Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (186)
December 25, 2023
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 265: Brrr. Cold, dark, and rainy. Best for sleeping in, not best for Mondays when you have to get up and get out. I’m eagerly awaiting the last of the gifts I ordered to arrive today, mostly for my furry niblings.
It feels like I must be buying things (cold meds for the kids, shampoo/conditioner/toothpaste, etc for us, gifts for other people that are on their wishlist) to feel better about something but it’s probably more my natural hoarding tendencies kicking in, along with a small side of self-soothing pre holiday anxiety. Generally, they’re all practical things. Even the things I don’t need, just want, aren’t terribly extravagant – all of the Toby Daye series, the few Incryptid books I’m missing, the rest of the Murderbot series, nice pens, cool stamps.
*****
You know what would have helped this morning? Remembering that I have to generate dopamine before getting into complicated work. Going at it backwards made the work a lot more painful than it needed to be.
Year 4, Day 266: More than 4 hours of sleep after a late night of work and before a very running around day would have been deeply appreciated but it wasn’t in the cards. Smol Acrobat was on the night terrors track and then my body was angry for the next few hours.
So I ran Sera 🐶 out for her walk. I ran JB to school. I ran back to school for their Winter Performance. I ran back home. I had therapy. Then I ran to pick up JB from school. Later I ran them to their class. Then I threw together dinner in 30 minutes: tortellini (3 min boil from Costco), a pot of rice in case the tortellini was rejected, the last of the salad bag, quartered the pound of brussels sprouts and sauteed them in butter, oil and brown sugar (which I added after tasting one and it was disgustingly bitter), heated up the leftover panko chicken.
Of course that’s around the time Smol Acrobat decided they were Very Very Sad/Angry and had to have a screaming fit. JB couldn’t jolly them out of this one so they and I went to sit (lay down on the floor) in their bedroom while they worked it out of their system. By 7 pm I was entirely out of gas. But not out of work!
Year 4, Day 267: We’re four days into the first bout of the rainy season. My toes are perpetually cold, and my overprotective (very kind) neighbors are shocked that I insist on wading out into the wet without an umbrella. This is a holdover when my hands hurt far too much to hold an umbrella, I still avoid using my hands for anything that I don’t absolutely have to, to spare them for the things that are very necessary. A hoodie or a hat will suffice, I’m lucky enough to head back to a warm dry home after I get soaked so it doesn’t bother me.
Most of the year I wonder why we pay for rain boots for the kids, these are the days I’m glad we did. The Crocs rainboots we got for Smol Acrobat are pretty delightful. They’re bright and cheerful, and so lightweight they can tromp around in the rain without losing a boot, unlike the clunky old hand me downs they’ve had. I’m all for hand me downs normally but sometimes it’s better to just buy what you need.
Year 4, Day 268: We’ve bought so many things for other people in a short period of time that I’m having trouble tracking all the charges to my credit card. I’m JUST keeping on top of it with extra spreadsheet notes but the Amazon charges are bizarrely off by a few dollars each. That troubles me. Is this a potential hacking problem or something else? Hopefully it shakes out fine in the end without extra work from me.
In semi-related news, my travel and holiday related anxiety appears to continue to hover at lower levels than historical baselines. I noticed this shift earlier in this year and wondered if it would continue to hold. Instead of big giant holding-breath level anxiety and needing to do things like packing six months out, I find myself managing my cope with smaller actions. Setting up spreadsheets for 2024, paying bills, buying consumable supplies for the household, semi-obsessively checking bank accounts – all of these help me cope with the balance of feeling in control of some things and not in control of other things.
Rosacea: It’s been about a week since I started using the cream. In the morning, I used my micellar water to wash, applied the cream and a bit of lotion. Later I’d put sunblock on top before going outside. In the evening, I used the same. I’m not really sure if it’s making any difference yet. At least one day in the past week my redness flushing and that weird feeling like the reddened skin is thickened flared up pretty seriously. It took a few hours for the effects to settle down some. The feeling like the flaring skin is thickening makes me nervous about longer term developments. My mom struggled with incredibly painful and widespread rosacea and I don’t want it to get that bad. I’ll keep using the cream and observing here how it works.
Year 4, Day 269: The kids being on break plus my working until midnight every night this week = today feels like a very bare minimum kind of day. I don’t want to do anything that doesn’t absolutely have to be done today.
A moment of “we live in the future now”: a cousin texted me asking if she could Zelle me something for the kids for Christmas. Our family tradition is to gift red envelope money but you have to show up to get it. My kids have been out of luck because we haven’t traveled for Lunar New Year since they were born? We don’t make the traditional rounds (in part because time is short and mostly because my feelings about my family are complicated and I didn’t know until last year that they were on my side), so they haven’t gotten any gifts. It’s not an exclusion thing specifically, it’s just how we worked. You give a traditional blessing and they give you the red envelope. My energy has been too limited to make that happen. Anyway, it amuses me to have my elder cousin bring this gifting into the present using technology.
