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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January 17, 2025
We’ve donated to WCK and Pasadena Human Society and to the following GoFundMes to help folks affected by the fire:
Maria and Rudolph’s home was destroyed.
Jordan Mitchell lost his father and brother and home.
Tragic Sandwich‘s friend lost their home.
Courtney Milan shared these in her newsletter: “In all of these cases, I personally know someone who is connected to these families, and who has vouched for their authenticity.”
The Resendiz Family
The Washington Family
The Gibson Family
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January 15, 2025
Welp. New year. The wider world in 2024 was NOT kinder than 2023.
COVID is still a problem. This country is targeting trans people and taking away reproductive rights, with likely more horrible stuff on the way since half this country’s voting public chose THAT fucking guy to be president again. I can’t stress how much THAT is stressing us out. Russia is still trying to destroy Ukraine. Israel is hellbent on destroying Palestinians. The Syrians did overthrow Assad, that was amazing. The South Koreans showed us all how to properly fight for democracy, though, I don’t think they may have the same militarized police problem where they’re all too happy to run over and shoot protestors.
We had our first tsunami warning in the Bay area this year.
2024 Highlights in Health
- I continued brain therapy – I have a lot of work to do. One big improvement this year was catching myself at the start of a depressive episode, recognizing the self-hating thoughts after a particularly fraught parent-child conflict as part of that cycle instead of a Truth to bludgeon myself to pieces with. I managed to stick to a holding pattern instead of doubling down, and walked back from that ledge instead of spiraling headfirst into self-loathing. It wasn’t easy, it was uncomfortable, but a sight better than past episodes that ended up with me curled in a ball.
- Massage therapy was irregular but removing the mental load by scheduling appointments for the whole year really helped. I just did the same for 2025.
- I took antivirals all year which helped fend off viruses and the general YUCK that was the entirety of 2024 enough to make it through.
- I’ve worked with a trainer for five months and, for the first time in more than two decades, have been able to keep up a regular routine of mildly challenging exercises without ending up in near-traction with pain and fatigue (at least as a direct result of the exercise) every single workout. I DID end up laid up for days with pain and fatigue from overdoing it a few times but that was more to do with life than the exercise. I started taking a medication that helps ward off my nightmares so I may not be rested when I wake but I’m not more tired than when I went to sleep. That’s pretty huge.
- Smol Acrobat’s immune system seems to be working better this year. They still won’t / can’t sleep through the night on their own but they stopped getting sick every single week finally and I’m so relieved for that much.
- We battled Sera’s final illness from January until April. It was an incredibly compressed and intense experience of caregiving followed up by a great deal of grieving. I’m still deeply sad about being dogless.
We continued to be cautious about socializing, avoiding crowds, getting vaccinated, and staying masked around other people. I’m leaving PiC and JB out of these sections going forward unless there’s something critical to include.
2024 Highlights in Life
Work was 110% terrible. There were some late in the year developments that suggest it might maybe start to get better in 2025 but I’ll believe it when I see it nope. Not better at all. Parenting has been hard. There have been small bright spots with the kids that I try to appreciate fully as a bulwark against the grief and sadness but it’s hard to see the bright during the endless slog of conflicts.
We had so many losses this year. Three human friends, three canine friends. Serving as a support to the friends who have had their child-related losses has also been a special type of challenge.
2024 Highlights in Money
- We ended 2024 with a bit less cash in our checking account as we started the year.
- Our net worth climbed steadily but incrementally.
- I invested in my own 401K for the first time in many years.
- I opened a savings account for JB’s earned income so they can observe interest rates in action instead of a Roth IRA – it was easier for now. I still haven’t decided what to do with the kids’ cash savings but it’d be nice to get their gift savings into an investment account for them.
- The Lakota families project helped so many people. I need to find some time (where??) to summarize 2024.
We had two full time incomes and did our best to supplement that with extras (surveys, etc). His employer continued with three more rounds of layoffs which we were lucky to avoid this year. My employer may or may not follow suit in the next two years depending on the new administration. I’m practicing mindfulness around appreciating what we have despite the fear and worry.
Expenses kept rising this year with big lumps of spending: $$$$$ on Sera’s care, $$$$$ on daycare, $$$$ on the washing machine, $$$$ on security equipment, my therapy ($$$$), LOTS of food (take out, groceries, convenience foods), $$$ my retainer plan, $$$ reupping hosting for this blog for another three years.
