June 12, 2023
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 73: You know it was a rough weekend when you’re looking forward to Monday because you can work without parenting for several whole hours.
Both kids are making me banana pants in their own special ways and to add insult to injury, it’s been ten days of this sleep regression. Smol’s waking 2x a night and refusing to go back to their crib on the second one (usually from 2-4 am). I am noticeably frayed around the edges.
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Sometimes, I feel dislocated in time. When I was 17, I felt ancient compared to my peers. Now I’m 40 and hear that my friend is sanding her deck and think: that’s what adults do. How does one both feel agéd and too young at the same time? It’s weird.
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Writing my net worth update for last month made me realize that I still have a lot of financial anxiety only half buried. It usually floats in the background but our extremely expensive summer is (probably) making it come to the surface.
Realistically, 7.5 years to reach our financial goal isn’t terrible. There are so many other factors that we’ll have to deal with in the meantime – getting small kids through daycare and primary school, prepping them for college, aging elders in our lives to care for, figuring out how to climate-change proof our lives (as much as is actually possible), activism against fascism, etc.
Five dollar bet that zeroing in on this financial goal situation is my subconscious’s attempt to hold onto some kind of semblance of (false) control. It’s following up with a tantrum because I consciously know I can’t control anything. You’d think saying that out loud would help, but it doesn’t yet. It will, I think, just not right away.
Year 3, Day 74: Between the sleep regressions and being the biggest pill in the world at every single dinner, Smol is really showing JB up in the Difficult Toddler Department. Their arms mysteriously lose the ability to convey food to their mouth but if you take them from the table, they scream EAT EAT EAT!! When you return them to the table, they sit and crumple a napkin or turn sideways to contemplate the cosmos or pick at the coasters. But those arms still can’t convey food to the mouth. 🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️
My rule of thumb is that they’ll eat if they’re hungry and don’t worry about it during the day, but the last meal of the day is the last meal. If they go to bed after 1 broccoli floret and 6 goldfish crackers from an earlier snack, I’ll be hearing “mama milk mama eat” at 430 am and then I just might transform into a banshee and scream. So I suffer through all kinds of contortions trying to get them to cooperate and consume the minimum number of calories into their system to hopefully get us closer to “through the night”. But my GAHHH is it frustrating to spend every single dinner trying to finagle food into the toddler whose disinterest in feeding themselves closely resembles a cat presented with an inferior meal. And it’s truly disinterest. They don’t have any issues with the food taste or texture. They’ll go from “food what food” to willingly eating anything if a sufficiently motivating greater prize has been offered. A kid that’s got texture or taste issues wouldn’t flip the switch like that.
Year 3, Day 75: PiC and JB are attempting to commute to summer camp by bike. I was quietly horrified by the idea as a very weak bicyclist but I knew they were in good hands with PiC who has years of bike commute experience. This second ride was a fun adventure for JB but it’s too stressful for PiC. JB can’t listen or hear well when they’re on the road. While the cars have been unusually careful around them this week, he was sweating bullets because JB’s ability to hear instructions on the bike on the streets is terrible. This experiment may end this week.
I had to run some paperwork to the elementary school and on my way out, remembered to ask the secretary if she knew when the lost and found giveaway was going to be. It turns out I’d gotten that wrong! Last year, it wasn’t an intentional giveaway, it was an old book giveaway and so they decided to put the lost and found items out too. She offered to let me pick through to find JB’s stuff so I explained that my interest was actually on behalf of the Lakota reservation. I’d planned to pack as many as I could carry back home for them (fingers crossed). She said, oh! No one’s come to claim anything so it’s all getting donated. May I have them, then? I asked, sight unseen.
They were happy to let me have it all! We packed up a huge box and 6 large garbage bags of jackets, sweaters, and vests. About half were already washed, I’ll have to wash the other half. Sera was quite surprised when I came home after my “quick errand” with many many sacks, like a rescue Santa. My local friend can provide 3-4 large boxes for me to pack these, so for the cost of shipping, we’ll be able to send at least a hundred, probably more, pieces of outerwear.
