Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (116)
August 22, 2022
Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 3, Day 150: PiC got JB a slot in the local swim classes for the fall! It was a highly competitive registration process. 6 am on a Monday morning is just inhumane. I loaded him up with all the step by step instructions the night before and he got up predawn to make it happen. We lucked out, he had everything fully prepared and there were more slots at the lower level. JB has been going to a private swim program that costs $60 PER LESSON (vs $60/8 lessons) 💀 and they refreshed lost skills and added new skills the instruction these past two months has been so hit and miss. They started placing kids in JB’s higher level classes who hadn’t mastered the very basic level’s essential skills, they were passing JB on skills they most definitely hadn’t acquired yet. I’m glad JB is back in the water like a fish (temperament wise) but they need consistent instruction that doesn’t just pass them on skills. I am not paying an arm and a leg for the appearance of ability!
This makes me wonder what their problem is: poor instructor training? A mistaken belief parents just want to see progress whether or not it’s real? Bad communication across the program?
I also did some initial research into some weekday self defense programs for JB.
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Someone tweeted this Budget Bytes recipe (ONE POT LEMON PEPPER CHICKEN WITH ORZO) which sounded better than the dinner from the freezer we’d planned. I throughly borked it since I had neither lemon pepper, orzo, or parsley. I used ground lemon peel with garlic powder (Penzey’s!) and ditalini. Nothing quite worked as it would have if I’d stuck to the recipe’s main ingredients. By the time I was done, I was pretty sure the chicken noodle soup I’d renamed it was inedible. I set it aside on the stove to cool and walked away. Oddly enough though, after it had soaked up an unreasonable amount of broth, it wasn’t half bad. Not good, but not bad.
(Thread) Here is a list of extremely easy ways to improve your day that everyone should know about:
— Roxi Horror 💀🌸 (@roxiqt) August 6, 2022
Year 3, Day 151: I feel positively Kryptonian today. It feels like the perfectly hot day somehow spawned lots of little good things seeded through what normally would have just been another rough working and parenting day.
78 degrees and people all around us are getting puppies! I get to pet them! And NOT take care of them. Then I met a lovely older lab who was just bursting with good cheer and wiggles.
We had some flight credits with Southwest Air that were set to expire next month and at the end of July, they cancelled all expiration dates. I’m just hearing about this now. Woo!
Smol Acrobat and I passed a pleasant morning picking up tiny bits of litter off the sidewalk until they finally got bored and shifted to sidewalk chalk and writing on my shoes. Then we hung out with our potatoes for a while.
On Sunday, I’d ordered a couple dinners from Bentocart and Today Me is pretty pleased with my selections. Yummy prepared foods that were a snap to reheat, making our evening that much easier without having to think about it. Those dan dan noodles were LAVA. Yummy but lava. I’m a bit of a spice-heat lightweight and was sweating after a few bites.
Year 3, Day 152: Smol and I tackled weeds again this morning. Seems to be our week for weeding and picking up rocks and whatnot. We’ll finally clear this swath only for the rainy season to hit and super power the darn things, forcing me to start all over again! But unless we’re willing to do major landscaping and yard maintenance, which I’m not as I’m protecting the budget for a new car eventually, we’re just going to have to make the best of our mornings together and weed.
They usually claim the best tools, insist that I wear gloves, and tell me what to do: “Cha Cha Cha Cha!”
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I decided we needed cornbread for our chili that I’d made earlier – why do I never think of it at the time I make the chili? After I’d combined the dry ingredients, I reached for eggs that weren’t there. Dammit! This might be the first time we’ve run out of eggs since the pandemic started. We were clearly overdue for a Costco run so off we dashed. Except the car battery was dead yet again. Honestly! It’d been trickle-charged and checked by AAA, and yet here we are again, dead battery for the third time in three weeks. I think it’s time to just replace the sad thing.
This is why we can’t be a one car family. I’m not sure what we’d do if we were stranded with the two kids and errands needing running and a dead car but I AM sure that it’d be a huge pain. Of course the engine in the second car now gives me a bit of a worry, it sounds funny. Both our cars are pushing 20 years old. With the reduced usage through the pandemic, I thought we’d make it there and beyond easily, but I’m starting to wonder.
