Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (114)
August 8, 2022
Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 3, Day 136: 6:20 am, drat. The sleep is creeping in the wrong direction again.
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My return to work was a depressing crash landing into stressing about too much to do. It was less about the work and more about the volume of everything.
I have to: do all my work in a limited amount of time; mind Smol Acrobat most of the day before and after their ONE nap; help JB (who still has another several days home before school starts) with any tech arrangements needed for their tutoring refresher courses that I set up; follow up on the Lakota giving orders I placed.
I think the stress is compounded by my (near pathological) need to have everything tidied up and right and tight on my FIRST DAY back. That may be related to my need to depart on time when we travel, as well, which sets off no end of anxiety. I keep twisting myself up into knots trying to meet totally unreasonable standards. Huh. There’s a theme.
PiC and I are trying something new: not pushing ourselves to be all caught up on work in an unreasonable amount of time.
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I leaned into the inevitable inability to work after Smol’s nap, and took the kids out for a walk to the playground nearby. Sadly for every inch of my body, the nearest one was closed. I should have steered us home to the backyard but gave into the “try to be a better parent” impulse to give JB a proper play on a big play structure and urged Sera and Smol into this ill considered adventure. It was a huge pain getting Smol to cooperate and get there in the first place. I had regrets almost immediately. But after much coaxing and pushing and prodding, they conquered the promised playground. They also had fun playing in the dirt so I remind myself we didn’t have to go that far for entertainment.
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Speaking of entertainment, I went and dug potatoes for dinner. We spent $100 in gardening supplies last year which is a lot to grow some potatoes that sell for $3-5 per 5-lb bag. But I can’t hang a price on the fun of planting with friends nor the ability to dig fresh new potatoes at need instead of having to plan them on the grocery run and using them before they sprout! Rather amazing because my whole issue with fresh produce is the inability to sync up my use of them within the period of freshness. I hate hate hate the amount of waste created by my body’s inability to function consistently and on demand.
Year 3, Day 137: We are DRAGGING today. Smol woke up crying at 4 am, which ruined my sleep, and PiC was up late working which ruined his. Can we please reset?? Also, I got a wicked papercut right on the palm of my hand from one of those partially sealed envelopes. A little insult to injury.
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Lakota Giving: Kohl’s is ridiculous. I placed an order to be shipped halfway across the country and they had an item that wasn’t available for shipping. Instead of making that clear, they just assumed I’d want to pick it up at my local store. How does that make sense??
I placed some orders this week and am waiting for everything to ship: One for a man in need of clothing, one for a student going off to their senior year at boarding school, and school supplies for the Allen Youth Center. I’m also pulling together another box of excess hand me down clothes from friends to share.
Year 3, Day 138: Woof. A day, this was. PiC was onsite again this week, I hate this onsite business and it’s only going to get worse. Probably soon.
In the morning, I played with Smol until they asked for a nap then hammered out a slew of work. I fed two of us, did more work. Then in the afternoon, fed Smol, took the kids outside for almost two hours of play (and squeezed in a little gardening), and cooked a full dinner of rice, stirfried onions and ong choy, and pan fried pork chops. It took longer than I’d anticipated but it’s one of our simpler from scratch dinners that I feel good about feeding the family. I also finally cooked the chops first and let them rest while cooking the veggies. Learn something new every day!
I topped off my night with a 30 minute fight with a clogged toilet. I won, though! I spent 20 of those minutes pondering on how my friend had just said “we don’t even have time to get into your inability to ask for help!” and how right she was because it was very late but also also how I was still being self aware and stubborn and refusing to ask for help.
Also I’m a control freak, still. And I mask it under “being capable and independent”.
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A news report about a study (that very annoyingly didn’t link to the study directly) about a link between ultra-processed foods and cognitive decline made me grumpy about our diet. So many of our foods right now are processed: cereal, chips, cheese, deli meats, bread and tortillas and croissants, pasta.
We do eat non-processed foods: eggs, fruit, some veggies, pork, chicken, the occasional beef. But when we cook, we are likely to use processed ingredients for seasoning. I don’t know if we have the bandwidth to do better.
Year 3, Day 139: The last three days have really worn me down. Not just me, both of us.
I’m unsettled and antsy, unable to focus. There are several things I wanted to get done (convert foreign currency, an inch tall stack of paperwork) last week and I just don’t have it in me to look at them.
It’s hard when there’s no respite from the daily slog. It feels like complaining to state the obvious. But. Even just the short family time during which JB was able to go play with aunties and uncles for ten to thirty minutes at a time, instead of needing us constantly, felt a revelation in rest. We were still doing things and minding Smol but my goodness what a difference it makes to have adults around who can mind the kids / a kid for just a bit.
All that to say, each of us really needed some time away from everyone today.
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I love a cat loaf so much!
— cats being weird little guys (@weirdlilguys) August 4, 2022
Year 3, Day 140: 530 am. Blurgghh.
I thought I’d hit a wall yesterday. Oh no, THIS is a wall.
All things considered, the day did go ok: JB’s tutor had to postpone their meeting so they got to go for a long bike ride with PiC and Smol. They loved that. They also got their teacher assignment today for second grade. PiC covered parenting all morning so I could work. They also did their chores without whining so *I* was happy.
