July 20, 2026

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (320)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 7, Day 76: Microburst cleaning: I bought a bulk pack of customizable compartment bead organizers and used one of them to organize my desk supplies. I’ve been using an old desk drawer organizer to hold odds and ends: binder clips, paper clips, rulers, calculator, staplers, tape measures, post it notepads, etc for the past 15 years but it’s very inefficient because it sits on a medium height shelf and I can’t see into it. Mostly I grabbed things by feel and memory.

This was a terrible way to inadvertently encourage detritus build-up, and a really ineffective use of vertical space. All the small items fit into two closed boxes after I extracted small supplies from another medium bin and organized them together. That emptied 90% of the tray and freed up 1/3 of the medium bin. The remaining larger items were rehomed into the free space in the medium bin, and voila! Neatness! This freed up some shelf space with better accessibility. It’d be even better if I could have it set up as a mini shelving system so they’re not sitting atop each other and could be pulled out but this is good for now.

I might tackle the kids’ Legos with the remaining boxes. I got into the beads briefly on the weekend but it turns out while JB has a vast variety of beads, they aren’t in the quantities I’d thought. They have wide variety but not deep supplies. We’ll need pivot to more shallow boxes. It’s possible we didn’t need all 8 of these deep storage bins but we’ll see.

Year 7, Day 77: Sticker shock at the produce shop we used to frequent: Corn on the cob was TWO DOLLARS AN EAR. Nectarines were $4 per pound. Asparagus was $6 per pound. If we didn’t need to bring produce to our friends’ BBQ, I would have fled empty-handed.

Five of my colleagues are gone now with another 15 of us scheduled to go in a bit over a month. I continue to harbor both deep resentment along with that weird layer of relief, but the bitter is stronger right now.

Year 7, Day 78: The ten bags and giant box of cousin hand me downs and community donations are sorted! I plopped on a stool and went through everything quick as I could, picking out a few things to keep, discarding anything that wasn’t good enough to share, and packing everything else. Four out of five pairs of sneakers went to recycling, one pair is in good shape. A stack of what might have been cloth napkins are quite yellowed, I might try to wash them before donating instead of sending to fabric recycling.

I kept a stack of undershirts for JB; a couple books in perfect condition; a set of heavy duty kids cups in rainbow colors which deeply pleased SmolAc – they hand washed them immediately. I kept a small crossbody bag with so many zippers to test. It seemed much too small at first glance but in the trial run so far it’s been quite nice to have all the separate pockets for keys, phones, wallets, masks and more for a quick outing like a dropoff and return home. If I keep this, I need to cover up the weird logo on the front. A cute nerdy patch would do the trick. I also kept a pair of squishy house slippers. The terrycloth doesn’t feel pleasant, but they’re free and squishy so good enough!

What’s left for donation fills two enormous boxes. I would fit in them comfortably with room for a kid to squish in with me. And I’m not tiny like I once was! Lots of clothes in good condition that have just been sitting closets, backpacks with plenty of wear left in them, that sort of thing. Once I do a sweep of our kids’ outgrown clothes to add, two more ~ 40 lb boxes will head to the reservation. That’ll make 7 moving boxes this year woo!

Year 7, Day 79: I just got the paper bill in the mail for a procedure a few months back. Delta Dental won’t cover part of the procedure so I thought we’d owe another $600 but they wrote off more than half of the remaining balance as a courtesy (proactively even, this is the first bill I’ve seen since getting the denial letter) so that trimmed it down to $200 we have to pay now. Whew, I appreciate that!

All phone calls this morning trying to get my CalABLE account problems squared away and to get Kaiser scheduling settled. Three hours of attempted phone calls (they kept saying we’re too busy, call later) or waiting on hold whisked away the last of my energy and I put myself to bed for a few hours of much-needed rest.

Year 7, Day 80: It’s July so of course the weather is All Gloomy. It’s so foggy that it feels like a light misting rain. I suspect this means the green beans I tried to start outside are not coming out of their shells. Maybe I need to bring them in to attempt inside germination.

I think my cleaning energy ran out for the week. I’m feeling deflated and depressed (not necessarily in the clinical sense, more in the metaphysical sense of feeling soul-crushed) and ever so tired.

July 13, 2026

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (319)

Year 7 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 7, Day 69: Welp, this might be me paying the price for thinking I could do two medical things in a row: a massage to loosen up the lumps that pass for muscles and a vaccine in the same week. It feels roughly like a giant jumped on me with two feet. After an extra 10 hours in bed on Sunday, I’m still feeling well below baseline. That’s a spanner in the works for this week. I’ve got a donation pickup scheduled for tomorrow but that presupposed that all of Sunday was going to be sorting community donations. That didn’t happen. Instead, SmolAc, still sick much more dramatically than I am, in both senses of the word has continued cosplaying a barnacle stuck to my side today. We did drop off together, then did a bit of light gardening for outdoor air, then snacked painfully and slowly. Lego time saved us both for an hour.

