Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (128)
November 14, 2022
Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 3, Day 234: I’m trying to put together a backup plan in case Twitter goes belly up. I’ve come to rely on it as the gathering place for many friends and acquaintances and the place where neat information comes up or hilarious interactions cross my path that I otherwise wouldn’t ever have known. I have plenty of one on one connections but there’s something unique about the (highly curated) experience of Twitter as a round the clock no commitment social gathering place that’s been really helpful in easing my health-induced isolation.
It’s my digital pub, and it may well be going away. It’s sad. The process of curating a list so that spoiled brat of a billionaire throwing tantrums and threatening to make it impossible to see your own feed unless you pay means I keep running across old fallow accounts. I hate that because it also makes me sad and I don’t know why when I clearly haven’t talked to the person behind that account in 2, 4, 7 years. It’s a thing that always gets to me: reading comments on my blog from years past, people who touched my life for just a moment and disappeared.
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Prices just keep going up at the grocery store and I’m sort of insulated from seeing it because PiC continues to do the majority of our grocery shopping but I pay the bills and see the totals there adding up faster and faster. Making our next to last batch of pasta carbonara was a real shocker. I looked up our favorite bacon (Zingerman’s) and it’s now $19/lb!!! I normally buy a bunch when it’s half that price and freeze it to use throughout the year. We may not get our next year’s batch at these prices.
Pine Ridge / Lakota giving update
USPS should have picked up the first box I prepped for shipping on Saturday but they no showed. And claimed they did pick it up. Weird. I scheduled another pick up for today.
Weekend update! I found a clearance sale on towels at Bed Bath and Beyond and bought 28 of them for a smidge over $100. Then Sunday brought with it an exciting swoosh of contributions in the form of cash and gift cards to stores that I’ll be buying supplies from (Kohl’s, Lands’ End, CVS).
Day 11 spend: $102.40
Day 12 balance: $1,627.08
Day 13: I could absolutely scream. I put together an order at CVS thanks to a wonderful contributor supplying gift cards to the store. But after 3 hours, 4 calls, and 4 CSRs, it turns out that CVS doesn’t even take their own gift cards on their own site. I blew my whole morning dealing with this and no one in any part of CVS except for the harried dude at the GC department knew the answer to this. It was appallingly frustrating. In the end, I asked around for any friend willing to give me cash in exchange for the gift cards and waited. There’s no point in throwing away more time trying to make this work since it won’t.
Later in the evening, I found a Costco deal on kid’s 3 in 1 jackets, bringing them to $17 each after a discount, and picked up ten. I’ve asked a friend to purchase another ten since it’s limited to ten per member.
Day 13 spend: $167.10
Day 13 balance: $1,499.98
Year 3, Day 235: A worried Sera woke me up at 5 am. One of the seven fire alarms was chirping which scares her. But I was way too tired to get out of bed to figure out which one it is because I can’t reach them anyway so we settled for her settling in to sleep next to me while I awkwardly hung my arm off the side to keep a hand touching her for comfort. That might explain why I can’t raise my left arm today, come to think.
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The scammers are at it again! They sent me a Paypal invoice:
If I didn’t already know this was a common scam and that I would NEVER buy ETH from anyone, this would seem pretty real. I reported it to ReportFraud.ftc.gov and phishing@paypal.com. I doubt they’ll do anything but I have to at least try.
Pine Ridge / Lakota giving update
I had a taker on the CVS cards which freed me up to complete the purchase and wow! WOW. The site wouldn’t let me complete the purchase. That was the final nail in the coffin. I cancelled the order entirely and went to Walgreens, which had comparable price on everything, and picked up 34 bottles of medication: children’s ibuprofen, children’s acetaminophen, and infant acetaminophen.
Shifting over to toddler jackets, I consulted with friends with snow experience to figure out our next order. After much discussion about the merits of a 3 in 1 jacket vs a lined puffy jacket, we decided that the lined puffy jacket was better because it has fewer parts to lose, doesn’t really need to be waterproof (snow pants should be), and the lower price means we can get more of them. I’ll order tomorrow.
