Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (166)
August 7, 2023
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 129: I am letting JB enjoy a true summer treat a few days this week: sleeping in as late as they felt like. Usually I make them get up by 930 so that their sleep patterns aren’t too disrupted but a day or two of teenage-late rising won’t hurt. They’ll have a full week to start getting up earlier until they’re back on track for the first day of school. That’s approaching fast.
We don’t do any back to school shopping for the kids but I will be gearing up to do shopping for the Lakota families. I knew I wouldn’t have time to take on a July family so we helped two families in June. My plan was to recover lost ground from being off work and then pick up an August family or tackle a bulk school shopping list. I’ve gotten a special request from the coordinators who are worried about the many requests that are going up on the Okini as the summer comes to a close. So many kids need school clothes and school supplies. We’ll have a phone call this week to talk about possible ways we could organize a bulk buying solution to make the most of our money.
Year 4, Day 130: My therapist and I were both right. She was right: taking some time off was incredibly refreshing, I haven’t felt so few symptoms in years. I was right about what would happen after taking time off: I don’t want to work at all. I want to do the things I care about buuuuut that doesn’t include this work. Since that’s not yet an option financially… welp. Here we are. Working again. Getting back into the groove of something I am quite good at but do not love for the sake of a paycheck and our future financial stability, utterly begrudgingly some days. Less so on other days.
A dear friend and I daydreamed about what we’d do with life-changing windfall money, as unlikely as it is to occur. They’d probably stay on their current career path for a spell, to show they could. Their spouse would keep a hand in. They derive joy from their work and would be happier continuing, but a fraction of the current volume would be sufficient to keep them happy. I personally have nothing to prove to myself, I’d just stay on to set my team up for success and negotiate for more money for them before I left. Without that bit, I could step away tomorrow and not look back. I think PiC would happily walk away from his job too if our income and healthcare were covered.
Year 4, Day 131: My local friend notified me that they have a ton of household goods collected for the Lakota Reservation. That’s great!
More than three extra large shipping boxes worth. Oh. Oh boy. I canvassed a local business we frequent to ask for their large shipping boxes when they next get merchandise in. If they thought I was very weird they hid it well.
Now I have to figure out how to make time to pack and ship it all.
Orville Peck’s voice is something!
Year 4, Day 132: I’m not ready to say I’m feeling rested after sleeping but I am noticing that I’ve slept like a rock a few days this week. Deep sleep, undisturbed by constant nightmares, is so unusual I can’t recall when that was last the norm.
Year 4, Day 133: JB enjoyed a full day of fun with an Uncle they adore and haven’t seen in three years. I got time to cook two pot roasts for a special going away dinner for said Uncle and made some progress on every work item on my very long for a Friday list of work priorities. They got the better deal but I’m not dissatisfied.
I omitted the tomato paste and flour and used red wine this time, using this recipe, and it seems like the wine is the one variable that’s been missing and much needed for a successfully delicious pot roast. My past pot roasts have been almost good enough but not quite. I’ll need to pick up some reasonably priced red wine to keep on hand for the next ones instead of using a rather pricey Pinot that was gifted to us four years ago and had been gathering dust all this time. I’d also splurged on a large bag of small potatoes and they were perfect. Minimal prep needed and they didn’t fall apart.
This looks like a bad bill and we should tell our Senators not to support it: Senate panel advances bills to childproof the internet
I’m so glad you took the time off and it felt good both physically and mentally.
I sometimes think that the main thing I miss about being single is the sense that I could be fully at my own whim when I wasn’t working. The best I get these days is about 20-30 min of at-whim before my kid gets up… and that hasn’t been happening lately. She wakes up so early in the summer! I’m looking forward to the later sunrises for that reason alone.
And man, I envy you if you don’t have to do back-to-school shopping for your kids. School starts next week for us, and I’ve already bought the required classroom supplies. Still to come will be buying long pants, to replace the ones that I spent the spring patching… but I’m putting that off until we’re a little closer to colder weather.
And, minor rant ahead: hoping that this year’s pants last longer! I will DEFINITELY not be buying Cat&Jack kid pants again: all of them had holes by the 3rd wear. One even got a hole on the 1st wear. They were cheap to buy, but I got so tired of patching them. Some of them even got so shredded by the end of a school day that they couldn’t be patched well.
“I could be fully at my own whim when I wasn’t working.”
I never had a chance to do this as an adult, and I sometimes wonder if I would metaphorically drown in too much freedom. But mostly I wonder if it would feel really great to get large chunks of time off.
Does your kid’s waking still track with sunrise? JB no longer seems to be in time with the sun, they seem to be more in line with a teenager’s sleeping in. But of course Smol Acrobat isn’t on that train so they’re getting us up pre-dawn.
I truly thought that Cat and Jack pants were normal quality pants and JB’s just unbelievably hard on them. In fairness, no pants survived them from Years 2-5, that’s not a stretch. I sprang for a few pairs for them this year, to round out the latest set of hand me downs, so we’ll see if they fall apart as fast as they used to. Fingers crossed.
DH and I were just talking about pot roasts and how to make them flavorful because there was a sale this week. DH also likes the boef burgundy variant. (We were reminiscing about how I wanted to fix the tasteless roasts one of his relatives who hated cooking used to make and I was like… add wine or tomato or chili powder or onion soup mix or cream of onion soup anything!)
I have a bunch of amazing pot roast recipes from the old fashioned cookbook.
What happens if I add ALL of those things, I wonder? Or maybe just a few of them. Onion soup mix? Really? I’m curious how that will turn out.
In my A / B testing, I’m convinced the oven version was much more flavorful than the crockpot iteration.
I personally wouldn’t do onion soup mix now because it has yeast extract in it now (which gives me headaches), but it was a really popular and easy midwestern potroast back in the day (likely with straight-up MSG back then, which isn’t as much of a headache trigger for me). I wonder if the recipe is still on the Lipton package– if not, there’s a million iterations online.
I wouldn’t do all of them– they’re all very different. (And I meant cream of mushroom soup, not cream of onion– that’s another popular midwestern thing– pour over a can of cream of mushroom soup. We don’t really do that anymore because of all the HFCS and stuff Campbell’s puts in their soups, but back in the day…)
We had beef stew (with burgundy) for dinner last night and the kids decimated it. We must not be giving them enough meat!