By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (193)

February 12, 2024

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 4, Day 314: I’ll do a full write-up later. Our power is still out today, internet is still down, my phone’s data connectivity is next to nothing. The kids are sick, I have a sore throat and a huge workload, and we spent too much of the day navigating choked roads to get to a safe place where we could connect to the internet and charge the devices enough to get us through the day and night.

The county libraries were all open to the public for water, snacks, and charging.

I’ll tell you what, functioning by lamplight, with only power for the fridge and no other appliances, really narrows your focus on what you can do. No dishwasher, no vacuuming the mess tracked in from the storm, no toaster oven, no microwave, no hair dryers, no space heaters, no heating pad.

We still have running water and plumbing, and gas to heat food and the water for bathing, and I cannot tell you how thankful I was for that much. We are so not equipped for the loss of power, internet, gas AND running water.

Year 4, Day 315: POWER IS BACK. It’s weird to see the utterly still blue sky, with one enormous grey cloud hovering as if copy-pasted in place, after the stormy weekend with all the challenges and consequences. We get a one day reprieve, then it rains again tomorrow. I think that may be the end of the wet for a handful of days.

I may have overdone it trying to right the ship doing all the things this morning: 3 loads of laundry, ran the vacuum twice, ran the dishwasher, while trying to catch up on a couple hundred emails and projects.

With JB home sick another day, and trying to heft an unbelievable amount of work, I’ve been on edge and snappish. I decided JB won’t be going to their class this afternoon. They probably have the energy to and would be fine (masked as always) but I needed to take any one damn thing off my plate and that was my pick. It was a good call.

Smol Acrobat came home meowing sadly. They’re running a slight fever, appear flushed, and tell us “I’m not feew-wing well.” Their throat hurts and they’ve got that weird dry congestion that doesn’t result in a drippy nose, just leaves you feeling stuffed up with no relief. I had to spoonfeed them their dinner. I pulled out the remaining frozen half of the Japanese curry I cooked a while back for dinner. Thanks two weeks ago me!

We’re in for a rough night. Well, PiC is. He’s been fielding all the nights for a while. Even if he hadn’t, Smol Acrobat switched from wanting Mom cuddles and feeding at dinner to the quavery: “Daddy, can you take care of me?” and only wanting Daddy to give them their medicine and prepare them for bed.

Year 4, Day 316: JB hacking coughed their way through the night, Smol Acrobat sobbed and fussed through the night. I offered to take over at 2 am but PiC waved me off. In the end that was for the best, I needed that sleep pretty badly and Smol Acrobat had to stay home with us today with that fever. We traded off work time slots throughout the day.

They were surprisingly chipper, despite their very rough night, and managed a halfway decent nap midday. I was so tempted to lay down with them but I’d just get mad having to get back up again even if I napped. As a night ogre, the waking up transition at any time is unpleasant.

JB and I also had an appt at the orthodontist after school. They’re headed for braces in a few months. Sigh.

Texting with an old high school classmate who’s visiting our old teachers brought on the sads of a blobby amorphous feeling that I don’t belong anywhere in meatspace. I think this is about feeling very disconnected from the friend groups online and off. One of my closest daily friends has dropped out of contact for almost two years now, and I miss them deeply. I know it was for their own reasons, I respect that, I just miss them. (Separately, it makes me wonder if I’m just a bad friend because I’m the only one who was dropped. Maybe I’m just too much of whatever I am.) It’s gotten worse since Twitter went to pieces and my social web was destroyed. I have this space, some folks in the Discord and a bit of Bluesky, I peek into Instagram because I was forced to create one for the business. It feels scattered. That sense of wide connectedness is gone. Even though I still text with a handful of friends from the ‘nets, I feel out of sync with myself and with the world, emotionally.

I had to do a Murderbot and face the wall this evening for a minute when the feelings were too much. I’m in the middle of Network Effect right now and very much empathize with Murderbot. I hate feelings. 😔

Year 4, Day 317: Frost everywhere this morning! Aftermath cleanup continues. I’ve finished recharging all the lanterns and the Yeti. That just leaves the crank radio to charge. It can be charged by cranking of course, that’s the point of it, but why not save our arms if we can charge it ahead of time. So I finally get JB to school, load Smol Acrobat up for their ride with PiC, clean up a bit around the house and reheat my breakfast eggs. Sit down and really start to dig into emails and urgent morning work stuff. Take a bite of egg. Miss a text. See a call come in from PiC: they got a flat tire 3 miles away from daycare. ARGH. The full round trip rescue ate my morning. Who put this curse on us? It’s one thing after another this week. Relentless.

We had to skip JB’s afterschool class again because I could not handle losing another 2 hour chunk of my time today. It’s all management work today and I don’t fancy working until 11 pm again. (That was last night.) It wasn’t until dinnertime that I remembered my whole breakfast, lunch, and snack was a plate of scrambled eggs and half a box of Wheat Thins. Not ideal.

There were “this is where rain may fall again Thursday!” headlines that I waved off and YEP! IT WAS US. PiC and Smol Acrobat got caught out biking home. They were drenched.

Year 4, Day 318: Work work everywhere, as far as the eye can see. This was my first mostly uninterrupted workday all week. I was desperate for one but didn’t dare say it out loud for fear of triggering another spontaneous combustion of my day. I’m not at all recovered from the week but having gotten through the worst of the workload, I can finally say TGIF.

Also not great: PiC’s company is a multinational one so from their POV this isn’t (maybe) that big a deal but from ours it is: They just laid off a couple hundred people. Still no idea on how much of this will roll over to his department, and we wouldn’t know until it hit. He’s not high enough up to be privy to those conversations.

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