Financial Checklist for 2025
WE DID IT. We finally got through the process of update our wills and trusts to include Smol Acrobat, to exclude my nuclear family members from being considered as guardians for the kids or beneficiaries, changed our executors to two friends who have more ability to deal with our mess in case something happens to us.
Now, I need to get a complete set of the documents to each set of people in different states. I also intend to lodge our vital records with a set of friends for safekeeping in case we get hit by a giant quake or mass deportations really do become a reality and we get scooped up. A government sanctioned sweep isn’t going to care that we’re citizens, born and raised, they just care if we visually fit a profile. I see politicians drumming up anti-Asian sentiment already and I clearly remember the effects of the Japanese internment – that directly affected close friends. This country has hated Asian people, along with Black and Hispanic, for all throughout its history. I’m never able to forget that.
Thoughts for 2025
I’m not sure what 2025 holds, other than more stress and terrible things on the political landscape. I’m trying to do my best to take care of the people within my sphere, and to try to put supports in place for myself as well so that next year isn’t awful like 2024 was. I’m cherishing the friends who care enough about their own and our health to test and mask and get vaccinated so that we can see each other with some measure of safety.
Our money
Same goal: Save more, invest more, give more. Achieve FI in 5-10 years.
Basically all our expenses will go up next year. The increases are substantial enough that we may start losing ground financially. We can’t expect COL salary increases to keep pace with the expenses, nor can we expect the stock market to continue to perform like it did this year. I’m looking into what we can do to mitigate rising costs.
Little life things
I’m putting a couple more people on my monthly call list.
Last year’s big picture project: Declutter, donate, organize. ✔️ Still my big picture project this year in semi-regular spurts. Bought myself more Sterilite storage boxes for both organizing our stuff and to store donations in between times that I pack up boxes. It’s already working out well – I can just pull out the storage totes to pack up a shipping box now instead of stumbling over piles in the office or hallway.
I stuck with gift bags this year, and will keep doing that. I like the much reduced waste aspect of fabric gift bags.
Prep better for 3/4 of the kids in 2024: Sort of. Everyone we saw received a gift, at least, plus a few I didn’t see. I’ve picked up more books for next year’s kid crop, will need to do some research on good comics / graphic novels to gift in 2025.
The Lakota Giving project was chugging along at a lower level of donations as expected considering how hard it’s been to share the needs. However, we got a boost from new contributors at Bluesky at the end of summer and then a really big boost from friends sharing on Mastodon when I dug into another round of fundraising after the election. I get the sense that a lot of people felt how I did after the elections: direct aid feels real and meaningful. As always, I’m very grateful that our regular contributors stayed the course with us this year and I hope that also means they’re also fine overall financially.
:: Let’s be real, 2025 is going to be some kind of shitshow and we’re going to need to pull together big-time to get through. How was your 2024?
January 13, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 264: Day 17 in a row of being with one or both of my children. I’m tired. I’m so tired of the “Mom! Mom! Mom! (They did, they said, can I have, when can we, I need, they hit me, they’re taking my …)” When did this become a Mom household?? You have a father! I just really need several hours in a row without any humans in my immediate vicinity. Dogs, cats, and Corvid crew welcome. PiC gave me a few-hours break today, taking both of them away for the morning, thank goodness, which flew by almost as if it were mere minutes.
I ran training, checked on all the paperwork, followed up on Lakota orders, set up shipping labels for community donations, dealt with management problems and minutia, processed my feelings of general resentment about work stress. I sat with JB for an hour guiding them through another round of organizing their things into the appropriate bins and baskets, and assigned them 15 minutes of carrying on with the work solo while I worked. I pondered my radiating hip pain (entirely self inflicted because I agreed to go on a hike yesterday, foolish mortal), and I pondered the former friend who called me selfish and self-centered. Even if that outburst was more about whatever was going on in their life than me, those words were calculated to hurt and they continue to sting.
Year 5, Day 265: This week’s stressor: the unknowable. A friend was speculating that my life – I don’t make friends when people are incompetent and a LOT of incompetent people have entered our sphere over the past 12 months – is going to get so much worse for me this year. They’ve got a front row seat to some of the shenanigans from last year and had more time in the corporate grind than I have had so their prognostications are likely to be accurate. I have so much to do in 2025 but lack any confidence that I will get the proper support or recognition (by which I mean both title AND money) for it. In fact, I think it’s quite likely I will be left in the lurch (without support from higher ups) by the summer and my entire self doesn’t know what to do with this likelihood other than hate it.
As much as I hate the idea of job hunting, that’s the logical thing to do. I rewrote my LinkedIn as practice for rewriting my resume. Having lots of feelings about this whole thing. Wrote a recommendation for my staff, will write more later.
