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
Year 6, Day 322: I’m so unsettled. Insomnia last night was severe, but the fatigue was mostly at a bit of a distance. I was able to pull some weeds, plant a few seeds, air out the house and do all the laundry, buy gifts, clean and pay bills this weekend. All this was followed up by a nap I didn’t want but sorely needed. It should feel good to have managed as much as I did but instead I just feel like an overshaken bottle of soda. Maybe this is a weird side effect of DST?
Money: We have had Giving money come in since our last support push but I’ve been thoroughly overwhelmed so had to wait a bit to pick our next family from the One Spirit Okini list. This time, I selected a mom whose kid needs clothes and kitted them out with some of each of the requested items (jeans, tees, hoodies, underwear, socks, a pair of shoes). I bought a few pieces in the next size up, too. It sets my mind at ease when I have the next immediate size of clothes on hand and wanted to give a little of that peace to this mom. We also loaded them up with multiples of the requested hygiene items: shampoo/conditioner, body wash, toothpaste/toothbrushes so they ought to be stocked for at least several months.
Year 6, Day 323: Time for another grocery takeaway! Once in a while, our neighbors get a badly timed grocery delivery and ask us to come take some produce off their hands. I trotted over today and picked up eggplant, bok choy, avocados, zucchini and some frozen chicken. PiC’s ambitiously saying we should cook all of it when I was going to split it further with another neighbor. We’ll see if we actually manage that but in the meantime, I’m moving along the big sack of apples that I would normally have fed to the dogs to a friend whose dogs can enjoy them. I really wanted to find some horses to share those apples with but I’m not friends with any local horses at the moment. Now that is definitely a problem that needs solving. Anyway these little food shares fire up my gratitude engine. I’m glad to share what we have with our neighbors and that we have enough. And these little extras that we get frees me up to give more to the people who don’t have enough outside of our circles. I like to think of it as a giant community cycle of some kind, maybe concentric circles where we push out help from our center, even if we never meet the people we help outside our local circles.
Year 6, Day 324: Trainer stuff: I’ve been struggling to get back to my “good” performance in working out: completing all sets assigned on my 3-4 days of written workouts. The CFS kicked my ass for several weeks, the depression spiral and suicidal ideation period was another asskicking. Overall time and energy have been hugely scarce on top of all that, and some days had to be rest days.
I have never gone a week without doing some sets but it’s never what I’d call enough. It feels like I’m wasting my trainer’s time because so little progress is made one week to the next. But this is a mental exercise in seeing the service of my trainer as separate from my performance of the workouts. If my body could just consistently improve, I wouldn’t need him to begin with.
Money: I’ve redeemed our Cigna Wellness Incentives for the kids and myself as our dental appointments are all done. That’ll be $150 in our pocket which covers the premium. PiC’s $50 when he does his well check will be profit in our pockets.
Year 6, Day 325: DST is kicking everyone’s asses. SmolAc sat up crying hysterically for an hour? hours? in the middle of the night, I don’t know when it was or how long. Just that I had to cuddle them until they finally settled down and fell asleep at 2 am. I’m so tired.
Work stress: I can taste actual adrenaline, I’m so stressed these days. I hate this.
Money: JB’s friend is asking for bookstore gift cards for their birthday. What’s an appropriate amount to gift kids turning 11-12? I’ve usually spent $20-25 per kid when gifting books or cash for the younger set, usually shopping from Bookoutlet if I can to save some cash. I’m not sure if $25-35 or more makes sense. To add to the confusion, this latest party involves the host telling us that they’re giving the kids $40 worth of credit to use so I have an idea of what they’re spending on the party itself. I don’t usually know that.
Year 6, Day 326: Having a bit of an existential crisis internal scream-fest. The existence and use of AI is destroying my professional world AND destroying the one planet we have and the helplessness I feel about that, though we fight against it daily – literally, is eating my sanity. I was just telling a friend that if all we did was bullshit anyway I could just shrug it off some. But I can’t. The stuff we output actually matters. So, between the massively organized fraud that people are perpetuating and the use of AI to create utter slop in ways that are going to deeply impact (actual real life things I can’t get into here but it’s serious), oh my GAHHHHHH. We are fighting against it, daily, and have been since the first ChatGPT came out. It’s grinding me down.
Money: SmolAc was invited to a birthday party and hah! The stack of books that I bought for the last party they were invited to (but arrived too late) can now be wrapped for this kid’s gifts. MRSP: $40. I paid $22. Stash of gifts, FTW.
1. I’m grateful for our robot vacuum. It’s getting old, it can’t do corners or crevices, and is limited to the wider areas of space but even still it can do the job well enough to save me the energy of running the full vacuum everywhere.