If anyone wants to pitch in for shipping costs (or the next family), now’s a great time!
Year 3, Day 76: JB was the first up this morning. Smol had two wake ups in the middle of the night, PiC tended to both, so the two of them were out cold in the guest bed. I was aching and tired from yesterday’s haul, so I wasn’t up for another half hour.
They got up, got dressed, made breakfast, packed lunch for PiC, packed their own bags, and were ready to go without a single word from me or their dad. Amazing!
Now that I reflect on the day, I’m suspicious that we got a replacement JB. There was the whole morning thing. When I picked them up early from camp, they ran out quickly, no prompting needed, dressed for class, didn’t whine or complain when I gave them only 5 minutes to play after, didn’t dawdle when time was up, helped me at the grocery store, put on a pot of rice while I made the rest of dinner. They even bathed Smol after. I had quite the Supermom day myself, but that was very much enabled by JB being their (or someone else’s, where has THIS kid been?) best self today, unprompted. My guess is they were in an excellent mood because they had a field trip to look forward to and no school bully to deal with. They’ll be back to normal tomorrow. But I appreciated it!
Year 3, Day 77: Every day this week has felt like a highly compressed hour and also a week, rolled into one.
This was my first day all week without calls, meetings, or other out of office errands. I needed that solid block of focused work time to clear my desk before the weekend and finished just in the nick of time. Is it just me who feels this imperative to meet a totally arbitrary cutoff we set because that feels good? Because it’s very much my own deadline that I set. But it’s so nice to start the week with very long timelines on work rather than feeling crunched right from the get go because I didn’t clear enough work on Friday.
We had some commute logistics to straighten out. PiC had left the bike in longer term parking at work and JB’s bike was brought home, so he had to get that bike back before we could pick up the kids in the car. I don’t know if they’ll be doing the bike commute together again, it sounds like it was stressful.
June 5, 2023
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 66: It’s Memorial Day in the US. Somehow I never realized that we normally share Memorial Day with Canada. I guess the subject has just never come up? Anyway we usually have the same holiday Monday until we didn’t (this year) and Canadian friends wondering what all the moaning about work last Monday was about is how I learned we normally share it.
Usually holiday Mondays feel like punishment because the work that piles up by Tuesday hits like a hurricane but this week I’m appreciating it because the entire week’s schedule is terrible. I’ve got to take the kids to appointments both Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, have a midday Tuesday meeting, and have to take JB to activities once or twice a day every day this week. I spent some time Sunday and today doing as much work as I could squeeze into half hour blocks of time between child minding and my current pain flare which feels roughly like having an acid bath inside one’s skin. Nothing but the best fun for me! And, naturally, since my car has recovered from its fits last week, PiC’s car died this afternoon. Sigh.
Year 3, Day 67: It’s only the first day of four and already I’m ready to quit. 😅 We survived the stress of getting to our appt this morning, dashed back home to squish in some work, then had my midday call. By the time I had lunch with JB (catered by chef JB), I had an hour left to work before we had to get back out the door. Sigh. I did NOT want to go. I’m not even sure JB wanted to go. But they had a proper lazy half morning and half afternoon playing math and typing games on the computer and were ready to move around.
On the plus side, our postage has shipped and is due to arrive on Thursday. Next time we get a big enough order or three, I’ll be able to test the pricing against Pirateship to see if it’s cheaper there (thanks, Rae!). I hope it is, I really like the sound of scheduling pickup! For the small orders, the first class pricing is pretty reasonable.
Year 3, Day 68: My Tuesday ended with working until 11 pm, and today started with Smol Acrobat waking up at 4 am and again at 5 with a diaper leak. Absolutely no one was in the mood for life. But we had to haul everyone’s butts out the door because Smol had their second dentist appt and we had to get there in plenty of time to deal with any balking or bawling. JB had wanted to come along so we scheduled it for a day they could come, and they were helpful keeping Smol corralled and on track thankfully. Some days are good, some days are full of regret. Poor kiddo was so tired from the early wake up, they kept telling us they were tired. They didn’t want to go to daycare. Unfortunately for them, they had to. We warned the teachers and they caught a hefty nap in midday. Whew.
