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 7, Day 181: I had to carve up the giant pork shoulder (on sale from Costco) to freeze in manageable portions and to cook one chunk for dinner in a narrow 20 minute window before my morning calls started. The problem was that I also wanted to be doing the laundry, cleaning up the weekend mess, and managing my admin paperwork in those same 20 minutes. Too bad, had to pick one. I made it with about 8 minutes to spare, which was lovely. Then I got into the admin work and got the laundry going after my calls, so there to my Instant Gratification driven self. It is possible to get many of the things done even if it’s not all done between 8-9 am.
The weekend was taxing and the number of things on my to do list this week is staggering. Pacing is critical lest I PEMs myself right into the ground but it’s so hard to force myself to slow down. The kids have been given their chores and I’m laying down until we have to go to the next lesson.
I am pleased that I didn’t get the pickup dates and times wrong today, they keep changing on us because of conferences and other things. There’s one more change next week and then we should be stable until the spring conferences.
Year 7, Day 182: This week is WHOA. I still have 4 loads of laundry (I’ve already done 3 loads ).
A European friend is in town so we have to meet up sometime this week.
We have to take JB to two tutoring sessions right after school, and they still need to do homework, practice their instrument, and chores.
My friend needs us to mind their kid four days this week.
It’s our 1Nth wedding anniversary this week and we haven’t had a minute to even think about what we’d like to do to mark that.
We still have work to do on our inventory for the craft fair and signage.
We’ll make it through but I’m feeling it since I haven’t yet recovered from the weekend.
Year 7, Day 183: There’s a sale on Cheerios and Chex cereal at Safeway and PiC has picked up a dozen boxes. It’s ridiculous for normal people. However. He’s an inveterate snacker, and even more so when stressed, these won’t last the month. Given the disparity between our rates of eating, me – 1 serving from a box, him – the rest of the box, we need a dozen just for me to get a few servings. And of course the kids want some, too. So it’s possible we’re contemplating grabbing another half dozen boxes. 😆
The chill in the air seems here to stay. SmolAc usually runs so hot that they’re down to their skivvies by the morning. You know it’s really cold when they wear their cozy jammies and doesn’t strip them off an hour into sleep. We even had to run the heater today. Soon it will be time for me to live full time in my Oodie hoodie AND pants. *rubs hands*
Year 7, Day 184: TIL: My search for a replacement for Adobe petered out for lack of time but today I realized that one answer at least has been staring me in the face. When my PDFs automatically open in Firefox, there are tools available! I can sign and date a document! I don’t think I can combine documents or paste images, also functions I need, but this works for now until there’s time to figure out the rest.
Today was all about craft fair prep – all the admin stuff, all the pricing stuff, most of the signage. Then it was about ferrying children from one location to the next until we hit the final payoff: a Halloween party with rides, games, and goodies. We only made it for the last 45 minutes but it was still fun. Of course, I’m totally worn out now.
Year 7, Day 185: There’s the last last paycheck in the bank now.
I was really irritated at Amazon that I had to deal with them for the 4th or 5th time about a defective shipment that that they keep telling me to return, even though they told me NOT to return it at the time I reported it. Today chat says “no no, I took care of it don’t worry about it.” That’s what that last two people said, are you going to compensate me for my time now that I have had to come back AGAIN despite that? They promised to send me a $25 refund to my CC. We’ll see if it materializes (and by that I mean, I set myself a calendar alert to make sure it does.) It’s the principle of the matter, but also I need them to stop harassing me for the return of something they told me to dispose of!
Year 7, Day 174: Farnoosh of So Money has started using her email list again. Turns out that I signed up for it, must have been a decade ago?, and I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to unsubscribe or not but this bit happens to align with my current state of being.
If you’re questioning your next chapter, try asking:
What still interests me?
What keeps draining me?
What could I change or get help with?
Your answer might be to stop doing something. It might be to try a different version. Give yourself some room to find out.
I’m mulling over these questions in the back of my mind this week while I deal with collecting tax documents for our donations from the past few months. I’ve kept records but hadn’t kept up with downloading the receipts.
Year 7, Day 175: We’re rapidly coming up on the end now. After what has felt like an interminable wait, it’s right around the corner. We only have days left.
I’ve been tidying as I go and now trying to make sure I’ve checked all the boxes before the last sand grains trickle through the glass. I’ve done the personal thank you gifts; the thank you notes to external folks; offered recommendations to the external people who have worked with my department who have concerns about their futures; cleaned up historical documentation that doesn’t need to exist any longer; cleaned up personal communications that should stay personal. I’ve maxed out my 401k and claimed all my FSA money. I’ll be pulling everyone’s permissions on all our thingies next week.