Helping folks: There’s still time to hit up the fandom craft market! This is a fundraiser run by Our Family, Our Fight for the American Immigration Council.
AIC provides legal representation to thousands of people detained by ICE, as well as working legislatively and through the courts to challenge our broken immigration system. They also work in 40 states to help local leaders and communities fight back.
Year 6, Day 315: Day one of solo parenting. PiC is away at a work thing this week. I’ve been bracing myself for this for weeks, telling myself that I would moderate my expectations for work and household stuff. The goal: keep the kids fed, clothed, alive, get them to and from school. Don’t break myself trying to do the impossible.
How we coped: burgers at the local place with outdoor seating. Stern directions to head DIRECTLY for the shower after we got home. Everyone in bed for math tutoring and reading time. SmolAc was happily sandwiched between us “reading” while we painfully inched our way through one equation after another.
From The Diplomat – Callum: You’re a military-industrial complex papered over by a Constitution.
Boy does that description of America hits home especially hard since this administration has been murdering right left and center and has torpedoed all the soft diplomacy we used to do through USAID.
Year 6, Day 316: Day two of solo parenting. I had a very tight timetable for dropping off JB and SmolAc this morning to get back in time for a meeting. I made all the runs in exactly 60 minutes and managed to get to my meeting in time. Score! JB had an afterschool activity at school so that bought me an extra hour to “rest” (working from bed). That helped.
Picking up JB late meant that I went straight from school to the orthodontist, then to pick up SmolAc a little earlier than Monday in hopes that we’ll be able to get dinner on the table earlier, get homework done, and get to bed earlier. That’s not how things worked out of course.
We got home much earlier yes, we ate dinner earlier also yes, but JB ran into trouble with their math homework and I had to teach them how to do it step by step, work through several problems, and then figure out how to create a story around how to solve that type of problem that would stick in their brain.
We did not hit the 8 pm bedtime. We did not remember to take out the garbage bins. We definitely did not have 5-7 minutes for my workout. But we survived intact.
Year 6, Day 317: Day three of solo parenting. And there’s my limit! Did the drop-offs this morning again. Kept running into people we know who haven’t seen me in months (PiC has been doing this run to save me time) so they wanted to catch up. It’s touching that they seemed so delighted to see me but that took a whackload of energy. I drove him and felt the exhaustion buzz set into my limbs.
The best encounter was a surprise appearance of our neighbor dogs who nearly shivered out of their skins with excitement when we spotted each other. I adore them and the feeling is mutual and I never walk away from them wondering if they actually like me or if they’re just being polite/friendly like I do with humans.
The one really good thing this week: the crushing suffocating relentless fatigue of the past several weeks has finally lifted. I’d forgotten what it felt like to only have pain without dragging the 1000 lb weight of fatigue with me and it’s so tolerable. My fingers are randomly swollen. My lower back aches. My upper back and shoulders are tight as a drum. And it’s still so much better than being crushed by fatigue. I am grateful. (Update: It lasted one day. I’m still grateful for the experience of that one day.)
Year 6, Day 318: A friend shared that her Asian ex-GF has gone to become a police officer in the Bay Area and my brain stuttered to a stop. WHAT. Really? In the years 2025-2026? That PD is notoriously racist even for police.
It also made me reflect on this scene from The Diplomat that felt similar though I wonder if one could legitimately make the argument the CIA is both a rotten agency AND still does SOME good. I don’t know enough about them to comment on that. I definitely don’t feel like we can make that argument for American police. I don’t know of any police that do any amount of good sufficient to counterbalance even a fraction of the evil they do.
Stuart: How are you not furious? Eidra: Stuart, I am a young tiny Asian American woman at the top of one of the most baldly paternalistic arms of the UG government. I am furious all the time. If I could go after terrorists and human traffickers with an organization that didn’t have an 80 year legacy of racism and human rights violations, I would. Stuart: We should be getting this for the recruitment video. Eidra: There is not another better CIA or America. The ones we have are fucked up. We make compromises. Some days we feel ok about that. Some days we have gin.
Year 6, Day 319: Confusion. The garden faucet has had a slow drip for months. I’d made the mistake of using it and then it wouldn’t shut off completely. I can’t replace it because the jerks here before us installed some kind of bizarre lock on the faucet that our handy friend says has to be cut off if we don’t have a key for it. There is no key for it. I stuck a jug under the drip and have been using that to water the garden until I solve the problem. I went to do the usual garden watering dump today and the jug is empty. The drip has stopped?? Woo!
I haven’t had time to figure out how to fix our oven yet. Maybe it will also mysteriously fix itself? Please?
Small business Jack working as hard as he can to pay his rent, laboring under a heart condition.
