Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (170)
September 4, 2023
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 157: My money nerd self soothing involves looking at our dividend income and figuring out how much of our bills we can pay with it. Right now the monthly average is about $300 so. That covers the water/sewer every other month, and the electric/gas bill, and 1/12 of the property tax. That’s not going so far.
I bought Costco stock in 2013 when it was around $120/share and that was expensive for my cash flow. If you’d told me back then that it would be quadruple in price in ten years, I wouldn’t have believed you. But I might have scraped together the cash to buy ten or twenty more shares just in case. I wish I had. The next time I bought was in 2021 at $360/share and I would have sworn that was the peak. It’s around $530 now so I clearly know nothing. Of course my incredulity that it’s $530 feels the same as I felt when it was $120/share and $360/share.
Year 4, Day 158: I’ve enjoyed having our potato growing sacks so much, especially because they don’t really need much tending day to day, that I’ve been strongly tempted to venture into berries. Blueberries and/or blackberries. Our friends a few miles away who actually get sun have fantastically producing bushes and as I type this I realize that sun could be the reason they have such a great garden. Am I going to be wasting our money on bushes? I recall reading that you need two buy two bushes for cross pollination of the blueberries, I wonder if that’s the same for blackberries. We’ll also need to put netting over them. Our friends didn’t in their first year and lost almost their entire harvest to the birds.
Year 4, Day 159: I am unsurprised to see that on Day 3 post-email, the principal still hasn’t acknowledged receipt or responded in any way. I’m giving myself the week to catch up on rest and work and then next week, when she still won’t have responded, I’ll wade back into this and escalate.
This is my week of sleeplessness. One night it’s because the pain just won’t fade enough for me to sleep. The next night it’s Smol Acrobat waking up multiple times crying and needing soothing back to sleep. The next, insomnia again. Maybe this is my body’s way of saying “you only think you’re relaxing!”
Year 4, Day 160: A month ago we surprised ourselves by buying the new car that came available rather unexpectedly. The expected result was that we needed to downsize by selling our now-extraneous third car. It makes sense. There’s no room in the garage for three cars. There’s barely room in there for two. The decluttering part of me wanted it gone the week after the new car came home but we’ve been really busy so I’ve just maneuvered as best I could and he cleared as much detritus that built up in the garage as he could. We coped. PiC finally found time last weekend to prepare the ad and now he’s getting replies. My I can’t wait to have that space cleared impatience was replaced with sadness the second the ad replies started to come in.
That was the car we brought Sera and Smol Acrobat home in. That was the car we took the whole family, including Seamus and Sera, on trips in. And that was the car we took Seamus for his last ride in.
Finally letting go of it feels really sad. But as a reminder, I can’t trust the trunk lid to stay up properly which is really irritating so I’ll try to balance the nostalgia with the stuff I won’t miss.
Year 4, Day 161: This makes six days this week I’ve not gotten four hours of sleep any night. I’m too tired to exist.
Friday food review! We had a Trader Joe’s frozen meals medley one night. Thank goodness the food is decent quality or that meal would have been really sad. We tried Jollibee for the first time. JB loved the burgersteak and Smol Acrobat loved the fried chicken, that was the opposite result from what I expected. JB loved the peach mango pie as expected and Smol didn’t like it, less of a surprise. Adults were fine with all of it. We had two leftovers nights and one sushi (big treat!) night. Feeding one kid who mostly loves everything (and therefore wants my sashimi) and one kid who dislikes mostly everything (and therefore only picks at every possible option) is becoming extra annoying when I have to spend special treat nights trying to find one thing Smol Acrobat can eat enough of to qualify as a sufficient calorie meal.
I know I said I’d give myself a week to rest before wading back into the fight but Monday is a holiday which means I felt like I needed to get a jump on drafting my email to the superintendent.
I understand why I felt that way but it was a terrible decision.
That was an awful way to close out the week, of course, leaving me irritable and angsty about the upcoming confrontation.