Meanwhile JB and I had to run back home for a couple hours for me to work and then run back out to their half day camp. I stayed, working, for the full 4.5 hours to mind how it was run and generally get a feel for the place. That hard folding chair was not comfortable at all and it was a huge relief to retreat to the car after a few hours.
I felt like maybe I was being a helicopter parent. They were trepidatious about being left in a strange place alone for the first time, nothing like their intro to daycare where they could not care less if we were still there. I wondered if I was negatively affecting their resilience by agreeing to stay there. But we’d never been there before and I needed to know how things ran for my peace of mind. After a half day, they were absolutely comfortable and didn’t care if I stayed or not. Thankfully! I could not camp there another solid 4.5 hours or 9 hours later this week.
Year 3, Day 69: A morning half camp for JB today meant I caught a few hours of quiet work at home before having to go pick them up, drop off PiC’s lunch, and run by two elementary schools on our way home to drop off the student prizes and my paperwork. This week has been a poorly plotted marathon of appointments and errands and I will be so glad to be done with the last one tomorrow. I wished I had rescheduled some things but the two biggies could not have been rescheduled.
We still made it to their two self defense classes and I still got my work done so we’re going to call this an Exhausted Win.
Year 3, Day 70: We made it to the finish line! Not unscathed.
JB lost their damn mind at the end of the day and interrupted me to mouth off about setting the table for dinner. Smol Acrobat went ballistic when dinner was over and it was time to brush teeth.
PHEW.
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Going through all our home insurance and other important paperwork, I noticed that our dwelling coverage has almost doubled since 2017. It’s increased incrementally each year, and so have the premiums, but never noticed this creep. This is a bit of a surprise. I wonder if this is all automatic adjusting for inflation. Must be, we haven’t done anything.
May 29, 2023
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 59: A very Mondayest of Mondays – we have work up to our ears, unethical/shady customers, my ribs feel caved in and I can’t raise my arms to shoulder height because they feel like they’re getting dislocated, and of course, car trouble. Oh and then midday brain fog floated in that I want to box it. But I can’t because the arms, they cannot be raised. Ger-offa-me!
We have quite old cars and they’ve been relatively low maintenance. Certainly maintenance has been cheaper than any car payment would have been. My car started acting up on Saturday, which is unnerving at this age. I always wonder if this time will be more expensive to repair than it’s worth. That’s a mix of not being in charge of car maintenance and my usual catastrophizing tendencies (work in progress!) PiC is working on it but this week we’re effectively down to one car. We’ll make it work but it’s not great with the 2 different school dropoffs/pickups and PiC going to work onsite plus appointments this week.
We ran the diagnostic tool thingie (which I’m sure has a real name) which told us to replace the spark plugs and ignition coils. Crossing my fingers that this is all that’s needed. I’ll be grateful if we only need to spend a few hundred to get her up and running again.
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We’re meeting with a potential dogsitter this week. This person is much closer than our emergency sitter we’ve used for the past two trips. We really LIKE the emergency sitter, but it’s such an impractical distance to travel at the best of times.
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Year 3, Day 60: We’re coming up on the last day of school in these parts fast and we’ve been putting together JB’s camp schedule. The problem is, I don’t know a single soul at this new camp we’re trying for a few days. I do NOT feel comfortable leaving my kid there without a known reliable adult or any friends with kids there. I don’t know when I’ll be ok with that, probably not for a few more years. This means I’m going to be work-camping out all week at the new camp for the first week. We’ll be back at a known camp after that. Yes, I realize this seems like overkill but it’s my comfort level. That requires back up power packs with higher outputs since I can’t count on having an outlet to plug into. Now isn’t the ideal time to buy but now it when I need them and they were always part of the multi-layer plan to be prepared for power outages so I might as well test them out.