I still have some grieving to do, certainly, but the length of this winding down has given me enough time and space to settle the big affairs. Small favors.
Year 7, Day 176: Multi-level shopping planning! There was a 100% rebate offer on at Office Depot so I used gift cards to pay for 2 packs of AA batteries. The purchase price, $59.98, in rewards rebates has landed. That will pay for the holiday cards in a few weeks or so when I get that together. Basically I got a cheap side of batteries to go with our holiday cards.
Also today’s project: collecting all the transaction records for my Rollover IRA. I’m almost sure I might have missed filing a form for it one year but I’m not positive. I definitely don’t know how the heck we tell which gains correlated to the taxed and untaxed contributions. But at least I’ll have a complete record of the transactions to start from.
This also probably answers my semi-eternal question (again) about whether it’s actually worth the trouble of contributing to the IRA solely so that it’s there for future Roth IRA conversions. Maybe not. This much admin work is a total pain and I’m not even positive that it’ll be worth the effort later. Meaning, I’m not sure if the math will make sense to do conversions, or when we should do it. We can’t this year, our income last year and this year will be high. Our income next year will be … er, right now, projected to be ~75% of this year’s. That’s assuming I don’t land a job (very likely) and don’t have another income stream develop (unsure). The year after that, who knows what the future holds. Speaking of the future, I have been up nights worrying about our final retirement number because of reading up on Long COVID (given its high overlap with ME/CFS), particularly about the kids. I am so worried that one of these days they’re going to catch an infection that they never recover from and how we’d bear the costs of that to support them long term. Heck, if any one of us gets hit that way, it’ll be really bad. It’s one of the futures that I fear. I’m already living a version of that life, with the good fortune of being at least half ablebodied enough to work well past my originally presumed expiration point. At 19, it seemed like my train would run out of steam by early 30s, and the stark reality of that existence is very clear. I don’t want it to hit one of us, any of us, and then also not have the money to pay for sufficient care and support.
Year 7, Day 177: Our ballots are filled out and dropped off in a ballot box! The research was, as usual, a total pain in the neck but it’s done done done.
I did one hour of yardwork and it put me flat on my back for the rest of the day. Not that I was able to stay there. Had to drag myself out to pick up kids twice and then to drive to lessons after that. I keep thinking if I could lay abed for a solid 12 hours, that would be sufficient to recover. But that’s not actually possible with parenting duties.
1. Hard as it is to believe, my ME/CFS is only mild-somewhat moderate. This former athlete is severe and my God it’s bleak. I feel so deeply for her, this speaking out is truly going to cost her. I know because it would cost me and my price is measured in days and weeks for overextendjng myself. My life is different and difficult enough going from a recreational athletic life to what it changed to now, first with chronic pain and then CFS: The Olympic sprinter now bedbound for 22 hours a day
Year 7, Day 167: I actually fell asleep last night without a sleep aid! That’s … it’s been months since I could get to sleep naturally! But oh my gosh I’m creaky and achy today. We had time in the pool this weekend and it coincided with my throat FINALLY healing up – both good things! However, I also gave my liver a break today and didn’t take pain meds until evening so got to enjoy the new pain in all its glory.
We received confirmation that we have been assigned a table at a craft fair this fall so now JB and I are cranking out the papercrafts like it’s our job. It sort of is! I’m not sure how much of each product to bring for a crowd this big (hundreds) in this economy (terrible) for a whole 6 hours. Thinking positively, we’ve branched out from their art on greeting cards to adding prints, stickers, and buttons of their designs too. They’re all very cute!
Thinking less positively, I’m debating whether it’s worth updating the online shop. It doesn’t get any traffic anymore since Twitter was destroyed and I haven’t had time to do much with it on Bluesky. But that can be a question for later. I’ve been taking progress photos and maybe those can serve for the online postings.
I’ve got to get cracking in my sewing, too, though I can’t imagine that I’ll be able to make a great deal more of them by the time we show. It takes about 3 hours per item and that’s a lot of time and related energy.
Year 7, Day 168: I’m about to go to war with our shower water pressure. It’s been dwindling a little more each day, and just stopped like it was choked off today! What the heck?? I’m not as sanguine about tackling a possible repair here on my own as I was (also not) about fixing the oven. Plumbing is scarier than some oven surgery. I don’t want to have to open up the walls but we are worried this is because of a leak somewhere. For the moment, this is getting backburnered though, we have another shower to use and we simply don’t have the energy to tackle this.
I asked my trainer to crank my workouts way down last month because I’m being pulled in so many directions it’s not even funny. It’s become more and more draining to do even the barest minimum workout, though, which is both frustrating on principle and in the whole chronic illness this problem is not solveable kind of way.