Lily Meade and her mother are unhoused and she just lost her second book contract and her agent in succession. I know what it’s like to feel hopeless and I haven’t had to do it under as dire circumstances as she’s in.
Sonia Hale has been trying to get back on her feet after divorcing a domestic abuser.
Also feeding folks.
My friend in Alaska works with a refugee center and the facts are life is super bleak right now. Refugees without green cards are no longer receiving SNAP, refugees are no longer safe from DHS detaining them indefinitely regardless of their status, they will likely lose Medicaid sometime this year. This is despicable. We’re supposed to help people get on their feet and this is disgusting and inhumane. In response to this and many other problems created by this administration, the refugee center is working in with local groups to support local farms and provide food to those who need it: What is Grow Local, Give Local?
I’m adding this to my donation list for next week.
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 $1156 in dividends from the stocks portfolio.
Year 6, Day 308: A sad and scared worry. On the weekend, I’d been up and about for maybe 1.5 hours doing basic chores and my body buzzed with the sort of exhaustion warning that means the longer I do this, the harder the crash will be. I’ve “rested” (doing almost all the usual parenting and some of my work and some of my housework) for almost a month. What if this is my new baseline of awful? What if, unless I do something drastic like quitting my job (in this economy/fascist country??), this is the best/most my body can do?
My job sucks right now so obviously I am not fundamentally averse to quitting but I am completely averse to not having income and the consequences of that (eventual poverty). That’s the curve my mom’s reality took: work really hard to build a solid foundation, get sick, lose eveything. That takes very little foresight to predict if I don’t save and invest enough first. (And even then I occasionally wonder: really, how safe is our net worth?)
I wish it wasn’t a choice between potentially gaining health improvement in the short term by way of committing myself to the long term consequences of having cut my income at the peak of my career.
Year 6, Day 309: Today I’m reminding myself that the reason that I stay at my current job is that I have a level of autonomy that would be difficult to get elsewhere in the industry and that it’s entirely remote and that latter bit is what makes it possible for me to survive having a full time job while being a full time parent and doing all the other things that I need/want to do. I will still be sad and complain now and again but those are the two things I have to come back to – these are the things that would be very difficult to find in the COVID+6 years world where everyone is irrationally hot to get bodies back into office despite there being ample evidence that many jobs could be remove (and therefore more accessible to the disabled community). My therapist doesn’t think it’s healthy for me to think of myself as disabled but if I require a job that lets me work from bed for two months, or else I wouldn’t be able to survive doing my work AND being a parent, I’m not sure what else to call it. I don’t need to be called disabled but anywhere else in the professional world, what I need to do well at my job and manage life would be considered an unreasonable accommodation.
Year 6, Day 310: Is it ironic that while I’m still slowly shedding the tentacles of depression that bonded to my brain, death metal felt very soothing? Maybe but hattip to Fleshgod Apocalypse (a friend’s rec) and later on, The Hu, for helping ease my mind through a rough patch.
Shutterfly sent one of their “A glimpse of your memories from twenty years ago” emails and it served me a picture of me with an old friend, and an even older friend who died of cancer last year. Wow that hurts.
Year 6, Day 311: I love dental cleanings. I love that it’s only a 7 minute drive away. I especially love when I get what feels like an A or B at my exam. I got a “looks good” from the dentist, a “looks pretty good, not much build-up” from the hygienist and gum measurements show some improvement since my last exam. My goal is to have no 4s or 5s in 6 months. Hope hope hope.
Other things that are good: one friend’s divorce from a suddenly awful spouse who just upped sticks is final. Two more friends are divorcing abusive husbands. I hope their dissolutions are quick and drama free, I don’t trust those men even an ounce.
Trading unhealthy relationships for better circumstances FTW!
Year 6, Day 312: An unseasonably warm day today was an unanticipated treat. We’ve had a couple weeks of rain on and off. Even hail and a thunderstorm once! That was actually pretty neat since we don’t get a wide range of weather here.
I’m dragging into this Friday but at least still practically upright despite all kinds of staffing drama this week. I’m still putting a few of the smaller fires out but the worst of the solvable problems this week have been.
1. This line makes me laugh out loud every time I read it: “Oh thank the stars.” Caldenia exhaled. “No offense to your cooking, but the thought of going back to it was causing me actual anxiety.”
Helping folks: WatchingMinnesotans helping their neighbors has been an extraordinary experience. Ashley Fairbanks built this site, Keep MN Housed, and through it, people from all over have been able to pitch in to help the community organizers on the ground. I’m glad they’re getting some attention and I hope it brings continual support. They’re on my list each week. I also hope that our communities can learn from this to effectively fight back when it comes home.