Year 7, Day 70: I cancelled the donation pickup for today and settled myself in for just chaffeur duties, puttering and nursing care. Not a lot of puttering happened but they seem to be at least less feverish today. Good thing I set my expectations really low for one, and my job no longer matters for two.

Told PiC not to bother trying to spell me, his job performance still matters (maybe, who knows how they decide who to lay off) and mine doesn’t. I’m only doing the barest of minimums now because they’ve squeezed the last blood they’re gonna get from this stone. For the next two months it’s all about my health and my family’s needs and anything I can do to help my staff get jobs.

Year 7, Day 71: Finally got my garden delivery! Soil acidifier, compost, and more soil since the potatoes are going to need hilling before I know it. The winds like to carry off a thin layer of soil every time we turn around, and last night happened to be especially gusty. I dug into the acidifier and compost first, spreading it around the blueberry and blackberry bushes. Fingers crossed that was done right / enough. I need help lugging out the 3 cubic foot bag of soil which – that sack and I barely made it into the garage so there it’s staying until I have a second big-enough pair of hands. SmolAc is currently in a mostly helpful phase so 70% chance they would pipe up “I can help you, Mommy!” and 100% chance they would be crushed under the bag.

Meanwhile I’m sprouting wee sugar snap peas in cotton out of pure curiosity and it’s neat to actually see the little sprout as it shows to come to the surface preparatory to emerging from the seed. No clue where they’re going to go. They can’t go in the bag that used to be dedicated to them, the mold spores are waiting to pounce. Could they thrive at the top of the potatoes soil mounds alongside the green beans that will be planted once the soil is heaped up? Worth a shot. My gardening is very haphazard.

Year 7, Day 72: Big medical mail day. I’ve been waiting on a reprint of a prescription receipt for 7 weeks for FSA redemption and last week had given up on it arriving. Even deleted it from my to so list so naturally here it is! The FSA would be maxed out eventually with or without it – therapy and medications add up. Next year I’ll be missing having two FSAs badly. My Ambien refill landed as did JB’s meds and the SPF 50 sunscreen we’re trying.

Speaking of Ambien, it’s a new as needed prescription. I haven’t had to use it too often, sheer fatigue has been enough many nights, but when I do it’s worked reasonably well. So far there haven’t been any weird sleep-calls or texts or purchases. That I know of. Hopefully Sleep Me is simply too uncoordinated to buy anything while on Ambien. My sleep set up has finally stabilized too. These days, I layer two shirts, plus a heating pad for the muscle aches, and layer 1 Oodie blanket and a beautiful gift quilt on top. That combination seems to ward off the cycle of temperature dysregulation of sweating a royal mess and then waking up shivering from having sweated through a shirt and hoodie (so gross).

Year 7, Day 73: My Bing point total isn’t high enough for a redemption but I do my research in advance of having enough points to redeem. Except that 3 for 3 redemption options are all out of stock and I AM NOW FORMING A CONSPIRACY THEORY. Something is wrong there??? Are my points going to disappear?? All my efforts gone for naught? I hope not. (A friend pointed out that it lines up with corporate shenanigans at the end of the quarter which actually makes a lot of sense – I recently learned that corporations will do crappy stuff like refuse to pay their freelancers for 2-4 weeks leading up to the end of the quarter or after. Just garbage behavior.)

*She was probably right. Once the quarterly earnings were reported, along with 4800 layoffs, the ability to redeem points was magically back.

I’ve squeezing every single earning opportunity big and tiny because, of course, every penny counts. It goes into the mental piggybank for after the severance comes out.

We got a big check this week reimbursing past out of network medical care which was a happy surprise. It was immediately chopped up to cover upcoming big bills: dental expenses for 2 (2026), auto and home insurance, the little left shores up the property tax account. That settles my stomach a little bit.

July 6, 2026

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (318)

Year 7 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 7, Day 62: I’ve never wandered into the clothing section at Costco before but after seeing Maggie‘s excellent linen pants recently I figured it could be worth a meander, and it was! We lucked into $7 and $16 shorts. But I had to guesstimate my size and sadly I was off by a small but significant margin on the $7 shorts. Turns out I’m not a size 4 and if I’d been thinking straight I would have gotten two sizes to try and return the one that didn’t fit. Drat for that miss. I did like the fit of the other pair though, and now that I think about it, am more than a little miffed that I found shorts that fit my waist comfortably but none of my pants do, new or old. It’s so frustrating to constantly be adjusting the waist of my pants whether it’s my cargo pants with sufficient pockets that keep sliding down or the jeans that require a belt to keep them up except that makes them too tight or the newer fleece lined cuffed pants that are an inch or two too short. I’m about ready to give up on wearing clothes in public and just slouch around in sweats or fleece like a Yeti.

