Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (221)
August 26, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 131: After issuing a draconian rule to JB last week, up by 7 am and out the door by 8 am, we made it to school without running like our butts were on fire. That bit was good this morning. Smol’s glacial slowness eating breakfast wasn’t.
That segued into a crappy work day where nothing worked as it should BUT I decided to make much of it someone else’s problem rather than trying to fix things myself. If corporate is going to make it impossible for me to be efficient and get shit done like I normally would, then they can bite me. Someone else will deal with it and I will hound them until they do. It’s a small shift but for now it feels better.
It was still a long damn day, though. After helping Smol Acrobat help me hang up their clothes before dinner, I ran clean out of cope and melted to the ground for about 20 minutes. They cuddled with me for a bit and then suggested games “wif no buttons” (quiet, non-battery operated) we could play from a recumbent position. That little breather got me through to dinner. The reports from the DNC were further uplifting, giving me enough fuel to buckle down one more time. I’ve got a bunch of personal stuff to deal with tomorrow so I have to get stuff out of the way now.
It’s been really hard watching this country elect a man who is incapable of stringing together two coherent complete sentences in a row, and then have to go through the painful process of seeing him run AGAIN despite January 6th.
The very powerful reproductive freedom segment at the DNC
Year 5, Day 132: Back to the struggle of running late to school. Sigh. I’m setting my alarm 15 minutes early to see if that helps us with incrementally waking up earlier. Cold turkey from summer hours isn’t working. This is one of my scattered days: work, do a personal appointment, work more, do another personal commitment, come back and work late into the night after dinner. And still not make a big enough dent in the piles.
Garden harvest report: this week we picked the One and The Only Blueberry that the bush managed to create! There were originally two but it fell off the bush when it was but a microscopic berry. We cut it in half for the kids. They both declared it amazing.
I also picked all the green beans off the two bush beans that are companions to the blackberry bush. Three one-inch beans! 😂 They were crispety crunchy and JB declared them SO GOOD. The 6 other bush bean plants aren’t doing much, just growing leaves and being green. They’re spindly little things, so it’s hard to imagine them giving up real sized green beans. We’re definitely well past the estimated time to maturity of 2 months. Speaking of the blackberry bush, it’s down to the last 3 berries of this growing period. We probably got about 40 berries all told. The kids kept picking them as they ripened so the count is rough.
Trainer time! He increased my sets to four per exercise this week so I have to not take that as a challenge to also increase my reps. Mostly aiming for the middle or high middle of the reps range. Except for the calf raise, that one feels so easy I maxed out on my first set (10 reps). Then I realized that too is a mistake and eased back on each subsequent set, so the last set was only 4 reps.
Year 5, Day 133: Today was meant to be a”see no one, get tons done” day buuuuut I forgot that it’s a minimum day for JB and they have to go to the orthodontist. Sigh. SO much for that. Though I will say, it’s nice for it to still be quite early when we finish up at the appointment. We had plenty of time left to get a lasagna in the oven AND for me to get more work done. So that was one less point of stress. Much appreciated.
My coworker and I had a long chat about the frustration with our jobs, the external problems that started last fall and how we’re on the verge of rage quitting. He’s got a more versatile skill set, he could switch industries pretty easily whereas I’m more specialized and limited. We agree that things are absolutely maddening right now. We both really like our internal teams, we just hate the parent company teams. And neither of us want to have to go back to any of the places we’ve been before: non-profit, corporate, start up, small family business, academia-adjacent. They got us here and all had their own dysfunctionality, but we don’t want to revisit them.
Easy dinners this week: leftover pizza one night, tofu+soba+Costco tempura shrimp another night, and lasagna tonight. I had every intention of cooking up those chicken thighs but it just doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.
Year 5, Day 134: Most of my joints felt mildly inflamed today. Just enough that everything felt swollen and lumpy. I wasn’t excited to do my workout for the first time since starting, and I didn’t want to take JB to self defense in the afternoon. Admittedly they also didn’t want to go, their tightened braces hurt too much, so it worked out that I was letting both of us off the hook, but that did feel like a bit of a fail.
