Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (167)
August 14, 2023
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 136: JB starts school this week which is both good and bad for me. They’ll finally be out of the house for a large chunk of hours during the work day, yay!! We actually have to be up and out the door by 8 am, siiiiiiigh. I’m not looking forward to that bit.
Mixed bag on the health front. My throat has been sore for 8 days, along with mysterious mouth pain that made me wonder “hand foot mouth??? nooooooo!” It’s not COVID after three at home tests, nor anything the family is susceptible to since I’m the only miserable one. HMF is generally very contagious so I am hopeful it’s not stealth HMF. I have no idea what it is but it stinks. I chatted with my doctor who’s putting me on 2 months of antacids to see if that improves anything before referring me to ENT.
On the other hand, I took Sera for a much longer afternoon walk than we usually take and I wasn’t gasping for breath or debating crawling back the last steps. That’s a huge change from the norm!
Year 4, Day 137: What an unexpectedly beautiful morning we had today! It inspired me to push a little harder going uphill than I’ve done in a long while, which resulted in my heart pounding and thighs burning but not terribly. It’s SO nice to feel like my body functions (almost) properly!
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I confess to a curiosity about how our neighbors are managing financially. They have four kids and drive a very high end car we most certainly couldn’t afford on payments or otherwise. I wouldn’t have thought twice about it except one of them mentioned to me that neither of them have worked since COVID shutdown. A layoff, I think it was?
They mentioned it offhandededly, mainly to complain about the effect of the early “retired” spouse being home all the time on their sanity. Of course my brain went to “wait but how can you afford to LIVE?” Even my most robust emergency cash reserves couldn’t have stretched, what, 36-38 months? At best we’d last about 18? Maaaaybe 24 months before cashing out investments. I thought of them when we walked past their house. We used to see them outside on our walks, I’d invited the mom to join us on our walks if she saw us out and about. I hope they’re ok.
Year 4, Day 138: Another beautiful day. I’m mildly suspicious, when is the other shoe going to drop? Or perhaps it’s just the effect of heat waves everywhere else and our equivalent is this lovely 72 degrees with a cool wind.
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A friend shared this reminder with me, a reminder I find myself needing daily for one reason or another (depression, pain, fatigue, other aches and pains):
Year 4, Day 139: JB’s first day of school went well. They had fun and seem to like the teacher. Our big relief: confirming that they aren’t in class with last year’s bully again. I’m hoping the school will respect my request not to put the two of them in class together the rest of their time in this school. That kid is a sneaky little jerk who tried to force JB to give up friendships because “they had dibs”. You can’t claim dibs on PEOPLE! When the teacher intervened and told them that, they stopped saying it out loud and just tried to turn the friend against JB directly. They demanded Mutual Friend to pick between the two friends, told Mutual Friend “secrets” that they’d loudly announce they wouldn’t tell JB. Mean petty stuff that made JB feel really bad.
I’ve seen that kind of thing turn into a power trip and ostracizing of the targeted kid over time, so I wasn’t going to let it develop further this year if we could do anything about it.
Year 4, Day 140: The weather went back to drizzly and grey today. We almost had a whole week of beautiful weather! I appreciated the run while it lasted. The grey and my aches are back. The funny thing about that is my body can’t decide what’s better. My bones love the heat, but my soft tissue apparently hates it. I was swollen and puffy when it was nice and hot, and my bones felt good. Flip the weather and my bones creak like a haunted house, but my fingers aren’t doing their best impression of sausages. Bodies are weird.
Observations on our personal economy:
- Gas is over $5/gallon. PiC says it’s been hovering there for a bit. I’ve been doing a lot more driving with the kids lately but clearly haven’t even glanced at the gas stations since it was a surprise to me today.
- I’m starting a 2-month course of omeprazole (Prilosec). If I bought it as a generic OTC med, it’d run $30. It’s only $8 as a prescribed med at the pharmacy. That’s a huge difference! That might just be a weird pharmacy / healthcare thing, though.
- We usually keep Trader Joe’s frozen Indian food meals on hand as our fall back plan for dinners on hard days. They used to be $3, now they’re $5 each.
- Dog food used to be $45 per bag after tax. I remember the receipts being roughly $91 for two bags. Now it’s $120 for two bags.
- Our water and sewer bills creep up every quarter. They’re now 20% higher than they were last year.
- We’re slowly rebuilding our emergency funds, one week at a time. I can’t tell if I can credit therapy or the depression meds for my lack of anxiety over the need to rebuild them. Either way, I’m grateful for the lack of anxiebees even while I tap my fingers impatiently.
- We spent a lot on takeout the past two weeks before this one, treating visiting friends to meals at our favorite eateries. We weren’t deliberately trying to be austere this week but it was good that we were.
Are your costs of living up 20-40% too? I feel like we’re doing a lot to generate extra income just to maintain or barely maintain status quo. And we make decent money! It’s a hell of a lot harder for people living with less cushion in their incomes. Part of the reason I’m feeling it more is because of the combined cost of increased direct giving to help friends in less fortunate positions and the giant bill for daycare we pay every month. Just three more years of that.
This nerd wallet article on inflation is interesting: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/price-of-food
Gas prices are pretty low for us– $3/gallon give or take. Grocery prices and restaurant prices have definitely been going up. Insurance prices are up as well.
“limited service meals (takeout only) rose 7.1% year-over-year” – that’s painfully clear to us! We only do takeout, we’re still not eating out in restaurants.
I assume our gas prices are so much higher because we have more restrictions on gas or something like that.
I do appreciate egg prices go down a little. Or at least the supply of eggs is steady. We rely on them a lot.
Our cost of living is up, but I’m very deliberately not doing the math on it. For my own happiness. My husband’s work has mandated more office days starting soon, and he HAS done the math on what that will cost.
I’m listening to his complaints, but am trying not to get myself caught up in his mood about it. Yes, it sucks… but we both work. As a family, we’re ok.
Mandated in office days for jobs that don’t truly need it are so ridiculous. PiC is doing a lot more because of our daycare drop off situation but if it weren’t for that, he doesn’t truly need to be on site.
This is the first time I’ve really tallied more than a couple bills at a time, too. I’ve mostly been intentionally glossing over the details even though that feels irresponsible as the person in charge of our finances from my normal baseline of being nearly manic about all the details all the time. This is probably closer to the right happy medium of being aware and not living twisted up in anxiety, though.
Also not doing the numbers. But the pain is real. We had half price public transport for a long time and that just ended. Add to that a price increase at the same time and extra extra whammy…
Groceries are crazy.
Spud starts school soon so uniforms will be a cost but amazingly this school is no-fees for anything and provides so many things. They have free lunch (though the govt funding for that may be at risk post election), also unsure if kiddo will actually eat it (AND not sure how well they cater to dietary needs…)
Also having to go into the office more, BOO.
Still marvelling at your neighbours. They must have independent wealth by the sounds of it?!
Yeah, even when I was deliberately not running the numbers, I could still feel the bite.
Was the half price public transport related to COVID?
Is Spud going to a public school? Really hope they provide food that he needs.
Yeah I keep thinking they must have a really good source of fallback income because goodness, it’s been a long while.
The price increases take a bite, but our biggest thing is my partner not cooking any more, and wanting more variety in his meals. It has been a very tough year health-wise for us both, and he just doesn’t have the spoons at the moment, I figure. We will get a new, probably lower cost groove at some point, but we aren’t there yet. First priority is to get physical and mental health back on track for us both. Best of luck to you with all the plates you are spinning.