Kicking myself over making silly mistakes like donating to international GFM campaigns with the wrong credit card so that I got hit with a foreign transaction fee. Rookie mistake! I have a credit card for these things that do NOT charge foreign transaction fees. Sigh. It’s really not a large amount at all, it’s the principle of wasting any money at all, ever.
Year 5, Day 266: Second stressor: The Santa Ana winds have made the fires so unbelievably dangerous in Southern California. I grew up there and even in early adulthood the fires didn’t seem this bad back then. It can’t just be my imagination, CA wildfires must generally be a lot worse in the past decade or so. I’ve checked on a lot of our friends and family, the fire came within a mile (!!) of one of our families but they’re safe, thankfully. So much destruction has occurred and none of it is contained.
Third stressor: I hate change. I haven’t changed my doctor in 13 years, we have only moved once and I have no desire to move again if things aren’t dire. I hold on to clothes until they fall apart or don’t fit anymore. All this to say: when faced with big changes in my work life that I have zero control over and will deeply impact my life and my family’s lives, my stomach churns with stress and I hate it so much. This is in addition to the world being terrible, on the larger scale.
I also realized something about myself though can’t explain it. I toil in obscurity. I do some big and important things (in some respects) professionally but very few people know my name, what I do, or why it matters. And most of the time this doesn’t register on my list of things that matter. It does register when I think about needing to suss out job opportunities and regret not having a strong professional network for referrals. But the moment there’s a chance of visibility on a wider scale, I drag someone in front of me as a human shield, “take him instead!” Best I can say is that this is the same as my thing about fame and money: I’ll take all of the money (so I can do good things with it), I want nothing to do with the fame.
I know what I’m good at and I loathe masking. I haven’t had to operate as the completely professional version of me for more than a decade, I’ve been a more human version, and I’ve gotten used to that. It still takes energy but less than when I face high level corporate executive types and lawyers. When that happens, I feel awkward and put on my professional armor defensively. Except it doesn’t fit the way it used to. It’s happening more than it used to now, and it’s going to keep happening. Deep deep sigh.
I suppose they’ll have to deal with what they get: a well seasoned professional (smells of rosemary?) who has none* fucks left to offer in service of politics and nonsense. (*To quote Smol Acrobat, “none means zero”.) I deliver great work, I don’t have the energy for the other nonsense. Except can I continue to deliver great work if the other nonsense becomes part of my life?
Year 5, Day 267: I haven’t slept well all week. That’s the work stress taking chomps out of my sanity and confidence. Bits of Tiffany’s “I think we’re alone now” has been stuck in the back of my mind with just barely discernible lyrics so it took me 3 days to figure out what song it was. That one I can’t explain.
There’s been a lot to stress about and a lot of extra drain on my energy dealing with those stressors. I had this whole plan to make this year go smoothly and then my cabbage cart was kicked over. ARGH. Imagine me throwing those cabbages back into the cart, muttering direly to myself, and those cabbages are hours-long conversations with various key people and flashes of “oh shit, I forgot that thing too!” That’s been my week.
I freely shared with JB that I am SO TIRED. Dragged myself to and from school pick up and afterschool class. We ran out of Hawaiian rolls so I searched the internet (can’t even call it Googling anymore, what’s going on 2025) and decided we’d whip up a cornbread to go with the pulled pork. Right. Whip up. The slowest whipping up ever. We did manage it, we used Sally’s Baking Addiction’s cornbread recipe which has twice as many ingredients as I like but it was very tasty. If I can, I’d like to make a couple more. One to eat, one to freeze. Ambitious.
Year 5, Day 268: The stress-induced heartburn continues. The endless documentation for various management needs continues. The seemingly-endless backlog of work continues. The fires in LA continue.
My hair is down to my waist again, it’s now been another 2-3 years since my last haircut and I don’t want to go to the hair place because they don’t mask and I don’t know if they vaccinate. Not that vaccination will stop transmission, it’s just the principle. I’m this close to just hacking off several inches myself and damn the consequences. Except for the first time in ages, it might matter what I look like. 🙄
All that wasn’t enough, we foolishly decided to let the kids go to the school Movie Night because the PTA sent out a call for volunteers to staff the snack bar. I was far too tired for that but went and sat with the kids through the movie while PiC did the volunteering. We cleaned up afterward and trudged home. Stick a fork in me, I’m done!