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I started collecting funds to hold for the Fall shipment of snacks for Penny’s students before folks disperse for the summer. $20-25 contributions go a long way when we all lift together! We’ll be able to set them up nicely in the fall and it’s really good to know we’re concretely helping hungry kids get some food during their school days.
I’m also collecting funds for the next Lakota family. I’m reserving $120 to ship 4 boxes and a stash of gift cards to shop the Thanksgiving sales this fall. I wonder if we can repeat last year’s Thanksgiving and Native Heritage Month drive. I really HOPE to but….it’s been a weird year for a lot of folks.
Year 3, Day 61: JB has been dealing with conflict with a kid in their class on and off all year. We hadn’t heard anything for months until this week, and a whole jumble of bad behavior came out. This kid tries to push a mutual friend to take sides, tells the mutual friend to keep a secret and loudly proclaims “DON’T TELL JB!” and tries to turn the other kids against JB at lunch. She tried on stomp on JB’s belongings and weaponizes a teacher-relative against the other kids. JB has tried to talk to her about it but the kid just rolls her eyes or denies having ever done anything wrong. In short, this kid is a giant jerk. It makes me angry on their behalf that this kid seems to go out of their way to be a jerk. We had a lot of talks about it, but there’s no real solution for a second grader beyond: stay away from people who treat you like crap. Then again, that’s true of many such jerks they’ll encounter in life.
I hope that the jerk either grows up over the summer, or disappears from JB’s life entirely, lost to the crowds of people that they’ll encounter as they change classes each year. I know there’s no guarantee they won’t cross paths again, but I can hope!
I’m also hoping this isn’t developing into a real bullying situation but it sure shows the early signs of being one.
Year 3, Day 62: Smol Acrobat woke 5 minutes after midnight and plaintively asked to sleep in the big bed after they calmed down. I caved and let them squirmy wormy all over my prone self as I tried to sleep and ignore them, they’re using grumpy at night when they’re getting sick and I worried.
We’ve finally registered JB for a mishmash of gymnastics camps next week. They’re pretty excited about it. Today, I registered them for 6 consecutive weeks of summer camp at almost $500/week. ☠️
It’s starting to sink in that in addition to daycare, we’re paying another $2000/month roughly for camp.
Between these, and our recent car trouble, summer is $$$$!
Year 3, Day 63: Uf, another “big bed” night for Smol coupled with a 550 am “Mama, eat”. Nooooo…..
We need more postage for Ye Little Art Shoppe. We’ve had a steady trickle of sales but they’ve stopped for now. Thinking ahead, I’ll be with JB nearly all next week, working, monitoring their camp, and prepping their latest round of art to prepare new cards for the shop.
I won’t have time to fill card orders next week so I might as well treat next week as a rest and regroup period. That means I can order postage online instead of trying to add a trip to the post office with all our meetings and appointments. It’ll cost $1.55 extra but buying online means one less errand to run over a holiday weekend and I can get a variety of the new forever stamps that our local PO is too small to have. This might have to be my last indulgence for a few months.
I’m sad today. My friends from my working college days are in town and initially they were going to spend a day with us. But instead they’ve changed their plans to go sightseeing further north instead. I couldn’t afford the energy to go with them today, even though we haven’t been able to see them in years, before the pandemic. I understand but I’m sad.
May 22, 2023
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 52: There are days I’m tired of being the only working set of eyes around here. This isn’t one of those stereotypical overworked wives things. PiC sees all the clutter and cleaning that needs to be done, and maintenance and does his share. This isn’t a household fairness thing. It’s literally about eyesight. The two of them cannot find things!
JB let their backup set of glasses go missing, the pair that’s supposed to live in their backpack, and I was annoyed that PiC had to find this out when their primary pair broke. I was grouchy that I hadn’t remembered to follow up about whether they were wearing their glasses at school MONTHS ago like I’d intended. Anyway, he did the disgruntled first parent on the scene talk with them, then I followed up with the slightly calmer but still irritated orders that they were to spend the entire afternoon today searching for the glasses and doing nothing else until they succeeded.