Day 14 spend: $193.56
Day 14 balance: $1,332.88
Year 3, Day 236: Another 5 am wake up because the damn alarm started the chirping again. I forgot to have PiC change out that battery! Went on to be a bit of a rough morning. JB is up and down and up and down with their moods and therefore their ability to do their chores without a whooooole lot of attitude. Considering that’s the whole deal for their allowance, I had to remind them that whining, grumping, and outbursts when it’s time to do a chore means the loss of the allowance. They still have to do the chore but we’re not paying for attitude. Then, also, Smol must be waking up too early or just coming hard into the Terrible Twos because they are having multiple tantrums before we get out the door in the morning and that’s … SIGH.
Pine Ridge / Lakota giving update
I put in that order for the ten toddler coats, and Tami helped get around the “Limit 10 per member” on the kids coats by ordering ten coats using her Costco membership. The team reimbursed her out of our funds. That’s a total of 20 big kid coats, and 10 toddler (sizes 2T, 4T and 5) coats. Thirty kids will be warmer!
Day 15 spend: $292.40
Day 15 balance: $1,089.02
Year 3, Day 237: What a strange day from top to bottom.
I was woken up at 130 because the damn fire alarm started chirping again. PiC had already changed the battery! This makes me think even our back up batteries are low on juice. I wonder if keeping them in the fridge like we used to really does help slow their drain. Sera was very scared and needed comforting for a while.
There was a rare (and odd) work meeting that wasn’t much of anything but it threw off my whole groove for the day. This was the third bad thing in combination, with a tripled workload, and distraction from Twitter back up planning, that just made the whole day feel upside down. The Twitter back up planning was a just in case move, to have some place to land with Twitter friends if and when it crashes, but as the day wore on, it felt a whole lot like watching Twitter go into a death spiral of some sort. I hate this. A lot of people who rely on this platform for good and serious reasons are going to be hurt and I hate that. Having friends on Twitter has gotten me through some hard times that my offline friends don’t even know about. I truly thought we had more than a week and change before things started spiraling the drain at Twitter.
Taking JB to their lesson, they managed to forget their workout pants. Pants!! Like mother like child, apparently. They also had substitute teachers today and that whole class rhythm was odd. Not bad, just weird.
We got stuck in a conversation with a mom of a mob of children on our way out the door. That extra bit of chaos made us get home well after dark. Thankfully PiC and Smol Acrobat had gotten home ahead of us, safely before full dark, and dinner was almost ready by the time we came in (defrosting a Pyrex of frozen chili from a couple weeks ago, thanks Past Me!)
Robitussin can’t be had in any shape or form from any store around here, I’m having to change over to Dimetapp for JB’s cough. The kids went through 6 oz of ibuprofen just for this cold alone. We have 6 oz left. I ordered another large bottle and a small bottle of acetaminophen because if cold and flu season get really aggressive, I’d better be prepared.
Pine Ridge / Lakota giving update
I picked two families to help out on my own this week. I couldn’t shake the compulsion to help folks at the Okini page as usual. One elder had been on the list for a month with no help. She’d moved to be closer to family for help after some healthcare procedures and needed basic household stuff. I sent her a cart full of the supplies she needed. Another elder had a pack of dogs who needed food, and I sent six sacks of food. I couldn’t get her the outdoor garbage can she asked for though. Can’t seem to find a good one that will ship yet, but it’ll probably be at least $100? I’m guessing. Anyway that $350 was out of pocket. I didn’t take that out of the giving funds meant for the Allen Youth Center.
Day 15 spend: $0
Day 15 balance: $1,089.02
Year 3, Day 238: Oh hey, gas is just under $5/gallon. It’s been pushing $6/gal for so long.
The kids and I played (“played”?) a ton this morning: self defense drills, math using dice to produce equations, music time.
PiC had a grueling day with spreadsheets so I covered most of the childminding while juggling my work. He does the same when my days are bad, of course, but the balance is tilting towards him having more hard work days than me right now thanks to his stream of projects.
Pine Ridge / Lakota giving update
I’m taking a short breather from the shopping today. My team is dealing with life stuff and I’m dealing with work and life stuff. Plenty of admin stuff though: sending tracking numbers, reminding people to
Day 16 spend: $0
Day 16 balance: $1,089.02
I have a Costco membership, too, if you need to make more purchases from there. PM me and we can work out the details.
Thanks for the offer! At the moment we don’t have enough funds to need an extra person ordering but I appreciate knowing we have another option on deck.