Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (46)
April 19, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 29: Is it just me or does every Monday feel like three days crammed into one? I know this isn’t the first time I’ve had this thought. I wonder what we can change to make it less triple threat terrible. I already do some work over the weekend so that my workload is lighter, and I try to cook at least one meal or have something to defrost so we’re just reheating leftovers. PiC’s Mondays tend to be meeting heavy which doesn’t help but it also can’t BE helped. We’ve shifted to needing take out during the week as much as we do on the weekends but we’re trying not to blow the budget out of the water by doing takeout more than twice a week.
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We’re out of Tylenol again. Only I can go through multiple Costco sized bottles of Tylenol in a year.
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My list of health issues are multiplied because of fatigue: neck pain, a severe sore throat, lower back pain. Thankfully, with PiC taking some overnights (which he’s always been willing to do but I needed some specific changes to our routines to feel ok with it), some of those are starting to feel less intensely bad. They all still hurt but not quite as much as last Friday.
Year 2, Day 30: WOW. Smol really worked me over last night. I don’t think they got as much as two hours of sleep strung together and then I wasn’t able to hand them off until 11 am. I needed a solid 2.5 hours of separation before I felt anything like human again, or able to face other humans.
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JB is really looking forward to their upcoming dentist appointment and I am grateful they’re so bribeable with goodies from the dentist.
Year 2, Day 31: It was PiC’s turn with the baby last night and on five or six hours of sleep I feel like 84% a new person. Even if I had to stumble out and pump right away (which I still hate), my severe sore throat is improving and so is my neck pain. Sleep is the magic elixir!
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Pondering on the method of scrambling eggs. I like the creaminess of the eggs scrambled in a pan that’s only warm to start but I hate how much they stick to a non stick pan after and it feels like I lose some egg to the sticking. The eggs scrambled in a hot pan with the heat turned off after I’ve added the eggs leaves a cleaner surface I don’t have to scrub and the final dish is still good. We like our eggs to still be “wet”. Do you have a favorite way to make eggs? Have you see the olive oil fried eggs?
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As I work on getting Smol down for a nap, and see they’ve dropped their pacifier again because they don’t really want it, I remember how JB would crawl around the little infants laying on the playmats in daycare and insert pacifiers into bawling mouths. They never used a pacifier themselves but they knew the wee babies liked them. It was cute.
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JB surprised us with ham and cheese sandwiches for dinner. PiC got turkey and cheese. He quietly commented that since they made it, he couldn’t make any adjustments to the sandwich like he’d do without hesitation if I’d made it. Hah!
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It’s amazing how much my outlook on life shifts when I get a night of sleep and end the day only really tired and in minor pain, as opposed to rock bottom fatigued and hurting all over. It goes from Monday which feels like a week in a day, to Tuesday which feels like death, to today feeling like just a long and tiring day. I am about to fall over by 730 but that’s still an improvement over the past two days. I need more sleep.
Year 2, Day 32: PiC and I had to navigate almost conflicting meetings while juggling Smol today and that was not fun. Luckily JB was online for school and didn’t need anything from us because as it was, Smol was one variable too many on top of two sets of meetings and no available adult. Add to that my utter inability to get them down for a morning nap and I just wanted to cry.
PiC finally wrangled them into a nap 90 freaking minutes after I tried. This child. So stubborn.
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We’ve been alternating Smol duty two nights at a time since last weekend. I’m thinking as we get better at this, maybe we can start alternating every night so no one of us gets too rundown after two nights in a row. It can be pretty demoralizing (as witness my entries here!) to be that tired if they’re two not good sleep nights in a row. Right now, they’re all bad night sleeps and I need two days to recover from two nights on.
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Coming back to work feels like running ahead of an avalanche. I can hardly keep ahead of a massive amount of work. Things got messy in my absence. I’m working through it but it’s hard to feel like I’ve got anything in hand when I’m struggling so much on every front: home, work, relationships. Still, regular paychecks and not fighting with EDD over payments is a thing I’ve looked forward to. It also makes me yearn for the security of FI. We are simply nowhere near that, particularly with the healthcare question being utterly unpredictable right now.
Year 2, Day 33: I finally set up a data backup task and have been running the initial backing up of our critical files. It’s taking a loooooong time. I have something like 50,000 files and it slows down my computer a great deal while it’s running so I run it when I’m between work time blocks. I hope running it overnight will finish that last half.
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Smol has refused to nap properly all day and that always tanks the day because one of us always has to be on. JB can take a shift now and again, loves to in fact, but we wouldn’t rely on them to actually take care of all of Smol’s needs.
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Would you believe I was working on 2017 tax amendments and utterly forgot to put the CA amended return in the mail by tax day? I’m kicking myself so hard. I hope they’ll still take it even if it’s postmarked a couple days late but I also discovered that my tax person gave me out of date advice on preparing that return amendment. Sigh.
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I still have so much work left undone but I’m going to bed early tonight and getting what rest I can. Last night with Smol was a disaster for me and I need the recovery time.
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I’m starting to think that even the compromise with Home Chef isn’t helping us enough. I need every minute I can get to create some mental buffer for the inevitable rough days. Getting recipes and food shipped to us saves some time in having to come up with new recipes but there’s still mental load in picking the meals every week, and actually preparing the food. We got a rare DoorDash delivery this week because I was scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of energy and brainpower and I couldn’t believe what a relief it was to click a few buttons and have it show up on our doorstep. Thank goodness for a gift certificate from a friend!
I’m thinking that we need to shift over to delivery a couple times a week while we go through this particularly hard period. It’s going to double our spending on the prepared foods front which I don’t like at all but with so few other viable avenues for relief, I might have to just suck it up and deal. We might try Shef.com too but they’re definitely not a savings either.
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I tried to get PiC a vaccine appointment, expecting to see none available, but we spotted one set of appointments in the wild. We’ll keep checking semi-regularly.
My mom just set up the same meal kits on repeat, can you do that with your service? I just got a double thick mattress topper and it took away alll the pain of lying in bed!
They don’t have the option of repeat menus unfortunately, but that would be great.
I’m glad your mattress topper is great! Yay!
I have the same scrambled egg issues you do. I love the soft texture of the first method, but have cleaning up. I have started frying eggs in olive oil – Dpanish eggs. It’s delicious. I have a small jar where I pour off the extra oil and reuse it on the next set of eggs, because otherwise it feels so wasteful. Try it!
Hate cleaning up.
Darn, I wish I knew how to eliminate that cleaning problem. If I come up with something, I’ll share here 🙂
I read about the eggs in olive oil method a while back, I’ll give it a try one of these days.
Infant, kid, pandemic, two full time jobs, health problems, little sleep, no daycare… GET THAT TAKEOUT!
Advice from a long time lurker on your blog. 🙂
When you put it that way!
Thanks for visiting and commenting!
Tax day was rescheduled! Maybe you have a particular thing due, but the federal and California deadlines are both now in May, so you’re probably on time 🙂
Oh this is an amendment so I THINK they were still due on the original tax day because it’s three years from the previous tax date. But I hope they’re still taking them anyway!
T has this technique (maybe a Gordon Ramsey?) of doing scrambled eggs in a pot, I think with no oil. I hate it. Leaves so much mess!
I’ve heard a couple entrepreneurs talk about hiring someone to plan and cook dinners for their family. #lifegoals
OH my goodness that sounds like a sticky post-cooking mess indeed.
I’m VERY much in favor of hiring a personal chef. A masseuse and private chef, some day!