6 pm rolls around, PiC had gotten dinner on the table, and JB still hasn’t found them.
Still irritated, I went through their desk area, knocking over the apparently never been emptied pencil sharpener in the process, vacuumed that mess up, and then checked their room. I found those damn glasses in 15 minutes without zero idea of where they had last been sighted.
Smol Acrobat had better have my finding ability, I refuse to be the only one that can find lost items in this family!
Year 3, Day 53: Smol and JB were sick all weekend and Smol spiked a really scary fever overnight so I was up all night with them making sure that the fever responded to meds. It did but it was a trudge along, trying to just get the bare minimum done, no-rest sort of day for me.
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Bless my GP, she doesn’t know whatall is wrong with me but she’s always willing to explore and test to cross things off the list if there’s even a semi plausible reason to consider it. While I don’t present with classic Cushing’s and she’s mildly skeptical that it is the (or a) cause for some of my issues, we’re doing a screening for it anyway just to be sure since I don’t object to it.
Year 3, Day 54: Squeaky and hoarse, Smol started talking at about 630 this morning. They made it through the night, thank goodness, without waking and crying like they’d done six times Friday night. They were even in a GOOD mood, thank more goodness. PiC was up too late working, and small miracle I wasn’t feeling as bad as usual, so Smol and I had an unusual early morning together. And it was ok! They were opinionated but not overly difficult.
Random food thoughts: Cilantro suddenly tastes like soap to me this week. Liquid Dawn, in fact. It’s never tasted like soap before. It’s always tasted like green stuff. Not great, not terrible, and I didn’t love or hate it before. But suddenly, it’s a mouthful of soap. Weirdly, that wasn’t terrible like a real mouthful of soap would me. Surprising but I didn’t hate it.
That was related to the cilantro that I stopped adding to the leftover pozole I had for lunch – absolutely wonderful. I love fresh squeezed limes. Also apple fritters. I love those unexpectedly crunchy little bits scattered along the edges.
Year 3, Day 55: FINALLY! I remembered to follow up on the form I need to volunteer at JB’s school. Now, to be fair, I only just got my required physical done recently so it wasn’t that I was dragging my feet. I just forgot all this week that I could ask them to get the form filled out now.
I’m not particularly in love with the idea of more socializing but I do want to have the option of going on field trips with them or helping out at the library or in the garden if I can make time, someday. Here’s hoping I’ll have enough time to get those forms into the school office before the end of the year.
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It’s pitiful that it’s taken me months to get around to the dog bedding laundry but it has. Today, today was the day! Sera’s 🐶 bed cover was swapped out for the clean spare, and washed with her blankets and sweaters. The washing bit isn’t hard, though timing things so I wash and dry everything before 4 pm is tricky when squeezed in between working, doing school pickup, and walking and feeding Sera. The part I’ve not had the energy to cover is, when the washer dries out, needing to vacuum the whole thing or else the lingering fur gets all over the next load of laundry. But today, I did it all. I was tireder than a sloth but fit into today’s rounds and now Sera 🐶 is snuggling happily with a fresh blanket and we are both happy. No wonder I live a small life. The simplest things are satisfying.
Year 3, Day 56: The mass exodus from Twitter (and maybe also the economy? I’m less sure about that part) has made fundraising for the Lakota families
REALLY slow this year. I confirmed there will be a post-school giveaway of lost and found clothes where I’ll gather many armloads of kid sized coats to ship to the Allen Youth Center this month, I confirmed that’s still on. My fingers are crossed we’ll gather enough funds to help out another family in June but it’s hard to say if we’ll be able to hit that goal.
I’ll continue throwing notes out into Twitter in hopes enough folks are still around who want to contribute. I’d surely appreciate y’all sharing too if you can.
