Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (61)
August 2, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 134: I woke myself up shouting at a neighbor for dismissing her kid’s attempt to murder my baby as “that’s just what kids do” and that really set the tone for my day. I won’t say it exactly went downhill from there, it just kept circling the drain as Smol struggled to nap, JB’s class started unexpectedly late and I had to scramble to get some Spanish activities together so they weren’t just wasting time, then JB couldn’t get themselves together enough to knock off 2 minutes of chores in under 20 minutes. I definitely lost my temper at the 15th distraction and shouted. I normally don’t shout but zero of the firm non shouting reminders or stern warnings worked.
I just want the house to myself for two hours. Just two hours that’s all I’m asking. Instead we’re getting ready to attend a far away funeral and it’s going to be time for me to be trapped in a car with a severely undersocialized extrovert for 9 hours and I think I will truly lose my mind. Bye-bye mind. Bye-bye.
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Over the weekend, I finally downloaded the last pictures up to the present time from our phones and cleared out the Google Drives so they’re no longer threatening to shut down. That’s Phase 1.
Phase 2 is renaming a whole hell of a lot of files and editing their metadata so they’re as correct as possible. That’s going to suck where I have old files that have been through multiple programs and lost the right file metadata. Phase 3 is deleting the 2 years worth of files I already uploaded to the NAS. Phase 4 is uploading all the completed files that have all the corrected file metadata to our NAS.
I’m giving myself a small break before I start Phase 2.
Actually, a small break and an interim task. I’m going to create the private shared file where I will be saving copies of our estate plan to share that and the action plan in case something happens to us. We’re going to need to change the executors of our will, and once that’s done, our executors will need easy access to the paperwork. I also want to make sure they have access to it sooner than later so we can have a conversation about what we want.
The point of this is to say: holy crap I’m doing my work so much faster when I’m JUST doing my work and not also juggling the two data streams. Also: man, I still got through all my work last week even while juggling multiple major personal projects. I’m pretty awesome.
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MAN all the food options we want are closed on Mondays. Sometimes also on Tuesdays.
Year 2, Day 135: Packing packing packing and packing. I leaned hard on my checklist which needed multiple revisions which I will definitely incorporate for a better packing experience next time we have to do this dance.
We had to pick up a rental car since we don’t all fit in our car anymore and that was a minor fiasco of the rental still being a bit too small and also the trunk making funny noises. Ever since I narrowly missed getting crushed by a trunk door when the arm broke, I’ve been extra cautious of trunk lids making funny noises.
Sera is getting wound up as she senses Things Are Afoot. She’s trotting anxiously from one room to the next, checking on everyone, and wondering why PiC is Carrying Important Things Out the Door. There’s no point in assuring her that all is fine and she’s coming with us. She’ll just look at me funny. So I tuck a new toy into her bag to take the edge off later.
We manage to complete most of my pack ahead list before 11 pm. There’s a Pack the Day of list: perishables, toiletries we still need to use, baby things we’re still using. Pre-pandemic I’d gotten in the habit of maintaining travel versions of everything but we stopped after not traveling for so long. We will need to start again to reduce the amount of day of packing. Pray that we’re done with bottles by the time I have to hit the road again, though, please?
Year 2, Day 136: It turns out that I had forgotten about my recent carsickness issues, what with not having anywhere to go for so long, and it turns out that I forgot to pick up some Dramamine to try. I had better give that a shot!
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Travel days are HARD. Getting all of us out the door for errands is complicated enough, getting out the door for overnight stays? URGHHH!
Not impossible, but bad enough so you wish it were and you could just give up.
It was tough from beginning to end with carsickness, a Smol Acrobat who wouldn’t nap for more than 33 minutes at a time, incredibly cramped quarters, temperatures leaping 40 degrees up the thermometer, and a semi anxious dog worrying every time the car stopped. Then the hotel was a whole other mess of incompetence and bad communication and honestly I do not know how they get by.
Year 2, Day 137: We saw so many people we haven’t seen in years at the services and it was a mix of wonderful and surreal and uncomfortable and so much sadness when I let myself remember our loved one is gone and I didn’t get to say goodbye.
We’re all in mourning even as we showed up for our friend, and it’s such a bittersweet mix of emotions to be together for the first time in years for some of us and for this reason. We ended the night with a very low key gathering of just a few vaccinated friends.
Smol was keenly observant of all these new people, in person, and very self contained about the whole thing for much of the day. I’m very glad that they were not terribly jarred by most of it, the occasional loud applause did startle them but otherwise they were quietly steady and a hilarious contrast to their elder sib who was cackling and All Over the Place with select relatives as soon as socializing was permitted. JB was stellar about staying masked regardless of what anyone else was doing around them and I was so proud of them for it.
Year 2, Day 138: There’s this thing Smol does when they’re tired, their eye rubbing then slumping over, that I’m starting to suspect comes from me because I catch myself doing exactly that when I’m this tired.
It’s been an intense few days and I’ve been wrung out and hung up and feel utterly shaken and stirred.
I have a sore throat and a cough, and I’m pretty sure it’s because I’m so tired I could just die and because the air is so damn dry. But of course these are also potential symptoms so if I manage a night of sleep and still feel symptomatic, I’m going to have to get tested just to be sure.
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To add to the internal chaos, the CDC info leak on the delta variant had me and PiC I getting caught in the vortex of second guessing every interaction we’ve had.
Our pediatrician at first advised last month that he thought it was ok for Smol to be held by family members even if not masked and unvaccinated and I was absolutely not in agreement with that. Then as Delta spread, he advised that they be masked if unvaccinated but I still preferred that even the adults who were vaccinated to be masked. I felt like yes, I was being perhaps unnecessarily cautious but I still preferred that. I did not love that a couple family members, vaccinated, held Smol outside without masks. But I suspected I was being overly cautious and let it go.
This morning’s update of the CDC info leak saying that vaccinated adults can still carry the virus in high amounts felt like a bombshell of regret. I had to consciously stop myself from playing back the day over and over to try and estimate risks. I was making myself go into a tizzy. We moved on to adjust how we interacted with people going forward and will cross our fingers that all are well.
I meant to comment on Friday . . . but got bogged down in memo writing again. So, out-of-sync just saying I appreciated the description of the Emergency Preparedness Dry Run. I am just so glad that I did the whole In-Case-of-Emergency books for me and my adult kids a few years ago, as they come in handy even in lesser instances of … mild disruption(?). You reminded me that I need to get a few more cans of tuna fish or something, now that we’re late in the summer and the canned fruits and turkey broth and such are almost all eaten down.
Yay I’m glad you enjoyed it.
We learned also that we need a LOT more water, and it’s time to refresh some stocks since we have been eating down the pandemic stash. š