January 10, 2025
1. We tried a build your own poke bowl bar at a super fancy grocery store when we were out of town and it was So Good. I would absolutely love to spend $20 on a bowl chock full of poke and make some rice to go with it at home – that one bowl made 1.5 meals for us.
The wildfires are terrible. Ways you can help.
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January 6, 2025
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 257: It’s getting so we need a third suitcase for family travel. We’ve crammed four humans’ worth of clothing and necessities into 2 small suitcases and a mini one up til now but it’s time. I’m not looking forward to trying to make a decision about what to get. The last time we got a new suitcase, it was a free one from Alaska Air for breaking the wheel on my older suitcase (Swiss army, they sent me a replacement wheel). That’s just a little too big to be a carryon but not big enough to hold a great deal more. It’s maybe about 23-24 inches compared to the 21 inch.
It’d probably be best to get a standard carryon size to make it easy to use for both air and car travel? Or maybe we need to just go medium checked size to have enough space for us adults and the two kids can use the smaller ones as they get older.
Year 5, Day 258: Good grief what a terrible season. So many of our friends and family got sick and/or injured these past two weeks, I’ve started holding my breath whenever someone texts, hoping that this isn’t another illness or injury. It took me two full recovery days to try and get past the worst of my symptoms which were then followed up by several days of hands swollen up like oven mitts.
It was also a really hard day with the kids. They kept taking turns whining for HOURS until I snapped and made them go out on a “walk until you STOP IT” nature walk with me. There were moments I vaguely entertained notions of walking into the sunset and disappearing. It was nice to just pretend to think about for a few minutes. Unexpectedly, eventually they ran out of whine and tuned into the nature around us. Minor miracles. They picked flowers and rosemary and we made it home intact. Emotionally worn down but intact.
I’ve got brand new white hairs and can confidently say they’re from the kids. STRESS.
Year 5, Day 259: Our last visit of the holiday season was a really good restful one. It’s usually our first visit but I rather like ending the whole grueling ordeal with a comparatively peaceful person to be around. We also had the opportunity to care for a dear friend who was unwell. They’ve so often cared for and about me and I haven’t been around for the past decade to help out when they weren’t well. This time we were able to return one of the many favors. It’s a good feeling.
This week’s self soothing activity: Finalizing all the details our spreadsheets to shift over to 2025. I had to clean up some messes and update our tax spreadsheet as we rolled out of 2024 and into 2025.
Year 5, Day 260: My mail order pharmacy won’t cover omeprazole anymore. They had the audacity to say that “it may cost less to purchase OTC”. For a quick comparison, 42 tabs of 20 mg omeprazole at Target is $18. 60 tabs of the same from the pharmacy has been $8. I knew that they were going to change medication coverage but didn’t know exactly how it would impact us, now I am starting to get a glimpse . It looks like I should (maybe?) still be able to order it online for in-person pickup at the normal price, at least.
Ah-ha, corporations are good for something. SFO is booked solid through March 31 for Global Entry appointments and won’t take walk-ins. PiC’s coworker told him that the company pays for the TTP people to come every so often to handle applications for employees and families so he managed to get the kids scheduled for this month. We’d like to plan a trip but I cannot do that until all the paperwork is taken care of, it gives me the collywobbles booking travel without the passports and TTP and all that done.
They were advertising a 5x match on donations before December 31, but I went to the KIND site and they’re now showing a 7x match. I’m wondering if that’s accurate. Either way, I made them our first tax-deductible donation of the year: migrant children are going to have a really rough time of it with this administration. The Young Center also does good work on this front. Their Charity Navigator ratings: KIND, The Young Center.
Year 5, Day 261: All those poppy seeds that I thought the ants or the birds took? They were slandered. Many seeds have burst into not-quite-bloom, but germination and grown into green plants! This was a delightful discovery, like a little reward for surviving the holidays. I’m getting some plant therapy in now, pulling the grass and clover that’s sprung up around the flower plants too. I can’t call them weeds without a flash of guilt now, thanks to The Spellshop.
January 3, 2025
1. I’ve made one small dent in each of the three messes: my office, JB’s room, and Smol Acrobat’s room. Work in progress.
Challenges this week: we need to figure out our home and auto insurance. They are EXPENSIVE.
Not good: net neutrality was struck down by the federal court. (I mistyped feral and honestly, how wrong is that, really?) Watching Celeste Pewter for more news.
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January 1, 2025
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.
***
Dividend income. We received $501.10 in dividends from the stocks portfolio.
We banked $260 in gift cards for participating in a big study. That covers a lot of household essentials.
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