I finished 60% of my work and then traded PiC work time in the afternoon for parenting. I did the laziest possible version of childcare, as I was teetering on the precipice of crashing, and by 530 had decided that while I COULD force myself to push through cooking, it should just be a takeout night. Check it out, me making decisions to preserve myself instead of forcing myself to a breaking point and not feeling horribly guilty about it! Win.
Everyone felt their needs were generally met as well as they could be. We’re just wiped out.
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Why do people do horrible harmful things and think saying “it’s not personal” or “it’s just business” justifies their choices?
It doesn’t.
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We’re convinced this is why Doggle didn’t have half his teeth, the sweet but oh so dim soul that he was.
I’ve seen a lot of Irish things on my trip, but somehow the MOST Irish thing has been this old village dog who has no teeth because he sits by Lake Urlaur all day in the shadow of a crumbling abbey, waiting for folks to throw rocks in the water so he can fetch & chew on them. pic.twitter.com/CaPSAGw9VA
— Andrew Farmer (@thatsajellyfish) August 5, 2022
I went and looked up the study as best I could. From what I can find, it’s a non-peer-reviewed paper that was presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference a few weeks ago. It involved a decent-sized cohort (10775) of Brazilians over the course of 8 years, and the correlation was seen at over 20% of caloric intake.
Here is what I would want to see:
* How were participants selected? What were the inclusion/exclusion criteria?
* How was diet data collected? (Was it solely self-reported?)
* In what percentage of participants was the decline seen?
* What was the degree of decline in each measure?
* How were participants assessed, and how often?
* How did they control for other potential contributing factors beyond diet?
* Will it ever see publication in a legitimate peer-reviewed journal?
The way that the popular press reports on medical research drives me crazy—they report on things as if they are proven facts without explaining the analysis and caveats.
Adding:
Almost all of these studies are correlational only. Often they completely exclude omitted variables like socioeconomic status and “cares about health”– so we don’t know if it is the dietary choices or something else that’s just correlated with dietary choices.
The studies that are randomized controlled trials usually find much weaker causal evidence. But with these nutrition things you usually start out with retrospective correlations, then people get money to do RCT to see if the correlations are actually causal or not (see: eggs– are they bad for you? probably not! Bacon, on the other hand…). When it’s something long-term it’s much harder to do an RCT.
Yeah agreed that it’s less about the study and more about how I already feel about where I want our diet to be and where I can realistically exist. They are not currently in harmony.
Yes, there was SO much information from that particular study that wasn’t available in the press on it.
I should say that I reacted more because I GENERALLY am uneasy about how much of our diet is processed foods vs not. I would like to be more intentional about eating a more than not plant based diet that’s less processed, so it’s easy to get under my skin about it.
I think processed vs. unprocessed is too broad a separation.
You can increase benefits by eating processed foods that are whole grain and don’t have a lot of sugar/additives. So… muesli, triscuits, whole grain bread, local-to-you tortillas, whole grain pasta, actual cheese instead of process-cheese-food etc.
Like, you don’t have to go paleo and it’s not even clear that paleo is healthy. They’re not saying yogurt is bad for you (it’s not!), they’re saying yogurt filled with sugar and preservatives may not be that great for you. Or at least… people who eat less processed food do better than people who eat more processed food.
Heck, fermentation is food processing, and we’re supposed to eat a lot more fermented food than most of us do. (The latest bad science headline says 30 plant-based foods per week.)
#NotANutritionist #Disclaimer
Good points! And helpful in keeping my head from spinning off its axis with very little provocation. I don’t think I’m usually this prone to overreacting, it’s been a rough week.
I was thinking of the category of “processed” as in foods that get a ton of additives (sugars and preservatives), and more on par with things like Oreos, rather than true processing. From experimentation, for me personally, things with more sugars added are bad for me.
But I’m all about pickled foods, radish and daikon and carrots, yum.
I gave up cloth diapering when we had to go gluten free because I had just enough spoons to EITHER bake GF things from scratch OR wash/dry/fold cloth diapers every week, but not both. In a perfect world I wouldn’t have chosen to use 100% disposables – but in a perfect world I wouldn’t have faced that choice. *shrug* Sometimes a mom’s gotta do what a mom’s gotta do!
<3 That makes perfect sense. I forget to give myself some slack for, y'know, reality.
Thanks Nicole and Maggie for digging into it! I also feel terrible about how much processed food we’re eating. But my bandwidth is about zero. Fed is fed. And as terrible as it sounds, I think Spud sometimes does better with these things than when I cook other certain ‘fresher’ dishes (probably reactions to trace unknown ingredients)
And cloth diapering. Whoooo. My intentions did not match reality, especially when it was so hard to find brands that fit Spud well.
Yeah Smol is refusing to eat lots of the homecooked foods, at times relying almost entirely on cereal, PB on toast, yogurt and tortilla chips (for dinner). It’s not that they do BETTER on them but they’re willing to eat them without a giant fight.
Yeah I hated that we couldn’t do cloth diapering but I had to shelve that concern too.