May 15, 2023
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 45: Experiencing mild jealousy. JB’s friend is the 3rd of 4 kids and all the kids have been looked after by their grandparents. The older kids who are in school are dropped off and picked up by grandparents if the parents aren’t available, they also chauffeur the kids to all their afterschool activities. Entirely leaving aside the reality of the parents we have, I can only imagine how much we could give and save if we didn’t have to spend over $2000 a month on childcare ever over the course of JB and Smol Acrobat’s pre-school lives. Anyway, I don’t envy their lives. Four kids is just too many for me to wrap my head around. I just sigh over the imagined savings for a minute because I’m feeling our inability to do ALL the things. I need to save, and invest, and really want to be able to help a whole lot of people going through rough times right now. But with the huge $2300 monthly bite out of our budget, I’ve had to pull back. That is going to annoy me for a bit. I’d gotten used to being able to help folks more.
To go with that, I am mildly annoyed at myself. We/I somehow failed to increase our FSA contributions this year to the maximum $3050. How did I mess that up?! Ugh. Next year we’ll get it right.
Year 3, Day 46: Ant update: they still haven’t returned to the kitchen and might be gone from one bathroom. Several were spotted in the other bathroom today, though. Where to bait them…? They were inside the shower which gets wet daily. Outside the shower is too accessible to kids and Sera 🐶.
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Gripe: people like @trappercap on accessibility are the worst. American society is hugely inaccessible. This is related to games development but it’s so common to hear this kind of tripe with regard to accessibility in anything. It’s so frustrating as someone who could really use a lot of accommodations but constantly makes do, at my own personal health expense, without. Making things more accessible is often good for so many more people than you’d think at first. It’s not just for people who are disabled. Often it’s also good for the very young, or elderly, or new parents who have babies in strollers, or any number of other life circumstances that may be temporary but still difficult. (more…)
May 8, 2023
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 38: JB has been sleeping in Smol Acrobat’s room weeknights and the unlooked-for side effect is Smol gets JB up in the morning far earlier than their usual. This has slowly shifted everyone’s waking time earlier. Usually the kids blow that time playing because we can’t get it together, which is fun for them but exponentially less fun for us when we have to interrupt their play to head out. Then everyone is cranky.
This is the first morning we’ve intentionally left as early as possible, like we did last school year, to drop off both kid which means the work day can finally start at a reasonably early hour. If we can make this our new routine, we might all be a little less stressed and cranky by the end of the day.
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It’s May 1st! I don’t know why that feels so portentous or something but it does. Also my neck really hurts and that feels like an ill portent. Why are heads so heavy?
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A few more checklist items for the Wells Fargo account bonuses: setting up the $1000 direct deposits to the new accounts (done), linking those accounts to an outside-Wells account so I can transfer all our money back out later (done), checking if my qualifying spend had posted to the CC yet so I can pay that off (checked, not yet). I LIKE doing these bonus things if I can find the energy, it yields so much ongoing dopamine.
Year 3, Day 39: BOO 5 am wake ups with Smol. I zombie parented for an hour until PiC took over at 6 am. I crawled back into bed, sure I’d regret not staying up, but that rest helped my neck to feel about 70% better. What a huge relief that is!
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May 1, 2023
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 31: Ok. I SAID I would take the year’s finances as it comes instead of reprojecting our spending and saving but someone could have called me on the blatant lie. That’s most certainly not how I work.
As much as I hated doing it, a week of not doing it reminded me that I hate not having a balanced financial roadmap much more.
I’ve subtracted the cost of daycare from our planned monthly savings and reprojected a lower savings rate for the rest of the year. If we end any month with more than expected due to lower spending, I’ll push that to savings too.
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I don’t have the patience for more than a 2-3 minute meditation so I’m sticking with the Body and Sound Meditation (3 mins) in my attempts to recenter my brain and my body.
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After yet another high pain weekend, this being my third week of flare-up, I had no appetite for eating or cooking. PiC’s been handling our food for the past few weeks and was drawing a blank on dinner ideas.
We got Thai takeout but once again my generic Asianness worked against me. I ordered the pad see ew with mild spice, everything else non spicy, to keep the kids from inhaling my favorite dish. I am not Thai but alas, being mistaken for a native is common and means that “mild” for me is the equivalent of a firebomb. One of these days I’ll learn to order under a pseudonym.
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