Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (16)
September 14, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,763.51; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Week 26 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Week 26, Day 178: I hate that living and working in a pandemic with all these restrictions in the hopes of avoiding a horrible illness, with severe, long lasting and still uncertain effects even if death isn’t the end of the story, has hit some kind of normal for us.
We had to adapt, and we have, and we had to adopt a long term mindset because our government is worse than a failure, but I hate that this and ever-creeping fascism are what we have become accustomed to in 2020. It’s perfectly normal to have a President who commits multiple unconscionable acts, who proudly and openly violates all the rules and norms and the Hatch Act and isn’t called to account even once by “his” party.
It’s depressing that our mental goalposts have moved to such low standards.
Week 26, Day 179: This long day of labwork completely wiped me out. I expected that it would require rest time after but I didn’t expect it to knock me for such a loop that I’d fall asleep after laying down for “just a rest”.
I took the rest of the day “off” so I’d only be doing parenting and home life and household management without also trying to work. I spent some time working through forms and paperwork, some time working on finance related research and sending our CPA a bunch of questions for the 2020 tax year prep. I work on this all through the year so that my 2021 tax prep isn’t awful.
JB spent some of the afternoon using up my thank you cards to write short not-thank-you notes to people. Their phonetic spelling is spectacular / interesting and I’m tempted to take pictures of all of them for an archive. They’re pretty funny.
Week 26, Day 180: We woke up to DoomSky which is so very 2020.
My phone absolutely refused to take an accurate picture and kept filtering out all the yellow / orange / red but our skies were approximately like this:
It was dark at noon.
It was really unsettling to feel like we should be doing SOMETHING but I didn’t know what since we’re a fair distance away from actual danger.
Week 26, Day 181: Day 2 of DoomSky. At least it wasn’t dark today though, it’s been yellow-orange rather than orange-red.
I had a headache all day though and I couldn’t decide if it was because our air quality was absolute trash or because I didn’t sleep well (this is normal, though).
JB woke up in a great mood but that didn’t last long. Combination of air quality, not enough physical activity, no outside time and being five? Who knows.
Week 26, Day 182: Day 3 of DoomSky.
We’re starting to feel a bit trapped. The air quality is positively dismal so we can’t even go outside for long walks or hikes or biking. PiC and JB are really struggling mentally and emotionally with that.
Seamus has been having (urinary) accidents this entire week. I’ve scrubbed floors, beds, and rugs, and PiC has done six loads of dog laundry. It wasn’t until confirming with PiC today that their walk durations haven’t been short all week as I had mistakenly though, plus mentioning it to @WindyCityGal that it occurred to me this might be a UTI again. AGAIN. Or worse, Cushings. I’m hoping for a UTI, even if it was a major bummer to knock out last time.
I can’t tell you the number of times that being exasperated and mentioning a problem to a friend by text has resulted in pieces clicking together and possible answers!
PiC and I agreed that this week has been one of THE toughest in the past six months. We had comfort pizza night.
I’m so sorry that you’re dealing with the wildfires & air quality, AND health issues, on top of our normal COVID-19 stuff. And, you know, the slow decaying of our democracy.
Here’s to hoping this week, and the rest of this year, end up better.
I keep telling myself to brace for it getting worse before it’s better so as to set better expectations but it doesn’t seem to help!
Jesus. This is just unimaginable.
Struggling a bit with our second wave and getting used to wearing masks, etc. Nothing like what you’re dealing wiht. (hugs)
Meanwhile, we (expletive) here still haven’t gotten through a first wave … sigh.
We’re old hands at wearing masks now because we can’t trust anyone else around us to act like mature unselfish adults. I’m fine with masks in general, I’m annoyed by how they (or the lack of them) represent how selfish our country is.
We are in the Central Valley of California (about an hour south of Fresno) and even though our skies look a lot better than yours, we are still being very careful not to be outside for long.
That’s wise. Even if we can’t see the particulates, the air quality index isn’t terribly reliable in telling us whether the air quality is actually harmful.