Microburst of stress cleaning: I vacuumed the air vents in the hair dryer, modem and hard drives, and all around them. They’d been clogged with dust.

Year 7, Day 63: I’m data collecting this week to pull the bigger and/or recurring bills that we currently cashflow in order to pinpoint our required spending vs optional spending. I’d been deliberately relaxing about that over the years to train myself down to a lower level of hypervigilance but it means there are gaps on my spreadsheets to fill in now while I can still do something about it (set aside extra cash). While I have a sense of how long our halved income and savings will last, it’s a birds-eye view and I want a firmer grip on our new disposable income number.

I downloaded the Chase app to do … something, I don’t remember what but it set off a little cascade of really annoying effects. First, Chase locked me out of my account telling me that they had detected unusual activity. Friend joked that it was my buying spree at Sephora, and I thought maybe it was too, but when I called it was because I was using the mobile app and that was unusual. Ok?? Feels like you could have texted asking if that was me using the app instead of going into instant lockdown. Then they unilaterally decided that my having the app meant I have to use the app IN ALL THINGS. They changed my 2-factor authentication to: log in with password, go and log into the mobile app (with the same credentials) to answer a question to verify my identity. (What does that prove?? I guess it proves I have possession of the credentials and the phone but humph.) Anyway, fine, I schlep off to do that and *crickets*. No question to answer. I try again, still no question. And again. On the seventh try I quit, exasperated and called them to get a code and also ask What the Hell? The CSR was no help on the latter but after she gave me a code to access my dratted accounts, I found it on my own under Security and Privacy: I manually elected to receive codes by email. Like I had ALWAYS done before, no one asked you to change this, Chase. Annoying.

Year 7, Day 64: I get to submit PiC’s claims for found money. On that note, my checklists are absolutely bananas right now. Today’s count, where 3 items were combo items, was 28 checked boxes of chores, paperwork, file backups, phone calls, texts, scheduling, purchase tracking, purchase-making. The rest of the week isn’t much different either. I have calls and appointments every day this week. It’s boggling. I mean, yes, we were offline for a week not doing any chores but is this all backlog from one week? Usually it’s a work backlog needing slogging through, not personal/household things. Some are work related. Because of the layoff, there are extra calls to take and farewell notes to write and personal gifts to be shipped. And yes, also because of the layoff, there’s 30-60 minutes of job hunting per day, on average.

But the vast majority of this week is household money stuff. Or household (stress) cleaning stuff. It’s weird but here’s hoping that it’s just one week of playing catch-up and then it settles down a bit. Rest time and hiding under the covers time needs to be scheduled in here somewhere.

This is the third night in a row that I’ve sat up working til 11. This trend can stop now, please and thank you.

Year 7, Day 65: One byproduct of the layoff, and my attitude towards the whole place (now doing the barest of minimums), is the space to make a conscious effort in my personal life. Focus on prioritizing the things that fill my bucket, notice good stuff around me, and be there for the kids even if that experience isn’t exactly filling my bucket.

To whit: how did it take me a year to realize the chairs at my bodywork place are incredibly soft and comfortable?? I’m not in frequently, but have sat in them a few times. ‘Tis a cloud for my posterior!

Or this weekend, my therapy appointment was rescheduled so I humored SmolAc wanting me to come watch their swim lesson. PiC is the swim parent but they still want my approval. Normally I’d use the free time to do more chores. This time we all went to swim and the library.

Year 7, Day 66: This is momentous – SmolAc was reminded to put away the clean utensils and they just did it without whining. A summer miracle.

There is a soy and tofu festival here and I didn’t know about it?! I missed my chance at a local chocolate festival, too. They changed their format in the last year or two from doing a really big gathering of chocolate vendors to making us schlep all over the Bay Area to visit the individual shops. Gas is too expensive for all that!

Planning (paralysis actually) for my next microburst of cleaning: I saved some dryer vent cleaning kit/recs somewhere but indecision has got hold of my ankle. Will I have to move the whole dryer? I really don’t want to – high risk of scratching up things or squashing my fingers. But I can’t imagine any kit will be good enough that I could clean the whole vent through the lint catcher opening, it’s so restricted. In which case, we come back to – what’s the best kit for my needs?