On that note, I really hope we don’t need to replace both cars at the same time but I’d better save for that eventuality.
Year 3, Day 153: It’s street sweeper day! After school drop off, Smol and I hung out watching the truck drive up and down the street. We didn’t get to do this with JB at this age, all the garbage trucks and sweepers went through at 5 am or earlier, so this is a novelty this time around. They always beep at Smol to say hi, too, which is fun.
This usually means we meet a neighbor or two walking their dog, and we have a quick chat while Smol hangs back watching me pet another dog.
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My cousin that I reconnected with called me today and I jumped about a mile mentally. Was something wrong? Is this about my biodad? Is this the beginning of being pushed to forgive and forget, to an unwanted reconciliation, again?
I let it go to voicemail so I could center myself and followed up by text later. It turns out that he was passing by and had gifts for the kids. He’d left them with a local friend to drop off to us. Our address has been a closely guarded secret for years, ever since the estrangement, because I still have nightmares about unwanted estranged family (on both sides) showing up on my doorstep. We dodged the question this time by arranging to pick it up ourselves but the whole thing opened up a new aspect of my trauma I hadn’t considered.
After the fact I felt a little foolish.
Why did I immediately assume it was bad? Why had I instinctively assumed my good cousin would be weird about the estrangement? Why did I think he’d have gone to the dark side when he himself said my dad was in the wrong? I pondered this while scrubbing the pots really hard.
Well for one thing, I’m completely out of practice. We haven’t been in touch since I was a teen. For another, after believing my whole life with my entire being that my dad was a good person and having my trust die after a thousand cuts, it’s been a rough road putting my sense of truth back together. There were so many lies. Small lies, big lies, lifetime spanning lies. Lies that turned my life upside down and shook it repeatedly. Causing the car repossession. Not seeking affordable housing so he could bleed me dry financially.
I had always doubted absolutely everyone else’s love and loyalty in my life, not knowing why, but it makes more sense now. The cognitive dissonance of him being how and who he was even if I didn’t consciously know, when he was one of the two parents who built my foundations, why wouldn’t my trust in others always have been fractured?
Even though no one else has done what he’s done, this whole thing has been disorienting in a deep and disturbing way. It’s going to take time to heal all that vertigo.
I hate that the healing isn’t a straightforward and linear process. Give me a checklist, let me fix this and be whatever normal I would have been if I hadn’t internalized so much. /grump
Year 3, Day 154: Ugh, my whole body is ringing with the residue of bad dreams. I woke up in a mental sludge believing my mom was alive and I was confronting racist neighbors for her, my dad was dead, I couldn’t remember who bought this house, and unsure what day it was. Yuck.
My nightmares have been non-stop since seeing my family. It’s not that it was a bad experience, it’s just stirred up all the conflict inherent in having any relationship with them rather than hiding in isolation. Isolation felt easier. Lonelier but simpler.
Also this is me:
pic.twitter.com/TYh1VjNk5Q
— memes i wish i could tag my cat in (@memesiwish) August 18, 2022
Sounds like your subconscious is hard at work! I’m not a therapist, but I assume that processing it all is part of healing. I occasionally have nightmares about my dad too, and we were definitely worried about my parents just showing up on our doorstep and talked about what to do if that happened. It didn’t happen, thankfully.
My therapist agrees with you!
I wonder if it would help to talk about how to handle it if my family shows up on my doorstep. If you’re willing to share your thoughts on that, I’d appreciate them.
Yay for swim lessons!!
Sounds like time for a new battery. I delayed replacing mine for a long time, and in retrospect the amount of time I spent thinking about it / dealing with it (being sure to drive every 3 days, waiting for a jump when I forgot, driving around to recharge), I should have done it sooner.
Good for you for not answering that call in the moment. That was smart. Sure, it turned out to be innocuous but you couldn’t know!
I REALLY hope these instructors are better than the private company’s swim instructors.
Spoiler alert: You’re right! I thought batteries were either good or bad, full stop. Not this weird in between thing.
It’s a good policy. I think I’ll keep it!