I think the way my joints felt, no cushions, was a lot the way my brain felt today, no cushion. I’ve been burning the late night oil too many nights in a row and that deepens the usual fatigue dramatically. Instead of being terrible to myself about it when I had trouble re-focusing, or when I decided not to do self defense class, I spent some time packing up a box of COVID tests for our friends. We still get them free from our healthcare provider and they don’t, so I’ve been ordering extra (well within our permitted amounts) to share with friends.
Trainer time! I did do my workout, though. I don’t want to break my streak so early. It felt like a good challenge when I finally got around to it which is why I’ve still been keeping up with it. I started with fewer reps and increased in the third and fourth sets if I felt ok. That felt better than the other way around. Smol Acrobat is sneaking up on me now, gotta go!
Year 5, Day 135: Boy, did we nearly blow it this morning. Everyone slept through their alarms again. I was the first one out of bed 15 minutes before we had to leave for school. It took all day to figure out that, at least for my part, this was likely because I haven’t had any recovery time from the last weekend. I’m not sure why everyone else is dragging. They’re usually a lot more peppy but we have got to reset for next week somehow. How do we get everyone energized and back to their more usual early morning schedules?
I had a delightful visit with our neighbor’s puppy today. I had planned to borrow his older sister but she managed to make herself sick (still crossing my fingers that she will be just fine after all the shenanigans she pulled), so we agreed it’d be Little Brother’s turn today. He was a curious soul, exploring and examining everything he could put his nose to, but it was a polite sort of investigation. He didn’t try to steal anything or chew on anything, he just wanted a really thorough sniff. We went through his commands, and he earned so many treats.
It’s good therapy to have dog time and it’s also a great reminder that if I adopted a dog now, I’m not going to but if I did, I’d be 100% committed to their well being and that can be a lot on top of what we’re already handling. The initial transition period can be so so hard. It was with Sera. I find myself more at peace with taking this time and space for me now without piling on caretaking.
All the YAYs that you get puppy/dog time in your life. I was on a walk yesterday and a sweet one refused to cross the street until we got to say hi, dogs are just the best.
I hope that work gets better OR your network kicks in – that’s how I wound up getting out of a rather weird/specialized role. A number of coworkers had moved to the same employer and one of them pulled me in (and I left 18 months later when I had more broadly-applicable skills and they tried to say they didn’t do raises. ha!).
The Sharing of the Lone Blueberry is so charming.
They really are the best! I love when dogs decide that nope, we’re not going anywhere until we meet this person. It’s the best.
Thanks, if I had to choose, I’d really hope for this job to get better because so many of the people in my immediate circles are great. I don’t want to have to ditch them and start all over. But a lot of the shit is rolling down on us from above and it’s hard to see how that could or would improve.
I’m glad we only had to split it two ways, that blueberry wasn’t big enough to share more than that XD
“The early bird gets the worm, but worms are gross and mornings are stupid.”
School starts next week for us so we’re slowly inching our wakeup times earlier, and it stiiiiiinks. I can only offer the usual trite suggestions of simplifying everything that can possibly be simplified, prepping outfits & lunches the night ahead, and having a special treat like hot chocolate to help coax short people out of bed. ☹️
HAH! I love that. It’s so true.
Oh that’s actually a good reminder! I never really think about having special treats in the morning because it’s about all I can manage to roll myself out but maybe I can come up with something for the mornings. I had JB prep their lunch last night, we need to do that every night.
That sounds like a really nice puppy visit. Our old girl died last week- it was and wasn’t unexpected at the same time, which makes no sense. We know we are moving in the next few years, and we also know that we like to adopt old dogs and give them a great retirement. So we are thinking we will be dogless for a while, too, and I may have to follow your example and borrow a friendly puppy for snuggles…
Oh Rae, I’m so terribly sorry for your loss <3.
I do hope you have a neighbor puppy to borrow! It scratches the itch just enough for me. Like you, we tend to adopt senior pups and that transition is every bit as involved and high maintenance as a new puppy or infant in its own way.