By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (196)

March 4, 2024

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 4, Day 335: Monday, we meet again.

PiC has been taking the brunt of the rougher parenting times: covering JB’s week off of school and all the overnights with Smol Acrobat who simply cannot get through any night without a fuss and a cry at least once if not three times a night so that I can get at least a few hours of sleep. I covered last night and the kid kept waking me every half hour with a startle and needing a cuddle before they could sleep again. I’m a zombie today. Or Mombie. They’ve been calling me Bombie for “Mom-Zombie” and I can’t argue.

The A LOT going on this week: Short school days all week for JB.
A parent teacher conference this week.
I’m still constantly monitoring Sera’s health and meds and meals and appetite. I’m constantly worrying over her enlarged abdomen, worrying that it’s her (confirmed) enlarged liver and the mass teaming up to make her sicker.
Work is feeling very hard right now. We discover more problems (fraud) every week and I have to create systemic ways to catch them. Pre-COVID, these would have been just about unthinkable, we’d catch a case once a year, maybe? Now, industry-wide, all bets are off. Hundreds of people are committing various forms of fraud utterly shamelessly. Totally depressing, frustrating and makes everything feel futile. Big changes are brewing as well, and that’s unsettling as all get out.

I’m having real trouble pulling on the memory of joy from the weekend. The garden isn’t stirring up contentment, petting Sera, I’m just full of worry for her. I’d like to just lose myself in a stack of books for a week.

Year 4, Day 336: The brain fog was thicker than pea soup today. I couldn’t even pingpong my way through it as usual (flip from one easy task to another for as long as my attention lasted). Brain was sludgy, kludgy, and sort of drippy. Information would leak a bit from one task over to another to another and none of them ever quite got done because drips and drops of brain isn’t enough. I tried to Angry Snack it off, that also didn’t work. Finally Sera and I went for an early walk to try to walk it off and then I opened all the windows for blasts of cold air. That helped just enough for the gears to move at a minimally acceptable rate. It really stinks when your brain goes incommunicado without permission.

Semi-related: I hate the ending of The Good Place. It’s SO well done and makes me so damn sad! Which is fitting for this week.

Unrelated to anything: I waded through a 98 page document AND sent off the engagement letter to the lawyer to thingie our will/trust/etc. All in the same night. They’ll be getting that done in about two weeks. It went a lot faster when I decided to delay the discussion of what else we’d want and just take care of these essentials now.

Year 4, Day 337: I am full of sadness. Also existential dread. Also anxiety? I’m not sure. It’s weird. On the face of it, we’re in a good place in life right now. The kids do drive us up one wall and down the next but they are fundamentally decent kids (SO FAR, my anxiety demands this caveat). They have friends. Well, friend singular, in Smol Acrobat’s case. We both earn a living wage in an incredibly expensive place so we can afford our moderate lifestyle, but we don’t earn enough that only one of us has to work or both of us could go part-time. We are decidedly medium on this point. We have some community. We say hi to several neighbors, we trade favors with one set. There are big shifts at work (the aforementioned horrible fraudy frauds) and I might last as long as a whole year before I completely lose my patience with the new landscape and have to make some hard decisions. I don’t see people going back to being MORE ethical by choice. That’s a big stressor.

The irrationality of feeling so sad when our fundamental needs of life are met might be the depression speaking. Or the grief. Losing two friends in two months is remarkably sad. I don’t know how to tease out the answer.

I’m trying to balance my sadness out, a little bit at a time. Keeping busy, always. Work is constant, so are kids, so are life things like eating and cleaning.

Organizing sometimes helps. I bought four new large bins from Office Depot (on sale for $34, minus $12 in Rewards, working out to about $7 a bin) to house the kids’ legion of Legos and trains. JB’s train set from their second birthday has real staying power. I asked for a couple spare tracks for Christmas, they’d lost a key piece of track and could no longer form an oval, and they received a box of hand me down spares. as I’d requested but fifteen times more than I asked for!

Distraction thought exercises: what would be a life changing amount of money for me (an absurd amount) and how much would we need to have for me to feel comfortable handing out life changing amounts to people with much lower thresholds?

I’m taking it very literally. Life changing money, enough that I could stop worrying about money entirely for the next 40-50+ years, means so much money because a) baglady syndrome is persistent and b) healthcare.

I keep thinking, could we get to a place where $5000 or $10000 gifts, amounts that could significantly improve a person’s life when they’re experiencing precarity, would be possible for us to give? Without endangering our financial stability? I hope so. I think that’s more possible than the entire broken system getting fixed but that’s a really low bar.

Year 4, Day 338: Bit of good news: the car insurance people finally got their crap together and recalculated the premium for the car that we’ve garaged and just registered as non-operational. My first time ever doing that, by the way. I asked them to do this early January and someone dropped the ball so we got a bill for $400. After a few more emails, the premium is now $60. WHEW. Our insurance is now $1000 every 6 months, because of the new car, for the two cars in use. That’s hard enough to swallow. $400 for the non operational car? No sir no thank you!

Today being Leap Day totally erased the fact that it is also Spreadsheet day today in my mind. I’m glad someone mentioned it on Twitter. I still really like updating our monthly net worth, something about filling in numbers is soothing. We’re so close to a milestone number on the mortgage. Which still has an astounding balance on it, of course, so the milestone is more of a haha-siiiigh. A less good milestone, oh wow that vet appointments are adding up really fast. That’s a $4000 credit card bill I’m eyeballing. Sigh. She’s worth it, I just wish we had a better prognosis. Her poor body condition makes me sad and worried.

Year 4, Day 339: Status: the kind of tired where you get uncomfortably close to putting lotion on your toothbrush.

I had set appointments all through 2024 for massages to try and keep a promise to take better care of myself. My normal rule is never schedule more than one appointment per day, and my massage was scheduled for today, so that should have made for a reasonably good Friday. Naturally the universe cackled at me and pushed JB’s jaw expander out again. Today was the first appointment they had, so my work day was truncated even more. Woof. I had to race through my work to try and get enough work squared away that I wouldn’t have to work late into the night.

Sent some cash to a friend whose bank account is zero until next week because of medical treatments, they need groceries. Venmoed some cash to Tinu. Another friend is dealing with a hospital stay for their kid, I’m buying their dinner tomorrow when they get home. Fingers crossed they’re all able to go home tomorrow.

Spent some time paying bills and sort of balancing the cashflow for the month.

It’s been takeout for us every day this week. Well, takeout, then leftovers. Then takeout and then leftovers. It adds up so fast. But we’ve been running absolutely ragged and that’s before even thinking about cooking. I’m starting to feel like we need stock in Bon Chon Chicken and Super Duper Burger. We mostly buy from local restaurants but the chains get our business too. I’m laying on the floor typing this because I’m too tired to sit up. I’m also trying to sneak in a cuddle with Sera 🐶 who is also laying on the floor but I know she’s just tolerating me laying next to her. She’s not much of a cuddler of humans. She prefers to cuddle other dogs. We did remember that I’d frozen a batch of the meal I cooked last week, though. It freezes so well, I think I’m going to try to make a triple batch, all for freezing soon. I need a few more recipes like this: easy, comforting, goes down well.

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