By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (197)

March 11, 2024

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 4, Day 342: I’ve moved the toothpaste well away from the lotion on the vanity. Just to be sure.

This week has to be an early out the door week. Last week needed to be, too, but we didn’t manage it. My heaviness pinned me to the bed most mornings, too tired after a night of painsomnia and sadness to crawl out earlier. Today was a more promising start. It was physically painful but I got out 20 minutes earlier, closer to my preferred time, and even got JB to school at the earliest possible drop off time. It was a good warmup for tomorrow when we have to get PiC out even earlier so he can make a meeting.

We’ve got work meetings, the PTA this week, and a Sera 🐶 appointment this week. Fingers crossed that no more than that gets added to the calendar.

It was an unusual “only small problems, no giant fraud rings” Monday and I’m fully appreciating it. I’ve got to get back on my management horse tomorrow and deal with some training and staffing things but any reprieve is a good reprieve.

Yesterday I attempted three rounds of planks on my hands instead of my forearms. This is the first time in decades that I’ve tested my hands and wrists this way. For years, any pressure or weight on them would trigger a flare. It’s been a real sinker of my morale because my one strength was upper body strength as the runt in my class. I’m hoping I can build up to some strength and tolerance in them again but this is my warning to myself to skip days in between so I don’t stress them right out of the gate. Tonight, they’re mildly twingy, not quite stiff or painful, so I’m hopeful I can do another short set tomorrow. 🤞

PiC brought home a large slice of the most decadent chocolate cake we’ve ever tasted in our lives. We don’t even like chocolate cake but this was heavenly. It’s from some specialty bakery up too north to be worth the drive so obviously we’ll never get it again. We will have fond memories. 😂

Year 4, Day 343: Well. I got that early wake up. PiC discovered, to our great dismay, that Sera 🐶 had had an accident inside. We’ve been so careful to walk, medicate, feed and water her on a very specific schedule to make her comfortable enough to get through the night. Walks every 2-4 hours starting at 730 depending on her mood/need, meds by 3 pm, last food and water by 8 pm, last late night walk between 10 pm-12 am. 8 weeks without incident. Then I screwed up. So busy with work, I missed her 3 pm meds alarm yesterday, and it threw her enough out of whack that she couldn’t make it through the night. Nothing like a 6 am wake up to go scrub floors together. Sigh.

I carefully calibrated her schedule for the rest of the day to take her out six times to empty her bladder sufficiently to make it through tonight. Six walks today, plus four JB pickup and dropoffs, plus work, plus throwing together dinner (part leftover, part baked salmon).

Then I threw in a half hour of reading aloud to JB because I want them to give Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series a chance to see the contrast between the empty calorie racist Harry Potter series and a well written wizarding series recommended by Ursula Vernon. I love anything Vernon writes so I figured her taste in books has to be pretty reliable. Not that I expected it to be like her books, it doesn’t work that way. But she’s a thoughtful person and an author who enjoys reading, that tends to add up to good recommendations. Anyway, Young Wizards starts out a bit more dense than they’re used to so I decided to read it to them and let them ask me all the questions. We’ll see how long I can handle making this additional thing work.

My wrists held up through 3 very short rounds of planks. They twinged after but not terribly and if they recover throughout tomorrow, I can try again on Thursday.

It’s not 9 pm yet and I’m dropping in my tracks. But I still owe some people some answers so back online I go for another 1.5 hours of work, and then I’ve got Sera’s last walk. If I manage to make lights out at 11, that’ll feel almost like a win.

Reading Fiqah’s obituary (gift link) made my sadness feel heavier, albeit clearer. She deserved better than this. She was a good person.

Year 4, Day 344: I had dreams all night that Fiqah was still alive and we were still able to help her. I hate how those dreams about our losses linger in my psyche all day long. I get them with my mom and past dogs, too.

I’m trying to shake that ‘I’m such a downer’ feeling with everything going on and find something joyful. Then I remembered that a friend sent me this pilot of The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency show. I’ve read all the books and didn’t know it was a series! Sadly, there’s only one season, but that might be the pick me up needed. Jill Scott is absolutely perfect as Precious Ramotse.

Also I SHOULD feel triumph over finally figuring out a foreign tax claim back form that took me hours to work on. I’m not feeling it yet but I’m reminding myself that that was big. More than one of PiC’s colleagues weren’t even aware of that tax claim form’s existence so I should also be a little proud for digging deep and finally finding something that refunds a significant amount of money that doesn’t seem to be common knowledge. They’ve asked PiC for a guide which means they’re really asking me. They’ve been good colleagues to him so I’ll save them a bit of legwork but it’ll need to be when I’m a little less tired.

Year 4, Day 345: A friend commented on her burnout and what she described, feeling upset/angry/cynical about the world, our government, the pandemic and the CDC, our future, do we have one??, climate change, it’s all very much how I’m feeling, plus my personal grief from losses this year. It’s all too much and it’s all so heavy.

It’s probably not normal to mentally growl “UGH I HATE YOU” to every email you write, even if it’s well deserved, to fraudy fraudpants customers. It’s probably not normal to feel like giving up after being asked to do even the smallest slightest extra thing. I’m feeling like the proverbial camel and the last straw has been sliding on top of the pile. That’s been a dark cloud hanging over my psyche for months.

My working day was almost entirely derailed by a huge shakeup at work that required hours of follow up. That’s a huge thing I’m processing, interspersed with Sera’s frequent outings, school pick up, after school activity, and then throwing dinner on the table in time to try to listen to the PTA meeting, whew. I was back at my desk to clear off the last remaining things that I needed done before a long day ahead of me tomorrow.

One good bit, though it’s more work for me: JB asked if we could read more So You Want To Be A Wizard tomorrow night. I actually really hate reading out loud but it’ll be worth the sacrifice to encourage them to stretch their reading horizons a little.

Year 4, Day 346: Friend shared this and I couldn’t help but laugh.

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A post shared by Rama (@ramalauw)

PiC got his tax claim forms notarized so I can try to wrap up THAT one small section of taxes. I have to wait another week before I can finalize the package for our tax person to get working on them. I’m really resentful of the one company that went and asked for an extension because I could be DONE by now but they’ve put me two weeks behind. Grumble.

It turns out my tax person may be wrong, and I don’t have to file a tax return for JB to prove they have earned income before I can deposit their business earnings in a Roth IRA for them. They had a handful of sales last year, not enough to need to file a return, so that would be the only reason I’d file. I certainly don’t intend to sign up for extra work if I don’t have to! I am a little excited about opening the Roth once I figure out what’s net after expenses.

I’ve been taking up Sera’s 🐶 water after 8 pm because she’s drinking so much that she’ll be full to bursting before I get up to walk her in the morning. She followed me around as I got ready for bed, and oh my goodness the LOOK I got when I filled my water bottle and didn’t give her any. It was grim. I felt so bad. But I also can’t get up in the middle of the night to take her out, I’m too physically exhausted from the 5-6 walks a day plus everything else I do. I need some unbroken sleep. One wakeup doesn’t equal two ok blocks of sleep for me. It means a splinter of sleep because my anxiety about waking up would prevent me from sleeping, and then I’d be too tired and wired to fall asleep again until just half an hour before needing to get up. My body is like clockwork. Deranged, broken, irrational clockwork.

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