Year 7, Day 169: I’ve been fighting a sad and losing war with the powdery mildew that’s come back to attack my snap peas. I’ve been spraying the plant with a vinegar and dish soap solution to try to treat the affected leaves to no avail. It’s a bit depressing and has led to me neglecting the garden a bit. Usually every day I get a bit of joy from a tiny bit of growth, a new little tendril poking up, a little bundle of flower starting to develop, but the plant essentially looked dead all last week. It was just a matter of time before I had to rip it out, like last year’s, I thought. I had germinated a back up in the house which is growing pretty hardily but hadn’t quite gotten to the point where it seemed safe to
But this morning I spy some little bits of white peeking out from under new leaves! Not just one or two, either, there are at least half a dozen, maybe more. Maybe all hope is not lost.
Year 7, Day 170: Getting near the end here. I’ve put together personal thank you notes for vendors who have worked with us over the years. I wanted to thank them myself. They’ll never get that acknowledgement from the faceless corporation that doesn’t give two hoots about anyone, before I close this chapter.
This week’s loaf of foccacia was a little flat. Turns out I forgot my lukewarm water temp range and mixed in 120 degree water instead of 100-115. Whoops. Still edible! It just didn’t grow much. Oh and I oversalted the top. That was much less great but it’s easy to brush off the extra salt. Ooh! Maybe the next go should be 1.5x to get a taller loaf next time for sandwiches. I’ll skip the kosher salt on top, and stick with a bit of sea salt, since the kosher salt seems to do something funny to the top.
Year 7, Day 171: It’s a bit frustrating that I’ve been taking Tragic Sandwich‘s advice from a few months back to rest as much as I can and YET it’s still not enough. I send myself back to bed for 1-2 hours of rest every weekday and it’s still like peeling myself, a caramel bog, back out when the timer goes off to go pick up a child. No, it’s a lot frustrating. *wild gesticulating*
My sleep in general has been an ever-changing beast. It used to be non-existent and stressful, full of screaming nightmares. When the buyout happened, sleep was only possible in chunks of a few hours and I could taste adrenaline every morning so was too keyed up to sleep any more than that. By the summer, sleep deprivation was so bad that my doc and I agreed to try Ambien just to get some hours logged at night. Now, my body craves more and more sleep, no matter how much I get.
SmolAc has been going around dripping like a faucet this week. Thankfully their throat isn’t painful anymore, it was earlier, but I’m still downing antivirals and directing them to the tissues. Crossing all the things that this one doesn’t overcome my faux immune system.
That temporary awful thing I’m dreading starts today. It won’t be that long in actual time but it’ll feel like four lifetimes. Wish me luck and survival?
The start of middle school has felt a lot like the time you spend holding your breath as you creak your way up the curve of a rollercoaster, anticipating the drop. I can’t tell what the drop is going to be but the fact that our most social family member still hasn’t established even the start of any promising friendships worries me. There’s always been a bit of a shuffle of friends and they’ve had the misfortune of as several besties move away in a row, one after another, along with the near suffocating presence of drama-inclined classmates. But they’ve also always managed to form some sort of social circle that works for them. It’s never taken this long before, though. Ironic that the one time they might be taking their time forming new friendships, it’s making me nervous rather than glad that they’re possibly pacing themself and observing people before befriending them. I used to wish they’d be a little more circumspect about declaring friendship because it’s frustrating when yet another so called friend turns out to be a crappy person. Now, maybe because middle school is expected to be so hard socially, I’m twisting my whiskers when they’re not so quick to make friends.
Everyone I know, teachers and parents who have been through it recently, have said that the kids are mostly terrible in their middle school arc. Even the most adjusted and well socialized kid we know went silent and communicated in single syllables with his parents for two years even if he didn’t engage in any of the other “lost hold of my brains” antics that his cohort reveled in. He didn’t even think they were funny, he found them intensely irritating. But his answers to every question were also: Fine. Stuff. (He’s recovered now. He’s got a lot of opinions to share, though he never did hesitate to share those with us before.)
Life with Smol Acrobat
We saw Smol Acrobat standing up for themself in real time the other day. At a birthday party, the kids were all lined up and the line rippled as the front of the line kids took a hasty unexpected step backwards. The kid behind SmolAc in line started to cry and yell SmolAc pushed me! SmolAc clearly replied, no, it was the line that was pushing (and we all got pushed).
Precious Moments
SmolAc with pomp and fervor: Tonight! We celebrate! Da zoooon!
JB, *exasperated* it’s “tonight, we steal the moon!”
SmolAc, trying to guess my age: are you 16? Are you ONE HUNDRED???
