade Bully is the instigator but given there were no conflicts for many weeks before they joined, and the conflicts immediately started when they joined, I have my suspicions.
Year 5, Day 194: “The great love of my life is a homicidal maniac. No one’s perfect.” I really liked the premise of Lucy Liu’s Elementary when it first came out but never got to see much of it. Now that it’s on Netflix, I get to enjoy it as my background noise. I like it!
Good news, JB and the other kids apparently mended bridges. I wasn’t sure which way that was going to go. That’s a bit of a relief but I expect the larger issues with the conflict-provocateur remain.
Money: If you use any of the listed P&G brands, they have holiday and sports-related rebates: Get $15 when you spend $50 and Get $5 when you spend $20, good from Sept 29-Dec 29 2024.
My exciting Friday night: working until I had to make dinner, cooking dinner and getting everyone else off to bed, and then doing tutoring prep (scanning pages out of JB’s math book for their uncle professor to use) and then researching and predicting preventative healthcare costs for 2025 so we can make open enrollment decisions next week. The dental bit is the most painful. They say they’ll pay 90% of “reasonable and customary fees” but I need to know what that means in order to figure out how much of that 90% stacks up to my dentist’s costs and therefore what our anticipated OOP costs will likely be. Only I can’t because according to the ADA: the words usual, customary and reasonable are not interchangeable and UCR is a misleading acronym.
UCR is actually three different concepts, not one. Usual fees are determined by the dentist. The fee the insurance company determines to be customary may be lower than the area dentists’ usual or reasonable fees for the same service. There is no universally accepted method for determining the customary fee schedule, which may vary a great deal among plans, even when those plans operate in the same area. So, the benefit paid will generally be based on a percentage of the insurance company’s customary fee schedule. Patients often do not know what their out-of-pocket costs will be because third-party payers generally do not release these customary fee schedule maximums to the public.
That’s VERY ANNOYING.
SIGH.
Anyway, I worked out most of our expected fees because the hygienist helped me schedule all of their appointments for next year in one go, so at least I have that information to go on. I think I’ve wrapped my head around this: they cover 100% preventative care at their discounted rates so the other percentages of coverage for treatment don’t matter. I don’t have to wrangle with the other stuff for now because all we have planned is preventive care and we can’t predict anything else at this point. So that’s dental done for now. For my 401k, since I’m already accustomed to the accelerated rate of contributions, I may keep that percentage for the first half of the year and be done with that, similar to how we do PiC’s plan. That’ll give us better cash flow for the second half of the year and ensure we’ve maxed it out a second time before dreams of rage-quitting start up again. Hopefully.
October 25, 2024
1. We voted!!!! The local races were the hardest for me to work through. Also resisting the impulse to put a big X through TFG’s name on the ballot.
2. It’s hard to explain what life is like for us with my chronic health stuff and how much harder it is to cope with hits like a feverish preschooler or a grade schooler running into trouble with their schoolwork or classmates on top of being beyond maxed out at work. I don’t often try to explain. So when a friend reacts with what might seem like over the top sympathy for a new hit landing squarely on my metaphorical jaw, it’s kind of nice that they understand.
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October 21, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 183: Holiday Mondays are weird Mondays.
We took the kids to the park where they took minor injuries, both to the knees doing completely different things, and came home needing a big lunch and a rest. While my time with the trainer is definitely showing (tiny) results and helping reduce how badly my body reacts to this sort of flagrant overuse, it’s still pretty unhappy with the decision to take fresh air and several thousand steps instead of sitting in my soft but supportive office chair for several hours. My brain doesn’t mind the break, my body strenuously objects to the change in routine.
The subject of filial responsibility came up on Bluesky and it brought up my low-level creeping uncertainty about what’s in store for the future. Seven years ago, I had a consult with a lawyer who felt I had no legal reason to worry about making a break with the biodad and that I was on firm legal ground to stop supporting him. I would hope that after this many years of estrangement, and likely more by the time a nursing home comes into play, that my legal responsibility is similarly not. I would like to talk to a lawyer again in the near future to confirm their understanding of the CA filial responsibility law and confirm the likelihood that I would be pulled into that vortex without my consent.
Year 5, Day 184: We had house guests for the long weekend and the dynamic has been such a rollercoaster. Now we know what having three kids three years apart could have been like: constantly up and down. Love, hate, love, hate, love, hate, bicker bicker huuuuuuug. We three adults are simultaneously bemused and exhausted. I’ve so appreciated having the company of a long time friend who knows my medical stuff and is super mindful of COVID risks, so that’s been so good for my soul. But the children. 😆😵💫 I am so grateful they made the trip to visit us, we’re so lucky that they still love us after all that. At least I hope they do. 😆
Is my brain broken: Going over homework with JB, I seem to have just lost all memory of how we borrow numbers when subtracting. Like there’s a block of knowledge that used to live in my head but isn’t there anymore. What. I know that I keep losing memory but to lose a core set of computing rules that I’ve been using since I was 7 is really disturbing. After waiting for it to come back, I gave up and looked it up but it still feels foreign like this is knowledge I never knew at all. There’s nothing familiar about the facts I relearned. There aren’t any echoes of familiarity like addition or multiplication tables or division which may feel rusty but the memory-feel, the layers of having done that for years, is still there for those things. Not so for this part of subtraction.
Year 5, Day 185: Back to the metaphorical donut shop for me today after seeing our friends safely to the airport. I’m really tired both from prolonged socializing, as enjoyable as it was, and from catching some viral thing yesterday. Just my luck. I get to spend time with this friend for the first time in years and of course my body craps out after a few days. So rude. I have no regrets! Just continued annoyance that some of our meatsuits are so incredibly fragile. Everyone else is, of course, fine. I’m glad everyone else is fine, I just want to be in that group.
Today’s my first trainer day since Friday and have I already lost all conditioning? Last week, arms days were feeling pretty good. I was doing the max number of reps, not a huge number of course but high for me, and feeling a smidge stronger each day. Today, after only 20 modified pushups and 24 lateral raises, my face was in extreme danger of being ground into the carpet during planks. We barely made it to the end of three planks. Summary: noodle arms.
Probably doesn’t help anything that I’m not feeling well either. Maybe that’s connected. We’ll see!
Year 5, Day 186: So much drag, today, physically.
PiC finally got the second car to the shop! He had to go about it in a convoluted way since we had registered it as non-operational: get it registered as operational, tow it to the shop, get key maintenance and smogging done, drive it home, sell it. Registration was $164, smog check and a water thingie replacement ($600). It’s been SUCH a relief to have it out of the garage where it’s been a Very Tight squeeze for more than a year but it’ll be home again in only a few days so please join me in crossing my fingers that someone buys it before the end of this year.
Also it just occurred to me that I should just order JB more Vogmasks. If I attach the liner to them to protect them from stains, that’ll get them a better fit until the custom masks come in. The custom masks are a couple months out. This way, I can stop driving myself up the wall about the aged materials’ poor fit! I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before.
Year 5, Day 187: Today would have been a dog borrow day but for the mountain of work that towers over me. I took a risk earlier this week, hoping someone could come through for me but they couldn’t, so here I am with a week’s worth of work on a Friday. The saddest of faces I’m making. I ended up working until 11 pm.
